Escaping pursuit along the moving strips

Escaping pursuit along the moving strips is the episode in which Elijah Baley turns an apparent escape into an investigation of political organization. When R. Daneel Olivaw identifies six watchers from the crowd outside the shoe store, Baley suspects that the earlier disturbance was arranged rather than spontaneous. Instead of arresting the men and provoking trouble immediately, he and R. Daneel leave the kitchen by way of the City’s moving strips, using Baley’s old running skills and knowledge of its passages to break the followers’ trail. They reach a power plant, where Baley believes they have shaken their pursuers. The flight sharpens the distinction between mass anti-robot feeling and a smaller group capable of planning action.

The watchers and the suspected plan

R. Daneel’s observation gives Baley a specific reason to reconsider the shoe-store disturbance: six of the watchers had been in the crowd outside the store the previous night. The fact does not prove that they organized the incident, but it unsettles the assumption that the trouble was merely spontaneous. Baley imagines that anti-robot opponents who had studied robots closely might recognize R. Daneel for what he was. His immediate concern is not only that the two are being followed, but that a group may be guiding them toward a place where another disturbance can be started.

Baley thinks through the danger of a planned riot as a problem of setting and escape. A crowded kitchen would be a poor place for organizers to provoke violence: once panic began, they could be trapped alongside everyone else. A narrow City passage, by contrast, could funnel panic while offering prepared exits into side passages or onto localways. Baley concludes that he and R. Daneel are likely being followed until their pursuers reach a suitable point to set off the next stage of the plan. His suspicion remains a working theory, not proof, but it is enough to make arrest the wrong immediate move.

Choosing flight over arrest

R. Daneel asks why they should not arrest the watchers. Baley answers that arrest would only begin the trouble sooner. He instead plans to disrupt the pursuit and leave the identification of the men for another time. R. Daneel says that he is capable of remembering their faces, giving Baley confidence that retreat need not mean abandoning the investigation.

Baley directs R. Daneel to follow his movements exactly. He takes care to set his dish upside down on the movable disc and return his fork to its recess; R. Daneel copies him, and the dishes and utensils disappear from view. The ordinary, orderly action contrasts with Baley’s calculation that the pair are under observation. Once the men behind them begin to rise as well, the escape starts without a public confrontation that might turn suspicion into a riot.

Baley’s route across the strips

Baley leaves the kitchen briskly but not fast enough to draw immediate attention. He counts his steps until he feels the first accelerating strip beneath him, aware that the opening moments are the most dangerous. He has not run the strips for more than twenty years, but he remembers the practice from his youth: he once led a gang from the Concourse Sector toward Queens, crossing three expressways and arriving alone after shaking off followers. Now in his forties, he has lost some agility, but he relies on his long experience as a policeman and his knowledge of where the City’s metal-bordered passages begin and end.

He begins by running upward at twice the safe rate, leaning into the acceleration. Then he appears to retreat, weaving backward through the crowd toward slower strips, before allowing himself to be carried along at a more moderate speed. The sequence uses the moving system not simply as transport but as cover: changing pace and direction makes it harder for the followers to keep their position. Baley’s old thrill at running returns even as he concentrates on the danger, a reminder that the City’s infrastructure is both an everyday environment and a terrain he knows how to exploit.

The escape also depends on R. Daneel. At a difficult point, R. Daneel supports Baley and lifts him; Baley has no time for more than a brief thanks before they continue. He leads them down decelerating strips in a complicated pattern, timing their feet to meet the V-joint strips of an expressway at the crossing. They accelerate again, pass over an expressway, and take another localway before descending toward an official-looking doorway. Baley shows his identification to the guard and says that they are on official business.

The power plant and the larger investigation

Inside, Baley identifies the destination as a power plant and says that it breaks their tracks completely. The escape has therefore achieved its immediate aim: R. Daneel can report that no pursuer remains in sight. But the arrival does not resolve who the watchers are or whether they belong to an organized conspiracy. It gives Baley room to consider the pursuit as part of a larger pattern rather than as an isolated street disturbance.

That pattern becomes clearer when Baley later describes an organization built on two levels. He distinguishes a broad ground-level membership, without a specific program beyond providing mass support for a possible coup, from a much smaller elite committed to planned action. He considers the dull, repetitive local meetings Jessie has described dispensable to the investigation compared with the elite he wants to find. R. Daneel cautions that this account depends on accepting Jessie’s story; Baley says he accepts it as true. The escape along the strips thus sits between observation and analysis: the watchers suggest deliberate coordination, while Baley’s later model explains how a mass movement might conceal a more purposeful core.

Political context and significance

The episode unfolds against a history in which resentment toward the Spacers and their barrier has already taken collective, disruptive form. Baley remembers having joined the Barrier Riots, when crowds gathered outside the barrier, disregarded City rating privileges, ran across the strips, and damaged City property in frustration. Separately, the growing Medievalist movement is associated with the pressures of declassification and with the risk that accumulated hostility may turn into destruction. These contexts make Baley’s uncertainty consequential: anti-robot hostility is real, but a crowd’s anger and an organization’s deliberate use of it are not the same thing.

A further complication is the possibility that reports of robot danger can themselves shape public feeling. Baley has argued that the rumor of a robot working with the police could spread through the yeast-vat country and Long Island hydroponic plants, making R. Daneel’s presence a source of political alarm. Against that background, choosing not to arrest the watchers immediately is also a choice not to supply a fresh spark. The moving strips carry Baley and R. Daneel out of immediate reach, but their more important function is investigative: they let Baley preserve the distinction between a volatile crowd and the people who may be trying to direct it.