Running the strips

Running the strips is a youth game played across a City’s rapid-transit system, where the leader tries to reach a destination alone by shaking off the followers. For Elijah Baley, it is both a remembered adolescent triumph and a practical skill: decades after his own celebrated run, he draws on the game’s tactics and his police knowledge of the City to escape with R. Daneel Olivaw.

Rules and Risks

The game’s local rules vary only trivially from City to City, while its central challenge remains recognizable across them. A player from San Francisco, for instance, could join a game in Cairo without difficulty. The aim is to travel from one point to another by way of the rapid transit system, with the leader trying to lose as many pursuers as possible. Reaching the destination alone marks an exceptionally skillful leader; remaining with the leader marks an equally determined follower.

Evening rush hour is the customary time to play. The packed transit system makes the game more difficult and more hazardous: the leader runs up and down accelerating strips, holds position unpredictably, then leaps in either direction or moves rapidly across several strips before waiting again. A follower who overshoots can pass the leader or fall behind before recovering, and an astute leader exploits the mistake by changing direction. The challenge can be made more complex by using localways or expressways, boarding and then leaping off the other side. Avoiding those routes entirely or lingering on them is considered poor play.

The danger is inseparable from the game’s attraction. Players risk collisions with legitimate travelers, face police persecution and punishment from parents, and are denounced in schools and on the subetherics. The record includes adolescent deaths and injuries, as well as harm to bystanders. Yet those costs do not eliminate the gangs. Risk helps confer honor among fellow players: a successful runner may swagger, and a recognized leader can become the group’s most admired figure.

Baley’s Record and Skill

Baley remembers his own striprunning years with satisfaction. As a boy, he led a gang of twenty from the Concourse Sector to the borders of Queens, crossing three expressways. After two tireless hours, he had shaken off even the Bronx followers known for their agility and reached the destination alone. The run remained a story among the players for months, a measure of how long a successful performance could shape a young runner’s standing.

By the time of the escape, Baley is in his forties and has not run the strips for more than twenty years. His old agility has diminished, but he compensates with a different advantage: he is a policeman who knows the City and its routes intimately, including where nearly every metal-bordered alley begins and ends. The passage thus recasts the game from youthful bravado as a combination of timing, spatial knowledge, and tactical judgment—capacities Baley can still use even when his body no longer has its former speed.

From Game to Escape

As Baley leaves the kitchen with R. Daneel Olivaw, the responsibility for getting away rests plainly with him. At first he walks briskly, but not so fast as to draw attention; he expects the cry of “Robot, robot” from behind them and counts his steps until he reaches an accelerating strip. The game’s basic discipline—anticipating pursuit while controlling when and how to move—now serves a real escape rather than a contest among teenagers.

Baley checks whether they are still being followed and learns that the pursuer remains close. To make a successful break, he concludes, they must use the moving platforms themselves, a maneuver requiring coordination that he is unsure he still possesses. He identifies their location as B-zzd Street, calculates quickly, then moves steadily up the remaining strips and swings onto a localway platform. R. Daneel comes alongside him, and together they climb aboard and squeeze through the railings, startling the passengers. The episode makes the game’s old lesson newly consequential: the same unpredictable transit system that once earned Baley adolescent prestige now offers a route away from immediate pursuit.

Narrative Significance

Running the strips links Baley’s past to his present without making the two situations identical. The remembered contest establishes why he can act decisively in the City’s transit network, while the escape tests what remains of a skill he has not used for decades. Its rules supply the practical logic of the action—misdirection, sudden changes, careful timing, and knowledge of the routes—but police experience, rather than youthful speed alone, makes Baley’s strategy possible.

The game also gives the City’s transit infrastructure two opposed meanings. For commuters, the strips and platforms are routine means of travel; for the runners, they become a difficult arena in which reputation is earned at others’ risk. During the escape, that arena shifts again, becoming terrain in a pursuit. The transition from game to evasion turns a nostalgic memory into an instrument of survival and makes Baley’s intimate knowledge of the City a direct advantage for both himself and R. Daneel Olivaw.