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R. Daneel
     Olivaw could not feel human grief, lacking the human mental structures necessary for that
     bitter reassessment and reshaping of neuronal pathways; but, like Lodovik, he could feel a
     sharp and persistent unease, somewhere between guilt at failure and the warning signals of
     impending loss of function. The news that one of his most valued cohorts was missing
     distressed him at the very least in that way. He had lost so many to the tiktoks, guided
     by the alien meme-entities, it seemed so recently-decades, however, and his discomfort
     (and loneliness!) still burned.
    He had seen the newsfilm in a store window the day before, of the loss of the Spear of
     Glory and the probable end to any hope of rescue for the citizens of several worlds.
    In his present guise, he looked very much as he had twenty millennia before, in the time
     of his first and perhaps most influential relationship with a human, Elijah Bailey. Of
     medium height, slender, with brown hair, he appeared about thirty-five human years of age.
     He had made some small accessions to the changes in human physiology in that time; the
     fingernails on his pinkie fingers were now gone, and he was some six centimeters taller.
     Still, Bailey might have recognized him.
    It was doubtful that Daneel would have recognized his ancient human friend, however; all
     but the most general of those memories had long since been stored in separate caches, and
     were not immediately accessible to the robot.
    Daneel had undergone many transformations since that time, the most famous of them being
     Demerzel, First Minister to the Emperor Cleon I; Hari Seldon himself had succeeded him in
     that post. Now the time was approaching when Daneel would have to intensify his direct
     participation in Tranter's politics, a prospect he found distasteful. The loss of Lodovik
     would make his work all the more difficult.
    He had never enjoyed public displays. He was far more content to operate in the background
     and let his thousands of cohorts act out public roles. He preferred, in any case, that his
     robots assert themselves in small ways here and there over time, at key locations, to
     effect changes that would in turn effect other changes, producing a cascade with (he
     hoped) the desired results.
    In the centuries of his work he had seen a few failures and many successes, but with
     Lodovik he had hoped to insure his most important goal, the perfection of the Plan, Hari
     Seldon's Psychohistory Project, and the settlement of a First Foundation world.
    Seldon's psychohistory had already given Daneel the tools necessary to see the Empire's
     future in bleak detail. Collapse, disintegration, wholesale destruction: chaos. There was
     nothing he could do to prevent that collapse. Perhaps had he acted ten thousand years ago,
     with then-impossible foresight, using the crude and piecemeal psychohistory then at his
     disposal, he might have put off this catastrophe. But Daneel could not allow the Empire's
     decline and fall to proceed without intervention, for too many humans would suffer and
     die-over thirty-eight billion on Trantor alone-and the First Law dictated that no human
     should be harmed or allowed to come to harm.
    His duty for all of those twenty thousands of years had been to mitigate human failures
     and redirect human energies for the greater human good.
    To do that, he had mired himself in history, and some of the changes he had effected had
     resulted in pain, harm, even death.
    It was the Zeroth Law, first formulated by the remarkable robot Giskard Reventlov, that
     allowed him to continue functioning under these circumstances.
    The Zeroth Law was not a simple concept, though it could be stated simply enough: some
     humans could be harmed, if by so doing one could prevent harm for the greater number.
    The ends justify the means.
    This dreadful implication had powered so much agony in human history, but it was no time
     to