For the first time in his life, Baley found himself envying a robot. Imagine being able to walk through that; to be indifferent to water, to sight, to sound; to be able to ignore surroundings and to have a pseudo-life that was absolutely courageous; to know no fear of pain or of death, because there was no pain or death. And yet to be incapable of originality of thought, to be incapable of unpredictable leaps of intuition— Were such gifts worth what humanity paid for them?
