Asimov’s Future History Volume 4

by Isaac Asimov

  Clousarr squirmed. “All right, so I’m ruined, too. But the children aren’t ruined yet. There are babies being born continuously. Get them out, for God’s sake. Let them have space and open air and sun. If we’ve got to, we’ll cut our population little by little, too.”

  “Backward, in other words, to an impossible past.” Baley did not really know why he was arguing, except for the strange fever that was burning in his own veins. “Back to the seed, to the egg, to the womb. Why not move forward? Don’t cut Earth’s population. Use it for export. Go back to the soil, but go back to the soil of other planets. Colonize!”

  Clousarr laughed harshly. “And make more Outer Worlds? More Spacers?”

  “We won’t. The Outer Worlds were settled by Earthmen who came from a planet that did not have Cities, by Earthmen who were individualists and materialists. Those qualities were carried to an unhealthy extreme. We can now colonize out of a society that has built co-operation, if anything, too far. Now environment and tradition can interact to form a new middle way, distinct from either old Earth or the Outer Worlds. Something newer and better.”

  He was parroting Dr. Fastolfe, he knew, but it was coming out as though he himself had been thinking of it for years.

  Clousarr said, “Nuts! Colonize desert worlds with a world of our own at our fingertips? What fools would try?”

  “Many. And they wouldn’t be fools. There’d be robots to help.”

  “No,” said Clousarr, fiercely. “Never! No robots!”

  “Why not, for the love of Heaven? I don’t like them, either, but I’m not going to knife myself for the sake of a prejudice. What are we afraid of in robots? If you want my guess, it’s a sense of inferiority. We, all of us, feel inferior to the Spacers and hate it. We’ve got to feel superior somehow, somewhere, to make up for it, and it kills us that we can’t at least feel superior to robots. They seem to be better than us–only they’re not. That’s the damned irony of it.”

  Baley felt his blood heating as he spoke. “Look at this Daneel I’ve been with for over two days. He’s taller than I am, stronger, handsomer. He looks like a Spacer, in fact. He’s got a better memory and knows more facts. He doesn’t have to sheep on eat. He’s not troubled by sickness or panic or love or guilt.

  “But he’s a machine. I can do anything I want to him, the way I can to that microbalance night there. If I slam the microbalance, it won’t hit me back. Neither will Daneel. I can order him to take a blaster to himself and he’ll do it.

  “We can’t ever build a robot that will be even as good as a human being in anything that counts, let alone better. We can’t create a robot with a sense of beauty or a sense of ethics or a sense of religion. There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism.

  “We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men.

  “A robot’s brain must be finite or it can’t be built. It must be calculated to the final decimal place so that it has an end. Jehoshaphat, what are you afraid of? A robot can look like Daneel, he can look like a god, and be no more human than a lump of wood is. Can’t you see that?”

  Clousarr had tried to interrupt several times and failed against Baley’s furious torrent. Now, when Baley paused in sheer emotional exhaustion, he said weakly, “Copper turned philosopher. What do you know?”

  R. Daneel re-entered.

  Baley looked at him and frowned, partly with the anger that had not yet heft him, partly with new annoyance.

  He said, “What kept you?”

  R. Daneel said, “I had trouble in reaching Commissioner Enderby, Elijah. It turned out he was still at his office.”

  Baley looked at his watch. “Now? What for?”

  “There is a certain confusion at the moment. A corpse has been discovered in the Department.”

  “What! For God’s sake, who?”

  “The errand boy, R. Sammy.”

  Baley gagged. He stared at the robot and said in an outraged voice, “I thought you said a corpse.”

  R. Daneel amended smoothly, “A robot with a completely deactivated brain, if you prefer.”

  Clousarr laughed suddenly and Baley turned on him, saying huskily, “Nothing out of you! Understand?” Deliberately, he unlimbered his blaster. Clousarr was very silent.

  Baley said, “Well, what of it? R. Sammy blew a fuse. So what?”

  “Commissioner Enderby was evasive, Elijah, but while he did not say so outright, my impression is that the Commissioner believes R. Sammy to have been deliberately deactivated.”

  Then, as Baley absorbed that silently, R. Daneel added gravely, “Or, if you prefer the phrase–murdered.”

  16: Questions Concerning a Motive

  BALEY REPLACED HIS blaster, but kept his hand unobtrusively upon its butt.

  He said, “Walk ahead of us, Clousarr, to Seventeenth Street Exit B.”

  Clousarr said, “I haven’t eaten.”

  “Tough,” said Baley, impatiently. “There’s your meal on the floor where you dumped it.”

  “I have a right to eat.”

  “You’ll eat in detention, or you’ll miss a meal. You won’t starve. Get going.”

  All three were silent as they threaded the maze of New York Yeast, Clousarr moving stonily in advance, Baley night behind him, and R. Daneel in the rear.

  It was after Baley and R. Daneel had checked out at the receptionist’s desk, after Clousarr had drawn a leave of absence and requested that a man be sent in to clean up the balance room, after they were out in the open just to one side of the parked squad car, that Clousarr said, “Just a minute.”

  He hung back, turned toward R. Daneel, and, before Baley could make a move to stop him, stepped forward and swung his open hand full against the robot’s cheek.

  “What the devil,” cried Baley, snatching violently at Clousarr.

  Clousarr did not resist the plain-clothes man’s grasp. “It’s all right. I’ll go. I just wanted to see for myself.” He was grinning.

  R. Daneel, having faded with the slap, but not having escaped it entirely, gazed quietly at Clousarr. There was no reddening of his cheek, no mark of any blow.

  He said, “That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved

  backward, you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain.”

  Clousarr laughed.

  Baley said, “Get in, Clousarr. You, too, Daneel. Right in the back seat with him. And make sure he doesn’t move. I don’t care if it means breaking his arm. That’s an order.”

  “What about the First Law?” mocked Clousarr.

  “I think Daneel is strong enough and fast enough to stop you without hurting you, but it might do you good to have an arm or two broken at that.”

  Baley got behind the wheel and the squad car gathered speed. The empty wind ruffled his hair and Clousarr’s, but R. Daneel’s remained smoothly in place.

  R. Daneel said quietly to Clousarr, “Do you fear robots for the sake of your job, Mr. Clousarr?”

  Baley could not turn to see Clousarr’s expression, but he was certain it would be a hard and rigid mirror of detestation, that he would be sitting stiffly apart, as far as he might, from R. Daneel.

  Clousarr’s voice said, “And my kids’ jobs. And everyone’s kids.”

  “Surely adjustments are possible,” said the robot. “If your children, for instance, were to accept training for emigration–”

  Clousarr broke in. “You, too? The policeman talked about emigration. He’s got good robot training. Maybe he is a robot.”

  Baley growled, “That’s enough, you!”

  R. Daneel said, evenly, “A training school for emigrants would involve security, guaranteed classificat
ion, an assured career. If you are concerned over your children, that is something to consider.”

  “I wouldn’t take anything from a robot, or a Spacer, or any of your trained hyenas in the Government.”

  That was all. The silence of the motorway engulfed them and there was only the soft whirr of the squad-car motor and the hiss of its wheels on the pavement.

  Back at the Department, Baley signed a detention certificate for Clousarr and left him in appropriate hands. Following that, he and R. Daneel took the motospiral up the levels to Headquarters.

  R. Daneel showed no surprise that they had not taken the elevators, nor did Baley expect him to. He was becoming used to the robot’s queer mixture of ability and submissiveness and tended to leave him out of his calculations. The elevator was the logical method of heaping the vertical gap between Detention and Headquarters. The long moving stairway that was the motospiral was useful only for short climbs or drops of two or three levels at most. People of all sorts and varieties of administrative occupation stepped on and then off in less than a minute. Only Baley and R. Daneel remained on continuously, moving upward in a slow and stolid measure.

  Baley felt that he needed the time. It was only minutes at best, but up in Headquarters he would be thrown violently into another phase of the problem and he wanted a rest. He wanted time to think and orient himself. Slowly as it moved, the motospiral went too quickly to satisfy him.

  R. Daneel said, “It seems then we will not be questioning Clousarr just yet.”

  “He’ll keep,” said Baley, irritably. “Let’s find out what the R. Sammy thing is all about.” He added in a mutter, far more to himself than to R. Daneel, “It can’t be independent; there must be a connection.”

  R. Daneel said, “It is a pity. Clousarr’s cerebric qualities–”

  “What about them?”

  “They have changed in a strange way. What was it that took place between the two of you in the balance room while I was not present?”

  Baley said, absently, “The only thing I did was to preach at him. I passed along the gospel according to St. Fastolfe.”

  “I do not understand you, Elijah.”

  Baley sighed and said, “Look, I tried to explain that Earth might as well make use of robots and get its population surplus onto other planets. I tried to knock some of the Medievalist hogwash out of his head. God knows why. I’ve never thought of myself as the missionary type. Anyway, that’s all that happened.”

  “I see. Well, that makes some sense. Perhaps that can be fitted in. Tell me, Elijah, what did you tell him about robots?”

  “You really want to know? I told him robots were simply machines. That was the gospel according to St. Gerrigel. There are any number of gospels, I think.”

  “Did you by any chance tell him that one could strike a robot without fear of a return blow, much as one could strike any other mechanical object?”

  “Except a punching bag, I suppose. Yes. But what made you guess that?” Baley looked curiously at the robot.

  “It fits the cerebric changes,” said R. Daneel, “and it explains his blow to my face just after we left the factory. He must have been thinking of what you said, so he simultaneously tested your statement, worked off his aggressive feelings, and had the pleasure of seeing me placed in what seemed to him a position of inferiority. In order to be so motivated and allowing for the delta variations in his quintic...”

  He paused a long moment and said, “Yes, it is quite interesting, and now I believe I can form a self-consistent whole of the data.”

  Headquarters level was approaching. Baley said, “What time is it?”

  He thought, pettishly: Nuts, I could look at my watch and take less time that way.

  But he knew why he asked him, nevertheless. The motive was not so different from Clousarr’s in punching R. Daneel. To give the robot a trivial order that he must fulfill emphasized his roboticity and, contrariwise, Baley’s humanity.

  Baley thought: We’re all brothers. Under the skin, over it, everywhere. Jehoshaphat!

  R. Daneel said, “Twenty-ten.”

  They stepped off the motospiral and for a few seconds Baley had the usual queen sensation that went with the necessary adjustment to non-motion after long minutes of steady movement.

  He said, “And I haven’t eaten. Damn this job, anyway.”

  Baley saw and heard Commissioner Enderby through the open door of his office. The common room was empty, as though it had been wiped clean, and Enderby’s voice rang through it with unusual hollowness. His round face looked bare and weak without its glasses, which he held in his hand, while he mopped his smooth forehead with a flimsy paper napkin.

  His eyes caught Baley just as the latter reached the door and his voice rose into a petulant tenor.

  “Good God, Baley, where the devil were you?”

  Baley shrugged off the remark and said, “What’s doing? Where’s the night shift?” and then caught sight of the second person in the office with the Commissioner.

  He said, blankly, “Dr. Gerrigel!”

  The gray-haired roboticist returned the involuntary greeting by nodding briefly. “I’m glad to see you again, Mr. Baley.”

  The Commissioner readjusted his glasses and stared at Baley through them. “The entire staff is being questioned downstairs. Signing statements. I was going mad trying to find you. It looked queer, your being away.”

  “My being away!” cried Baley, strenuously.

  “Anybody’s being away. Someone in the Department did it and there’s going to be hell to pay for that. What an unholy mess! What an unholy, rotten mess!”

  He raised his hands as though in expostulation to heaven and as he did so, his eyes fell on R. Daneel.

  Baley thought sardonically: First time you’ve looked Daneel in the face. Take a good look, Julius!

  The Commissioner said in a subdued voice, “He’ll have to sign a statement. Even I’ve had to do it. I!”

  Baley said, “Look, Commissioner, what makes you so sure that R. Sammy didn’t blow a gasket all by himself? What makes it deliberate destruction?”

  The Commissioner sat down heavily. “Ask him,” he said, and pointed to Dr. Gerrigel.

  Dr. Gerrigel cleared his throat. “I scarcely know how to go about this, Mr. Baley. I take it from your expression that you are surprised to see me.”

  “Moderately,” admitted Baley.

  “Well, I was in no real hurry to return to Washington and my visits to New York are few enough to make me wish to linger. And what’s more important, I had a growing feeling that it would be criminal for me to leave the City without having made at least one more effort to be allowed to analyze your fascinating robot, whom, by the way,” (he looked very eager) “I see you have with you.”

  Baley stirred restlessly. “That’s quite impossible.”

  The roboticist looked disappointed. “Now, yes. Perhaps later?”

  Baley’s long face remained woodenly unresponsive.

  Dr. Gerrigel went on. “I called you, but you weren’t in and no one knew where you could be located. I asked for the Commissioner and he asked me to come to headquarters and wait for you.”

  The Commissioner interposed quickly. “I thought it might be important. I knew you wanted to see the man.”

  Baley nodded. “Thanks.”

  Dr. Gerrigel said, “Unfortunately my guide rod was somewhat off, or perhaps in my overanxiety I misjudged its temperature. In either case I took a wrong turning and found myself in a small room–”

  The Commissioner interrupted again. “One of the photographic supply rooms, Lije.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Gerrigel. “And in it was the prone figure of what was obviously a robot. It was quite clear to me after a brief examination that he was irreversibly deactivated. Dead, you might say. Nor was it very difficult to determine the cause of the deactivation.”

  “What was it?” asked Baley

  “In the robot’s partly clenched right fist,” said Dr. Gerrigel, “was
a shiny ovoid about two inches long and half an inch wide with a mica window at one end. The fist was in contact with his skull as though the robot’s last act had been to touch his head. The thing he was holding was an alpha-sprayer. You know what they are, I suppose?”

  Baley nodded. He needed neither dictionary nor handbook to be told what an alpha-sprayer was. He had handled several in his lab courses in physics: a head-alloy casing with a narrow pit dug into it longitudinally, at the bottom of which was a fragment of a plutonium salt. The pit was capped with a shiver of mica, which was transparent to alpha particles. In that one direction, hard radiation sprayed out.

  An alpha-sprayer had many uses, but killing robots was not one of them, not a legal one, at least.

  Baley said, “He held it to his head mica first, I take it.”

  Dr. Gerrigel said, “Yes, and his positronic brain paths were immediately randomized. Instant death, so to speak.”

  Baley turned to the pale Commissioner. “No mistake? It really was an alpha-sprayer?”

  The Commissioner nodded, his plump hips thrust out. “Absolutely. The counters could spot it ten feet away. Photographic film in the storeroom was fogged. Cut and dried.”

  He seemed to brood about it for a moment or two, then said abruptly, “Dr. Gerrigel, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in the City a day or two until we can get your evidence down on wine-film. I’ll have you escorted to a room. You don’t mind being under guard, I hope?”

  Dr. Gerrigel said nervously, “Do you think it’s necessary?”

  “It’s safer.”

  Dr. Gerrigel, seeming quite abstracted, shook hands all around, even with R. Daneel, and left.

  The Commissioner heaved a sigh. “It’s one of us, Lije. That’s what bothers me. No outsider would come into the Department just to knock off a robot. Plenty of them outside where it’s safer. And it had to be somebody who could pick up an alpha-sprayer. They’re hard to get hold of.”

  R. Daneel spoke, his cool, even voice cutting through the agitated words of the Commissioner. He said, “But what is the motive for this murder?”

  The Commissioner glanced at R. Daneel with obvious distaste, then looked away. “We’re human, too. I suppose policemen can’t get to like robots any more than anyone else can. He’s gone now and maybe it’s a relief to somebody. He used to annoy you considerably, Lije, remember?”