“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.
“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.”
That didn’t surprise Alvar. All witnesses concealed things. “Was he lying?” he asked. “Lying directly?”
“No, sir. But he was most concerned to learn we knew about the gravitonic brains. I found this confusing, as he went to some length to discuss them. I formed the impression that he was intent on steering the interrogation away from some other point.”
“You caught that, too, I see. The damnable thing is that I can’t imagine what point he was trying to lead us away from. My hunch is he thinks we know more than we do.”
“That is my opinion as well.”
Alvar Kresh drummed his fingers on the table and stared at the door Jomaine Terach had used to leave the room.
There was more going on here than the attack on Leving. Something else was up. Something that involved the Governor, and Leving, and Welton, and the Settler-Spacer relationship on Inferno.
Indeed, the attack was already beginning to recede in importance in his mind. That was merely the loose thread he was tugging on. He knew that if he left it alone, the rest of it would never be revealed. Pull it too hard, and it would snap, break its connections to the rest of the mystery. But play the investigation of the attack carefully, tug the thread gently, and maybe he could use it to unravel the whole tangled problem.
Alvar Kresh was determined to find out all he could.
Because something big was going on.
JOMAINE Terach left the interview room. His personal robot, Bertran, was waiting outside in the hall and dutifully followed him as Jomaine hurried back to his own laboratory.
Sheriff Kresh had made Bertran wait outside the room during the interrogation. It was just a little harassment, Jomaine told himself, another way for Kresh to get and keep me unnerved. And yes, he admitted to himself, it had worked. Spacers in general, and Infernals particularly, did not like to be without their robots.
Only after he was in his own lab, only after Bertran had followed him in and shut the door safely behind him, did Jomaine allow himself to succumb to the fears he was feeling. He crossed the room hurriedly. He dropped back into his favorite old armchair and breathed a sigh of relief.