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material concerning the Outer Worlds.
I see. Can you eat, Daneel?
I am nuclear-powered. I had thought you were aware of that.
I m perfectly aware of it. I didn t ask if you needed to eat. I asked if you
could eat. If you could put food in your mouth, chew it, and swallow it. I
should think that would be an important item in seeming to be a man.
I see your point. Yes, I can perform the mechanical operations of chewing and
swallowing. My capacity is, of course, quite limited, and I would have to
remove the ingested material from what you might call my stomach sooner or
later.
All right. You can regurgitate, or whatever you do, in the quiet of our room
tonight. The point is that I m hungry. I ve missed lunch, damn it, and I want
you with me when I eat. And you can t sit there and not eat without attracting
attention. So if you can eat, that s what I want to hear. Let s go!
Section kitchens were the same all over the City. What s more, Baley had been
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in Washington, Toronto, Los Angeles, London, and Budapest in the way of
business, and they had been the same there, too.
Perhaps it had been different in Medieval times when languages had varied and
dietaries as well.
Nowadays, yeast products were just the same from Shanghai to Tashkent and from
Winnipeg to Buenos
Aires; and English might not be the English of Shakespeare or Churchill, but
it was the final potpourri that was current over all the continents and, with
some modification, on the Outer Worlds as well.
But language and dietary aside, there were the deeper similarities. There was
always that particular odor, undefinable but completely characteristic of
kitchen. There was the waiting triple line moving slowly in, converging at
the door and splitting up again, right, left, center. There was the rumble of
humanity, speaking and moving, and the sharper clatter of plastic on plastic.
There was the gleam of simulated wood, highly polished, highlights on glass,
long tables, the touch of steam in the air.
Baley inched slowly forward as the line moved (with all possible staggering of
meal hours, a wait of at least ten minutes was almost unavoidable) and said to
R. Daneel in sudden curiosity, Can you smile?
R. Daneel, who had been gazing at the interior of the kitchen with cool
absorption, said, I beg your
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pardon, Elijah.
I m just wondering, Daneel. Can you smile? He spoke in a casual whisper.
R. Daneel smiled. The gesture was sudden and surprising. His lips curled back
and the skin about either end folded. Only the mouth smiled, however. The rest
of the robot s face was untouched.
Baley shook his head. Don t bother, R. Daneel. It doesn t do a thing for
you.
They were at the entrance. Person after person thrust his metal food tag
through the appropriate slot and had it scanned. Click--click--click-- Someone
once calculated that a smoothly running kitchen could allow the entrance of
two hundred persons a minute, the tags of each one being fully scanned to
prevent kitchen-jumping, meal-jumping, and ration-stretching. They had also
calculated how long a waiting line was necessary for maximum efficiency and
how much time was lost when any one person required special treatment.
It was therefore always a calamity to interrupt that smooth click-click by
stepping to the manual window, as Baley and R. Daneel did, in order to thrust
a special-permit pass at the official in charge.
Jessie, filled with the knowledge of an assistant dietitian, had explained it
once to Baley.
It upsets things completely, she had said. It throws off consumption
figures and inventory estimates. It means special checks. You have to match
slips with all the different Section kitchens to make sure the balance isn t
too unbalanced, if you know what I mean. There s a separate balance sheet to
be made out each week. Then if anything goes wrong and you re overdrawn, it s
always your fault. It s never the fault of the City Government for passing out
special tickets to everybody and his kid sister. Oh, no. And when we have to
say that free choice is suspended for the meal, don t the people in line make
a fuss. It s always the fault of the people behind the counter ...
Baley had the story in the fullest detail and so he quite understood the dry
and poisonous look he received from the woman behind the window. She made a
few hurried notes. Home Section, occupation, reason for meal displacement
( official business, a very irritating reason indeed, but quite irrefutable).
Then she folded the slip with firm motions of her fingers and pushed it into a
slot. A computer seized it, devoured the contents, and digested the
information.
She turned to R. Daneel.
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Baley let her have the worst. He said, My friend is out-of-City.
The woman looked finally and completely outraged. She said, Home City,
please.
Baley intercepted the ball for Daneel once again. All records are to be
credited to the Police
Department. No details necessary. Official business.
The woman brought down a pad of slips with a jerk of her arm and filled in the
necessary matter in dark-light code with practiced pressings of the first two
fingers of her right hand.
She said, How long will you be eating here?
Till further notice, said Baley.
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Press fingers here, she said, inverting the information blank.
Baley had a short qualm as R. Daneel s even fingers with their glistening
nails pressed downward.
Surely, they wouldn t have forgotten to supply him with fingerprints.
The woman took the blank away and fed it into the all-consuming machine at her
elbow. It belched nothing back and Baley breathed more easily.
She gave them little metal tags that were in the bright red that meant
temporary.
She said, No free choices. We re short this week. Take table DF.
They made their way toward DF.
R. Daneel said, I am under the impression that most of your people eat in
kitchens such as these regularly.
Yes. Of course, it s rather gruesome eating in a strange kitchen. There s no
one about whom you know. In your own kitchen, it s quite different. You have
your own seat which you occupy all the time.
You re with your family, your friends. Especially when you re young, mealtimes
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