Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire

“Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. There are so many other threads, each valuable, each contributing—!”

Baley stopped speaking, but Daneel waited patiently.

Baley’s eyes opened and, looking at Daneel, he frowned slightly.

“You are still here? It is time for you to go. I have told you what I meant to tell you.”

“I do not wish to go, Partner Elijah.”

“You must. I cannot hold off death any longer. I am tired—desperately tired. I want to die. It is time.”

“May I not wait while you live?”

“I don’t wish it. If I die while you watch, it may affect you badly despite all my words. Go now. That is an order. I will allow you to be a robot if you wish but, in that case, you must follow my orders. You cannot save my life by anything you can do, so there is nothing to come ahead of Second Law. Go!”

Baley’s finger pointed feebly and he said, “Good-bye, friend Daneel.”

Daneel turned slowly, following Baley’s orders with unprecedented difficulty “Good-bye, Partner—” He paused and then said, with a faint hoarseness, “Good-bye, friend Elijah.”

Bentley confronted Daneel in the next room. “Is he still alive?”

“He was alive when I left.”

Bentley went in and came out almost at once. “He isn’t now. He saw you and then—let go.”

Daneel found he had to lean against the wall. It was some time before he could stand upright.

Bentley, eyes averted, waited and—then together they returned to the small ship and moved back up into orbit where Gladia waited.

And she, too, asked if Elijah Baley was still-alive and when they told her gently that he was not, she turned away, dry-eyed, and went into her own cabin to weep.

Daneel continued his thought as though the sharp memory of Baley’s death in all its details had not momentarily intervened. “And yet I may understand something more of what Partner Elijah was saying now in the light of Madam Gladia’s speech.

“In what way?”

“I am not yet sure. It is very difficult to think in the direction—I am trying to think.”

“I will wait for as long as is necessary,” said Giskard.

Genovus Pandaral was tall and not, as yet, very old for all his thick shock of white hair which, together with his fluffy white sideburns, gave him a look of dignity and distinction. His general air of looking like a leader had helped his advancement through the ranks, but as he himself knew very well, his appearance was much stronger than his inner fiber.

Once he had been elected to the Directory, he had gotten over the initial elation rather rapidly. He was in beyond his depth and, each year, as he was automatically pushed up a notch, he knew that more clearly. Now he was Senior Director.

Of all the times to be Senior Director!

In the old days, the task of ruling had been nothing. In the time of Nephi Morler, eight decades before, the same Morler who was always being held up to the schoolchildren as the greatest of all Directors, it had been nothing. What had Baleyworld been then? A small world, a trickle of farms, a handful of towns clustered along natural lines of communication. The total population had been no more than five million and its most important exports had been raw wood and some titanium.

The Spacers had ignored them completely under the more or less benign influence of Han Fastolfe of Aurora and life was simple. People could always make trips back to Earth—if they wanted a breath of culture or the feel of technology—and there was a steady flow of Earthpeople arriving as immigrants. Earth’s mighty population was inexhaustible.

Why shouldn’t Morler have been a great Director, then? He had had nothing to do.

And, in the future, ruling would again be simple. As the Spacers continued to degenerate (every schoolchild was told that they would, that they must drown in the contradictions of their society—though Pandaral wondered, sometimes, whether this was really certain) and as the Settlers continued to increase in numbers and strength, the time would soon come when life would be again secure. The Settlers would live in peace and develop their own technology to the utmost.

As Baleyworld filled, it would assume the proportion and ways of another Earth, as would all the worlds, while new ones would spring up here and there in ever greater numbers, finally making up the great Galactic Empire to come. And surely Baleyworld, as the oldest and most populous of the Settler worlds, would always have a prime place in that Empire, under the benign and perpetual rule of Mother Earth.

But it was not in the past that Pandaral was Senior Director. Nor was it in the future. It was now.

Han Fastolfe was dead, now, but Kelden Amadiro was alive. Amadiro had held out against Earth being allowed to send out Settlers twenty decades ago and he was still alive now to make trouble. The Spacers were still too strong to be disregarded; the Settlers were still not quite strong enough to move forward with confidence. Somehow the Settlers had to hold off the Spacers till the balance had shifted sufficiently.

And the task of keeping the Spacers quiet and the Settlers at once resolute and yet sensible fell more upon Pandaral’s shoulders than on anyone else’s—and it was a task he neither liked nor wanted.

Now it was morning, a cold, gray morning with more snow coming—though that was no surprise—and he made his way through the hotel alone. He wanted no retinue.

The security guards, out in force, snapped to attention as he passed and he acknowledged them wearily. He spoke to the captain of the—guard when the latter advanced to meet him. “Any trouble, Captain?”

“None, Director. All is quiet.”

Pandaral nodded. “In which room has Baley been put?—Ah.—And the Spacer woman and her robots are under strict guard?—Good.”

He passed on. On the whole, D.G. had behaved well. Solaria, abandoned, could be used by Traders as an almost endless supply of robots and as a source of large profits though profits were not to be taken as the natural equivalent of world security, Pandaral thought morosely. But Solaria, booby-trapped, had best be left alone. It was not worth a war. D.G. had done well to leave at once.

And to take the nuclear intensifier with him. So far, such devices were so overwhelmingly massive that they could be used only in huge and expensive installations designed to destroy invading ships—and even these had never gotten beyond the planning stage. Too expensive. Smaller and cheaper versions were absolutely necessary, so D.G. was right in feeling that bringing home a Solarian intensifier was more important than all the robots on that world put together. That intensifier should help the scientists of Baleyworld enormously.

And yet if one Spacer world had a portable intensifier, why not others? Why not Aurora? If those weapons grew small enough to place on warships, a Spacer fleet could wipe out any number of Settler ships without trouble. How far toward that development were they? And how fast could Baleyworld progress in the same direction with the help of the intensifier D.G. had brought back?

He signaled at D.G.’s hotel room door, then entered without quite waiting for a response and sat down without quite waiting for an invitation. There were some useful perquisites that went along with being Senior Director…

D.G. looked out of the bathroom and said through the towel with which he was giving his hair a first dry, “I would have liked to greet your Directorial Excellence in a properly imposing manner, but you catch me at a disadvantage, since I am in the extremely undignified predicament of having just emerged from my shower.”