The Caves of Steel (4 page)

“I want it,” he said. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I? But what would I get if I couldn’t break the case?”

“Why wouldn’t you break it, Lije?” the Commissioner wheedled. “You’re a good man. You’re one of the best we have.”

“But there are half a dozen men with higher ratings in my department section. Why should they be passed over?”

Baley did not say out loud, though his bearing implied it strongly, that the Commissioner did not move outside protocol in this fashion except in cases of wild emergency.

The Commissioner folded his hands. “Two reasons. You’re not just another detective to me, Lije. We’re friends, too. I’m not forgetting we were in college together. Sometimes it may look as though I have forgotten, but that’s the fault of rating. I’m Commissioner, and you know what that means. But I’m still your friend and this is a tremendous chance for the right person. I want you to have it.”

“That’s one reason,” said Baley, without warmth.

“The second reason is that I think you’re my friend. I need a favor.”

“What sort of favor?”

“I want you to take on a Spacer partner in this deal. That was the condition the Spacers made. They’ve agreed not to report the murder; they’ve agreed to leave the investigation in our hands. In return, they insist one of their own agents be in on the deal, the whole deal.”

“It sounds like they don’t trust us altogether.”

“Surely you see their point. If this is mishandled, a number of them will be in trouble with their own governments. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, Lije. I’m willing to believe they mean well.”

“I’m sure they do, Commissioner. That’s the trouble with them.”

The Commissioner looked blank at that, but went on. “Are you willing to take on a Spacer partner, Lije?”

“You’re asking that as a favor?”

“Yes, I’m asking you to take the job with all the conditions the Spacers have set up.”

“I’ll take a Spacer partner, Commissioner.”

“Thanks, Lije. He’ll have to live with you.”

“Oh, now, hold on.”

“I know. I know. But you’ve got a large apartment, Lije. Three rooms. Only one child. You can put him up. He’ll be no trouble. No trouble at all. And it’s necessary.”

“Jessie won’t like it. I know that.”

“You tell Jessie,” the Commissioner was earnest, so earnest that his eyes seemed to bore holes through the glass discs blocking his stare, “that if you do this for me, I’ll do what I can when this is all over to jump you a grade. C-7, Lije. C-7!”

“All right, Commissioner, it’s a deal.”

Baley half rose from his chair, caught the look on Enderby’s face, and sat down again.

“There’s something else?”

Slowly, the Commissioner nodded. “One more item.”

“Which is?”

“The name of your partner.”

“What difference does that make?”

“The Spacers,” said the Commissioner, “have peculiar ways. The partner they’re supplying isn’t—isn’t …”

Baley’s eyes opened wide. “Just a minute!”

“You’ve got to, Lije. You’ve
got
to. There’s no way out.”

“Stay at my apartment? A thing like that?”

“As a friend, please!”

“No.
No
!”

“Lije, I can’t trust anyone else in this. Do I have to spell it out for you? We’ve
got
to work with the Spacers. We’ve got to succeed, if we’re to keep the indemnity ships away from Earth. But we can’t succeed just any old way. You’ll be partnered with one of their R’s. If
he
breaks the case, if he can report that we’re incompetent, we’re ruined, anyway. We, as a department. You see that, don’t you? So you’ve got a delicate job on your hands. You’ve got to work with him, but see to it that
you
solve the case and not he. Understand?”

“You mean co-operate with him 100 per cent, except that I cut his throat? Pat him on the back with a knife in my hand?”

“What else can we do? There’s no other way out.”

Lije Baley stood irresolute. “I don’t know what Jessie will say.”

“I’ll talk to her, if you want me to.”

“No, Commissioner.” He drew a deep, sighing breath. “What’s my partner’s name?”

“R. Daneel Olivaw.”

Baley said, sadly, “This isn’t a time for euphemism, Commissioner. I’m taking the job, so let’s use his full name.
Robot
Daneel Olivaw.”

There was the usual, entirely normal crowd on the expressway: the standees on the lower level and those with seat privileges above. A continuous trickle of humanity filtered off the expressway, across the decelerating strips to localways or into the stationaries that led under arches or over bridges into the endless mazes of the City Sections. Another trickle, just as continuous, worked inward from the other side, across the accelerating strips and onto the expressway.

There were the infinite lights: the luminous walls and ceilings that seemed to drip cool, even phosphorescence; the flashing advertisements screaming for attention; the harsh, steady gleam of the “lightworms” that directed
THIS WAY TO JERSEY SECTIONS, FOLLOW ARROWS TO EAST RIVER SHUTTLE, UPPER LEVEL FOR ALL WAYS TO LONG ISLAND SECTIONS
.

Most of all there was the noise that was inseparable from life: the sound of millions talking, laughing, coughing, calling, humming, breathing.

No directions anywhere to Spacetown, thought Baley.

He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final sixty-mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.

No directions to Spacetown, he thought.

No need for directions. If you’ve business there, you know the way. If you don’t know the way, you’ve no business there. When Spacetown was first established some twenty-five years earlier, there was a strong tendency to make a showplace out of it. The hordes of the City herded in that direction.

The Spacers put a stop to that. Politely (they were always polite), but without any compromise with tact, they put up a force barrier between themselves and the City. They established a combination Immigration Service and Customs Inspection. If you had business, you identified yourself, allowed yourself to be searched, and submitted to a medical examination and a routine disinfection.

It gave rise to dissatisfaction. Naturally. More dissatisfaction than it deserved. Enough dissatisfaction to put a serious spoke in the program of modernization. Baley remembered the Barrier Riots. He had been part of the mob that had suspended itself from the rails of the expressways, crowded onto the seats in disregard of rating privileges, run recklessly along and across the strips at the risk of a broken body, and remained just outside the Spacetown barrier for two days, shouting slogans and destroying City property out of sheer frustration.

Baley could still sing the chants of the time if he
put his mind to it. There was “Man Was Born on Mother Earth, Do You Hear?” to an old folk tune with the gibberish refrain, “Hinky-dinky-parley-voo.”

There were hundreds of verses. A few were witty, most were stupid, many were obscene. Every one, however, ended with “Dirty Spacer, do you hear?” Dirty, dirty. It was the futile throwing back in the face of the Spacers their most keenly felt insult: their insistence on considering the natives of Earth as disgustingly diseased.

The Spacers didn’t leave, of course. It wasn’t even necessary for them to bring any of their offensive weapons into play. Earth’s outmoded fleet had long since learned that it was suicide to venture near any Outer World ship. Earth planes that had ventured over the Spacetown area in the very early days of its establishment had simply disappeared. At the most, a shredded wing tip might tumble down to Earth.

And no mob could be so maddened as to forget the effect of the subetheric hand disruptors used on Earthmen in the wars of a century ago.

So the Spacers sat behind their barrier, which itself was the product of their own advanced science, and that no method existed on Earth of breaking. They just waited stolidly on the other side of the barrier until the City quieted the mob with somno vapor and retch gas. The below-level penitentiaries rattled
afterward with ringleaders, malcontents, and people who had been picked up simply because they were nearest at hand. After a while they were all set free.

After a proper interval, the Spacers eased their restrictions. The barrier was removed and the City Police entrusted with the protection of Spacetown’s isolation. Most important of all, the medical examination was more unobtrusive.

Now, thought Baley, things might take a reverse trend. If the Spacers seriously thought that an Earthman had entered Spacetown and committed murder, the barrier might go up again. It would be bad.

He lifted himself onto the expressway platform, made his way through the standees to the tight spiral ramp that led to the upper level, and there sat down. He didn’t put his rating ticket in his hatband till they passed the last of the Hudson Sections. A C-5 had no seat rights east of the Hudson and west of Long Island, and although there was ample seating available at the moment, one of the way guards would have automatically ousted him. People were increasingly petty about rating privileges and, in all honesty, Baley lumped himself in with “people.”

The air made the characteristic whistling noise as it frictioned off the curved windshields set up above the back of every seat. It made talking a chore, but it was no bar to thinking when you were used to it.

Most Earthmen were Medievalists in one way or another. It was an easy thing to be when it meant looking back to a time when Earth was
the
world and not just one of fifty. The misfit one of fifty at that. Baley’s head snapped to the right at the sound of a female shriek. A woman had dropped her handbag; he saw it for an instant, a pastel pink blob against the dull gray of the strips. A passenger hurrying from the expressway
must inadvertently have kicked it in the direction of deceleration and now the owner was whirling away from her property.

A corner of Baley’s mouth quirked. She might catch up with it, if she were clever enough to hurry to a strip that moved slower still and if other feet did not kick it this way or that. He would never know whether she would or not. The scene was half a mile to the rear, already.

Chances were she wouldn’t. It had been calculated that, on the average, something was dropped on the strips every three minutes somewhere in the City and not recovered. The Lost and Found Department was a huge proposition. It was just one more complication of modern life.

Baley thought: It was simpler once. Everything was simpler. That’s what makes Medievalists.

Medievalism took different forms. To the unimaginative Julius Enderby, it meant the adoption of archaisms. Spectacles! Windows!

To Baley, it was a study of history. Particularly the history of folkways.

The City now! New York City in which he lived and had his being. Larger than any City but Los Angeles. More populous than any but Shanghai. It was only three centuries old.

To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been
called
New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn’t been a
City
.

There were no Cities then. There were just huddles of dwelling places large and small, open to the air. They were something like the Spacers’ Domes, only much different, of course. These huddles (the largest barely reached ten million in population and most
never reached one million) were scattered all over Earth by the thousands. By modern standards, they had been completely inefficient, economically.

Efficiency had been forced on Earth with increasing population. Two billion people, three billion, even five billion could be supported by the planet by progressive lowering of the standard of living. When the population reaches eight billion, however, semistarvation becomes too much like the real thing. A radical change had to take place in man’s culture, particularly when it turned out that the Outer Worlds (which had merely been Earth’s colonies a thousand years before) were tremendously serious in their immigration restrictions.

The radical change had been the gradual formation of the Cities over a thousand years of Earth’s history. Efficiency implied bigness. Even in Medieval times that had been realized, perhaps unconsciously. Home industry gave way to factories and factories to continental industries.

Think of the inefficiency of a hundred thousand houses for a hundred thousand families as compared with a hundred-thousand-unit Section; a book-film collection in each house as compared with a Section film concentrate; independent video for each family as compared with video-piping systems.