“Like a murder, eh? Is that it? You’ll admit it would have to be a pretended murder. You won’t suggest, I hope, that we’d really kill one of ourselves for the sake of an incident.”
“You built a robot to look like Dr. Sarton, blasted the robot, and showed the remains to Commissioner Enderby.”
“And then,” said Dr. Fastolfe, “having used R. Daneel to impersonate Dr. Sarton in the false murder, we have to use Dr. Sarton to impersonate R. Daneel in the false investigation of the false murder.”
“Exactly. I am telling you this in the presence of a witness who is not here in the flesh and whom you cannot blast out of existence and who is important enough to be believed by the City government and by Washington itself. We will be prepared for you and we know what your intentions are. If necessary, our government will report directly to your people, expose the situation for exactly what it is. I doubt if this sort of interstellar rape will be tolerated.”
Fastolfe shook his head. “Please, Mr. Baley, you are being unreasonable. Really, you have the most astonishing notions. Suppose now, just quietly suppose, that R. Daneel is really R. Daneel. Suppose he is actually a robot. Wouldn’t it follow that the corpse Commissioner Enderby saw was really Dr. Sarton? It would be scarcely reasonable to believe that the corpse were still another robot. Commissioner Enderby witnessed R. Daneel under construction and can vouch for the fact that only one existed.”
“If it comes to that,” said Baley, stubbornly, “the Commissioner is not a robotics expert. You might have had a dozen such robots.”
“Stick to the point, Mr. Baley. What if R. Daneel is really R. Daneel? Would not the entire structure of your reasoning fall to the ground? Would you have any further basis for your belief in this completely melodramatic and implausible interstellar plot you have constructed?”
“If he is a robot! I say he is human.”
“Yet you haven’t really investigated the problem, Mr. Baley,” said Fastolfe. “To differentiate a robot, even a very humanoid robot, from a human being, it isn’t necessary to make elaborately shaky deductions from little things he says and does. For instance, have you tried sticking a pin into R. Daneel?”
“What?” Baley’s mouth fell open.
“It’s a simple experiment. There are others perhaps not quite so simple. His skin and hair look real, but have you tried looking at them under adequate magnification. Then again, he seems to breathe, particularly when he is using air to talk, but have you noticed that his breathing is irregular, that minutes may go by during which he has no breath at all. You might even have trapped some of his expired air and measured the carbon dioxide content. You might have tried to draw a sample of blood. You might have tried to detect a pulse in his wrist, or a heartbeat under his shirt. Do you see what I mean, Mr. Baley?”
“That’s just talk,” said Baley, uneasily. “I’m not going to be bluffed. I might have tried any of those things, but do you suppose this alleged robot would have let me bring a hypodermic to him, or a stethoscope or a microscope?”
“Of course. I see your point,” said Fastolfe. He looked at R. Daneel and gestured slightly.
R. Daneel touched the cuff of his right shirt sleeve and the diamagnetic seam fell apart the entire length of his arm. A smooth, sinewy, and apparently entirely human limb lay exposed. Its short, bronze hairs, both in quantity and distribution, were exactly what one would expect of a human being.
Baley said, “So?”
R. Daneel pinched the ball of his right middle finger with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Exactly what the details of the manipulation that followed were, Baley could not see.
But, just as the fabric of the sleeve had fallen in two when the diamagnetic field of its seam had been interrupted, so now the arm itself fell in two.
There, under a thin layer of fleshlike material, was the dull blue gray of stainless steel rods, cords, and joints.
“Would you care to examine Daneel’s workings more closely, Mr. Baley?” asked Dr. Fastolfe politely.
Baley could scarcely hear the remark for the buzzing in his ears and for the sudden jarring of the Commissioner’s high-pitched and hysterical laughter.
Chapter 9.
ELUCIDATION BY A SPACER
The minutes passed and the buzzing grew louder and drowned out the laughter. The dome and all it contained wavered and Baley’s time sense wavered, too.
At least, he found himself sitting in an unchanged position but with a definite feeling of lost time. The Commissioner was gone; the trimensic receiver was milky and opaque; and R. Daneel sat at his side, pinching up the skin of Baley’s bared upper arm. Baley could see, just beneath the skin, the small thin darkness of a hypo-sliver. It vanished as he watched, soaking and spreading away into the intercellular fluid, from that into the blood stream and the neighboring cells, from that into all the cells of his body.
His grip on reality heightened.
“Do you feel better, partner Elijah?” asked R. Daneel.
Baley did. He pulled at his arm and the robot let him take it away. He rolled down his sleeve and looked about. Dr. Fastolfe sat where he had been, a small smile softening the homeliness of his face.
Baley said, “Did I black out?”
Dr. Fastolfe said, “In a way, yes. You received a sizable shock, I’m afraid.”
It came back to Baley quite clearly. He seized R. Daneel’s nearer arm quickly, forcing up the sleeve as far as it would go, exposing the wrist. The robot’s flesh felt soft to his fingers, but underneath was the hardness of something more than bone.
R. Daneel let his arm rest easily in the plain-clothes man’s grip. Baley stared at it, pinching the skin along the median line. Was there a faint seam?
It was logical, of course, that there should be. A robot, covered with synthetic skin, and deliberately made to look human, could not be repaired in the ordinary fashion. A chest plate could not be unriveted for the purpose. A skull could not be hinged up and outward. Instead, the various parts of the mechanical body would have to be put together along a line of micromagnetic fields. An arm, a head, an entire body, must fall in two at the proper touch, then come together again at a contrary touch.
Baley looked up. “Where’s the Commissioner?” he mumbled, hot with mortification.
“Pressing business,” said Dr. Fastolfe. “I encouraged him to leave, I’m afraid. I assured him we would take care of you.”
“You’ve taken care of me quite nicely already, thank you,” said Baley, grimly. “I think our business is done.”
He lifted himself erect on tired joints. He felt an old man, very suddenly. Too old to start over again. He needed no deep insight to foresee that future.
The Commissioner would be half frightened and half furious. He would face Baley whitely, taking his glasses off to wipe them every fifteen seconds. His soft voice (Julius Enderby almost never shouted) would explain carefully that the Spacers had been mortally offended.
“You can’t talk to Spacers that way, Lije. They won’t take it.” (Baley could hear Enderby’s voice very plainly down to the finest shade of intonation.) “I warned you. No saying how much damage you’ve done. I can see your point, mind you. I see what you were trying to do. If they were Earthmen, it would be different. I’d say yes, chance it. Run the risk. Smoke them out. But Spacers! You might have told me, Lije. You might have consulted me. I know them. I know them inside and out.”
And what would Baley be able to say? That Enderby was exactly the man he couldn’t tell. That the project was one of tremendous risk and Enderby a man of tremendous caution. That it had been Enderby himself who had pointed up the supreme dangers of either outright failure or of the wrong kind of success. That the one way of defeating declassification was to show that guilt lay in Spacetown itself…