Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  “But what in the Nine Circles of Hell does it mean?” 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 right and 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 this is 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 that all 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 I can 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 let me 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 for everything.

  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 did not 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 that I 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 not want 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 the hell 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.

  Chapter 9

  GUBBER ANSHAW KNEW he was not a courageous man, but at least he had the courage to admit that much to himself. He had the strength of character to understand his own limitations, and surely that had to count for something.

  Well, it was comforting to tell himself that, at any rate. Not that such self-understanding was much use under the present circumstances. But be that as it may. There were times when even a coward had to do the right thing.

  And now, worse luck, was one such time. He watched as Tetlak, his personal robot, guided Gubber’s deliberately undistinctive aircar through the dark of night toward Settlertown. The aircar slowed to a halt, hung in midair waiting for Settlertown’s traffic and security system to query the car’s transponder and see that it was on the preapproved list. Then the ground opened up beneath them as a fly-in portal to the underground city granted them entrance. The car flew down through the depths, down into the great central cavern of Settlertown, and came in for a landing.

  Gubber used a hand gesture to order Tetlak to stay with the car, then got out himself. He walked to the waiting runcart and got in. “To Madame Welton’s, please,” he said as he settled in. The little open vehicle took off the moment he sat down. Gubber barely had time to reflect on the unnerving fact that there was no conscious being in control of the cart before he was delivered to Tonya’s quarters.

  He walked to her doorway and stood there for a moment before he remembered to press the annunciator button. Normally that was something his robot would do for him. But Tetlak made Tonya nervous sometimes, and he had no wish for unneeded awkwardness. It was bad enough that he had come without calling ahead.

  A sleepy Tonya Welton opened the door and looked upon her visitor in surprise. “Gubber! What in the Galaxy are you doing here?”

  Gubber looked at her for a moment, raised his hand uncertainly, and then spoke. “I know it was risky to come, but I had to see you. I don’t think I was followed. I had to come and say – say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye!” Tonya’s astonishment and upset were plainly visible on her face. “Are you breaking it off because –”

  “I’m not breaking anything off, Tonya. You will always be there in my heart. But I don’t think I will be able to see you again after – after I go to see Sheriff Kresh.”

  “What!”

  “I’m turning myself in, Tonya. I’m going to take the blame.” Gubber felt his heart pounding, felt the sweat starting to bead up on his body. For the briefest of moments, he felt a bit faint. “Please,” he said. “May I come in?”

  Tonya backed away from the door and ushered him in. Gubber stepped inside and looked around. Ariel stood motionless in her robot niche, staring out at nothing at all. The room was in its bedroom configuration, all the tables and chairs stowed away, replaced by a large and comfortable bed – a bed that Gubber had reason to remember most fondly. Now he crossed the room and sat, morosely, on the edge of it, feeling most lost and alone.

  Tonya watched him cross the room, watched as he sat down. Gubber looked up at her. She was so beautiful, so natural, so much herself Not like Spacer women, all artifice and appearance and affectation.

  “I have to turn myself in,” Gubber said.

  Tonya looked at him, quietly, thoughtfully. “For what, Gubber?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “What charge, exactly, will you confess to when you turn. yourself in? What is it you’ve done? When they ask you for a detailed description of how you committed your crime, what will you say?”

  Gubber shrugged uncertainly and looked down at the floor. He had no idea what to confess to, of course. In his own mind, he had committed no crime, but he doubted the law would share that opinion. But what point to confessing to a crime in order to shield Tonya when he did not know what, if anything, they suspected she had done? Tonya had her own secrets, and he dared not ask what they were.

  Clearly it would be safer for both of them if each kept certain things to themselves for now.

  The silence dragged on, until Tonya took it as an answer.

  “I thought so,” she said at last. “Gubber, it just won’t work.” She sat down next to him and put her arm across his shoulders. “Dearest Gubber, you are a wonder. Back home on Aurora, I must have known a hundred men full of thunder and bluster, always ready to show me just how big and brave they were. But none of them had your courage.”

  “My courage!” Gubber looked sadly at Tonya. “Hah! There’s a contradiction in terms.”

  “Is it? No big burly Settler man would dream of confessing a crime, going to a penal colony, for the sake of the woman he loved. And you’d do it, I know you would. But you can’t. You mustn’t.”

  “But –”

  “Don’t you see? Kresh is no fool. He’ll be able to crack through a false confession i
n a heartbeat, and you don’t know what to confess to. We have the police report, but he’s not fool enough to tell us everything he knows. Once he’s cracked you, he’ll ask himself why you’d confess to what you hadn’t done. Sooner or later, he’ll find out you did it to protect me. Then we’ll both end up in trouble.”

  Something deep inside Gubber froze up. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. But no, wait. There was one thing she hadn’t thought of. “That won’t happen, Tonya. After all, no one knows about us –”

  “But maybe they will, Gubber. Odds are Kresh will find out sooner or later. I’ve done what I could to protect you, and I know you’ve done the same for me. But we dare do no more. If we’re lucky, and we don’t draw attention to ourselves, we’ll be all right. But if either of us does anything to draw Kresh’s attention –”

  Tonya let the words hang in the air. There was no need for her to complete the sentence. Gubber turned to her, put his arms around her, and kissed her, passionately and for a long while. At last he drew back, just a bit. He looked her in the eye, stroked her hair, whispered her name. “Tonya, Tonya. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You know that.”

  “I know, I know,” Tonya said, her eyes bright with loving tears. “But we must be careful. We must think with our heads, not our hearts. Oh, Gubber. Hold me.”

  Then they kissed again, and Gubber felt passion sweeping away his fears and worries. They reached for each other, eagerly, urgently, pulling their clothes off, falling back onto the bed, their bodies coming together in desire and need.

  Gubber glanced up and saw Ariel standing, motionless, in her wall niche. For a split second he worried, wondering if her being there would bother Tonya. A robot in the bedroom meant nothing to a Spacer, of course

  The devil take it. It was more than obvious that Ariel was the furthest thing from Tonya’s mind. Why bring her attention to it? He reached out to the side of the bed and jabbed down the manual switch, shutting off the overhead lights, and gave no more thought to it.