The roboticist put a hesitant hand to his chin. “That is anomalous.”
“Not at all,” said R. Daneel, suddenly. “Partner Elijah, would you look at the blaster that you took from me?”
Baley looked down upon the blaster he held cradled in his left hand.
“Break open the charge chamber,” urged R. Daneel. “Inspect it.” Baley weighed his chances, then slowly put his own blaster on the table beside him. With a quick movement, he opened the robot’s blaster.
“It’s empty,” he said, blankly.
“There is no charge in it,” agreed R. Daneel. “If you will look closer, you will see that there has never been a charge in it. The blaster has no ignition bud and cannot be used.”
Baley said, “You held an uncharged blaster on the crowd?”
“I had to have a blaster or fail in my role as plain-clothes man,” said R. Daneel. “Yet to carry a charged and usable blaster might have made it possible for me to hurt a human being by accident, a thing which is, of course, unthinkable. I would have explained this at the time, but you were angry and would not listen.”
Baley stared bleakly at the useless blaster in his hand and said in a low voice, “I think that’s all, Dr. Gerrigel. Thank you for helping out.”
Baley sent out for lunch, but when it came (yeast-nut cake and a rather extravagant slice of fried chicken on cracker) he could only stare at it.
Round and round went the currents of his mind. The lines on his long face were etched in deep gloom.
He was living in an unreal world, a cruel, topsy-turvy world.
How had it happened? The immediate past stretched behind him like a misty improbable dream dating back to the moment he had stepped into Julius Enderby’s office and found himself suddenly immersed in a nightmare of murder and robotics.
Jehoshaphat! It had begun only fifty hours before.
Persistently, he had sought the solution in Spacetown. Twice he had accused R. Daneel, once as a human being in disguise, and once as an admitted and actual robot, each time as a murderer. Twice the accusation had been bent back and broken.
He was being driven back. Against his will he was forced to turn his thoughts into the City, and since last night he dared not. Certain questions battered at his conscious mind, but he would not listen; he felt he could not. If he heard them, he couldn’t help but answer them and, oh God, he didn’t want to face the answers.
“Lije! Lije!” A hand shook Baley’s shoulder roughly.
Baley stirred and said, “What’s up, Phil?”
Philip Norris, Plain-clothes man C-5, sat down, put his hands on his knees, and leaned forward, peering at Baley’s face. “What happened to you? Been living on knockout drops lately? You were sitting there with your eyes open and, near as I could make out, you were dead.”
He rubbed his thinning, pale blond hair, and his close-set eyes appraised Baley’s cooling lunch greedily. “Chicken!” he said. “It’s getting so you can’t get it without a doctor’s prescription.”
“Take some,” said Baley, listlessly.
Decorum won out and Norris said, “Oh, well, I’m going out to eat in a minute. You keep it.—Say, what’s doing with the Commish?”
“What?”
Norris attempted a casual attitude, but his hands were restless. He said, “Go on. You know what I mean. You’ve been living with him ever since he got back. What’s up? A promotion in the works?”
Baley frowned and felt reality return somewhat at the touch of office politics. Norris had approximately his own seniority and he was bound to watch most assiduously for any sign of official preference in Baley’s direction.
Baley said, “No promotion. Believe me. It’s nothing. Nothing. And if it’s the Commissioner you’re wanting, I wish I could give him to you. Jehoshaphat! Take him!”
Norris said, “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care if you get promoted. I just mean that if you’ve got any pull with the Commish, how about using it for the kid?”
“What kid?”
There was no need of any answer to that. Vincent Barrett, the youngster who had been moved out of his job to make room for R. Sammy, was shuffling up from an unnoticed corner of the room. A skull cap turned restlessly in his hands and the skin over his high cheekbones moved as he tried to smile.
“Hello, Mr. Baley.”
“Oh, hello, Vince. How’re you doing?”
“Not so good, Mr. Baley.”
He was looking about hungrily. Baley thought: He looks lost, half dead—declassified.
Then, savagely, his lips almost moving with the force of his emotion, he thought: But what does he want from me?
He said, “I’m sorry, kid.” What else was there to say?
“I keep thinking—maybe something has turned up.”
Norris moved in close and spoke into Baley’s ear. “Someone’s got to stop this sort of thing. They’re going to move out Chenlow now.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“No, I haven’t. Damn it, he’s a C-3. He’s got ten years behind him.”
“I grant that. But a machine with legs can do his work. Who’s next?”
Young Vince Barrett was oblivious to the whispers. He said out of the depths of his own thinking, “Mr. Baley?”
“Yes, Vince?”
“You know what they say? They say Lynane Millane, the subethenics dancer, is really a robot.”
“That’s silly.”
“Is it? They say they can make robots look just like humans; with a special plastic skin, sort of.”
Baley thought guiltily of R. Daneel and found no words. He shook his head.
The boy said, “Do you suppose anyone will mind if I just walk around. It makes me feel better to see the old place.”
“Go ahead, kid.”
The youngster wandered off. Baley and Norris watched him go.
Norris said, “It looks as though the Medievalists are right.”
“You mean back to the soil? Is that it, Phil?”
“No. I mean about the robots. Back to the soil. Huh! Old Earth has an unlimited future. We don’t need robots, that’s all.”
Baley muttered, “Eight billion people and the uranium running out! What’s unlimited about it?”
“What if the uranium does run out. We’ll import it. Or we’ll discover other nuclear processes. There’s no way you can stop mankind, Lije. You’ve got to be optimistic about it and have faith in the old human brain. Our greatest resource is ingenuity and we’ll never run out of that, Lije.”
He was fairly started now. He went on, “For one thing, we can use sunpower and that’s good for billions of years. We can build space stations inside Mercury’s orbit to act as energy accumulators. We’ll transmit energy to Earth by direct beam.”
This project was not new to Baley. The speculative fringe of science had been playing with the notion for a hundred and fifty years at least. What was holding it up was the impossibility so far of projecting a beam tight enough to reach fifty million miles without dispersal to uselessness. Baley said as much.
Norris said, “When it’s necessary, it’ll be done. Why worry?”
Baley had the picture of an Earth of unlimited energy. Population could continue to increase. The yeast farms could expand, hydroponic culture intensify. Energy was the only thing indispensable. The raw minerals could be brought in from the uninhabited rocks of the System. If ever water became a bottleneck, more could be brought in from the moons of Jupiter. Hell, the oceans could be frozen and dragged out into Space where they could circle Earth as moonlets of ice. There they would be, always available for use, while the ocean bottoms would represent more land for exploitation, more room to live. Even carbon and oxygen could be maintained and increased on Earth through utilization of the methane atmosphere of Titan and the frozen oxygen of Umbriel.
Earth’s population could reach a trillion or two. Why not? There was a time when the current population of eight billion would have been viewed as impossible. There was a time when a population of a single billion would have been unthinkable. There had always been prophets of Malthusian doom in every generation since Medieval times and they had always proven wrong.