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entirely. And although he comes up with some speculations about the murder that Baley knocks down (''Logical but not reasonable. Wasn't that the definition of a robot?"), he does not participate in the murder's resolution, being on his way to Leebig's house (a final irony that Baley himself notes: Leebig committed suicide rather than meet one of the robots he loved). |
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The key image of the novel after the naked sun is "walls." The first sentence speaks of Baley's panic at the thought of leaving the protection of his New York City walls and of flying to Washington, even though the trip itself would never expose Baley to the open air "The New York Runway Number 2 . . . was decently enclosed, with a lock opening to the unprotected atmosphere only after air speed had been achieved." The airplane has no windows and a news-strip unrolls constantly at eye level with news and short fiction to distract travelers. Baley even tells himself: |
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I'm enclosed. This plane is just a little City. |
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But he didn't fool himself. There was an inch of steel at his left; he could feel it with his elbow. Past that, nothing |
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Well, air! But that was nothing, really. |
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A thousand miles of it in one direction. A thousand in another. One mile of it, maybe two, straight down. |
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He almost wished he could see straight down, glimpse the top of the buried Cities he was passing over; New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. He imagined the rolling, low-slung cluster complexes of domes he had never seen but knew to be there. And under them, for a mile underground and dozens of miles in every direction, would be the Cities. |
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The endless, living corridors of the Cities, he thought, alive with people; apartments, community kitchens, factories, Expressways, all comfortable and warm with the evidence of man. |
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From Washington, Baley goes to a spaceship and experiences an Earth night ("Baley shivered spasmodically in the raw, open air"), but it is not so bad because "the night closed in . . . like dark black walls melting into a black ceiling overhead." Then he must travel by Spacer vessel, by Jump through hyperspace, to Solaria. That is not so bad either because the spaceship is all enclosed like a small city and even larger than an airplane. The first crisis comes when the spaceship is scheduled to land on Solaria, and Baley is told it will land in daylight. He will "have to step out onto the unprotected surface of a planet in daytime." He is fighting panic again as the first chapter ends. |
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Baley tries to tell himself that being in the open is natural; men had |
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