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Page 113
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.
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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.
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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

 
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