"Very well, then, but if your answers are deliberately longwinded and evasive, that, too, will show up in the recording."
"Obviously."
"With that understood, may I have a glass of water, to begin with?"
"Absolutely. - Giskard, will you oblige Mr. Baley?"
Giskard was out of his niche at once. There was the inevitable tinkle of ice at the bar at one end of the room and a tall glass of water was on the desk immediately before Baley.
Baley said, "Thank you, Giskard," and waited for him to move back into his niche.
He said, "Dr. Amadiro, am I correct in considering you the head of the Robotics Institute?"
"Yes, you are."
"And its founder?"
"Correct. - You see, I answer briefly."
"How long has it been in existence?"
"As a concept - decades. I have been gathering like-minded people for at least fifteen years. Permission was obtained from the Legislature twelve years ago. Building began nine years ago and active work began six years ago. In its present completed form, the Institute is two years old and there are long range plans for further expansion, eventually. - There you have a long answer, sir, but presented reasonably concisely."
"Why did you find it necessary to set up the Institute?"
"Ah, Mr. Baley. Here you surely expect nothing but a long winded answer."
"As you please, sir."
At this point, a robot brought in a tray of small sandwiches and still smaller pastries, none of which were familiar to Baley. He tried a sandwich and found it crunchy and not exactly unpleasant but odd enough for him to finish it only with an effort. He washed it down with what was left of his water.
Amadiro watched with a kind of gentle amusement and said, "You must understand, Mr. Baley, that we Aurorans are unusual people. So are Spacers generally, but I speak of Aurorans in particular now. We are descended from Earthpeople something most of us do not willingly think about - but we are self selected."
"What does that mean, sir?"
"Earthpeople have long lived on an increasingly crowded planet and have drawn together into still more crowded cities that finally became the beehives and anthills you call Cities with a capital 'C.' What kind of Earthpeople, then, would leave Earth and go to other worlds that are empty and hostile so that they might build new societies from nothing, societies that they could not enjoy in completed form in their own lifetime - trees that would still be saplings when they died, so to speak."
"Rather unusual people, I suppose."
"Quite unusual. Specifically, people who are not so dependent on crowds of their fellows as to lack the ability to face emptiness. People who even prefer emptiness, who would like to work on their own and face problems by themselves, rather than hide in the herd and share the burden so that their own load is virtually nothing. Individualists, Mr. Baley. Individualists!"
"I see that."
"And our society is founded on that. Every direction in which the Spacer worlds have developed further emphasizes our individuality. We are proudly human on Aurora, rather than being huddled sheep on Earth. - Mind you, Mr. Baley, I use the metaphor not as way of deriding Earth. It is simply a different society which I find unadmirable but which you, I suppose, find comforting and ideal."
"What has this to do with the founding of the Institute, Dr. Amadiro?"
"Even proud and healthy individualism has its drawbacks. The greatest minds - working singly, even for centuries - cannot progress rapidly if they refuse to communicate their findings. A knotty puzzle may hold up a scientist for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve. - The Institute is an attempt, in the narrow field of robotics at least, to introduce a certain community of thought."
"Is it possible that the particular knotty puzzle you are attacking is that of the construction of a humaniform robot?"
Amadiro's eyes twinkled. "Yes, that is obvious, isn't it? It was twenty-six years ago that Fastolfe's new mathematical system, which he calls 'intersectional analysis,' made it possible to design humaniform robots - but he kept the system to himself. Years afterward, when all the difficult technical details were worked out, he and Dr. Sarton applied the theory to the design of Daneel. Then Fastolfe alone completed Jander. But all of those details were kept secret, also.
"Most roboticists shrugged and felt that this was natural. They could only try, individually, to work out the details for themselves. I, on the other hand, was struck by the possibility of an Institute in which efforts would be pooled. It wasn't easy to persuade other roboticists of the usefulness of the plan, or to persuade the Legislature to fund it against Fastolfe's formidable opposition, or to persevere through the years of effort, but here we are."
Baley said, "Why was Dr. Fastolfe opposed?"
"Ordinary self-love, to begin with - and I have no fault to find with that, you understand. All of us have a very natural self-love. It comes with the territory of individualism. The point is that Fastolfe considers himself the greatest roboticist in history and also considers the humaniform robot his own particular achievement. He doesn't want that achievement duplicated by a group of roboticists, individually faceless compared to himself. I imagine he viewed it as a conspiracy of inferiors to dilute and deface his own great victory."
"You say that was his motive for opposition 'to begin with.' That means there were other motives. What were they?"
"He also objects to the uses to which we plan to put the humaniform robots."