Isaac Asimov's Caliban

Roger MacBride Allen

1993

The three laws of robotics had been so deeply ingrained into Spacer culture that they could no more conceive of a robot without those laws than they could conceive of not breathing.

Sheriff Alvar Kresh was getting distressingly used to being called out on assault cases now that the Settler terraforming teams had been called in to help Inferno redo the original terraforming. But the sheriff's latest case was no mugging gone too far! Fredda Leving founder of Leving Robotics Lab had been found in a pool of blood by one of the lab's robots. Falling prey to robo-lock the robot can't tell the investigators anything of use but it wasn't just the blood of the victim that caused severe dissonnosance in Kresh's robotic aide when the bloody robotic footprints were noted, and Kresh himself is shaken to the core. When Tonya Welton, head of the terraforming project, and a Settler, arrived on the scene just minutes after Kresh himself she attracts his attention as a potential attacker.

But Kresh only knows part of what's been going on at Leving Labs and on Inferno. And as he learns more, he becomes ever more unhappy with the state of his planet.

However, the answer to the attempted murder is finally exposed in the arid wastes of Inferno's backcountry.

The series of which this is part was authorised by Isaac Asimov and the author was able to discuss the direction of the series with him before the Doctor's untimely death. It is an excellent addition to the Doctor's universe.

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