Asimov's Future History Volume 3

by Isaac Asimov

  “Good.” The robot’s hand closed on his with a smoothly increasing pressure that reached a comfortably friendly peak, then declined. “Yet I seem to detect disturbance. May I ask that you be frank with me? It is best to have as many relevant facts as possible in a relationship such as ours. And it is customary on my world for partners to call one another by the familiar name. I trust that that is not counter to your own customs.”

  “It’s just, you see, that you don’t look like a robot,” said Baley, desperately.

  “And that disturbs you?”

  “It shouldn’t, I suppose, Da – Daneel. Are they all like you on your world?”

  “There are individual differences, Elijah, as with men.”

  “Our own robots... Well, you can tell they’re robots, you understand. You look like a Spacer.”

  “Oh, I see. You expected a rather crude model and were surprised. Yet it is only logical that our people use a robot of pronounced humanoid characteristics in this case if we expected to avoid unpleasantness. Is that not so?”

  It was certainly so. An obvious robot roaming the City would be in quick trouble.

  Baley said, “Yes.”

  “Then let us leave now, Elijah.”

  They made their way back to the expressway. R. Daneel caught the purpose of the accelerating strips and maneuvered along them with a quick proficiency. Baley, who had begun by moderating his speed, ended by hastening it in annoyance.

  The robot kept pace. He showed no awareness of any difficulty. Baley wondered if R. Daneel were not deliberately moving slower than he might. He reached the endless cars of expressway and scrambled aboard with what amounted to outright recklessness. The robot followed easily.

  Baley was red. He swallowed twice and said, “I’ll stay down here with you.”

  “Down here?” The robot, apparently oblivious to both the noise and the rhythmic swaying of the platform said, “Is my information wrong? I was told that a rating of C-5 entitled one to a seat on the upper level under certain conditions.”

  “You’re right. I can go up there, but you can’t.”

  “Why can I not go up with you?”

  “It takes a C-5, Daneel.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “You’re not a C-5.” Talking was difficult. The hiss of frictioning air was louder on the less shielded lower level and Baley was understandably anxious to keep his voice low.

  R. Daneel said, “Why should I not be a C-5? I am your partner and, consequently, of equal rank. I was given this.”

  From an inner shirt pocket he produced a rectangular credential card, quite genuine. The name given was Daneel Olivaw, without the all-important initial. The rating was C-5.

  “Come on up,” said Baley, woodenly.

  Baley looked straight ahead, once seated, angry with himself, very conscious of the robot sitting next to him. He had been caught twice. First he had not recognized R. Daneel as a robot; secondly, he had not guessed the logic that demanded R. Daneel be given C-5 rating.

  The trouble was, of course, that he was not the plain-clothes man of popular myth. He was not incapable of surprise, imperturbable of appearance, infinite of adaptability, and lightning of mental grasp. He had never supposed he was, but he had never regretted the lack before.

  What made him regret it was that, to all appearances, R. Daneel Olivaw was that very myth, embodied.

  He had to be. He was a robot.

  Baley began to find excuses for himself. He was accustomed to the robots like R. Sammy at the office. He had expected a creature with a skin of a hard and glossy plastic, nearly dead white in color. He had expected an expression fixed at an unreal level of inane good humor. He had expected jerky, faintly uncertain motions.

  R. Daneel was none of it.

  Baley risked a quick side glance at the robot. R. Daneel turned simultaneously to meet his eye and nod gravely. His lips had moved naturally when he had spoken and did not simply remain parted as those of Earth robots did. There had been glimpses of an articulating tongue.

  Baley thought: ‘Why does he have to sit there so calmly? This must be something completely new to him. Noise, lights, crowds!

  Baley got up, brushed past R. Daneel, and said, “Follow me!”

  Off the expressway, down the decelerating strips.

  Baley thought: Good Lord, what do I tell Jessie, anyway?

  The coming of the robot had rattled that thought out of his head, but it was coming back with sickening urgency now that they were heading down the localway that led into the very jaws of the Lower Bronx Section.

  He said, “This is all one building, you know, Daneel; everything you see, the whole City. Twenty million people live in it. The expressways go continuously, night and day, at sixty miles an hour. There are two hundred and fifty miles of it altogether and hundreds of miles of localways.”

  Any minute now, Baley thought, I’ll be figuring out how many tons of yeast product New York eats per day and how many cubic feet of water we drink and how many megawatts of power the atomic piles deliver per hour.

  Daneel said, “I was informed of this and other similar data in my briefing.”

  Baley thought: Well, that covers the food, drink, and power situation, too, I suppose. Why try to impress a robot?

  They were at East 182nd Street and in not more than two hundred yards they would be at the elevator banks that fed those steel and concrete layers of apartments that included his own.

  He was on the point of saying, “This way,” when he was stopped by a knot of people gathering outside the brilliantly lighted force door of one of the many retail departments that lined the ground levels solidly in this Section.

  He asked of the nearest person in an automatic tone of authority, “What’s going on?”

  The man he addressed, who was standing on tiptoe, said, “Damned if I know. I just got here.”

  Someone else said, excitedly, “They got those lousy R’s in there. I think maybe they’ll throw them out here. Boy, I’d like to take them apart.”

  Baley looked nervously at Daneel, but, if the latter caught the significance of the words or even heard them, he did not show it by any outward sign.

  Baley plunged into the crowd. “Let me through. Let me through. Police!”

  They made way. Baley caught words behind him.

  “... take them apart. Nut by nut. Split them down the seams slowlike...” And someone else laughed.

  Baley turned a little cold. The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control. Occasionally, built-up inhibitions exploded.

  He remembered the Barrier Riots.

  Reasons for anti-robot rioting certainly existed. Men who found themselves faced with the prospect of the desperate minimum involved in declassification, after half a lifetime of effort, could not decide cold-bloodedly that individual robots were not to blame. Individual robots could at least be struck at.

  One could not strike at something called “governmental policy” or at a slogan like “Higher production with robot labor.”

  The government called it growing pains. It shook its collective head sorrowfully and assured everyone that after a necessary period of adjustment, a new and better life would exist for all.

  But the Medievalist movement expanded along with the declassification process. Men grew desperate and the border between bitter frustration and wild destruction is sometimes easily crossed.

  At this moment, minutes could be separating the pent-up hostility of the crowd from a flashing orgy of blood and smash.

  Baley writhed his way desperately to the force door.

  3: Incident at a Shoe Counter

  THE INTERIOR OF the store was emptier than the street outside. The manager, with commendable foresight, had thrown the force door early in the game, preventing potential troublemakers from entering. It also kept the principles in the argument from leaving, but that was minor.


  Baley got through the force door by using his officer’s neutralizer. Unexpectedly, he found R. Daneel still behind him. The robot was pocketing a neutralizer of his own, a slim one, smaller and neater than the standard police model.

  The manager ran to them instantly, talking loudly. “Officers, my clerks have been assigned me by the City. I am perfectly within my rights.”

  There were three robots standing rodlike at the rear of the department. Six humans were standing near the force door. They were all women.

  “All right, now,” said Baley, crisply. “What’s going on? ‘What’s all the fuss about?”

  One of the women said, shrilly, “I came in for shoes. Why can’t I have a decent clerk? Ain’t I respectable?” Her clothing, especially her hat, were just sufficiently extreme to make it more than a rhetorical question. The angry flush that covered her face masked imperfectly her overdone makeup.

  The manager said, “I’ll wait on her myself if I have to, but I can’t wait on all of them, Officer. There’s nothing wrong with my men. They’re registered clerks. I have their spec charts and guarantee slips –”

  “Spec charts,” screamed the woman. She laughed shrilly, turning to the rest. “Listen to him. He calls them men! What’s the matter with you anyway? They ain’t men. They’re ro-bots!” She stretched out the syllables. “And I tell you what they do, in case you don’t know. They steal jobs from men. That’s why the government always protects them. They work for nothin’ and, on account o’ that, families gotta live out in the barracks and eat raw yeast mush. Decent hard-working families. We’d smash up all the ro-bots, if I was boss. I tell you that!”

  The others talked confusedly and there was always the growing rumble from the crowd just beyond the force door.

  Baley was conscious, brutally conscious, of R. Daneel Olivaw standing at his elbow. He looked at the clerks. They were Earthmade, and even on that scale, relatively inexpensive models. They were just robots made to know a few simple things. They would know all the style numbers, their prices, the sizes available in each. They could keep track of stock fluctuations, probably better than humans could, since they would have no outside interests. They could compute the proper orders for the next week. They could measure the customer’s foot.

  In themselves, harmless. As a group, incredibly dangerous.

  Baley could sympathize with the woman more deeply than he would have believed possible the day before. No, two hours before. He could feel R. Daneel’s nearness and he wondered if R. Daneel could not replace an ordinary plain-clothes man C-5. He could see the barracks, as he thought that. He could taste the yeast mush. He could remember his father.

  His father had been a nuclear physicist, with a rating that had put him in the top percentile of the City. There had been an accident at the power plant and his father had borne the blame. He had been declassified. Baley did not know the details; it had happened when he was a year old.

  But he remembered the barracks of his childhood; the grinding communal existence just this side of the edge of bearability. He remembered his mother not at all; she had not survived long. His father he recalled well, a sodden man, morose and lost, speaking sometimes of the past in hoarse, broken sentences.

  His father died, still declassified, when Lije was eight. Young Baley and his two older sisters moved into the Section orphanage. Children’s Level, they called it. His mother’s brother, Uncle Boris, was himself too poor to prevent that.

  So it continued hard. And it was hard going through school, with no father-derived status privileges to smooth the way.

  And now he had to stand in the middle of a growing riot and beat down men and women who, after all, only feared declassification for themselves and those they loved, as he himself did.

  Tonelessly, he said to the woman who had already spoken, “Let’s not have any trouble, lady. The clerks aren’t doing you any harm.”

  “Sure they ain’t done me no harm,” sopranoed the woman. “They ain’t gonna, either. Think I’ll let their cold, greasy fingers touch me? I came in here expecting to get treated like a human being. I’m a citizen. I got a right to have human beings wait on me. And listen, I got two kids waiting for supper. They can’t go to the Section kitchen without me, like they was orphans. I gotta get out of here.”

  “Well, now,” said Baley, feeling his temper slipping, “if you had let yourself be waited on, you’d have been out of here by now. You’re just making trouble for nothing. Come on now.”

  “Well!” The woman registered shock. “Maybe you think you can talk to me like I was dirt. Maybe it’s time the guv’min’ reelized robots ain’t the only things on Earth. I’m a hard-working woman and I’ve got rights.” She went on and on and on.

  Baley felt harassed and caught. The situation was out of hand. Even if the woman would consent to be waited on, the waiting crowd was ugly enough for anything.

  There must be a hundred crammed outside the display window now. In the few minutes since the plain-clothes men had entered the store, the crowd had doubled.

  “What is the usual procedure in such a case?” asked R. Daneel Olivaw, suddenly.

  Baley nearly jumped. He said, “This is an unusual case in the first place.”

  “What is the law?”

  “The R’s have been duly assigned here. They’re registered clerks. There’s nothing illegal about that.”

  They were speaking in whispers. Baley tried to look official and threatening. Olivaw’s expression, as always, meant nothing at all.

  “In that case,” said R. Daneel, “order the woman to let herself be waited on or to leave.”

  Baley lifted a corner of his lip briefly. “It’s a mob we have to deal with, not a woman. There’s nothing to do but call a riot squad.”

  “It should not be necessary for citizens to require more than one officer of the law to direct what should be done,” said Daneel.

  He turned his broad face to the store manager. “Open the force door, sir.”

  Baley’s arm shot forward to seize R. Daneel’s shoulder, swing him about. He arrested the motion. If, at this moment, two law men quarreled openly, it would mean the end of all chance for a peaceful solution.

  The manager protested, looked at Baley. Baley did not meet his eye.

  R. Daneel said, unmoved, “I order you with the authority of the law.”

  The manager bleated, “I’ll hold the City responsible for any damage to the goods or fixtures. I serve notice that I’m doing this under orders.”

  The barrier went down; men and women crowded in. There was a happy roar from them. They sensed victory.

  Baley had heard of similar riots. He had even witnessed one. He had seen robots being lifted by a dozen hands, their heavy unresisting bodies carried backward from straining arm to straining arm. Men yanked and twisted at the metal mimicry of men. They used hammers, force knives, needle guns. They finally reduced the miserable objects to shredded metal and wire. Expensive positronic brains, the most intricate creation of the human mind, were thrown from hand to hand like footballs and mashed to uselessness in a trifle of time.

  Then, with the genius of destruction so merrily let loose, the mobs turned on anything else that could be taken apart.

  The robot clerks could have no knowledge of any of this, but they squealed as the crowd flooded inward and lifted their arms before their faces as though in a primitive effort at hiding. The woman who had started the fuss, frightened at seeing it grow suddenly so far beyond what she had expected, gasped, “Here, now. Here, now.”

  Her hat was shoved down over her face and her voice became only a meaningless shrillness.

  The manager was shrieking, “Stop them, Officer. Stop them!”

  R. Daneel spoke. Without apparent effort, his voice was suddenly decibels higher than a human’s voice had a right to be. Of course, thought Baley for the tenth time, he’s not –

  R. Daneel said, “The next man who moves will be shot.”

  Someone well in the b
ack yelled, “Get him!”

  But for a moment, no one moved.

  R. Daneel stepped nimbly upon a chair and from that to the top of a Transtex display case. The colored fluorescence gleaming through the slits of polarized molecular film turned his cool, smooth face into something unearthly.

  Unearthly, thought Baley.

  The tableau held as R. Daneel waited, a quietly formidable person.

  R. Daneel said crisply, “You are saying, This man is holding a neuronic whip, or a tickler. If we all rush forward, we will bear him down and at most one or two of us will be hurt and even they will recover. Meanwhile, we will do just as we wish and to space with law and order.”

  His voice was neither harsh nor angry, but it carried authority. It had the tone of confident command. He went on, “You are mistaken. What I hold is not a neuronic whip, nor is it a tickler. It is a blaster and very deadly. I will use it and I will not aim over your heads. I will kill many of you before you seize me, perhaps most of you. I am serious. I look serious, do I not?”

  There was motion at the outskirts, but the crowd no longer grew. If newcomers still stopped out of curiosity, others were hurrying away. Those nearest R. Daneel were holding their breath, trying desperately not to sway forward in response to the mass pressure of the bodies behind them.

  The woman with the hat broke the spell. In a sudden whirlpool of sobbing, she yelled, “He’s gonna kill us. I ain’t done nothing. Oh, lemme outta here.”

  She turned, but faced an immovable wall of crammed men and women. She sank to her knees. The backward motion in the silent crowd grew more pronounced.

  R. Daneel jumped down from the display counter and said, “I will now walk to the door. I will shoot the man or woman who touches me.

  When I reach the door, I will shoot any man or woman who is not moving about his business. This woman here –”

  “No, no,” yelled the woman with the hat, “I tell ya I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t mean no harm. I don’t want no shoes. I just wanta go home.”