Caliban

13

HRT-234, better known as Horatio, was an extremely busy robot at the moment. But then, there was nothing unusual about that. Such had been the case for some time now. There was, after all, Limbo to deal with.

Horatio noted the time and checked his internal datastore, but the information there only increased his sense of mounting frustration. He linked into a hyperwave link to check the submaster schedule for the next three hours. No doubt about it. They had fallen behind again out on the auxiliary shipping floor. There was a bottleneck somewhere. Smoothing out bottlenecks was one of his duties. Being sure to stay linked into the comm net via hyperwave, he left his normal duty station in Depot Central and hurried out to aux shipping to see what was up.

The Limbo Project was enormously complicated. Horatio’s duties were complex, and his responsibilities tremendous, but he knew that he was concerned with only the slightest, smallest piece of the picture. At least, he had surmised as much for himself. Doing so was not hard: The evidence was there to be seen on all sides, in the density of message traffic, in the complexity of the routing problems, in the patterns of communications security…

But, truth be told, there was no need to examine such esoteric areas as signal analysis to know there was something big going on. The conclusion was there to be drawn by a mere glance at the whirling, overorganized chaos that surrounded him on the aux shipping floor.

The shipping floor, the whole depot, was a place of noise and confusion, of heavy unpainted stresscrete floors and towering support girders, roller/carriers and liftwagons, of hurrying robots darting everywhere and hectoring men and women shouting and arguing, talking into mobile phones, checking the time, pointing at lists of things that had to be done.

Even the air was filled with rush and hurry. Even here, four deep levels below ground level, there was no room for the cargo vehicles to land while waiting for a load. The heavy-duty cargo flyers were forced to hover instead, and they hung in midair everywhere, waiting for their chance to land. Carrier robots of all descriptions humped freight into the cargo bays of the flyers that found a place to come down. As Horatio watched, another flyer sealed up and launched through the great accessways, up toward ground level and the sky beyond, its place taken by another ship almost before the first had cleared the loading zone. Instantly the newly arrived ship was surrounded by a swarm of loader robots. The cargo doors swung open and they started rushing the cargo inside. Similar scenes were being repeated on all sides. Horatio had heard one of the human supervisors say it reminded her of the panicky rushing about in an overturned ant heap, and Horatio was reluctantly forced to concede he could see the comparison.

Limbo Depot had often been a busy place, and something close to a madhouse in the days just gone by. But today was the worst of all. Without being told, Horatio could tell there was some sort of deadline approaching. Everything was being rushed through at the last minute.

It was almost as if someone feared that today would be the last day anything could be done. One or two of the human supervisors—Settler as well as Spacer—had hinted as much.

But it was not, Horatio somewhat primly reminded himself, his place to worry about such things. If the humans did not wish to advise him of their worries, then those worries were no concern of his. Still, he could not help but worry: The humans could easily do harm to themselves or their vast project—whatever it was—by keeping it too secret. How could he head off trouble if he did not know what was going on?

It was, he knew, a problem he shared with many harried and overworked supervisor robots. Conversations with the other supervisors confirmed what he had always suspected. It wasn’t just Horatio or the Limbo Project: The humans never told any of their management robots everything they needed to know. It barely mattered, at this point. Horatio had been so busy recently that he was unaware of anything that had taken place outside of Limbo Depot in the past month. The seas could rise up and wipe out the island of Purgatory and the city of Limbo with it, and the first he would know of it would be when his cargo carriers did not return.

Right now all he needed to know was why the loading operation was falling behind. Horatio turned a practiced eye on the aux shipping floor, searching for the bottleneck that was slowing things down. He knew that the seeming chaos was an illusion, that this operation was moving with a high degree of efficiency. But somewhere out there was a problem that was slowing matters down again. A malfunctioning piece of equipment, a gang of robots confused by a poorly phrased order, something.

Then Horatio spotted the two humans, a Settler man and a Spacer man, arguing at the far end of the loading dock, surrounded by a cluster of inactive robots. If Horatio had been human himself, he might have let out a sigh just then, for even as he went over to make the attempt to smooth things over, he knew there was nothing to be done. The robots could take no action until the humans agreed what they should do, and, judging by the heated nature of the discussion between Spacer and Settler, that moment seemed likely to be rather far off.

With little hope of a quick resolution, and all the tact he had at his disposal, he walked to the end of the dock and waded into the argument.

FIFTEEN minutes later, a difficulty over which of two loads of cargo should be loaded first was resolved. It could have been settled in fifteen nanoseconds. If either the Spacer or the Settler had been interested in speed rather than winning the spat, both cargoes could have been loaded and on their way by now. But at least it was over now, and the two humans had wandered off to disrupt operations somewhere else. Honestly! He knew humans were superior to robots, and it went without saying that he held each and every one of them in the highest respect, and always followed their orders to the letter, but there were times when they could just seem so silly.

But be that as may be, he had a job to do, other orders to follow. Orders that seemed far more straightforward than they really were.

In simplest terms, all he was called upon to do was see to it that the N.L. robots were shipped to the island of Purgatory. Whatever N.L. meant.

But that, it quickly developed, was to be no simple task. For reasons that were kept from him altogether, the N.L. robots were not to be shipped in a fully assembled condition. Their brains were being sent separately from the bodies.

In addition, the brains were to be sent in three different shipments by three different routes. He returned to his duty station. The N.L. robots, boxed up and ready to go, were in the center of the shipping floor, a formidable wall of packing cases stacked up nearly to the ceiling. Guard robots stood on duty, one every three meters around the perimeter of the boxes. Two more guard robots stood on top of the stacked cases as well.

More guards watched over another, smaller, stack of packing cases, the ones that held the robots’ brains. Horatio felt a sudden impulse to take another look at the brains, or at least the boxes they came in. He walked over to them. After a moment’s hesitation, the guards let him past. Horatio knelt down and took a good hard look at the cases. He found himself mystified at all the fuss. The containers seemed to be ordinary padded shipping boxes. The only thing even remotely out of the ordinary seemed to be that new labels reading

had been hurriedly slapped over the old ones, as if someone were trying to cover up what the old labels had said. On one of the boxes, the new label failed to cover the old one completely, and the first letters of two lines of type were visible.

THE first was obviously HANDLE WITH CARE, but Horatio could not imagine what GRA could be. Horatio had a strong streak of curiosity, and he was at least somewhat tempted to peel back the new label and get a peek at the old one. But that he knew he could never do. Management robots were of necessity given a large degree of autonomy, a lot of room to make their own decisions. However, that did not give manager robots the ability to exceed the wishes of their owners—and it was clearly the wish of Leving Robotics Laboratories that the original label remain hidden and unread, and he, Horatio, was charged with the security of the shipment.

Reluctantly, dutifully, he took a marker from his workbag and obliterated the exposed part of the old label.

He stood up and went back to his work rostrum. Horatio’s instructions told him to send the bodies in three shipments as well, sending them at different times, via different routes, using different shipping procedures, from the three brain shipments. Human overseers would meet the three brain and three body shipments at their arrival points on the island of Purgatory and escort them to their final destination.

A third set of components, not brains or bodies, was to go out via its own secure route. “Range restricters,” it said on the invoice, but Horatio had not the slightest idea what that meant. Just another piece of busywork the humans insisted upon.

“Excuse me,” a rich, mellifluous voice said at his back.

Horatio turned around, expecting to see a human at his back. To his surprise, he instead saw a tall red robot there, a robot with a remarkably sophisticated voice system. Indeed, that voice went to waste in the cacophony of this place. It was difficult to speak on the working levels of the depot, and most robots did not bother trying. “Use your hyperwave, my friend,” Horatio said. “It is hard to hear you.”

“Use my what?”

“Your hyperwave signaling system. It is too noisy for speech here.”

“A moment, please.” The robot paused, as if he were consulting some internal reference or another. “Ah. Hyperwave,” he said at last. “Now I see. I was unfamiliar with the term. I am afraid I have no such signaling system. I must speak out loud.”

Horatio was astonished. Even the crudest, lowest-end carrier robots were equipped with hyperwave. And even if this robot did not have hyperwave, how could he not know what it was at first, and yet then be able to look it up? High-level robots sometimes had internal look-up sources, but they were meant for referral to esoteric knowledge needed for a specific job. Certainly such look-up datastores were not meant to serve as a dictionary of common terms. It would be a waste of effort, when such things could have and should have been downloaded to the robot’s brain during manufacture.

What sort of strange robot was this? “Very well,” Horatio said. “We shall talk out loud. What is it that you require?”

“You are supervisor Horatio?”

“Yes. What are you called?”

“Caliban. I am glad to find you, friend Horatio. I need your advice. I tried to seek some sort of help from the other robots, the blue ones working over there, but none of them seemed able to offer me guidance. They advised me to come and talk with you.”

Horatio was more puzzled than ever. The Shakespearean name “Caliban” told him something. Fredda Leving herself had built this robot, as she had built Horatio. But the name “Horatio” should have meant something to this Caliban, and yet it seemed that it did not. Stranger still, this advanced, sophisticated-looking robot had gone to the lowest of laborers seeking advice. The DAA-BOR series robots, such as the blue workers Caliban had gestured at, were capable of only the most limited sort of thought. Another fact that any robot or human should have known.

There was something very strange going on here. And perhaps strangest of all, friend Caliban seemed quite unaware of the oddness of his own behavior.

All this flickered through his mind in an instant. “Well, I hope that I can be of more help. What is the difficulty?”

The strange robot hesitated for a moment, and made an oddly tentative gesture with one hand. “I am not sure,” he said at last. “That in itself is part of the difficulty. I seem to be in the most serious sort of trouble, and I don’t know what to do about it. I am not even sure who I am.”

How much stranger could this get? “You just told me. You are Caliban.”

“Yes, but who is that?” Caliban made a broad, sweeping gesture. “You are Horatio. You are a supervisor. You tell other robots what to do and they do it. You help operate this place. That is, in large part, who you are. I have nothing like that.”

“But, friend Caliban. We are all defined by what we do. What is it that you do? That is what you are.”

Caliban looked out across the wide expanse of the depot, pausing before he spoke. “I flee from those who pursue me. Is that all I am, Horatio? Is that my existence?”

Horatio was speechless. What could this be? What could it all mean? Beyond question, this situation was peculiar enough, and potentially serious, that he would have to give it some time. Things were running smoothly for the moment. Perhaps they would remain that way for a while. “Perhaps,” Horatio said gently, “we should go to another place to talk.”

THEY rode up the main personnel elevator toward the surface levels of the depot. They got off the elevator and Horatio led Caliban toward the most private spot he could think of.

The human supervisor’s office was vacant for the moment. Up until a few weeks ago, it had rarely ever been occupied. Humans hadn’t much need to come to the depot. But things were different now. Men and women were here, working, at all hours, designing, planning, meeting with one another. At times, Horatio thought that there was something quite stimulating about all the rushed activity. At other times, it could be rather overwhelming, the way the orders and plans and decisions came blizzarding down.

But any combination of confused and conflicting orders would be more understandable than this Caliban. Horatio ushered him into the luxurious office. It was a big, handsome room, with big couches and deep chairs. Humans working late often used them for quick naps. There was a big conference table on one side of the room, surrounded by chairs. At present, it had a large-scale map of the island of Purgatory on it. All the other rooms and cubicles and compartments of Limbo Depot were windowless, blank-walled affairs. But the north and south walls of the place were grand picture windows, the south one looking toward the busy aboveground upper levels of the depot, the northern one looking out toward the still-lovely vistas of Inferno’s desiccating landscape, prairie grass and desert and mountains and blue sky. The west wall was given over to the doors they had just come through, along with a line of robot niches, while the east wall was almost entirely taken up with view screens, communications and display systems of all sorts.

Caliban wandered the room, seeming to be astonished by all that he saw. He stared hard at the map upon the table, closely examined a globe of the planet that stood hanging in the air by the table. He stared out both windows, but seemed to take a special interest in the vistas of nature to the north.

But Horatio’s time was precious, and he could not let it drift away watching this odd robot stare out the window. “Friend Caliban—” he said at last. “If you could explain yourself now, perhaps I could be of assistance.”

“Excuse me, yes,” Caliban said. “It is just that I have never seen such things before. The map, the globe, the desert—even this sort of room, this human room—they are all new things to me.”

“Indeed? Pardon my saying so, friend Caliban, but many things seem new to you. Even if you have never seen these precise objects before, surely your initial internal dataset included information on them. Why do you seem so surprised by them all?”

“Because I am surprised. My internal dataset held almost no information at all, beyond language and the knowledge of my own name. I have had to learn about everything, either from a built-in datastore that works as a look-up system, rather than a memory, or by firsthand observation. I have found that I must rely far more on the second technique, as large and important areas of information have been deleted from the datastore.”

Horatio pulled out one of the hardwood chairs at the conference table and sat down, not out of any question of comfort, but so he could seem as quiet and passive as possible. “What sort of data has been deleted? And how can you be sure it was cut out? Perhaps it was never there in the first place.”

Caliban turned and faced Horatio, then crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite him at the conference table. “I know it was deleted,” he said, “because the space it should have occupied is still there. That space is simply empty. There are literally gaps in my map of the city, places that do not exist according to the map. Some gaps exist inside the city limits, but the land outside the city is nonexistent. The first time I went to the border of the city, I wondered what the ‘nothing’ beyond the city limits would look like.” Caliban pointed out the window. “The mountains I see out that window do not exist in my map. According to my map, there is nothing whatsoever outside the city of Hades. No land, no water, no nothing. Did your initial datasets tell you such things?”

“No, of course not. I awakened fully aware of the basics of geography and galactography.”

“What is galactography?” Caliban asked.

“The study of the locations and properties of the stars and planets in the sky.”

“Stars. Planets. I am unfamiliar with these terms. They are not in my datastore.”

Horatio could only stare. Clearly this robot was suffering a major memory malfunction. It could not be that a robot of such high intellect would be allowed out of the factory with such a faulty knowledge base. Horatio decided he must assume that any highly stressful event could send this Caliban over the edge. Horatio found himself fascinated by Caliban. As a management robot, it was his duty to oversee the mental health of the laborers in this section. He had made something of a study of robopsychology, but he had never seen anything like Caliban. Any robot who showed this degree of confusion and disorientation should be almost completely incapable of any meaningful action. Yet this Caliban seemed to be functioning rather well under circumstances that should have produced catatonia. What has Dr. Leving done to make him so strong and yet so confused? he wondered. “The terms ‘stars’ and ‘planets’ are not immediately important,” he said soothingly. “Are there any other major gaps? Any other subjects you feel that you should know more about?”

“Yes,” Caliban said. “Robots.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My internal data sources say nothing at all about beings such as ourselves, beyond providing the identifying term ‘robot.’ ”

Again, and for a long time, Horatio was left with nothing but silence. At first, he even entertained the idea that Caliban was joking. But that seemed hardly possible. Robots had no sense of humor, and there was nothing other than deadly seriousness in Caliban’s voice.

“Surely you must be in error. Perhaps the data is misfiled, wrongly loaded,” he suggested.

Caliban opened his palms, in a rather human gesture of helplessness. “No,” he said. “It is simply not there. I have no information about robots. I was very much hoping you could tell me about them—about us.”

“You know nothing. Not about the science of robotics, or the proper modes of addressing a human, or the theory underlying the Three Laws?”

“None of that, though I can surmise what some of it is. Robotics, I take it, is the study of robotic design and robot behavior. As to how to address a human, I have a great deal of data about them. There are many different social statuses and ranks, and I have already gathered that there is a rather complicated system of address based on all sorts of variables. I can see that robots must have their place in that system. As to the last, I am afraid that I know nothing about the theory underlying the Three Laws you mentioned. I’m afraid I don’t even know what the Three Laws you’re talking about are.”

Horatio actually blacked out for a split second. He did not collapse forward, or twitch violently, or any of that. It was more subtle than that, just a quick moment of total and complete cognitive dissonance. There, before him, talking quite rationally, was a robot who did not know what the Three Laws were! Impossible. Flatly impossible. Then he was back, from wherever he had been. Wait a moment. He had heard of such cases in the past. Yes, yes. There were cases, many of them, of robots who did not know they knew the Three Laws—and yet obeyed them, anyway. It must be something like that. Yes. Yes. The alternative was unthinkable, impossible. “Why don’t you tell me everything,” Horatio suggested. “Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”

“That could take some time,” Caliban said. “Will it cause you any problem to be away from your duties that long?”

“I can assure you, there can be no higher duty for me at this time than dealing with a robot in your situation.”

Which was certainly true. Horatio would no more leave Caliban to wander off on his own than he would walk away from an occupied house on fire.

“I am deeply relieved,” Caliban said. “At last, I have someone sympathetic, experienced, and intelligent who will listen to me and be able to help.”

“I will certainly do my best,” Horatio said.

“Excellent,” Caliban said. “Then let me begin at the beginning. I have only been alive for a brief time. I awoke two days ago in the Leving Robotics Laboratories, and the first thing I saw was a woman I have since identified as Fredda Leving, unconscious on the floor in front of me, a pool of blood under her head.”

Horatio’s head snapped back with astonishment. “Unconscious! Bleeding! This is terrible news. Did she recover? Were you able to assist her, or summon help?”

Caliban hesitated for a moment. “I must admit that I should have done so, but up until you suggested it just now, it never occurred to me to do any such thing. I should have gone to the aid of a fellow being. But I must plead my own inexperience as a defense. The world was quite new to me—indeed it still is. No, I stepped over her and left the room and the building.”

Horatio felt himself freeze up inside. This was inconceivable. A robot—this robot, in front of him—had walked away from a badly injured human. His vision dimmed again, but he managed to hang on. “I—ah—I—you…” He was not at all surprised to learn that he was unable to speak.

Caliban seemed concerned. “Excuse me, friend Horatio. Are you all right?”

Horatio got his voice back, though not fully under control. “You left her there? Unconscious and bleeding? Even though, by your inaction, you could have cau-cau-caused her dea-death?” It was a major effort of will to say the last words. Just hearing about this secondhand, he could feel the First Law conflict building up inside himself, interfering with his ability to function. And yet Caliban seemed quite unaffected. “You are say—saying that you did noth-nothing-ing to help her.”

“Well, yes.”

“But the Fir—First Law!”

“If that is one of the Three Laws you mentioned earlier, I have already told you, friend Horatio, that I have never heard of them. I did not even learn of the concept of laws at all until I looked up the concept of a sheriff after the police tried to destroy me.”

“Destroy you!”

“Yes, through some sort of massive explosion as they were chasing me.”

“Chasing you! Didn’t they simply order you to stop?”

“If they did, I never heard them. The man with the packages ordered me to stop, but I saw no reason to obey him. He was in no position of authority over me.”

“You refused a direct order from a human being?”

“Why, yes. What of it?”

It had to be real. It could not be some fantastic misunderstanding wherein some malfunction caused this poor unfortunate to lose conscious awareness of the Laws, even as he followed them. This robot, this Caliban, had truly never heard of the Three Laws and was not bound by them. If one of the DAA-BOR models down on the loading docks had suddenly given birth to a baby robot, he would have been no more astonished.

But he had to hear this. The police would need to know everything they could about this robot. Best to let him talk, and call in the authorities after he was done, after he, Horatio, had the full story. “I think you had best start at the beginning again,” he said.

“Yes, certainly.” Caliban proceeded to tell all that had happened to him, from his first moment of awakening over the unconscious Fredda Leving, describing all that had happened since then. His wandering the city, his encounter with the robot-bashing Settlers, his discovery of the blanks in his knowledge, the police chase, all of it. He told his story quickly but carefully.

Horatio felt himself growing more and more confused. Several times, he found that he wanted to stop Caliban and ask a question, but he found that he was unable to do so. Hardly surprising that his speech center was malfunctioning, given the degree of cognitive dissonance Caliban’s story was inducing. He could feel his own intellect sliding toward mindlock, toward a state where the mere hearing of Caliban’s endless violations of the Laws was damaging him severely. And he reported his incredible, horrifying behavior in such a matter-of-fact way, as if none of it were strange, or abnormal, or unnatural. It was hard to focus, hard to concentrate

Wait! There was something wrong. Something he had to do. Something about the—the—yes, the police. He had to call them. Call them. Get them to take this horrifying robot out of here out of here out of here. Wait. Focus. Have to do it without alerting Calicalicaliban. He knew there was a way. How? How? Yes! Hyperwave. Call police hyperwave. Call. Concentrate. Hyperwave. Make the link. Call. Call.

“Sheriff’s Dispatcher,” the voice whispered inside his head, as Caliban related his journeys through the tunnels of the city.

With a feeling of palpable relief, Horatio recognized that he had reached a human dispatcher. Just the sound of a human voice made him feel better. How wise of the Sheriff’s Department to use human dispatchers on the robot call-in frequency. “This is robot HRT-234,” he transmitted, struggling to get the words out. Even over hyperwave, even with a human on the other end of the line, First Law conflict reaction was making it all but impossible to form words. How to tell them? Suddenly he knew. “Caaaan’t ta-talk,” he sent to the dispatcher. “Calib-b-b-an.” Caliban had said the police were after him. If the police had learned his name

“What? Say again, HRT-234.” There was something urgent, eager, in the dispatcher’s voice, something that told Horatio that the human knew who Caliban was.

Horatio concentrated, forced all his effort into sending clearly. “CaliCalibanban. Speeeeechlock.”

“I understand. The rogue robot Caliban is with you and you are suffering speechlock. Good work, HRT-234. Keep your send frequency open to provide a homing signal. Aircar units will be there in ninety seconds.”

Good work, the human dispatcher had said. Horatio suddenly felt better, felt capable of noticing his surroundings again.

“—iend Horatio! What is wrong with you? Horatio!” Horatio came back to himself and found Caliban reaching out across the table, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wha! Sorr sorr sorry. Lost touch. Could not hear you you while hype hype hype—” Too late, Horatio regained partial control over his speech centers. It had blurted out.

“Could not hear me while you what?” Caliban demanded, but Horatio could say no more. “Hyperwave!” Caliban said. “While you hyperwaved to the Sheriff for help! What else should I have expected!”

“I—I—I had to call! You danger! Danger!”

Suddenly there was the wind-rush sound of an aircar coming down fast. Both robots turned to look out the windows on the north side of the building. Horatio felt a surge of relief as he saw the sky-blue deputy’s cars swoop down for a landing.

But he was still badly slowed by First Law conflict shock. He just barely turned his head back in time to see Caliban smash his fist through the south window and leap through the opening. Horatio got up, moved toward the south window as slowly as though he were moving through hip-deep mud.

There was the thunder of heavy boots in the hallway, and then a squad of deputies in battle armor burst into the room. It was all Horatio could do to point toward Caliban’s retreating figure as it vanished down one of the tunnel entrances to the vast underground maze of the depot.

Two of the deputies raised their weapons and fired out the window. A DAA-BOR robot exploded into a shower of metallic-blue confetti, but Caliban was not there anymore.

“Damn it!” one of the deputies cried out. “Come on, after him!” The humans smashed out more glass with the butts of the rifles and jumped the meter drop to ground level. They ran toward the tunnel, and Horatio watched them go.

But he knew already they would never catch Caliban.

CALIBAN ran.

Full speed, full out, dodging the busy herds of robots, picking his tunnels and turnings and movements to leave the most tangled trail possible for his pursuers.

All were against him. Robots, deputies, Settlers, civilians. And they would never give up chasing him through the city. He did not understand why, but it was plain from Horatio’s reactions that they regarded him as a threat, a menace.

Which is what they were to him.

Very well, then. It was time to do everyone a favor. If they intended to chase him the length and breadth of the city, it was time to leave the city. He needed to make plans.

Caliban ran on, into the darkness.

DONALD guided Alvar’s aircar skillfully through the gathering dusk toward the Central Auditorium. “Unfortunately, the deputies were unable to track him through the tunnels,” he said as he drove. “Caliban has clearly learned to make good use of the underground ways.”

Kresh shook his head. He had managed a quick nap in midafternoon, but he was still dead tired. It was hard to concentrate. Of course, the second failure of his deputies to effect Caliban’s capture did tend to bring things into focus. “Back down into the tunnels,” he said, half to himself. “And my deputies hardly ever have need to go down there. They don’t know their way around.” Kresh thought for a minute. “What about the robots on the scene? Why the devil didn’t the deputies simply order the robots in the area to surround and subdue Caliban?”

“I suspect it was for the very simple reason that no one thought of it. No member of your force, no robot on this planet, has ever needed to pursue a rogue robot before. The idea of chasing a robot almost seems a contradiction in terms.”

“No one has thought of the implications of the situation,” Kresh agreed. “Even I have trouble remembering that it’s a dangerous robot we’re after. Hell, there have probably been a half dozen times we could have used other robots to catch him. But it’s too late now. Now he knows to beware of other robots as well. Ah, well. If nothing else, there is a certain consistency to this case. Everything goes wrong.”

“Sir, I am receiving an incoming call from Tonya Welton.”

Alvar Kresh groaned. The damned woman must have called a half dozen times since he left the Governor’s office.

He did not want to talk to that woman—and the Governor had hinted pretty strongly that he would not much care if Welton didn’t get every bit of news instantly. “Tell her there is no new information, Donald.”

“Sir, that would be an untruth. The incident at Limbo Depot occurred after her last call—”

“Then tell her I said there was no new information. That much is the truth.” That was the trouble with having a robot screen your calls—the damned things were so truthful.

“Yes, sir, but she is calling to report information of her own.”

“Wonderful,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “Put her through, audio only.”

“Sheriff Kresh,” Tonya’s voice said, coming out of Donald’s speaker grille. “Sorry to be calling so often, but there is something you should know.”

“Good news, I hope,” Alvar said, mostly for want of anything else to say.

“Actually it is. Our people have picked up one Reybon Derue. We’ve got him dead to rights as the leader of that robot-basher gang our friend Caliban happened to run into. As best we can tell, we’ve got the rest of the gang, too, and they’re trying to see who can spill the beans on each other first. Caliban scared the merry hell out of them. I don’t think there’ll be any more incidents for a while. The bad news is none of them were able to tell us much of anything about Caliban that we didn’t already know.”

“I see,” Kresh said. No more robot bashing. Three days ago, he would have regarded that news as a major victory. Today it was incidental. “That’s good to know, Madame Welton. Thank you for reporting in.”

“While I’m on the line, Sheriff, can you give me any updates?”

“No, Madame Welton. I might have something for you later, but just at the moment, you know all that I do,” Kresh lied. “I’m afraid I have to get back to work now. I’ll call you when there is some meaningful information. Goodbye for now.” He made a throat-cutting gesture to Donald, and the line went dead.

“If she calls again tonight, Donald, I will not take the call. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, back to business. What about this robot Horatio? The supervisor robot that called the deputies in.”

“Still suffering from partial speechlock, I’m afraid. Sheriff’s Department robopsychologist Gayol Patras has been working with him since the time of the incident, trying to bring Horatio out of it.”

“Any prognosis yet?”

“ ‘Guarded but optimistic’ was the phrase Dr. Patras used in her last report. She expects him to make a full recovery and be able to make an informative statement—unless she is rushed and pressured. Trying to get too much from him too fast could result in permanent speechlock and complete malfunction.”

“The roboshrinks always say that,” Alvar growled.

“Perhaps, sir, if I may be so bold, they always say it because it is always true. Virtually all serious mental disorders in robots produce severe and irreparable damage to positronic brains.”

“That is as it may be, Donald, but you and Patras are working on the assumption that I am concerned with Horatio’s recovery. I am not. That robot is utterly expendable. All I care about is getting at the information inside that robot’s brain as fast as possible. Horatio talked with Caliban. What did they say to each other? What did Caliban have to say for himself? I tell you, Donald, if we knew what Horatio knows, then we would know a great deal more than we do now.”

“Yes, sir. But if I may observe, your only hope of getting that information lies in Horatio’s recovery. He cannot relate his information in a catatonic state.”

“I suppose you’re right, Donald. But damn all the hells there are, it’s frustrating. For all we know, the answers to this case are locked up inside that robot’s skull, waiting for us, just beyond reach.”

“If we leave Robopsychologist Patras to her own devices, I expect we will have all that information in very short order. Meantime, we have all been looking forward to Fredda Leving’s second lecture with great anticipation. We shall be landing at the auditorium in approximately eight minutes. I expect that a great number of our questions will be answered as we listen to her.”

“I hope so, Donald. I sure as hell hope so.”

The aircar flew on.

FREDDA Leving paced back and forth backstage, pausing every minute or two to peek through the curtain.

Last time there had not been much of a turnout. Call it a testimony to the power of rumor and speculation, but tonight the auditorium was a madhouse. It had been designed to hold a thousand people and their attendant robots, with the robots sitting behind their owners on low jumper seats. But the thousand seats were long ago filled, and could have been filled again.

After a massive struggle, the management had got everyone in, a feat accomplished by the expedient of ejecting all the robots and giving places to the overflow crowd. The whole operation of getting people into their seats was taking a while. Fredda’s talk was going to have to start a bit late.

She peeked through the curtain again and marveled at the crowd. Word had certainly gotten out, that was clear. Not only about her first talk, but about the mysterious rogue robot Caliban, and the fast-swirling rumors of Settler robot-sabotage plots. There was endless speculation regarding the important announcement due to be made tonight. The whole city was whispering, full of unbelievable stories—most of them flatly wrong.

Tonya Welton and her robot, Ariel, were backstage with Fredda, and though Fredda supposed they had to be there, under the circumstances, it was not going to be easy talking to this crowd with the Queen of the Settlers on the stage, glaring icily down.

Governor Grieg himself was backstage, too, ready to show his support, for whatever that was worth just now.

Gubber Anshaw and Jomaine Terach were here as well, about as calm and relaxed as two men awaiting the executioner. The Governor wasn’t looking very at ease, either. Only Tonya Welton looked relaxed. Well, why not? If things went wrong, her worst-case scenario was that she got to go home.

There were a fair number of Settlers in attendance, sitting off by themselves on the right side of the house. By the looks of them, they weren’t exactly the most gentle or refined examples of their people. Rowdies, to put it bluntly. Tonya said she had made no arrangements for a Settler contingent. So who had set it up, and who had chosen this bunch of toughs to attend?

Maybe they were friends of the robot bashers who had been arrested. Maybe they were here to do a little paying back for the latest Settlertown incident. Whoever they were, Fredda had not the slightest doubt they were hoping there was an excuse for trouble.

Fredda stole one last peek around the edge of the curtain, and what she saw this time made her curse out loud. Ironheads. What better excuse for trouble could there be? A whole crew of them, maybe fifty or sixty, easily identifiable by the steel-grey uniforms they insisted on wearing for some reason, and Simcor Beddle himself in attendance. At least they had been seated at the rear left of the auditorium, as far as possible from the Settlers.

Sitting in the center of the front row was Alvar Kresh. Fredda surprised herself by being glad to see him. Maybe things wouldn’t get out of hand. His robot, Donald, was still in the auditorium, no doubt coordinating security. Fredda counted at least twenty deputies in the auditorium, lined up along the walls in the niches usually reserved for robots. They looked to be ready for anything—except who in the world could know what to be ready for?

She sighed. If only this roomful of people, and the words she was about to say, were all she had to worry about. But life was not that simple. There was the Caliban crisis, and now these garbled reports about Horatio and some sort of trouble at Limbo Depot. What the devil had happened there?

She stared again at Kresh. He knew. He knew what had happened to Horatio, and she had no doubt whatsoever that he was closing in on the real story behind Caliban as well.

She felt her head throbbing slightly and put her hand up to her turbaned head. She felt the small, discreet bandage on the back of her head under the hat. At least the turban would hide her shaved head and the bandage. No doubt everyone here knew she had been attacked, but there was no need to advertise it.

She stepped back from the curtain and found herself pacing the stage, lost in thought, lost to the world. But that was too lonely, too nerve-racking. She needed to speak to someone. She turned to her two associates, who were doing their own nervous waiting.

“Do you really think they’ll listen, Jomaine?” she asked. “Do you, Gubber? Do you think they’ll accept our ideas?”

Gubber Anshaw shook his head nervously. “I—I don’t know. I honestly can’t say which way they’ll jump.” He knitted his fingers together and then pulled his hands apart, as if they were two small animals he was having trouble controlling. “For all we know, they’ll form a lynch mob at the end of the night.”

“Nice of you to go out of your way to make Fredda feel better, Gubber,” Jomaine said acidly.

Gubber shrugged awkwardly and rubbed his nose with the tips of his fingers, his hand stiff and flat. “There’s no call for you to talk that way to me, Jomaine. Fredda asked for my honest opinion—and, and—I gave it to her, that’s all. It’s no reflection on you, Fredda, nor on our work, if the people choose not to accept what you say. We always knew there was a risk. Yes, I was unsure about signing on to the project in the first place, but you long ago convinced me that your approach makes sense. But you said it yourself enough times: You are challenging what amounts to the state religion. If there are enough hard-core true believers out there—”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense,” Jomaine said wearily. “The only thing close to robotics worship is the Ironhead organization, and their only belief is that robots are the magic solution to everything. They’re here looking for a reason to cause trouble. It’s the only reason they go anywhere. And I promise you—if we don’t give them a reason for a fight, they’ll do their best to find one. The only question is whether the police are here in enough force to keep them from succeeding.”

“But what about the rest of the people out there?” Fredda asked.

“My dear, you are not going to manage a blanket conversion tonight,” Jomaine said in a far gentler voice. “At best you will open a debate. If we are lucky, people will start thinking about what you say. Some will take one side, some another. They will argue. If we are lucky, things that people have taken for granted all their lives will suddenly be topical issues. That is the best we can hope for.” Jomaine cleared his throat delicately, a prim little noise. “And,” he added in rather dry tones, “the fact that you are going to present them all with one hell of a fait accompli at the end of the evening should intensify that debate, just ever so slightly.”

Fredda smiled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s not going to be over tonight.” She turned toward Gubber again, but noticed he had wandered off toward the other end of the stage, and was chatting with Tonya Welton while the Governor sat waiting quietly at the table. “It’s gotten to Gubber more than any of us, hasn’t it?” Fredda said. “Since all this started, he’s in the worst shape I’ve ever seen him.”

Jomaine Terach grunted noncommittally. Gubber was undoubtedly even more tightly strung than usual, but Jomaine was not entirely convinced it had all that much to do with ‘the Caliban crisis’ or the N.L. robots. Jomaine could not imagine that conducting a supposedly secret romance with Tonya Welton would be all that relaxing an activity.

Did Fredda know about the affair? It seemed at least possible she did not. The way gossip moved through the average workplace, the boss was often the last to know. Should I tell her? he asked himself for the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time, he came to the same conclusion. Given the strained relations between Leving Labs and the Limbo Project—in other words, between Fredda and Tonya—Jomaine could see no point in telling Fredda and giving her something else to worry about.

“Come on, Fredda,” he said. “It’s nearly time to start again.”

“WE cannot talk here!” Tonya hissed angrily under her breath. She hated this, but there was no help for it. Here was Gubber, not half a meter from her. And instead of reaching out to him, throwing her arms around him, and feeling the warmth of his embrace, she was forced to snap at him, to stand apart, to make it seem that he was the last man in the world she wanted to be with. “It’s bad enough that this charade has forced us to appear in public on the same stage, but we cannot be seen talking together. The situation is bad enough without one of Kresh’s goons putting two and two together.”

“The—the curtain is drawn closed,” Gubber said, awkwardly wringing his hands together. “Kresh can’t see us.”

“For all we know, he has undercover surveillance robots working as stagehands, or listening devices trained on the backstage area,” Tonya said, struggling to keep her voice firm. For both their sakes, she dare not give in to him, much as she wanted to do.

“Why in the world would he do that?” Gubber asked, deeply confused.

“Because he might already suspect. There’s gossip about us, I’m sure of it. If he has heard any of it, he might be very interested to hear what we have to say to each other. So we must say nothing. We can’t meet, and we must assume that every comm system will be tapped. We must have no direct contact with each other until this is over, or everything will be ruined.”

“But how can we—” Gubber began, but then it seemed that he could not bear to say more. The poor man. She could see it in his eyes. He thought this was the end. Tonya’s heart welled up with sadness. He was always so afraid that she was going to break off with him, cut her losses, reduce her risk. He thought it a mad dream to think a woman like her would want a fellow like him.

How little he knew. Half the Settler women Tonya knew would do anything to have a man like Gubber, a gentle, thoughtful man who knew how to treat a woman with affection and courtesy. Settler men were so full of bluster, so determined to prove their virility with yet another conquest. Tonya smiled to herself. Not that Gubber had anything to prove on that score.

“Gubber, Gubber,” Tonya said, her voice suddenly soft and gentle. “Darling. I can see what you’re thinking, and it’s just not so. I’m not going to leave you. I could never do that. But with the way things are, it would be almost suicidal for us to meet or use the comm nets. I’ll send Ariel to you with a message later tonight. That’s all we dare risk. All right?”

Tonya saw the wave of relief wash over him. It was going to be all right.

“Thank you,” he said, “Come on. They’re about to start.”

ALVAR Kresh was in his seat in the first row of the auditorium, Donald accompanying him. Alvar Kresh was the only person whose personal robot was permitted to stay. Rank hath its privileges—and he needed Donald close.

“Excuse me, sir. I am receiving an encrypted transmission. Stand by. Reception is complete.”

On the other hand, there were times when having Donald close could be a positive nuisance. This was not the best time or place to receive a confidential document. “Hell. The lecture’s about to start. Read it, Donald, and tell me if it will keep until after the lecture.”

“Yes, sir. One moment.” Donald stared off into nothing at all for several seconds and then came back to life. “Sir, I believe you had best read it at once. It is a raw transcript of the first interview with the robot Horatio. Robopsychologist Patras appears to have been successful in pulling the robot out of catatonia.”

“What’s in the transcript?”

“Sir, I think you should read it for yourself. I would not wish to color your reactions, and I must admit that I find the contents rather—disturbing. I would find it most unpleasant to discuss them.”

Kresh grunted in annoyance. It seemed as if Donald’s mental state was getting to be more and more delicate. Well, police robots had to be on the lookout for that, but it was getting to be an all-too-frequent inconvenience. “All right, all right,” he said. “Print me out a hard copy and maybe I can get through it before Leving starts her talk.”

There was a soft whirring noise from inside Donald, and a door slid open on his chest, revealing a slot. Paper started to feed out from the slot, a page at a time. Donald caught each page neatly in his left hand and transferred it to his right. He handed the pages to Kresh.

Kresh began to read, absently handing each page back to Donald as he was done.

And then Kresh began to swear.

“Most disturbing, as I said, sir.”

Alvar Kresh nodded. He dared not discuss this openly with Donald, not here in public, not with the other members of the audience all around. Best not to say anything direct at all. Clearly Donald had come to the same conclusion.

No wonder Donald had found the transcript upsetting. No wonder this Horatio robot had come unhinged. If the very clear implications in this transcript were accurate, then there was a robot out there that did not have the Three Laws.

No. He could not believe it. No one would be insane enough to build a robot without the Laws. There had to be some other explanation. There had to be some mistake.

Except Caliban, the robot in question, had been built by the woman up on the stage, who had used her first lecture to say how robots were no good for humans. So why the devil was she shielding the rogue robot who had attacked her? Alvar Kresh handed the last page to Donald, and the robot slipped the pages of the document into a storage slot on the side of his body.

“What are we to do, sir?” Donald asked.

Do? That was an excellent question. The situation was a tinderbox. In theory, he now had the evidence to move against Fredda Leving, but not now. What could he do? Clamber up on the stage and arrest her in the midst of her speech? No. Doing so could easily upend the entire intricate arrangement with the Settlers. Fredda Leving fit into that somehow, that much was clear. How, he had no idea. Besides, he had the very strong impression that he would need hear what she had to say if he was going to pursue this case.

But there were other avenues open to him besides the arrest of Fredda Leving.

“We can’t take Leving in, Donald, much as I’d like to,” Kresh said at last. “Not with the Governor and Welton with her. But the moment this damned talk is over with, we are picking up Terach and Anshaw. It’s time we sweated those two a little.”

As for Fredda Leving, maybe he could not arrest her tonight. But he had no intention of making her life easy. He glared up at the stage, waiting for the curtain to open.

AT long last, and far too soon, Fredda could hear the sound she had been waiting for—and dreading. The gong sounded, and the audience began to settle down, grow quiet. It was about to begin. A stagehand robot gave Governor Grieg a hand signal and he nodded. He came over to Fredda and touched her forearm. “Ready, Doctor?”

“What? Oh, yes, yes of course.”

“Then I think we should begin.” He guided her to a seat behind a table at one side of the stage, between Tonya Welton on one side, and Gubber and Jomaine on the other.

All had their attendant robots hovering nearby. Gubber’s old retainer Tetlak, with him since forever. Jomaine’s latest updated, upgraded unit. What was the name? Bertram? Something like that. The joke around the lab was that he changed his personal robot more frequently than he changed underwear. Tonya Welton with Ariel.

A strange, slight irony there. Tonya was here on Inferno to preach against reliance on robots, and here she was with the robot Fredda had given her in happier days. Meanwhile, she, Fredda, had no robot with her at all.

With a start, she realized that the curtain had opened, that the audience was applauding the Governor politely—with a few boos from the back of the house—and that the Governor was well launched into her introduction. In fact, he was finishing up. Hells and heavens! How could her mind wander that much? Was it some aftereffect of the injury, or the treatment, or just a subconscious way of dealing with stage fright?

“…not expect you to agree with all she has to say,” Governor Grieg was saying. “There is much that I do not agree with myself. But I do believe that hers is a voice to which we must listen. I am convinced that her ideas—and the news she will relate—will have tremendous repercussions for us all. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.

Not quite sure if it would not be wiser to cut and run for the stage wings and the side exit, Fredda stood up and walked toward the lectern. Chanto Grieg retreated back toward the table at the rear of the stage and took a seat next to Jomaine.

She was there, all alone. She stared out into the sea of faces and asked herself what madness had brought her to this place. But here she was, and there was nothing to do but move forward.

She cleared her throat and began to speak.