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with mysteries"). Only Fastolfe has the knowledge to have placed the robot into "roblock," but Fastolfe denies doing so, suggesting instead that it must have occurred as a chance one-in-a-billion "mental freeze-out." He has a motive, moreover, that relates to Baley's interests: he still believes that Earthmen should colonize the Galaxy; his opponents on Aurora think that Spacers, particularly Aurorans, should do so, but since they would have difficulty leaving Aurora, humaniform robots like Daneel and Jander Panell, as the murdered robot is named, should be built to precede them to planets intended for colonization and prepare them for Auroran migration when they have been made as comfortable as Aurora. Fastolfe doesn't think this would work, and Baley agrees; but unless Baley proves that Fastolfe did not incapacitate Jander as a means of demonstrating the fallibility of the design, Fastolfe's political opponents are likely to win. Because of his earlier successes, Baley's help has been requested by Fastolfe and by the Auroran government.
Baley's predicament is made even more difficult by the fact that if he fails, Earth will see that the blame falls on him, not on Earth, and he will return in disgrace. In addition, once he gets to Aurora, he discovers that the murdered robot had been loaned by Fastolfe to a neighbor. That neighbor turns out to be Gladia Delmarre, who had left Solaria and come to Aurora to get away from her unpleasant memories and, she confesses to Baley, to find the physical pleasures of sex that her brief contact with Baley had led her to believe she might experience. Now Gladia herself is once more a suspect.
Gladia's situation allows Asimov to set up another of the contrasts that he seems to enjoy and that, for the reader, lends psychological depth to his observations. On Solaria, personal contact is so repugnant to normal Solarians that sex is infrequent and unpleasant. On Aurora sex is so commonplace and so divorced from love and affection that Gladia found it boring. Finally she turned to her humaniform robot (in his memoir, Asimov wrote that inability to deal with that situation had stopped his work on the novel in 1958) and found in him the ideal mate until his irreversible freeze-out.
In spite of the similarity between the styles and substance of the earlier Robot novels and their recent sequel, the differences in the treatment of sex alone indicates how much the times (and Asimov) have changed. In The Naked Sun Asimov had to make do with the removal of a glove and a touch on the cheek. In The Robots of Dawn Gladia not only discusses with Baley the pleasures of sex and confesses to taking Jander as her lover and even looking upon him as her husband, she spends a night of passion with Baley. Baley, in his examination of Jander's

 
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