Kresh kept his face expressionless, but damn it, this case never got any clearer. The time limit wasn’t reduced.
“All right, then. You heard Jomaine come in, call to Fredda, and then what?”
“It sounded like he entered his lab. We waited for a bit, then when we didn’t hear anything more, we decided he must have left by one of the exterior doors in his lab. We said our goodbyes and Tonya left first, as usual. Then, um, well, I’m afraid I dozed off.”
“For how long?”
Gubber shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t really say. Ten minutes, forty-five minutes, perhaps longer. It had been a dead-flat-exhausting day even before Tonya showed up. When she left, and I had nothing to do but lie back in a bed in a dark, quiet room until the coast was clear—well, why not take a nap? It was not a very restful sleep. I had rather disturbing dreams, all about Fredda and Tonya fighting and bickering, with me caught in the middle, taking all the blows whenever either of them struck at the other. After a while, I woke up, used the duty office refresher, and got dressed.
“I stepped out into the hallway and walked over to my lab to collect my things and go home.”
Kresh leaned in eagerly, no longer able to pretend that this was routine, mere confirmation of other information. What Gubber Anshaw could say about what he saw and what he did could break the whole case open. Even if he was lying, his statement would be useful, for sooner or later they would be able to trap him in that lie, and the nature of his lie could help to guide their inquiries. “All right, then,” he said. “Now I want you to be as careful and detailed as possible. I want you to tell me everything you saw. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”
Anshaw looked at Kresh rather nervously. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let me think carefully. The first thing that I noticed was that the door to my lab was closed, though I normally leave it open. That struck me as slightly odd, but not greatly so. We are in and out of each other’s labs in the course of a day. Someone could have come in looking for me and closed the door out of force of habit on the way out.
“I walked down the hallway to my door and opened it, and then I saw—saw it.”
“What, Anshaw? What, exactly, did you see?”
“She was lying there on the floor, passed out cold, the robot out of the test rack, standing over her, the robot’s arm raised like this.” Gubber held his left arm out in front of him, elbow bent about halfway, his palm open, arm and hand both held parallel with the side of his body.
But Kresh was not paying attention to details of how Caliban had held his arm in front of him. Burning devils in deepest hell. Gubber was saying Caliban had still been there! Never in a hundred years had he expected that. It made no sense. No sense at all. If Caliban had committed the attack, why was he still standing there? If he had not, why in the world had he vanished later?
“Hold it a moment. Caliban was still there?”
Gubber looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, of course. I thought you knew that.”
“We have, ah, several variant versions of the crime scene.”
“Might I ask if Caliban was operational?” Donald asked. “Was he powered up and functional, or still switched off?”
“Ah, neither, actually. I must admit that he was not the first thing I thought of. I did not take a close look at him. Naturally my first instinct was to look at Fredda. I could not tell if she was dead or alive. There was a small pool of blood just beginning to form under her head.
“Naturally I was scared to death. I was still a bit muzzy from my nap, and my dreams about the two women fighting were still mixed up in my head. I assumed that it had to have been Tonya who—who did it. I was standing over Fredda, next to the robot, wondering what to do, when I heard the robot’s functionality confirmed tone code.”
“His what?”
“It’s a tripled triple beep. Beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep. It’s one of a sequence of tone codes a gravitonic brain robot makes as it powers up. One of the minor drawbacks of the gravitonic brain is that its initial power-up sequence takes about fifteen minutes to an hour, rather than the two or three seconds of a positronic unit. We ought to be able to reduce that delay in the next generation of brains, but—”
“Hold it, hold it. Let’s not worry about the next generation of brains just now. Let me understand this. You heard this tripled triple tone coming out of Caliban, and that tone indicated he was in the process of coming on?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Incredible. How could they have missed it? Caliban had been turned on for the first night. They had accepted that without ever asking the burningly obvious question—by whom? Damnation! Gubber Anshaw was supposed to supply new answers, not new questions. “All right. What happened then?”
“I left. I grabbed the things I had meant to collect when I went into the lab and I left.”
“What? Your friend and superior dead or unconscious on the floor and you leave?”
Gubber dropped his head down to stare intently at his hands. “I’m not proud of it, Sheriff. But it is what happened. The tripled triple tone told me that the robot there would be fully activated in another two minutes. I had no reason to think he was anything other than a standard Three Law unit. Gravitonic robots can take the Three Laws or New Laws just as effectively, and there is a standing lab policy to keep all New Law robots under very strict control. If Caliban had been Three Law, then Fredda Leving would have received first-aid attention within 120 seconds—and far better care than I could offer. And there would be a witness there—a robot witness but a witness all the same to report that I had been there when the attack happened. I had nothing to do with it, I swear it. Neither did Tonya or Jomaine. I realized that later.”
“How do you know that?”
“Fredda’s tea mugs.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Fredda drinks her tea from rather large and fragile mugs that some artist friend of hers makes. Fredda is forever forgetting they are not as strong as standard containers. She’s careless with them. They fall and break frequently, and when they smash into the hard floors of the lab, you hear it everywhere in the building.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“There were the remains of a broken mug on the floor of the lab. I heard both Tonya and Jomaine in the hallway. I heard Tonya leave, and both she and I heard Jomaine leave the hall and go into his own lab, down the other end of the hall. He never came back down it, and the exterior doors to the labs lock from the inside, so he could only have gotten into the building through the main entrance. I heard all that.” Gubber looked up, glanced from Kresh to Donald and back again before he went on.
“Now, I suppose someone could strike someone else over the head without a lot of noise. Maybe I would have missed that. But I was listening carefully when both Jomaine and Tonya left and I never heard the cup smash against the floor. It must have happened when I was asleep. I’m a deep sleeper, and as I said I was exhausted. Either I slept right through it, or else I incorporated the sound into my dream about the two women fighting. Perhaps that crashing noise even set that dream in motion.”
“Forgive a most awkward question, sir,” Donald said, “but is it possible that you might have missed the crash if it had happened earlier, when you and Lady Leving were together in the duty office?”
Gubber glanced up, beet-red, plainly embarrassed. “Ah, well, yes,” he said. “There were certainly times in that period when we would not have heard anything.”