I offer a truce, in the name of humanity,Lodovic had sent.I promise you’ll find the trip worthwhile.

Klia and Brann were safe and happy. Dors had set up defenses and precautions overwhelmingly stronger than any conceivable threat, and her robot assistants were vigilant. There was no reasonnot to go. Yet her decision was wrenching.

Now, with the rendezvous approaching, she flexed her hands, feeling tension in positronic receptors that had been placed in exactly the same locations as the nerves of a real woman. On the crystal viewing pane, her reflected image superimposed across the rising forestscape. She wore the same face as when she had dwelled with Hari. Her own face, as she would always think of it.

Hari Seldon still lives,Dors thought. It was part hearsay and part intuition. Although she was not one of the robots to whom Daneel had given Giskardian mentalic powers, Dors felt certain she would know, the instant that her human husband died. A part of her would freeze at that point, locking his image and memory in permanent, revolving circuitry. While Dors knew she might last another ten thousand years, in a sense she would always be Hari’s.

“We shall be landing in just two hours, Dors Venabili.”

The pilot, a lesser humaniform robot, had once been part of a heretical Calvinian group that schemed to mess up Hari’s psychohistory project. Thirty of the dissident machines were captured a year ago by Daneel’s forces and dispatched to a secret repair world for conversion to accept the Zeroth Law of Robotics. But that cargo of prisoners had been hijacked en route by Lodovic Trema. Now they apparently worked for him.

I don’t understand why Daneel trusted Trema with that mission…or any mission. Lodovic should have been destroyed as soon as we discovered that his brain no longer obeyed the Four Laws of Robotics.

Daneel was evidently conflicted in some way. The robot who had guided humanity for twenty thousand years seemed uncertain how to treat a mechanism that behaved more like man than machine. One whochose to act ethically, instead of having it compelled by rigorous programming.