The Caves of Steel (15 page)

“Of course. I see your point,” said Fastolfe. He looked at R. Daneel and gestured slightly.

R. Daneel touched the cuff of his right shirt sleeve and the diamagnetic seam fell apart the entire length of his arm. A smooth, sinewy, and apparently entirely human limb lay exposed. Its short, bronze hairs, both in quantity and distribution, were exactly what one would expect of a human being.

Baley said, “So?”

R. Daneel pinched the ball of his right middle finger with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Exactly what the details of the manipulation that followed were, Baley could not see.

But, just as the fabric of the sleeve had fallen in two when the diagmagnetic field of its seam had been interrupted, so now the arm itself fell in two.

There, under a thin layer of fleshlike material, was the dull blue gray of stainless steel rods, cords, and joints.

“Would you care to examine Daneel’s workings more closely, Mr. Baley?” asked Dr. Fastolfe politely.

Baley could scarcely hear the remark for the buzzing in his ears and for the sudden jarring of the Commissioner’s high-pitched and hysterical laughter.

The minutes passed and the buzzing grew louder and drowned out the laughter. The dome and all it contained wavered and Baley’s time sense wavered, too.

At last, he found himself sitting in an unchanged position but with a definite feeling of lost time. The Commissioner was gone; the trimensic receiver was milky and opaque; and R. Daneel sat at his side, pinching up the skin of Baley’s bared upper arm. Baley could see, just beneath the skin, the small thin darkness of a hyposliver. It vanished as he watched, soaking and spreading away into the intercellular fluid, from that into the blood stream and the neighboring cells, from that into all the cells of his body.

His grip on reality heightened.

“Do you feel better, partner Elijah?” asked R. Daneel.

Baley did. He pulled at his arm and the robot let him take it away. He rolled down his sleeve and looked about. Dr. Fastolfe sat where he had been, a small smile softening the homeliness of his face.

Baley said, “Did I black out?”

Dr. Fastolfe said, “In a way, yes. You received a sizable shock, I’m afraid.”

It came back to Baley quite clearly. He seized R. Daneel’s nearer arm quickly, forcing up the sleeve as far as it would go, exposing the wrist. The robot’s flesh felt soft to his fingers, but underneath was the hardness of something more than bone.

R. Daneel let his arm rest easily in the plainclothes man’s grip. Baley stared at it, pinching the skin along the median line. Was there a faint seam?

It was logical, of course, that there should be. A robot, covered with synthetic skin, and deliberately made to look human, could not be repaired in the ordinary fashion. A chest plate could not be unriveted for the purpose. A skull could not be hinged up and outward. Instead, the various parts of the mechanical body would have to be put together along a line of micromagnetic fields. An arm, a head, an entire body, must fall in two at the proper touch, then come together again at a contrary touch.

Baley looked up. “Where’s the Commissioner?” he mumbled, hot with mortification.

“Pressing business,” said Dr. Fastolfe. “I encouraged him to leave, I’m afraid. I assured him we would take care of you.”

“You’ve taken care of me quite nicely already, thank you,” said Baley, grimly. “I think our business is done.”

He lifted himself erect on tired joints. He felt an old man, very suddenly. Too old to start over again. He needed no deep insight to foresee that future.

The Commissioner would be half frightened and half furious. He would face Baley whitely, taking his glasses off to wipe them every fifteen seconds. His soft voice (Julius Enderby almost never shouted) would
explain carefully that the Spacers had been mortally offended.

“You
can’t
talk to Spacers that way, Lije. They won’t take it.” (Baley could hear Enderby’s voice very plainly down to the finest shade of intonation.) “I warned you. No saying how much damage you’ve done. I can see your point, mind you. I see what you were trying to do. If they were Earthmen, it would be different. I’d say yes, chance it. Run the risk. Smoke them out. But
Spacers
! You might have told me, Lije. You might have consulted me. I know them. I know them inside and out.”

And what would Baley be able to say? That Enderby was exactly the man he couldn’t tell. That the project was one of tremendous risk and Enderby a man of tremendous caution. That it had been Enderby himself who had pointed up the supreme dangers of either outright failure or of the wrong kind of success. That the one way of defeating declassification was to show that guilt lay in Spacetown itself.…

Enderby would say, “There’ll have to be a report on this, Lije. There’ll be all sorts of repercussions. I know the Spacers. They’ll demand your removal from the case, and it’ll have to be that way. You understand that, Lije, don’t you? I’ll try to make it easy on you. You can count on that. I’ll protect you as far as I can, Lije.”

Baley knew that would be exactly true. The Commissioner would protect him, but only as far as he could, not to the point, for instance, of infuriating further an angry Mayor.

He could hear the Mayor, too. “Damn it, Enderby, what
is
all this? Why wasn’t I consulted? Who’s running the City? Why was an unauthorized robot allowed inside the City? And just what the devil did this Baley …”

If it came to a choice between Baley’s future in
the Department and the Commissioner’s own, what possible result could Baley expect? He could find no reasonable way of blaming Enderby.

The least he could expect was demotion, and that was bad enough. The mere act of living in a modern City insured the bare possibility of existence, even for those entirely declassified. How bare that possibility was he knew only too well.

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.

Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges,
once acquired
, without a pang. That was the point.

What a trifling addition to the convenience of the apartment an activated washbasin was when for thirty years previously the trip to Personal had been an automatic and unregarded one. How useless it was even as a device to prove “status” when it was considered the height of ill form to parade “status.” Yet were the washbasin to be deactivated, how humiliating and unbearable would each added trip to Personal be! How yearningly attractive the memory of the bedroom shave! How filled with a sense of lost luxury!

It was fashionable for modern political writers to look back with a smug disapproval at the “fiscalism” of Medieval times, when economy was based on money. The competitive struggle for existence, they said, was brutal. No truly complex society could be maintained because of the strains introduced by the eternal “fight-for-the-buck.” (Scholars had varying interpretations of the word “buck,” but there was no dispute over the meaning as a whole.)

By contrast, modern “civism” was praised highly as efficient and enlightened.

Maybe so. There were historical novels both in the romantic and the sensational tradition, and the Medievalists thought “fiscalism” had bred such things as individualism and initiative.

Baley wouldn’t commit himself, but now he wondered sickly if ever a man fought harder for that buck, whatever it was, or felt its loss more deeply, than a City dweller fought to keep from losing his Sunday night option on a chicken drumstick—a real-flesh drumstick from a once-living bird.

Baley thought: Not me so much. There’s Jessie and Ben.

Dr. Fastolfe’s voice broke in upon his thoughts. “Mr. Baley, do you hear me?”

Baley blinked. “Yes?” How long had he been standing there like a frozen fool?

“Won’t you sit down, sir? Having taken care of the matter on your mind, you may now be interested in some films we have taken of the scene of the crime and of the events immediately following.”

“No, thank you. I have business in the City.”

“Surely the case of Dr. Sarton comes first.”

“Not with me. I imagine I’m off the case already.” Suddenly, he boiled over. “Damn it, if you could prove R. Daneel was a robot, why didn’t you do it at once? Why did you make such a farce of it all?”

“My dear Mr. Baley, I was very interested in your deductions. As for being off the case, I doubt it. Before the Commissioner left, I made a special point of asking that you be retained. I believe he will co-operate.”

Baley sat down, not entirely voluntarily. He said, sharply, “Why?”

Dr. Fastolfe crossed his legs and sighed. “Mr. Baley, in general I have met two kinds of City dwellers,
rioters and politicians. Your Commissioner is useful to us, but he is a politician. He tells us what we want to hear. He
handles
us, if you know what I mean. Now you came here and boldly accused us of tremendous crimes and tried to prove your case. I enjoyed the process. I found it a hopeful development.”

“How hopeful?” asked Baley sardonically.

“Hopeful enough. You are someone I can deal with frankly. Last night, Mr. Baley, R. Daneel reported to me by shielded subether. Some things about you interested me very much. For instance, there was the point concerning the nature of the book-films in your apartment.”

“What about them?”

“A good many dealt with historical and archaeological subjects. It makes it appear that you are interested in human society and that you know a little about its evolution.”

“Even policemen can spend their free time on book-films, if they so choose.”

“Quite. I’m glad of your choice in viewing matter. It will help me in what I am trying to do. In the first place, I want to explain, or try to, the exclusivism of the men of the Outer Worlds. We live here in Spacetown; we don’t enter the City; we mingle with you City dwellers only in a very rigidly limited fashion. We breathe the open air, but when we do, we wear filters. I sit here now with filters in my nostrils, gloves on my hands, and a fixed determination to come no closer to you than I can help. Why do you suppose that is?”

Baley said, “There’s no point in guessing.” Let
him
talk now.

“If you guessed as some of your people do, you would say that it was because we despised the men of Earth and refused to lose caste by allowing their
shadow to fall upon us. That is not so. The true answer is really quite obvious. The medical examination you went through, as well as the cleansing procedures, were not matters of ritual. They were dictated by necessity.”

“Disease?”

“Yes, disease. My dear Mr. Baley, the Earthmen who colonized the Outer Worlds found themselves on planets entirely free of Terrestrial bacteria and viruses. They brought their own, of course, but they also brought with them the latest medical and microbiological techniques. They had a small community of micro-organisms to deal with and no intermediate hosts. There were no mosquitoes to spread malaria, no snails to spread schistosomiasis. Disease agents were wiped out and symbiotic bacteria allowed to grow. Gradually, the Outer Worlds became disease-free. Naturally, as time went on, entrance requirements for immigrant Earthmen were made more and more rigorous, since less and less could the Outer Worlds endure the possible introduction of disease.”

“You’ve never been sick, Dr. Fastolfe?”

“Not with a parasitic disease, Mr. Baley. We are all liable to degenerative diseases such as atherosclerosis, of course, but I have never had what you would call a cold. If I were to contract one, I might die of it. I’ve built up no resistance to it whatsoever. That’s what’s wrong with us here in Spacetown. Those of us who come here run a definite risk. Earth is riddled with diseases to which we have no defense, no
natural
defense. You yourself are carrying the germs of almost every known disease. You are not aware of it, since you keep them all under control at almost all times through the antibodies your body has developed over the years. I, myself, lack the antibodies. Do you wonder
that I come no closer to you? Believe me, Mr. Baley, I act aloof only in self-defense.”

Baley said, “If this is so, why isn’t the fact made known on Earth? I mean, that it is not just queasiness on your part, but a defense against an actual physical danger.”

The Spacer shook his head. “We are few, Mr. Baley, and are disliked as foreigners anyway. We maintain our own safety on the basis of a rather shaky prestige as a superior class of being. We cannot afford to lose face by admitting that we are
afraid
to approach an Earthman. Not at least until there is a better understanding between Earthmen and Spacers.”

“There won’t be, on present terms. It’s your supposed superiority that we—they hate you for.”

“It is a dilemma. Don’t think we aren’t aware of it.”

   “Does the Commissioner know of this?”

“We have never explained it to him flatly, as I have just done to you. He may guess it, however. He is quite an intelligent man.”