The Caves of Steel

He thought wonderingly: The City smells.

He thought of the twenty million human beings crammed into the steel walls of the great cave and for the first time in his life he smelled them with nostrils that had been washed clean by outdoor air.

He thought: Would it be different on another world? Less people and more air-cleaner?

But the afternoon roar of the City was all around them, the smell faded and was gone, and he felt a little ashamed of himself.

He let the drive rod in slowly and tapped a larger share of the beamed power. The squad car accelerated sharply as it slanted down into the empty motorway.

“Daneel,” he said.

“Yes, Elijah.”

“Why was Dr. Fastolfe telling me all he did?”

“It seems probable to me, Elijah, that he wished to impress you with the importance of the investigation. We are not here just to solve a murder, but to save Spacetown and with it, the future of the human race.”

Baley said dryly, “I think he’d have been better off if he’d let me see the scene of the crime and interview the men who first found the body.”

“I doubt if you could have added anything, Elijah. We have been quite thorough.”

“Have you? You’ve got nothing. Not a clue. Not a suspect.”

“No, you are right. The answer must be in the City. To be accurate, though, we did have one suspect.”

“What? You said nothing of this before.”

“I did not feel it to be necessary, Elijah. Surely it is obvious to you that one suspect automatically existed.”

“Who? In the devil’s name, who?”

“The one Earthman who was on the scene. Commissioner Julius Enderby.”

Chapter 10.

AFTERNOON OF A PLAIN-CLOTHES MAN

The squad car veered to one side, halted against the impersonal concrete wall of the motorway. With the humming of its motor stopped, the silence was dead and thick.

Baley looked at the robot next to him and said in an incongruously quiet voice, “What?”

Time stretched while Baley waited for an answer. A small and lonesome vibration rose and reached a minor peak, then faded. It was the sound of another squad car, boring its way past them on some unknown errand, perhaps a mile away. Or else it was a fire car hurrying along toward its own appointment with combustion.

A detached portion of Baley’s mind wondered if any one man any longer knew all the motorways that twisted about in New York City’s bowels. At no time in the day or night could the entire motorway system be completely empty, and yet there must be individual passages that no man had entered in years. With sudden, devastating clarity, he remembered a short story he had viewed as a youngster.

It concerned the motorways of London and began, quietly enough, with a murder. The murderer fled toward a prearranged hideout in the corner of a motorway in whose dust his own shoeprints had been the only disturbance for a century. In that abandoned hole, he could wait in complete safety till the search died.

But he took a wrong turning and in the silence and loneness of those twisting corridors he swore a mad and blaspheming oath that, in spite of the Trinity and all the saints, he would yet reach his haven. From that time on, no turning was right. He wandered through an unending maze from the Brighton Sector on the Cha

Sometimes he heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast he rushed (for he would gladly have given himself up by then) the corridors he reached were always empty. Sometimes he saw an exit far ahead that would lead to the City’s life and breath, but it always glimmered further away as he approached until he would turn-and it would be gone.

Occasionally, Londoners on official business through the underground would see a misty figure limping silently toward them, a semitransparent arm lifted in pleading, a mouth open and moving, but soundless. As it approached, it would waver and vanish.

It was a story that hid lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore. The “Wandering Londoner” had become a familiar phrase to all the world.

In the depths of New York City, Baley remembered the story and stirred uneasily.

R. Daneel spoke and there was a small echo to his voice. He said, “We may be overheard.”

“Down here? Not a chance. Now what about the Commissioner?”

“He was on the scene, Elijah. He is a City dweller. He was inevitably a suspect.”

“Was! Is he still a suspect?”

“No. His i

“Was the murder weapon found at all, by the way?”

“No, Elijah. Every blaster in Spacetown was checked and none had been fired for weeks. A check of the radiation chambers was quite conclusive.”

“Then whoever had committed the murder had either hidden the weapon so well—”

“It could not have been hidden anywhere in Spacetown. We were quite thorough.”

Baley said impatiently, “I’m trying to consider all possibilities. It was either hidden or it was carried away by the murderer when he left.”

“Exactly.”

“And if you admit only the second possibility, then the Commissioner is cleared.”

“Yes. As a precaution, of course, he was cerebroanalyzed.”

“What?”

“By cerebroanalysis, I mean the interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells.”

“Oh,” said Baley, unenlightened. “And what does that tell you?”

“It gives us information concerning the temperamental and emotional makeup of an individual. In the case of Commissioner Enderby, it told us that he was incapable of killing Dr. Sarton. Quite incapable.”

“No,” agreed Baley. “He isn’t the type. I could have told you that.”

“It is better to have objective information. Naturally, all our people in Spacetown allowed themselves to be cerebroanalyzed as well.”

“All incapable, I suppose.”

“No question. It is why we know that the murderer must be a City dweller.”

“Well, then, all we have to do is pass the whole City under your cute little process.”

“It would not be very practical, Elijah. There might be millions temperamentally capable of the deed.”

“Millions,” grunted Baley, thinking of the crowds of that long ago day who had screamed at the dirty Spacers, and of the threatening and slobbering crowds outside the shoe store the night before.

He thought: Poor Julius. A suspect!

He could hear the Commissioner’s voice describing the period after the discovery of the body: “It was brutal, brutal.” No wonder he broke his glasses in shock and dismay. No wonder he did not want to return to Spacetown. “I hate them,” he had ground out between his teeth..

Poor Julius. The man who could handle Spacers. The man whose greatest value to the City lay in his ability to get along with them. How much did that contribute to his rapid promotions?

No wonder the Commissioner had wanted Baley to take over. Good old loyal, close-mouthed Baley. College chum! He would keep quiet if he found out about that little incident. Baley wondered how cerebroanalysis was carried out. He imagined huge electrodes, busy pantographs skidding inklines across graphed paper, self-adjusting gears clicking into place now and then.

Poor Julius. If his state of mind were as appalled as it almost had a right to be, he might already be seeing himself at the end of his career with a forced letter of resignation in the hands of the Mayor.