Asimov's Future History Volume 5

by Isaac Asimov

  “You’ve washed,” said Amadiro. “You’ve taken care of your needs. There may be other roboticists here whom you will wish to question and I would welcome that, since I am determined to show I have put no barriers in your way during the short time in which you will yet be permitted to conduct your investigation. In fact, there is no reason you can’t have dinner with us.”

  Giskard said, “If I may interrupt, sir –”

  “You may not!” said Amadiro with unmistakable firmness and the robot fell silent.

  Amadiro said, “My dear Mr. Baley, I understand these robots. Who should know them better? – Except for the unfortunate Fastolfe, of course. Giskard, I am sure, was going to remind you of some appointment, some promise, some business – and there is no point in any of that. Since the investigation is about over, I promise you, none of what he was going to remind you of will have any significance. Let us forget all such nonsense and, for a brief time, be friends.

  “You must understand, my good Mr. Baley,” he went on, “that I am quite an aficionado of Earth and its culture. It is not the most popular of subjects on Aurora, but I find it fascinating. 1 am particularly interested in Earth’s past history, the days when it had a hundred languages and Interstellar Standard had not yet been developed. – May I compliment you, by the way, on your own handling of Interstellar?

  “This way, this way,” he said, turning a corner. “We’ll be coming to the pathway – simulation room, which has its own weird beauty, and we may have a mock – up in operation. Quite symphonic, actually. – But I was talking about your handling of Interstellar. It is one of the many Auroran superstitions concerning Earth, that Earthpeople speak an all – but – incomprehensible version of Interstellar. When the show about you was produced, there were many who said that the actors could not be Earthpeople because they could be understood, yet I can understand you.” He smiled as he said that.

  “I’ve tried reading Shakespeare,” he continued with a confidential air, “but I can’t read him in the original, of course, and the translation is curiously flat. I can’t help but believe that the fault lies with the translation and not with Shakespeare. I do better with Dickens and Tolstoy, perhaps because that is prose, although the names of the characters are, in both cases, virtually unpronounceable to me.

  “What I’m trying to say, Mr. Baley, is that I’m a friend of Earth. I really am. I want what is best for it. Do you understand?” He looked at Baley and again the wolf showed in his twinkling eyes.

  Baley raised his voice, forcing it between the softly running sentences of the other. “I’m afraid I cannot oblige you, Dr. Amadiro. I must be about my business and I have ‘no further questions to ask of either you or anyone else here. If you –”

  Baley paused. There was a faint and curious rumble of sound in the air. He looked up, startled. “What is that?”

  “What is what?” asked Amadiro. “I sense nothing.” He looked at the robots, who had been following the two human beings in grave silence. “Nothing!” he said forcefully. “Nothing.”

  Baley recognized that as the equivalent of an order. Neither robot could now claim to have heard the rumble in direct contradiction to a human being, unless Baley himself applied a counter – pressure – and he was sure he could not manage to do it skillfully enough in the face of Amadiro’s professionalism.

  Nevertheless, it didn’t matter. He had heard something and he was not a robot; he would not be talked out of it. He said, “By your own statement, Dr. Amadiro, I have little time left me, That is all the more reason that I must –”

  The rumble again. Louder.

  Baley said, with a sharp, cutting edge to his voice, “That, I suppose, is precisely what you didn’t hear before and what you don’t hear now. Let me go, sir, or I will ask my robots for help.”

  Amadiro loosened his grip on Baley’s upper arm at once. “My friend, you had but to express the wish. Come! I will take you to the nearest exit and, if ever you are on Aurora again, which seems unlikely in the extreme, please return and you may have the tour I promised you.”

  They were walking faster. They moved down the spiral ramp, out along a corridor to the commodious and now empty anteroom and the door by which they had entered. The windows in the anteroom showed utterly dark. Could it be night already?

  It wasn’t. Amadiro muttered to himself, “Rotten weather! They’ve opacified the windows.”

  He turned to Baley, “I imagine it’s raining. They predicted it and the forecasts can usually be relied on – always, when they’re unpleasant.”

  The door opened and Baley jumped backward with a gasp. A cold wind gusted inward and against the sky – not black but a dull, dark gray – the tops of trees were whipping back and forth.

  There was water pouring from the sky – descending in streams. And as Baley watched, appalled, a streak of light flashed across the sky with blinding brilliance and then the rumble came again, this time with a cracking report, as though the light – streak had split the sky and the rumble was the noise it had made.

  Baley turned and fled back the way he had come, whimpering.

  15: Again Daneel and Giskard

  60.

  BALEY FELT DANEEL’S strong grip on his arms, just beneath his shoulders. He halted and forced himself to stop making that infantile sound. He could feel himself trembling.

  Daneel said with infinite respect, “Partner Elijah, it is a thunderstorm – expected – predicted – normal.”

  “I know that,” whispered Baley.

  He did know it. Thunderstorms had been described innumerable times in the books he had read, whether fiction or nonfiction. He had seen them in holographs and on hyperwave shows – sound, sight, and all.

  The real thing, however, the actual sound and sight, had never penetrated into the bowels of the City and he had never in his life actually experienced such a thing.

  With all he knew – intellectually – about thunderstorms, he could not face – viscerally – the actuality. Despite the descriptions, the collections of words, the sight in small pictures and on small screens, the sounds captured in recordings; despite all that, he had no idea the flashes were so bright and streaked so across the sky; that the sound was so vibratorily bass in sound when it rattled across a hollow world; that both were so sudden; and that rain could be so like an inverted bowl of water, endlessly pouring.

  He muttered in despair, “I can’t go out in that.”

  “You won’t have to,” said Daneel urgently. “Giskard will get the airfoil. It will be brought right to the door for you. Not a drop of rain will fall on you.”

  “Why not wait until it’s over?”

  “Surely that would not be advisable, Partner Elijah. Some rain, at least, will continue past midnight and if the Chairman arrives tomorrow morning, as Dr. Amadiro implied he might, it might be wise to spend the evening in consultation with Dr. Fastolfe.”

  Baley forced himself to turn around, face in the direction from which he wanted to flee, and look into Daneers eyes. They seemed deeply concerned, but Baley thought dismally that that was merely the result of his own interpretation of the appearance of those eyes. The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)

  He was somehow aware that Amadiro was gone. He said, “Amadiro delayed me deliberately – by ushering me into the Personal, by his senseless talk, by his preventing you or Giskard from interrupting and warning me about the storm. He would even have tried to persuade me to tour the building or dine with him. He desisted only at the sound of the storm. That was what he was waiting for.”

  “It would seem so. If the storm now keeps you here, that may be what he was waiting for.”

  Baley drew a deep breath. “You are right. I must leave – somehow.”

  Reluctantly, he took a step toward the door, which was still open, still filled with a dark gray vista of whipping rain. Another step. And st
ill another – leaning heavily on Daneel.

  Giskard was waiting quietly at the door.

  Baley paused and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, to himself rather than to Daneel, “I must do it,” and moved forward again.

  61.

  “ARE YOU WELL, sir?” asked Giskard.

  It was a foolish question, dictated by the programming of the robot, thought Baley, though, at that, it was no worse than the questions asked by human beings, sometimes with wild inappropriateness, out of the programming of etiquette.

  “Yes,” said Baley in a voice he tried – and failed – to raise above a husky whisper. It was a useless answer to the foolish question, for Giskard, robot though he was, could surely see that Baley was unwell and that Baley’s answer was a palpable lie.

  The answer was, however, given and accepted and that freed Giskard for the next step. He said, “I will now leave to get the airfoil and bring it to the door.”

  “Will it work – in all this – this water, Giskard?”

  “Yes, sir. This is not an uncommon rain.”

  He left, moving steadily into the downpour. The lightning was flickering almost continuously and the thunder was a muted growl that rose to a louder crescendo every few minutes.

  For the first time in his life, Baley found himself envying a robot. Imagine being able to walk through that; to be indifferent to water, to sight, to sound; to be able to ignore surroundings and to have a pseudo – life that was absolutely courageous; to know no fear of pain or of death, because there was no pain or death.

  And yet to be incapable of originality of thought, to be incapable of unpredictable leaps of intuition – Were such gifts worth what humanity paid for them? At the moment, Baley could not say. He knew that, once he no longer felt terror, he would know that no price was too high to pay for being human. But now that he experienced nothing but the pounding of his heart and the collapse of his will, he could not help but wonder of what use it might be to be a human being if one could not overcome these deep – seated terrors, this intense agoraphobia.

  Yet he had been in the open for much of two days and had managed to be almost comfortable.

  But the fear had not been conquered. He knew that now. He had suppressed it by thinking intensely of other things, but the storm overrode all intensity of thought.

  He could not allow this. If all else failed – thought, pride, will – then he would have to fall back on shame. He could not collapse under the impersonal, superior gaze of the robots. Shame would have to be stronger than fear.

  He felt Daneel’s steady arm about his waist and shame prevented him from doing what, at the moment, he most wanted to do – to turn and hide his face against the robotic chest. He might have been unable to resist if Daneel had been human – He had lost contact with reality, for he was becoming aware of Daneel’s voice as though it were reaching him from a long distance. It sounded as though Daneel was feeling something akin to panic.

  “Partner Elijah, do you hear me?”

  Giskard’s voice, from an equal distance, said, “We must carry him.”

  “No,” mumbled Baley. “Let me walk.”

  Perhaps they did not hear him. Perhaps he did not really speak, but merely thought he did. He felt himself lifted from the ground. His left arm dangled helplessly and he strove to lift it, to push it against someone’s shoulder, to lift himself upright again from the waist, to grope for the floor with his feet and stand upright.

  But his left arm continued to dangle helplessly and his striving went for nothing.

  He was somehow aware that he was moving through the air and he felt a wash of spray against his face. Not actually water but the sifting of damp air. Then there was the pressure of a hard surface against his left side, a more resilient one against his right side.

  He was in the airfoil, wedged in once more between Giskard and Daneel. What he was most conscious of was that Giskard was very wet.

  He felt a jet of warm air cascading over him. Between the near – darkness outside and the film of trickling water upon the glass, they might as well have been opacified – or so Baley thought till opacification actually took place and total darkness descended. The soft noise of the jet, as the airfoil rose above the grass and swayed, muted the thunder and seemed to draw its teeth.

  Giskard said, “I regret the discomfort of my wet surface, sir. I will dry quickly. We will wait here a short while till you recover.”

  Baley was breathing more easily. He felt wonderfully and comfortably enclosed. He thought: Give me back my City. Wipe out all the Universe and let the Spacers colonize it. Earth is all we need.

  And even as he thought it, he knew it was his madness that believed it, not he.

  He felt the need to keep his mind busy.

  He said weakly, “Daneel.”

  “Yes, Partner Elijah?”

  “About the Chairman. Is it your opinion that Amadiro was judging the situation correctly in supposing that the Chairman would put an end to the investigation or was he perhaps allowing his wishes to do his thinking for him?”

  “It may be, Partner Elijah, that the Chairman will indeed interview Dr. Fastolfe and Amadiro on the matter. It would be a standard procedure for settling a dispute of this nature. There are ample precedents.”

  “But why?” asked Baley weakly. “If Amadiro was so persuasive, why should not the Chairman simply order the investigation stopped?”

  “The Chairman,” said Daneel, “is in a difficult political situation. He agreed originally to allow you to be brought to Aurora at Dr. Fastolfe’s urging and he cannot so sharply reverse himself so soon without making himself look weak and irresolute – and without angering Dr. Fastolfe, who is still a very influential figure in the Legislature.”

  “Then why did he not simply turn down Amadiro’s request?”

  “Dr. Amadiro is also influential, Partner Elijah, and likely to grow even more so. The Chairman must temporize by hearing both sides and by giving at least the appearance of deliberation before coming to a decision.”

  “Based on what?”

  “On the merits of the case, we must presume.”

  “Then by tomorrow morning, I must come up with something that will persuade the Chairman to side with Fastolfe, rather than against him. If I do that, will that mean victory?”

  Daneel said, “The Chairman is not all – powerful, but his influence is great. If he comes out strongly on Dr. Fastolfe’s side, then, under the present political conditions, Dr. Fastolfe will probably win the backing of the Legislature.”

  Baley found himself beginning to think clearly again. “That would seem explanation enough for Amadiro’s attempt to delay us. He might have reasoned that I had nothing yet to offer the Chairman and he needed only to delay to keep me from getting anything in the time that remained to me.”

  “So it would seem, Partner Elijah.”

  “And he let me go only when he thought he could rely on the storm continuing to keep me.”

  “Perhaps so, Partner Elijah.”

  “In that case, we cannot allow the storm to stop us.”

  Giskard said calmly, “Where do you wish to be taken, sir?”

  “Back to the establishment of Dr. Fastolfe.”

  Daneel said, “May we have one moment’s more pause, Partner Elijah? Do you plan to tell Dr. Fastolfe that you cannot continue the investigation?”

  Baley said sharply, “Why do you say that?” It was a measure of his recovery that his voice was loud and angry.

  Daneel said, “It is merely that I fear you might have forgotten for a moment that Dr. Amadiro urged you to do so for the sake of Earth’s welfare.”

  “I have not forgotten,” said Baley grimly, “and I am surprised, Daneel, that you should think that that would influence me. Fastolfe must be exonerated and Earth must send its settlers outward into the Galaxy. If there is danger in that from the Globalists, that danger must be chanced.”

  “But, in that case, Partner Elijah, why go
back to Dr. Fastolfe? It doesn’t seem to me that we have anything of moment to report to him. Is there no direction in which we can further continue our investigation before reporting to Dr. Fastolfe?”

  Baley sat up in his seat and placed his hand on Giskard, who was now entirely dry. He said, in quite a normal voice, “I am satisfied with the progress I have already made, Daneel. Let’s get moving, Giskard. Proceed to Fastolfe’s establishment.”

  And then, tightening his fists and stiffening his body, Baley added, “What’s more, Giskard, clear the windows. I want to look out into the face of the storm.”

  62.

  BALEY HELD HIS breath in preparation for transparency. The small box of the airfoil would no longer be entirely enclosed; it would no longer have unbroken walls.

  As the windows clarified, there was a flash of light that came and went too quickly to do anything but darken the world by contrast

  Baley could not prevent his cringe as he tried to steel himself for the thunder which, after a moment or two, rolled and grumbled.

  Daneel said pacifyingly, “The storm will get no worse and soon enough it will recede.”

  “I don’t care whether it recedes or not,” said Baley through trembling lips. “Come on. Let’s go.” He was trying, for his own sake, to maintain the illusion of a human being in charge of robots.

  The airfoil rose slightly in the air and at once underwent a sideways movement that tilted it so that Baley felt himself pushing hard against Giskard.

  Baley cried out (gasped out, rather), “Straighten the vehicle, Giskard!”

  Daneel placed his arm around Baley’s shoulder and pulled him gently back His other arm was braced about a hand – grip attached to the frame of the airfoil.

  That cannot be done, Partner Elijah,” Daneel said. “There is a fairly strong wind.”

  Baley felt his hair bristle. “You mean – we’re going to be blown away?”

  “No, of course not,” said Daneel. “If the car were antigrav – a form of technology that does not, of course, exist – and if its mass and inertia were eliminated, then it would be blown like a feather high into the air. However, we retain our full mass even when our jets lift us and poise us in the air, so our inertia resists the wind. Nevertheless, the wind makes us sway, even though the car remains completely under Giskard’s control.”