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Page 115
but dimmer; imprisoned, somehow." She identifies it as "the wall about you, the way you can't go outside, the way you have to be inside. You are inside there. Don't you see?" Baley's disapproval of the image leads him to agree to walk outside with Gladia, hoping that if he goes in spite of his impulse to refuse she will agree "to take away the gray." But as they leave, the structure of light "stayed behind, holding Baley's imprisoned soul fast in the gray of the Cities.''
The walk is the ultimate trial not only for Gladia, who enjoys "seeing" and proximity to a man in spite of her upbringing, but for Baley. He finds that space draws him, but he wants "Earth and the warmth and companionship of the man-crammed Cities." But he no longer can summon up an image of New York to sustain him. The time is late afternoon, and Baley faces the movement of the sun. Finally, he finds himself staring directly at the sun as it rests nearly at the horizon, and he has a vision.
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The sun was moving down to the horizon because the planet's surface was moving away from it, a thousand miles an hour, spinning under that naked sun, spinning with nothing to guard the microbes called men that scurried over its spinning surface, spinning madly forever, spinning spinning. . . .
The experience overcomes him; he faints again, from what Daneel later calls the cumulative effects of being exposed to the open.
Baley's successful fight against his neurosis comes to a resolution when, still weak from his sunset experience, he walks to the window and starts to lift the curtain. Daneel takes it out of his fingers. "In the split fraction of a moment in which Baley watched the robot's hand take the curtain away from him with the loving caution of a mother protecting her child from the fire, a revolution took place within him." Just as Delmarre's nursery robots cannot match long-term good against the short-term discipline of their charges, so Daneel cannot understand Baley's need to face his terror.
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He [Baley] snatched the curtain back, yanking it out of Daneel's grasp. Throwing his full weight against it he tore it away from the window, leaving shreds behind.
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"Partner Elijah!" said Daneel softly. "Surely you know now what the open will do to you."
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"I know," said Baley, "what it will do for me." . . .
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And for the first time he faced it freely. It was no longer bravado, or perverse curiosity, or the pathway to a solution of a murder. He faced it because he knew he wanted to and because he needed to. That made all the difference.

 
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