Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition) (28 page)

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Authors: James Gunn

BOOK: Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (Revised Edition)
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Baley tries to tell himself that being in the open is natural; men had 
done it all their lives, and the Spacers did it now. "There is no real harm in wall-lessness." But reason alone is not enough. "Something above and beyond reason cried out for walls and would have none of space." Daneel, however, anticipates Baley's neurosis and arranges for an airtube, commonly used in space between vessels, to be connected to a ground-transport vehicle. Daneel speaks of Baley's "peculiarities," a term Baley doesn't like. He resents Daneel's concern about his neurosis and feels "a sudden need to see," motivated partly by Daneel's oversolicitude and partly by Minnim's instructions to observe. But Daneel will not retract the top of the vehicle for fear of the harm that Baley might suffer. Baley has to trick the robot driver into opening the top and exposing him to Solaria's naked sun: "Blue, green, air, noise, motion and over it all, beating down, furiously, relentlessly, frighteningly, was the white light that came from a ball in the sky.'' Daneel has to pull Baley down to keep him from injuring his eyes by staring too long at the sun, and Baley loses consciousness.
Asimov made Baley's neurosis convincingly crippling today it is called "panic disorder" and treated with drugs such as Prozac or therapy much like Baley's own exposure of himself to what he fears the most but also presents Baley as a man with a stubborn need to face his fear and conquer it.
What he really wanted was an inner knowledge that he could take care of himself and fulfill his assignment. The sight and fear of the open had been hard to take. It might be that when the time came he would lack the hardihood to dare face it again at the cost of his self-respect and, conceivably, of Earth's safety. All over a small matter of emptiness.
His face grew grim even at the glancing touch of that thought. He would face air, sun, and empty space yet!
When Baley tries to sleep, however, he pictures the house that has been built for him and Daneel (and will be torn down when he leaves because only one house is allowed per estate and labor is cheap), "balanced precariously at the outer skin of the world, with emptiness waiting just outside like a monster." And he thinks of Jessie, a thousand light-years away, and he wishes there were a tunnel from Solaria to Earth so he could walk back to Earth, back to Jessie, back to comfort and security.
Baley and the reader are continually reminded of Baley's insecurity and his determination to resist it. He reflects that the topmost levels in New York are low-rent (this seems inconsistent with his description in
The Caves of Steel
of the solariums of the wealthy). His dream of Jessie 
includes a sun shining down on them through the caves of steel. Daneel continues his efforts to protect Baley from his own weaknesses, trying to persuade him on several occasions to stay within the house prepared for them and to do his interviewing by trimensional projection.
Baley finds himself in an airborne vessel for a second time on his way to see the sociologist Anselmo Quemot, but this vessel has windows and the windows are transparent. Baley fights his distress, which Asimov reveals through understatement: "he buried his head in his knees only when he could absolutely no longer help it." But, a bit earlier, Baley "had begun by stepping across open ground to the waiting plane with a kind of lightheaded dizziness that was almost enjoyable, and he had ordered the windows left unblanked in a kind of manic self-confidence." Baley's will begins to master his fears. In the interview with Quemot, opposing fears are neatly balanced as Baley's initial concern about blanking out the windows is matched by Quemot's growing neurosis about Baley's physical presence.
In the next scene, Baley goes to see Delmarre's assistant, Klorissa Cantoro. He scarcely minds the plane trip this time, but he expresses a desire to get indoors quickly again this is contrasted with Klorissa's concern that he come no closer to her than some twenty-five feet. But Baley asks to go outside again ("I'm trying to grow accustomed to the outdoors") in order to observe the children at play. He has a physical reaction to the outdoors his body feels chilled, his teeth chatter, his eyes hurt from looking "so far at a horizon so hazy green and blue" "and yet he could fight off the urge to run, to return to enclosure." He marvels at ''a living tree!" A bit later he walks under a group of three trees and finds it "almost like being surrounded by imperfect walls. The sun was only a wavering series of glitters through the leaves, so disconnected as almost to be robbed of horror." But when Klorissa calls to him "watch out!" his taut emotions "snapped wide and he flamed into panic. All the terror of the open air and the endless vaults of heaven broke in upon him."
On his way to an interview with Gladia, "for the first time Baley found himself not minding a plane flight through open space. . . . It was almost as though he were in his own element. . . . How fast could a man adapt to nightmare? Or was it Gladia? He would be seeing her soon, not viewing her. Was that what gave him confidence and this odd feeling of mixed apprehension and anticipation?"
During the interview, the image of walls reappears in a light-form portrait Gladia does of him. She encloses it all in "a flat, lusterless hollow cube of slate gray . . ." and "the light within shone through it, 
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.
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.
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.
"Partner Elijah!" said Daneel softly. "Surely you know now what the open will do to you."
"I know," said Baley, "what it will do for me." . . .
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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