Isaac Asimov - The Robots of Dawn

“We will discuss it later, Daneel. I am still not certain as to whether this room is bugged or not.”

Baley was by now quite done. He said, “Well, Daneel, I’ve been leisurely about this; I haven’t rushed at all. Now I’m ready to go out again and I wonder if Amadiro is still waiting for us after all this time or whether he has delegated an underling to do the rest of the job of showing us out. After all, Amadiro is a busy man, and cannot spend all day with me. What do you think, Daneel?”

“It would be more logical if Dr. Amadiro had delegated the task.”

“And you, Giskard? What do you think?”

“I agree with friend Daneel, though it is my experience that human beings do not always make what would seem the logical response.”

Baley said, “For my part, I suspect, Amadiro is waiting for us quitter patiently. If something has driven him to waste this much time on us, I rather think that the driving force—whatever it might be—has not yet weakened.”

“I do not know what might be the driving force you speak of, Partner Elijah,” said Daneel.

“Nor I, Daneel,” said Baley, “which bothers me a great deal. But let us open the door now and see.”

Amadiro was waiting outside the door for them, precisely where Baley had left him. He smiled at them, showing no sign of impatience. Baley could not resist shooting a quiet I-told-you-so glance at Daneel, who responded with bland impassivity.

Amadiro said, “I rather regretted, Mr. Baley, that you had not left Giskard outside when you entered the Personal. I might have known him in times past, when Fastolfe and I were on better terms but somehow never did. Fastolfe was my teacher once, you know.”

“Was he?” said Baley. “I didn’t know that, as a matter of fact.”

“No reason you should, unless you had been told—and, in the short time you’ve been on the planet, you can scarcely have had time to learn much in the way of this sort of trivia, I suppose.—Come now, it has occurred to me that you can scarcely think me hospitable if I do not take advantage of your being at the Institute to show you around.”

“Really,” said Baley, stiffening a bit. “I must—”

“I insist,” said Amadiro, with something of a note of the imperious entering his voice. “You arrived on Aurora yesterday morning and I doubt that you will be staying on the planet much longer. This may be the only chance you will ever have of getting a glimpse of a modern laboratory doing research work on robotics.”

He linked arms with Baley and continued to speak in familiar terms. (“Prattled” was the term that occurred to the astonished Baley.)

“You’ve washed,” said Amadiro. “You’ve taken care of your needs. There may be other roboticists here whom you will wish to question and I would welcome that, since I am determined to show I have put no barriers in your way during the short time in which you will yet be permitted to conduct your investigation. In fact, there is no reason you can’t have dinner with us.”

Giskard said, “If I may interrupt, sir—”

“You may not!” said Amadiro with unmistakable firmness and the robot fell silent.

Amadiro said, “My dear Mr. Baley, I understand these robots. Who should know them better?—Except for the unfortunate Fastolfe, of course. Giskard, I am sure, was going to remind you of some appointment, some promise, some business—and there is no point in any of that. Since the investigation is about over, I promise you, none of what he was going to remind you of will have any significance. Let us forget all such nonsense and, for a brief time, be friends.

“You must understand, my good Mr. Baley,” he went on, “that I am quite an aficionado of Earth and its culture. It is not the most popular of subjects on Aurora, but I find it fascinating. I am particularly interested in Earth’s past history, the days when it had a hundred languages and Interstellar Standard had not yet been developed.—May I compliment you, by the way, on your own handling of Interstellar?

“This way, this way,” he said, turning a corner. “We’ll be coming to the pathway-simulation room, which has its own weird beauty, and we may have a mock-up in operation. Quite symphonic, actually.—But I was talking about your handling of Interstellar. It is one of the many Auroran superstitions concerning Earth, that Earthpeople speak an all, but incomprehensible version of Interstellar. When the show about you was produced, there were many who said that the actors could not be Earthpeople because they could be understood, yet I can understand you.” He smiled as he said that.

“I’ve tried reading Shakespeare,” he continued with a confidential air, “but I can’t read him in the original, of course, and the translation is curiously flat. I can’t help but believe that the fault lies with the translation and not with Shakespeare. I do better with Dickens and Tolstoy, perhaps because that is prose, although the names of the characters are, in both cases, virtually unpronounceable to me.

“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Baley, is that I’m a friend of Earth. I really am. I want what is best for it. Do you understand?” He looked at Baley and again the wolf showed in his twinkling eyes.

Baley raised his voice, forcing it between the softly running sentences of the other. “I’m afraid I cannot oblige you, Dr. Amadiro. I must be about my business and I have no further questions to ask of either you or anyone else here. If you—”

Baley paused. There was a faint and curious rumble of sound in the air. He looked up, startled. “What is that?”

“What is what?” asked Amadiro. “I sense nothing.” He looked at the robots, who had been following the two human beings in grave silence. “Nothing!” he said forcefully. “Nothing.”

Baley recognized that as the equivalent of an order. Neither robot could now claim to have heard the rumble in direct contradiction to a human being, unless Baley himself applied a counter-pressure—and he was sure he could not manage to do it skillfully enough in the face of Amadiro’s professionalism.

Nevertheless, it didn’t matter. He had heard something and he was not a robot; he would not be talked out of it. He said, “By your own statement, Dr. Amadiro, I have little time left me. That is all the more reason that I must—”

The rumble again. Louder.

Baley said, with a sharp, cutting edge to his voice, “That, I suppose, is precisely what you didn’t hear before and what you don’t hear now. Let me go, sir, or I will ask my robots for help.”

Amadiro loosened his grip on Baley’s upper arm at once. “My friend, you had but to express the wish. Come! I will take you to the nearest exit and, if ever you are on Aurora again, which seems unlikely in the extreme, please return and you may have the tour I promised you.”

They were walking faster. They moved down the spiral ramp, out along a corridor to the commodious and now empty anteroom and the door by which they had entered.

The windows in the anteroom showed utterly dark. Could it be night already?

It wasn’t. Amadiro muttered to himself, “Rotten weather! They’ve opacified the windows.”

He turned to Baley, “I imagine it’s raining. They predicted it and the forecasts can usually be relied on—always, when they’re unpleasant.”

The door opened and Baley jumped backward with a gasp. A cold wind gusted inward and against the sky—not black but a dull, dark gray—the tops of trees were whipping back and forth.

There was water pouring, from the sky—descending in streams. And as Baley watched, appalled, a streak of light flashed across the sky with blinding brilliance and then the rumble came again, this time with a cracking report, as though the light-streak had split the sky and the rumble was the noise it had made.