Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov [82]
“Maybe,” said Clousarr slowly, “but it’s just about the end of my shift. How about tomorrow?”
“Lots of hours between now and tomorrow. Let’s make it now.” Baley opened his wallet and palmed it at the yeast farmer.
But Clousarr’s hands did not waver in their somber wiping motions. He said, coolly, “I don’t know the system in the Police Department, but around here you get tight eating hours with no leeway. I eat at 17:00 to 17:45, or I don’t eat.”
“It’s all right,” said Baley. “I’ll arrange to have your supper brought to you.”
“Well, well,” said Clousarr, joylessly. “Just like an aristocrat, or a C-class copper. What’s next? Private bath?”
“You just answer questions, Clousarr,” said Baley, “and save your big jokes for your girl friend. Where can we talk?”
“If you want to talk, how about the balance room? Suit yourself about that. Me, I’ve got nothing to say.”
Baley thumbed Clousarr into the balance room. It was square and antiseptically white, air-conditioned independently of the larger room (and more efficiently), and with its walls lined with delicate electronic balances, glassed off and manipulable by field forces only. Baley had used cheaper models in his college days. One make, which he recognized, could weigh a mere billion atoms.
Clousarr said, “I don’t expect anyone will be in here for a while.”
Baley grunted, then turned to Daneel and said, “Would you step out and have a meal sent up here? And if you don’t mind, wait outside for it.”
He watched R. Daneel leave, then said to Clousarr, “You’re a chemist?”
“I’m a zymologist, if you don’t mind.”
“What’s the difference?”
Clousarr looked lofty. “A chemist is a soup-pusher, a stink-operator. A zymologist is a man who helps keep a few billion people alive. I’m a yeast-culture specialist.”
“All right,” said Baley.
But Clousarr went on, “This laboratory keeps New York Yeast going. There isn’t one day, not one damned hour, that we haven’t got cultures of every strain of yeast in the company growing in our kettles. We check and adjust the food factor requirements. We make sure it’s breeding true. We twist the genetics, start the new strains and weed them out, sort out their properties and mold them again.
“When New Yorkers started getting strawberries out of season a couple of years back, those weren’t strawberries, fella. Those were a special high-sugar yeast culture with truebred color and just a dash of flavor additive. It was developed right here in this room.
“Twenty years ago Saccharomyces olei Benedictae was just a scrub strain with a lousy taste of tallow and good for nothing. It still tastes of tallow, but its fat content has been pushed up from 15 per cent to 87 per cent. If you used the expressway today, just remember that it’s greased strictly with 5. O. Benedictae, Strain AG-7. Developed right here in this room.
“So don’t call me a chemist. I’m a zymologist.”
Despite himself, Baley retreated before the fierce pride of the other.
He said abruptly, “Where were you last night between the hours of eighteen and twenty?”
Clousarr shrugged. “Walking. I like to take a little walk after dinner.”
“You visit friends? Or a subetheric?”
“No. Just walked.”
Baley’s lips tightened. A visit to the subetherics would have involved a notch in Clousarr’s ration plack. A meeting with a friend would have involved naming a man or woman, and a cross check. “No one saw you, then?”
“Maybe someone did. I don’t know. Not that I know of, though.”
“What about the night before last?”
“Same thing.”
“You have no alibi then for either night?”
“If I had done anything criminal, Officer, I’d have one. What do I need an alibi for?”
Baley didn’t answer. He consulted his little book. “You were up before the magistrate once. Inciting a riot.”
“All right. One of the R things pushed past me and I tripped him up. Is that inciting to riot?”
“The courts thought so. You were convicted and fined.”
“That ends it, doesn’t it? Or do you want to fine me again?”
“Night before last, there was a near riot at a shoe department in the Bronx. You were seen there.