The cot creaked. Gladia must know what he was doing, but she did not turn around. Though she did not offer to help, she did not protest either.
Baley withdrew his arms. Jander felt warm to the touch. Presumably, the power unit continued to do so simple a thing as to maintain temperature, even with the brain inoperative. The body felt firm and resilient, too. Presumably, it never went through any stage analogous to rigor mortis.
One arm was now dangling off the cot in quite a human fashion. Baley moved it gently and released it. It swung to and fro slightly and came to a halt. He bent one leg at the knee and studied the foot, then the other. The buttocks were perfectly formed and there was even an anus.
Baley could not get rid of the feeling of uneasiness. The notion that he was violating the privacy of a human being would not go away. If it were a human corpse, its coldness and its stiffness would have deprived it of humanity.
He thought uncomfortably: A robot corpse is much more human than a human corpse.
Again he reached under Jander, lifted, and turned him over.
He smoothed out the sheet as best he could, then replaced the cover as it had been and smoothed that. He stepped back and decided it was as it had been at first - or as near to that as he could manage.
"I'm finished, Gladia," he said.
She turned, looked at Jander with wet eyes, and said, "May we go, then?"
"Yes, of course, but Gladia - "
"Well?"
"Will you be keeping him this way? I imagine he won't decay."
"Does it matter if I do?"
"In some ways, yes. You must give yourself a chance to recover. You can't spend three centuries mourning. What is over is over." (His statements sounded hollowly sententious in his own ear. What must they have sounded like in hers?)
She said, "I know you mean it kindly, Elijah. I have been requested to keep Jander till the investigation is done. He will then be torched at my request."
"Torched?"
"Put under a plasma torch and reduced to his elements, as human corpses are. I will have holograms of him - and memories. Will that satisfy you?"
"Of course. I must return to Dr. Fastolfe's house now."
"Yes. Have you learned anything from Jander's body?"
"I did not expect to, Gladia."
She faced him full. "And Elijah, I want you to find who did this and - why. I must know."
"But Gladia - "
She shook her head violently, as though keeping out anything she wasn't ready to hear. "I know you can do this."
Chapter 7. AGAIN FASTOLFE
27
Baley emerged from Gladia's house into the sunset. He turned toward what he assumed must be the western horizon and found Aurora's sun, a deep scarlet in color, topped by thin strips of ruddy clouds set in an apple-green sky.
"Jehoshaphat," he murmured. Clearly, Aurora's sun, cooler and more orange than Earth's sun, accentuated the difference at setting, when its light passed through a greater thickness of Aurora.
Daneel was behind him; Giskard, as before, well in front.
Daneel's voice was in his ear. "Are you well, Partner Elijah?"
"Quite well," said Baley, pleased with himself. "I'm handling the Outside well, Daneel. I can even admire the sunset. Is it always like this?"
Daneel gazed dispassionately at the setting sun and said, "Yes. But let us move quickly toward Dr. Fastolfe's establishment. At this time of year, the twilight does not last long, Partner Elijah, and I would wish you there while you can still see easily."
"I'm ready. Let's go." Baley wondered if it might not be better to wait for the darkness. It would not be pleasant not to see, but, then, it would give him the illusion of being enclosed - and he was not, in his heart, sure as to how long this euphoria induced by admiring a sunset (a sunset, mind you, Outside) would last. But that was a cowardly uncertainty and he would not own up to it.
Giskard noiselessly drifted backward toward him and said, "Would you prefer to wait, sir? Would the darkness suit you better? We ourselves will not be discommoded."
Baley became aware of other robots, farther off, on every side. Had Gladia marked off her field robots for guard duty or had Fastolfe sent his?
It accentuated the way they were all caring for him and, perversely, he would not admit to weakness. He said, "No, we'll go now," and struck off at a brisk walk toward Fastolfe's establishment, which could just see through the distant trees.
Let the robots follow or not, as they wished, he thought boldly. He knew that, if he let himself think about it, there would be something within him that would still quail at the thought of himself on the outer skin of a planet with no protection but air between himself and the great void, but he would not think of it.
It was the exhilaration at being free of the fear that made his jaws tremble and his teeth click. Or it was - the cool wind of evening that did it - and that also - set the gooseflesh to appearing on his arms.
It was not the Outside.
It was not.
He said, trying to unclench his teeth, "How well did you know Jander, Daneel?"
Daneel said, "We were together for some time. From the time of friend Jander's construction, till he passed into the establishment of Miss Gladia, we were together steadily."
"Did it bother you, Daneel, that Jander resembled you so closely?"
"No, sir. He and I each knew ourselves apart, Partner Elijah, and Dr. Fastolfe did not mistake us either. We were, therefore, two individuals."
"And could you tell them apart, too, Giskard?" They were closer to him now, perhaps because the other robots had taken over the long-distance duties.