The squad car veered to one side, halted against the impersonal concrete wall of the motorway. With the humming of its motor stopped, the silence was dead and thick.
Baley looked at the robot next to him and said in an incongruously quiet voice, “What?”
Time stretched while Baley waited for an answer. A small and lonesome vibration rose and reached a minor peak, then faded. It was the sound of another squad car, boring its way past them on some unknown errand, perhaps a mile away. Or else it was a fire car hurrying along toward its own appointment with combustion.
A detached portion of Baley’s mind wondered if any one man any longer knew all the motorways that twisted about in New York City’s bowels. At no time in the day or night could the entire motorway system be completely empty, and yet there must be individual passages that no man had entered in years. With sudden, devastating clarity, he remembered a short story he had viewed as a youngster.
It concerned the motorways of London and began, quietly enough, with a murder. The murderer fled toward a prearranged hideout in the corner of a motorway in whose dust his own shoeprints had been the only disturbance for a century. In that abandoned hole, he could wait in complete safety till the search died.
But he took a wrong turning and in the silence and loneness of those twisting corridors he swore a mad and blaspheming oath that, in spite of the Trinity and all the saints, he would yet reach his haven.
From that time on, no turning was right. He wandered through an unending maze from the Brighton Sector on the Channel to Norwich and from Coventry to Canterbury. He burrowed endlessly beneath the great City of London from end to end of its sprawl across the south-eastern corner of Medieval England. His clothes were rags and his shoes ribbons, his strength wore down but never left him. He was tired, tired, but unable to stop. He could only go on and on with only wrong turnings ahead of him.
Sometimes he heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast he rushed (for he would gladly have given himself up by then) the corridors he reached were always empty. Sometimes he saw an exit far ahead that would lead to the City’s life and breath, but it always glimmered further away as he approached until he would turn--and it would be gone.
Occasionally, Londoners on official business through the underground would see a misty figure limping silently toward them, a semitransparent arm lifted in pleading, a mouth open and moving, but soundless. As it approached, it would waver and vanish.
It was a story that hid lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore. The “Wandering Londoner” had become a familiar phrase to all the world.
In the depths of New York City, Baley remembered the story and stirred uneasily.
R. Daneel spoke and there was a small echo to his voice. He said, “We may be overheard.”
“Down here? Not a chance. Now what about the Commissioner?”
“He was on the scene, Elijah. He is a City dweller. He was inevitably a suspect.”
“Was! Is he still a suspect?”
“No. His innocence was quickly established. For one thing, there was no blaster in his possession. There could not very well be one. He had entered Spacetown in the usual fashion; that was quite certain; and, as you know, blasters are removed as a matter of course.”
“Was the murder weapon found at all, by the way?”
“No, Elijah. Every blaster in Spacetown was checked and none had been fired for weeks. A check of the radiation chambers was quite conclusive.”
“Then whoever had committed the murder had either hidden the weapon so well--”
“It could not have been hidden anywhere in Spacetown. We were quite thorough.”
Baley said impatiently, “I’m trying to consider all possibilities. It was either hidden or it was carried away by the murderer when he left.”
“Exactly.”
“And if you admit only the second possibility, then the Commissioner is cleared.”
“Yes. As a precaution, of course, he was cerebroanalyzed.”
“What?”
“By cerebroanalysis, I mean the interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells.”
“Oh,” said Baley, unenlightened. “And what does that tell you?”
“It gives us information concerning the temperamental and emotional makeup of an individual. In the case of Commissioner Enderby, it told us that he was incapable of killing Dr. Sarton. Quite incapable.”
“No,” agreed Baley. “He isn’t the type. I could have told you that.”
“It is better to have objective information. Naturally, all our people in Spacetown allowed themselves to be cerebroanalyzed as well.”
“All incapable, I suppose.”
“No question. It is why we know that the murderer must be a City dweller.”
“Well, then, all we have to do is pass the whole City under your cute little process.”
“It would not be very practical, Elijah. There might be millions temperamentally capable of the deed.”
“Millions,” grunted Baley, thinking of the crowds of that long ago day who had screamed at the dirty Spacers, and of the threatening and slobbering crowds outside the shoe store the night before.
He thought: Poor Julius. A suspect!
He could hear the Commissioner’s voice describing the period after the discovery of the body: “It was brutal, brutal.” No wonder he broke his glasses in shock and dismay. No wonder he did not want to return to Spacetown. “I hate them,” he had ground out between his teeth..
Poor Julius. The man who could handle Spacers. The man whose greatest value to the City lay in his ability to get along with them. How much did that contribute to his rapid promotions?
No wonder the Commissioner had wanted Baley to take over. Good old loyal, close-mouthed Baley. College chum! He would keep quiet if he found out about that little incident. Baley wondered how cerebroanalysis was carried out. He imagined huge electrodes, busy pantographs skidding inklines across graphed paper, self-adjusting gears clicking into place now and then.
Poor Julius. If his state of mind were as appalled as it almost had a right to be, he might already be seeing himself at the end of his career with a forced letter of resignation in the hands of the Mayor.
The squad car slanted up into the sublevels of City Hall.
It was 14:30 when Baley arrived back at his desk. The Commissioner was out. R. Sammy, grinning, did not know where the Commissioner was.
Baley spent some time thinking. The fact that he was hungry didn’t register.
At 15:20 R. Sammy came to his desk and said, “The Commissioner is in now, Lije.”
Baley said, “Thanks.”
For once he listened to R. Sammy without being annoyed. R. Sammy, after all, was a kind of relation to R. Daneel, and R. Daneel obviously wasn’t a person--or thing, rather--to get annoyed with. Baley wondered how it would be on a new planet with men and robots starting even in a City culture. He considered the situation quite dispassionately.
The Commissioner was going through some documents as Baley entered, stopping occasionally to make notations.
He said, “That was a fairly giant-size blooper you pulled out in Spacetown.”
It flooded back strongly. The verbal duel with Fastolfe.
His long face took on a lugubrious expression of chagrin. “I’ll admit I did, Commissioner. I’m sorry.”
Enderby looked up. His expression was keen through his glasses. He seemed more himself than at any time these thirty hours. He said, “No real matter. Fastolfe didn’t seem to mind, so we’ll forget it. Unpredictable, these Spacers. You don’t deserve your luck, Lije. Next time you talk it over with me before you make like a one-man subether hero,”
Baley nodded. The whole thing rolled off his shoulders. He had tried a grandstand stunt and it hadn’t worked. Okay. He was a little surprised that he could be so casual about it, but there it was.
He said, “Look, Commissioner. I want to have a two-man apartment assigned to Daneel and myself. I’m not taking him home tonight.”
“What’s all this?”
“The news is out that he’s a robot. Remember? Maybe nothing will happen, but if there is a riot, I don’t want my family in the middle of it.”
“Nonsense, Lije. I’ve had the thing checked. There’s no such rumor in the City.”
“Jessie got the story somewhere, Commissioner.”
“Well, there’s no organized rumor. Nothing dangerous. I’ve been checking this ever since I got off the trimensic at Fastolfe’s dome. It was why I left. I had to track it down, naturally, and fast. Anyway, here are the reports. See for yourself. There’s Doris Gillid’s report. She went through a dozen Women’s Personals in different parts of the City. You know Doris. She’s a competent girl. Well, nothing showed. Nothing showed anywhere.”
“Then how did Jessie get the rumor, Commissioner?”
“It can be explained. R. Daneel made a show of himself in the shoe store. Did he really pull a blaster, Lije, or were you stretching it a little?”
“He really pulled one. Pointed it, too.”
Commissioner Enderby shook his head. “All right. Someone recognized him. As a robot, I mean.”
“Hold on,” said Baley, indignantly. “You can’t tell him for a robot.”
“Why not?”
“Could you? I couldn’t.”
“What does that prove? We’re no experts. Suppose there was a technician out of the Westchester robot factories in the crowd. A professional. A man who has spent his life building and designing robots. He notices something queer about R. Daneel. Maybe in the way he talks or holds himself. He speculates about it. Maybe he tells his wife. She tells a few friends. Then it dies. It’s too improbable. People don’t believe it. Only it got to Jessie before it died.”
“Maybe,” said Baley, doubtfully. “But how about an assignment to a bachelor room for two, anyway?”
The Commissioner shrugged, lifted the intercom. After a while, he said, “Section Q-27 is all they can do. It’s not a very good neighborhood.”
“It’ll do,” said Baley.
“‘Where’s R. Daneel now, by the way?”
“He’s at our record files. He’s trying to collect information on Medievalist agitators.”
“Good Lord, there are millions.”
“I know, but it keeps him happy.”
Baley was nearly at the door, when he turned, half on impulse, and said, “Commissioner, did Dr. Sarton ever talk to you about Spacetown’s program? I mean, about introducing the C/Fe culture?”
“The what?”
“Introducing robots.”
“Occasionally.” The Commissioner’s tone was not one of any particular interest.
“Did he ever explain what Spacetown’s point was?”
“Oh, improve health, raise the standard of living. The usual talk; it didn’t impress me. Oh, I agreed with him. I nodded my head and all that. What could I do? It’s just a matter of humoring them and hoping they’ll keep within reason in their notions. Maybe some day..
Baley waited but he didn’t say what maybe-some-day might bring.
Baley said, “Did he ever mention anything about emigration?”
“Emigration! Never. Letting an Earthman into an Outer World is like finding a diamond asteroid in the rings of Saturn.”
“I mean emigration to new worlds.”
But the Commissioner answered that one with a simple stare of incredulousness.
Baley chewed that for a moment, then said with sudden bluntness, “What’s cerebroanalysis, Commissioner? Ever hear of it?”
The Commissioner’s round face didn’t pucker; his eyes didn’t blink. He said evenly, “No, what’s it supposed to be?”
“Nothing. Just picked it up.”
He left the office and at his desk continued thinking. Certainly, the Commissioner wasn’t that good an actor. Well, then. . .
At 16:05 Baley called Jessie and told her he wouldn’t be home that night nor probably any night for a while. It took a while after that to disengage her.
“Lije, is there trouble? Are you in danger?”
A policeman is always in a certain amount of danger, he explained lightly. It didn’t satisfy her. “Where will you be staying?”
He didn’t tell her. “If you’re going to be lonely tonight,” he said, “stay at your mother’s.” He broke connections abruptly, which was probably just as well.
At 16:20 he made a call to Washington. It took a certain length of time to reach the man he wanted and an almost equally long time to convince him he ought to make an air trip to New York the next day. By 16:40, he had succeeded.
At 16:55 the Commissioner left, passing him with an uncertain smile. The day shift left en masse. The sparser population that filled the offices in the evening and through the night made its way in and greeted him in varied tones of surprise.
R. Daneel came to his desk with a sheaf of papers.
“And those are?” asked Baley.
“A list of men and women who might belong to a Medievalist organization.”
“How many does the list include?”
“Over a million,” said R. Daneel. “These are just part of them.”
“Do you expect to check them all, Daneel?”
“Obviously that would be impractical, Elijah.”
“You see, Daneel, almost all Earthmen are Medievalists in one way or another. The Commissioner, Jessie, myself. Look at the Commissioner’s--” (He almost said, “spectacles,” then remembered that Earthmen must stick together and that the Commissioner’s face must be protected in the figurative as well as the literal sense.) He concluded, lamely, “eye ornaments.”
“Yes,” said R. Daneel, “I had noticed them, but thought it indelicate, perhaps, to refer to them. I have not seen such ornaments on other City dwellers.”
“It is a very old-fashioned sort of thing.”
“Does it serve a purpose of any sort?”
Baley said, abruptly, “How did you get your list?”
“It was a machine that did it for me. Apparently, one sets it for a particular type of offense and it does the rest. I let it scan all disorderly conduct cases involving robots over the past twenty-five years. Another machine scanned all City newspapers over an equal period for the names of those involved in unfavorable statements concerning robots or men of the Outer Worlds. It is amazing what can be done in three hours. The machine even eliminated the names of non-survivors from the lists.”
“You are amazed? Surely you’ve got computers on the Outer Worlds?”
“Of many sorts, certainly. Very advanced ones. Still, none are as massive and complex as the ones here. You must remember, of course, that even the largest Outer World scarcely has the population of one of your Cities and extreme complexity is not necessary.”
Baley said, “Have you ever been on Aurora?”
“No,” said R. Daneel, “I was assembled here on Earth.”
“Then how do you know about Outer World computers?”
“But surely that is obvious, partner Elijah. My data store is drawn from that of the late Dr. Sarton. You may take it for granted that it is rich in factual material concerning the Outer Worlds.”
“I see. Can you eat, Daneel?”
“I am nuclear-powered. I had thought you were aware of that.”
“I’m perfectly aware of it. I didn’t ask if you needed to eat. I asked if you could eat. If you could put food in your mouth, chew it, and swallow it. I should think that would be an important item in seeming to be a man.”
“I see your point. Yes, I can perform the mechanical operations of chewing and swallowing. My capacity is, of course, quite limited, and I would have to remove the ingested material from what you might call my stomach sooner or later.”
“All right. You can regurgitate, or whatever you do, in the quiet of our room tonight. The point is that I’m hungry. I’ve missed lunch, damn it, and I want you with me when I eat. And you can’t sit there and not eat without attracting attention. So if you can eat, that’s what I want to hear. Let’s go!”
Section kitchens were the same all over the City. What’s more, Baley had been in Washington, Toronto, Los Angeles, London, and Budapest in the way of business, and they had been the same there, too. Perhaps it had been different in Medieval times when languages had varied and dietaries as well. Nowadays, yeast products were just the same from Shanghai to Tashkent and from Winnipeg to Buenos Aires; and English might not be the “English” of Shakespeare or Churchill, but it was the final potpourri that was current over all the continents and, with some modification, on the Outer Worlds as well.
But language and dietary aside, there were the deeper similarities. There was always that particular odor, undefinable but completely characteristic of “kitchen.” There was the waiting triple line moving slowly in, converging at the door and splitting up again, right, left, center. There was the rumble of humanity, speaking and moving, and the sharper clatter of plastic on plastic. There was the gleam of simulated wood, highly polished, highlights on glass, long tables, the touch of steam in the air.
Baley inched slowly forward as the line moved (with all possible staggering of meal hours, a wait of at least ten minutes was almost unavoidable) and said to R. Daneel in sudden curiosity, “Can you smile?”
R. Daneel, who had been gazing at the interior of the kitchen with cool absorption, said, “I beg your pardon, Elijah.”
“I’m just wondering, Daneel. Can you smile?” He spoke in a casual whisper.
R. Daneel smiled. The gesture was sudden and surprising. His lips curled back and the skin about either end folded. Only the mouth smiled, however. The rest of the robot’s face was untouched.
Baley shook his head. “Don’t bother, R. Daneel. It doesn’t do a thing for you.”
They were at the entrance. Person after person thrust his metal food tag through the appropriate slot and had it scanned. Click- click-click-
Someone once calculated that a smoothly running kitchen could allow the entrance of two hundred persons a minute, the tags of each one being fully scanned to prevent kitchen-jumping, meal-jumping, and ration-stretching. They had also calculated how long a waiting line was necessary for maximum efficiency and how much time was lost when any one person required special treatment.
It was therefore always a calamity to interrupt that smooth click- click by stepping to the manual window, as Baley and R. Daneel did, in order to thrust a special-permit pass at the official in charge.
Jessie, filled with the knowledge of an assistant dietitian, had explained it once to Baley.
“It upsets things completely,” she had said. “It throws off consumption figures and inventory estimates. It means special checks. You have to match slips with all the different Section kitchens to make sure the balance isn’t too unbalanced, if you know what I mean. There’s a separate balance sheet to be made out each week. Then if anything goes wrong and you’re overdrawn, it’s always your fault. It’s never the fault of the City Government for passing out special tickets to everybody and his kid sister. Oh, no. And when we have to say that free choice is suspended for the meal, don’t the people in line make a fuss. It’s always the fault of the people behind the counter. . .
Baley had the story in the fullest detail and so he quite understood the dry and poisonous look he received from the woman behind the window. She made a few hurried notes. Home Section, occupation, reason for meal displacement (“official business,” a very irritating reason indeed, but quite irrefutable). Then she folded the slip with firm motions of her fingers and pushed it into a slot. A computer seized it, devoured the contents, and digested the information.
She turned to R. Daneel.
Baley let her have the worst. He said, “My friend is out-of-City.”
The woman looked finally and completely outraged. She said, “Home City, please.”
Baley intercepted the ball for Daneel once again. “All records are to be credited to the Police Department. No details necessary. Official business.”
The woman brought down a pad of slips with a jerk of her arm and filled in the necessary matter in dark-light code with practiced pressings of the first two fingers of her right hand.
She said, “How long will you be eating here?”
“Till further notice,” said Baley.
“Press fingers here,” she said, inverting the information blank.
Baley had a short qualm as R. Daneel’s even fingers with their glistening nails pressed downward. Surely, they wouldn’t have forgotten to supply him with fingerprints.
The woman took the blank away and fed it into the all-consuming machine at her elbow. It belched nothing back and Baley breathed more easily.
She gave them little metal tags that were in the bright red that meant “temporary.”
She said, “No free choices. We’re short this week. Take table DF.”
They made their way toward DF.
R. Daneel said, “I am under the impression that most of your people eat in kitchens such as these regularly.”
“Yes. Of course, it’s rather gruesome eating in a strange kitchen. There’s no one about whom you know. In your own kitchen, it’s quite different. You have your own seat which you occupy all the time. You’re with your family, your friends. Especially when you’re young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day.” Baley smiled in brief reminiscence.
Table DF was apparently among those reserved for transients. Those already seated watched their plates uneasily and did not talk with one another. They looked with sneaking envy at the laughing crowds at the other tables.
There is no one so uncomfortable, thought Baley, as the man eating out-of-Section. Be it ever so humble, the old saying went, there’s no place like home-kitchen. Even the food tastes better, no matter how many chemists are ready to swear it to be no different from the food in Johannesburg.
He sat down on a stool and R. Daneel sat down next to him.
“No free choice,” said Baley, with a wave of his fingers, “so just close the switch there and wait.”
It took two minutes. A disc slid back in the table top and a dish lifted.
“Mashed potatoes, zymoveal sauce, and stewed apricots. Oh, well,” said Baley.
A fork and two slices of whole yeast bread appeared in a recess just in front of the low railing that went down the long center of the table.
R. Daneel said in a low voice, “You may help yourself to my serving, if you wish.”
For a moment, Baley was scandalized. Then he remembered and mumbled, “That’s bad manners. Go on. Eat.”
Baley ate industriously but without the relaxation that allows complete enjoyment. Carefully, he flicked an occasional glance at R. Daneel. The robot ate with precise motions of his jaws. Too precise. It didn’t look quite natural.
Strange! Now that Baley knew for a fact that R. Daneel was in truth a robot, all sorts of little items showed up clearly. For instance, there was no movement of an Adam’s apple when R. Daneel swallowed.
Yet he didn’t mind so much. Was he getting used to the creature? Suppose people started afresh on a new world (how that ran through his mind ever since Dr. Fastolfe had put it there); suppose Bentley, for instance, were to leave Earth; could he get so he didn’t mind working and living alongside robots? Why not? The Spacers themselves did
it.
R. Daneel said, “Elijah, is it bad manners to watch another man while he is eating?”
“If you mean stare directly at him, of course. That’s only common sense, isn’t it? A man has a right to his privacy. Ordinary conversation is entirely in order, but you don’t peer at a man while he’s swallowing.”
“I see. Why is it then that I count eight people watching us closely, very closely?”
Baley put down his fork. He looked about as though he were searching for the salt-pinch dispenser. “I see nothing out of the ordinary.”
But he said it without conviction. The mob of diners was only a vast conglomeration of chaos to him. And when R. Daneel turned his impersonal brown eyes upon him, Baley suspected uncomfortably that those were not eyes he saw, but scanners capable of noting, with photographic accuracy and in split seconds of time, the entire panorama.
“I am quite certain,” said R. Daneel, calmly.
“Well, then, what of it? It’s crude behavior, but what does it prove?”
“I cannot say, Elijah, but is it coincidence that six of the watchers were in the crowd outside the shoe store last night?”
Baley’s grip tightened convulsively on his fork.
“Are you Sure?” he asked automatically, and as he said it, he realized the uselessness of the question. You don’t ask a computer if it is sure of the answer it disgorges; not even a computer with arms and legs.
R. Daneel said, “Quite!”
“Are they close to us?”
“Not very. They are scattered.”
“All right, then.” Baley returned to his meal, his fork moving mechanically. Behind the frown on his long face, his mind worked furiously.
Suppose the incident last night had been organized by a group of anti-robot fanatics, that it had not been the spontaneous trouble it had seemed. Such a group of agitators could easily include men who had studied robots with the intensity born of deep opposition. One of them might have recognized R. Daneel for what he was. (The Commissioner had suggested that, in a way. Damn it, there were surprising depths to that man.)
It worked itself out logically. Granting they had been unable to act in an organized manner on the spur of last evening’s moment, they would still have been able to plan for the future. If they could recognize a robot such as R. Daneel, they could certainly realize that Baley himself was a police officer. A police officer in the unusual company of a humanoid robot would very likely be a responsible man in the organization. (With the wisdom of hindsight, Baley followed the line of reasoning with no trouble at all.)
It followed then that observers at City Hall (or perhaps agents within City Hall) would be bound to spot Baley, R. Daneel, or both before too long a time had passed. That they had done so within
twenty-four hours was not surprising. They might have done so in less time if so much of Baley’s day had not been spent in Spacetown and along the motorway.
R. Daneel had finished his meal. He sat quietly waiting, his perfect hands resting lightly on the end of the table.
“Had we not better do something?” he asked.
“We’re safe here in the kitchen,” said Baley. “Now leave this to me. Please.”
Baley looked about him cautiously and it was as though he saw a kitchen for the first time.
People! Thousands of them. What was the capacity of an average kitchen? He had once seen the figure. Two thousand two hundred, he thought. This one was larger than average.
Suppose the cry, “Robot,” were sent out into the air. Suppose it were tossed among the thousands like a. . .
He was at a loss for a comparison, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t happen.
A spontaneous riot could flare anywhere, in the kitchens as easily as in the corridors or in the elevators. More easily, perhaps. There was a lack of inhibition at mealtimes, a sense of horseplay that could degenerate into something more serious at a trifle.
But a planned riot would be different. Here in the kitchen, the planners would themselves be trapped in a large and mob-filled room. Once the dishes went flying and the tables cracking there would be no easy way to escape. Hundreds would certainly die and they themselves might easily be among them.
No, a safe riot would have to be planned in the avenues of the City, in some relatively narrow passageway. Panic and hysteria would travel slowly along the constriction and there would be time for the quick, prepared fadeaway along the side passage or the unobtrusive step onto an escalating localway that would move them to a higher level and disappearance.
Baley felt trapped. There were probably others waiting outside. Baley and R. Daneel were to be followed to a proper point and the fuse would be set off.
R. Daneel said, “Why not arrest them?”
“That would only start the trouble sooner. You know their faces, don’t you? You won’t forget?”
“I am not capable of forgetting.”
“Then we’ll nab them another time. For now, we’ll break their net. Follow me. Do exactly as I do.”
He rose, turned his dish carefully upside down, centering it on the movable disc from below which it had risen. He put his fork back in its recess. R. Daneel, watching, matched his action. The dishes and utensils dropped out of sight.
R. Daneel said, “They are getting up, too.”
“All right. It’s my feeling they won’t get too close. Not here.”
The two moved into line now, drifting toward an exit where the click-click-click of the tags sounded ritualistically, each click recording the expenditure of a ration unit.
Baley looked back through the steamy haze and the noise and, with incongruous sharpness, thought of a visit to the City Zoo with Ben six or seven years ago. No, eight, because Ben had just passed his eighth birthday then. (Jehoshaphat! Where did the time go?)
It had been Ben’s first visit and he had been excited. After all, he had never actually seen a cat or a dog before. Then, on top of that, there was the bird cage! Even Baley himself, who had seen it a dozen times before, was not immune to its fascination.
There is something about the first sight of living objects hurtling through air that is incomparably startling. It was feeding time in the sparrow cage and an attendant was dumping cracked oats into a long trough (human beings had grown used to yeast substitutes, but animals, more conservative in their way, insisted on real grain).
The sparrows flocked down in what seemed like hundreds. Wing to wing, with an ear-splitting twitter, they lined the trough. .
That was it; that was the picture that came to Baley’s mind as he looked back at the kitchen he was leaving. Sparrows at the trough. The thought repelled him.
He thought: Jehoshaphat, there must be a better way.
But what better way? What was wrong with this way? It had never bothered him before.
He said abruptly to R. Daneel, “Ready, Daneel?”
“I am ready, Elijah.”
They left the kitchen and escape was now clearly and flatly up to Baley.
There is a game that youngsters know called “running the strips.” Its rules vary in trivial fashion from City to City, but its essentials are eternal. A boy from San Francisco can join the game in Cairo with no trouble.
Its object is to get from point A to point B via the City’s rapid transit system in such a way that the “leader” manages to lose as many of his followers as possible. A leader who arrives at the destination alone is skillful indeed, as is a follower who refuses to be shaken.
The game is usually conducted during the evening rush hour when the increased density of the commuters makes it at once more hazardous and more complicated. The leader sets off, running up and down the accelerating strips. He does his best to do the unexpected, remaining standing on a given strip as long as possible, then leaping off suddenly in either direction. He will run quickly through several strips, then remain waiting once more.
Pity the follower who incautiously careens forward one strip too far. Before he has caught his mistake, unless he is extraordinarily nimble, he has driven past the leader or fallen behind. The clever leader will compound the error by moving quickly in the appropriate direction.
A move designed to increase the complexity of the task tenfold involves boarding the localways or the expressways themselves, and hurtling off the other side. It is bad form to avoid them completely and also bad form to linger on them.
The attraction of the game is not easy for an adult to understand, particularly for an adult who has never himself been a teen-age striprunner. The players are roughly treated by legitimate travelers into whose path they find themselves inevitably flying. They are persecuted bitterly by the police and punished by their parents. They are denounced in the schools and on the subetherics. No year passes without its four or five teen-agers killed at the game, its dozens hurt, its cases of innocent bystanders meeting tragedy of varying degree.
Yet nothing can be done to wipe out the strip-running gangs. The greater the danger, the more the strip-runners have that most valuable of all prizes, honor in the eyes of their fellows. A successful one may well swagger; a well-known leader is cock-of-the-walk.
Elijah Baley, for instance, remembered with satisfaction even now that he had been a strip-runner once. He had led a gang of twenty from the Concourse Sector to the borders of Queens, crossing three expressways. In two tireless and relentless hours, he had shaken off some of the most agile followers of the Bronx, and arrived at the destination point alone. They talked about that run for months.
Baley was in his forties now, of course. He hadn’t run the strips for over twenty years, but he remembered some of the tricks. What he had lost in agility, he made up in another respect. He was a policeman. No one but another policeman as experienced as himself could possibly know the City as well, know where almost every metal-bordered alley began and ended.
He walked away from the kitchen briskly, but not too rapidly. Each moment he expected the cry of “Robot, robot” to ring out behind him. That initial set of moments was the riskiest. He counted the steps until he felt the first accelerating strip moving under him.
He stopped for a moment, while R. Daneel moved smoothly up beside him.
“Are they still behind us, Daneel?” asked Baley in a whisper.
“Yes. They’re moving closer.”
“That won’t last,” said Baley confidently. He looked at the strips stretching to either side, with their human cargo whipping to his left more and more rapidly as their distance from him increased. He had felt the strips beneath his feet many times a day almost all the days of his life, but he had not bent his knees in anticipation of running them in seven thousand days and more. He felt the old familiar thrill and his breath grew more rapid.
He quite forgot the one time he had caught Ben at the game. He had lectured him interminably and threatened to have him put under police surveillance.
Lightly, quickly, at double the “safe” rate, he went up the strips. He leaned forward sharply against the acceleration. The localway was humming past. For a moment, it looked as though he would mount, but suddenly he was fading backward, backward, dodging through the crowd to left and right as it thickened on the slower strips.
He stopped, and let himself be carried along at a mere fifteen miles an hour.
“How many are with us, Daneel?”
“Only one, Elijah.” The robot was at his side, unruffled, unbreathing.
“He must have been a good one in his day, too, but he won’t last either.”
Full of self-confidence, he felt a half-remembered sensation of his younger days. It consisted partly of the feeling of immersion in a mystic rite to which others did not belong, partly of the purely physical sensation of wind against hair and face, partly of a tenuous sense of danger.
“They call this the side shuffle,” he said to R. Daneel in a low voice.
His long stride ate distance, but he moved along a single strip, dodging the legitimate crowd with a minimum of effort. He kept it up, moving always closer to the strip’s edge, until the steady movement of his head through the crowd must have been hypnotic in its constant velocity--as it was intended to be.
And then, without a break in his step, he shifted two inches sideways and was on the adjoining strip. He felt an aching in his thigh muscles as he kept his balance.
He whipped through a cluster of commuters and was on the forty-five-mile strip.
“How is it now, Daneel?” he asked.
“He is still with us,” was the calm answer.
Baley’s lips tightened. There was nothing for it but to use the moving platforms themselves, and that really required co-ordination; more, perhaps, than he still retained.
He looked about quickly. Exactly where were they now? B-22d Street flashed by. He made rapid calculations and was off. Up the remaining strips, smoothly and steadily, a swing onto the localway platform.
The impersonal faces of men and women, calloused with the ennui of way-riding, were jolted into something like indignation as Baley and R. Daneel clambered aboard and squeezed through the railings.
“Hey, now,” called a woman shrilly, clutching at her hat.
“Sorry,” said Baley, breathlessly.
He forced his way through the standees and with a wriggle was off on the other side. At the last moment, a jostled passenger thumped his back in anger. He went staggering.
Desperately he tried to regain his footing. He lurched across a strip boundary and the sudden change in velocity forced him to his knees and then over on his side.
He had the sudden, panicky vision of men colliding with him and bowling over, of a spreading confusion on the strips, one of the dreaded “man-jams” that would not fail to put dozens in the hospital with broken limbs.
But R. Daneel’s arm was under his back. He felt himself lifted with more than a man’s strength.
“Thanks,” gasped Baley, and there was no time for more.
Off he went and down the decelerating strips in a complicated pattern so designed that his feet met the V-joint strips of an expressway at the exact point of crossover. Without the loss of rhythm, he was accelerating again, then up and over an expressway.
“Is he with us, Daneel?”
“Not one in sight, Elijah.”
“Good. But what a strip-runner you would have been, Daneel!--Oops, now, now!”
Off onto another localway in a whirl and down the strips with a clatter to a doorway, large and official in appearance. A guard rose to his feet.
Baley flashed his identification. “Official business.”
They were inside.
“Power plant,” said Baley, curtly. “This breaks our tracks completely.”
He had been in power plants before, including this one. Familiarity did not lessen his feeling of uncomfortable awe. The feeling was heightened by the haunting thought that once his father had been high in the hierarchy of a plant such as this. That is, before. . .
There was the surrounding hum of the tremendous generators hidden in the central well of the plant, the faint sharpness of ozone in the air, the grim and silent threat of the red lines that marked the limits beyond which no one could pass without protective clothing.
Somewhere in the plant (Baley had no idea exactly where) a pound of fissionable material was consumed each day. Every so often, the radioactive fission products, the so-called “hot ash,” were forced by air pressure through leaden pipes to distant caverns ten miles out in the ocean and a half mile below the ocean floor. Baley sometimes wondered what would happen when the caverns were filled.
He said to R. Daneel with sudden gruffness, “Stay away from the red lines.” Then, he bethought himself and added sheepishly, “But I suppose it doesn’t matter to you.”
“Is it a question of radioactivity?” asked Daneel.
“Yes.”
“Then it does matter to me. Gamma radiation destroys the delicate balance of a positronic brain. It would affect me much sooner than it would affect you.”
“You mean it would kill you?”
“I would require a new positronic brain. Since no two can be alike, I would be a new individual. The Daneel you now speak to would be, in a manner of speaking, dead.”
Baley looked at the other doubtfully. “I never knew that.--Up these ramps.”
“The point isn’t stressed. Spacetown wishes to convince Earthmen of the usefulness of such as myself, not of our weaknesses.”
“Then why tell me?”
R. Daneel turned his eyes full on his human companion. “You are my partner, Elijah. It is well that you know my weaknesses and shortcomings.”
Baley cleared his throat and had nothing more to say on the subject.
“Out in this direction,” he said a moment later, “and we’re a quarter of a mile from our apartment.”
It was a grim, lower-class apartment. One small room and two beds. Two fold-in chairs and a closet. A built-in subetheric screen that allowed no manual adjustment, and would be working only at stated hours, but would be working then. No washbasin, not even an Unactivated one, and no facilities for cooking or even boiling water. A small trash-disposal pipe was in one corner of the room, an ugly, unadorned, unpleasantly functional object.
Baley shrugged. “This is it. I guess we can stand it.”
R. Daneel walked to the trash-disposal pipe. His shirt unseamed at a touch, revealing a smooth and, to all appearances, well-muscled chest.
“What are you doing?” asked Baley.
“Getting rid of the food I ingested. If I were to leave it, it would putrefy and I would become an object of distaste.”
R. Daneel placed two fingers carefully under one nipple and pushed in a definite pattern of pressure. His chest opened longitudinally. R. Daneel reached in and from a welter of gleaming metal withdrew a thin, translucent sac, partly distended. He opened it while Baley watched with a kind of horror.
R. Daneel hesitated. He said, “The food is perfectly clean. I do not salivate or chew. It was drawn in through the gullet by suction, you know. It is edible.”
“That’s all right,” said Baley, gently. “I’m not hungry. You just get rid of it.”
R. Daneel’s food sac was of fluorocarbon plastic, Baley decided. At least the food did not cling to it. It came out smoothly and was placed little by little into the pipe. A waste of good food at that, he thought.
He sat down on one bed and removed his shirt. He said, “I suggest an early start tomorrow.”
“For a specific reason?”
“The location of this apartment isn’t known to our friends yet. Or at least I hope not. If we leave early, we are that much safer. Once in City Hall, we will have to decide whether our partnership is any longer practical.”
“You think it is perhaps not?”
Baley shrugged and said dourly, “We can’t go through this sort of thing every day.”
“But it seems to me--”
R. Daneel was interrupted by the sharp scarlet sliver of the door signal.
Baley rose silently to his feet and unlimbered his blaster. The door signal flashed once more.
He moved silently to the door, put his thumb on the blaster contact while he threw the switch that activated the one-way transparency patch. It wasn’t a good view-patch; it was small and had a distorting effect, but it was quite good enough to show Baley’s youngster, Ben, outside the door.
Baley acted quickly. He flung the door open, snatched brutally at Ben’s wrist as the boy raised his hand to signal a third time, and pulled him in.
The look of fright and bewilderment faded only slowly from Ben’s eyes as he leaned breathlessly against the wall toward which he had been hurled. He rubbed his wrist.
“Dad!” he said in grieved tones. “You didn’t have to grab me like that.”
Baley was staring through the view-patch of the once-again-closed door. As nearly as he could tell, the corridor was empty.
“Did you see anyone out there, Ben?”
“No. Gee, Dad, I just came to see if you were all right.”
“Why shouldn’t I be all right?’
“I don’t know. It was Mom. She was crying and all like that. She said I had to find you. If I didn’t go, she said she would go herself, and then she didn’t know what would happen. She made me go, Dad.”
Baley said, “How did you find me? Did your mother know where I was?”
“No, she didn’t. I called up your office.”
“And they told you?”
Ben looked startled at his father’s vehemence. He said, in a low voice, “Sure. Weren’t they supposed to?”
Baley and Daneel looked at one another.
Baley rose heavily to his feet. He said, “Where’s your mother now, Ben? At the apartment?”
“No, we went to Grandma’s for dinner and stayed there. I’m supposed to go back there now. I mean, as long as you’re all right, Dad.”
“You’ll stay here. Daneel, did you notice the exact location of the floor communo?”
The robot said, “Yes. Do you intend leaving the room to use it?”
“I’ve got to. I’ve got to get in touch with Jessie.”
“Might I suggest that it would be more logical to let Bentley do that. It is a form of risk and he is less valuable.”
Baley stared. “Why, you--”
He thought: Jehoshaphat, what am I getting angry about?
He went on more calmly, “You don’t understand, Daneel. Among us, it is not customary for a man to send his young son into possible danger, even if it is logical to do so.”
“Danger!” squeaked Ben in a sort of horrified pleasure. “What’s going on, Dad? Huh, Dad?”
“Nothing, Ben. Now, this isn’t any of your business. Understand? Get ready for bed. I want you in bed when I get back. You hear me?”
“Aw, gosh. You could tell a fellow. I won’t say anything.”
“In bed!”
“Gosh!”
Baley hitched his jacket back as he stood at the floor communo, so that his blaster butt was ready for snatching. He spoke his personal number into the mouthpiece and waited while a computer fifteen miles away checked it to make sure the call was permissible. It was a very short wait that was involved, since a plain-clothes man had no limit on the number of his business calls. He spoke the code number of his mother-in-law’s apartment.
The small screen at the base of the instrument lit up, and her face looked out at him.
He said, in a low voice, “Mother, put on Jessie.”
Jessie must have been waiting for him. She was on at once. Baley looked at her face and then darkened the screen deliberately.
“All right, Jessie. Ben’s here. Now, what’s the matter?” His eyes roved from side to side continuously, watching.
“Are you all right? You aren’t in trouble?”
“I’m obviously all right, Jessie. Now stop it.”
“Oh, Lije, I’ve been so worried.”
“What about?” he asked tightly.
“You know. Your friend.”
“What about him?”
“I told you last night. There’ll be trouble.”
“Now, that’s nonsense. I’m keeping Ben with me for tonight and you go to bed. Good-by, dear.”
He broke connections and waited for two breaths before starting back. His face was gray with apprehension and fear.
Ben was standing in the middle of the room when Baley returned. One of his contact lenses was neatly pocketed in a little suction cup. The other was still in his eye.
Ben said, “Gosh, Dad, isn’t there any water in the place? Mr. Olivaw says I can’t go to the Personal.”
“He’s right. You can’t. Put that thing back in your eye, Ben. It won’t hurt you to sleep with them for one night.”
“All right.” Ben put it back, put away his suction cup and climbed into bed. “Boy, what a mattress!”
Baley said to R. Daneel. “I suppose you won’t mind sitting up.”
“Of course not. I was interested, by the way, in the queer glass Bentley wears close to his eyes. Do all Earthmen wear them?”
“No. Just some,” said Baley, absently. “I don’t, for instance.”
“For what reason is it worn?”
Baley was too absorbed with his own thoughts to answer. His own uneasy thoughts.
The lights were out.
Baley remained wakeful. He was dimly aware of Ben’s breathing as it turned deep and regular and became a bit rough. ‘When he turned his head, he grew somehow conscious of R. Daneel, sitting in a chair with grave immobility, face turned toward the door.
Then he fell asleep, and when he slept, he dreamed.
He dreamed Jessie was falling into the fission chamber of a nuclear power plant, falling and falling. She held out her arms to him, shrieking, but he could only stand frozenly just outside a scarlet line and watch her distorted figure turn as it fell, growing smaller until it was only a dot.
He could only watch her, in the dream, knowing that it was he, himself, who had pushed her.
Elijah Baley looked up as Commissioner Julius Enderby entered the office. He nodded wearily.
The Commissioner looked at the chock and grunted, “Don’t tell me you’ve been here all night!”
Baley said, “I won’t.”
The Commissioner said in a low voice, “Any trouble last night?” Baley shook his head.
The Commissioner said, “I’ve been thinking that I could be minimizing the possibility of riots. If there’s anything to--”
Baley said tightly, “For God’s sake, Commissioner, if anything happened, I’d tell you. There was no trouble of any sort.”
“All right.” The Commissioner moved away, passing beyond the door that marked off the unusual privacy that became his exalted position.
Baley looked after him and thought: He must have slept last night.
Baley bent to the routine report he was trying to write as a cover-up for the real activities of the last two days, but the words he had tapped out by finger touch blurred and danced. Slowly, he became aware of an object standing by his desk.
He lifted his head. “What do you want?”
It was R. Sammy. Baley thought: Julius’s private flunky. It pays to be a Commissioner.
R. Sammy said through his fatuous grin, “The Commissioner wants to see you, Lije. He says right away.”
Baley waved his hand. “He just saw me. Tell him I’ll be in later.”
R. Sammy said, “He says right away.”
“All right. All right. Go away.”
The robot backed away, saying, “The Commissioner wants to see you right away, Lije. He says right away.”
“Jehoshaphat,” said Baley between his teeth. “I’m going. I’m going.” He got up from his desk, headed for the office, and R. Sammy was silent.
Baley said as he entered, “Damn it, Commissioner, don’t send that thing after me, will you?”
But the Commissioner only said, “Sit down, Lije. Sit down.”
Baley sat down and stared. Perhaps he had done old Julius an injustice. Perhaps the man hadn’t slept after all. He looked fairly beat.
The Commissioner was tapping the paper before him. “There’s a record of a call you made to a Dr. Gerrigel at Washington by insulated beam.”
“That’s right, Commissioner.”
“There’s no record of the conversation, naturally, since it was insulated. ‘What’s it all about?”
“I’m after background information.”
“He’s a roboticist, isn’t he?”
“That’s right.”
The Commissioner put out a lower lip and suddenly looked like a child about to pout. “But what’s the point? What kind of information are you after?”
“I’m not sure, Commissioner. I just have a feeling that in a case like this, information on robots might help.” Baley clamped his mouth shut after that. He wasn’t going to be specific, and that was that.
“I wouldn’t, Lije. I wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s wise.”
“What’s your objection, Commissioner?”
“The fewer the people who know about all this, the better.”
“I’ll tell him as little as I can. Naturally.”
“I still don’t think it’s wise.”
Baley was feeling just sufficiently wretched to lose patience.
He said, “Are you ordering me not to see him?”
“No. No. You do as you see fit. You’re heading this investigation. Only. .
“Only what?”
The Commissioner shook his head. “Nothing.--Where is he? You know who I mean.”
Baley did. He said, “Daneel’s still at the files.”
The Commissioner paused a long moment, then said, “We’re not making much progress, you know.”
“We’re not making any so far. Still, things may change.”
“All right, then,” said the Commissioner, but he didn’t look as though he really thought it were all right.
R. Daneel was at Baley’s desk, when the latter returned.
“Well, and what have you got?” Baley asked gruffly.
“I have completed my first, rather hasty, search through the files, partner Elijah, and I have located two of the people who tried to track us last night and who, moreover, were at the shoe store during the former incident.”
“Let’s see.”
R. Daneel placed the small, stamp-size cards before Baley. They were mottled with the small dots that served as code. The robot also produced a portable decoder and placed one of the cards into an appropriate slot. The dots possessed electrical conduction properties different from that of the card as a whole. The electric field passing through the card was therefore distorted in a highly specific manner and in response to that specification the three-by-six screen above the decoder was filled with words. Words which, uncoded, would have filled several sheets of standard size report paper. Words, moreover, which could not possibly be interpreted by anyone not in possession of an official police decoder.
Baley read through the material stolidly. The first person was Francis Clousarr, age thirty-three at time of arrest two years before; cause of arrest, inciting to riot; employee at New York Yeast; home address, so-and-so; parentage, so-and-so; hair, eyes, distinguishing marks, educational history, employment history, psychoanalytic profile, physical profile, data here, data there, and finally reference to the photo in the rogues’ gallery.
“You checked the photograph?” asked Baley.
“Yes, Elijah.”
The second person was Gerhard Paul. Baley glanced at the material on that card and said, “This is all no good.”
R. Daneel said, “I am sure that cannot be so. If there is an organization of Earthmen who are capable of the crime we are investigating, these are members. Is that not an obvious likelihood? Should they then not be questioned?”
“We’d get nothing out of them.”
“They were there, both at the shoe store and in the kitchen. They cannot deny it.”
“Just being there’s no crime. Besides which, they can deny it. They can just say they weren’t there. It’s as simple as that. How can we prove they’re lying?”
“I saw them.”
“That’s no proof,” said Baley, savagely. “No court, if it ever came to that, would believe that you could remember two faces in a blur of a million.”
“It is obvious that I can.”
“Sure. Tell them what you are. As soon as you do that, you’re no witness. Your kind have no status in any court of law on Earth.”
R. Daneel said, “I take it, then, that you have changed your mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yesterday, in the kitchen, you said there was no need to arrest them. You said that as long as I remembered their faces, we could arrest them at any time.”
“Well, I didn’t think it through,” said Baley. “I was crazy. It can’t be done.”
“Not even for psychological reasons? They would not know we had no legal proof of their complicity in conspiracy.”
Baley said, tensely, “Look, I am expecting Dr. Gerrigel of Washington in half an hour. Do you mind waiting till he’s been here and gone? Do you mind?”
“I will wait,” said R. Daneel.
Anthony Gerrigel was a precise and very polite man of middle height, who looked far from being one of the most erudite roboticists on Earth. He was nearly twenty minutes late, it turned out, and quite apologetic about it. Baley, white with an anger born of apprehension, shrugged off the apologies gracelessly. He checked his reservation on Conference Room D, repeated his instructions that they were not to be disturbed on any account for an hour, and led Dr. Gerrigel and R. Daneel down the corridor, up a ramp, and through a door that led to one of the spy-beam-insulated chambers.
Baley checked the walls carefully before sitting down, listening to the soft burr of the pulsometer in his hand, waiting for any fading of the steady sound which would indicate a break, even a small one, in the insulation. He turned it on the ceiling, floor, and, with particular care, on the door. There was no break.
Dr. Gerrigel smiled a little. He looked like a man who never smiled more than a little. He was dressed with a neatness that could only be described as fussy. His iron-gray hair was smoothed carefully back and his face looked pink and freshly washed. He sat with a posture of prim stiffness as though repeated maternal advice in his younger years concerning the desirability of good posture had rigidified his spine forever.
He said to Baley, “You make this all seem very formidable.”
“It’s quite important, Doctor. I need information about robots that only you can give me, perhaps. Anything we say here, of course, is top secret and the City will expect you to forget it all when you leave.” Baley looked at his watch.
The little smile on the roboticist’s face winked away. He said, “Let me explain why I am late.” The matter obviously weighed upon him. “I decided not to go by air. I get airsick.”
“That’s too bad,” said Baley. He put away the pulsometer, after checking its standard settings to make last-minute certain that there was nothing wrong with it, and sat down.
“Or at least not exactly airsick, but nervous. A mild agoraphobia. It’s nothing particularly abnormal, but there it is. So I took the expressways.”
Baley felt a sudden sharp interest. “Agoraphobia?”
“I make it sound worse than it is,” the roboticist said at once. “It’s just the feeling you get in a plane. Have you ever been in one, Mr. Baley?”
“Several times.”
“Then you must know what I mean. It’s that feeling of being surrounded by nothing; of being separated from--from empty air by a mere inch of metal. It’s very uncomfortable.”
“So you took the expressway?”
“Yes.”
“All the way from Washington to New York?”
“Oh, I’ve done it before. Since they built the Baltimore-Philadelphia tunnel, it’s quite simple.”
So it was. Baley had never made the trip himself, but he was perfectly aware that it was possible. ‘Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had grown, in the last two centuries, to the point where all nearly touched. The Four-City Area was almost the official name for the entire stretch of coast, and there were a considerable number of people who favored administrational consolidation and the formation of a single super-City. Baley disagreed with that, himself. New York City by itself was almost too large to be handled by a centralized government. A larger City, with over fifty million population, would break down under its own weight.
“The trouble was,” Dr. Gerrigel was saying, “that I missed a connection in Chester Sector, Philadelphia, and lost time. That, and a little difficulty in getting a transient room assignment, ended by making me late.”
“Don’t worry about that, Doctor. What you say, though, is interesting. In view of your dislike for planes, what would you say to going outside City limits on foot, Dr. Gerrigel?”
“For what reason?” He looked startled and more than a little apprehensive.
“It’s just a rhetorical question. I’m not suggesting that you really should. I want to know how the notion strikes you, that’s all.”
“It strikes me very unpleasantly.”
“Suppose you had to leave the City at night and walk cross country for half a mile or more.”
“I--I don’t think I could be persuaded to.”
“No matter how important the necessity?”
“If it were to save my life or the lives of my family, I might try. . . .” He looked embarrassed. “May I ask the point of these questions, Mr. Baley?”
“I’ll tell you. A serious crime has been committed, a particularly disturbing murder. I’m not at liberty to give you the details. There is a theory, however, that the murderer, in order to commit the crime, did just what we were discussing; he crossed open country at night and alone. I was just wondering what kind of man could do that.”
Dr. Gerrigel shuddered. “No one I know. Certainly not I. Of course, among millions I suppose you could find a few hardy individuals.”
“But you wouldn’t say it was a very likely thing for a human being to do?”
“No. Certainly not likely.”
“In fact, if there’s any other explanation for the crime, any other conceivable explanation, it should be considered.”
Dr. Gerrigel looked more uncomfortable than ever as he sat bolt upright with his well-kept hands precisely folded in his lap. “Do you have an alternate explanation in mind?”
“Yes. It occurs to me that a robot, for instance, would have no difficulty at all in crossing open country.”
Dr. Gerrigel stood up. “Oh, my dear sir!”
“What’s wrong?”
“You mean a robot may have committed the crime?”
“Why not?”
“Murder? Of a human being?”
“Yes. Please sit down, Doctor.”
The roboticist did as he was told. He said, “Mr. Baley, there are two acts involved: walking cross country, and murder. A human being could commit the hatter easily, but would find difficulty in doing the former. A robot could do the former easily, but the latter act would be completely impossible. If you’re going to replace an unlikely theory by an impossible one--”
“Impossible is a hell of a strong word, Doctor.”
“You’ve heard of the First Law of Robotics, Mr. Baley?”
“Sure. I can even quote it: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” Baley suddenly pointed a finger at the roboticist and went on, “Why can’t a robot be built without the First Law? What’s so sacred about it?”
Dr. Gerrigel looked startled, then tittered, “Oh, Mr. Baley.”
“Well, what’s the answer?”
“Surely, Mr. Baley, if you even know a little about robotics, you must know the gigantic task involved, both mathematically and electronically, in building a positronic brain.”
“I have an idea,” said Baley. He remembered well his visit to a robot factory once in the way of business. He had seen their library of bookfilms, long ones, each of which contained the mathematical analysis of a single type of positronic brain. It took more than an hour for the
average such film to be viewed at standard scanning speed, condensed though its symbolisms were. And no two brains were alike, even when prepared according to the most rigid specifications. That, Baley understood, was a consequence of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This meant that each film had to be supplemented by appendices involving possible variations.
Oh, it was a job, all right. Baley wouldn’t deny that.
Dr. Gerrigel said, “Well, then, you must understand that a design for a new type of positronic brain, even one where only minor innovations are involved, is not the matter of a night’s work. It usually involves the entire research staff of a moderately sized factory and takes anywhere up to a year of time. Even this large expenditure of work would not be nearly enough if it were not that the basic theory of such circuits has already been standardized and may be used as a foundation for further elaboration. The standard basic theory involves the Three Laws of Robotics: the First Law, which you’ve quoted; the Second Law, which states, ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law,’ and the Third Law, which states, ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’ Do you understand?”
R. Daneel, who, to all appearances, had been following the conversation with close attention, broke in. “If you will excuse me, Elijah, I would like to see if I follow Dr. Gerrigel. What you imply, sir, is that any attempt to build a robot, the working of whose positronic brain is not oriented about the Three Laws, would require first the setting up of a new basic theory and that this, in turn, would take many years.”
The roboticist looked very gratified. “That is exactly what I mean, Mr. . .”
Baley waited a moment, then carefully introduced R. Daneel: “This is Daneel Olivaw, Dr. Gerrigel.”
“Good day, Mr. Olivaw.” Dr. Gerrigel extended his hand and shook Daneel’s. He went on, “It is my estimation that it would take fifty years to develop the basic theory of a non-Asenion positronic brain-- that is, one in which the basic assumptions of the Three Laws are disallowed--and bring it to the point where robots similar to modern models could be constructed.”
“And this has never been done?” asked Baley. “I mean, Doctor, that we’ve been building robots for several thousand years. In all that time, hasn’t anybody or any group had fifty years to spare?”
“Certainly,” said the roboticist, “but it is not the sort of work that anyone would care to do.”
“I find that hard to believe. Human curiosity will undertake anything.”
“It hasn’t undertaken the non-Asenion robot. The human race, Mr. Baley, has a strong Frankenstein complex.”
“A what?”
“That’s a popular name derived from a Medieval novel describing a robot that turned on its creator. I never read the novel myself. But that’s beside the point. What I wish to say is that robots without the First Law are simply not built.”
“And no theory for it even exists?”
“Not to my knowledge, and my knowledge,” he smiled self-consciously, “is rather extensive.”
“And a robot with a First Law built in could not kill a man?”
“Never. Unless such killing were completely accidental or unless it were necessary to save the lives of two or more men. In either case, the positronic potential built up would ruin the brain past recovery.”
“All right,” said Baley. “All this represents the situation on Earth. Right?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“What about the Outer Worlds?”
Some of Dr. Gerrigel’s self-assurance seemed to ooze away. “Oh dear, Mr. Baley, I couldn’t say of my own knowledge, but I’m sure that if non-Asenion positronic brains were ever designed or if the mathematical theory were worked out, we’d hear of it.”
“Would we? Well, let me follow up another thought in my mind, Dr. Gerrigel. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. Not at all.” He looked helplessly first at Baley, then at R. Daneel. “After all, if it is as important as you say, I’m glad to do all I can.”
“Thank you, Doctor. My question is, why humanoid robots? I mean that I’ve been taking them for granted all my life, but now it occurs to me that I don’t know the reason for their existence. Why should a robot have a head and four limbs? Why should he look more or less like a man?”
“You mean, why shouldn’t he be built functionally, like any other machine?”
“Right,” said Baley. “Why not?”
Dr. Gerrigel smiled a little. “Really, Mr. Baley, you are born too late. The early literature of robotics is riddled with a discussion of that very matter and the polemics involved were something frightful. If you would like a very good reference to the disputatious among the functionalists and anti-functionalists, I can recommend Hanford’s ‘History of Robotics.’ Mathematics is kept to a minimum. I think you’d find it very interesting.”
“I’ll look it up,” said Baley, patiently. “Meanwhile, could you give me an idea?”
“The decision was made on the basis of economics. Look here, Mr. Baley, if you were supervising a farm, would you care to buy a tractor with a positronic brain, a reaper, a harrow, a milker, an automobile, and so on, each with a positronic brain; or would you rather have ordinary unbrained machinery with a single positronic robot to run them all. I warn you that the second alternative represents only a fiftieth or a hundredth the expense.”
“But why the human form?”
“Because the human form is the most successful generalized form in all nature. We are not a specialized animal, Mr. Baley, except for our nervous systems and a few odd items. If you want a design capable of doing a great many widely various things, all fairly well, you could do no better than to imitate the human form. Besides that, our entire technology is based on the human form. An automobile, for instance, has its controls so made as to be grasped and manipulated most easily by human hands and feet of a certain size and shape, attached to the body by limbs of a certain length and joints of a certain type. Even such simple objects as chairs and tables or knives and forks are designed to meet the requirements of human measurements and manner of working. It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically the very philosophy of our tools.”
“I see. That makes sense. Now isn’t it true, Doctor, that the roboticists of the Outer World manufacture robots that are much more humanoid than our Own?”
“I believe that is true.”
“Could they manufacture a robot so humanoid that it would pass for human under ordinary conditions?”
Dr. Gerrigel lifted his eyebrows and considered that. “I think they could, Mr. Baley. It would be terribly expensive. I doubt that the return could be profitable.”
“Do you suppose,” went on Baley, relentlessly, “that they could make a robot that would fool you into thinking it was human?”
The roboticist tittered. “Oh, my dear Mr. Baley. I doubt that. Really. There’s more to a robot than just his appear--”
Dr. Gerrigel froze in the middle of the word. Slowly, he turned to R. Daneel, and his pink face went very pale.
“Oh, dear me,” he whispered. “Oh, dear me.”
He reached out one hand and touched R. Daneel’s check gingerly. R. Daneel did not move away but gazed at the roboticist calmly.
“Dear me,” said Dr. Gerrigel, with what was almost a sob in his voice, “you are a robot.”
“It took you a long time to realize that,” said Baley, dryly.
“I wasn’t expecting it. I never saw one like this. Outer World manufacture?”
“Yes,” said Baley.
“It’s obvious now. The way he holds himself. The manner of his speaking. It is not a perfect imitation, Mr. Baley.”
“It’s pretty good though, isn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s marvelous. I doubt that anyone could recognize the imposture at sight. I am very grateful to you for having me brought face to face with him. May I examine him?” The roboticist was on his feet, eager.
Baley put out a hand. “Please, Doctor. In a moment. First, the matter of the murder, you know.”
“Is that real, then?” Dr. Gerrigel was bitterly disappointed and showed it. “I thought perhaps that was just a device to keep my mind engaged and to see how long I could be fooled by--”
“It is not a device, Dr. Gerrigel. Tell me, now, in constructing a robot as humanoid as this one, with the deliberate purpose of having it pass as human, is it not necessary to make its brain possess properties as close to that of the human brain as possible?”
“Certainly.”
“Very well. Could not such a humanoid brain hack the First Law? Perhaps it is left out accidentally. You say the theory is unknown. The very fact that it is unknown means that the constructors might set up a brain without the First Law. They would not know what to avoid.”
Dr. Gerrigel was shaking his head vigorously. “No. No. Impossible.”
“Are you sure? We can test the Second Law, of course.--Daneel, let me have your blaster.”
Baley’s eyes never left the robot. His own hand, well to one side, gripped his own blaster tightly.
R. Daneel said calmly, “Here it is, Elijah,” and held it out, butt first.
Baley said, “A plain-clothes man must never abandon his blaster, but a robot has no choice but to obey a human.”
“Except, Mr. Baley,” said Dr. Gerrigel, “when obedience involves breaking the First Law.”
“Do you know, Doctor, that Daneel drew his blaster on an unarmed group of men and women and threatened to shoot?”
“But I did not shoot,” said R. Daneel.
“Granted, but the threat was unusual in itself, wasn’t it, Doctor?”
Dr. Gerrigel bit his lip. “I’d need to know the exact circumstances to judge. It sounds unusual.”
“Consider this, then. R. Daneel was on the scene at the time of the murder, and if you omit the possibility of an Earthman having moved across open country, carrying a weapon with him, Daneel and Daneel alone of all the persons on the scene could have hidden the weapon.”
“Hidden the weapon?” asked Dr. Gerrigel.
“Let me explain. The blaster that did the killing was not found. The scene of the murder was searched minutely and it was not found. Yet it could not have vanished like smoke. There is only one place it could have been, only one place they would not have thought to look.”
“Where, Elijah?” asked R. Daneel.
Baley brought his blaster into view, held its barrel firmly in the robot’s direction.
“In your food sac,” he said. “In your food sac, Daneel!”
“That is not so,” said R. Daneel, quietly.
“Yes? We’ll let the Doctor decide. Dr. Gerrigel?”
“Mr. Baley?” The roboticist, whose glance had been alternating wildly between the plain-clothes man and the robot as they spoke, let it come to rest upon the human being.
“I’ve asked you here for an authoritative analysis of this robot. I can arrange to have you use the laboratories of the City Bureau of Standards. If you need any piece of equipment they don’t have, I’ll get it for you. What I want is a quick and definite answer and hang the expense and trouble.”
Baley rose. His words had emerged calmly enough, but he felt a rising hysteria behind them. At the moment, he felt that if he could only seize Dr. Gerrigel by the throat and choke the necessary statements out of him, he would forgo all science.
He said, “Well, Dr. Gerrigel?”
Dr. Gerrigel tittered nervously and said, “My dear Mr. Baley, I won’t need a laboratory.”
“Why not?” asked Baley apprehensively. He stood there, muscles tense, feeling himself twitch.
“It’s not difficult to test the First Law. I’ve never had to, you understand, but it’s simple enough.”
Baley pulled air in through his mouth and let it out slowly. He said, “Would you explain what you mean? Are you saying that you can test him here?”
“Yes, of course. Look, Mr. Baley, I’ll give you an analogy. If I were a Doctor of Medicine and had to test a patient’s blood sugar, I’d need a chemical laboratory. If I needed to measure his basal metabolic rate, or test his cortical function, or check his genes to pinpoint a congenital malfunction, I’d need elaborate equipment. On the other hand, I could check whether he were blind by merely passing my hand before his eyes and I could test whether he were dead by merely feeling for his pulse.
“What I’m getting at is that the more important and fundamental the property being tested, the simpler the needed equipment. It’s the same in a robot. The First Law is fundamental. It affects everything. If it were absent, the robot could not react properly in two dozen obvious ways.”
As he spoke, he took out a flat, black object which expanded into a small book-viewer. He inserted a well-worn spool into the receptacle. He then took out a stop watch and a series of white, plastic slivers that fitted together to form something that looked like a slide rule with three independent movable scales. The notations upon it struck no chord of familiarity to Baley.
Dr. Gerrigel tapped his book-viewer and smiled a little, as though the prospect of a bit of field work cheered him.
He said, “It’s my Handbook of Robotics. I never go anywhere without it. It’s part of my clothes.” He giggled self-consciously.
He put the eyepiece of the viewer to his eyes and his finger dealt delicately with the controls. The viewer whirred and stopped, whirred and stopped.
“Built-in index,” the roboticist said, proudly, his voice a little muffled because of the way in which the viewer covered his mouth. “I constructed it myself. It saves a great deal of time. But then, that’s not the point now, is it? Let’s see. Umm, won’t you move your chair near me, Daneel.”
R. Daneel did so. During the roboticist’s preparations, he had watched closely and unemotionally.
Baley shifted his blaster.
What followed confused and disappointed him. Dr. Gerrigel proceeded to ask questions and perform actions that seemed without meaning, punctuated by references to his triple slide rule and occasionally to the viewer.
At one time, he asked, “If I have two cousins, five years apart in age, and the younger is a girl, what sex is the older?”
Daneel answered (inevitably, Baley thought), “It is impossible to say on the information given.”
To which Dr. Gerrigel’s only response, aside from a glance at his stop watch, was to extend his right hand as far as he could sideways and to say, “Would you touch the tip of my middle finger with the tip of the third finger of your left hand?”
Daneel did that promptly and easily.
In fifteen minutes, not more, Dr. Gerrigel was finished. He used his slide rule for a last silent calculation, then disassembled it with a series of snaps. He put away his stop watch, withdrew the Handbook from the viewer, and collapsed the latter.
“Is that all?” said Baley, frowning.
“That’s all.”
“But it’s ridiculous. You’ve asked nothing that pertains to the First Law.”
“Oh, my dear Mr. Baley, when a doctor hits your knee with a little rubber mallet and it jerks, don’t you accept the fact that it gives information concerning the presence or absence of some degenerative nerve disease? When he looks closely at your eyes and considers the reaction of your iris to light, are you surprised that he can tell you something concerning your possible addiction to the use of certain alkaloids?”
Baley said, “Well, then? What’s your decision?”
“Daneel is fully equipped with the First Law!” The roboticist jerked his head in a sharp affirmative.
“You can’t be right,” said Baley huskily.
Baley would not have thought that Dr. Gerrigel could stiffen into a rigidity that was greater than his usual position. He did so, however, visibly. The man’s eyes grew narrow and hard.
“Are you teaching me my job?”
“I don’t mean you’re incompetent,” said Baley. He put out a large, pleading hand. “But couldn’t you be mistaken? You’ve said yourself nobody knows anything about the theory of non-Asenion robots. A blind man could read by using Braille or a sound-scriber. Suppose you didn’t know that Braille or sound-scribing existed. Couldn’t you, in all honesty, say that a man had eyes because he knew the contents of a certain book-film, and be mistaken?”
“Yes,” the roboticist grew genial again, “I see your point. But still a blind man could not read by use of his eyes and it is that which I was testing, if I may continue the analogy. Take my word for it, regardless of what a non-Asenion robot could or could not do, it is certain that R. Daneel is equipped with First Law.”
“Couldn’t he have falsified his answers?” Baley was floundering, and knew it.
“Of course not. That is the difference between a robot and a man. A human brain, or any mammalian brain, cannot be completely analyzed by any mathematical discipline now known. No response can therefore be counted upon as a certainty. The robot brain is completely analyzable, or it could not be constructed. We know exactly what the responses to given stimuli must be. No robot can truly falsify answers. The thing you call falsification just doesn’t exist in the robot’s mental horizon.”
“Then let’s get down to cases. R. Daneel did point a blaster at a crowd of human beings. I saw that. I was there. Granted that he didn’t shoot, wouldn’t the First Law still have forced him into a kind of neurosis? It didn’t, you know. He was perfectly normal afterward.”
The roboticist put a hesitant hand to his chin. “That is anomalous.”
“Not at all,” said R. Daneel, suddenly. “Partner Elijah, would you look at the blaster that you took from me?”
Baley looked down upon the blaster he held cradled in his left hand.
“Break open the charge chamber,” urged R. Daneel. “Inspect it.”
Baley weighed his chances, then slowly put his own blaster on the table beside him. With a quick movement, he opened the robot’s blaster.
“It’s empty,” he said, blankly.
“There is no charge in it,” agreed R. Daneel. “If you will look closer, you will see that there has never been a charge in it. The blaster has no ignition bud and cannot be used.”
Baley said, “You held an uncharged blaster on the crowd?”
“I had to have a blaster or fail in my role as plain-clothes man,” said R. Daneel. “Yet to carry a charged and usable blaster might have made it possible for me to hurt a human being by accident, a thing
which is, of course, unthinkable. I would have explained this at the time, but you were angry and would not listen.”
Baley stared bleakly at the useless blaster in his hand and said in a low voice, “I think that’s all, Dr. Gerrigel. Thank you for helping out.”
Baley sent out for lunch, but when it came (yeast-nut cake and a rather extravagant slice of fried chicken on cracker) he could only stare at it.
Round and round went the currents of his mind. The lines on his long face were etched in deep gloom.
He was living in an unreal world, a cruel, topsy-turvy world.
How had it happened? The immediate past stretched behind him like a misty improbable dream dating back to the moment he had stepped into Julius Enderby’s office and found himself suddenly immersed in a nightmare of murder and robotics.
Jehoshaphat! It had begun only fifty hours before.
Persistently, he had sought the solution in Spacetown. Twice he had accused R. Daneel, once as a human being in disguise, and once as an admitted and actual robot, each time as a murderer. Twice the accusation had been bent back and broken.
He was being driven back. Against his will he was forced to turn his thoughts into the City, and since last night he dared not. Certain questions battered at his conscious mind, but he would not listen; he felt he could not. If he heard them, he couldn’t help but answer them and, oh God, he didn’t want to face the answers.
“Lije! Lije!” A hand shook Baley’s shoulder roughly.
Baley stirred and said, “What’s up, Phil?”
Philip Norris, Plain-clothes man C-5, sat down, put his hands on his knees, and leaned forward, peering at Baley’s face. “What happened to you? Been living on knockout drops lately? You were sitting there with your eyes open and, near as I could make out, you were dead.”
He rubbed his thinning, pale blond hair, and his close-set eyes appraised Baley’s cooling lunch greedily. “Chicken!” he said. “It’s getting so you can’t get it without a doctor’s prescription.”
“Take some,” said Baley, listlessly.
Decorum won out and Norris said, “Oh, well, I’m going out to eat in a minute. You keep it.--Say, what’s doing with the Commish?”
“What?”
Norris attempted a casual attitude, but his hands were restless. He said, “Go on. You know what I mean. You’ve been living with him ever since he got back. What’s up? A promotion in the works?”
Baley frowned and felt reality return somewhat at the touch of office politics. Norris had approximately his own seniority and he was bound to watch most assiduously for any sign of official preference in Baley’s direction.
Baley said, “No promotion. Believe me. It’s nothing. Nothing. And if it’s the Commissioner you’re wanting, I wish I could give him to you. Jehoshaphat! Take him!”
Norris said, “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care if you get promoted. I just mean that if you’ve got any pull with the Commish, how about using it for the kid?”
“What kid?”
There was no need of any answer to that. Vincent Barrett, the youngster who had been moved out of his job to make room for R. Sammy, was shuffling up from an unnoticed corner of the room. A skull cap turned restlessly in his hands and the skin over his high cheekbones moved as he tried to smile.
“Hello, Mr. Baley.”
“Oh, hello, Vince. How’re you doing?”
“Not so good, Mr. Baley.”
He was looking about hungrily. Baley thought: He looks lost, half dead--declassified.
Then, savagely, his lips almost moving with the force of his emotion, he thought: But what does he want from me?
He said, “I’m sorry, kid.” What else was there to say?
“I keep thinking--maybe something has turned up.”
Norris moved in close and spoke into Baley’s ear. “Someone’s got to stop this sort of thing. They’re going to move out Chen-low now.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“No, I haven’t. Damn it, he’s a C-3. He’s got ten years behind him.”
“I grant that. But a machine with legs can do his work. Who’s next?”
Young Vince Barrett was oblivious to the whispers. He said out of the depths of his own thinking, “Mr. Baley?”
“Yes, Vince?”
“You know what they say? They say Lynane Millane, the subetherics dancer, is really a robot.”
“That’s silly.”
“Is it? They say they can make robots look just like humans; with a special plastic skin, sort of.”
Baley thought guiltily of R. Daneel and found no words. He shook his head.
The boy said, “Do you suppose anyone will mind if I just walk around. It makes me feel better to see the old place.”
“Go ahead, kid.”
The youngster wandered off. Baley and Norris watched him go. Norris said, “It looks as though the Medievalists are right.”
“You mean back to the soil? Is that it, Phil?”
“No. I mean about the robots. Back to the soil. Huh! Old Earth has an unlimited future. We don’t need robots, that’s all.”
Baley muttered, “Eight billion people and the uranium running out! What’s unlimited about it?”
“What if the uranium does run out. We’ll import it. Or we’ll discover other nuclear processes. There’s no way you can stop mankind, Lije. You’ve got to be optimistic about it and have faith in the old human brain. Our greatest resource is ingenuity and we’ll never run out of that, Lije.”
He was fairly started now. He went on, “For one thing, we can use sunpower and that’s good for billions of years. We can build space stations inside Mercury’s orbit to act as energy accumulators. We’ll transmit energy to Earth by direct beam.”
This project was not new to Baley. The speculative fringe of science had been playing with the notion for a hundred and fifty years at least. What was holding it up was the impossibility so far of projecting a beam tight enough to reach fifty million miles without dispersal to uselessness. Baley said as much.
Norris said, “When it’s necessary, it’ll be done. Why worry?”
Baley had the picture of an Earth of unlimited energy. Population could continue to increase. The yeast farms could expand, hydroponic culture intensify. Energy was the only thing indispensable. The raw minerals could be brought in from the uninhabited rocks of the System. If ever water became a bottleneck, more could be brought in from the moons of Jupiter. Hell, the oceans could be frozen and dragged out into Space where they could circle Earth as moonlets of ice. There they would be, always available for use, while the ocean bottoms would represent more land for exploitation, more room to live. Even carbon and oxygen could be maintained and increased on Earth through utilization of the methane atmosphere of Titan and the frozen oxygen of Umbriel.
Earth’s population could reach a trillion or two. Why not? There was a time when the current population of eight billion would have been viewed as impossible. There was a time when a population of a single billion would have been unthinkable. There had always been prophets of Malthusian doom in every generation since Medieval times and they had always proven wrong.
But what would Fastolfe say? A world of a trillion? Surely! But they would be dependent on imported air and water and upon an energy supply from complicated storehouses fifty million miles away. How incredibly unstable that would be. Earth would be, and remain, a feather’s weight away from complete catastrophe at the slightest failure of any part of the System-wide mechanism.
Baley said, “I think it would be easier to ship off some of the surplus population, myself.” It was more an answer to the picture he had himself conjured up than to anything Norris had said.
“Who’d have us?” said Norris with a bitter lightness.
“Any uninhabited planet.”
Norris rose, patted Baley on the shoulder. “Lije, you eat your chicken, and recover. You must be living on knockout pills.” He left, chuckling.
Baley watched him leave with a humorless twist to his mouth. Norris would spread the news and it would be weeks before the humor boys of the office (every office has them) would hay off. But at least it got him off the subject of young Vince, of robots, of declassification.
He sighed as he put a fork into the now cold and somewhat stringy chicken.
Baley finished the last of the yeast-nut and it was only then that R. Daneel left his own desk (assigned him that morning) and approached.
Baley eyed him uncomfortably. “Well?”
R. Daneel said, “The Commissioner is not in his office and it is not known when he’ll be back. I’ve told R. Sammy we will use it and that he is to allow no one but the Commissioner to enter.”
“What are we going to use it for?”
“Greater privacy. Surely you agree that we must plan our next move. After all, you do not intend to abandon the investigation, do you?”
That was precisely what Baley most longed to do, but obviously, he could not say so. He rose and led the way to Enderby’s office.
Once in the office, Baley said, “All night, Daneel. What is it?”
The robot said, “Partner Elijah, since last night, you are not yourself. There is a definite alteration in your mental aura.”
A horrible thought sprang full-grown into Baley’s mind. He cried, “Are you telepathic?”
It was not a possibility he would have considered at a less disturbed moment.
“No. Of course not,” said R. Daneel.
Baley’s panic ebbed. He said, “Then what the devil do you mean by talking about my mental aura?”
“It is merely an expression I use to describe a sensation that you do not share with me.”
“What sensation?”
“It is difficult to explain, Elijah. You will recall that I was originally designed to study human psychology for our people back in Spacetown.”
“Yes, I know. You were adjusted to detective work by the simple installation of a justice-desire circuit.” Baley did not try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“Exactly, Elijah. But my original design remains essentially unaltered. I was constructed for the purpose of cerebroanalysis.”
“For analyzing brain waves?”
“Why, yes. It can be done by field-measurements without the necessity of direct electrode contact, if the proper receiver exists. My mind is such a receiver. Is that principle not applied on Earth?”
Baley didn’t know. He ignored the question and said, cautiously, “If you measure the brain waves, what do you get out of it?”
“Not thoughts, Elijah. I get a glimpse of emotion and most of all, I can analyze temperament, the underlying drives and attitudes of a man. For instance, it was I who was able to ascertain that Commissioner Enderby was incapable of killing a man under the circumstances prevailing at the time of the murder.”
“And they eliminated him as a suspect on your say-so.”
“Yes. It was safe enough to do so. I am a very delicate machine in that respect.”
Again a thought struck Baley. “Wait! Commissioner Enderby didn’t know he was being cerebroanalyzed, did he?”
“There was no necessity of hurting his feelings.”
“I mean you just stood there and looked at him. No machinery. No electrodes. No needles and graphs.”
“Certainly not. I am a self-contained unit.”
Baley bit his lower lip in anger and chagrin. It had been the one remaining inconsistency, the one loophole through which a forlorn stab might yet be made in an attempt to pin the crime on Spacetown.
R. Daneel had stated that the Commissioner had been cerebroanalyzed and one hour later the Commissioner himself had, with apparent candor, denied any knowledge of the term. Certainly no man could have undergone the shattering experience of electroencephalographic measurements by electrode and graph under the suspicion of murder without an unmistakable impression of what cerebroanalysis must be.
But now that discrepancy had evaporated. The Commissioner had been cerebroanalyzed and had never known it. R. Daneel told the truth; so had the Commissioner.
“Well,” said Baley, sharply, “what does cerebroanalysis tell you about me?”
“You are disturbed.”
“That’s a great discovery, isn’t it? Of course, I’m disturbed.”
“Specifically, though, your disturbance is due to a clash between motivations within you. On the one hand your devotion to the principles of your profession urges you to look deeply ‘into this conspiracy of Earthmen who lay siege to us last night. Another motivation, equally strong, forces you in the opposite direction. This much is cleanly written in the electric field of your cerebral cells.”
“My cerebral cells, nuts,” said Baley, feverishly. “Look, I’ll tell you why there’s no point in investigating your so-called conspiracy. It has nothing to do with the murder. I thought it might have. I’ll admit that. Yesterday in the kitchen, I thought we were in danger. But what happened? They followed us out, were quickly lost on the strips, and that was that. That was not the action of well-organized and desperate men.
“My own son found out where we were staying easily enough. He called the Department. He didn’t even have to identify himself. Our precious conspirators could have done the same if they had really wanted to hurt us.”
“Didn’t they?”
“Obviously not. If they had wanted riots, they could have started one at the shoe counter, and yet they backed out tamely enough before one man and a blaster. One robot, and a blaster which they must have known you would be unable to fire once they recognized what you were. They’re Medievalists. They’re harmless crackpots. You wouldn’t know that, but I should have. And I would have, if it weren’t for the fact that this whole business has me thinking in--in foolish melodramatic terms.
“I tell you I know the type of people that become Medievalists. They’re soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed. If you could cerebroanalyze a movement as you do an individual, you would find they are no more capable of murder than Julius Enderby himself.”
R. Daneel said slowly, “I cannot accept your statements at face value.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your conversion to this view is too sudden. There are certain discrepancies, too. You arranged the appointment with Dr. Gerrigel hours before the evening meal. You did not know of my food sac then and could not have suspected me as the murderer. Why did you call him, then?”
“I suspected you even then.”
“And last night you spoke as you slept.”
Baley’s eyes widened. “What did I say?”
“Merely the one word ‘Jessie’ several times repeated. I believe you were referring to your wife.”
Baley let his tight muscles loosen. He said, shakily, “I had a nightmare. Do you know what that is?”
“I do not know by personal experience, of course. The dictionary definition has it that it is a bad dream.”
“And do you know what a dream is?”
“Again, the dictionary definition only. It is an illusion of reality experienced during the temporary suspension of conscious thought which you call sheep.”
“All right. I’ll buy that. An illusion. Sometimes the illusions can seem damned real. Well, I dreamed my wife was in danger. It’s the sort of dream people often have. I called her name. That happens under such circumstances, too. You can take my word for it.”
“I am only too glad to do so. But it brings up a thought. How did Jessie find out I was a robot?”
Baley’s forehead went moist again. “We’re not going into that again, are we? The rumor--”
“I am sorry to interrupt, partner Elijah, but there is no rumor. If there were, the City would be alive with unrest today. I have checked reports coming into the Department and this is not so. There simply is no rumor. Therefore, how did your wife find out?”
“Jehoshaphat! What are you trying to say? Do you think my wife is one of the members of--of. . .”
“Yes, Elijah.”
Baley gripped his hands together tightly. “Well, she isn’t, and we won’t discuss that point any further.”
“This is not like you, Elijah. In the course of duty, you accused me of murder twice.”
“And is this your way of getting even?”
“I am not sure I understand what you mean by the phrase. Certainly, I approve your readiness to suspect me. You had your reasons.
They were wrong, but they might easily have been right. Equally strong evidence points to your wife.”
“As a murderess? Why, damn you, Jessie wouldn’t hurt her worst enemy. She couldn’t set foot outside the City. She couldn’t. . -- Why, if you were flesh and blood I’d--”
“I merely say that she is a member of the conspiracy. I say that she should be questioned.”
“Not on your life. Not on whatever it is you call your life. Now, listen to me. The Medievalists aren’t after our blood. It’s not the way they do things. But they are trying to get you out of the City. That much is obvious. And they’re trying to do it by a kind of psychological attack. They’re trying to make life unpleasant for you and for me, since I’m with you. They could easily have found out Jessie was my wife, and it was an obvious move for them to let the news leak to her. She’s like any other human being. She doesn’t like robots. She wouldn’t want me to associate with one, especially if she thought it involved danger, and surely they would imply that. I tell you it worked. She begged all night to have me abandon the case or to get you out of the City somehow.”
“Presumably,” said R. Daneel, “you have a very strong urge to protect your wife against questioning. It seems obvious to me that you are constructing this line of argument without really believing it.”
“What the hell do you think you are?” ground out Baley. “You’re not a detective. You’re a cerebroanalysis machine like the electroencephalographs we have in this building. You’ve got arms, legs, a head, and can talk, but you’re not one inch more than that machine. Putting a lousy circuit into you doesn’t make you a detective, so what do you know? You keep your mouth shut, and let me do the figuring out.”
The robot said quietly, “I think it would be better if you lowered your voice, Elijah. Granted that I am not a detective in the sense that you are, I would still like to bring one small item to your attention.”
“I’m not interested in listening.”
“Please do. If I am wrong, you will tell me so, and it will do no harm. It is only this. Last night you left our room to call Jessie by corridor phone. I suggested that your son go in your place. You told me it was not the custom among Earthmen for a father to send his son into danger. Is it then the custom for a mother to do so?”
“No, of cour--” began Baley, and stopped.
“You see my point,” said R. Daneel. “Ordinarily, if Jessie feared for your safety and wished to warn you, she would risk hen own life, not send her son. The fact that she did send Bentley could only mean that she felt that he would be safe while she herself would not. If the conspiracy consisted of people unknown to Jessie, that would not be the case, or at least she would have no reason to think it to be the case. On the other hand, if she were a member of the conspiracy, she would know, she would know, Elijah, that she would be watched for and recognized, whereas Bentley might get through unnoticed.”
“Wait now,” said Baley, sick at heart, “that’s feather-fine reasoning,
There was no need to wait. The signal on the Commissioner’s desk was flickering madly. R. Daneel waited for Baley to answer, but the latter could only stare at it helplessly. The robot closed contact.
“What is it?”
R. Sammy’s slurring voice said, “There is a lady here who wishes to see Lije. I told hen he was busy, but she will not go away. She says her name is Jessie.”
“Let her in,” said R. Daneel calmly, and his brown eyes rose unemotionally to meet the panicky glare of Baley’s.
Baley remained standing in a tetany of shock, as Jessie ran to him, seizing his shoulders, huddling close.
His pale lips formed the word, “Bentley?”
She looked at him and shook her head, her brown hair flying with the force of her motion. “He’s all right.”
“Well, then. . .”
Jessie said through a sudden torrent of sobs, in a low voice that could scarcely be made out, “I can’t go on, Lije. I can’t. I can’t sleep or eat. I’ve got to tell you.”
“Don’t say anything,” Baley said in anguish. “For God’s sake, Jessie, not now.”
“I must. I’ve done a terrible thing. Such a terrible thing. Oh, Lije. . .” She lapsed into incoherence.
Baley said, hopelessly, “We’re not alone, Jessie.”
She looked up and stared at R. Daneel with no signs of recognition. The tears in which her eyes were swimming might easily be refracting the robot into a featureless blur.
R. Daneel said in a low murmur, “Good afternoon, Jessie.”
She gasped. “Is it the--the robot?”
She dashed the back of her hand across her eyes and stepped out of Baley’s encircling right arm. She breathed deeply and, for a moment, a tremulous smile wavered on her lips. “It is you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Jessie.”
“You don’t mind being called a robot?”
“No, Jessie. It is what I am.”
“And I don’t mind being called a fool and an idiot and a--a subversive agent, because it’s what I am.”
“Jessie!” groaned Baley.
“It’s no use, Lije,” she said. “He might as well know if he’s your partner. I can’t live with it any more. I’ve had such a time since yesterday. I don’t care if I go to jail. I don’t care if they send me down to the lowest levels and make me live on raw yeast and water. I don’t cane if. . . You won’t let them, will you, Lije? Don’t let them do anything to me. I’m fuh-frightened.”
Baley patted her shoulder and let her cry.
He said to R. Daneel. “She isn’t well. We can’t keep her here. What time is it?”
R. Daneel said without any visible signs of consulting a timepiece, “Fourteen-forty-five.”
“The Commissioner could be back any minute. Look, commandeer a squad car and we can talk about this in the motorway.”
Jessie’s head jerked upright. “The motorway? Oh, no, Lije.”
He said, in as soothing a tone as he could manage, “Now, Jessie, don’t be superstitious. You can’t go on the expressway the way you are. Be a good girl and calm down or we won’t even be able to go through the common room. I’ll get you some water.”
She wiped her face with a damp handkerchief and said drearily, “Oh, look at my makeup.”
“Don’t worry about your makeup,” said Baley. “Daneel, what about the squad car?”
“It’s waiting for us now, partner Elijah.”
“Come on, Jessie.”
“Wait. Wait just a minute, Lije. I’ve got to do something to my face.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
But she twisted away. “Please. I can’t go through the common room like this. I won’t take a second.”
The man and the robot waited, the man with little jerky clenchings of his fists, the robot impassively.
Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. (If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since Medieval times, it was a woman’s purse. Even the substitution of magnetic clotures for metal clasps had not proven successful.) Jessie pulled out a small mirror and the silver-chased cosmetokit that Baley had bought her on the occasion of three birthdays before.
The cosmetokit had several orifices and she used each in turn. All but the last spray were invisible. She used them with that fineness of touch and delicacy of control that seems to be the birthright of women even at times of the greatest stress.
The base went on first in a smooth even layer that removed all shininess and roughness from the skin and left it with the faintly golden glow which long experience had taught Jessie was just the shade most suited to the natural coloring of hen hair and eyes. Then the touch of tan along the forehead and chin, a gentle brush of rouge on either cheek, tracing back to the angle of the jaw; and a delicate drift of blue on the upper eyelids and along the earlobes. Finally there was the application of the smooth carmine to the lips. That involved the one visible spray, a faintly pink mist that glistened liquidly in air, but dried and deepened richly on contact with the lips.
“There,” said Jessie, with several swift pats at her hair and a look of deep dissatisfaction. “I suppose that will do.”
The process had taken more than the promised second, but less than fifteen seconds. Nevertheless, it had seemed interminable to Baley.
“Come,” he said.
She barely had time to return the cosmetokit to the purse before he had pushed her through the door.
The eerie silence of the motorway lay thick on either side.
Baley said, “All right, Jessie.”
The impassivity that had covered Jessie’s face since they first heft the Commissioner’s office showed signs of cracking. She looked at her husband and at Daneel with a helpless silence.
Baley said, “Get it over with, Jessie. Please. Have you committed a crime? An actual crime?”
“A crime?” She shook her head uncertainly.
“Now hold on to yourself. No hysterics. Just say yes or no, Jessie. Have you--” he hesitated a trifle, “killed anyone?”
The look on Jessie’s face was promptly transmuted to indignation. “Why, Lije Baley!”
“Yes or no, Jessie.”
“No, of course not.”
The hard knot in Baley’s stomach softened perceptibly. “Have you stolen anything? Falsified ration data? Assaulted anyone? Destroyed property? Speak up, Jessie.”
“I haven’t done anything--anything specific. I didn’t mean anything like that.” She looked over her shoulder. “Lije, do we have to stay down here?”
“Right here until this is over. Now, start at the beginning. What did you come to tell us?” Over Jessie’s bowed head, Baley’s eyes met R. Daneel’s.
Jessie spoke in a soft voice that gained in strength and articulateness as she went on.
“It’s these people, these Medievalists; you know, Lije. They’re always around, always talking. Even in the old days when I was an assistant dietitian, it was like that. Remember Elizabeth Thornbowe? She was a Medievalist. She was always talking about how all our troubles came from the City and how things were better before the Cities started.
“I used to ask her how she was so sure that was so, especially after you and I met, Lije (remember the talks we used to have), and then she would quote from those small book-reels that are always floating around. You know, like Shame of the Cities that the fellow wrote. I don’t remember his name.”
Baley said, absently, “Ogrinsky.”
“Yes, only most of them were lots worse. Then, when I married you, she was really sarcastic. She said, ‘I suppose you’re going to be a real City woman now that you’ve married a policeman.’ After that, she didn’t talk to me much and then I quit the job and that was that. Lots of things she used to say were just to shock me, I think, or to make herself look mysterious and glamorous. She was an old maid, you know; never got married till the day she died. Lots of those Medievalists don’t fit in, one way or another. Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.”
Baley remembered, and his words now sounded flip and superficial in his own ears. He said, gently, “Keep to the point, Jessie.”
She went on, “Anyway, Lizzy was always talking about how there’d come a day and people had to get together. She said it was all the fault of the Spacers because they wanted to keep Earth weak and decadent. That was one of her favorite words, ‘decadent.’ She’d look at the menus I’d prepare for the next week and sniff and say, ‘Decadent, decadent.’ Jane Myers used to imitate her in the cook room and we’d die laughing. She said, Elizabeth did, that someday we were going to break up the Cities and go back to the soil and have an accounting with the Spacers who were trying to tie us forever to the Cities by forcing robots on us. Only she never called them robots. She used to say ‘soulless monster-machines,’ if you’ll excuse the expression, Daneel.”
The robot said, “I am not aware of the significance of the adjective you used, Jessie, but in any case, the expression is excused. Please go on.”
Baley stirred restlessly. It was that way with Jessie. No emergency, no crisis could make her tell a story in any way but her own circuitous one.
She said, “Elizabeth always tried to talk as though there were lots of people in it with her. She would say, ‘At the last meeting,’ and then stop and look at me sort of half proud and half scared as though she wanted me to ask about it so she could look important, and yet scared I might get her in trouble. Of course, I never asked her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
“Anyway, after I married you, Lije, it was all over, until. . .”
She stopped.
“Go on, Jessie,” said Baley.
“You remember, Lije, that argument we had? About Jezebel, I mean?”
“What about it?” It took a second or two for Baley to remember that it was Jessie’s own name, and not a reference to another woman.
He turned to R. Daneel in an automatically defensive explanation. “Jessie’s full name is Jezebel. She is not fond of it and doesn’t use it.”
R. Daneel nodded gravely and Baley thought: Jehoshaphat, why waste worry on him?
“It bothered me a lot, Lije,” Jessie said. “It really did. I guess it was silly, but I kept thinking and thinking about what you said. I mean about your saying that Jezebel was only a conservative who fought for the ways of her ancestors against the strange ways the newcomers had brought. After all, I was Jezebel and I always. . .”
She groped for a word and Baley supplied it. “Identified yourself?”
“Yes.” But she shook her head almost immediately and looked away. “Not really, of course. Not literally. The way I thought she was, you know. I wasn’t like that.”
“I know that, Jessie. Don’t be foolish.”
“But still I thought of her a lot and, somehow, I got to thinking, it’s just the same now as it was then. I mean, we Earth people had our old ways and here were the Spacers coming in with a lot of new ways and trying to encourage the new ways we had stumbled into ourselves and maybe the Medievalists were right. Maybe we should go back to our old, good ways. So I went back and found Elizabeth.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“She said she didn’t know what I was talking about and besides I was a cop’s wife. I said that had nothing to do with it and finally she said, well, she’d speak to somebody, and then about a month later she came to me and said it was all right and I joined and I’ve been at meetings ever since.”
Baley looked at her sadly. “And you never told me?”
Jessie’s voice trembled. “I’m sorry, Lije,”
“Well, that won’t help. Being sorry, I mean. I want to know about the meetings. In the first place, where were they held?”
A sense of detachment was creeping over him, a numbing of emotions. What he had tried not to believe was so, was openly so, was unmistakably so. In a sense, it was a relief to have the uncertainty over.
She said, “Down here.”
“Down here? You mean on this spot? What do you mean?”
“Here in the motorway. That’s why I didn’t want to come down here. It was a wonderful place to meet, though. We’d get together--”
“How many?”
“I’m not sure. About sixty or seventy. It was just a sort of local branch. There’d be folding chairs and some refreshments and someone would make a speech, mostly about how wonderful life was in the old days and how someday we’d do away with the monsters, the robots,
that is, and the Spacers, too. The speeches were sort of dull really, because they were all the same. We just endured them. Mostly, it was the fun of getting together and feeling important. We would pledge ourselves to oaths and there’d be secret ways we could greet each other on the outside.”
“Weren’t you ever interrupted? No squad cars or fire engines passed?”
“No. Never.”
R. Daneel interrupted, “Is that unusual, Elijah?”
“Maybe not,” Baley answered thoughtfully. “There are some side-passages that are practically never used. It’s quite a trick, knowing which they are, though. Is that all you did at the meetings, Jessie? Make speeches and play at conspiracy?”
“It’s about all. And sing songs, sometimes. And of course, refreshments. Not much. Sandwiches, usually, and juice.”
“In that case,” he said, almost brutally, “what’s bothering you now?”
Jessie winced. “You’re angry.”
“Please,” said Baley, with iron patience, “answer my question. If it were all as harmless as that, why have you been in such a panic for the last day and a half?”
“I thought they would hurt you, Lije. For heaven’s sake, why do you act as though you don’t understand? I’ve explained it to you.”
“No, you haven’t. Not yet. You’ve told me about a harmless little secret kaffee-klatsch you belonged to. Did they ever hold open demonstrations? Did they ever destroy robots? Start riots? Kill people?”
“Never! Lije, I wouldn’t do any of those things. I wouldn’t stay a member if they tried it.”
“Well, then, why do you say you’ve done a terrible thing? Why do you expect to be sent to jail?”
“Well. . . Well, they used to talk about someday when they’d put pressure on the government. We were supposed to get organized and then afterward there would be huge strikes and work stoppages. We could force the government to ban all robots and make the Spacers go back where they came from. I thought it was just talk and then, this thing started; about you and Daneel, I mean. Then they said, ‘Now we’ll see action,’ and ‘We’re going to make an example of them and put a stop to the robot invasion right now.’ Right there in Personal they said it, not knowing it was you they were talking about. But I knew. Right away.”
Her voice broke.
Baley softened. “Come on, Jessie. It was all nothing. It was just talk. You can see for yourself that nothing has happened.”
“I was so--so suh--scared. And I thought: I’m part of it. If there were going to be killing and destruction, you might be killed and Bentley and somehow it would be all muh--my fault for taking part in it, and I ought to be sent to jail.”
Baley let her sob herself out. He put his arm about her shoulder and stared tight-lipped at R. Daneel, who gazed calmly back.
He said, “Now, I want you to think, Jessie. Who was the head of your group?”
She was quieter now, patting the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. “A man called Joseph Klemin was the leader, but he wasn’t really anybody. He wasn’t more than five feet four inches tall and I think he was terribly henpecked at home. I don’t think there’s any harm in him. You aren’t going to arrest him, are you, Lije? On my say-so?” She looked guiltily troubled.
“I’m not arresting anyone just yet. How did Klemin get his instructions?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did any strangers come to meeting? You know what I mean: big shots from Central Headquarters?”
“Sometimes people would come to make speeches. That wasn’t very often, maybe twice a year or so.”
“Can you name them?”
“No. They were always just introduced as ‘one of us’ or ‘a friend from Jackson Heights’ or wherever.”
“I see. Daneel!”
“Yes, Elijah,” said R. Daneel.
“Describe the men you think you’ve tabbed. We’ll see if Jessie can recognize them.”
R. Daneel went through the list with clinical exactness. Jessie listened with an expression of dismay as the categories of physical measurements lengthened and shook her head with increasing firmness.
“It’s no use. It’s no use,” she cried. “How can I remember? I can’t remember how any of them looked. I can’t--”
She stopped, and seemed to consider. Then she said, “Did you say one of them was a yeast farmer?”
“Francis Clousarr,” said R. Daneel, “is an employee at New York Yeast.”
“Well, you know, once a man was making a speech and I happened to be sitting in the first row and I kept getting a whiff, just a whiff, really, of raw yeast smell. You know what I mean. The only reason that I remember is that I had an upset stomach that day and the smell kept making me sick. I had to stand up and move to the back and of course I couldn’t explain what was wrong. It was so embarrassing. Maybe that’s the man you’re speaking of. After all, when you work with yeast all the time, the odor gets to stick to your clothes.” She wrinkled her nose.
“You don’t remember what he looked like?” said Baley.
“No,” she replied, with decision.
“All right, then. Look, Jessie, I’m going to take you to your mother’s. Bentley will stay with you, and none of you will leave the Section. Ben can stay away from school and I’ll arrange to have meals sent in and the corridors around the apartment watched by the police.”
“What about you?” quavered Jessie.
“I’ll be in no danger.”
“But how long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just a day on two.” The words sounded hollow even to himself.
They were back in the motorway, Baley and R. Daneel, alone now. Baley’s expression was dark with thought.
“It would seem to me,” he said, “that we are faced with an organization built up on two levels. First, a ground level with no specific program, designed only to supply mass support for an eventual coup. Secondly, a much smaller elite dedicated to a well-planned program of action. It is this elite we must find. The comic-opera groups that Jessie spoke of can be ignored.”
“All this,” said R. Daneel, “follows, perhaps, if we can take Jessie’s story at face value.”
“I think,” Baley said stiffly, “that Jessie’s story can be accepted as completely true.”
“So it would seem,” said R. Daneel. “There is nothing about her cerebra-impulses that would indicate a pathological addiction to lying.”
Baley turned an offended look upon the robot. “I should say not. And there will be no necessity to mention her name in our reports. Do you understand that?”
“If you wish it so, partner Elijah,” said R. Daneel calmly, “but our report will then be neither complete nor accurate.”
Baley said, “Well, maybe so, but no real harm will be done. She has come to us with whatever information she had and to mention hen name will only put her in the police records. I do not want that to happen.”
“In that case, certainly not, provided we are certain that nothing more remains to be found out.”
“Nothing remains as far as she’s concerned. My guarantee.”
“Could you then explain why the word, Jezebel, the mere sound of a name, should lead her to abandon previous convictions and assume a new set? The motivation seems obscure.”
They were traveling slowly through the curving, empty tunnel.
Baley said, “It is hard to explain. Jezebel is a rare name. It belonged once to a woman of very bad reputation. My wife treasured that fact. It gave her a vicarious feeling of wickedness and compensated for a life that was uniformly proper.”
“Why should a law-abiding woman wish to feel wicked?”
Baley almost smiled. “Women are women, Daneel. Anyway, I did a very foolish thing. In a moment of irritation, I insisted that the historic Jezebel was not particularly wicked and was, if anything, a good wife. I’ve regretted that ever since.
“It turned out,” he went on, “that I had made Jessie bitterly unhappy. I had spoiled something for her that couldn’t be replaced. I suppose what followed was her way of revenge. I imagine she wished to punish me by engaging in activity of which she knew I wouldn’t approve. I don’t say the wish was a conscious one.”
“Can a wish be anything but conscious? Is that not a contradiction in terms?”
Baley stared at R. Daneel and despaired at attempting to explain the unconscious mind. He said, instead, “Besides that, the Bible has a great influence on human thought and emotion.”
“What is the Bible?”
For a moment Baley was surprised, and then was surprised at himself for having felt surprised. The Spacers, he knew, lived under a thoroughly mechanistic personal philosophy, and R. Daneel could know only what the Spacers knew; no more.
He said, curtly, “It is the sacred book of about half of Earth’s population.”
“I do not grasp the meaning here of the adjective.”
“I mean that it is highly regarded. Various portions of it, when properly interpreted, contain a code of behavior which many men consider best suited to the ultimate happiness of mankind.”
R. Daneel seemed to consider that. “Is this code incorporated into your laws?”
“I’m afraid not. The code doesn’t lend itself to legal enforcement. It must be obeyed spontaneously by each individual out of a longing to do so. It is in a sense higher than any law can be.”
“Higher than law? Is that not a contradiction in terms?”
Baley smiled wryly. “Shall I quote a portion of the Bible for you? Would you be curious to hear it?”
“Please do.”
Baley let the car slow to a halt and for a few moments sat with his eyes closed, remembering. He would have liked to use the sonorous Middle English of the Medieval Bible, but to R. Daneel, Middle English would be gibberish.
He began, speaking almost casually in the words of the Modern Revision, as though he were telling a story of contemporary life, instead of dredging a tale out of Man’s dimmest past:
“ ‘Jesus went to the mount of Olives, and at dawn returned to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and preached to them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought to him a woman caught in adultery, and when they had placed her before him, they said to him, “Master, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us to stone such offenders. What do you say?”
“ ‘They said this, hoping to trap him, that they might have grounds for accusations against him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he had not heard them. But when they continued asking him, he stood up and said to them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
“ ‘And again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. And those that heard this, being convicted by their own conscience, went away one by one, beginning with the oldest, down to the last: and Jesus was left alone, with the woman standing before him. When Jesus stood up and saw no one but the woman, he said to her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”
“ ‘She said, “No one, Lord.”
“ ‘And Jesus said to hen, “Nor do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” ’ “
R. Daneel listened attentively. He said, “What is adultery?”
“That doesn’t matter. It was a crime and at the time, the accepted punishment was stoning; that is, stones were thrown at the guilty one until she was killed.”
“And the woman was guilty?”
“She was.”
“Then why was she not stoned?”
“None of the accusers felt he could after Jesus’s statement. The story is meant to show that there is something even higher than the justice which you have been filled with. There is a human impulse known as mercy; a human act known as forgiveness.”
“I am not acquainted with those words, partner Elijah.”
“I know,” muttered Baley. “I know.”
He started the squad car with a jerk and let it tear forward savagely. He was pressed back against the cushions of the seat.
“Where are we going?” asked R. Daneel.
“To Yeast-town,” said Baley, “to get the truth out of Francis Clousarr, conspirator.”
“You have a method for doing this, Elijah?”
“Not I, exactly. But you have, Daneel. A simple one.”
They sped onward.