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Page 114
includes a sun shining down on them through the caves of steel. Daneel continues his efforts to protect Baley from his own weaknesses, trying to persuade him on several occasions to stay within the house prepared for them and to do his interviewing by trimensional projection.
Baley finds himself in an airborne vessel for a second time on his way to see the sociologist Anselmo Quemot, but this vessel has windows and the windows are transparent. Baley fights his distress, which Asimov reveals through understatement: "he buried his head in his knees only when he could absolutely no longer help it." But, a bit earlier, Baley "had begun by stepping across open ground to the waiting plane with a kind of lightheaded dizziness that was almost enjoyable, and he had ordered the windows left unblanked in a kind of manic self-confidence." Baley's will begins to master his fears. In the interview with Quemot, opposing fears are neatly balanced as Baley's initial concern about blanking out the windows is matched by Quemot's growing neurosis about Baley's physical presence.
In the next scene, Baley goes to see Delmarre's assistant, Klorissa Cantoro. He scarcely minds the plane trip this time, but he expresses a desire to get indoors quickly again this is contrasted with Klorissa's concern that he come no closer to her than some twenty-five feet. But Baley asks to go outside again ("I'm trying to grow accustomed to the outdoors") in order to observe the children at play. He has a physical reaction to the outdoors his body feels chilled, his teeth chatter, his eyes hurt from looking "so far at a horizon so hazy green and blue" "and yet he could fight off the urge to run, to return to enclosure." He marvels at ''a living tree!" A bit later he walks under a group of three trees and finds it "almost like being surrounded by imperfect walls. The sun was only a wavering series of glitters through the leaves, so disconnected as almost to be robbed of horror." But when Klorissa calls to him "watch out!" his taut emotions "snapped wide and he flamed into panic. All the terror of the open air and the endless vaults of heaven broke in upon him."
On his way to an interview with Gladia, "for the first time Baley found himself not minding a plane flight through open space. . . . It was almost as though he were in his own element. . . . How fast could a man adapt to nightmare? Or was it Gladia? He would be seeing her soon, not viewing her. Was that what gave him confidence and this odd feeling of mixed apprehension and anticipation?"
During the interview, the image of walls reappears in a light-form portrait Gladia does of him. She encloses it all in "a flat, lusterless hollow cube of slate gray . . ." and "the light within shone through it,

 
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