The Caves of Steel (18 page)

“I see. Can you eat, Daneel?”

“I am nuclear-powered. I had thought you were aware of that.”

“I’m perfectly aware of it. I didn’t ask you if you
needed to eat. I asked if you
could
eat. If you could put food in your mouth, chew it, and swallow it. I should think that would be an important item in seeming to be a man.”

“I see your point. Yes, I can perform the mechanical operations of chewing and swallowing. My capacity is, of course, quite limited, and I would have to remove the ingested material from what you might call my stomach sooner or later.”

“All right. You can regurgitate, or whatever you do, in the quiet of our room tonight. The point is that I’m hungry. I’ve missed lunch, damn it, and I want you with me when I eat. And you can’t sit there and
not
eat without attracting attention. So if you can eat, that’s what I want to hear. Let’s go!”

   Section kitchens were the same all over the City. What’s more, Baley had been in Washington, Toronto, Los Angeles, London, and Budapest in the way of business, and they had been the same there, too. Perhaps it had been different in Medieval times when languages had varied and dietaries as well. Nowadays, yeast products were just the same from Shanghai to Tashkent and from Winnipeg to Buenos Aires; and English might not be the “English” of Shakespeare or Churchill, but it was the final potpourri that was current over all the continents and, with some modification, on the Outer Worlds as well.

But language and dietary aside, there were the deeper similarities. There was always that particular odor, undefinable but completely characteristic of “kitchen.” There was the waiting triple line moving slowly in,
converging
at the door and splitting up again, right, left, center. There was the rumble of humanity, speaking and moving, and the sharper clatter of plastic on plastic. There was the gleam of simulated
wood, highly polished, highlights on glass, long tables, the touch of steam in the air.

Baley inched slowly forward as the line moved (with all possible staggering of meal hours, a wait of at least ten minutes was almost unavoidable) and said to R. Daneel in sudden curiosity, “Can you smile?”

R. Daneel, who had been gazing at the interior of the kitchen with cool absorption, said, “I beg your pardon, Elijah.”

“I’m just wondering, Daneel. Can you smile?” He spoke in a casual whisper.

R. Daneel smiled. The gesture was sudden and surprising. His lips curled back and the skin about either end folded. Only the mouth smiled, however. The rest of the robot’s face was untouched.

Baley shook his head. “Don’t bother, R. Daneel. It doesn’t do a thing for you.”

They were at the entrance. Person after person thrust his metal food tag through the appropriate slot and had it scanned. Click—click—click—

Someone once calculated that a smoothly running kitchen could allow the entrance of two hundred persons a minute, the tags of each one being fully scanned to prevent kitchen-jumping, meal-jumping, and ration-stretching. They had also calculated how long a waiting line was necessary for maximum efficiency and how much time was lost when any one person required special treatment.

It was therefore always a calamity to interrupt that smooth click—click by stepping to the manual window, as Baley and R. Daneel did, in order to thrust a special-permit pass at the official in charge.

Jessie, filled with the knowledge of an assistant dietitian, had explained it once to Baley

“It upsets things completely,” she said. “It throws off consumption figures and inventory estimates. It
means special checks. You have to match slips with all the different Section kitchens to make sure the balance isn’t too unbalanced, if you know what I mean. There’s a separate balance sheet to be made out each week. Then if anything goes wrong and you’re overdrawn, it’s always your fault. It’s never the fault of the City Government for passing out special tickets to everybody and his kid sister. Oh, no. And when we have to say that free choice is suspended for the meal, don’t the people in line make a fuss. It’s always the fault of the people behind the counter.…”

Baley had the story in the fullest detail and so he quite understood the dry and poisonous look he received from the woman behind the window. She made a few hurried notes. Home Section, occupation, reason for meal displacement (“official business,” a very irritating reason indeed, but quite irrefutable). Then she folded the slip with firm motions of her fingers and pushed it into a slot. A computer seized it, devoured the contents, and digested the information.

She turned to R. Daneel.

Baley let her have the worst. He said, “My friend is out-of-City.”

The woman looked finally and completely outraged. She said, “Home City, please.”

Baley intercepted the ball for Daneel once again. “All records are to be credited to the Police Department. No details necessary. Official business.”

The woman brought down a pad of slips with a jerk of her arm and filled in the necessary matter in dark-light code with practiced pressings of the first two fingers of her right hand.

She said, “How long will you be eating here?”

“Till further notice,” said Baley.

“Press fingers here,” she said, inverting the information blank.

Baley had a short qualm as R. Daneel’s even fingers with their glistening nails pressed downward. Surely, they wouldn’t have forgotten to supply him with fingerprints.

The woman took the blank away and fed it into the all-consuming machine at her elbow. It belched nothing back and Baley breathed more easily.

She gave them little metal tags that were in the bright red that meant “temporary.”

She said, “No free choices. We’re short this week. Take table DF.”

They made their way toward DF.

R. Daneel said, “I am under the impression that most of your people eat in kitchens such as these regularly.”

“Yes. Of course, it’s rather gruesome eating in a strange kitchen. There’s no one about whom you know. In your own kitchen, it’s quite different. You have your own seat which you occupy all the time. You’re with your family, your friends. Especially when you’re young, mealtimes are the bright spot of the day.” Baley smiled in brief reminiscence.

Table DF was apparently among those reserved for transients. Those already seated watched their plates uneasily and did not talk with one another. They looked with sneaking envy at the laughing crowds at the other tables.

There is no one so uncomfortable, thought Baley, as the man eating out-of-Section. Be it ever so humble, the old saying went, there’s no place like home-kitchen. Even the food tastes better, no matter how many chemists are ready to swear it to be no different from the food in Johannesburg.

He sat down on a stool and R. Daneel sat down next to him.

“No free choice,” said Baley, with a wave of his fingers, “so just close the switch there and wait.”

It took two minutes. A disc slid back in the table top and a dish lifted.

“Mashed potatoes, zymoveal sauce, and stewed apricots. Oh, well,” said Baley.

A fork and two slices of whole yeast bread appeared in a recess just in front of the low railing that went down the long center of the table.

R. Daneel said in a low voice, “You may help yourself to my serving, if you wish.”

For a moment, Baley was scandalized. Then he remembered and mumbled, “That’s bad manners. Go on. Eat.”

Baley ate industriously but without the relaxation that allows complete enjoyment. Carefully, he flicked an occasional glance at R. Daneel. The robot ate with precise motions of his jaws. Too precise. It didn’t look quite natural.

Strange! Now that Baley knew for a fact that R. Daneel was in truth a robot, all sorts of little items showed up clearly. For instance, there was no movement of an Adam’s apple when R. Daneel swallowed.

Yet he didn’t much mind so much. Was he getting used to the creature? Suppose people started afresh on a new world (how that ran through his mind ever since D. Fastolfe had put it there); suppose Bentley, for instance, were to leave Earth; could he get so he didn’t mind working and living alongside robots? Why not? The Spacers themselves did it.

R. Daneel said, “Elijah, is it bad manners to watch another man while he is eating?”

“If you mean stare directly at him, of course. That’s only common sense, isn’t it? A man has a right to his privacy. Ordinary conversation is entirely in
order, but you don’t peer at a man while he’s swallowing.”

“I see. Why is it then that I count eight people watching us closely, very closely?”

Baley put down his fork. He looked about as though he were searching for the salt-pinch dispenser. “I see nothing out of the ordinary.”

But he said it without conviction. The mob of diners was only a vast conglomeration of chaos to him. And when R. Daneel turned his impersonal brown eyes upon him, Baley suspected uncomfortably that those were not eyes he saw, but scanners capable of noting, with photographic accuracy and in split seconds of time, the entire panorama.

“I am quite certain,” said R. Daneel, calmly.

“Well, then, what of it? It’s crude behavior, but what does it prove?”

“I cannot say, Elijah, but is it coincidence that six of the watchers were in the crowd outside the shoe store last night?”

Baley’s grip tightened convulsively on his fork. “Are you sure?” he asked automatically, and as he said it, he realized the uselessness of the question. You don’t ask a computer if it is sure of the answer it disgorges; not even a computer with arms and legs.

R. Daneel said, “Quite!”

“Are they close to us?”

“Not very. They are scattered.”

“All right, then.” Baley returned to his meal, his fork moving mechanically. Behind the frown on his long face, his mind worked furiously.

Suppose the incident last night had been organized by a group of anti-robot fanatics, that it had not been the spontaneous trouble it had seemed. Such a group of agitators could easily include men who had studied robots with the intensity born of deep opposition. One of them might have recognized R. Daneel for what he was. (The Commissioner had suggested that, in a way. Damn it, there were surprising depths to that man.)

It worked itself out logically. Granting they had
been unable to act in an organized manner on the spur of last evening’s moment, they would still have been able to plan for the future. If they could recognize a robot such as R. Daneel, they could certainly realize that Baley himself was a police officer. A police officer in the unusual company of a humanoid robot would very likely be a responsible man in the organization. (With the wisdom of hindsight, Baley followed the line of reasoning with no trouble at all.)

It followed then that observers at City Hall (or perhaps agents within City Hall) would be bound to spot Baley, R. Daneel, or both before too long a time had passed. That they had done so within twenty-four hours was not surprising. They might have done so in less time if so much of Baley’s day had not been spent in Spacetown and along the motorway.

R. Daneel had finished his meal. He sat quietly waiting, his perfect hands resting lightly on the end of the table.

“Had we not better do something?” he asked.

“We’re safe here in the kitchen,” said Baley. “Now leave this to me. Please.”

Baley looked about him cautiously and it was as though he saw a kitchen for the first time.

People! Thousands of them. What was the capacity of an average kitchen? He had once seen the figure. Two thousand two hundred, he thought. This one was larger than average.

Suppose the cry, “Robot,” were sent out into the air. Suppose it were tossed among the thousands like a …

He was at a loss for a comparison, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t happen.

A spontaneous riot could flare anywhere, in the kitchens as easily as in the corridors or in the elevators. More easily, perhaps. There was a lack of inhibition at
mealtimes, a sense of horseplay that could degenerate into something more serious at a trifle.

But a planned riot would be different. Here in the kitchen, the planners would themselves be trapped in a large and mob-filled room. Once the dishes went flying and the tables cracking there would be no easy way to escape. Hundreds would certainly die and they themselves might easily be among them.

No, a safe riot would have to be planned in the avenues of the City, in some relatively narrow passageway. Panic and hysteria would travel slowly along the constriction and there would be time for the quick, prepared fadeaway along the side passage or the unobtrusive step onto an escalating localway that would move them to a higher level and disappearance.

Baley felt trapped. There were probably others waiting outside. Baley and R. Daneel were to be followed to a proper point and the fuse would be set off.

R. Daneel said, “Why not arrest them?”

“That would only start the trouble sooner. You know their faces, don’t you? You won’t forget?”

“I’m not capable of forgetting.”

“Then we’ll nab them another time. For now, we’ll break their net. Follow me. Do exactly as I do.”