Asimov's Robot novels

[Anonymouse]

Just a little note about a flaw I've found in The Robots Of Dawn. R. Giskard Reventlov was accidentally given telepathic skills by Vasilia Fastolfe (later Aliena). He uses these to inactivate R. Jander Panell and so bring Plainclothesman Elijah Baley of Earth to Aurora, so he can study Baley's mindset. Later in Robots And Empire she figures this out, and he makes her forget.
This is entirely in keeping with R. Daneel Olivaw's Zeroth Law, over and above First Law in that it protects all human beings. But here's the flaw:
Gladia Solaria took Jander as a sexual partner and developed feelings for him, to the extent of calling him her husband - only natural in that he gave her what she desperately needed and cared nothing for the fact that she could not pleasure him. By First Law, to refuse her would be to do her harm, albeit psychological. By having sex with her, he was pleasing her. He would never do anything she didn't like - again, First Law. He would never pressure her, criticise her, complain, say he was too tired, cheat on her. All these things would hurt her. Hurt is harm. Harm is forbidden by First Law.
One might almost call him a woman's ideal companion. If and when we invent such lifelike robots (Jander was a humaniform, indistinguishable from humanity except to an expert), one wonders if women might not get the same idea...

She was terribly distressed when he was inactivated. But stress, by definition, is harm to a human being - which act would have been forbidden by First Law. Certainly no-one mentioned anything like the Zeroth Law to him; it was some 200 years before Daneel formulated it.
Giskard must have known what Jander's 'death' would do to Gladia and he didn't have the Zeroth Law (and he only accepted it right at the end of his existence). So how did he violate First Law and not be destroyed by his safeguards, which were designed to do just that?

(Incidentally that's a point that wasn't mentioned in the admittedly good I, Robot: the NS-4 who rescued Spooner would have been useless afterwards because its positronic brain would've been destroyed - it only had time to rescue one human being. The other would die by its inaction - whoever it saved, First Law would've been violated. One could argue, as Spooner did, that it should have saved the little girl - and I for one think Spooner had a much better chance than the robot gave him.)

But I do love the Robot novels, especially the last, which had a robot lying by omission - Daneel told Madam Quintana that "I am in no position to tell you the whole story of how we came to have undertaken the task"
(Perfectly true because she would probably, in fright, have ordered their IMMEDIATE destruction for violating, or at least being capable of violating, First Law)
"and there is no way in which I can tell you the name of the human being under whose instructions we work."
(Also true, as there was no human under whose instructions they were working).