Asimov's Future History Volume 4 Read Online Free

constriction and there would be time for the quick, prepared fadeaway along the side passage or the unobtrusive step onto an escalating localway that would move them to a higher level and disappearance.
    Baley felt trapped. There were probably others waiting outside. Baley and R. Daneel were to be followed to a proper point and the fuse would be set off.
    R. Daneel said, “Why not arrest them?”
    “That would only start the trouble sooner. You know their faces, don’t you? You won’t forget?”
    “I am not capable of forgetting.”
    “Then we’ll nab them another time. For now, we’ll break their net. Follow me. Do exactly as I do.”
    He rose, turned his dish carefully upside down, centering it on the movable disc from below which it had risen. He put his fork back in its recess. R. Daneel, watching, matched his action. The dishes and utensils dropped out of sight.
    R. Daneel said, “They are getting up, too.”
    “All right. It’s my feeling they won’t get too close. Not here.”
    The two moved into line now, drifting toward an exit where the click-click-click of the tags sounded ritualistically, each click recording the expenditure of a ration unit.
    Baley looked back through the steamy haze and the noise and, with incongruous sharpness, thought of a visit to the City Zoo with Ben six or seven years ago. No, eight, because Ben had just passed his eighth birthday then. (Jehoshaphat! Where did the time go?)
    It had been Ben’s first visit and he had been excited. After all, he had never actually seen a cat or a dog before. Then, on top of that, there was the bird cage! Even Baley himself, who had seen it a dozen times before, was not immune to its fascination.
    There is something about the first sight of living objects hurtling through air that is incomparably startling. It was feeding time in the sparrow cage and an attendant was dumping cracked oats into a long trough (human beings had grown used to yeast substitutes, but animals, more conservative in their way, insisted on real grain).
    The sparrows flocked down in what seemed like hundreds. Wing to wing, with an ear-splitting twitter, they lined the trough.
    That was it; that was the picture that came to Baley’s mind as he looked back at the kitchen he was leaving. Sparrows at the trough. The thought repelled him.
    He thought: Jehoshaphat, there must be a better way .
    But what better way? What was wrong with this way? It had never bothered him before.
    He said abruptly to R. Daneel, “Ready, Daneel?”
    “I am ready, Elijah.”
    They left the kitchen and escape was now clearly and flatly up to Baley.
     
    There is a game that youngsters know called “running the strips.” Its rules vary in trivial fashion from City to City, but its essentials are eternal. A boy from San Francisco can join the game in Cairo with no trouble.
    Its object is to get from point A to point B via the City’s rapid transit system in such a way that the “leader” manages to lose as many of his followers as possible. A leader who arrives at the destination alone is skillful indeed, as is a follower who refuses to be shaken.
    The game is usually conducted during the evening rush hour when the increased density of the commuters makes it at once more hazardous and more complicated. The leader sets off, running up and down the accelerating strips. He does his best to do the unexpected, remaining standing on a given strip as long as possible, then leaping off suddenly in either direction. He will run quickly through several strips, then remain waiting once more.
    Pity the follower who incautiously careens forward one strip too far. Before he has caught his mistake, unless he is extraordinarily nimble, he has driven past the leader or fallen behind. The clever leader will compound the error by moving quickly in the appropriate direction.
    A move designed to increase the complexity of the task tenfold involves boarding the localways or the expressways themselves, and hurtling off