by Isaac Asimov
The Commissioner stopped short, standing before Baley, and said, “That’s no good, Lije. No one just passes through a power plant to get somewhere else.”
Baley shrugged. There was no point in going through the story of the pursuing Medievalists, of the dash along the strips. Not now.
He said, “If you’re trying to hint that I had an opportunity to get the alpha-sprayer that knocked out R. Sammy, I’ll remind you that Daneel was with me and will testify that I went right through the plant without stopping and that I had no alpha-sprayer on me when I left.”
Slowly, the Commissioner sat down. He did not look in R. Daneel’s direction or offer to speak to him. He put his pudgy white hands on the desk before him and regarded them with a look of acute misery on his face.
He said, “Lije, I don’t know what to say or what to think. And it’s no use having your—your partner as alibi. He can’t give evidence.”
“I still deny that I took an alpha-sprayer.”
The Commissioner’s fingers intertwined and writhed. He said, “Lije, why did Jessie come to see you here this afternoon?”
“You asked me that before, Commissioner. Same answer. Family matters.”
“I’ve got information from Francis Clousarr, Lije.”
“What kind of information?”
“He claims that a Jezebel Baley is a member of a Medievalist society dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force.”
“Are you sure he has the right person? There are many Baleys.”
“There aren’t many Jezebel Baleys.”
“He used her name, did he?”
“He said Jezebel. I heard him, Lije. I’m not giving you a second-hand report.”
“All right. Jessie was a member of a harmless lunatic-fringe organization. She never did anything but attend meetings and feel devilish about it.”
“It won’t look that way to a board of review, Lije.”
“You mean I’m going to be suspended and held on suspicion of destroying government property in the form of R. Sammy?”
“I hope not, Lije, but it looks awfully bad. Everyone knows you didn’t like R. Sammy. Your wife was seen talking to him this afternoon. She was in tears and some of her words were heard. They were harmless in themselves, but two and two can be added up, Lije. You might feel it was dangerous to leave him in a position to talk. And you had an opportunity to obtain the weapon.”
Baley interrupted. “If I were wiping out all evidences against Jessie, would I bring in Francis Clousarr? He seems to know a lot more about her than R. Sammy could have. Another thing. I passed through the power plant eighteen hours before R. Sammy spoke to Jessie. Did I know that long in advance that I would have to destroy him and pick up an alpha-sprayer out of clairvoyance?”
The Commissioner said, “Those are good points. I’ll do my best. I’m sorry about this, Lije.”
“Yes? Do you really believe I didn’t do it, Commissioner?”
Enderby said slowly, “I don’t know what to think, Lije. I’ll be frank with you.”
“Then I’ll tell you what to think. Commissioner, this is all a careful and elaborate frame.”
The Commissioner stiffened. “Now, wait, Lije. Don’t strike out blindly. You won’t get any sympathy with that line of defense. It’s been used by too many bad eggs.”
“I’m not after sympathy. I’m just telling the truth. I’m being taken out of circulation to prevent me from learning the facts about the Sarton murder. Unfortunately for my framing pal, it’s too late for that.”
“What!”
Baley looked at his watch. It was 23:00.
He said, “I know who is framing me, and I know how Dr. Sarton was killed and by whom, and I have one hour to tell you about it, catch the man, and end the investigation.”
18.
END OF AN INVESTIGATION
Commissioner Enderby’s eyes narrowed and he glared at Baley. “What are you going to do? You tried something like this in Fastolfe’s dome yesterday morning. Not again. Please.”
Baley nodded. “I know. I was wrong the first time.”
He thought, fiercely: Also the second time. But not now, not this time, not …
The thought faded out, spluttering like a micropile under a positronic damper.
He said, “Judge for yourself, Commissioner. Grant that the evidence against me has been planted. Go that far with me and see where it takes you. Ask yourself who could have planted that evidence. Obviously only someone who’d known I was in the Williamsburg plant yesterday evening.”
“All right. Who would that be?”
Baley said, “I was followed out of the kitchen by a Medievalist group. I lost them, or I thought I did, but obviously at least one of them saw me pass through the plant. My only purpose in doing so, you understand, was to help me lose them.”
The Commissioner considered. “Clousarr? Was he with them?”
Baley nodded.
Enderby said, “All right, we’ll question him. If he’s got anything in him, we’ll have it out of him. What more can I do, Lije?”
“Wait, now. Don’t quit on me. Do you see my point?”
“Well, let’s see if I do.” The Commissioner clasped his hands. “Clousarr saw you go into the Williamsburg power plant, or else someone in his group did and passed the information along to him. He decided to utilize that fact to get you into trouble and off the investigation. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s close to it.”
“Good.” The Commissioner seemed to warm to the task. “He knew your wife was a member of his organization, naturally, and so he knew you wouldn’t face a really close probe into your private life. He thought you would resign rather than fight circumstantial evidence. By the way, Lije, what about a resignation? I mean, if things looked really bad. We could keep things quiet—”
“Not in a million years, Commissioner.”
Enderby shrugged. “Well, where was I? Oh, yes, so he got an alpha-sprayer, presumably through a confederate in the plant, and had another confederate arrange the destruction of R. Sammy.” His fingers drummed lightly on the desk. “No good, Lije.”
“Why not?”
“Too farfetched. Too many confederates. And he has a cast-iron alibi for the night and morning of the Spacetown murder, by the way. We checked that almost right away, though I was the only one who knew the reason for checking that particular time.”
Baley said, “I never said it was Clousarr, Commissioner. You did. It could be anyone in the Medievalist organization. Clousarr is just the owner of a face that Daneel happened to recognize. I don’t even think he’s particularly important in the organization. Though there is one queer thing about him.”
“What?” asked Enderby, suspiciously.
“He did know Jessie was a member. Does he know every member in the organization, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know. He knew about Jessie, anyway. Maybe she was important because she was the wife of a policeman. Maybe he remembered her for that reason.”
“You say he came right out and said that Jezebel Baley was a member. Just like that? Jezebel Baley?”
Enderby nodded. “I keep telling you I heard him.”
“That’s the funny thing, Commissioner. Jessie hasn’t used her full first name since before Bentley was born. Not once. I know that for certain. She joined the Medievalists after she dropped her full name. I know that for sure, too. How would Clousarr come to know her as Jezebel, then?”
The Commissioner flushed and said, hastily, “Oh, well, if it comes to that, he probably said Jessie. I just filled it in automatically and gave her full name. In fact, I’m sure of that. He said Jessie.”
“Until now you were quite sure he said Jezebel. I asked several times.”
The Commissioner’s voice rose. “You’re not saying I’m a liar, are you?”
“I’m just wondering if Clousarr, perhaps, said nothing at all. I’m wondering if you made that up. You’ve known Jessie for twenty years, an
d you knew her name was Jezebel.”
“You’re off your head, man.”
“Am I? Where were you after lunch today? You were out of your office for two hours at least.”
“Are you questioning me?”
“I’ll answer for you, too. You were in the Williamsburg power plant.”
The Commissioner rose from his seat. His forehead glistened and there were dry, white flecks at the corners of his lips. “What the hell are you trying to say?”
“Weren’t you?”
“Baley, you’re suspended. Hand me your credentials.”
“Not yet. Hear me out.”
“I don’t intend to. You’re guilty. You’re guilty as the devil, and what gets me is your cheap attempt to make me, me, look as though I were conspiring against you.” He lost his voice momentarily in a squeak of indignation. He managed to gasp out, “In fact, you’re under arrest.”
“No,” said Baley, tightly. “Not yet. Commissioner, I’ve got a blaster on you. It’s pointed straight and it’s cocked. Don’t fool with me, please, because I’m desperate and I will have my say. Afterward, you can do what you please.”
With widening eyes, Julius Enderby stared at the wicked muzzle in Baley’s hands.
He stammered, “Twenty years for this, Baley, in the deepest prison level in the City.”
R. Daneel moved suddenly. His hand clamped down on Baley’s wrist. He said, quietly, “I cannot permit this, partner Elijah. You must do no harm to the Commissioner.”
For the first time since R. Daneel had entered the City, the Commissioner spoke directly to him. “Hold him, you. First Law!”
Baley said quickly, “I have no intention of hurting him, Daneel, if you will keep him from arresting me. You said you would help me clear this up. I have forty-five minutes.”
R. Daneel, without releasing Baley’s wrist, said, “Commissioner, I believe Elijah should be allowed to speak. I am in communication with Dr. Fastolfe at this moment—”
“How? How?” demanded the Commissioner, wildly.
“I possess a self-contained subetheric unit,” said R. Daneel. The Commissioner stared.
“I am in communication with Dr. Fastolfe,” the robot went on inexorably, “and it would make a bad impression, Commissioner, if you were to refuse to listen to Elijah. Damaging inferences might be drawn.”
The Commissioner fell back in his chair, quite speechless.
Baley said, “I say you were in the Williamsburg power plant today, Commissioner, and you got the alpha-sprayer and gave it to R. Sammy. You deliberately chose the Williamsburg power plant in order to incriminate me. You even seized Dr. Gerrigel’s reappearance to invite him down to the Department and give him a deliberately maladjusted guide rod to lead him to the photographic supply room and allow him to find R. Sammy’s remains. You counted on him to make a correct diagnosis.”
Baley put away his blaster. “If you want to have me arrested now, go ahead, but Spacetown won’t take that for an answer.”
“Motive,” spluttered Enderby breathlessly. His glasses were fogged and he removed them, looking once again curiously vague and helpless in their absence. “What motive could I have for this?”
“You got me into trouble, didn’t you? It will put a spoke in the Sarton investigation, won’t it? And all that aside, R. Sammy knew too much.”
“About what, in Heaven’s name?”
“About the way in which a Spacer was murdered five and a half days ago. You see, Commissioner, you murdered Dr. Sarton of Spacetown.”
It was R. Daneel who spoke. Enderby could only clutch feverishly at his hair and shake his head.
The robot said, “Partner Elijah, I am afraid that this theory is quite untenable. As you know, it is impossible for Commissioner Enderby to have murdered Dr. Sarton.”
“Listen, then. Listen to me. Enderby begged me to take the case, not any of the men who overranked me. He did that for several reasons. In the first place, we were college friends and he thought he could count on its never occurring to me that an old buddy and respected superior could be a criminal. He counted on my well-known loyalty, you see. Secondly, he knew Jessie was a member of an underground organization and expected to be able to maneuver me out of the investigation or blackmail me into silence if I got too close to the truth. And he wasn’t really worried about that. At the very beginning he did his best to arouse my distrust of you, Daneel, and make certain that the two of us worked at cross-purposes. He knew about my father’s declassification. He could guess how I would react. You see, it is an advantage for the murderer to be in charge of the murder investigation.”
The Commissioner found his voice. He said, weakly, “How could I know about Jessie?” He turned to the robot. “You! If you’re transmitting this to Spacetown, tell them it’s a lie! It’s all a lie!”
Baley broke in, raising his voice for a moment and then lowering it into a queer sort of tense calm. “Certainly you would know about Jessie. You’re a Medievalist, and part of the organization. Your old-fashioned spectacles! Your windows! It’s obvious your temperament is turned that way. But there’s better evidence than that.
“How did Jessie find out Daneel was a robot? It puzzled me at the time. Of course we know now that she found out through her Medievalist organization, but that just shoves the problem one step backward. How did they know? You, Commissioner, dismissed it with a theory that Daneel was recognized as a robot during the incident at the shoe counter. I didn’t quite believe that. I couldn’t. I took him for human when I first saw him, and there’s nothing wrong with my eyes.
“Yesterday, I asked Dr. Gerrigel to come in from Washington. Later I decided I needed him for several reasons, but, at the time I first called him, my only purpose was to see if he would recognize Daneel for what he was with no prompting on my part.
“Commissioner, he didn’t! I introduced him to Daneel, he shook hands with him, we all talked together, and it was only after the subject got around to humanoid robots that he suddenly caught on. Now, that was Dr. Gerrigel, Earth’s greatest expert on robots. Do you mean to say a few Medievalist rioters could do better than he under conditions of confusion and tension, and be so certain about it that they would throw their entire organization into activity based on the feeling that Daneel was a robot?
“It’s obvious now that the Medievalists must have known Daneel to be a robot to begin with. The incident at the shoe counter was deliberately designed to show Daneel and, through him, Spacetown, the extent of anti-robot feeling in the City. It was meant to confuse the issue, to turn suspicion away from individuals and toward the population as a whole.
“Now, if they knew the truth about Daneel to begin with, who told them? I didn’t. I once thought it was Daneel himself, but that’s out. The only other Earthman who knew about it was you, Commissioner.”
Enderby said, with surprising energy, “There could be spies in the Department, too. The Medievalists could have us riddled with them. Your wife was one, and if you don’t find it impossible that I should be one, why not others in the Department?”
The corners of Baley’s lips pulled back a savage trifle. “Let’s not bring up mysterious spies until we see where the straightforward solution leads us. I say you’re the obvious informer and the real one.
“It’s interesting now that I look back on it, Commissioner, to see how your spirits rose and fell accordingly as I seemed to be far from a solution or possibly close to it. You were nervous to begin with. When I wanted to visit Spacetown yesterday morning and wouldn’t tell you the reason, you were practically in a state of collapse. Did you think I had you pinned, Commissioner? That it was a trap to get you into their hands? You hated them, you told me. You were virtually in tears. For a time, I thought that to be caused by the memory of humiliations in Spacetown when you yourself were a suspect, but then Daneel told me that your sensibilities had been carefully regarded. You had never known you were a suspect. Your panic was due to fear, not humiliation.
“Then w
hen I came out with my completely wrong solution, while you listened over trimensional circuit, and you saw how far, how immensely far, from the truth I was, you were confident again. You even argued with me, defended the Spacers. After that, you were quite master of yourself for a while, quite confident. It surprised me at the time that you so easily forgave my false accusations against the Spacers when earlier you had so lectured me on their sensitivity. You enjoyed my mistake.
“Then I put in my call for Dr. Gerrigel and you wanted to know why and I wouldn’t tell you. That plunged you into the abyss again because you feared—”
R. Daneel suddenly raised his hand. “Partner Elijah!”
Baley looked at his watch. 23:42! He said, “What is it?”
R. Daneel said, “He might have been disturbed at thinking you would find out his Medievalist connections, if we grant their existence. There is nothing, though, to connect him with the murder. He cannot have had anything to do with that.”
Baley said, “You’re quite wrong, Daneel. He didn’t know what I wanted Dr. Gerrigel for, but it was quite safe to assume that it was in connection with information about robots. This frightened the Commissioner, because a robot had an intimate connection with this greater crime. Isn’t that so, Commissioner?”
Enderby shook his head. “When this is over—” he began, but choked into inarticulacy.
“How was the murder committed?” demanded Baley with a suppressed fury. “C/Fe, damn it! C/Fe! I use your own term, Daneel. You’re so full of the benefits of a C/Fe culture, yet you don’t see where an Earthman might have used it for at least a temporary advantage. Let me sketch it in for you.
“There is no difficulty in the notion of a robot crossing open country. Even at night. Even alone. The Commissioner put a blaster into R. Sammy’s hand, told him where to go and when. He himself entered Spacetown through the Personal and was relieved of his own blaster. He received the other from R. Sammy’s hands, killed Dr. Sarton, returned the blaster to R. Sammy, who took it back across the fields to New York City. And today he destroyed R. Sammy, whose knowledge had become dangerous.