by Isaac Asimov
“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 over-ranked 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 antirobot 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 Eanthman 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 hips 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 humiliation 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 when I came out with my completely wrong solution, while you listened over trimensional circuit, and you saw how fan, 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 his greaten 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.
“That explains everything. The presence of the Commissioner, the absence of a weapon. And it makes it unnecessary to suppose any human New Yorker had crawled a mile under the open sky at night.”
But at the end of Baley’s recitation, R. Daneel said, “I am sorry, partner Elijah, though happy for the Commissioner, that your story explains nothing. I have told you that the cerebroanalytic properties of the Commissioner are such that it is impossible for him to have committed deliberate murder. I don’t know what English word would be applied to the psychological fact: cowardice, conscience, or compassion. I know the dictionary meanings of all these, but I cannot judge. At any rate, the Commissioner did not murder.”
“Thank you,” muttered Enderby. His voice gained strength and confidence. “I don’t know what your motives are, Baley, or why you should try to ruin me this way, but I’ll get to the bottom–”
“Wait,” said Baley. “I’m not through. I’ve got this.”
He slammed the aluminum cube on Enderby’s desk, and tried to feel the confidence he hoped he was radiating. For half an hour now, he had been hiding from himself one little fact: that he did not know what the picture showed. He was gambling, but it was all that was heft to do.
Enderby shrank away from the small object. “What is it?”
“It isn’t a bomb,” said Baley, sardonically. “Just an ordinary microprojector.”
“Well? What will that prove?”
“Suppose we see.” His fingernail probed at one of the slits in the cube, and a corner of the Commissioner’s office blanked out, then lit up in an alien scene in three dimensions.
It reached from floor to ceiling and extended out past the walls of the room. It was awash with a gray light of a sort the City’s utilities never provided.
Baley thought, with a pang of mingled distaste and perverse attraction: It must be the dawn they talk about.
The pictured scene was of Dr. Sarton’s dome. Dr. Sarton’s dead body, a horrible, broken remnant, filled its center.
Enderby’s eyes bulged as he stared.
Baley said, “I know the Commissioner isn’t a killer. I don’t need you to tell me that, Daneel. If I could have gotten around that one fact earlier, I would have had the solution earlier. Actually, I didn’t see a way out of it until an hour ago when I carelessly said to you that you had once been curious about Bentley’s contact lenses.–That was it, Commissioner. It occurred to me then that your nearsightedness and your glasses were the key. They don’t have nearsightedness on the Outer Worlds, I suppose, or they might have reached the true solution of the murder almost at once. Commissioner, when did you break your glasses?”
The Commissioner said, “What do you mean?”
Baley said, “When I first saw you about this case, you told me you had broken your glasses in Spacetown. I assumed that you broke them in your agitation on hearing the news of the murder, but you never said so, and I had no reason for making that assumption. Actually, if you were entering Spacetown with crime on your mind, you were already sufficiently agitated to drop and break your glasses before the murder. Isn’t that so, and didn’t that, in fact, happen?”
R. Daneel said, “I do not see the point, partner Elijah.”
Baley thought: I’m partner Elijah for ten minutes more. Fast! Talk fast! And think fast!
He was manipulating Sarton’s dome image as he spoke. Clumsily, he expanded it, his fingernails unsure in the tension that was overwhelming him. Slowly, in jerks, the corpse widened, broadened, heightened, came closer. Baley could almost smell the stench of its scorched flesh. Its head, shoulders, and one upper arm lolled crazily, connected to hips and legs by a blackened remnant of spine from which charred rib stumps jutted.
Baley cast a side glance at the Commissioner. Enderby had closed his eyes. He looked sick. Baley felt sick, too, but he had to look. Slowly he circled the trimensional image by means of the transmitter controls, rotating it, bringing the ground about the corpse to view in successive quadrants. His fingernail slipped and the imaged floor tilted suddenly and expanded till floor and corpse alike were a hazy mass, beyond the resolving power of the transmitter. He brought the expansion down, let the corpse slide away.
He was still talking. He had to. He couldn’t stop till he found what he was looking for. And if he didn’t, all his talk might be useless. Worse than useless. His heart was throbbing, and so was his head.
He said, “The Commissioner can’t commit deliberate murder. True! Deliberate. But any man can kill by accident. The Commissioner didn’t enter Spacetown to kill Dr. Sarton. He came in to kill you, Daneel, you! Is there anything in his cerebroanalysis that says he is incapable of wrecking a machine? That’s not murder, merely sabotage.
“He is a Medievalist, an earnest one. He worked with Dr. Sarton and knew the purpose for which you were designed, Daneel. He feared that purpose might be achieved, that Earthmen would eventually be weaned away from Earth. So he decided to destroy you, Daneel. You were the only one of your type manufactured as yet and he had good reason to think that by demonstrating the extent and determination of Medievalism on Earth, he would discourage the Spacers. He knew how strong popular opinion was on the Outer Worlds to end the Spacetown project altogether. Dr. Sarton must have discussed that with him. This, he thought, would be the last nudge in the proper direction.
“I don’t say even the thought of killing you, Daneel, was a pleasant one. He would have had R. Sammy do it, I imagine, if you didn’t look so human that a primitive robot such as Sammy could not have told the difference, or understood it. First Law would stop him. Or the Commissioner would have had another human do it if he, himself, were not the only one who had ready access to Spacetown at all times.
“Let me reconstruct what the Commissioner’s plan might have been. I’m guessing, I admit, but I think I’m close. He made the appointment with Dr. Sarton, but deliberately came early, at dawn, in fact. Dr. Sarton would be sleeping, I imagine, but you, Daneel, would be awake. I assume, by the way, you were living with Dr. Sarton, Daneel.”
The robot nodded. “You are quite right, partner Elijah.”
Baley said, “Then let me go on. You would come to the dome door, Daneel, receive a blaster charge in the chest or head, and be done with. The Commissioner would leave quickly, through the deserted streets of Spacetown’s dawn, and back to where R. Sammy waited. He would give him back the blaster, then slowly walk again to Dr. Sarton’s dome. If necessary, he would ‘discover’ the body himself, though he would prefer to have someone else do that. If questioned concerning his early arrival, he could say, I suppose, that he had come to tell Dr. Sarton of rumors of a Medievalist attack on Spacetown, urge him to take secret precautions to avoid open trouble between Spacers and Earthmen. The dead robot would lend poin
t to his words.
“If they asked about the long interval between your entering Spacetown, Commissioner, and your arrival at Dr. Sarton’s dome, you could say–let’s see–that you saw someone lurking through the streets and heading for open country. You pursued for a while. That would also encourage them along a false path. As for R. Sammy, no one would notice him. A robot among the truck farms outside the City is just another robot.
“How close am I, Commissioner?”
Enderby writhed, “I didn’t–”
“No,” said Baley, “you didn’t kill Daneel. He’s here, and in all the time he’s been in the City, you haven’t been able to look him in the face or address him by name. Look at him now, Commissioner.”
Enderby couldn’t. He covered his face with shaking hands.
Baley’s shaking hands almost dropped his transmitter. He had found it.
The image was now centered upon the main door to Dr. Sarton’s dome. The door was open; it had been slid into its wall receptacle along its shining metal runner grooves. Down within them. There! There!
The sparkle was unmistakable.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” said Baley. “You were at the dome when you dropped your glasses. You must have been nervous and I’ve seen you when you’re nervous. You take them off; you wipe them. You did that then. But your hands were shaking and you dropped them; maybe you stepped on them. Anyway, they were broken, and just then, the door opened and a figure that looked like Daneel faced you.
“You blasted him, scrabbled up the remains of your glasses, and ran. They found the body, not you, and when they came to find you, you discovered that it was not Daneel, but the early-rising Dr. Sarton, that you had killed. Dr. Sarton had designed Daneel in his own image, to his great misfortune, and without your glasses in that moment of tension, you could not tell them apart.
“And if you want the tangible proof, it’s there!” The image of Sarton’s dome quivered and Baley put the transmitter carefully upon the desk, his hand tightly upon it.