Asimov's Future History Volume 4 (13 page)

“Well, who knew about it? You and I, of course, and Jessie–
and R. Sammy
. He saw her in a state of panic. When he told her that we had left orders not to be disturbed, she must have lost control. You saw the way she was when she first came in.”

R. Daneel said, “It is unlikely that she said anything incriminating to him.”

“That may be so. But I’m reconstructing the case the way they will. They’ll say she did. There’s my motive. I killed him to keep him quiet.”

“They will not think so.”

“They
will
think so. The murder was arranged deliberately in order to throw suspicion on me. Why use an alpha-sprayer? It’s a rather risky way. It’s hard to get and it can be traced. I think that those were the very reasons it
was
used. The murderer even ordered R. Sammy to go into the photographic supply room and kill himself there. It seems obvious to me that the reason for that was to have the method of murder unmistakable. Even if everyone was so infantile as not to recognize the alpha-sprayer immediately, someone would be bound to notice fogged photographic film in fairly short order.”

“How does that all relate to you, Elijah?”

Bailey grinned tightly, his long face completely devoid of humor. “Very neatly. The alpha-sprayer was taken from the Williamsburg power plant. You and I passed through the Williamsburg power plant yesterday. We were seen, and the fact will come out. That gives me opportunity to get the weapon as well as motive for the crime. And it may turn out that we were the last ones to see or hear R. Sammy alive, except for the real murderer, of course.”

“I was with you in the power plant and I can testify that you did not have the opportunity to steal an alpha-sprayer.”

“Thanks,” said Baley sadly, “but you’re a robot and your testimony will be invalid.”

“The Commissioner is your friend. He will listen.”

“The Commissioner has a job to keep, and he already is a bit uneasy about me. There’s only one chance of saving myself from this very nasty situation.”

“Yes?”

“I ask myself,
why
am I being framed? Obviously to get rid of me. But why? Again obviously, because I am dangerous to someone. I am doing my best to be dangerous to whoever killed Dr. Sarton in Spacetown. That might mean the Medievalists, of course, or at least, the inner group among them. It would be this inner group that would know I had passed through the power plant; at least one of them might have followed me along the strips that far, even though you thought we had lost them.

“So the chances are that if I find the murderer of Dr. Sarton, I find the man or men who are trying to get me out of the way. If I think it through, if I crack the case, if I can only crack it, I’ll be safe. And Jessie. I couldn’t stand to have her... But I don’t have much time.” His fist clenched and unclenched spasmodically. “I don’t have much time.”

Baley looked at R. Daneel’s chiseled face with a sudden burning hope. Whatever the creature was, he was strong and faithful, animated by no selfishness. What more could you ask of any friend? Baley needed a friend and he was in no mood to cavil at the fact that a gear replaced a blood vessel in this particular one.

But R. Daneel was shaking his head.

The robot said, “I am sorry, Elijah”–there was no trace of sorrow on his face, of course–” but I anticipated none of this. Perhaps my action was to your harm. I am sorry if the general good requires that.”

“What general good?” stammered Baley.

“I have been in communication with Dr. Fastolfe.”

“Jehoshaphat! When?”

“While you were eating.”

Baley’s lips tightened.

“Well?” he managed to say. “What happened?”

“You will have to clear yourself of suspicion of the murder of R. Sammy through some means other than the investigation of the murder of my designer, Dr. Sarton. Our people at Spacetown, as a result of my information, have decided to bring that investigation to an end, as of today, and to begin plans for leaving Spacetown and Earth.”

17: Conclusion of a Project

B
ALEY
LOOKED
AT
his watch with something approaching detachment. It was 21:45. In two and a quarter hours it would be midnight. He had been awake since before six and had been under tension now for two and a half days. A vague sense of unreality pervaded everything.

He kept his voice painfully steady as he reached for his pipe and for the little bag that held his precious crumbs of tobacco. He said, “What’s it all about, Daneel?”

R. Daneel said, “Do you not understand? Is it not obvious?”

Baley said, patiently, “I do not understand. It is not obvious.”

“We are here,” said the robot, “and by we, I mean our people at Spacetown, to break the shell surrounding Earth and force its people into new expansion and colonization.”

“I know that. Please don’t labor the point.”

“I must, since it is the essential one. If we were anxious to exact punishment for the murder of Dr. Sarton, it was not that in doing so we expected to bring Dr. Sarton back to life, you understand; it was only that failure to do so would strengthen the position of our home planet politicians who are against the very idea of Spacetown.”

“But now,” said Baley, with sudden violence, “you say you’re getting ready to go home of your own accord. Why? In heaven’s name, why? The answer to the Sarton case is close. It
must
be close or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to blast me out of the investigation. I have a feeling I have all the facts I need to work out the answer. It must be in here somewhere.” He knuckled his temple wildly. “A sentence might bring it out. A word.”

He clenched his eyes fiercely shut, as though the quivering opaque jelly of the last sixty hours were indeed on the point of clarifying and becoming transparent. But it did not. It did not.

Baley drew a shuddering breath and felt ashamed. He was making a weak spectacle of himself before a cold and unimpressed machine that could only stare at him silently.

He said harshly, “Well, never mind that. Why are the Spacers breaking off?”

The robot said, “Our project is concluded. We are satisfied that Earth will colonize.”

“You’ve switched to optimism then?” The plain-clothes man drew in his first calming puff of tobacco smoke and felt his grip upon his own emotions grow firmer.

“I have. For a long time now, we of Spacetown have tried to change Earth by changing its economy. We have tried to introduce our own C/Fe culture. Your planetary and various City governments co-operated with us because it was expedient to do so. Still, in twenty-five years, we have failed. The harder we tried, the stronger the opposing party of the Medievalists grew.”

“I know all this,” said Baley. He thought: No use. He’s got to tell this in his own way, like a field recording. He yelled silently at R. Daneel:
Machine!

R. Daneel went on, “It was Dr. Sarton who first theorized that we must reverse our tactics. We must first find a segment of Earth’s population that desired what we desired or could be persuaded to do so. By encouraging and helping them, we could make the movement a native one rather than a foreign one. The difficulty was in finding the native element best suited for our purposes. You, yourself, Elijah, were an interesting experiment.”

“I?
I?
What do you mean?” demanded Baley.

“We were glad your Commissioner recommended you. From your psychic profile we judged you to be a useful specimen. Cerebroanalysis, a process I conducted upon you as soon as I met you, confirmed our judgment. You are a practical man, Elijah. You do not moon romantically oven Earth’s past, despite your healthy interest in it. Nor do you stubbornly embrace the City culture of Earth’s present day. We felt that people such as yourself were the ones that could lead Earthmen to the stars once more. It was one reason Dr. Fastolfe was anxious to see you yesterday morning.

“To be sure, your practical nature was embarrassingly intense. You refused to understand that the fanatical service of an ideal, even a mistaken ideal, could make a man do things quite beyond his ordinary capacity, as, for instance, crossing open country at night to destroy someone he considered an archenemy of his cause. We were not overly surprised, therefore, that you were stubborn enough and daring enough to attempt to prove the murder a fraud. In a way, it proved you were the man we wanted for our experiment.”

“For God’s sake, what experiment?” Baley brought his fist down on the table.

“The experiment of persuading you that colonization was the answer to Earth’s problems.”

“Well, I was persuaded. I’ll grant you that.”

“Yes, under the influence of the appropriate drug.”

Baley’s teeth loosened their grip on his pipestem. He caught the pipe as it fell. Once again, he was seeing that scene in the Spacetown dome. Himself swimming back to awareness after the shock of learning that R. Daneel was a robot after all; R. Daneel’s smooth fingers pinching up the flesh of his arm; a hypo-shiver standing out darkly under his skin and then fading away.

He said, chokingly, “What was in the hypo-shiver?”

“Nothing that need alarm you, Elijah. It was a mild drug intended only to make your mind more receptive.”

“And so I believed whatever was told me. Is that it?”

“Not quite. You would not believe anything that was foreign to the basic pattern of your thought. In fact, the results of the experiment were disappointing. Dr. Fastolfe had hoped you would become fanatical and single-minded on the subject. Instead you became rather distantly approving, no more. Your practical nature stood in the way of anything further. It made us realize that our only hope was the romantics after all, and the romantics, unfortunately, were all Medievalists, actual or potential.”

Baley felt incongruously proud of himself, glad of his stubbornness, and happy that he had disappointed them. Let them experiment with someone else.

He grinned savagely. “And so now you’ve given up and are going home?”

“Why, that is not it. I said a few moments ago that we were satisfied Earth would colonize. It was you that gave us the answer.”

“
I
gave it to you? How?”

“You spoke to Francis Clousarr of the advantages of colonization. You spoke rather fervently, I judge. At least our experiment on you had
that
result. And Clousarr’s cerebroanalytic properties changed. Very subtly, to be sure, but they changed.”

“You mean I convinced him that I was right? I don’t believe that.”

“No, conviction does not come that easily. But the cerebroanalytic changes demonstrated conclusively that the Medievalist mind is
open
to that sort of conviction. I experimented further myself. When leaving Yeast-town, guessing what might have happened between you two from his cerebric changes, I made the proposition of a school for emigrants as a way of insuring his children’s future. He rejected that, but again his aura changed, and it seemed to me quite obvious that it was the proper method of attack.”

R. Daneel paused, then spoke on.

“The thing called Medievalism shows a craving for pioneering. To be sure, the direction in which that craving turns itself is toward Earth itself, which is near and which has the precedent of a great past. But the vision of worlds beyond is a similar something and the romantic can turn to it easily, just as Clousarr felt the attraction as a result of one lecture from you.

“So you see, we of Spacetown had already succeeded without knowing it. We ourselves, rather than anything we tried to introduce, were the unsettling factor. We crystallized the romantic impulses on Earth into Medievahism and induced an organization in them. After all, it is the Medievalist who wishes to break the cake of custom, not the City officials who have most to gain from preserving the
status quo
. If we leave Spacetown now, if we do not irritate the Medievalist by our continued presence until he has committed himself to Earth, and only Earth, past redemption, if we leave behind a few obscure individuals or robots such as myself who, together with sympathetic Earthmen such as yourself, can establish the training schools for emigrants that I spoke of, the Medievalist will eventually turn away from Earth. He will need robots and will either get them from us or build his own. He will develop a C/Fe culture to suit himself.”

It was a long speech for R. Daneel. He must have realized that himself, for, after another pause, he said, “I tell you all this to explain why it is necessary to do something that may hurt you.”

Baley thought bitterly: A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human being’s ultimate good after all.

Baley said, “Just a minute. Let me introduce a practical note. You’ll go back to your worlds and say that an Earthman killed a Spacer and is unpunished. The Outer Worlds will demand an indemnity from Earth, and I warn you, Earth is no longer in a mood to endure such treatment. There will be trouble.”

“I am sure that will not happen, Elijah. The elements on our planets that would be most interested in pressing for an indemnity would be also most interested in forcing an end to Spacetown. We can easily offer the latter as an inducement to abandon the former. It is what we plan to do, anyway. Earth will be left in peace.”

And Baley broke out, his voice hoarse with sudden despair, “And where does that leave me? The Commissioner will drop the Sarton investigation at once if Spacetown is willing, but the R. Sammy thing will have to continue, since it points to corruption inside the Department. He’ll be in any minute with a ream of evidence against me. I know that. It’s been arranged. I’ll be declassified, Daneel. There’s Jessie to consider. She’ll be smeared as a criminal. There’s Bentley–”

R. Daneel said, “You must not think, Elijah, that I do not understand the position in which you find yourself. In the service of humanity’s good, the minor wrongs must be tolerated. Dr. Sarton has a surviving wife, two children, parents, a sister, many friends. All must grieve at his death and be saddened at the thought that his murderer has not been found and punished.”