The Caves of Steel

“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 i

“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.”

Chapter 17.

CONCLUSION OF A PROJECT

Baley 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 over 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 stubbor