D.G. said, “How are you doing?” Then, as her hand touched a contact and the images faded, shriveled, and were gone. He said, “You don’t have to turn it off. I’ll watch it with you.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

“Are you—comfortable?”

“Not entirely. I am—isolated.”

“Sorry! But then, I was isolated on Aurora. They would allow none of my men to come with me.”

“Are you having your revenge?”

“Not at all. For one thing, I allowed you two robots of your choice to accompany you. For another, it is not I but my crew who enforce this. They don’t like either Spacers or robots. But why do you mind? Doesn’t this isolation lessen your fear of infection?”

Gladia’s eyes were haughty, but her voice sounded weary. “I wonder if I haven’t grown too old to fear infection. In many ways, I think I have lived long enough. Then, too, I have my gloves, my nose filters, and—if necessary—my mask. And besides, I doubt that you will trouble to touch me.”

“Nor will anyone else,” said D.G. with a sudden edge of grimness to his voice, as his hand wandered to the object at the right side of his hip.

Her eyes followed the motion. “What is that?” she asked.

D.G. smiled and his beard seemed to glitter in the light. There were occasional reddish hairs among the brown. “A weapon,” he said and drew it. He held it by a molded hilt that bulged above his hand as though the force of his grip were squeezing it upward. In front, facing Gladia, a thin cylinder stretched some fifteen centimeters forward. There was no opening visible.

“Does that kill people?” Gladia extended her hand toward it.

D.G. moved it quickly away. “Never reach for someone’s weapon, my lady. That is worse than bad manners, for any Settler is trained to react violently to such a move and you may be hurt.”

Gladia, eyes wide, withdrew her hand and placed both behind her back. She said, “Don’t threaten harm. Daneel has no sense of humor in that respect. On Aurora, no one is barbarous enough to carry weapons.”

“Well,” said D.G., unmoved by the adjective, “we don’t have robots to protect us.—And this is not a killing device. It is, in some ways, worse. It emits a kind of vibration that stimulates those nerve endings responsible for the sensation of pain. It hurts a good deal worse than anything you can imagine. No one would willingly endure it twice and someone carrying this weapon rarely has to use it. We call it a neuronic whip.”

Gladia frowned. “Disgusting! We have our robots, but they never hurt anyone except in unavoidable emergency and then minimally.”

D.G. shrugged. “That sounds very civilized, but a bit of pain—a bit of killing, even—is better than the decay of spirit brought about by robots. Besides, a neuronic whip is not intended to kill and your people have weapons on their spaceships that can bring about wholesale death and destruction.

“That’s because we’ve fought wars early in our history, when our Earth heritage was still strong, but we’ve learned better.”

“You used those weapons on Earth even after you supposedly learned better.”

“That’s—” she began and closed her mouth as though to bite off what she was about to say next.

D.G. nodded. “I know. You were about to say ‘That’s different.’ Think of that, my lady, if you should catch yourself wondering why my crew doesn’t like Spacers. Or why I don’t.—But you are going to be useful to me, my lady, and I won’t let my emotions get in the way.”

“How am I going to be useful to you?”

“You are a Solarian.”

“You keep saying that. More than twenty decades have passed. I don’t know what Solaria is like now. I know nothing about it. What was Baleyworld like twenty decades ago?”

“It didn’t exist twenty decades ago, but Solaria did and I shall gamble that you will remember something useful.”

He stood up, bowed his head briefly in, a gesture of politeness that was almost mocking, and was gone.

Gladia maintained a thoughtful and troubled silence for a while and then she said, “He wasn’t at all polite, was he?”

Daneel said, “Madam Gladia, the Settler is clearly under tension. He is heading toward a world on which two ships like his have been destroyed and their crews killed. He is going, into great danger, as is his crew.”

“You always defend any human being, Daneel,” said Gladia resentfully. “The danger exists for me, too, and I am not facing it voluntarily, but that does not force me into rudeness.”

Daneel said nothing.

Gladia said, “Well, maybe it does. I have been a little rude, haven’t I?”

“I don’t think the Settler minded,” said Daneel. “Might I suggest, madam, that you prepare yourself for bed. It is quite late.”

“Very well. I’ll prepare myself for bed, but I don’t think I feel relaxed enough to sleep, Daneel.”

“Friend Giskard assures me you will, madam, and he is usually right about such things.”

And she did sleep.

Daneel and Giskard stood in the darkness of Gladia’s cabin.

Giskard said, “She will sleep soundly, friend Daneel, and she needs the rest. She faces a dangerous trip.”

“It seemed to me, friend Giskard,” said Daneel, “that you influenced her to agree to go. I presume you had a reason.”

“Friend Daneel, we know so little about the nature of the crisis that is now facing the Galaxy that we cannot safely refuse any action that might increase our knowledge. We must know what is taking place on Solaria and the only way we can do so is to go there—and the only way we can go is for us to arrange for Madam Gladia to go. As for influencing her, that required scarcely a touch. Despite her loud statements to the contrary, she was eager to go. There was an overwhelming desire within her to see Solaria. It was a pain within her that would not cease until she went.”

“Since you say so, it is so, yet I find it puzzling. Had she not frequently made it plain that her life on Solaria was unhappy, that she had completely adopted Aurora and never wished to go back to her original home?”

“Yes, that was there, too. It was quite plainly in her mind. Both emotions, both feelings existed together and simultaneously. I have observed something of this sort in human minds frequently; two opposite emotions simultaneously present.”

“Such a condition does not seem logical, friend Giskard.”

“I agree and I can only conclude that human beings are not, at all times or in all respects, logical. That must be one reason that it is so difficult to work out the Laws governing human behavior.—In Madam Gladia’s case, I have now and then been aware of this longing for Solaria. Ordinarily, it was well hidden, obscured by the far more intense antipathy she also felt for the world. When the news arrived that Solaria had been abandoned by its people, however, her feelings changed.”

“Why so? What had the abandonment to do with the youthful experiences that led Madam Gladia to her antipathy? Or, having held in restraint her longing for the world the decades when it was a working society, why she lose that restraint once it became an abandoned planet and newly long for a world which must now be something utterly strange to her?”

“I cannot explain, friend Daneel, since the more knowledge I gather of the human mind, the more despair I feel at being unable to understand it. It is not an unalloyed advantage to see into that mind and I often envy you the simplicity of behavior control that results from your inability to see below the surface.”

Daneel persisted. “Have you guessed an explanation, friend Giskard?”

“I suppose she feels a sorrow for the empty planet. She deserted it twenty decades ago—”

“She was driven out.”

“It seems to her, now, to have been a desertion and I imagine she plays with the painful thought that she had set an example; that if she had not left, no one else would have and the planet would still be populated and happy. Since I cannot read her thoughts, I am only groping backward, perhaps inaccurately, from her emotions.”