The Caves of Steel Read Free Page A

you before. Come over here and take a look. In the old days, all rooms had things like this. They were called ‘windows.’ Did you know that?”
    Baley knew that very well, having viewed many historical novels.
    “I’ve heard of them,” he said.
    “Come here.”
    Baley squirmed a bit, but did as he was told. There was something indecent about the exposure of the privacy of a room to the outside world. Sometimes the Commissioner carried his affection of Medievalism to a rather foolish extreme.
    Like his glasses, Baley thought.
    That was it! That was what made him look wrong!
    Baley said, “Pardon me, Commissioner, but you’re wearing new glasses, aren’t you?”
    The Commissioner stared at him in mild surprise, took off his glasses, looked at them and then at Baley. Without his glasses, his round face seemed rounder and his chin a trifle more pronounced. He looked vaguer, too, as his eyes failed to focus properly.
    He said, “Yes.”
    He put his glasses back on his nose, then added with real anger, “I broke my old ones three days ago. What with one thing or another I wasn’t able to replace them till this morning. Lije, those three days were hell.”
    “On account of the glasses?”
    “And other things, too. I’m getting to that.”
    He turned to the window and so did Baley. With mild shock, Baley realized it was raining. For a minute, he was lost in the spectacle of water dropping from the sky, while the Commissioner exuded a kind of pride as though the phenomenon were a matter of his own arranging.
    “This is the third time this month I’ve watched it rain. Quite a sight, don’t you think?”
    Against his will, Baley had to admit to himself that it was impressive. In his forty-two years he had rarely seen rain, or any of the phenomena of nature, for that matter.
    He said, “It always seems a waste for all that waterto come down on the city. It should restrict itself to the reservoirs.”
    “Lije,” said the Commissioner, “you’re a modernist. That’s your trouble. In Medieval times, people lived in the open. I don’t mean on the farms only. I mean in the cities, too. Even in New York. When it rained, they didn’t think of it as waste. They gloried in it. They lived close to nature. It’s healthier, better. The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature. Read up on the Coal Century, sometime.”
    Baley had. He had heard many people moaning about the invention of the atomic pile. He moaned about it himself when things went wrong, or when he got tired. Moaning like that was a built-in facet of human nature. Back in the Coal Century, people moaned about the invention of the steam engine. In one of Shakespeare’s plays, a character moaned about the invention of gunpowder. A thousand years in the future, they’d be moaning about the invention of the positronic brain.
    The hell with it.
    He said, grimly, “Look, Julius.” (It wasn’t his habit to get friendly with the Commissioner during office hours, however many ‘Lijes’ the Commissioner threw at him, but something special seemed called for here.) “Look, Julius, you’re talking about everything except what I came in here for, and it’s worrying me. What is it?”
    The Commissioner said, “I’ll get to it, Lije. Let me do it my way. It’s—it’s trouble.”
    “Sure. What isn’t on this planet? More trouble with the R’s?”
    “In a way, yes. Lije. I stand here and wonder how much more trouble the old world can take. When I put in this window, I wasn’t just letting in the sky once in awhile. I let in the City. I look at it and I wonder what will become of it in another century.”
    Baley felt repelled by the other’s sentimentality, but he found himself staring outward in fascination. Even dimmed by the weather, the City was a tremendous thing to see. The Police Department was in the upper levels of City Hall, and City Hall reached high. From the Commissioner’s window, the neighboring towers fell short and the