The Caves of Steel (11 page)

She made a gulping sound and clutched at the neck of his pajamas. For a while, they clung together, and Baley’s growing sense of injury evaporated into a troubled concern.

“Why, Jessie? There’s nothing to be worried about. He’s harmless. I swear he is.”

“Can’t you get rid of him, Lije?”

“You know I can’t. It’s Department business. How can I?”

“What kind of business, Lije? Tell me.”

“Now, Jessie, I’m surprised at you.” He groped for her cheek in the darkness and patted it. It was wet. Using his pajama sleeve, he carefully wiped her eyes.

“Now, look,” he said tenderly, “you’re being a baby.”

“Tell them at the Department to have someone else do it, whatever it is. Please, Lije.”

Baley’s voice hardened a bit. “Jessie, you’ve been a policeman’s wife long enough to know an assignment is an assignment.”

“Well, why did it have to be you?”

“Julius Enderby—”

She stiffened in his arms. “I might have known. Why can’t you tell Julius Enderby to have someone else do the dirty work just once. You stand for too much, Lije, and this is just—”

“All right, all right,” he said, soothingly.

She subsided, quivering.

Baley thought: She’ll never understand.

Julius Enderby had been a fighting word with them since their engagement. Enderby had been two classes ahead of Baley at the City School of Administrative Studies. They had been friends. When Baley had taken his battery of aptitude tests and neuroanalysis and found himself in line for the police force, he found Enderby there ahead of him. Enderby had already moved into the plain-clothes division.

Baley followed Enderby, but at a continually greater distance. It was no one’s fault, precisely. Baley was capable enough, efficient enough, but he lacked something that Enderby had. Enderby fit the administrative machine perfectly. He was one of those persons who was born for a hierarchy, who was just naturally comfortable in a bureaucracy.

The Commissioner wasn’t a great brain, and
Baley knew it. He had his childish peculiarities, his intermittent rash of ostentatious Medievalism, for instance. But he was smooth with others; he offended no one; he took orders gracefully; he gave them with the proper mixture of gentleness and firmness. He even got along with the Spacers. He was perhaps over-obsequious to them (Baley himself could never have dealt with them for half a day without getting into a state of bristle; he was sure of that, even though he had never really spoken to a Spacer), but they trusted him, and that made him extremely useful to the City.

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5. Baley did not resent the contrast, though he was human enough to regret it. Enderby did not forget their earlier friendship and, in his queer way, tried to make up for his success by doing what he could for Baley.

The assignment of partnership with R. Daneel was an example of it. It was tough and unpleasant, but there was no question that it carried within it the germs of tremendous advance. The Commissioner might have given the chance to someone else. His own talk, that morning, of needing a favor masked but did not hide that fact.

Jessie never saw things that way. On similar occasions in the past, she had said, “It’s your silly loyalty index. I’m so tired of hearing everyone praise you for being so full of a sense of duty. Think of yourself once in a while. I notice the ones on top don’t bring up the topic of their
own
loyalty index.”

Baley lay in bed in a state of stiff wakefulness, letting Jessie calm down. He had to
think
. He had to be certain of his suspicions. Little things chased one
another and fitted together in his mind. Slowly they were building into a pattern.

He felt the mattress give as Jessie stirred.

“Lije?” Her lips were at his ears.

“What?”

“Why don’t you resign?”

“Don’t be crazy.”

“Why not?” She was suddenly almost eager. “You can get rid of that horrible robot that way. Just walk in and tell Enderby you’re through.”

Baley said coldly, “I can’t resign in the middle of an important case. I can’t throw the whole thing down the disposal tube just anytime I feel like it. A trick like that means declassification for cause.”

“Even so. You can work your way up again. You can do it, Lije. There are a dozen places where you’d fit into Service.”

“Civil Service doesn’t take men who are declassified for cause. Manual labor is the only thing I can do; the only thing you could do. Bentley would lose all inherited status. For God’s sake, Jessie, you don’t know what it’s like.”

“I’ve read about it. I’m not afraid of it,” she mumbled.

“You’re crazy. You’re plain crazy.” Baley could feel himself trembling. There was a familiar, flashing picture of his father in his mind’s eye. His father, moldering away toward death.

Jessie sighed heavily.

Baley’s mind turned savagely away from her. In desperation, it returned to the pattern it was constructing.

He said, tightly, “Jessie, you’ve got to tell me. How did you find out Daneel was a robot? What made you decide that?”

She began, “Well …” and just ran down. It was the third time she had begun to explain and failed.

He crushed her hand in his, willing her to speak. “Please, Jessie. What’s frightening you?”

She said, “I just guessed he was a robot, Lije.”

He said, “There wasn’t anything to make you guess that, Jessie. You didn’t think he was a robot before you left, now did you?”

“No-o, but I got to thinking …”

“Come on, Jessie. What was it?”

“Well … Look, Lije, the girls were talking in the Personal. You know how they are. Just talking about everything.”

Women! thought Baley.

“Anyway,” said Jessie. “The rumor is all over town. It must be.”

“All over town?” Baley felt a quick and savage touch of triumph, or nearly that. Another piece in place!

“It was the way they sounded. They said there was talk about a Spacer robot loose in the City. He was supposed to look just like a man and to be working with the police. They even asked
me
about it. They laughed and said, ‘Does your Lije know anything about it, Jessie?’ and I laughed, and said, ‘Don’t be silly!’

“Then we went to the etherics and I got to thinking about your new partner. Do you remember those pictures you brought home, the ones Julius Enderby took in Spacetown, to show me what Spacers looked like? Well, I got to thinking that’s what your partner looked like. It just came to me that that’s what he looked like and I said to myself, Oh, my God, someone must’ve recognized him in the shoe department and he’s with Lije and I just said I had a headache and I ran—”
Baley said, “Now, Jessie, stop, stop. Get hold of yourself. Now why are you afraid? You’re not afraid of Daneel himself. You faced up to him when you came home. You faced up to him fine. So—”

He stopped speaking. He sat up in bed, eyes uselessly wide in the darkness.

He felt his wife move against his side. His hand leaped, found her lips and pressed against them. She heaved against his grip, her hands grasping his wrist and wrenching, but he leaned down against her the more heavily.

Then, suddenly, he released her. She whimpered.

He said, huskily, “Sorry, Jessie, I was listening.”

He was getting out of bed, pulling warm Plastofilm over the soles of his feet.

“Lije, where are you going? Don’t leave me.”

“It’s all right. I’m just going to the door.”

The Plastofilm made a soft, shuffling noise as he circled the bed. He cracked the door to the living room and waited a long moment. Nothing happened. It was so quiet, he could hear the thin whistle of Jessie’s breath from their bed. He could hear the dull rhythm of blood in his ears.

Baley’s hand crept through the opening of the door, snaking out to the spot he needed no light to find. His fingers closed upon the knob that controlled the ceiling illumination. He exerted the smallest pressure he could and the ceiling gleamed dimly, so dimly that the lower half of the living room remained in semidusk.

He saw enough, however. The main door was closed and the living room lay lifeless and quiet.

He turned the knob back into the off position and moved back to bed.

It was all he needed. The pieces fit. The pattern was complete.

Jessie pleaded with him. “Lije, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Jessie. Everything’s all right. He’s not here.”

“The robot? Do you mean he’s gone? For good?”

“No, no. He’ll be back. And before he does, answer my question.”

“What question?”

“What are you afraid of?” Jessie said nothing.

Baley grew more insistent. “You said you were scared to death.”

“Of him.”

“No, we went through that. You weren’t afraid of him and, besides, you know quite well a robot cannot hurt a human being.”

Her words came slowly. “I thought if everyone knew he was a robot there might be a riot. We’d be killed.”

“Why kill us?”

“You know what riots are like.”

“They don’t even know where the robot is, do they?”

“They might find out.”

“And that’s what you’re afraid of, a riot?”

“Well—”

“Sh!” He pressed Jessie down to the pillow.

Then he put his lips to her ear. “He’s come back. Now listen and don’t say a word. Everything’s fine. He’ll be gone in the morning and he won’t be back. There’ll be no riot, nothing.”

He was almost contented as he said that, almost completely contented. He felt he could sleep.

He thought again: No riot, nothing. And no declassification.

And just before he actually fell asleep, he thought: Not even a murder investigation. Not even that. The whole thing’s solved.…

He slept.

Police Commissioner Julius Enderby polished his glasses with exquisite care and placed them upon the bridge of his nose.

Baley thought: It’s a good trick. Keeps you busy while you’re thinking what to say, and it doesn’t cost money the way lighting up a pipe does.

And because the thought had entered his mind, he drew out his pipe and dipped into his pinched store of rough-cut. One of the few luxury crops still grown on Earth was tobacco, and its end was visibly approaching. Prices had gone up, never down, in Baley’s lifetime; quotas down, never up.

Enderby, having adjusted his glasses, felt for the switch at one end of his desk and flicked his door into one-way transparency for a moment. “Where is he now, by the way?”

“He told me he wanted to be shown through the Department, and I let Jack Tobin do the honors.” Baley lit his pipe and tightened its baffle carefully. The Commissioner, like most non-indulgers, was petty about tobacco smoke.

“I hope you didn’t tell him Daneel was a robot.”

“Of course I didn’t.”

The Commissioner did not relax. One hand remained aimlessly busy with the automatic calendar on his desk.

“How is it?” he asked, without looking at Baley. “Middling rough.”

“I’m sorry, Lije.”

Baley said, firmly, “You might have warned me that he looked completely human.”

The Commissioner looked surprised. “I didn’t?” Then, with sudden petulance, “Damn it, you should have known. I wouldn’t have asked you to have him stay at your house if he looked like R. Sammy. Now would I?”

“I know, Commissioner, but I’d never seen a robot like that and you had. I didn’t even know such things were possible. I just wished you’d mentioned it, that’s all.”

“Look, Lije, I’m sorry. I should have told you. You’re right. It’s just that this job, this whole deal, has me so on edge that half the time I’m just snapping at people for no reason. He, I mean this Daneel thing, is a new-type robot. It’s still in the experimental stage.”

“So he explained himself.”

“Oh. Well, that’s it, then.”

Baley tensed a little. This was it, now. He said, casually, teeth clenched on pipestem, “R. Daneel has arranged a trip to Spacetown for me.”

“To Spacetown!” Enderby looked up with instant indignation.

“Yes. It’s the logical next move, Commissioner. I’d like to see the scene of the crime, ask a few questions.”

Enderby shook his head decidedly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Lije. We’ve gone over the ground. I doubt there’s anything new to be learned. And they’re
strange people. Kid gloves! They got to be handled with kid gloves. You don’t have the experience.”

He put a plump hand to his forehead and added, with unexpected fervor, “I hate them.”

Baley inserted hostility into his voice. “Damn it, the robot came here and I should go there. It’s bad enough sharing a front seat with a robot; I hate to take a back seat. Of course, if you don’t think I’m capable of running this investigation, Commissioner—”

“It isn’t that, Lije. It’s not you, it’s the Spacers. You don’t know what they’re like.”

Baley deepened his frown, “Well, then, Commissioner, suppose you come along.” His right hand rested on his knee, and two of his fingers crossed automatically as he said that.