Asimov’s Future History Volume 4

by Isaac Asimov

  Baley was desperate enough to say, “What if I refuse?” He knew the answer, of course. He knew exactly what declassification would mean to himself and, more than that, to his family.

  Minnim said nothing about declassification. He said softly, “You can’t refuse, Plainclothesman. You have a job to do.”

  “For Solaria? The hell with them.”

  “For us, Baley. For us.” Minnim paused. Then he went on, “You know the position of Earth with respect to the Spacers. I don’t have to go into that.”

  Baley knew the situation and so did every man on Earth. The fifty Outer Worlds, with a far smaller population, in combination, than that of Earth alone, nevertheless maintained a military potential perhaps a hundred times greater. With their underpopulated worlds resting on a positronic robot economy, their energy production per human was thousands of times that of Earth. And it was the amount of energy a single human could produce that dictated military potential, standard of living, happiness, and all besides.

  Minnim said, “One of the factors that conspires to keep us in that position is ignorance. Just that. Ignorance. The Spacers know all about us. They send missions enough to Earth, heaven knows. We know nothing about them except what they tell us. No man on Earth has ever as much as set foot on an Outer World. You will, though.”

  Baley began, “I can’t...”

  But Minnim repeated, “You will. Your position will be unique. You will be on Solaria on their invitation, doing a job to which they will assign you. When you return, you will have information useful to Earth.”

  Baley watched the Undersecretary through somber eyes. “You mean I’m to spy for Earth.”

  “No question of spying. You need do nothing they don’t ask you to do. Just keep your eyes and mind open. Observe! There will be specialists on Earth when you return to analyze and interpret your observations.”

  Baley said, “I take it there’s a crisis, sir.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Sending an Earthman to an Outer World is risky. The Spacers

  hate us. With the best will in the world and even though I’m there on invitation, I could cause an interstellar incident. The Terrestrial Government could easily avoid sending me if they chose. They could say I was ill. The Spacers are pathologically afraid of disease. They wouldn’t want me for any reason if they thought I were ill.”

  “Do you suggest,” said Minnim, “we try that trick?”

  “No. If the government had no other motive for sending me, they would think of that or something better without my help. So it follows that it is the question of spying that is the real essential. And if that is so, there must be more to it than just a see-what-you-can see to justify the risk.”

  Baley half expected an explosion and would have half welcomed one as a relief of pressure, but Minnim only smiled frostily and said, “You can see past the non-essentials, it seems. But then, I expected no less.”

  The Undersecretary leaned across his desk toward Baley. “Here is certain information which you will discuss with no one, not even with other government officials. Our sociologists have been coming to certain conclusions concerning the present Galactic situation. Fifty Outer Worlds, underpopulated, roboticized, powerful, with people that are healthy and long-lived. We ourselves, crowded, technologically underdeveloped, short-lived, under their domination. It is unstable.”

  “Everything is in the long run.”

  “This is unstable in the short run. A hundred years is the most we’re allowed. The situation will last our time, to be sure, but we have children. Eventually we will become too great a danger to the Outer Worlds to be allowed to survive. There are eight billions on Earth who hate the Spacers.”

  Baley said, “The Spacers exclude us from the Galaxy, handle our trade to their own profit, dictate to our government, and treat us with contempt. What do they expect? Gratitude?”

  “True, and yet the pattern is fixed. Revolt, suppression, revolt, suppression–and within a century Earth will be virtually wiped out as a populated world. So the sociologists say.”

  Baley stirred uneasily. One didn’t question sociologists and their computers. “But what do you expect me to accomplish if all this is so?”

  “Bring us information. The big flaw in sociological forecast is our lack of data concerning the Spacers. We’ve had to make assumptions on the basis of the few Spacers they sent out here. We’ve had to rely on what they choose to tell us of themselves, so it follows we know their strengths and only their strengths. Damn it, they have their robots and their low numbers and their long lives. But do they have weaknesses? Is there some factor or factors which, if we but knew, would alter the sociologic inevitability of destruction; something that could guide our actions and better the chance of Earth’s survival.”

  “Hadn’t you better send a sociologist, sir?”

  Minnim shook his head. “If we could send whom we pleased, we would have sent someone out ten years ago, when these conclusions were first being arrived at. This is our first excuse to send someone and they ask for a detective and that suits us. A detective is a sociologist, too; a rule-of-thumb, practicing sociologist, or he wouldn’t be a good detective. Your record proves you a good one.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Baley mechanically. “And if I get into trouble?”

  Minriim shrugged. “That’s the risk of a policeman’s job.” He dismissed the point with a wave of his hand and added, “In any case, you must go. Your rime of departure is set. The ship that will take you is waiting.”

  Baley stiffened. “Waiting? When do I leave?”

  “In two days.”

  “I’ve got to get back to New York then. My wife–”

  “We will see your wife. She can’t know the nature of your job, you know. She will be told not to expect to hear from you.”

  “But this is inhuman. I must see her. I may never see her again.” Minnim said, “What I say now may sound even more inhuman, but isn’t it true that there is never a day you set about your duties on which you cannot tell yourself she may never see you again? Plainclothesman Baley, we must all do our duty.”

  Baley’s pipe had been out for fifteen minutes. He had never noticed it.

  No one had more to tell him. No one knew anything about the murder. Official after official simply hurried him on to the moment when he stood at the base of a spaceship, all unbelieving still.

  It was like a gigantic cannon aimed at the heavens, and Baley shivered spasmodically in the raw, open air. The night closed in (for which Baley was thankful) like dark black walls melting into a black ceiling overhead. It was cloudy, and though he had been to Planetaria, a bright star, stabbing through a rift in the cloud, startled him when it caught his eyes.

  A little spark, far, far away. He stared curiously, almost unafraid of it. It looked quite close, quite insignificant, and yet around things like that circled planets of which the inhabitants were lords of the Galaxy. The sun was a thing like that, he thought, except much closer, shining now on the other side of the Earth.

  He thought of the Earth suddenly as a ball of stone with a film of moisture and gas, exposed to emptiness on every side, with its Cities barely dug into the outer rim, clinging precariously between rock and air. His skin crawled!

  The ship was a Spacer vessel, of course. Interstellar trade was entirely in Spacer hands. He was alone now, just outside the rim of the City. He had been bathed and scraped and sterilized until he was considered safe, by Spacer standards, to board the ship. Even so, they sent only a robot out to meet him, bearing as he did a hundred varieties of disease germs from the sweltering City to which he himself was resistant but to which the eugenically hot housed Spacers were not.

  The robot bulked dimly in the night, its eyes a dull red glow.

  “Plainclothesman Elijah Baley?”

  “That’s right,” said Baley crisply, the hair on the nape of his neck stirring a bit. He was enough of an Earthman to get angry goose flesh at the sight of a robot doing a
man’s job. There had been R. Daneel Olivaw, who had partnered with him in the Spacer murder affair, but that had been different. Daneel had been–“You will follow me, please,” said the robot, and a white light flooded a path toward the ship.

  Baley followed. Up the ladder and into the ship he went, along corridors, and into a room.

  The robot said, “This will be your room, Plainclothesman Baley. It is requested that you remain in it for the duration of the trip.”

  Baley thought: Sure, seal me off. Keep me safe. Insulated.

  The corridors along which he had traveled had been empty. Robots were probably disinfecting them now. The robot facing him would probably step through a germicidal bath when it left.

  The robot said, “There is a water supply and plumbing. Food will be supplied. You will have viewing matter. The ports are controlled from this panel. They are closed now but if you wish to view space–”

  Baley said with some agitation, “That’s all right, boy. Leave the ports closed.”

  He used the “boy” address that Earthmen always used for robots, but the robot showed no adverse response. It couldn’t, of course. Its responses were limited and controlled by the Laws of Robotics.

  The robot bent its large metal body in the travesty of a respectful bow and left.

  Baley was alone in his room and could take stock. It was better than the plane, at least. He could see the plane from end to end. He could see its limits. The spaceship was large. It had corridors, levels, rooms. It was a small City in itself. Baley could almost breathe freely.

  Then lights flashed and a robot’s metallic voice sounded over the communo and gave him specific instructions for guarding himself against take-off acceleration.

  There was the push backward against webbing and a yielding hydraulic system, a distant rumble of force-jets heated to fury by the proton micro-pile. There was the hiss of tearing atmosphere, growing thinner and high-pitched and fading into nothingness after an hour.

  They were in space.

  It was as though all sensation had numbed, as though nothing were real. He told himself that each second found him thousands of miles farther from the Cities, from Jessie, but it didn’t register.

  On the second day (the third?–there was no way of telling time except by the intervals of eating and sleeping) there was a queer momentary sensation of being turned inside out. It lasted an instant and Baley knew it was a Jump, that oddly incomprehensible, almost mystical, momentary transition through hyperspace that transferred a ship and all it contained from one point in space to another, light years away. Another lapse of time and another Jump, still another lapse, still another Jump.

  Baley told himself now that he was light-years away, tens of light years, hundreds, thousands.

  He didn’t know how many. No one on Earth as much as knew

  Solaria’s location in space. He would bet on that. They were ignorant, every one of them.

  He felt terribly alone.

  There was the feel of deceleration and the robot entered. Its somber, ruddy eyes took in the details of Baley’s harness. Efficiently it tightened a wing nut; quickly it surveyed the details of the hydraulic system.

  It said, “We will be landing in three hours. You will remain, if you please, in this room. A man will come to escort you out and to take you to your place of residence.”

  “Wait,” said Baley tensely. Strapped in as he was, he felt helpless. “When we land, what time of day will it be?”

  The robot said at once, “By Galactic Standard Time, it will be–”

  “Local time, boy. Local time! Jehoshaphat!”

  The robot continued smoothly, “The day on Solaria is twenty eight point thirty-five Standard hours in length. The Solarian hour is divided into ten decades, each of which is divided into a hundred centads. We are scheduled to arrive at an airport at which the day will be at the twentieth centad of the fifth decad.”

  Baley hated that robot. He hated it for its obtuseness in not understanding; for the way it was making him ask the question directly and exposing his own weakness.

  He had to. He said flatly, “Will it be daytime?”

  And after all that the robot answered, “Yes, sir,” and left.

  It would be day! He would have to step out onto the unprotected surface of a planet in daytime.

  He was not quite sure how it would be. He had seen glimpses of planetary surfaces from certain points within the City; he had even been out upon it for moments. Always, though, he had been surrounded by walls or within reach of one. There was always safety at hand.

  Where would there be safety now? Not even the false walls of darkness.

  And because he would not display weakness before the Spacers–he’d be damned if he would–he stiffened his body against the webbing that held him safe against the forces of deceleration, closed his eyes, and stubbornly fought panic.

  2: A Friend Is Encountered

  BALEY WAS LOSING his fight. Reason alone was not enough.

  Baley told himself over and over: Men live in the open all their lives. The Spacers do so now. Our ancestors on Earth did it in the past. There is no real harm in walllessness. It is only my mind that tells me differently, and it is wrong.

  But all that did not help. Something above and beyond reason cried out for walls and would have none of space.

  As time passed, he thought he would not succeed. He would be cowering at the end, trembling and pitiful. The Spacer they would send for him (with filters in his nose to keep out germs, and gloves on his hands to prevent contact) would not even honestly despise him. The Spacer would feel only disgust.

  Baley held on grimly.

  When the ship stopped and the deceleration harness automatically uncoupled, while the hydraulic system retracted into the wall, Baley remained in his seat. He was afraid, and determined not to show it.

  He looked away at the first quiet sound of the door of his room opening. There was the eye-corner flash of a tall, bronze-haired figure entering; a Spacer, one of those proud descendants of Earth who had disowned their heritage.

  The Spacer spoke. “Partner Elijah!”

  Baley’s head turned toward the speaker with a jerk. His eyes rounded and he rose almost without volition.

  He stared at the face; at the broad, high cheekbones, the absolute calm of the facial lines, the symmetry of the body, most of all at that level look out of nerveless blue eyes.

  “D-daneel.”

  The Spacer said, “It is pleasant that you remember me, Partner Elijah.”

  “Remember you!” Baley felt relief wash over him. This being was a bit of Earth, a friend, a comfort, a savior. He had an almost unbearable desire to rush to the Spacer and embrace him, to hug him wildly, and laugh and pound his back and do all the foolish things old friends did when meeting once again after a separation.

  But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He could only step forward, and hold out his hand and say, “I’m not likely to forget you, Daneel.”

  “That is pleasant,” said Daneel, nodding gravely. “As you are well aware, it is quite impossible for me, while in working order, to forget you. It is well that I see you again.”

  Daneel took Baley’s hand and pressed it with firm coolness, his fingers closing to a comfortable but not painful pressure and then releasing it.

  Baley hoped earnestly that the creature’s unreadable eyes could not penetrate Baley’s mind and see that wild moment, just past and not yet entirely subsided, when all of Baley had concentrated into a feeling of an intense friendship that was almost love.

  After all, one could not love as a friend this Daneel Olivaw, who was not a man at all, but only a robot.

  The robot that looked so like a man said, “I have asked that a robot-driven ground-transport vessel be connected to this ship by air”, Baley frowned. “An air-tube?”

  “Yes. It is a common technique, frequently used in space, in order that personnel and materiel be transferred from one vessel to another without the necessity of special
equipment against vacuum. It would seem then that you are not acquainted with the technique.”

  “No,” said Baley, “but I get the picture.”

  “It is, of course, rather complicated to arrange such a device between spaceship and ground vehicle, but I have requested that it be done. Fortunately, the mission on which you and I are engaged is one of high priority. Difficulties are smoothed out quickly.”

  “Are you assigned to the murder case too?”

  “Have you not been informed of that? I regret not having told you at once.” There was, of course, no sign of regret on the robot’s perfect face. “It was Dr. Han Fastolfe, whom you met on Earth during our previous partnership. and whom I hope you remember, who first suggested you as an appropriate investigator in this case. He made it a condition that I be assigned to work with you once more.”

  Baley managed a smile. Dr. Fastolfe was a native of Aurora and Aurora was the strongest of the Outer Worlds. Apparently the advice of an Auroran bore weight.

  Baley said, “A team that works shouldn’t be broken up, eh?” (The first exhilaration of Daneel’s appearance was fading and the compression about Baley’s chest was returning.)

  “I do not know if that precise thought was in his mind, Partner Elijah. From the nature of his orders to me, I should think that he was interested in having assigned to work with you one who would have experience with your world and would know of your consequent peculiarities.”

  “Peculiarities!” Ba1ey frowned and felt offended. It was not a term he liked in connection with himself.

  “So that I could arrange the air-tube, for example. I am well aware of your aversion to open spaces as a result of your upbringing in the Cities of Earth.”

  Perhaps it was the effect of being called “peculiar,” the feeling that he had to counterattack or lose caste to a machine, that drove Baley to change the subject sharply. Perhaps it was just that lifelong training prevented him from leaving any logical contradiction undisturbed.

  He said, “There was a robot in charge of my welfare on hoard this ship; a robot” (a touch of malice intruded itself here) “that looks like a robot. Do you know it?”