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Elijah Baley, Plainclothes Officer C-5, has something of a gait he takes up: in those moments of lowered vigilance, in which the prosecuted mind and allegiant body has stilled in its paranoiac fantasy, ceases inventing gazes on the throat or judgments on the posture; when he is happy and striving, in rare moments of expansiveness and high-color, and also in great distress; in times of great clarity, when, by necessity, from himself nothing can be demanded but himself. In his adult life particularly, none have noticed this odd, half-loping stride, the head forward on the jutting stalk of his neck--he becomes like a predatory insect.
Yet, today, two such noticers. Daneel follows him with quiet, charged intentfulness, a sort of sanctimonious wholeness in his movement, step and step, heel-to-toe and the contact with the linoleum against the plastic sole of his loafer is a condescension of a god to the earth, the pity earned and the pity returned with none escaped.
He stalks behind this strange, warm-bodied creature, seeped in the encephalographic color of its fear, and thus fearing himself, on its behalf: in him a little urticative fritzing of the positronics. And he stalks, and he watches, intently, everywhere, all over, as if he is one of those creatures whose experience could be so threatened by degradation. He can’t help but apply his entire attention to this immediacy, trading eternalities, exercising, quietly, and quite automatically, unconsciously, a judgment of value. His partner.
Elijah crosses the room with a singular concentration, a singular presence, and, suspended wholly in his orbit, Daneel goes, too.
And so Simpson leans back a bit from the booth of his cubicle, leveraging his chair on the backmost half of its coil to raise his vantage as the pair passes. Bronze-haired, blue-eyed, and blazing with his holy light--that concentration!--the transplant is a marvel beneath steel, nearly to the point of perturbation.
He has no business among the droll, uncommitted color of their precinct, a man living among the dead, shining in those clean, crisp clothes, without any sign of wear or mark of private style; a transplant not only to humming, drafty New York, but to the submission of living, to its grind and wear, fresh-bodied, fresh-souled. His slender jaw and lithe hands, broad shoulders and narrow hips, conjoin with all these traits, producing a startlingly handsome young archetype that is just a touch too effeminate to be really favored by women.
It seems that wouldn’t trouble him too badly, with the way his head tips, jaw a little low and temple forward, fixated on Lije Baley.
Now, Baley’s not a bad guy by any means--never been much more than totally politic to him. It wouldn’t be overly generous to describe him as genial at times, but much rests upon that qualification. He’s, well, Lije Baley: notoriously coarse, so that it nearly becomes surly, at once sincere and difficult to talk to, hard to like, and hard to be liked by, though easy enough to get along with. Nothing about him would inspire the attention of their impeccable transplant. He watches this still-faced Olivaw, watching Baley, watching Baley with an obsessiveness that indicates he wants to touch him--or worse--and a queasy, incredulous smile spreads his lips.
The seal on the office door is imperfect. This by design: the murmur of live bodies and live minds keeps Enderby alert, and applies a bidirectional psychological pressure; by knowledge that outside the door there are men who depend upon him, and men who answer to him, and thus, he is not them. And because his identification card and his correspondent recordings in the social registry sport such-and-such a signifier--and, in suit, because he is himself, his shutter is raised, and the city gleams at him in wet resignation, and there’s a wash of talk flowing from all about, but mostly from beneath the door, that rumbling quality of men’s voices like rising water.
He crosses the room, and, very slowly, thus very quietly, depresses the handle, inserts the toe of his shoe in the door to keep it propped.
As if triggering a contact on the wall of the personal, his eyes nearly water at the bluster of hot air wafting against them. Simpson’s voice rings loud, laughter surging up around it, over which that intelligible speech filters.
“How old must he be? I’d bet no older than…” Enderby’s mind supplies him the sound of the man swallowing, though he’s much too far, much too obstructed, “--thirty-two?”
His interlocutor snorts, “Baley must have been thirty-two before steel.” (Enderby was in academy with the man. Without realizing, he goggles a little on his behalf. They’re not that old, surely not that age after vitality and before austerity.)
“Hey now, hey now. Show some respect.”
“Bahh. But really, where’s he from? Jakarta? Didn’t realize they made ‘em like that on little ol’ Earth.”
“Now that you say it, he does have that look about him, doesn’t he? Like a Spacer.”
They all stop speaking, and it seems only Enderby breathes long, slightly rattling breath. They’ve violated a taboo, they’ve earned some visitation, if only in the form of a submental chill. Slowly, the blood trickles upwards into Enderby’s head with its peculiar sound, perhaps like that of rain . Of course, they laugh again, one and then the next, the sound of it frayed by overlap as they join in their yelping chorus.
“Don’t think they make Spacers with those big ol’ puppy-dog eyes.”
And they laugh again, with that edge of nerve searing the sound. What in the world could be funny about it?
“Do you think--I’ve just never imagined…”--now a little giggling, have these men no shame?--“Does he notice?”
They rise to the bait, each with their own conjecture, that Baley couldn’t see his way out of a handbag when he’s focused on a case, that Baley is leading the kid on with the intent of crushing him or otherwise instructing him, that the man is not in fact expressing any uncouth interest, but is on directive to watch Baley… Each thing more specious than the last, tickled by the flex of their own imagination, the want for an external intrigue to validate the importance of their lives. He’s going to be sick.
How insidious, how terrible, how willing people are to believe their own fantasies! These men beneath these miles of insulative metal having lost touch with their sensitivities to the human soul--being tricked by a puppet! He is horrified and repulsed, this feeling emanating from him radially and identifying all things equally as its object: in not quite these terms, he hates Spacers, he hates their machines, and he hates men, whatever-they-may-be.
The door closes sharply enough to suspend conversation. For a moment the men stand there, baffled, on the verge of flushing, as if whirled on their heels by that sharp-edged click of the strike plate, thrilled by some sudden draft. Some retire, and some begin the conversation anew, the hum of humanity resuming.
Julius Enderby sinks into the half-enclosing arch of his chair, his knees pressed together, his thighs tense, stomach roiling. His head is buzzing, buzzing into a white-fizzle of quiet. He covers his eyes with his cold hands and, in tipping his head back, exposes his throat. Righteousness mute, guilt speaks, and from the quiet erupts a plaintive voice; his own, pleading mercy!