"Yes, miss, in time."
"Tell me exactly," Eva told him, but the robot shook his head.
"I don't know. I couldn't catch it. His mind was all roiled up. He'd just come through a trying experience."
"Then you don't know."
"I wouldn't bother if I were you," the robot told her. "He struck me as a man who knew what he was doing. He'll come out all right."
"You're sure of that?"
"I'm sure of it," the robot said.
Eva snapped the visor off and walked back to the window.
Ash, she thought. Ash, my love, you simply have to be all right. You must know what you're doing. You must come back to us and you must write the book and…
Not for me alone, she said. Not for me alone, for I, least of all of them, have a claim on you. But the galaxy has a claim on you, and maybe someday the universe. The little striving lives are waiting for your words and the hope and dignity they spell. And most of all the dignity, she said. Dignity ahead of hope. The dignity of equality — the dignity of the knowledge that all life is on an equal basis, that life is all that matters, that life is the badge of a greater brotherhood than anything the mind of Man has ever spelled out in all its theorizing.