Asimov’s Future History Volume 4

by Isaac Asimov

  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 s
maller until it was only a dot.

  He could only watch her, in the dream, knowing that it was he, himself, who had pushed her.

  12: Words from an Expert

  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.