Donald’s body gave another strange twitch, and the robot flinched away from Alvar’s touch, backing away a step or two. His eyes flared up, painfully bright, before regaining their normal appearance. “I-I-thank you, sir. Thank you for calling to me. I do not think that I could have broken free of my own volition.”
“Are you all right? What the hell happened to you?”
“I believe that I am fine, sir, though it might be prudent if I underwent a diagnostic later.” He paused for a moment. “As to what happened, it was a severe cognitive loop-back sequence. I understand that humans are capable of holding two completely contrary viewpoints at once without any great strain. It is not so for robots. I was forced to simulate a lack of constraints on my behavior, although the Three Laws of course control my actions. It was most disconcerting.”
Donald hesitated for a moment and looked at Alvar, his head cocked to one side. “It has never occurred to me just how strange and uncertain, howunguided a thing it must be to be a human being. We robots know our duty, our purpose, our place, our limits. You humans know none of that. How strange to live a life where all things are permitted, whether or not they are possible. If I may be so bold as to ask, sir-how is it humans cancope? What is it they do with all the freedom we robots provide?”
Alvar found himself sorely confused and surprised by the question. Still thrown off guard by Donald’s experiment, he answered with more honesty than he would have permitted in a considered answer. “They waste it,” he said. “They do nothing with their lives, determined to make each day like the last.” He thought of the complaints on his desk, civilians whining that the police had disrupted their lives this morning by trying to capture Caliban, quite unconcerned that the disruption had been in the interests ofprotecting their lives. “They are sure change can only be for the worse. They battle against change-and so ensure there is no change for the better.”
But then Alvar stopped and turned away from Donald. “Damn it, that’s not fair. Not all of it, anyway. But I spent the morning learning how we’ve doomed ourselves with indolence and denial.”
“My apologies, sir. I did not intend to move the discussion into such irrelevant areas.”
“Irrelevant?” Alvar went back to his desk chair and sat back in it with a sigh. “I think perhaps the questions of change and freedom are very close to the issues in this case. We have looked hard, seeking to find how Fredda Leving was attacked, and who did it. But we have scarcely even stopped to ask ourselveswhy the blow was struck. I’ll tell you the reason we are bound to find, Donald.” Suddenly his voice was eager, excited. “The reason-the motive-is going to be change, and the fear of it. It’s got to be something mired down in the politics of all this. There is some big change coming, and someone either wants to protect that change-or stop it.That’s what we’re going to find out. But damn it, we have wandered.”
But Alvar had wandered deliberately. He wanted to give Donald a moment to settle down, a chance for his positronic brain to be focused on less frightening, unsettling thoughts for a moment. Alvar knew that the question of a crime’s motive, with the insight it provides into the human psyche, always fascinated Donald. “But your experiment, Donald. What were the results?”
“In brief, sir, it confirmed my initial hypothesis-that aa-beingwith the physical capabilities of a robot, but with no inhibitions on its behavior, and highly motivated to protect its own existence, could have-ki-killed all the Settlers at the warehouse and all the deputies in the tunnels. And, indeed, doing so would have been safer for this hypothetical being than acting as Caliban did.”
“What are you saying?”
“It would appear that Caliban acted to protect himself, but did not seek to harm humans. Whatever harm came to them was incidental to his self -defense, and perhaps accidental. There is no doubt that he set fire to the warehouse. There is no proof that he did it deliberately.”
“You almost make him sound human, Donald.”
“But sir, as I just observed, there are no constraints on human behavior.”
“Oh, but there are such constraints. Deep, strong constraints, imposed by ourselves and by society. They rarely fail to hold. They do not have the rigid code of the Three Laws imposed from without, but humans learn their own codes of behavior. But let’s not go off on another tangent. I’ve been thinking about the fact that Leving Labs is an experimental facility. We have yet to ask whatsort of experiment Caliban was meant to be. What was it that Fredda Leving had in mind? Did the experiment fail? Did it succeed?” A thought came to him, one that made his blood run cold. “Or is the experiment under way now, running exactly according to plan?”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“Robots come awake for the first time knowing all they need to know. Humans start out in the world knowing nothing of how the world works. Suppose Leving wondered how a robot that had to learn would behave. Suppose that Caliban is out there, behaving in accordance to the Three Laws, but with such a reduced dataset that he does not know, for example, what a human beingis. Tonya Welton reminded us that it has happened before. Suppose that Fredda Leving set him out to see how long it would take him to learn the ways of the world on his own.”
“That is indeed a most disturbing idea, sir. I can scarcely believe that Madame Leving would be capable of undertaking such an irresponsible experiment.”
“Well, she is sure as hell hidingsomething. That lecture last night took lots of potshots at the present state of affairs. I’ve got a feeling there will be even more bombshells at the second lecture. Maybe we’ll learn more then.”
Alvar Kresh looked down at his desk and found his thoughts turning toward the routine business of running the department. Personnel reports. Equipment requisitions. The dull humdrum of bureaucracy seemed downright attractive after the chaos of the last few days. Best get to it. “That’s all for now, Donald.”
“Sir, before I go, there is one more datum of which you need to be apprised. “
“What is that, Donald?”
“The blow to Fredda Leving, s head, sir. The forensic lab has established that Caliban almost certainly did not do it.”
“What?”
“It is another part of the new patterns of evidence, sir. There were traces of red paint found in the wound, sir.”
“Yes, I know that. What of it?”
“It was fresh paint, sir, not yet fully dry. Furthermore, according to the design specifications for Caliban’ s body type, a given robot’s color is integral to the exterior body panels. With that model robot body, dyes are blended into material used to form the panels. The panels are never painted. The body material is designed to resist stains, dyes, and paints. In short, nothing will stick to that material, which is why it must be imbued with a color during manufacture.”
“So that paint couldn’t have just flaked off Caliban’s arm.”
“No, sir. Therefore, someone else, presumably with the intent offraming Caliban, painted a robot arm red and struck Leving with it. I would further presume that person to be unknowledgeable concerning the manufacture of robot bodies, though that presents difficulties, as everything else suggests that the attacker knew quite a bit about robotics.”
“Unless the red paint was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a deliberate red herring.” Alvar thought for a moment. “It could still be Caliban, or someone else, who knew about the color process for that robot model. Caliban could have painted his red arm red merely to confuse the trail. He would know we would find out about the color issue, and therefore would know we’d think he could not have done it.”
“You are presupposing a great deal of knowledge and cunning for Caliban, especially considering that you suggested a minute ago that he did not know what a human being was.”