Caliban c-1

by Isaac Asimov

  It was time for the real investigation to begin.

  17

  “SO how long have you and Tonya Welton been romantically involved, Anshaw?” Alvar Kresh asked, his voice low and calm.

  Gubber’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at Sheriff Kresh in horrified astonishment.

  Kresh laughed. “Let me guess. That was the one thing you had been most determined to hide, the one thing that made you lie awake last night, scheming over the best way to conceal it from me—and we know it already.”

  “How did you know that?” he asked, his voice little more than a high-pitched squeak. “Who told you?”

  “No one had to tell me, Anshaw. And I didn’t know it for sure until just now. But it was simply the only explanation that made sense. It’s been staring me in the face from the start. The devil himself knows how I missed it.

  “Tonya Welton arrived at the crime scene five minutes after I did. She had no reason to insert herself into my investigation. At least no professional reason. Therefore, she had to have personal reasons.

  “But that’s not the time frame I’m interested in. Perhaps you could explain what she was doing—and you were doing—at the lab at the time of the attack on Fredda Leving.”

  Gubber Anshaw opened his mouth, but found that he had no words. No words at all.

  Kresh pressed home his advantage. “We’ve got the access recorder data, Anshaw. We know who was there, and when they were there. Three names stick out. Tonya Welton, Jomaine Terach—and you. Gubber Anshaw. All of you, and no one else, besides Fredda Leving herself. Medical evidence gives us about a one-hour period during which the attack could have happened—and you four were all in and out of that building during that time period. No one else.”

  “Ah—ah—ah…” Gubber tried to speak, but nothing would come.

  “Settle down, Anshaw. Tell me. Answer the questions I’m going to ask, or else you’re going to be in far deeper trouble than you are right now. Did you conceal the fact that she was there to shield her? Did you think she attacked Leving?”

  “Oh dear! Oh my!”

  “Answer!”

  “Yes, then. Yes. I don’t believe it now, of course. But that night—it was all so frightful. I did not know what to think. And she and Fredda had argued terribly that night.”

  “And why did you suppose that she would attack your superior?”

  Silence. Kresh pressed harder. “Talk, Anshaw. Talk now and talk well. Tell me what I need to know. That is the best thing you can do to protect Tonya Welton. Silence and lies can only hurt her now. Now I ask you again—what made you think Tonya Welton deliberately attacked your superior?”

  “Oh, I don’t think she did it deliberately,” Gubber said all of a rush. Then he realized the gaffe he had made. “That is, now, of course, I do not think she did it at all. But, but, at the time I thought that she might, just might have done it, out of anger, in a rush of temper, perhaps.”

  “All right, then. Now she concealed the fact that you were there,” Kresh said. “Did she do that to shield you? Did she think that you might have committed the attack?”

  Gubber looked up, a little confused and distracted. “What? Oh, yes. I suppose so.” He thought for a minute, then went on a bit more eagerly. “Fredda and I—Dr. Leving and I—had argued as well, rather often. Tonya could have thought I was angry enough to commit the attack—but if she thought that was possible, then that proves that she could not have done it herself!”

  “Unless she did commit the attack, and is doing everything she can to act innocent. Maybe she’s feigning innocence and planning to frame you. Or didn’t that occur to you?”

  Anshaw’s face fell. Clearly he had thought Kresh would find his logic convincing. “No, no, it didn’t. And I still don’t believe it. She is not that kind of person. She could not have attacked Fredda that way.”

  “You thought she could have at the time. Why do you think you were wrong then and are right now?”

  “The night it happened, I wasn’t able to think clearly. When I found the body, I was so scared and surprised, I did not know what to think. When I had time to think about it, I knew it was impossible.”

  When I found the body. It took all of Alvar’s training not to leap onto that slip immediately. But that could come later. Anshaw was not aware of what he had said, and the longer he was off guard the better. Let it ride, Kresh thought. Come back to it later. He chose another point to pursue, almost at random.

  “You said that you and Leving had been having arguments. What were they about?”

  Gubber drew himself up to sit straight in his chair, and folded his hands. “I did not approve of what she was doing.”

  “What was it you objected to?”

  “The New Law robots. I thought and think it is possible they are a very dangerous idea.”

  “But you went along with the project, anyway.”

  Gubber rested his hands flat on the table for a moment, but then knitted his fingers together. His hands were clammy with sweat. “Yes, that is true,” he said. He looked up at Alvar, and there was suddenly something bright, sharp, fierce in his eye. “I invented the gravitonic brain, Sheriff Kresh. It represents a tremendous advance over the positronic brain, a breakthrough of huge proportions. My gravitonic brain offers the chance for whole new vistas of research, vastly increased robotic intelligence and ability. I had the notes, the test materials, the models and designs, to prove that it would work. I took them to every lab on the planet and sent inquiries to half a dozen other Spacer worlds as well. And no one would listen.

  “No one cared. No one would use my work. If it wasn’t a positronic brain, it wasn’t a robot. My brain couldn’t go in a robot. That was an article of faith, everywhere I went. Fredda had rejected my ideas as first. Until it dawned on her that I was offering a blank slate upon which to write her New Laws.”

  “So you swallowed your objections to her ideas to prevent your own work from getting lost.”

  “Yes, that’s right. She was the only one who cared about my work, or would even give me the chance to complete it. Fredda Leving wasn’t—and isn’t—much interested in the technical improvements the gravitonic brain offers. To her, gravitonic brains were nothing more than robotic brains that did not have the Three Laws. That was her sole interest.”

  “And you went along. Even though you’ve just said the New Laws are dangerous.”

  “Yes, I went along, though now I wish I burned my work instead.” For a brief moment, Gubber showed a little spark of passion, but then the little man seemed to shrink in on himself again. Alvar Kresh felt a fleeting moment of pity for Gubber Anshaw. No matter how the matter was resolved, there seemed little hope that he would get his old life back. If he was something of a villain in the piece, so, too, was he something of a victim.

  “I won’t pretend that I have unblemished pride in what I did,” Gubber went on. “But it seemed the last chance that my life’s work would not be thrown away. I worked very hard to convince myself that the New Laws included adequate safeguards. Well, you know how that turned out. Something went wrong, either with the Laws or the brain. But I know the brain was good. It has to be the Laws.”

  Wait a second, Kresh told himself. He thinks that Caliban is a New Law robot. Kresh had just assumed that Terach was lying and Caliban’s true nature was bound to be common knowledge around the lab. If Anshaw was Tonya Welton’s main source of information, as seemed likely, then she, too, had to be assuming that Caliban was a New Law robot.

  Burning devils. If that was true, she would have serious and legitimate concerns about unleashing a whole army of the things at the Limbo Project, alongside her own people. If she hadn’t attacked Fredda, and was unsure who had, she would very much want to believe that Caliban was innocent, and harmless, for the sake of her own people. If Caliban and she herself were eliminated, then the suspect list was damned short—and her lover, Gubber Anshaw, was at the top of it.

  No wonder the woman was acting a bit edgy.
“I told myself the New Law robots would be mere laboratory experiments,” Anshaw went on. “I was wrong about that, too.”

  “Lab experiment? But the New Law robots are going to be all over the Limbo Project. They’ll be able to wander anywhere they want on Purgatory.”

  Anshaw smiled bleakly. “New Law robots at Limbo was my doing. Pillow talk, I suppose you’d call it. I mentioned the New Law project to Tonya, and she was fascinated by the idea. She could see they were just the thing for the Limbo Project, a real chance for compromise and common ground, for Spacer and Settler to work together, for a world with the advantages of robots with none of the drawbacks. Oh, she got very excited.

  “She knew that I would want my name kept out, of course, and she managed to fake a leak of the information from some other source. A Settler running into a Leving Labs worker in a bar, or something.”

  “That sounds plausible. Your security isn’t very tight.”

  “I don’t even know if that’s how it worked. I didn’t want to know the details. Anyway, Tonya went to see Fredda and let it be known that she had heard about the New Law project. Fredda was furious about the leak, of course, but then she started to get excited about the idea herself. They presented the idea to Governor Grieg as a joint proposal, and he accepted it.”

  “It sounds as if it was a fruitful collaboration,” Donald said. “What caused the two of them to fallout?”

  Gubber shifted uncomfortably. “Ambition,” he said at last. “Both of them always wanted—and still want—to be in charge of whatever project they are working on.”

  Ambition, competition, Kresh thought. Those could be damned potent motives, and Gubber knew it. What would be tougher for him—admitting those motives to the police or wondering, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, if those motives had indeed tempted his wild, brazen Settler lover into this violent attack?

  “You’ve said that you and Dr. Leving had argued as well. Might I ask the nature of those arguments?” Alvar asked. “Did she perhaps object to your relationship with Tonya Welton?”

  “What?” Gubber seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, no, no. She couldn’t have. She didn’t know about—doesn’t know about it.” He hesitated for a minute, and then doubt seemed to creep into his voice. “At least I thought she didn’t. But we didn’t do much of a job keeping it from you.”

  Kresh smiled. “If it’s of any comfort, she hasn’t given any sign of knowing about it.”

  “If I may broach a new subject, Dr. Anshaw,” Donald said. Kresh leaned back and let Donald carry on. At least Anshaw didn’t seem dreadfully insulted at the very idea of a robot asking questions. “We have a report concerning a minor point in connection with the New Law robots. Perhaps you could clear it up.”

  “Well, if I can.”

  Interesting how the man had become so cooperative in his own interrogation. Kresh had seen it before—the strange moment when the questioning became not a battle, but a collaboration.

  “You were asked to perform certain tests on a pair of sessile testbed New Law units without being told what you were testing them for. Do you recall that?”

  “Yes, of course. Nothing all that remarkable about it. It was some weeks ago. The only reason I remember it clearly is that Tonya—Lady Welton—happened to stop by that day. I remember thinking later that was the last time she stopped by the lab without an argument starting between Fredda and Tonya. She stayed and watched the tests, and even chatted with one of the sessiles. We do that sort of test all the time. Two units, one experimental and the other a production unit robot, a control, with the experiment operator not knowing which is which—or even the purpose of the experiment. The operator just gets a list of procedures to follow and runs the test as described.”

  “What is the purpose of masking the test unit and the experiment’s goal from the experiment operator?” Donald asked.

  “To avoid bias. Usually the test is of something that might be skewed by the experimenter’s own reactions, or by an interaction between the experimenter’s emotional response and the robot’s desire to please the experimenter. All of us at the lab have used each other to run that sort of test from time to time.”

  “On this particular test, what were you asked to do?”

  “Oh, nothing very much. I was told to discuss the Three Laws with the two robots and then record their basal reactions to simulated situations that would test their reactions. The two sessile robots were delivered toward the end of the day, and I got to work on them the next morning, explaining the Three Laws in detail, using a set series of procedures. Then I put them through the simulation drill and they both did fine.”

  “What became of them?”

  “Well, this was some time ago. The usual procedure would be to destroy the test unit and complete assembly of the control and place it in service. Let me think. The test unit, the experimental unit, was definitely destroyed. Standard safety procedure. As for the control—” Gubber thought for a moment. “You know, I can tell you about the control unit, come to think of it.

  “As I mentioned, Tonya Welton was in the lab that day and struck up a conversation with the control unit. Of course, it being a double-blind test, I didn’t know it was the control at the time, but later Tonya said she had taken a liking to the sessile robot that had spoken with her. Tonya wasn’t very happy with the robot she had been issued, and asked if I could arrange for her to exchange it for the one she had met in the lab.

  “If the one she had liked had turned out to be the experimental model, she would have been out of luck, of course. But as it turned out, Ariel was the control, and was working in the lab. Fredda authorized the swap, and so Tonya ended up with her robot.”

  Plainly, Gubber was puzzled by the question, but he wasn’t going to get any explanation for it.

  “Very good. It is always wise to confirm details wherever possible. That dovetails with our previous information.”

  And allows us to confirm that Jomaine Terach was telling the truth at least part of the time, Kresh thought. But maybe it was time to come back to the main point. When I found the body, Gubber had said, letting it drop very casually, as if he assumed that Kresh already knew that. That was the way to play it. Donald had been smart, giving Anshaw the idea that all they were doing was confirming information. Robots were incapable of lying, of course, except under the strongest of orders to do so, and even then they were never very good at it. But sophisticated units like Donald could allow a true statement to provide a false impression now and again.

  “Let’s go back to something else, Anshaw. Back to the moment when you discovered the body, all right?”

  Anshaw nodded calmly, clearly unperturbed by any thought than he had let something slip.

  “Good,” Kresh said, giving his voice the tone of a man going through the motions, clearing up routine details. “Now, you’ve already been extremely helpful today, but as you can imagine, the actual crime scene is important. The last thing we want to do is color your recollections of it. It’s the same as with your blind robotics tests, really. We don’t want to introduce a bias accidentally with a lot of leading questions that might end up with you subconsciously skewing your answers, giving us what we want. That make sense to you?”

  “Oh, yes, very much so. I know how those subtle errors can slip in and cause no end of confusion.”

  “Good, good.” Kresh was pleased with the analogy, and wondered if Donald had meant him to pick up on his line of questioning and use it. He could be a subtle one, that Donald. He went on with the delicate job of leading Gubber Anshaw down the garden path. “So, what I want you to do is simply tell exactly what happened, in your own words, without our drawing out your story question by question. Maybe I’ll ask a question or two if we don’t understand a detail, but in the main we’ll wait until you’re done. That will be time enough for us to go back and tidy up any discrepancies with the information we have already.” Which is close to bloody-helled nothing, Kresh thought.

&nb
sp; Gubber looked nervously at Kresh, but still he did not speak. Kresh realized he needed to press harder. But not too hard, or else there was an excellent chance Gubber would clam up altogether. “Talk to us, Gubber,” Kresh said. “You have no idea the damage silence has done already. That silence is a vacuum, and it’s sucking people in. A few words from you, the casual mention of some tiny detail you don’t even know you know, could be the thing we need to cut the last weak threads of suspicion tying you and Lady Welton to this case. The two of you were both suspects when you walked in here. You could both be scratched right off our list here and now if you tell us the truth,” Alvar lied.

  “Honestly?” Gubber asked, and it was clear how desperately he wanted to believe.

  “Honestly,” Kresh lied again, glancing involuntarily at Donald. This was one of those moments when it was downright dangerous to have a robot in on the game. If the complex admixture of First Law potentials broke the wrong way, there was nothing in the world—least of all Donald’s own will—to prevent the robot piping up to contradict Kresh.

  Donald knew Kresh was lying, making promises he had no intention of keeping. But how would Donald balance the First Law admonition to prevent harm from being done through inaction? Certainly Gubber could come to harm by believing Kresh. But if Donald spoke up, that could produce harm to Kresh and to the Sheriff’s Department. If speaking up, calling Kresh on the lie, wrecked the investigation, that could even cause harm to the population in general, by leaving Fredda’s attacker at large, free to strike again.

  Kresh had a pretty fair instinct for estimating the First Law situation in such cases, and he was reasonably sure that Donald would not speak up. But there was always the chance that he would jump in at exactly the wrong moment. Kresh sometimes thought that all the problems of lost energy and low morale in Spacer society could be eliminated in a stroke if some way could be found to eliminate all such dithering over robotic behavior.