Asimov's Future History Volume 4 Read Online Free Page A

the other side. It is bad form to avoid them completely and also bad form to linger on them.
    The attraction of the game is not easy for an adult to understand, particularly for an adult who has never himself been a teen-age striprunner. The players are roughly treated by legitimate travelers into whose path they find themselves inevitably flying. They are persecuted bitterly by the police and punished by their parents. They are denounced in the schools and on the subetherics. No year passes without its four or five teen-agers killed at the game, its dozens hurt, its cases of innocent bystanders meeting tragedy of varying degree.
    Yet nothing can be done to wipe out the strip-running gangs. The greater the danger, the more the strip-runners have that most valuable of all prizes, honor in the eyes of their fellows. A successful one may well swagger; a well-known leader is cock-of-the-walk.
    Elijah Baley, for instance, remembered with satisfaction even now that he had been a strip-runner once. He had led a gang of twenty from the Concourse Sector to the borders of Queens, crossing three expressways. In two tireless and relentless hours, he had shaken off some of the most agile followers of the Bronx, and arrived at the destination point alone. They talked about that run for months.
    Baley was in his forties now, of course. He hadn’t run the strips for over twenty years, but he remembered some of the tricks. What he had lost in agility, he made up in another respect. He was a policeman. No one but another policeman as experienced as himself could possibly know the City as well, know where almost every metal-bordered alley began and ended.
    He walked away from the kitchen briskly, but not too rapidly. Each moment he expected the cry of “Robot, robot” to ring out behind him. That initial set of moments was the riskiest. He counted the steps until he felt the first accelerating strip moving under him.
    He stopped for a moment, while R. Daneel moved smoothly up beside him.
    “Are they still behind us, Daneel?” asked Baley in a whisper.
    “Yes. They’re moving closer.”
    “That won’t last,” said Baley confidently. He looked at the strips stretching to either side, with their human cargo whipping to his left more and more rapidly as their distance from him increased. He had felt the strips beneath his feet many times a day almost all the days of his life, but he had not bent his knees in anticipation of running them in seven thousand days and more. He felt the old familiar thrill and his breath grew more rapid.
    He quite forgot the one time he had caught Ben at the game. He had lectured him interminably and threatened to have him put under police surveillance.
    Lightly, quickly, at double the “safe” rate, he went up the strips. He leaned forward sharply against the acceleration. The localway was humming past. For a moment, it looked as though he would mount, but suddenly he was fading backward, backward, dodging through the crowd to left and right as it thickened on the slower strips.
    He stopped, and let himself be carried along at a mere fifteen miles an hour.
    “How many are with us, Daneel?”
    “Only one, Elijah.” The robot was at his side, unruffled, unbreathing.
    “He must have been a good one in his day, too, but he won’t last either.”
    Full of self-confidence, he felt a half-remembered sensation of his younger days. It consisted partly of the feeling of immersion in a mystic rite to which others did not belong, partly of the purely physical sensation of wind against hair and face, partly of a tenuous sense of danger.
    “They call this the side shuffle,” he said to R. Daneel in a low voice.
    His long stride ate distance, but he moved along a single strip, dodging the legitimate crowd with a minimum of effort. He kept it up, moving always closer to the strip’s edge, until the steady movement of his head through the crowd must have been hypnotic in its constant velocity–as it was intended to