“Tonya Welton’s robot, Ariel, was present when the deputies arrived.”
The aircar jinked suddenly to one side, and Donald was halfway across the cabin to the controls before he could force himself to resist his First Law impulse to protect his master.
“Sorry about that, Donald. Return to your seat. That one took me by surprise. Ariel there, by the devil. What the hell was she doing there?”
“We do not know. When the deputies ordered her to explain her presence, she refused, stating that Madame Welton had given prior orders that prevented her from speaking on the subject.”
“Indeed. It requires highly sophisticated order-giving to keep a robot from speaking to a deputy. They get a lot of training in how to break just that sort of injunction. So how the hell did Tonya Welton learn how to do it—and what made her think to take such a precaution?”
“Yes, sir. Both of those questions occurred to me as well.”
“Interesting,” Sheriff Kresh said. “Very, very interesting.” Kresh spoke no more during the flight, and he flew on with a thoughtful expression on his face.
More to the point, so far as Donald was concerned, the Sheriff tended to fly more slowly when he had a problem to think on. Sure enough, the aircar slowed significantly.
Donald allowed himself to relax just a trifle as the airspeed indicator eased back. Remarkable, the effect one well-timed question could have. Still, it worked, and that was the main thing. Even so, it sometimes seemed to Donald that taking care of Alvar Kresh was more of an art than a science.
THE interrogation room was bare and plain, the walls a faded, dusty pale blue. In it there were two straight-backed chairs, one table, one robot, and one policeman. The prisoner was on the way. Kresh had considered long and hard before he decided what order in which to question them. At last he went with the gut instinct that told him to go for Terach first and Gubber Anshaw afterwards.
Yes, Gubber second. Save the best for last. Ariel at his house the night before. There could be only one explanation for that, and that explanation could blast open a lot of the locked doors in this case… still, he would have to handle Anshaw carefully. But first there was Jomaine. There was some important groundwork to cover here. The door opened. There stood Jomaine Terach, looking small and wan and pale behind the two big guard robots that had escorted him from his cell.
Kresh made a small hand gesture and Terach came in, sat at the table.
The players are in position, Kresh told himself. Let the games begin.
JOMAINE Terach felt lost in a jumble of emotions. He was confused, tired, frightened, angered, fearful, angry. He knew perfectly well he was in no fit state to be questioned. But that was exactly why they had chosen this moment to grill him.
Alvar Kresh grinned unpleasantly at him, and spoke in a voice that made it clear that he was enjoying himself. “Why don’t I just save time and tell you what we already know?” he asked. “And maybe this time you can be just a little bit more forthcoming with your answers. That way I won’t be tempted to use the charges we have against you already—the ones related to obstructing an investigation and failing to provide full and complete answers to a police officer. How does that sound to you?” Alvar Kresh smiled again, even more unpleasantly, as he looked his prisoner in the eye.
Jomaine Terach stared back and tried to keep calm, tried to calculate, tried to figure the situation. The night behind bars had been a long one, and it had not done his state of mind any good. No doubt it was not meant to. It was a fairly safe bet that they had picked up Gubber and maybe Fredda at the same time they got him. However, no one in the Sheriff’s Department was admitting to that or much of anything else.
But if Gubber was in here, well, Gubber was not much given to calm in the face of adversity. A night in a cell was likely to make Gubber’s tongue quite loose. And lurking in the background of Alvar Kresh’s angry, threatening courtesy was the unspoken threat of the Psychic Probe. No sane man wished to face that, and Jomaine regarded himself as eminently sane. Sane enough to know just how serious the charges against him could get if Kresh wanted to throw the book at him.
If he wanted to stay free and with a whole mind, he was going to have to tell Kresh what he wanted to know, and tell it to him before Gubber or Fredda did. The time had come to protect himself from everyone else’s mad schemes. Unless that time was already past.
“Say what you have to say and ask your questions,” he said. “I don’t know it all. I didn’t want to know it all. But what I know, I’ll tell you. I have run out of reasons for silence.”
Alvar Kresh leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let me start by telling you part of what we know already, and just see how well you do filling in the blanks.”
The operative word there was part, of course, Jomaine told himself. Was Kresh going to tell ninety-five percent of what the police knew, or five percent? There were any number of traps and pitfalls here.
“We know for starters that Caliban is not a Three Law robot, not even one of these damned New Law robots, but a No Law robot.”
Kresh looked hard at Jomaine, stared him down. The testing was starting early. Here was his chance, Jomaine realized. Kresh wanted to see what he would do if given the chance to play games. Kresh had not even asked a question. It was Jomaine’s chance to ask what a No Law was, or who Caliban was.
But Jomaine had a pretty fair idea what would happen if he did that, and he had no desire to find out if he was right.
The silence went on for another few seconds before Jomaine Terach could bring himself to speak the words.
“Yes,” he said. “Caliban is a No Law.”
“I see,” Kresh said. “How is that possible?”
Jomaine was thrown off balance by the question, and no doubt that was the intention. “I—I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I believe that what the Sheriff wishes to know are the technical details of the process,” Donald 111 said.
Jomaine looked over to the small blue robot, and was not fooled for a minute by Donald’s unprepossessing appearance and gentle voice. Donald had come out of Leving Labs, after all, and Jomaine had had a hand in his design. Behind that harmless blue exterior was a formidable mind, a positronic brain that came close to the theoretical limits for flexibility and learning ability.
“You mentioned in our first interview after the attack that gravitonic brains were a new departure,” Kresh said, his voice deceptively mild.
“Yes, they are. Gubber designed them that way and was justifiably proud of what he had done. But no one would listen to him—until he came to Fredda.”
“All right, that’s fine. But then we get into a problem area. I am not very happy to hear about this New Law experiment, to say the least, but it appears to have legal sanction from the Governor, and I don’t see that there is much I can do about it. But, as I understand it, these gravitonic brains have the New Laws as part of their integral makeup, just as the positronic brain’s basic structure must of necessity include the Three Laws. So how did you manage to erase those laws from Caliban’s brain?”
“They were never there in the first place,” Terach said. “There are no Laws inherent in the structure of the gravitonic brain. That’s the whole idea. The positronic brain became a dead end precisely because the Three Laws were so tightly woven into it. Because of the inherent nature of the Laws inside the positronic brain, it was almost impossible to consider one element of the brain by itself.
“The Laws interconnected all the aspects of the brain so thoroughly that any attempt to modify one part of a positronic brain would affect every other part of it in complex and chaotic ways. Imagine that rearranging the furniture in your living room could cause the roof to catch fire, or the paint on the basement walls to change color, and that putting out the fire or repainting could cause the doors to fall off and the furniture to reset to its original configuration. The interior architecture of the positronic brain is just about that interconnected. In any sort of deep-core programming or redesign, anything beyond the most trivial sort of potential adjustment was hopelessly complex. By leaving the gravitonic brain with a clean structure, by deliberately not making the Three Laws integral to every pathway and neural net, it became far easier to program a new pattern onto a blank brain.”