Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov [56]
There is no one so uncomfortable, thought Baley, as the man eating out-of-Section. Be it ever so humble, the old saying went, there’s no place like home-kitchen. Even the food tastes better, no matter how many chemists are ready to swear it to be no different from the food in Johannesburg.
He sat down on a stool and R. Daneel sat down next to him.
“No free choice,” said Baley, with a wave of his fingers, “so just close the switch there and wait.”
It took two minutes. A disc slid back in the table top and a dish lifted.
“Mashed potatoes, zymoveal sauce, and stewed apricots. Oh, well,” said Baley.
A fork and two slices of whole yeast bread appeared in a recess just in front of the low railing that went down the long center of the table.
R. Daneel said in a low voice, “You may help yourself to my serving, if you wish.”
For a moment, Baley was scandalized. Then he remembered and mumbled, “That’s bad manners. Go on. Eat.”
Baley ate industriously but without the relaxation that allows complete enjoyment. Carefully, he flicked an occasional glance at R. Daneel. The robot ate with precise motions of his jaws. Too precise. It didn’t look quite natural.
Strange! Now that Baley knew for a fact that R. Daneel was in truth a robot, all sorts of little items showed up clearly. For instance, there was no movement of an Adam’s apple when R. Daneel swallowed.
Yet he didn’t much mind so much. Was he getting used to the creature? Suppose people started afresh on a new world (how that ran through his mind ever since D. Fastolfe had put it there); suppose Bentley, for instance, were to leave Earth; could he get so he didn’t mind working and living alongside robots? Why not? The Spacers themselves did it.
R. Daneel said, “Elijah, is it bad manners to watch another man while he is eating?”
“If you mean stare directly at him, of course. That’s only common sense, isn’t it? A man has a right to his privacy. Ordinary conversation is entirely in order, but you don’t peer at a man while he’s swallowing.”
“I see. Why is it then that I count eight people watching us closely, very closely?”
Baley put down his fork. He looked about as though he were searching for the salt-pinch dispenser. “I see nothing out of the ordinary.”
But he said it without conviction. The mob of diners was only a vast conglomeration of chaos to him. And when R. Daneel turned his impersonal brown eyes upon him, Baley suspected uncomfortably that those were not eyes he saw, but scanners capable of noting, with photographic accuracy and in split seconds of time, the entire panorama.
“I am quite certain,” said R. Daneel, calmly.
“Well, then, what of it? It’s crude behavior, but what does it prove?”
“I cannot say, Elijah, but is it coincidence that six of the watchers were in the crowd outside the shoe store last night?”
11.
ESCAPE ALONG THE STRIPS
Baley’s grip tightened convulsively on his fork. “Are you sure?” he asked automatically, and as he said it, he realized the uselessness of the question. You don’t ask a computer if it is sure of the answer it disgorges; not even a computer with arms and legs.
R. Daneel said, “Quite!”
“Are they close to us?”
“Not very. They are scattered.”
“All right, then.” Baley returned to his meal, his fork moving mechanically. Behind the frown on his long face, his mind worked furiously.
Suppose the incident last night had been organized by a group of anti-robot fanatics, that it had not been the spontaneous trouble it had seemed. Such a group of agitators could easily include men who had studied robots with the intensity born of deep opposition. One of them might have recognized R. Daneel for what he was. (The Commissioner had suggested that, in a way. Damn it, there were surprising depths to that man.)
It worked itself out logically. Granting they had been unable to act in an organized manner on the spur of last evening’s moment, they would still have been able to plan for the future. If they could recognize a robot such as R. Daneel, they could