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although Baley considers himself too old to leave Earth (The Naked Sun refutes that assumption), he hopes that Daneel might help Ben to do so some day. At the end, suddenly smiling, Baley takes Daneel's elbow, and they walk out the door arm in arm. |
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That final image, more than anything else, speaks to Asimov's own perception of the novel's heart. And, as if to reinforce image with motivation, Daneel has already revealed that the whole Spacer concern had been to try to persuade at least a segment of Earth's population that Sarton's and Fastolfe's goals were their own. Daneel's work with Baley had been an experiment not in whether robots can solve crimes but in whether Earthmen can be persuaded to accept robots and the goal of extraterrestrial emigration. The Spacers conclude that their only hope is the romantics, and the romantics are all Medievalists, actual or potential. |
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The other characters are drawn with greater care than is customary in science-fiction novels: Enderby, first as the harried Commissioner with his Medievalist affections and then reinterpreted as a Medievalist leader who has been trapped by accident into the role of murderer; Jessie, whose loss of name pushes her into a harmless but misleading flirtation with the Medievalists; and Daneel himself, the polite, deferential, and literal-minded robot detective, with the built-in sense of justice, who provides the ideal foil for Baley's emotionalism, and is, no doubt, the author's reason for making Baley emotional. |
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Daneel allowed Asimov to reexplore the problems of robots that he had covered so thoroughly in I, Robot: the First Law, for instance, which eliminates robots as suspects, and the literalness of robot minds, such as Asimov dealt with two years later in "Risk." Baley is suspicious of Daneel's statement that a final adjustment of his circuits impressed into his motivation banks a particularly strong drive, a desire for justice. Justice, Baley says, is an abstraction; only a human being can understand it. But Daneel defines justice in pragmatic terms as the condition that exists when all the laws are enforced. |
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Asimov reversed the situation of "Evidence" when Baley accuses Daneel of being human, but it is not as difficult for a robot to prove that he is not human as vice versa. Like Byerley, however, Daneel can eat; he reveals a food sac from which he must later remove the food. Daneel is asked not to forget something, and he comments that robots are not capable of forgetting. Daneel's humanoid appearance and demeanor make even more effective the scene in which he is slapped by the Medievalist Clousarr. Daneel responds, "That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved backward you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain." |
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