Gladia shook her head. “You say that only because you’ve never lived with them.—In any case, I think you overestimate the longing for prolonged life among your people. You know my age, you look at my appearance, yet it doesn’t bother you.”

“Because I’m convinced that the Spacer worlds must dwindle and die, that it is the Settler worlds that are the hope of humanity’s future, and that it is our short-lived characteristic that ensures it. Listening to what you’ve just said, assuming it is all true, makes me the more certain.”

“Don’t be too sure. You may develop your own insuperable problems—if you haven’t already.”

“That is undoubtedly possible, my lady, but for now I must leave you. The ship is coasting in for a landing and I must stare intelligently at the computer that controls it or no one will believe that I am the captain.”

He left and she remained in gloomy abstraction for a while, her fingers plucking at the plastic that enclosed the coverall.

She had come to a sense of equilibrium on Aurora, a way of allowing life to pass quietly. Meal by meal, day, by day, season by season, it had been passing and the quiet had insulated her, almost, from the tedious waiting for the only adventure that remained, the final one of death.

And now she had been to Solaria—and had awakened the memories of a childhood that had long passed on a world that had long passed, so that the quiet had been shattered perhaps forever—and so that she now lay uncovered and bare to the horror of continuing life.

“What could substitute for the vanished quiet?”

She caught Giskard’s dimly glowing eyes upon her and she said, “Help me on with this, Giskard.”

It was cold. The sky was gray with clouds and the air glittered with a very light snowfall. Patches of powdery snow were swirling in the fresh breeze and off beyond the landing field Gladia could see distant heaps of snow.

There were crowds of people gathered here and there, held off by barriers from approaching too closely. They were all wearing coveralls of different types and colors and they all seemed to balloon outward, turning humanity into a crowd of shapeless objects with eyes. Some were wearing visors that glittered transparently over their faces.

Gladia pressed her mittened hand to her face. Except for her nose, she felt warm enough. The coverall did more than insulate; it seemed to exude warmth of its own.

She looked behind her. Daneel and Giskard were within reach, each in a coverall.

She had protested that at first. “They don’t need coveralls. They’re not sensitive to cold.”

“I’m sure they’re not,” D.G. had said, “but you say you won’t go anywhere without them and we can’t very well have Daneel sitting there exposed to the cold. It would seem against nature. Nor do we wish to arouse hostility by making it too clear you have robots.”

“They must know I’ve got robots with me and Giskard’s face will give him away—even in a coverall.”

“They might know,” said D.G., “but the chances are they won’t think about it if they’re not forced to—so let’s not force it.

Now D.G. was motioning her into a ground-car that had a transparent roof and sides. “They’ll want to see you as we travel, my lady,” he said, smiling.

Gladia seated herself at one side and D.G. followed on the other. “I’m co-hero,” he said.

“Do you value that?”

“Oh, yes. It means a bonus for my crew and a possible promotion for me. I don’t scorn that.”

Daneel and Giskard entered, too, and sat down in seats that faced the two human beings. Daneel faced Gladia; Giskard faced D.G.

There was a ground-car before them, without transparency, and a line of about a dozen behind them. There was the sound of cheering and a forest of arm-waving from the assembled crowd. D.G. smiled and lifted an arm in response and motioned to Gladia to do the same. She waved in a perfunctory manner. It was warm inside the car and her nose had lost its numbness.

She said, “There’s a rather unpleasant glitter to these windows. Can that be removed?”

“Undoubtedly, but it won’t be,” said D.G. “That’s as unobtrusive a force field as we can set up. Those are enthusiastic people out there and they’ve been searched, but someone may have managed to conceal a weapon and we don’t want you hurt.”

“You mean someone might try to kill me?”

(Daneel’s eyes were calmly scanning the crowd to one side of the car; Giskard’s scanned the other side.)

“Very unlikely, my lady, but you’re a Spacer and Settlers don’t like Spacers. A few might hate them with such a surpassing hatred as to see only the Spacerness in you.—But don’t worry. Even if someone were to try—which is, as I say, unlikely—they won’t succeed.”

The line of cars began to move, all together and very smoothly.

Gladia half-rose in astonishment. There was no one in front of the partition that closed them off. “Who’s driving?” she asked.

“The cars are thoroughly computerized,” said D.G. “I take it that Spacer cars are not?”

“We have robots to drive them.”

D.G. continued waving and Gladia followed his lead automatically. “We don’t,” he said.

“But a computer is essentially the same as a robot.”

“A computer is not humanoid and it does not obtrude itself on one’s notice. Whatever the technological similarities might be, they are worlds apart psychologically.”

Gladia watched the countryside and found it oppressively barren. Even allowing for winter, there was something desolate in the scattering of leafless bushes and in the sparsely distributed trees, whose stunted and dispirited appearance emphasized the death that seemed to grip everything.

D.G., noting her depression and correlating it with her darting glances here and there, said, “It doesn’t look like much now, my lady. In the summer, though, it’s not bad. There are grassy plains, orchards, grain fields—”

“Forests?”

“Not wilderness forests. We’re still a growing world. It’s still being molded. We’ve only had a little over a century and a half, really. The first step was to cultivate home plots for the initial Settlers, using imported seed. Then we placed fish and invertebrates of all kinds in the ocean, doing our best to establish a self-supporting ecology. That is a fairly easy procedure—if the ocean chemistry is suitable. If it isn’t, then the planet is not habitable without extensive chemical modification and that has never been tried in actuality, though there are all sorts of plans for such procedures.—Finally, we try to make the land flourish, which is always difficult, always slow.”

“Have all the Settler worlds followed that path?”

“Are following. None are really finished. Baleyworld is the oldest and we’re not finished. Given another couple of centuries, the Settler worlds will be rich and full of life land as well as sea—though by that time there will by many still-newer worlds that will be working their way through various preliminary stages. I’m sure the Spacer worlds went through the same procedure.”

“Many centuries ago—and less strenuously, I think. We had robots to help.”

“We’ll manage,” said D.G. briefly.

“And what about the native life—the plants and animals that evolved on this world before human beings arrived?”

D.G. shrugged. “Insignificant. Small, feeble things. The scientists are, of course, interested, so the indigenous life still exists in special aquaria, botanical gardens, zoos. There are out-of-the-way bodies of water and considerable stretches of land area that have not yet been converted. Some indigenous life still lives out there in the wild.”

“But these stretches of wilderness will eventually all be converted.”

“We hope so.

“Don’t you feel that the planet really belongs to these insignificant, small, feeble things?”

“No. I’m not that sentimental. The planet and the whole Universe belongs to intelligence. The Spacers agree with that. Where is the indigenous life of Solaria? Or of Aurora?”