by Isaac Asimov
He returned his attention to the datastore map. At first, his mind cast back and forth across the map in random, swooping passes, trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible while still keeping track of any building or place that seemed suspiciously blank. Then he resolved to quarter the whole city and go block by block, in an orderly manner. Perhaps there was something he could learn from the pattern of blanked places, something he could discern only when he had located them all.
The map of the city had definite edges to it, precise boundaries beyond which was nothingness. Caliban’s knowledge of the world, the universe, stopped at those borders. For a moment, Caliban toyed with the idea of venturing to the closest of those boundaries, just to see what it was like. He imagined himself standing on the edge of the world, looking down into nothingness. The idea was exciting and disturbing.
But no. It would not do to get sidetracked. First he must get answers about himself and about what had happened at the building where he had awakened. After those two mysteries were resolved, he could take the time to indulge his idle curiosity.
He set to work at the southern edge of the map and began to work across it methodically, examining a strip from east to west, then moving northward to examine the next strip, west to east.
And then he found it. Not far from the southern edge of the map was a great void, an emptiness a thousand times, ten thousand times larger than the blank, unmarked building in which he had awakened. But this was no area without detailed markings. This was emptiness, the absence of all things. No land, no water, no buildings, no roads. There was nothing there at all.
He wondered if the map was reporting literal truth. What could such a void look like in real life? What would cause it? His curiosity, his eagerness to see this place, was all but uncontrollable. But he held firm to his plan. He must examine the whole city, absorb the whole of the datastore map into his active memory. There could be other voids as well, equally significant. He held to his search pattern, moving south to north, shuttling east to west, west to east.
It took the better part of an hour, but at last Caliban had worked his way across the whole of the map of Hades. Yes, there were other voids, but none of them were even a fraction as large as the first he had found. Yes, there were other unmarked, unlabeled buildings, but he could not see any obvious pattern, no relation to the features on the rest of the map, that told him anything meaningful, or anything at all.
There was nothing left for it but to go and look. Now there was no reason to resist the temptation to see what the great void looked like. Caliban stood up and walked back to the field, using his infrared vision to move easily through the darkness.
The site of the void was a good distance across the city, and the first hints of dawn were lighting the east as he traveled through the semi-arid, half-populated expanses of Hades, imagining what a great emptiness would look like.
But what he saw when he got there was no blank on the map. As the dawn broke full over the horizon, Caliban stood at the edge of where the map said there was only emptiness.
What Caliban saw was a lively oasis in the midst of the fading city. He stood at the edge of a broad and verdant park, dotted stands of trees, great lawns, spraying fountains.
Small pavilions dotted the landscape and seemed to give access to underground facilities, judging by the people going in and out. Caliban walked along the low stone wall that formed the perimeter of the park, until he came to the entrance.
Settlertown, a sign said. Caliban stared at it in confusion. Another mystery. He had no idea what Settlers were, or why they should have their own town. He called to the datastore, but it had no information on any such term.
For some reason, all information regarding both his origin point and this place had been deleted from his datastore.
But why would anyone do that?
Darkness had passed, and dawn had come over the horizon, and the morning was well begun. Alvar Kresh paced the room, listening to the routine words of the routine interrogation of yet another routine coworker, one Jomaine Terach. Terach wasn’t normally up and at the lab by this hour, but he lived quite near the lab and all the commotion had wakened him. He had wandered over to see what was going on – or so he claimed. Police officers throughout history had been a little slow to believe witnesses who explained trifles such as coming to work with such elaboration – and Kresh was tempted to uphold that tradition in the present instance. It would be wise to treat everyone as a suspect just at the moment.
Kresh let Donald do most of the work. This night had been a long, hard journey through the darkness to the day. Crime scenes could be grueling.
They had taken over the duty office for the purpose of doing the intake interrogations, taking each worker as he or she arrived. The duty office was designed to accommodate an overnight stay, in case an experiment ran all night. The office featured a large and rather comfortable-looking bed, much better than the miserable cot in the duty room at Sheriff’s HQ. After a sleepless night, it looked more than slightly inviting.
“Tonya Welton claims that Fredda Leving was – is – working; for her. Is that true?” Donald asked.
“Absolutely not,” Jomaine Terach said, yawning mightily. “Fredda Leving has never worked for anyone but herself in her life, and she isn’t likely to start in by oiling up to the high and mighty Queen of the Settlers.” He yawned again. “My God, it’s early. Have you been at it since the attack?”
“Yes, sir. We have been here working straight through the night,” Donald said.
“So she and Tonya Welton don’t get along,” Kresh said, brushing aside Terach’s and Donald’s pleasantries. He sat back down at the table, next to Donald and opposite Terach. He drummed his fingers on the desktop, trying to keep his exhausted mind from wandering. Maybe he should have gone home instead of staying here all night.
Now, where was he? Damn it, his mind was wandering. He was getting fuzzy. He wasn’t going to learn much of anything if he was too exhausted to think. “So they didn’t like each other,” he said again, trying to cover up his overlong pause. “Were they at least polite around each other?”
“No, sir, not in the least,” Jomaine said. “Not anymore. They used to be much closer, real friends, I thought. Now there isn’t much left but the professional relationship.”
That was an interesting tidbit. Tonya Welton and Fredda Leving, each with a real reputation for being a hard-edged infighter. He could easily imagine them coming to a parting of the ways. It was far harder to imagine them becoming friends in the first place.
But being personally involved with the victim made it just that much more peculiar that Welton would barge into the investigation. She must have known that Kresh would quickly learn about the friction between herself and the victim. It was very early in the going, but right now, she was the one with the best motive for the attack. Why draw attention to herself?
Alvar Kresh leaned back in his chair and looked across the desk at the man he was interviewing. Jomaine Terach was a tall, thin man, sandy-haired, pale, with a long, thin face and a sharp-pointed nose. There was something a bit overrefined, overformal, about his manner of speech.
Kresh repressed a yawn. It hardly seemed worth staying up all night just to listen to the likes of Terach.
Alvar rubbed his eyes and brought his mind back to where he was in the questioning.” I find it hard to imagine the two of them as friends. Settlers hate robots, and Leving was one of the leading proponents of more and better robots. I can’t see how much they would have in common,” Kresh said.
“I think perhaps that was part of what made the friendship work – at least for a while. They enjoyed debating each other. But then things fell apart between them. Maybe it just got a little too intense,” Terach suggested.
“But if she wasn’t Tonya Welton’s employee, Master Terach, and they were no longer friends,” Donald 111 said, “might one ask what their relationship was?”
Terach glared at Donald. It clearl
y annoyed him to be questioned by a robot. But he was smart enough not to protest out loud.
Kresh watched Terach with a detached, professional interest. He often ordered Donald to take an active part in the questioning. It was a variation on the ancient good-cop, bad-cop routine. Donald unsettled the interrogation subjects, and then the subjects answered Kresh, looking to him for support and understanding, unwisely trusting him over Donald.
“They were collaborators, I suppose.” Terach turned toward Kresh. “There’s a lot I can’t say about the work at the lab,” he apologized.
“I’ve heard that more than once,” Kresh growled. “Every employee I’ve talked to has told me that. Those seem to be the only words most of your people know.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. We’ll be back once I’ve gotten the Governor to grant me some clearances.”
That prospect didn’t seem to please the rather reedy-looking Jomaine Terach. “Well, perhaps you needn’t bother, once the public announcement is made.”
“And I’ve heard that, too, and I know bloody damn well you’re about to tell me you can’t say anything more,” Kresh said. “So let’s talk about something else. Tell me why Fredda Leving would be in Gubber Anshaw’s lab in the middle of the night.”
Terach seemed genuinely astonished. “Oh, my heavens, I wouldn’t attach any great importance to that,” he said. “We’re in and out of each other’s labs all the time. The work is of a highly – ah – collaborative nature, and I expect that she was simply working on some subcomponent that happened to be in his lab.”
“Infernals tend to be rather territorial people,” Kresh suggested. “We like to have our own space.”
Terach shrugged. “That may be so, but that doesn’t mean everyone is compulsive about it,” he said, a bit pointedly.
“Mmmph,” Kresh grunted, not altogether convinced, and ignoring the gibe that was clearly intended to distract him. “Well, then, maybe you can tell me where the devil Gubber Anshaw is. He hasn’t shown up this morning and we have not been able to reach him at home. We assume he’s there, but his robots flatly refuse to confirm that, or to pass on any messages.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jomaine said. “Gubber likes to work at home, in complete privacy. He’s taken to doing it more and more recently. Sometimes we kid him that if you police threw an arrest perimeter around his house, he wouldn’t even notice.”
Kresh grunted noncommittally. Privacy, and the sanctity of the home, were indeed highly valued commodities on Inferno. Indeed, it was illegal to arrest a person in his or her home. The law was very precise on that point, and on the procedures that could and could not be followed. The police and their robots could wait outside until hell froze over, they could search the premises once an arrest was made, but they could not enter the home to effect the arrest.
It had happened more than once that a suspect had refused to come out for a long period of time. Precedents and rules of procedure had long ago been established in such cases, setting out what could and could not be done. The police could cut off all communications links to the surrounded house, but not food, or water, or power. Sometimes the prohibition against home arrests actually worked to police advantage: If kept up long enough, the police-robot vigil outside a suspect’s home amounted to house arrest without all the bother and expense of a trial.
“Well, it might come to an arrest perimeter if we don’t hear from him soon,” Kresh said warningly. “You might get that information to him.”
Jomaine cocked a surprised eyebrow at Kresh. “Have a little patience, Sheriff. Gubber rarely comes in much before midday on the days he does come in,” he said. “He spends his mornings at his home, working on other research projects. Most days – but not all of them – he comes in here and works on Leving Lab projects about midday and through the evening. But as I said, he doesn’t always come in. He’s not held to any sort of schedule.”
Jomaine thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing him when I came through here last night. I doubt he was here. My guess is he’s been at home, working, the entire time, quite unaware that anything has happened. And yes, his robots have strict orders to prevent his being disturbed. But that is routine with him. I wouldn’t suggest that you read anything into his absence, or waste any time thinking he had something to do with the attack on Fredda.”
Alvar Kresh frowned. “Why not? It was his lab she was attacked in. At this point we have no suspects, no motive, no real information at all. I don’t know Gubber Anshaw or anything about him. I see no reason to eliminate anyone at this point, especially someone who would seem to have the opportunity to commit the crime. Coworkers have been known to have motives for murder.”
“Well, there’s your argument against suspecting him right there,” Jomaine said, a bit overeagerly. “Gubber Anshaw had no motive for attacking Fredda, and every reason for wishing her well. I suppose, yes, he might have had the means and the opportunity to assault her – but Sheriff Kresh, you have the means and the opportunity to pull your blaster from your holster right now and vaporize my head. That doesn’t mean you will do it. You have no motives for killing me – and a lot of motives for not hurting me. You ‘d lose your job and get thrown in jail, at the very least. But it goes past that. Fredda was a great help to Gubber. He would most definitely not want to lose that.”
“You are suggesting that Gubber Anshaw would have a great deal to lose if something happened to Fredda Leving?” Donald asked.
Jomaine Terach looked cautiously at Donald, and then at Kresh. “Once again, that gets us into classified areas. But yes, I think that would be safe to say. Gubber had made some remarkable advances, advances that required the rejection of some very tried and true technology in favor of something newer and better and more flexible. However, he didn’t get far in promoting his discoveries. Robotics is in many ways a very conservative field. Leving Labs was the only place that was willing to use his work.”
“I suppose we’re talking about gravitonic brains here,” Kresh said.
Terach breathed in sharply, clearly surprised and unsettled. “How did you –”
“There was a stack of them in neatly labeled boxes in Anshaw ‘s lab,” Kresh said, more than a bit sardonically. “I think perhaps you need to work a little on security procedures down at the lab.”
“Apparently so,” Terach said, clearly nonplussed.
“So what the devil are gravitonic brains? Some sort of replacement for the positronic brain?”
Donald turned his head toward Kresh. “Sir! That would be quite impossible. The positronic brain is the basis, the core, of all robotics. The Three Laws are intrinsic to it, built into its very structure, burned into its fundamental pathways.”
“Take it easy, Donald,” Kresh said. “That doesn’t mean that the Three Laws couldn’t be built into another form of brain. Right, Terach?”
Terach blinked and nodded, still a bit distracted. “Of course, of course. I really cannot say anything specific about gravitonic brains, but I suppose it can’t do any harm to speak in broad generalities. Gubber Anshaw is really just at the beginning of his research on gravitonics, but in my opinion he’s already made tremendous breakthroughs. It’s time someone did.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that we have rung out the changes on positronics. Certainly today’s positronic brain is far superior to the original units. It has been greatly advanced and improved. There have been many refinements in it. But the positronic brain’s basic design hasn’t changed in thousands of years. It would be as. if we were still using chemical rockets for spacecraft, instead of hyperdrive. The positronic brain is an incredibly conservative design that puts tremendous and needless limits on what robots can do. Because the Three Laws are embedded in its design, the positronic brain is seen as the only possible design for use in robots. That is an article of belief, of faith, even among robotics researchers. But gravitonics could change all that.
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br /> “Gravitonic brains currently have one or two minor drawbacks, but they are at the beginning of their development. They promise tremendous advantages over positronics, in terms of flexibility and capacity.”
“Well, you certainly sound like a true believer yourself,” Kresh said dryly. There is none so faithful as the converted, he thought. “Very well, Terach. I may well wish to talk with you later, but that will do it for now. You may go.”
Jomaine nodded and stood up. He hesitated before heading for the door. “Ah, one question,” he said. “What is the prognosis for Fredda Leving?”
Kresh’s face hardened. “She’s still unconscious,” he said, “but they expect her to awaken sometime in the next day or so, and go on to a rapid and complete recovery. They are using the most advanced regeneration techniques to stimulate recovery. I understand her head injury should be completely healed within two days.”
Jomaine Terach smiled and nodded. “That’s excellent news,” he said. “The staff here will be delighted to hear it – ah, that is, if I’m allowed to tell them.”
Kresh waved his hand in negligent dismissal. “Go right ahead, Terach. It’s public knowledge – and she’s under heavy guard.”
Terach pasted on a patently false smile, nodded nervously, and left the room.
Kresh watched him go. “What’s your reading, Donald?” he asked, without looking over at the robot. No one talked about it much, but advanced police robots were specially engineered to detect the body’s involuntary responses to questions. In effect, Donald was a highly sophisticated lie detector.
“I should remind you that Jomaine Terach quite possibly knows about my capabilities as a truth-sensor. I have never met him before, but a records-check confirms that he was on staff here during my construction. That does add a variable. However, suffice to say that he was highly agitated, sir. Far more so than any of the others, and, in my opinion, more so than would be accounted for solely by surprise and concern over the attack on Lady Leving. Voice stress and other indicators confirm that he was concealing something.”
