"Yes, Elijah."
"Why was Dr. Fastolfe telling me all he did?"
"It seems probable to me, Elijah, that he wished to impress you with the importance of the investigation. We are not here just to solve a murder, but to save Spacetown and with it, the future of the human race."
Baley said dryly, "I think he'd have been better off if he'd let me see the scene of the crime and interview the men who first found the body."
"I doubt if you could have added anything, Elijah. We have been quite thorough."
"Have you? You've got nothing. Not a clue. Not a suspect."
"No, you are right. The answer must be in the City. To be accurate, though, we did have one suspect."
"What? You said nothing of this before."
"I did not feel it to be necessary, Elijah. Surely it is obvious to you that one suspect automatically existed."
"Who? In the devil's name, who?"
"The one Earthman who was on the scene. Commissioner Julius Enderby."
Chapter 10. AFTERNOON OF A PLAIN-CLOTHES MAN
The squad car veered to one side, halted against the impersonal concrete wall of the motorway. With the humming of its motor stopped, the silence was dead and thick.
Baley looked at the robot next to him and said in an incongruously quiet voice, "What?"
Time stretched while Baley waited for an answer. A small and lonesome vibration rose and reached a minor peak, then faded. It was the sound of another squad car, boring its way past them on some unknown errand, perhaps a mile away. Or else it was a fire car hurrying along toward its own appointment with combustion.
A detached portion of Baley's mind wondered if any one man any longer knew all the motorways that twisted about in New York City's bowels. At no time in the day or night could the entire motorway system be completely empty, and yet there must be individual passages that no man had entered in years. With sudden, devastating clarity, he remembered a short story he had viewed as a youngster.
It concerned the motorways of London and began, quietly enough, with a murder. The murderer fled toward a prearranged hideout in the corner of a motorway in whose dust his own shoeprints had been the only disturbance for a century. In that abandoned hole, he could wait in complete safety till the search died.
But he took a wrong turning and in the silence and loneness of those twisting corridors he swore a mad and blaspheming oath that, in spite of the Trinity and all the saints, he would yet reach his haven. From that time on, no turning was right. He wandered through an unending maze from the Brighton Sector on the Channel to Norwich and from Coventry to Canterbury. He burrowed endlessly beneath the great City of London from end to end of its sprawl across the southeastern corner of Medieval England. His clothes were rags and his shoes ribbons, his strength wore down but never left him. He was tired, tired, but unable to stop. He could only go on and on with only wrong turnings ahead of him.
Sometimes he heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast he rushed (for he would gladly have given himself up by then) the corridors he reached were always empty. Sometimes he saw an exit far ahead that would lead to the City's life and breath, but it always glimmered further away as he approached until he would turn-and it would be gone.
Occasionally, Londoners on official business through the underground would see a misty figure limping silently toward them, a semitransparent arm lifted in pleading, a mouth open and moving, but soundless. As it approached, it would waver and vanish.
It was a story that hid lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore. The "Wandering Londoner" had become a familiar phrase to all the world.
In the depths of New York City, Baley remembered the story and stirred uneasily.
R. Daneel spoke and there was a small echo to his voice. He said, "We may be overheard."
"Down here? Not a chance. Now what about the Commissioner?"
"He was on the scene, Elijah. He is a City dweller. He was inevitably a suspect."
"Was! Is he still a suspect?"
"No. His innocence was quickly established. For one thing, there was no blaster in his possession. There could not very well be one. He had entered Spacetown in the usual fashion; that was quite certain; and, as you know, blasters are removed as a matter of course."
"Was the murder weapon found at all, by the way?"
"No, Elijah. Every blaster in Spacetown was checked and none had been fired for weeks. A check of the radiation chambers was quite conclusive."
"Then whoever had committed the murder had either hidden the weapon so well - "
"It could not have been hidden anywhere in Spacetown. We were quite thorough."
Baley said impatiently, "I'm trying to consider all possibilities. It was either hidden or it was carried away by the murderer when he left."
"Exactly."
"And if you admit only the second possibility, then the Commissioner is cleared."
"Yes. As a precaution, of course, he was cerebroanalyzed."
"What?"
"By cerebroanalysis, I mean the interpretation of the electromagnetic fields of the living brain cells."
"Oh," said Baley, unenlightened. "And what does that tell you?"
"It gives us information concerning the temperamental and emotional makeup of an individual. In the case of Commissioner Enderby, it told us that he was incapable of killing Dr. Sarton. Quite incapable."
"No," agreed Baley. "He isn't the type. I could have told you that."
"It is better to have objective information. Naturally, all our people in Spacetown allowed themselves to be cerebroanalyzed as well."