"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Baley, is that I'm a friend of Earth. I really am. I want what is best for it. Do you understand?" He looked at Baley and again the wolf showed in his twinkling eyes.
Baley raised his voice, forcing it between the softly running sentences of the other. "I'm afraid I cannot oblige you, Dr. Amadiro. I must be about my business and I have no further questions to ask of either you or anyone else here. If you - "
Baley paused. There was a faint and curious rumble of sound in the air. He looked up, startled. "What is that?"
"What is what?" asked Amadiro. "I sense nothing." He looked at the robots, who had been following the two human beings in grave silence. "Nothing!" he said forcefully. "Nothing."
Baley recognized that as the equivalent of an order. Neither robot could now claim to have heard the rumble in direct contradiction to a human being, unless Baley himself applied a counter-pressure - and he was sure he could not manage to do it skillfully enough in the face of Amadiro's professionalism.
Nevertheless, it didn't matter. He had heard something and he was not a robot; he would not be talked out of it. He said, "By your own statement, Dr. Amadiro, I have little time left me. That is all the more reason that I must - "
The rumble again. Louder.
Baley said, with a sharp, cutting edge to his voice, "That, I suppose, is precisely what you didn't hear before and what you don't hear now. Let me go, sir, or I will ask my robots for help."
Amadiro loosened his grip on Baley's upper arm at once. "My friend, you had but to express the wish. Come! I will take you to the nearest exit and, if ever you are on Aurora again, which seems unlikely in the extreme, please return and you may have the tour I promised you."
They were walking faster. They moved down the spiral ramp, out along a corridor to the commodious and now empty anteroom and the door by which they had entered.
The windows in the anteroom showed utterly dark. Could it be night already?
It wasn't. Amadiro muttered to himself, "Rotten weather! They've opacified the windows."
He turned to Baley, "I imagine it's raining. They predicted it and the forecasts can usually be relied on - always, when they're unpleasant."
The door opened and Baley jumped backward with a gasp. A cold wind gusted inward and against the sky - not black but a dull, dark gray - the tops of trees were whipping back and forth.
There was water pouring, from the sky - descending in streams. And as Baley watched, appalled, a streak of light flashed across the sky with blinding brilliance and then the rumble came again, this time with a cracking report, as though the light-streak had split the sky and the rumble was the noise it had made.
Baley turned and fled back the way he had come, whimpering.
Chapter 15. AGAIN DANEEL AND GISKARD
60
Baley felt Daneel's strong grip on his arms, just beneath his shoulders. He hatted and forced himself to stop making that infantile sound. He could feel himself trembling.
Daneel said with infinite respect, "Partner Elijah, it is a thunderstorm - expected - predicted - normal."
"I know that," whispered Baley.
He did know it. Thunderstorms had been described innumerable times in the books he had read, whether fiction or nonfiction. He had seen them in holographs and on hyperwave shows - sound, sight, and all.
The real thing, however, the actual sound and sight, had never penetrated into the bowels of the City and he had never in his life actually experienced such a thing.
With all he knew - intellectually - about thunderstorms, he could not face - viscerally - the actuality. Despite the descriptions, the collections of words, the sight in small pictures and in recordings on small screens, the sounds aptured despite all that, he had no idea the flashes were so bright and streaked so across the sky; that the sound was so vibratorily bass in sound when it rattled across a hollow world; that both were so sudden; and that rain could be so like an inverted bowl of water, endlessly pouring.
He muttered in despair, "I can't go out in that."
"You won't have to," said Daneel urgently. "Giskard will get the airfoil. It will be brought right to the door for you. Not a drop of rain will fall on you."
"Why not wait until it's over?"
"Surely that would not be advisable, Partner Elijah. Some rain, at least, will continue past midnight and if the Chairman arrives tomorrow morning, as Dr. Amadiro implied he might, it might be wise to spend the evening in consultation with Dr. Fastolfe."
Baley forced himself to turn around, face in the direction from which he wanted to flee, and look into Daneel's eyes. They seemed deeply concerned, but Baley thought dismally that that was merely the result of his own interpretation of the appearance of those eyes. The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)
He was somehow aware that Amadiro was gone. He said, "Amadiro delayed me deliberately - by ushering me into the Personal, by his senseless talk, by his preventing you or Giskard from interrupting and warning me about the storm. He would even have tried to persuade me to tour the building or dine with him. He desisted only at the sound of the storm. That was what he was waiting for."
"It would seem so. If the storm now keeps you here, that may be what he was waiting for."
Baley drew a deep breath. "You are right. I must leave somehow."
Reluctantly, he took a step toward the door, which was still open, still filled with a dark gray vista of whipping rain. Another step. And still another - leaning heavily on Daneel.