Isaac Asimov - Robot 2 - The Caves Of Steel

THE CAVES OF STEEL

Isaac Asimov

VERSION 1.2 (DEC 2002) Proofed and formatted by <Bibliophile>. Undecipherable, dubious, or

missing text has been enclosed in brackets […].

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is

purely coincidental.

COPYRIGHT, 1953, 1954,

BY ISAAC ASIMOV

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

TO MY WIFE, GERTRUDE,

AND MY SON, DAVID

Contents

Chapter 1

..............................................................................................................................................4

Chapter 2............................................................................................................................................

11

Chapter 3............................................................................................................................................

18

Chapter 4............................................................................................................................................

23

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Chapter 5............................................................................................................................................

31

Chapter 6............................................................................................................................................

38

Chapter 7............................................................................................................................................

43

Chapter 8............................................................................................................................................

51

Chapter 9............................................................................................................................................

58

Chapter 10..........................................................................................................................................

66

Chapter 11..........................................................................................................................................

74

Chapter 12..........................................................................................................................................

81

Chapter 13..........................................................................................................................................

89

Chapter 14..........................................................................................................................................

98

Chapter 15........................................................................................................................................

106

Chapter 16........................................................................................................................................

113

Chapter 17........................................................................................................................................

121

Chapter 18........................................................................................................................................

127

Chapter 1

CONVERSATION WITH A COMMISSIONER

Lije Baley had just reached his desk when he became aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly.

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The dour lines of his long face hardened. “What do you want?”

“The boss wants you, Lije. Right away. Soon as you come in.”

“All right.”

R. Sammy stood there blankly.

Baley said, “I said, all right. Go away!”

R. Sammy turned on his heel and left to go about his duties. Baley wondered irritably why those same

duties couldn’t be done by a man.

He paused to examine the contents of his tobacco pouch and make a mental calculation. At two pipefuls

a day, he could stretch it to next quota day.

Then he stepped out from behind his railing (he’d rated a railed corner two years ago) and walked the

length of the common room.

Simpson looked up from a merc-pool file as he passed. “Boss wants you, Lije.”

“I know. R. Sammy told me.”

A closely coded tape reeled out of the merc-pool’s vitals as the small instrument searched and analyzed

its “memory” for the desired information stored in the tiny vibration patterns of the gleaming mercury

surface within.

“I’d kick R. Sammy’s behind if I weren’t afraid I’d break a leg,” said Simpson. “I saw Vince Barrett the

other day.”

“Oh?”

“He was looking for his job back. Or any job in the Department. The poor kid’s desperate, but what

could I tell him. R. Sammy’s doing his job and that’s all. The kid has to work a delivery tread on the

yeast farms now. He was a bright boy, too. Everyone liked him.”

Baley shrugged and said in a manner stiffer than he intended or felt, “It’s a thing we’re all living through.”

The boss rated a private office. It said JULIUS ENDERBY on the clouded glass. Nice letters. Carefully

etched into the fabric of the glass. Underneath, it said COMMISSIONER OF POLICE, CITY OF

NEW YORK.

Baley stepped in and said, “You want to see me, Commissioner?”

Enderby looked up. He wore spectacles because his eyes were sensitive and couldn’t take the usual

contact lenses. It was only after one got used to the sight of them that one could take in the rest of the

face, which was quite undistinguished. Baley had a strong notion that the Commissioner valued his glasses

for the personality they lent him and suspected that his eyeballs weren’t as sensitive as all that.

The Commissioner looked definitely nervous. He straightened his cuffs, leaned back, and said, too

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heartily, “Sit down, Lije. Sit down.”

Baley sat down stiffly and waited.

Enderby said, “[…]?”

[…], said Baley, […]

“Fine,” echoed Enderby. “Just fine.”

It had been a false start.

Baley thought: Something’s wrong with his face.

Aloud, he said, “Commissioner, I wish you wouldn’t send R. Sammy out after me.”

“Well, you know how I feel about those things, Lije. But he’s been put here and I’ve got to use him for

something.”

“It’s uncomfortable, Commissioner. He tells me you want me and then he stands there. You know what

I mean. I have to tell him to go or he just keeps on standing there.”

“Oh, that’s my fault, Lije. I gave him the message to deliver and forgot to tell him specifically to get back

to his job when he was through.”

Baley sighed. The fine wrinkles about his intensely brown eyes grew more pronounced. “Anyway, you

wanted to see me.”

“Yes, Lije,” said the Commissioner, “but not for anything easy.”

He stood up turned away, and walked [to] the wall behind his desk.

The Commissioner smiled. “I had this arranged specially last year, Lije. I don’t think I’ve showed it to

you before. Come over here and take a look. In the old days, all rooms had things like this. They were

called ‘windows.’ Did you know that?”

Baley knew that very well, having viewed many historical novels.

“I’ve heard of them,” he said.

“Come here.”

Baley squirmed a bit, but did as he was told. There was something indecent about the exposure of the

privacy of a room to the outside world. Sometimes the Commissioner carried his affectation of

Medievalism to a rather foolish extreme.

Like his glasses, Baley thought.

That was it! That was what made him look wrong!

Baley said, “Pardon me, Commissioner, but you’re wearing new glasses, aren’t you?”

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The Commissioner stared at him in mild surprise, took off his glasses, looked at them and then at Baley.

Without his glasses, his round face seemed rounder and his chin a trifle more pronounced. He looked

vaguer, too, as his eyes failed to focus properly.

He said, “Yes.”

He put his glasses back on his nose, then added with real anger, “I broke my old ones three days ago.

What with one thing or another I wasn’t able to replace them till this morning. Lije, those three days were

hell.”

“On account of the glasses?”

“And other things, too. I’m getting to that.”

He turned to the window and so did Baley. With mild shock, Baley realized it was raining. For a minute,

he was lost in the spectacle of water dropping from the sky, while the Commissioner exuded a kind of

pride as though the phenomenon were a matter of his own arranging.

“This is the third time this month I’ve watched it rain. Quite a sight, don’t you think?”

Against his will, Baley had to admit to himself that it was impressive. [In] his forty-two years he had

rarely seen rain, or any of the phenomena at nature, for that matter.

He said, “It always seems a waste for all that water to come down on the city. It should restrict itself to

the reservoirs.”

“Lije,” said the Commissioner, “you’re a modernist. That’s your trouble. In Medieval times, people lived

in the open. I don’t mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained,

they didn’t think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature. It’s healthier, better. The

troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. Read up on the Coal Century,

sometimes.”

Baley had. He had heard many people moaning about the invention of the atomic pile. He moaned about

it himself when things went wrong, or when he got tired. Moaning like that was a built-in facet of human

nature. Back in the Coal Century, people moaned about the invention of the steam engine. In one of

Shakespeare’s plays, a character moaned about the invention of gunpowder. A thousand years in the

future, they’d be moaning about the invention of the positronic brain.

The hell with it.

He said, grimly, “Look, Julius.” (It wasn’t his habit to get friendly with the Commissioner during office

hours, however many ‘Lijes’ the Commissioner threw at him, but something special seemed called for

here.) “Look, Julius, you’re talking about everything except what I came in here for, and it’s worrying

me. What is it?”

The Commissioner said, “I’ll get to it, Lije. Let me do it my way. It’s--it’s trouble.”

“Sure. What isn’t on this planet? More trouble with the R’s?”

“In a way, yes, Lije. I stand here and wonder how much more trouble the old world can take. “When I

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put in this window, I wasn’t just letting in the sky once in a while. I let in the City. I look at it and I

wonder what will become of it in another century.”

Baley felt repelled by the other’s sentimentality, but he found himself staring outward in fascination. Even

dimmed by the weather, the City was a tremendous thing to see. The Police Department was in the upper

levels of City Hall, and City Hall reached high. From the Commissioner’s window, the neighboring

towers fell short and the tops were visible. They were so many fingers, groping upward. Their walls were

blank, featureless. They were the outer shells of human hives.

“In a way,” said the Commissioner, “I’m sorry it’s raining. We can’t see Spacetown.”

Baley looked westward, but it was as the Commissioner said. The horizon closed down. New York’s

towers grew misty and came to an end against blank whiteness.

“I know what Spacetown is like,” said Baley.

“I like the picture from here,” said the Commissioner. “It can just be made out in the gap between the

two Brunswick Sectors. Low domes spread out. It’s the difference between us and the Spacers. We

reach high and crowd close. With them, each family has a dome for itself. One family: one house. And

land between each dome. Have you ever spoken to any of the Spacers, Lije?”

“A few times. About a month ago, I spoke to one right here on your intercom,” Baley said, patiently.

“Yes, I remember. But then, I’m just getting philosophical. We and they. Different ways of life.”

Baley’s stomach was beginning to constrict a little. The more devious the Commissioner’s approach, the

deadlier he thought might be the conclusion.

He said, “All right. But what’s so surprising about it? You can’t spread eight billion people over Earth in

little domes. They’ve got space on their worlds, so let them live their way.”

The Commissioner walked to his chair and sat down. His eyes looked unblinkingly at Baley, shrunken a

bit by the concave lenses in his spectacles. He said, “Not everyone is that tolerant about differences in

culture. Either among us or among the Spacers.”

“All right. So what?”

“So three days ago, a Spacer died.”

Now it was coming. The corners of Baley’s thin lips raised a trifle, but the effect upon his long, sad face

was unnoticeable. He said, “Too bad. Something contagious, I hope. A virus. A cold, perhaps.”

The Commissioner looked startled, “What are you talking about?” Baley didn’t care to explain. The

precision with which the Spacers had bred disease out of their societies was well known. The care with

which they avoided, as far as possible, contact with disease-riddled Earthmen was even better known.

But then, sarcasm was lost on the Commissioner.

Baley said, “I’m just talking. What did he die of?” He turned back to the window.

The Commissioner said, “He died of a missing chest. Someone had used a blaster on him.”

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Baley’s back grew rigid. He said, without turning, “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about murder,” said the Commissioner, softly. “You’re a plain-clothes man. You know what

murder is.”

And now Baley turned. “But a Spacer! Three days ago?”

“Yes.”

“But who did it? How?”

“The Spacers say it was an Earthman.”

“It can’t be.”

“Why not? You don’t like the Spacers. I don’t. Who on Earth does? Someone didn’t like them a little

too much, that’s all.”

“Sure, but--”

“There was the fire at the Los Angeles factories. There was the Berlin R-smashing. There were the riots

in Shanghai.”

“All right.”

“It all points to rising discontent. Maybe to some sort of organization.”

Baley said, “Commissioner, I don’t get this. Are you testing me for some reason?”

“What?” The Commissioner looked honestly bewildered.

Baley watched him. “Three days ago a Spacer was murdered and the Spacers think the murderer is an

Earthman. Till now,” his finger tapped the desk, “nothing’s come out. Is that right? Commissioner, that’s

unbelievable. Jehoshaphat, Commissioner, a thing like this would blow New York off the face of the

planet if it really happened.”

The Commissioner shook his head. “It’s not as simple as that. Look, Lije, I’ve been out three days. I’ve

been in conference with the Mayor. I’ve been out to Spacetown. I’ve been down in Washington, talking

to the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation.”

“Oh? And what do the Terries have to say?”

“They say it’s our baby. It’s inside city limits. Spacetown is under New York jurisdiction.”

“But with extraterritorial rights.”

“I know. I’m coming to that.” The Commissioner’s eyes fell away from Baley’s flinty stare. He seemed

to regard himself as having been suddenly demoted to the position of Baley’s underling, and Baley

behaved as though he accepted the fact.

“The Spacers can run the show,” said Baley.

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“Wait a minute, Lije,” pleaded the Commissioner. “Don’t rush me. I’m trying to talk this over, friend to

friend. I want you to know my position. I was there when the news broke. I had an appointment with

him--with Roj Nemennuh Sarton.”

“The victim?”

“The victim.” The Commissioner groaned. “Five minutes more and I, myself, would have discovered the

body. What a shock that would have been. As it was, it was brutal, brutal. They met me and told me. It

started a three-day nightmare, Lije. That on top of having everything blur on me and having no time to

replace my glasses for days. That won’t happen again, at least. I’ve ordered three pairs.”

Baley considered the picture he conjured up of the event. He could see the tall, fair figures of the

Spacers approaching the Commissioner with the news and breaking it to him in their unvarnished

emotionless way. Julius would remove his glasses and polish them. Inevitably, under the impact of the

event, he would drop them, then look down at the broken remnants with a quiver of his soft, full lips.

Baley was quite certain that, for five minutes anyway, the Commissioner was much more disturbed over

his glasses than over the murder.

The Commissioner was saying, “It’s a devil of a position. As you say, the Spacers have extraterritorial

rights. They can insist on their own investigation, make whatever report they wish to their home

governments. The Outer Worlds could use this as an excuse to pile on indemnity charges. You know

how that would sit with the population.”

“It would be political suicide for the White House to agree to pay.”

“And another kind of suicide not to pay.”

“You don’t have to draw me a picture,” said Baley. He had been a small boy when the gleaming cruisers

from outer space last sent down their soldiers into Washington, New York, and Moscow to collect what

they claimed was theirs.

“Then you see. Pay or not pay, it’s trouble. The only way out is to find the murderer on our own and

hand him over to the Spacers. It’s up to us.”

“Why not give it to the TBI? Even if it is our jurisdiction from a legalistic viewpoint, there’s the question

of interstellar relations--”

“The TBI won’t touch it. This is hot and it’s in our lap.” For a moment, he lifted his head and gazed

keenly at his subordinate. “And it’s not good, Lije. Every one of us stands the chance of being out of a

job.”

Baley said, “Replace us all? Nuts. The trained men to do it with don’t exist.”

“R’s,” said the Commissioner. “They exist.”

“What?”

“R. Sammy is just a beginning. He runs errands. Others can patrol the expressways. Damn it, man, I

know the Spacers better than you do, and I know what they’re doing. There are R’s that can do your

work and mine. We can be declassified. Don’t think differently. And at our age, to hit the labor pool ...”

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Baley said, gruffly, “All right.”

The Commissioner looked abashed. “Sorry, Lije.”

Baley nodded and tried not to think of his father. The Commissioner knew the story, of course.

Baley said, “When did all this replacement business come up?”

“Look, you’re being naive, Lije. It’s been happening all along. It’s been happening for twenty-five years,

ever since the Spacers came. You know that. It’s just beginning to reach higher, that’s all. If we muff this

case, it’s a big, long step toward the point where we can stop looking forward to collecting our

pension-tab booklets. On the other hand, Lije, if we handle the matter well, it can shove that point far

into the future. And it would be a particular break for you.”

“For me?” said Baley.

“You’ll be the operative in charge, Lije.”

“I don’t rate it, Commissioner. I’m a C-5, that’s all.”

“You want a C-6 rating, don’t you?”

Did he? Baley knew the privileges a C-6 rating carried. A seat on the expressway in the rush hour, not

just from ten to four. Higher up on the list-of-choice at the Section kitchens. Maybe even a chance at a

better apartment and a quota ticket to the Solarium levels for Jessie.

“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

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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?”

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Isaac Asimov - Robot 2 - The Caves Of Steel

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