Caliban (Isaac Asimov's Caliban #1)

Caliban (Isaac Asimov's Caliban #1) Page 9

JOMAINE Terach sat and waited in the hospital corridor, trying to practice patience-a difficult task under the circumstances. He watched Gubber Anshaw pace the hallway outside Fredda Leving, s hospital room, and felt his annoyance growing stronger. Why couldn't the miserable little fool have stayed holed up in his house a while longer? But no, he had to choosetonight to come out and latch onto good old Jomaine Terach.

Jomaine did what he could to force all thoughts of Gubber from his mind. He watched as the doctors and the med-robots bustled in and out of Fredda' s room in an almost constant flow, the rather stolid, oversized sky-blue sentry robots standing on either side of the door. The sentries flatly refused to let Anshaw or Terach in. No amount of arguing or reasoning or cajoling would shake them.

And yet, there was Gubber Anshaw, a professional roboticist who should have known better, going up to them again, demanding to be let in. Jomaine shook his head and swore under his breath. The last day or so had been nerve-racking enough without watching Gubber go to pieces on top of it.

"Will you settle down, for Galaxy's sake!" Jomaine finally snapped. "Leave the damned robots alone. Come over here, sit down and try to be calm."

"But she's awake, and they won't let us talk to her!" Gubber said, crossing back to Jomaine. He sat down on the couch next to his colleague, perching on the edge of his seat rather than leaning back into the cushion.

Jomaine rested his tired head against the wall behind the couch, and sighed. " And if I were the police, I wouldn't let us talk to her either," he said blandly. "It stands to reason we're both suspects in the case."

"Suspects!" Gubber blurted out, abruptly jumping up.

Jomaine snorted derisively. "Surely you've got that much of it worked out. I doubt Kresh has had the time to gather much in the way of useful information yet. He has nothing to go on. In the absence of anything to the contrary, who else but you and I should be suspects? Fredda was attacked in your lab, and I was at home. I doubt Kresh has missed the fact that my house is practically next door to the lab. There was no one else about the place. Who else would they suspect?" Jomaine looked over at his coworker and was startled to see the expression of shock on his face. Gubber seemed quite unaccountably taken aback. Why be so surprised by such an obvious line of reasoning?

Orwas it surprise? Perhaps there was something else underlying his reaction. For the first time, Jomaine Terach found himself wondering precisely what role Gubberhad played in the story. He seemed superbly unequipped to play any part in intrigue. Still, he seemed to be just as unlikely to be any good at romance-and yet it was an open secret, an astonishing, much-discussed open secret, that Gubber Anshaw, of all people, was carrying on a torrid affair with Tonya Welton, the leader of the Settler contingent on Inferno. It was one of those hilariously unsecret romances. No doubt the only person in the lab who did not know that everyone but the boss knew about it was Gubber himself. And if the man had enough hidden depth to carry on a love affair withthat dragon lady, what else might he be capable of?

At the moment, though, the nervous, cowering Gubber Anshaw seemed something less than plausible in the role of would-be murderer. "You might as well get used to it, Gubber old boy," Jomaine said. "The Sheriff is going to look long and hard at both of us."

That statement seemed to shock Gubber allover again. "But-but we have no motives!" he protested.

"Hah!" Jomaine replied faintly, a tired, resigned little exclamation. He leaned the back of his head against the wall again. "Gubber, you amaze me. Our lab is ahotbed of politics and bickering. Who there hasn't battled against someone else at one time or another? You, Fredda, and I have all been at cross-purposes many times over the years."

"But those have all been legitimate professional disagreements," Gubber said, a bit primly. "Well, some office politics, yes, but certainly not grounds for attempted murder."

"Perhaps not-but clearlysomeone had a motive for murder, and the police will look wherever they can for a reason. And I would offer the thought that few people have good reason for committing murder. I assure you, people have been tried and convicted on thinner evidence than office politics."

Gubber Anshaw turned toward his colleague, gestured toward the door to Fredda' s room. "Well, here we are, waiting to see her. Shouldn't that count in our favor? Show that we are all friends?"

Jomaine turned his head to look at Gubber in something approaching astonishment. How could anyone be so naive? On the face of it, there was more than friendship drawing them both to this place. What the devil went on in Gubber's mind? He was a deceptively unprepossessing individual, Jomaine decided, given his accomplishments. Still, no one ever said scientific genius went hand in hand with worldly sophistication. Jomaine smiled sadly and patted his friend on the shoulder. "Gubber, old fellow, you and I should face the facts, at least between ourselves. After all, weare here to see Fredda for the express purpose of making sure we have our stories straight. Try to bear that in mind. Obviously that's not what we tell Sheriff Kresh, but it is what he will assume, and it does happen to be the truth."

Gubber seemed about to reply, until he saw something over Jomaine's shoulder and his mouth snapped shut. Jomaine was about to turn and see what it was, but then he was spared the need.

Sheriff Alvar Kresh, looking haggard, sleep-starved, but well groomed and alert, rushed past them, eyes straight ahead, completely unaware of their presence. But Kresh's robot was right behind Kresh. And robots, Jomaine knew, never missed anything. And robots never forgot anything.

He had reason to havethat fact very much in mind, these days.

FREDDA Leving sat up in bed and waved the metallic white nurse-robots away with an impatient wave of her hand. Perhaps she had only been conscious for a brief time, an hour or two, but that was quite time enough to be tired of having one's pillows fluffed and covers straightened. "Leave me alone," she snapped. "I'm perfectly comfortable as I am." Well, that was far from the truth, but she could not abide being fussed over. The nurse-robots retired to their wall niches and stood in them, staring out, immobile, a pair of white marble statues raised to commemorate persons and events long forgotten.

But Fredda Leving had other things on her mind beside overly solicitous robots.

They hadn't told her anything yet.Anything. She could understand that the police did not want any preconceptions to warp her recollections, but still it was damnably galling. One minute she was working in Gubber's lab, and the next minute she was here in a hospital bed under police guard. All else was a blur, a blank.

Except for the sight of those two red-colored robot feet, standing over her. She shivered at the memory. Why did that image frighten her so? Was it even real? Or the result of some trauma associated with the incident?.

Damn it, what sort of incident was she talking about? She knewnothing. And that could be dangerous.

When was Kresh going to get here? She turned her head toward the door and felt the spasm of pain like a fresh blow to her skull. She knew, intellectually, that Spacers, shielded from virtually all harm by their robots, had a spectacularly low threshold of pain. Maybe what she was experiencing now would seem like nothing but a mild headache to a Settler-but damnation, she was no Settler, and ithurt! Why couldn't the damned Sheriff get here and get it over with, so she could take something strong enough to deal with the pain in her head?

The head was the worst, though she knew there were injuries to her face and shoulders as well. She could reach up and touch the healer packs attached to them and feel the numb stiffness in those places. No doubt the packs would be done with their work in another few hours, and would come off, leaving the skin below perfectly healed.

But her skull. Healer packs worked by deadening the nerve endings and then manipulating cell behavior. Unless you wanted the patient to hallucinate or go insane, such techniques were inadvisable for a cranial injury, especially after emergency surgery.

She reached up gingerly and felt a close-fitting padded cap-no, it was more the shape of a turban, as best she could tell. No doubt the turban had some sort of gadgetry that was dispensing speed-healing drugs. She found herself wondering, purposelessly enough, what color the turban was and how much of her hair had been shaved off in the course of surgery. She shook her head. This was no time to clutter her mind with such nonsense. Presumably she looked like hell, but she couldn't know for sure. Perhaps to avoid upsetting her over that very fact, the room had no mirror.

Fredda Leving was young and looked younger, neither of which facts made life easier in the long-lived society of Spacers. She was thirty-five standard years old and looked perhaps twenty-five. That was in part because she had a naturally youthful appearance, in part because she did whatever she could to preserve the appearance of youth, though that was itself something of an eccentricity. Youthfulness-worse, willful youthfulness-was no slight social disability in a society where the average life span was measured in centuries and anyone much under fifty was regarded as a youngster. In forty or fifty years, Fredda would have physically aged enough that she couldafford to look twenty-five and still be taken seriously. Until then, it would be a social drawback. But the hell with them all. Sheliked the way she looked.

Fredda was on the petite side, with curly black hair she normally wore short-though, she thought wryly, not as short as it no doubt was now, after shaving for the operation. She was round-faced, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, with a personality that veered toward the pugnacious at times. She was given to sudden enthusiasm and cursed with a sometimes mercurial temper.

And, if she was not careful, this was threatening to be one of the times that temper would come to the fore. But she could not give way, no matter how bad the throbbing in her head became. She wished devoutly that she could order the robots to administer painkillers; but anything strong enough to killthis pain would leave her slaphappy-and she dared not be anything but sharp and alert for the police.

For there was so much to protect-including herself.

After all, at least by their lights, she had committed a terrible crime.

And, perhaps, by her own lights as well. It was so hard to know.

Fredda bit her lip and tried to clear her head, ignore the pain. She would have to be careful, very careful, with the Sheriff. And yet there was so much she did not know! Something had gone wrong, terribly, terribly wrong-but what? How much did Kresh know? What had happened?

But then, in the midst of her fretful worrying, it dawned on her. She could tell Kresh that she knew nothing. That was true, after all. Guesses and fears-she had plenty of those. Butfacts? About the case in point, whatever it was, she knew nothing. She had no facts at all. That was a strange thing to find comforting, but still, she felt better. She smiled to herself. Now that she knew she was ignorant, she could face the police.

As if on cue, the door to her hospital room slid open, and a big, burly, white-haired man came in, closely followed by a sky-blue police robot.

"Hello, Dr. Leving," Donald said. "It's good to see you again, though I doubt you care for the circumstances any more than I do."

"Hello, Donald. I quite agree, on both points." Fredda looked at the robot thoughtfully. It was rare for a robot to put itself so far forward as to begin a conversation, but then the circumstances were unusual. Robots rarely knew their creators personally, and it was more ~are still for a robot to visit its creator in a hospital room after that creator had had a close brush with death. No doubt it was all rather stressful for Donald, and no doubt his forwardness could be explained as a minor side effect of the release of First Law conflicts. Or, to put it in more pedestrian terms, he had spoken out of turn because he was glad to see her recovering.

Whatever the explanation for it, it was plain that the exchange annoyed Sheriff Kresh. The norms of polite society required that robots be ignored. Fredda winced. It was not smart to start the interview by irritating Kresh.

On the other hand, there was one fact about Donald that she dared not ignore: He was a walking lie detector. As if she needed any further reason to be careful.

But be all that as it may. It would be for the best to get this over with as quickly as possible. She turned toward Kresh and gave him her warmest smile. "Welcome, Sheriff," she said in as gracious a tone as she could manage. "Please do have a seat."

"Thank you," he said, drawing up a chair by the foot of her bed.

"I expect you're here to ask me some questions," she said in what she hoped to be a calm, steady voice, "but I have a feeling you have more answers than I do. I honestly have no idea what happened. I was working in the lab, and then I woke up here."

"You have no memory of the attack itself?"

"Then therewas an attack on me. Up until you said that, I wasn't even sure of that. No, I don't recall anything."

Kresh sighed unhappily. "I was afraid of that. The med-robots warned me that traumatic amnesia was a possibility and that the loss may be permanent."

Fredda was startled, alarmed. "You mean my mind is going? I'm losing my memory?"

"Oh, no, no, nothing like that. They warned me that it would be possible that you would have no recollection of the attack. There was some hope that you might recall something, but-you don't remember anything at all?" he asked, clearly disappointed.

Fredda hesitated a moment and then decided it would be wise to be as forthcoming as possible. Things could get sticky down the road, and it might do her some good later if she played straight now. "No, nothing meaningful. I have a hazy recollection of lying on the floor, looking straight ahead, and seeing a pair of red feet. But I can't say if that was a dream, or hallucination, or real."

Kresh leaned forward eagerly. "Red feet. Can you describe them more completely? Were they wearing red shoes, or red socks, or-"

"No, no, they were definitely feet, not shoes or boots or socks. Robot's feet, metallic red. That's what I saw-if I did see it. As I said, it could have been all a hallucination."

"Why in the world would you hallucinate about red robot feet?" Kresh asked in that same eager tone. It was almost too clear that the red feet interested him very much indeed.

Fredda took a good hard look at Kresh. She got the distinct feeling that this man wouldn't be so obvious about what he wanted to know if he weren't so plainly exhausted.

"There was a red robot in the lab," she said.No point in hiding that fact, she thought.It was bound to come out, if it hadn't already. "It was in a standing position in a work rack. Well, you must have seen the robot there." She thought for a moment and then shook her head. "I'm afraid there's not much else I recall."

"Try, please."

Fredda shrugged and frowned. She tried to think back to that night, but it was all a jumbled fog. "I can't seem to get that night very clear. I seem to recall standing in the room, leaning over one of the worktables, reading over some notes-but I can't recall notes of what, and I can't tell you how long before the attack that was. As I say, nothing is very clear. Maybe I'm even subconsciously inventing my memories, reaching for something that's not there. I can't know-and before you can even suggest it, I'm certainly not going to submit to any form of the Psychic Probe to clear up the uncertainty."

Kresh smiled faintly. "I admit the idea had crossed my mind. But we should certainly pursue all the less drastic alternatives first. Perhaps we can jog your memory. These notes of your show were they stored? A paper notebook? A computer pad? What?"

"Oh, a very standard computer pad, with a blue floral pattern on the back cover."

"I see. Madame Leving, I'm afraid there was no sign either of your computer pad or a red robot. The work rack was empty when we got there. And I assure you, we searched carefully."

Fredda's mouth fell open, and suddenly she felt dizzy. She had feared that the police might have discovered just what sort of robot Caliban was. That would have been trouble enough. But it had never occurred to her that Caliban might begone. The devil help them all if some madman had switched him on and Caliban was wandering aroundloose.

"I'm stunned," she said quite truthfully. "I simply don't know what to say. At least now I know why I was attacked. Up until now, I could see no reason for it. "

"And what reason do you see now?" Kresh asked.

"Why, robbery, of course! They stole my robot!"

An expression of surprise flickered across Kresh' s face, and suddenly Fredda was flatly certain that the idea of a simple theft had never crossed his mind. "Why, yes, yes of course," Kresh replied.

But he was interested in the fact that I saw red robot feet,Fredda thought.He knew that there had been a red robot there,and knew it was gone. Suddenly it dawned on her. Kresh had reason to believe that Caliban had left her lab under his own power. Galaxy!Had someone in her own lab been lunatic enough to switch him on? But she needed time to think. Maybe she could get Kresh to chase in other directions for a while. After all, she was merely guessing that Caliban had gone off on his own. "Space alone knows why anyone would want to steal a testbed robot," she said. " All I can think is that this is some extreme case of industrial espionage. Some rival lab-or more likely, some third party hired by another lab-must have stolen my robot and my notes."

"Who might that be?" Kresh asked. "What lab would be likely to operate that way?"

Fredda shrugged helplessly, and paid for the gesture with a fresh spasm of pain. But the pain itself was useful. The more obvious it was that she was in difficulty, the less likely Kresh was to keep the interview going. She had been trying to hold back her reaction to pain, but now she let it all out. It was not acting-the pain was real, the pain was there. But what point in a show of fortitude that merely made her own situation more difficult? She let out a gasp and grabbed the bedclothes with knotted fingers. There was a strange relief in letting go, in allowing the pain to come out, rather than be bottled up.

But Kresh had asked a question about the rival labs, and he was waiting for an answer. "I have no idea who would use such tactics. Obviously someone made off with my notes and my robot, but it strikes me as a very strange and pointless crime. After all, surely anyone who stole my work would know I would have backups, proof that the work was mine, the ability to reproduce my work. Someone did it. Just don't ask me why."

"It's possible that they merely wished to slow you down, delay you long enough to let their own people catch up-with the added advantage of having your work in front of them."

"I suppose that could be, but we're building quite a rickety tower of supposition here."

Kresh smiled, a bit thinly. And yet there was real warmth behind that expression. The man was sincerely interested and concerned. "You 're right, of course. The trouble is, we have very little information to guide the investigation. Is there nothing else you can tell us?"

She shook her head. "Nothing I can think of."

"Very well," Kresh said, standing up. "I'm sure we'll need to talk later, but you need your rest."

"Yes. I have to be at my best to make my presentation tomorrow night."

Alvar Kresh looked at Fredda in obvious surprise. "Presentation?"

"I'm sorry, I assumed you knew. My lab is to make a major announcement tomorrow night. I'm afraid that I am not permitted to discuss it until then, but-"

"Ah, of course. Yes, we've been running into all sorts of people telling us that they couldn't talk yet, that we would have to wait for a public announcement. No one told us you were to make it. I find it surprising that they were all confident that you would be well enough to do so."

"Jomaine Terach would have given the talk if I could not, or if not Jomaine, Gubber Anshaw or someone else. If no one told youI was going to give the talk, I suspect it was because they knew the announcement would be made, but not who would give it." Fredda thought for a minute. "If I was attacked to prevent the talk from being given, then it would only make sense to keep the name of my replacement presenter secret. IfI were the replacement, I'd see a low profile as a good idea."

"So you think this attack could be related to your presentation?"

Fredda shruggedno, a bit too theatrically. Instantly the pain flared up again. Damnation, her head hurt. "I have no idea. But it's certainly quite possible," she said. "This announcement is to be made during the second of two lectures. Have you seen the first lecture?"

"No, I have not."

"Then I would strongly suggest you get a look at a recording of it. There was a lot of material in there that could give someone a motive for coshing me. A lot." Fredda Leving folded her arms and found herself staring fixedly at the hillock her toes made in the blanket. She had never quite believed that anyone would try tokill her for what she said.

"If it could suggest a motive for this attack, I will view it at the first opportunity. But you need your rest. We'll just have to leave it at that for now," Kresh said. "Come on, Donald."

But Donald did not move to follow his master. Instead he spoke. "Your pardon, Lady Leving," he said. "There are two questions that I feel are rather important at this time. For purposes of tracing or tracking your stolen robot, can you tell us if it had a name or a serial number that we might trace?"

"Oh, of course," she said, silently cursing to herself. Theywould have to ask. "Serial number CBN-001, also known as Caliban. What was your other question?"

"Quite a simple one, actually. Can you tell us, Lady Leving, where your personal robot was at the time of the attack? We were told you did not take you personal robot to work. Why not? And, for that matter, where is that robot now? All that I see here are hospital robots."

Damnation,Fredda thought.Trust Donald not to miss that one. By the look on Kresh's face, he's amazed that he didn't think of it. Well, with Donald there monitoring her every reaction, nothing but the truth would do. "I no longer keep a personal robot at all," she said very quietly.

There was dead silence in the room, the silence of stunned surprise, and Fredda balled up her hands into fists. The leading roboticist on the planet, and she kept no robot. It was as if the leading vegetarian on Inferno confessed to cannibalism.

"Might I ask why you no longer keep a personal robot?" Alvar Kresh asked, clearly working hard to pick his words carefully.

Fredda looked up from the foot of her bed, but she stared at the blank wall in front of her. She had no desire to look Alvar Kresh square in the eye. "Listen to my last lecture, Sheriff, and come to the next one. I believe then you will understand."

The room was silent again, until Alvar Kresh at last concluded she was not going to say anything more. "Very good, then, Madame Leving," he said in a tone of voice that made it clear the situation was anything but good. "We shall talk again later, you and I. Until then, may I wish you a speedy recovery?" He bowed to her, then turned and headed for the door. "Come, Donald." The robot followed behind, the door opened and shut, and she was alone.

Fredda Leving sank her head back on the pillow and gave thanks that the interrogation was over.

Though she had no doubt that the trouble had barely begun.

ALVAR Kresh shook his head and patted Donald on the shoulder as they stepped out into the hallway. A few steps away from Leving's door, he stopped and turned toward the robot. "I don't know, Donald. Sometimes I think I ought to quit and have them make you Sheriff. How the devil did I fail to notice she had no personal robot?" he asked.

"It did not occur to me until we were in the hospital room, sir. I might also point out that humans are in the habit of ignoring robots, while robots must of course notice each other. Besides, there is the old saying about the dog that didn't bark. It is always more difficult to notice what is missing, rather than what is there."

"All the same, that was a vital question. We're going to watch the recording of that first lecture the moment we're home, and the devil take the hour. Nice work."

"Thank you, sir. I would suggest, however, that confirming the name 'Caliban ' is the more useful piece of information," Donald said modestly. "We now have a direct, definite link. The two cases are one. The robot Caliban who vanished from the lab is the robot identified as Caliban by Santee Timitz at the arson site."

"But what in the Nine Circles of Hell does itmean?" Kresh asked. "What is going on?" He looked over Donald's shoulder. "Wait a second," he said. "Donald-behind you-is that-"

"Yes, sir. Jomaine Terach. The gentleman with him is, I believe, Gubber Anshaw, though the only police photos we have of him are of poor quality. I noted them on our way in."

"The robots on guard know to keep them out?"

"They are following standard procedure in such cases, in accordance with the law. To prevent any attempt at intimidation, no person associated with the case may talk with the victim of an assault until such time as statements are received from that person and the victim. Unless we file legal charges, we have no right to prevent meetings once statements are taken."

Kresh nodded. "In other words, we can stop Gubber Anshaw talking to her, but not Jomaine Terach. Which reminds me, it's high time we talked to Gubber, anyway. But damn it, I'm tired." Alvar Kresh reached up to rub the bridge of his nose. "Tomorrow," he said. "I'll talk to him tomorrow. But see to it the guard robots keep Anshaw away from her until then."

"Yes, sir. I have relayed the order over hyperwave."

"Good. Very good. Then let's go home."

"Sir, excuse me, but I fear you have neglected a vital point," Donald said. " Am I not right in asking if I should issue orders to apprehend this robot Caliban?"

Alvar Kresh shook his head and sighed. "You 're rightand you're wrong, Donald. It's risky to wait-but it could be just as risky to go out after him now. Think about it-if thisis some bizarre Settler plot, clearly the point of it is to sow panic, throw a good scare into us. Surely, if that is the case, the plotters stand ready to exploit that panic, perhaps by staging something even more frightening than a robot committing arson. No matter ~hat we do, the search for Caliban is bound to become public knowledge. Can you imagine the panic if word of a rogue got out-and a skilled conspirator set to work to build that fear?"

"It would be terrible, sir. And I might add that the very news of a robot behaving as Caliban has-well, it would be likely to cause permanent dysfunction in many, many robots. Still, the danger to humans that Caliban represents-"

"Must be weighed against the danger of moving too soon. If we start out now, with the information we have, what are we going to do? Arrest all the tall red robots? Or why stop there? Maybe our friend Caliban can disguise himself by slapping on a fresh coat of paint, or by exchanging his long arms and legs for short ones."

"With the result thatall robots will be distrusted. Which would be the intended result of a Settler plot. If the plot exists. Yes, sir, I see the difficulty."

"It's about all Ican see at this point," Kresh said, feeling very much like a tired old man. "But we can't move on this Caliban robot until we have more data. We can't do a search of the entire city. We need better information. But let us be ready if things break quickly. Relay an order for increased rapid-response air patrols. If we get lucky and spot him somewhere, I want a deputy on top of him within two minutes."

"Very well, sir. That will no doubt be sufficient to-" Suddenly Donald's head cocked to one side, as if he were listening to something only he could hear-and that was not far from the truth. Kresh was familiar with the mannerism. Donald's on-board communications system was receiving a message.

"Who's calling, Donald?" Alvar asked.

"One moment, sir. It is a timelock-secured message. I will have to wait for the synchronization burst to decode it. One moment. Ah, there it is. You are ordered to meet with the Governor tomorrow morning, first thing, seven hours from now."

Kresh groaned. "Devil take it all. The man's politics are bad enough. Does he have to get up at insane hours as well?"

But there was no real response to that question, and Donald offered none. At last Alvar Kresh sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Home, Donald," he said. "I want to see that damned lecture before I see the Governor. I've had it up to here with knowing less than everyone else."

"THEY'D only letme in, Fredda. Not Gubber. The police robots won't let him in until the Sheriff has-"

"Oh, be quiet, Jomaine. I know the law. My head hurts enough as it is." Fredda Leving leaned her head back against her pillow and shut her eyes. The throbbing was getting worse. But she could not take anything for it. Not yet. Not yet. She would have to be sharp, be careful, even with Jomaine. Especially with Jomaine. First, she had to take precautions against being monitored. It had been pointless before when there was a police robot in the room, but it was vital now. She would have to phrase the order carefully if it was to do any good.

She cleared her throat and spoke. "I order all robots in the room or monitoring this room in any way to forget all conversation that takes place between the time of this order and the next time I clap my hands three times within a period of five seconds. To remember any such conversation, or to report it, would almost certainly cause me harm."That ought to do it, unless the police had an actual human operative listening in on some hidden microphone, or a nonrobotic recording system working. But those possibilities were absurdly remote. Spacers used robots foreverything.

Which was, of course, the entire problem.

She turned toward Jomaine. "All right, I think we can talk now. Sit down and tell me what you know."

Jomaine Terach did as he was told, but it didn't take long for him to report the little that he was privy to. Not his fault, not really. Fredda had quite deliberately kept him in the dark, for everyone's sake. He couldn't tell what he didn't know-a fact that, in balance, was very much to her advantage at the moment. Gubber was enough of a risk. A well-informed Jomaine in Kresh's hands was a thought not to be contemplated. Still, he could at least serve to fill her in on any details Kresh had seen fit to leave out of his narrative.

Jomaine ran true to form, speaking overcarefully, working through all the details in a relentlessly orderly fashion, but even so it took him very little time to finish-no doubt in part because the crime scene was still sealed. No one not associated with the investigation had gotten into Gubber's lab yet. Indeed, it appeared that Jomaine did not even know that a robot was missing from the lab.

Fredda nodded her head thoughtfully after Jomaine had stopped. He had not really contributed a great deal to her store of knowledge. Caliban was gone, either escaped or stolen. Someone had attacked her and stolen her notes. But what he didnot say told her it could have been worse. That was not to say that a great deal of damage had not been done, but just now she would take whatever small comfort she could. "And that's it?" she asked. "Nothing else to report?"

Jomaine got to his feet, rather apologetically, and pulled a palm-sized computer pad from his pocket. "There' s nothing more thatI can tell you," he said, "but Gubber gave this to me for you. He seems to have some rather special sources of information." He handed her the pad and looked her straight in the eye, standing over her bed in a strangely formal, careful posture. It was obvious that he did not like what he was part of, but that he was determined to make the best of it and behave as correctly as possible. He pointed to the computer pad he had just given her. "I have not read that report," he said, "and I'm not going to. I don't want to know anything more. I have told you all I know, but none of what I think, and I expect that you will prefer it that way.

"To be quite blunt about the matter, my ideas about what you 're doing scare three kinds of hell out of me. Therefore, I would ask that you have the kindness to wait until I have left the room to look this over."

Fredda Leving stared at her assistant in astonishment for a full thirty seconds before she could find voice enough to speak. Never had the man been so bold or blunt. "Very well, Jomaine. Thank you for your honesty and discretion."

"I would suggest that those are two qualities we have all had in short supply recently," he said sharply. The expression on Terach' s pointed face softened a bit, and he reached out to touch her on the shoulder. "Rest, Fredda, heal," he said in a warm and gentle voice. "Even if none of this had happened, you' d need all your strength for tomorrow night."

Fredda smiled wanly and sighed. "You didn't need to remind me," she said. Tomorrow night's presentation might well decide more fates than her own.

Jomaine Terach turned and left, leaving Fredda alone with her thoughts and Gubber Anshaw' s computer pad. She was almost afraid to read it. Gubber had some amazing sources of information. Fredda had decided long ago that she did notwant to know what those sources were.

Fredda hardly dared wonder what he had come up with this time. She started to read the information in the pad. Three paragraphs into it she was so terrified she could scarcely see well enough to read it. For what she read in the computer pad made all the rest of her worries seem like no worries at all.

Good lord, where the hell had Gubber gotten this stuff? It looked like he had gotten his hands on the complete police reports of her attack, raw information not yet analyzed or put in order.Two sets of bloody robotic footprints? What the devil could that mean?

And the other reports-on the Ironhead riot at Settlertown and the robot basher/arson incident in the warehouse district. Sweet Fallen Angel, yes, Caliban had given his name to a witness there and she, Fredda, had just given it to Kresh as well. They had the link. They knew, or thought they knew, all they needed to know about Caliban.

Damn it, who thehell had let him out of the lab? Fredda had known right along that Caliban's earliest hours would be highly formative. That was why she had delayed powering him up for so long. She wanted all the conditions ideal when she did.

But look at the first hours he had had instead. He must have been at the very least a witness to the attack on her. Then he must have wandered the city, seen the subservient behavior of robots. That must have been damned confusing to him. She had deliberately edited out all information regarding robots from his datastore.

Hell's bells, how long had she worked on that datastore, carefully tailoring the information it contained? At best, all that work was now wasted.

At worst, it would wildly skew Caliban's view of the world. And on top of all that, for him to get mixed up with a mob of robot bashers...

Fredda Leving let the computer pad drop to the bed and slumped backwards, eyes shut, her stomach tied in a knot, her head a suddenly revitalized world of pain.Why? she wondered.Why did it have to be this way?

She thought about what Caliban had seen so far: violence, brutality, his own kind treated as slaves and worse. He had been given no other influences to shape his mind and viewpoint.

But that was far from the worst of it. Now Alvar Kresh was on the hunt, with every move Kresh made likely to reveal the truth at the wrong time and the wrong place. One accidental wrong move on Kresh' s part could smash down the political house of cards that was all that might save Inferno.

Fredda Leving felt her heart grow cold with fear.

Trouble was, she was not quite sure what to be afraid for.

Or afraid of.