Isaac Asimov - The Caves of Steel

“Don’t worry about your makeup,” said Baley. “Daneel, what about the squad car?”

“It’s waiting for us now, partner Elijah.”

“Come on, Jessie.”

“Wait. Wait just a minute, Lije. I’ve got to do something to my face.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

But she twisted away. “Please. I can’t go through the common room like this. I won’t take a second.”

The man and the robot waited, the man with little jerky clenchings of his fists, the robot impassively.

Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. (If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since Medieval times, it was a woman’s purse. Even the substitution of magnetic clotures for metal clasps had not proven successful.) Jessie pulled out a small mirror and the silver-cased cosmetokit that Baley had bought her on the occasion of three birthdays before.

The cosmetokit had several orifices and she used each in turn. All but the last spray were invisible. She used them with that fineness of touch and delicacy of control that seems to be the birthright of women even at times of the greatest stress.

The base went on first in a smooth even layer that removed all shininess and roughness from the skin and left it with the faintly golden glow which long experience had taught Jessie was just the shade most suited to the natural coloring of her hair and eyes. Then the touch of tan along the forehead and chin, a gentle brush of rouge on either cheek, tracing back to the angle of the jaw; and a delicate drift of blue on the upper eyelids and along the earlobes. Finally there was the application of the smooth carmine to the lips. That involved the one visible spray, a faintly pink mist that glistened liquidly in air, but dried and deepened richly on contact with the lips.

“There,” said Jessie, with several swift pats at her hair and a look of deep dissatisfaction. “I suppose that will do.”

The process had taken more than the promised second, but less than fifteen seconds. Nevertheless, it had seemed interminable to Baley.

“Come,” he said.

She barely had time to return the cosmetokit to the purse before he had pushed her through the door.

The eerie silence of the motorway lay thick on either side.

Baley said, “All right, Jessie.”

The impassivity that had covered Jessie’s face since they first left the Commissioner’s office showed signs of cracking. She looked at her husband and at Daneel with a helpless silence.

Baley said, “Get it over with, Jessie. Please. Have you committed a crime? An actual crime?”

“A crime?” She shook her head uncertainly.

“Now hold on to yourself. No hysterics. Just say yes or no, Jessie. Have you—” he hesitated a trifle, “killed anyone?”

The look on Jessie’s face was promptly transmuted to indignation. “Why, Lije Baley!”

“Yes or no, Jessie.”

“No, of course not.”

The hard knot in Baley’s stomach softened perceptibly. “Have you stolen anything? Falsified ration data? Assaulted anyone? Destroyed property? Speak up, Jessie.”

“I haven’t done anything—anything specific. I didn’t mean anything like that.” She looked over her shoulder. “Lije, do we have to stay down here?”

“Right here until this is over. Now, start at the beginning. What did you come to tell us?” Over Jessie’s bowed head, Baley’s eyes met R. Daneel’s.

Jessie spoke in a soft voice that gained in strength and articulateness as she went on.

“It’s these people, these Medievalists; you know, Lije. They’re always around, always talking. Even in the old days when I was an assistant dietitian, it was like that. Remember Elizabeth Thornbowe? She was a Medievalist. She was always talking about how all our troubles came from the City and how things were better before the Cities started.

“I used to ask her how she was so sure that was so, especially after you and I met, Lije (remember the talks we used to have), and then she would quote from those small book-reels that are always floating around. You know, like Shame of the Cities that the fellow wrote. I don’t remember his name.”

Baley said, absently, “Ogninsky.”

“Yes, only most of them were lots worse. Then, when I married you, she was really sarcastic. She said, ‘I suppose you’re going to be a real City woman now that you’ve married a policeman.’ After that, she didn’t talk to me much and then I quit the job and that was that. Lots of things she used to say were just to shock me, I think, or to make herself look mysterious and glamorous. She was an old maid, you know; never got married till the day she died. Lots of those Medievalists don’t fit in, one way or another. Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.”

Baley remembered, and his words now sounded flip and superficial in his own ears. He said, gently, “Keep to the point, Jessie.”

She went on, “Anyway, Lizzy was always talking about how there’d come a day and people had to get together. She said it was all the fault of the Spacers because they wanted to keep Earth weak and decadent. That was one of her favorite words, ‘decadent.’ She’d look at the menus I’d prepare for the next week and sniff and say, ‘Decadent, decadent.’ Jane Myers used to imitate her in the cook room and we’d die laughing. She said, Elizabeth did, that someday we were going to break up the Cities and go back to the soil and have an accounting with the Spacers who were trying to tie us forever to the Cities by forcing robots on us. Only she never called them robots. She used to say ‘soulless monster-machines,’ if you’ll excuse the expression, Daneel.”

The robot said, “I am not aware of the significance of the adjective you used, Jessie, but in any case, the expression is excused. Please go on.”

Baley stirred restlessly. It was that way with Jessie. No emergency, H no crisis could make her tell a story in any way but her own circuitous one.

She said, “Elizabeth always tried to talk as though there were lots of people in it with her. She would say, ‘At the last meeting,’ and then stop and look at me sort of half proud and half scared as though she wanted me to ask about it so she could look important, and yet scared I might get her in trouble. Of course, I never asked her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

“Anyway, after I married you, Lije, it was all over, until—” She stopped.

“Go on, Jessie,” said Baley.

“You remember, Lije, that argument we had? About Jezebel, I mean?”

“What about it?” It took a second or two for Baley to remember that it was Jessie’s own name, and not a reference to another woman.

He turned to R. Daneel in an automatically defensive explanation.

“Jessie’s full name is Jezebel. She is not fond of it and doesn’t use it.”

R. Daneel nodded gravely and Baley thought: Jehoshaphat, why waste worry on him?

“It bothered me a lot, Lije,” Jessie said. “It really did. I guess it was silly, but I kept thinking and thinking about what you said. I mean about your saying that Jezebel was only a conservative who fought for the ways of her ancestors against the strange ways the newcomers had brought. After all, I was Jezebel and I always…”

She groped for a word and Baley supplied it. “Identified yourself?”

“Yes.” But she shook her head almost immediately and looked away. “Not really, of course. Not literally. The way I thought she was, you know. I wasn’t like that.”

“I know that, Jessie. Don’t be foolish.”

“But still I thought of her a lot and, somehow, I got to thinking, it’s just the same now as it was then. I mean, we Earth people had our old ways and here were the Spacers coming in with a lot of new ways and trying to encourage the new ways we had stumbled into ourselves and maybe the Medievalists were right. Maybe we should go back to our old, good ways. So I went back and found Elizabeth.”