“I said there was animal life on the planet, and so there is, but where in the Galaxy were you taught that animal life necessarily implies human life?”

 

            “Why didn’t you say this when you first detected animal life?”

 

            “Because at that distance, I couldn’t tell. I could barely detect the unmistakable wash of animal neural activity, but there was no way I could, at that intensity, tell butterflies from human beings.”

 

            “And now?”

 

            “We’re much closer now, and you may have thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t-or, at least, only briefly. I was, to use an inappropriate word, listening as hard as I could for any sign of mental activity complex enough to signify the presence of intelligence.”

 

            “And there isn’t any?”

 

            “I would suppose,” said Bliss, with sudden caution, “that if I detect nothing at this distance, there can’t possibly be more than a few thousand human beings on the planet. If we come closer, I can judge it still more delicately.”

 

            “Well, that changes things,” said Trevize, with some confusion.

 

            “I suppose,” said Bliss, who looked distinctly sleepy and, therefore, irritable. “You can now discard all this business of analyzing radiation and inferring and deducing and who knows what else you may have been doing. My Gaian senses do the job much more efficiently and surely. Perhaps you see what I mean when I say it is better to be a Gaian than an Isolate.”

 

            Trevize waited before answering, clearly laboring to hold his temper. When he spoke, it was with a polite, and almost formal tone, “I am grateful to you for the information. Nevertheless, you must understand that, to use an analogy, the thought of the advantage of improving my sense of smell would be insufficient motive for me to decide to abandon my humanity and become a bloodhound.”

 

  

 

 34.

 

  

 

            THEY COULD see the Forbidden World now, as they moved below the cloud layer and drifted through the atmosphere. It looked curiously moth-eaten.

 

            The polar regions were icy, as might be expected, but they were not large in extent. The mountainous regions were barren, with occasional glaciers, but they were not large in extent, either. There were small desert areas, well scattered.

 

            Putting all that aside, the planet was, in potential, beautiful. Its continental areas were quite large, but sinuous, so that there were long shorelines, and rich coastal plains of generous extent. There were lush tracts of both tropical and temperate forests, rimmed by grasslands-and yet the moth-eaten nature of it all was evident.

 

            Scattered through the forests were semibarren areas, and parts of the grasslands were thin and sparse.

 

            “Some sort of plant disease?” said Pelorat wonderingly.

 

            “No,” said Bliss slowly. “Something worse than that, and more permanent.”

 

            “I’ve seen a number of worlds,” said Trevize, “but nothing like this.”

 

            “I have seen very few worlds,” said Bliss, “but I think the thoughts of Gaia and this is what you might expect of a world from which humanity has disappeared.”

 

            “Why?” said Trevize.

 

            “Think about it,” said Bliss tartly. “No inhabited world has a true ecological balance. Earth must have had one originally, for if that was the world on which humanity evolved, there must have been long ages when humanity did not exist, or any species capable of developing an advanced technology and the ability to modify the environment. In that case, a natural balance-everchanging, of course-must have existed. On all other inhabited worlds, however, human beings have carefully terraformed their new environments and established plant and animal life, but the ecological system they introduce is bound to be unbalanced. It would possess only a limited number of species and only those that human beings wanted, or couldn’t help introducing-”

 

            Pelorat said, “You know what that reminds me of?-Pardon me, Bliss, for interrupting, but it so fits that I can’t resist telling you right now before I forget. There’s an old creation myth I once came across; a myth in which life was formed on a planet and consisted of only a limited assortment of species, just those useful to or pleasant for humanity. The first human beings then did something silly-never mind what, old fellow, because those old myths are usually symbolic and only confusing if they are taken literally-and the planet’s soil was cursed. ‘Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,’ is the way the curse was quoted though the passage sounds much better in the archaic Galactic in which it was written. The point is, though, was it really a curse? Things human beings don’t like and don’t want, such as thorns and thistles, may be needed to balance the ecology.”

 

            Bliss smiled. “It’s really amazing, Pel, how everything reminds you of a legend, and how illuminating they are sometimes. Human beings, in terraforming a world, leave out the thorns and thistles, whatever they may be, and human beings then have to labor to keep the world going. It isn’t a self-supporting organism as Gaia is. It is rather a miscellaneous collection of Isolates and the collection isn’t miscellaneous enough to allow the ecological balance to persist indefinitely. If humanity disappears, and if its guiding hands are removed, the world’s pattern of life inevitably begins to fall apart. The planet unterraforms itself.”

 

            Trevize said skeptically, “If that’s what’s happening, it doesn’t happen quickly. This world may have been free of human beings for twenty thousand years and yet most of it still seems to be very much a going concern.”

 

            “Surely,” said Bliss, “that depends on how well the ecological balance was set up in the first place. If it is a fairly good balance to begin with, it might last for a long time without human beings. After all, twenty thousand years, though very long in terms of human affairs, is just overnight when compared to a planetary lifetime.”

 

            “I suppose,” said Pelorat, staring intently at the planetary vista, “that if the planet is degenerating, we can be sure that the human beings are gone.”

 

            Bliss said, “I still detect no mental activity at the human level and I am willing to suppose that the planet is safely free of humanity. There is the steady hum and buzz of lower levels of consciousness, however, levels high enough to represent birds and mammals. Just the same, I’m not sure that unterraforming is enough to show human beings are gone. A planet might deteriorate even if human beings existed upon it, if the society were itself abnormal and did not understand the importance of preserving the environment.”

 

            “Surely,” said Pelorat, “such a society would quickly be destroyed. I don’t think it would be possible for human beings to fail to understand the importance of retaining the very factors that are keeping them alive.”

 

            Bliss said, “I don’t have your pleasant faith in human reason, Pel. It seems to me to be quite conceivable that when a planetary society consists only of Isolates, local and even individual concerns might easily be allowed to overcome planetary concerns.”

 

            “I don’t think that’s conceivable,” said Trevize, “anymore than Pelorat does. In fact, since human-occupied worlds exist by the million and none of them have deteriorated in an unterraforming fashion, your fear of Isolatism may be exaggerated, Bliss.”

 

            The ship now moved out of the daylit hemisphere into the night. The effect was that of a rapidly deepening twilight, and then utter darkness outside, except for starlight where the sky was clear.

 

            The ship maintained its height by accurately monitoring the atmospheric pressure and gravitational intensity. They were at a height too great to encounter any upthrusting mountainous massif, for the planet was at a stage when mountain-building had not recently taken place. Still, the computer felt its way forward with its microwave finger-tips, just in case.

 

            Trevize regarded the velvety darkness and said, thoughtfully, “Somehow what I find most convincing as the sign of a deserted planet is the absence of visible light on the dark side. No technological society could possibly endure darkness.-As soon as we get into the dayside, we’ll go lower.”

 

            “What would be the use of that?” said Pelorat. “There’s nothing there.”

 

            “Who said there’s nothing there?”

 

            “Bliss did. And you did.”

 

            “No, Janov. I said there’s no radiation of technological origin and Bliss said there’s no sign of human mental activity, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Even if there are no human beings on the planet, there would surely be relics of some sort. I’m after information, Janov, and the remainders of a technology may have its uses in that direction.”

 

            “After twenty thousand years?” Pelorat’s voice climbed in pitch. “What do you think can survive twenty thousand years? There will be no films, no paper, no print; metal will have rusted, wood will have decayed, plastic will be in shattered grains. Even stone will have crumbled and eroded.”

 

            “It may not be twenty thousand years,” said Trevize patiently. “I mentioned that time as the longest period the planet may have been left empty of human beings because Comporellian legend has this world flourishing at that time. But suppose the last human beings had died or vanished or fled only a thousand years ago.”

 

            They arrived at the other end of the nightside and the dawn came and brightened into sunlight almost instantaneously.

 

            TheFar Star sank downward and slowed its progress until the details of the land surface were clearly visible. The small islands that dotted the continental shores could now be clearly seen. Most were green with vegetation.

 

            Trevize said, “It’s my idea that we ought to study the spoiled areas particularly. It seems to me that those places where human beings were most concentrated would be where the ecological balance was most lacking. Those areas might be the nucleus of the spreading blight of unterraforming. What do you think, Bliss?”

 

            “It’s possible. In any case, in the absence of definite knowledge, we might as well look where it’s easiest to see. The grasslands and forest would have swallowed most signs of human habitation so that looking there might prove a waste of time.”

 

            “It strikes me,” said Pelorat, “that a world might eventually establish a balance with what it has; that new species might develop; and that the bad areas might be recolonized on a new basis.”

 

            “Possibly, Pel,” said Bliss. “It depends on how badly out of balance the world was in the first place. And for a world to heal itself and achieve a new balance through evolution would take far more than twenty thousand years. We’d be talking millions of years.”

 

            TheFar Star was no longer circling the world. It was drifting slowly across a five-hundred-kilometer-wide stretch of scattered heath and furze, with occasional clumps of trees.

 

            “What do you think of that?” said Trevize suddenly, pointing. The ship came to a drifting halt and hovered in mid-air. There was a low, but persistent, hum as the gravitic engines shifted into high, neutralizing the planetary gravitational field almost entirely.

 

            There was nothing much to see where Trevize pointed. Tumbled mounds bearing soil and sparse grass were all that was visible.

 

            “It doesn’t look like anything to me,” said Pelorat.

 

            “There’s a straight-line arrangement to that junk. Parallel lines, and you can make out some faint lines at right angles, too. See? See? You can’t get that in any natural formation. That’s human architecture, marking out foundations and walls, just as clearly as though they were still standing there to be looked at.”

 

            “Suppose it is,” said Pelorat. “That’s just a ruin. If we’re going to do archeological research, we’re going to have to dig and dig. Professionals would take years to do it properly-”

 

            “Yes, but we can’t take the time to do it properly. That may be the faint outline of an ancient city and something of it may still be standing. Let’s follow those lines and see where they take us.”

 

            It was toward one end of the area, at a place where the trees were somewhat more thickly clumped, that they came to standing walls-or partially standing ones.

 

            Trevize said, “Good enough for a beginning. We’re landing.”

 

  

 

 9. Facing the Pack

 

  

 

 35.

 

  

 

      THEFar Star came to rest at the bottom of a small rise, a hill in the generally fiat countryside. Almost without thought, Trevize had taken it for granted that it would be best for the ship not to be visible for miles in every direction.

 

            He said, “The temperature outside is 24 C., the wind is about eleven kilometers per hour from the west, and it is partly cloudy. The computer does not know enough about the general air circulation to be able to predict the weather. However, since the humidity is some forty percent, it seems scarcely about to rain. On the whole, we seem to have chosen a comfortable latitude or season of the year, and after Comporellon that’s a pleasure.”

 

            “I suppose,” said Pelorat, “that as the planet continues to unterraform, the weather will become more extreme.”

 

            “I’m sure of that,” said Bliss.

 

            “Be as sure as you like,” said Trevize. “We have thousands of years of leeway. Right now, it’s still a pleasant planet and will continue to be so for our lifetimes and far beyond.”

 

            He was clasping a broad belt about his waist as he spoke, and Bliss said sharply, “What’s that, Trevize?”

 

            “Just my old navy training,” said Trevize. “I’m not going into an unknown world unarmed.”

 

            “Are you seriously intending to carry weapons?”

 

            “Absolutely. Here on my right”-he slapped a holster that contained a massive weapon with a broad muzzle-”is my blaster, and here on my left”-a smaller weapon with a thin muzzle that contained no opening-”is my neuronic whip.”

 

            “Two varieties of murder,” said Bliss, with distaste.

 

            “Only one. The blaster kills. The neuronic whip doesn’t. It just stimulates the pain nerves, and it hurts so that you can wish you were dead, I’m told. Fortunately, I’ve never been at the wrong end of one.”

 

            “Why are you taking them?”

 

            “I told you. It’s an enemy world.”

 

            “Trevize, it’s anempty world.”

 

            “Is it? There’s no technological society, it would seem, but what if there are post-technological primitives. They may not possess anything worse than clubs or rocks, but those can kill, too.”

 

            Bliss looked exasperated, but lowered her voice in an effort to be reasonable. “I detect no human neuronic activity, Trevize. That eliminates primitives of any type, post-technological or otherwise.”

 

            “Then I won’t have to use my weapons,” said Trevize. “Still, what harm would there be in carrying them? They’ll just make me a little heavier, and since the gravitational pull at the surface is about ninety-one percent that of Terminus, I can afford the weight.-Listen, the ship may be unarmed as a ship, but it has a reasonable supply of hand-weapons. I suggest that you two also-”

 

            “No,” said Bliss at once. “I will not make even a gesture in the direction of killing-or of inflicting pain, either.”

 

            “It’s not a question of killing, but of avoiding being killed, if you see what I mean.”

 

            “I can protect myself in my own way.”

 

            “Janov?”

 

            Pelorat hesitated. “We didn’t have arms on Comporellon.”

 

            “Come, Janov, Comporellon was a known quantity, a world associated with the Foundation. Besides we were at once taken into custody. If we had had weapons, they would have been taken away. Do you want a blaster?”

 

            Pelorat shook his head. “I’ve never been in the Navy, old chap. I wouldn’t know how to use one of those things and, in an emergency, I would never think of it in time. I’d just run and-and get killed.”

 

            “You won’t get killed, Pel,” said Bliss energetically. “Gaia has you in my/our/its protection, and that posturing naval hero as well.”

 

            Trevize said, “Good. I have no objection to being protected, but I am not posturing. I am simply making assurance doubly sure, and if I never have to make a move toward these things, I’ll be completely pleased, I promise you. Still Imust have them.”

 

            He patted both weapons affectionately and said, “Now let’s step out on this world which may not have felt the weight of human beings upon its surface for thousands of years.”

 

  

 

 36.

 

  

 

            “I HAVE a feeling,” said Pelorat, “that it must be rather late in the day, but the sun is high enough to make it near noon, perhaps.”

 

            “I suspect,” said Trevize, looking about the quiet panorama, “that your feeling originates out of the sun’s orange tint, which gives it a sunset feel. If we’re still here at actual sunset and the cloud formations are proper, we ought to experience a deeper red than we’re used to. I don’t know whether you’ll find it beautiful or depressing.-For that matter it was probably even more extreme on Comporellon, but there we were indoors virtually all the time.”

 

            He turned slowly, considering the surroundings in all directions. In addition to the almost subliminal oddness of the light, there was the distinctive smell of the world-or this section of it. It seemed a little musty, but far from actively unpleasant.

 

            The trees nearby were of middling height, and looked old, with gnarled bark and trunks a little off the vertical, though because of a prevailing wind or something off-color about the soil he couldn’t tell. Was it the trees that lent a somehow menacing ambience to the world or was it something else-less material?

 

            Bliss said, “What do you intend to do, Trevize? Surely we didn’t come all this distance to enjoy the view?”

 

            Trevize said, “Actually, perhaps that ought to be my part of it just now. I would suggest that Janov explore this place. There are ruins off in that direction and he’s the one who can judge the value of any records he might find. I imagine he can understand writings or films in archaic Galactic and I know quite well I wouldn’t. And I suppose, Bliss, you want to go with him in order to protect him. As for me, I will stay here as a guard on the outer rim.”

 

            “A guard against what? Primitives with rocks and clubs?”

 

            “Perhaps.” And then the smile that had hovered about his lips faded and he said, “Oddly enough, Bliss, I’m a little uneasy about this place. I can’t say why.”

 

            Pelorat said, “Come, Bliss. I’ve been a home-body collector of old tales all my life, so I’ve never actually put my hands on ancient documents. Just imagine if we could find-”

 

            Trevize watched them walk away, Pelorat’s voice fading as he walked eagerly toward the ruins; Bliss swinging along at his side.

 

            Trevize listened absently and then turned back to continue his study of the surroundings. What could there be to rouse apprehension?

 

            He had never actually set foot upon a world without a human population, but he had viewed many from space. Usually, they were small worlds, not large enough to hold either water or air, but they had been useful as marking a meeting site during naval maneuvers (there had been no war in his lifetime, or for a century before his birth but maneuvers went on), or as an exercise in simulated emergency repairs. Ships he had been on had been in orbit about such worlds, or had even rested on them, but he had never had occasion to step off the ships at those times.

 

            Was it that he was now actually standing on an empty world? Would he have felt the same if he had been standing on one of the many small, airless worlds he had encountered in his student days-and even since?

 

            He shook his head. It wouldn’t have bothered him. He was sure of that. He would have been in a space suit, as he had been innumerable times when he was free of his ship in space. It was a familiar situation and contact with a mere lump of rock would have produced no alteration in the familiarity. Surely!

 

            Of course-He was not wearing a space suit now.

 

            He was standing on a habitable world, as comfortable to the feel as Terminus would be-far more comfortable than Comporellon had been. He experienced the wind against his cheek, the warmth of the sun on his back, the rustle of vegetation in his ears. Everything was familiar, except that there were no human beings on it-at least, not any longer.

 

            Was that it? Was it that that made the world seem so eerie? Was it that it was not merely an uninhabited world, but adeserted one?

 

            He had never been on a deserted world before; never heard of a deserted world before; never thought a worldcould be deserted. All the worlds he had known of till now, once they had been populated by human beings, remained so populated forever.

 

            He looked up toward the sky. Nothing else had deserted it. An occasional bird flew across his line of vision, seeming more natural, somehow, than the slate-blue sky between the orange-tinted fair-weather clouds. (Trevize was certain that, given a few days on the planet, he would become accustomed to the off-color so that sky and clouds would grow to seem normal to him.)

 

            He heard birdsongs from the trees, and the softer noise of insects. Bliss had mentioned butterflies earlier and here they were-in surprising numbers and in several colorful varieties.

 

            There were also occasional rustlings in the clumps of grass that surrounded the trees, but he could not quite make out what was causing them.

 

            Nor did the obvious presence of life in his vicinity rouse fear in him. As Bliss had said, terraformed worlds had, from the very first, lacked dangerous animals. The fairy tales of childhood, and the heroic fantasies of his teenage years were invariably set on a legendary world that must have been derived from the vague myths of Earth. The hyperdrama holoscreen had been filled with monsters-lions, unicorns, dragons, whales, brontosaurs, bears. There were dozens of them with names he could not remember; some of them surely mythical, and perhaps all of them. There were smaller animals that bit and stung, even plants that were fearful to the touch-but only in fiction. He had once heard that primitive honeybees were able to sting, but certainly no red bees were in any way harmful.

 

            Slowly, he walked to the right, skirting the border of the hill. The grass was tall and rank, but sparse, growing in clumps. He made his way among the trees, also growing in clumps.

 

            Then he yawned. Certainly, nothing exciting was happening, and he wondered if he might not retreat to the ship and take a nap. No, unthinkable. Clearly, he had to stand on guard.

 

            Perhaps he ought to do sentry duty-marching, one, two, one two, swinging about with a snap and performing complicated maneuverings with a parade electro-rod. (It was a weapon no warrior had used in three centuries, but it was still absolutely essential at drill, for no reason anyone could ever advance.)

 

            He grinned at the thought of it, then wondered if he ought to join Pelorat and Bliss in the ruins. Why? What good would he do?

 

            Suppose he saw something that Pelorat had happened to overlook?-Well, time enough to make the attempt after Pelorat returned. If there was anything that might be found easily, by all means let Pelorat make the discovery.

 

            Might the two be in trouble? Foolish! What possible kind of trouble?

 

            And if therewere trouble, they would call out.

 

            He stopped to listen. He heard nothing.

 

            And then the irresistible thought of sentry duty recurred to him and h1 found himself marching, feet moving up and down with a stamp, an imaginary electro-rod coming off one shoulder, whirling, and being held out straight before him, exactly vertical-whirling again, end over end, and back over the other shoulder. Then, with a smart about-face, he was looking toward the ship (rather far-off now) once more.

 

            And when he did that, he froze in reality, and not in sentry make-believe.

 

            He was not alone.

 

            Until then, he had not seen any living creature other than plant growl insects, and an occasional bird. He had neither seen nor heard anything approach-but now an animal stood between him and the ship.

 

            Sheer surprise at the unexpected event deprived him, for a moment, of the ability to interpret what he saw. It was not till after a perceptible interval that he knew what he was looking at.

 

            It was only a dog.

 

            Trevize was not a dog person. He had never owned a dog and he felt no surge of friendliness toward one when he encountered it. He felt no such surge this time, either. He thought, rather impatiently, that there was no world on which these creatures had not accompanied men. They existed in countless varieties and Trevize had long had the weary impression that each world had at least one variety characteristic of itself. Nevertheless, all varieties were constant in this: whether they were kept for entertainment, show, or some form of useful work-they were bred to love and trust human beings.

 

            It was a love and trust Trevize had never appreciated. He had once lived with a woman who had had a dog. That dog, whom Trevize tolerated for the sake of the woman, conceived a deep-seated adoration for him, followed him about, leaned against him when relaxing (all fifty pounds of him), covered him with saliva and hair at unexpected moments, and squatted outside the door and moaned whenever he and the woman were trying to engage in sex.

 

            From that experience, Trevize had emerged with the firm conviction that for some reason known only to the canine mind and its odor-analyzing ability, he was a fixed object of doggish devotion.

 

            Therefore, once the initial surprise was over, he surveyed the dog without concern. It was a large dog, lean and rangy, and with long legs. It was staring at him with no obvious sign of adoration. Its mouth was open in what might have been taken as a welcoming grin, but the teeth displayed were somehow large and dangerous, and Trevize decided that he would be more comfortable without the dog in his line of view.

 

            It occurred to him, then, that the dog had never seen a human being, and that countless canine generations preceding had never seen one. The dog might have been as astonished and uncertain at the sudden appearance of a human being as Trevize had been at that of the dog. Trevize, at least, had quickly recognized the dog for what it was, but the dog did not have that advantage. It was still puzzled, and perhaps alarmed.

 

            Clearly, it would not be safe to leave an animal that large, and with such teeth, in an alarmed state. Trevize realized that it would be necessary to establish a friendship at once.

 

            Very slowly, he approached the dog (no sudden motions, of course). He held out his hand, ready to allow it to be sniffed, and made soft, soothing sounds, most of which consisted of “Nice doggy”-something he found intensely embarrassing.

 

            The dog, eyes fixed on Trevize, backed away a step or two, as though in distrust, and then its upper lip wrinkled into a snarl and from its mouth there issued a rasping growl. Although Trevize had never seen a dog behave so, there was no way of interpreting the action as representing anything but menace.

 

            Trevize therefore stopped advancing and froze. His eyes caught motion to one side, and his head turned slowly. There were two other dogs advancing from that direction. They looked just as deadly as the first.

 

            Deadly? That adjective occurred to him only now, and its dreadful appropriateness was unmistakable.

 

            His heart was suddenly pounding. The way to the ship was blocked. He could not run aimlessly, for those long canine legs would reach him in yards. If he stood his ground and used his blaster, then while he killed one, the other two would be upon him. Off in the distance, he could see other dogs approaching. Was there some way in which they communicated? Did they hunt in packs?

 

            Slowly, he shifted ground leftward, in a direction in which there were no dogs-as yet. Slowly. Slowly.

 

            The dogs shifted ground with him. He felt certain that all that saved him from instant attack was the fact that the dogs had never seen or smelled anything like himself before. They had no established behavior pattern they could follow in his case.

 

            If he ran, of course, that would represent something familiar to the dogs. They would know what to do if something the size of Trevize showed fear and ran. They would run, too. Faster.

 

            Trevize kept sidling toward a tree. He had the wildest desire to move upward where the dogs could not follow. They moved with him, snarling softly, coming closer. All three had their eyes fixed unwinkingly upon him. Two more were joining them and, farther off, Trevize could see still other dogs approaching. At some point, when he was close enough, he would have to make the dash. He could not wait too long, or run too soon. Either might be fatal.

 

            Now!

 

            He probably set a personal record for acceleration and even so it was a near thing. He felt the snap of jaws close on the heel of one foot, and for just moment he was held fast before the teeth slid off the tough ceramoid.

 

            He was not skilled at climbing trees. He had not climbed one since he was ten and, as he recalled, that had been a clumsy effort. In this case, though, the trunk was not quite vertical, and the bark was gnarled and offered handholds. What was more, he was driven by necessity, and it is remarkable what one can do if the need is great enough.

 

            Trevize found himself sitting in a crotch, perhaps ten meters above ground. For the moment he was totally unaware that he had scraped hand and that it was oozing blood. At the base of the tree, five dogs now on their haunches, staring upward, tongues lolling, all looking patiently expectant.

 

            What now?

 

  

 

 37.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE was not in a position to think about the situation in logical detail. Rather, he experienced flashes of thought in odd and distorted sequence which, if he had eventually sorted them out, would have come to this-

 

            Bliss had earlier maintained that in terraforming a planet, human Map would establish an unbalanced economy, which they would be able to keep from falling apart only by unending effort. For instance, no Settlers had brought with them any of the large predators. Small ones could not be helped. Insects, parasites-even small hawks, shrews, and so on.

 

            Those dramatic animals of legend and vague literary accounts-tigers, grizzly bears, orcs, crocodiles? Who would carry them from world to world even if there were sense to it? And where would there be sense to it?

 

            It meant that human beings were the only large predators, and it was up to them to cull those plants and animals that, left to themselves, would smother in their own overplenty.

 

            And if human beings somehow vanished, then other predators must take their place. But what predators? The most sizable predators tolerated by human beings were dogs and cats, tamed and living on human bounty.

 

            What if no human beings remained to feed them? They must then find their own food for their survival and, in all truth, for the survival of those they preyed on, whose numbers had to be kept in check lest overpopulation do a hundred times the damage that predations would do.

 

            So dogs would multiply, in their variations, with the large ones attacking the large, untended herbivores; the smaller ones preying on birds and rodents. Cats would prey by night as dogs did by day; the former singly, the latter in packs.

 

            And perhaps evolution would eventually produce more varieties, to fill additional environmental niches. Would some dogs eventually develop seagoing characteristics to enable them to live on fish; and would some cats develop gliding abilities to hunt the clumsier birds in the air as well as on the ground?

 

            In flashes, all this came to Trevize while he struggled with more systematic thought to tell him what he might do.

 

            The number of dogs kept growing. He counted twenty-three now surrounding the tree and there were others approaching. How large was the pack? What did it matter? It was large enough already.

 

            He withdrew his blaster from its holster, but the solid feel of the butt in his hand did not give him the sense of security he would have liked. When had he last inserted an energy unit into it and how many charges could he fire? Surely not twenty-three.

 

            What about Pelorat and Bliss? If they emerged, would the dogs turn on them? Were they safe even if they did not emerge? If the dogs sensed the presence of two human beings inside the ruins, what could stop them from attacking them there? Surely there would be no doors or barriers to hold them off.

 

            Could Bliss stop them, and even drive them away? Could she concentrate her powers through hyperspace to the desired pitch of intensity? For how long could she maintain them?

 

            Should he call for help then? Would they come running if he yelled, and would the dogs flee under Bliss’s glare? (Would it take a glare or was it simply a mental action undetectable to onlookers without the ability?) Or, if they appeared, would they then be torn apart under the eyes of Trevize, who would be forced to watch, helplessly, from the relative safety of his post in the tree?

 

            No, he would have to use his blaster. If he could kill one dog and frighten them off for just a while, he could scramble down the tree, yell for Pelorat and Bliss, kill a second dog if they showed signs of returning, and all three could then hustle into the ship.

 

            He adjusted the intensity of the microwave beam to the three-quartet mark. That should be ample to kill a dog with a loud report. The report would serve to frighten the dogs away, and he would be conserving energy.

 

            He aimed carefully at a dog in the middle of the pack, one who seemed (in Trevize’s own imagination, at least) to exude a greater malignancy than the rest-perhaps only because he sat more quietly and, therefore, seemed more cold-bloodedly intent on his prey. The dog was staring directly at the weapon now, as though it scorned the worst Trevize could do.

 

            It occurred to Trevize that he had never himself fired a blaster at a human being, or seen anyone else do it. There had been firing at water-filled dummies of leather and plastic during training; with the water almost instantaneously heated to the boiling point, and shredding the covering as it exploded.

 

            But who, in the absence of war, would fire at a human being? And what human being would withstand a blaster and force its use? Only here, on world made pathological by the disappearance of human beings-

 

            With that odd ability of the brain to note something utterly beside the point, Trevize was aware of the fact that a cloud had hidden the sun-and then he fired.

 

            There was an odd shimmer of the atmosphere on a straight line from the muzzle of the blaster to the dog; a vague sparkle that might have gone unnoticed if the sun were still shining unhindered.

 

            The dog must have felt the initial surge of heat, and made the smallest motion as though it were about to leap. And then it exploded, as a portion its blood and cellular contents vaporized.

 

            The explosion made a disappointingly small noise, for the dog’s integument was simply not as tough as that of the dummies they had practiced on. Flesh, skin, blood, and bone were scattered, however, and Trevize felt his stomach heave.

 

            The dogs started back, some having been bombarded with uncomfortably warm fragments. That was only a momentary hesitation, however. They crowded against each other suddenly, in order to eat what had been provided. Trevize felt his sickness increase. He was not frightening them; he was feeding them. At that rate, they would never leave. In fact, the smell of fresh blood and warm meat would attract still more dogs, and perhaps other smaller predators as well.

 

            A voice called out, “Trevize. What-”

 

            Trevize looked outward. Bliss and Pelorat had emerged from the ruins. Bliss had stopped short, her arms thrown out to keep Pelorat back. She stared at the dogs. The situation was obvious and clear. She had to ask nothing.

 

            Trevize shouted, “I tried to drive them off without involving you and Janov. Can you hold them off?”

 

            “Barely,” said Bliss, not shouting, so that Trevize had trouble hearing her even though the dogs’ snarling had quieted as though a soothing soundabsorbent blanket had been thrown over them.

 

            Bliss said, “There are too many of them, and I am not familiar with their pattern of neuronic activity. We have no such savage things on Gaia.”

 

            “Or on Terminus. Or on any civilized world,” shouted Trevize. “I’ll shoot as many of them as I can and you try to handle the rest. A smaller number will give you less trouble.”

 

            “No, Trevize. Shooting them will just attract others.-Stay behind me, Pel. There’s no way you can protect me.-Trevize, your other weapon.”

 

            “The neuronic whip?”

 

            “Yes. That produces pain. Low power. Low power!”

 

            “Are you afraid of hurting them?” called out Trevize in anger. “Is this a time to consider the sacredness of life?”

 

            “I’m considering Pel’s. Also mine. Do as I say. Low power, and shoot at one of the dogs. I can’t hold them much longer.”

 

            The dogs had drifted away from the tree and had surrounded Bliss and Pelorat, who stood with their backs to a crumbling wall. The dogs nearest the two made hesitant attempts to come closer still, whining a bit as though trying to puzzle out what it was that held them off when they could sense nothing that would do it. Some tried uselessly to scramble up the wall and attack from behind.

 

            Trevize’s hand was trembling as he adjusted the neuronic whip to low power. The neuronic whip used much less energy than the blaster did, and a single power-cartridge could produce hundreds of whip-like strokes but, come to think of it, he didn’t remember when he had last charged this weapon, either.

 

            It was not so important to aim the whip. Since conserving energy was not as critical, he could use it in a sweep across the mass of dogs. That was the traditional method of controlling crowds that showed signs of turning dangerous.

 

            However, he followed Bliss’s suggestion. He aimed at one dog and fired. The dog fell over, its legs twitching. It emitted loud, high-pitched squeals.

 

            The other dogs backed away from the stricken beast, ears flattening backward against their heads. Then, squealing in their turn, they turned and left, at first slowly, then more rapidly, and finally, at a full race. The dog who had been hit, scrambled painfully to its legs, and limped away whimpering, much the last of them.

 

            The noise vanished in the distance, and Bliss said, “We had better get into the ship. They will come back. Or others will.”

 

            Trevize thought that never before had he manipulated the ship’s entry mechanism so rapidly. And it was possible he might never do so again.

 

  

 

 38.

 

  

 

            NIGHT HAD fallen before Trevize felt something approaching to normal. The’ small patch of syntho-skin on the scrape on his hand had soothed the physical pain, but there was a scrape on his psyche for which soothing was not so easy.

 

            It was not the mere exposure to danger. He could react to that as well as any ordinarily brave person might. It was the totally unlooked-for direction from which the danger had come. It was the feeling of the ridiculous. How would it look if people were to find out he had been treed by snarlingdogs ? It would scarcely be worse if he had been put to flight by the whirring of angry canaries.

 

            For hours, he kept listening for a new attack on the part of the dogs, for the sound of howls, for the scratch of claws against the outer hull.

 

            Pelorat, by comparison, seemed quite cool. “There was no question in my mind, old chap, that Bliss would handle it, but I must say you fired the weapon well.”

 

            Trevize shrugged. He was in no mood to discuss the matter.

 

            Pelorat was holding his library-the one compact disc on which his lifetime of research into myths and legends were stored-and with it he retreated into his bedroom where he kept his small reader.

 

            He seemed quite pleased with himself. Trevize noticed that but didn’t follow it up. Time for that later when his mind wasn’t quite as taken up with dogs.

 

            Bliss said, rather tentatively, when the two were alone, “I presume you were taken by surprise.”

 

            “Quite,” said Trevize gloomily. “Who would think that at the sight of a dog-adog -I should run for my life.”

 

            “Twenty thousand years without men and it would not be quite a dog. Those beasts must now be the dominant large predators.”

 

            Trevize nodded. “I figured that out while I was sitting on the tree branch being a dominated prey. You were certainly right about an unbalanced ecology.”

 

            “Unbalanced, certainly, from the human standpoint-but considering how efficiently the dogs seem to be going about their business, I wonder if Pel may be right in his suggestion that the ecology could balance itself, with various environmental niches being filled by evolving variations of the relatively few species that were once brought to the world.”

 

            “Oddly enough,” said Trevize, “the same thought occurred to me.”

 

            “Provided, of course, the unbalance is not so great that the process of righting itself takes too long. The planet might become completely nonviable before that.”

 

            Trevize grunted.

 

            Bliss looked at him thoughtfully, “How is it that you thought of arming yourself?”

 

            Trevize said, “It did me little good. It was your ability-”

 

            “Not entirely. I needed your weapon. At short notice, with only hyperspatial contact with the rest of Gaia, with so many individual minds of so unfamiliar a nature, I could have done nothing without your neuronic whip.”

 

            “My blaster was useless. I tried that.”

 

            “With a blaster, Trevize, a dog merely disappears. The rest may be surprised, but not frightened.”

 

            “Worse than that,” said Trevize. “They ate the remnants. I was bribing them to stay.”

 

            “Yes, I see that might be the effect. The neuronic whip is different. It inflicts pain, and a dog in pain emits cries of a kind that are well understood by other dogs who, by conditioned reflex, if nothing else, begin to feel frightened themselves. With the dogs already disposed toward fright, I merely nudged their minds, and off they went.”

 

            “Yes, but you realized the whip was the more deadly of the two in this case. I did not.”

 

            “I am accustomed to dealing with minds. You are not. That’s why I insisted on low power and aiming at one dog. I did not want so much pain that it killed a dog and left him silent. I did not want the pain so dispersed as to cause mere whimpering. I wanted strong pain concentrated at one point.”

 

            “And you got it, Bliss,” said Trevize. “It worked perfectly. I owe you considerable gratitude.”

 

            “You begrudge that,” said Bliss thoughtfully, “because it seems to you that you played a ridiculous role. And yet, I repeat, I could have done nothing without your weapons. What puzzles me is how you can explain your arming yourself in the face of my assurance that there were no human beings on this world, something I am still certain is a fact. Did you foresee the dogs?”

 

            “No,” said Trevize. “I certainly didn’t. Not consciously, at least. And I don’t habitually go armed, either. It never even occurred to me to put on weapons at Comporellon.-But I can’t allow myself to trip into the trap of feeling it was magic, either. It couldn’t have been. I suspect that once we began talking about unbalanced ecologies earlier, I somehow had an unconscious glimpse of animals grown dangerous in the absence of human beings. That is clear enough in hindsight, but Imight have had a whiff of it in foresight. Nothing more than that.”

 

            Bliss said, “Don’t dismiss it that casually. I participated in the same conversation concerning unbalanced ecologies and I didn’t have that same foresight. It is that special trick of foresight in you that Gaia values. I can see, too, that it must be irritating to you to have a hidden foresight the nature of which you cannot detect; to act with decision, but without clear reason.”

 

            “The usual expression on Terminus is ‘to act on a hunch.”‘

 

            “On Gaia we say, ‘to know without thought.’ You don’t like knowing without thought, do you?”

 

            “It bothers me, yes. I don’t like being driven by hunches. I assume hunch has reason behind it, but not knowing the reason makes me feel I’m not in control of my own mind-a kind of mild madness.”

 

            “And when you decided in favor of Gaia and Galaxia, you were acting on a hunch, and now you seek the reason.”

 

            “I have said so at least a dozen times.”

 

            “And I have refused to accept your statement as literal truth. For that I am sorry. I will oppose you in this no longer. I hope, though, that I may continue to point out items in Gaia’s favor.”

 

            “Always,” said Trevize, “if you, in turn, recognize that them.”

 

            “Does it occur to you, then, that this Unknown World is reverting to a kind of savagery, and perhaps to eventual desolation and uninhabitability, because of the removal of a single species that is capable of acting as a guiding intelligence? If the world were Gaia, or better yet, a part of Galaxia, this could not happen. The guiding intelligence would still exist in the form of the Galaxy as a whole, and ecology, whenever unbalanced, and for whatever reason, would move toward balance again.”

 

            “Does that mean that dogs would no longer eat?”

 

            “Of course they would eat, just as human beings do. They would however, with purpose, in order to balance the ecology under deliberate direction, and not as a result of random circumstance.”

 

            Trevize said, “The loss of individual freedom might not matter to dogs, but it must matter to human beings.-And what ifall human beings were removed from existence, everywhere, and not merely on one world or on Several? What if Galaxia were left without human beings at all? Would there still be a guiding intelligence? Would all other life forms and inanimate matter be able to put together a common intelligence adequate for the purpose?”

 

            Bliss hesitated. “Such a situation,” she said, “has never been experienced. Nor does there seem any likelihood that it will ever be experienced in the future.”

 

            Trevize said, “But doesn’t it seem obvious to you, that the human mind is qualitatively different from everything else, and that if it were absent, the sum total of all other consciousness could not replace it. Would it not be true, then, that human beings are a special case and must be treated as such? They should not be fused even with one another, let alone with nonhuman objects.”

 

            “Yet you decided in favor of Galaxia.”

 

            “For an overriding reason I cannot make out.”

 

            “Perhaps that overriding reason was a glimpse of the effect of unbalanced ecologies? Might it not have been your reasoning that every world in the Galaxy is on a knife-edge, with instability on either side, and that only Galaxia could prevent such disasters as are taking place on this world-to say nothing of the continuing interhuman disasters of war and administrative failure.”

 

            “No. Unbalanced ecologies were not in my mind at the time of my decision.”

 

            “How can you be sure?”

 

            “I may not know what it is I’m foreseeing, but if something is suggested afterward, I would recognize it if that were indeed what I foresaw.-As it seems to me I may have foreseen dangerous animals on this world.”

 

            “Well,” said Bliss soberly, “we might have been dead as a result of those dangerous animals if it had not been for a combination of our powers, your foresight and my mentalism. Come, then, let us be friends.”

 

            Trevize nodded. “If you wish.”

 

            There was a chill in his voice that caused Bliss’s eyebrows to rise, but at this point Pelorat burst in, nodding his head as though prepared to shake it off its foundations.

 

            “I think,” he said, “we have it.”

 

  

 

 39.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE did not, in general, believe in easy victories, and yet it was only human to fall into belief against one’s better judgment. He felt the muscles in his chest and throat tighten, but managed to say, “The location of Earth? Have you discovered that, Janov?”

 

            Pelorat stared at Trevize for a moment, and deflated. “Well, no,” he said, visibly abashed. “Not quite that.-Actually, Golan, not that at all. I had forgotten about that. It was something else that I discovered in the ruins. I suppose it’s not really important.”

 

            Trevize managed a long breath and said, “Never mind, Janov. Every finding is important. What was it you came in to say?”

 

            “Well,” said Pelorat, “it’s just that almost nothing survived, you understand. Twenty thousand years of storm and wind don’t leave much. What’s more, plant life is gradually destructive and animal life-But never mind all that. The point is that ‘almost nothing’ is not the same as ‘nothing.’

 

            “The ruins must have included a public building, for there was some fallen stone, or concrete, with incised lettering upon it. There was hardly anything visible, you understand, old chap, but I took photographs with one of those cameras we have on board ship, the kind with built-in computer enhancement-I never got round to asking permission to take one, Golan, but it was important, and I-”

 

            Trevize waved his hand in impatient dismissal. “Go on!”

 

            “I could make out some of the lettering, which was very archaic. Even with computer enhancement and with my own fair skill at reading Archaic, it was impossible to make out much except for one short phrase. The letters there were larger and a bit clearer than the rest. They may have been incised more deeply because they identified the world itself. The phrase reads, ‘Planet Aurora,’ so I imagine this world we rest upon is named Aurora, orwas named Aurora.”

 

            “It had to be named something,” said Trevize.

 

            “Yes, but names are very rarely chosen at random. I made a careful search of my library just now and there are two old legends, from two widely spaced worlds, as it happens, so that one can reasonably suppose them to be of independent origin, if one remembers that.-But never mind that. In both legends, Aurora is used as a name for the dawn. We can suppose that Aurora may have actuallymeant dawn in some pre-Galactic language.

 

            “As it happens, some word for dawn or daybreak is often used as a name for space stations or other structures that are the first built of their kind. If this world is called Dawn in whatever language, it may be the first of its kind, too.”

 

            Trevize said, “Are you getting ready to suggest that this planet is Earth and that Aurora is an alternate name for it because it represents the dawn of life and of man?”

 

            Pelorat said, “I couldn’t go that far, Golan.”

 

            Trevize said, with a trace of bitterness, “There is, after all, no radioactive surface, no giant satellite, no gas giant with huge rings.”

 

            “Exactly. But Deniador, back on Comporellon, seemed to think this was one of the worlds that was once inhabited by the first wave of Settlers-the Spacers. If it were, then its name, Aurora, might indicate it to have been the first of those Spacer worlds. We might, at this very moment, be resting on the oldest human world in the Galaxy except for Earth itself. Isn’t that exciting?”

 

            “Interesting, at any rate, Janov, but isn’t that a great deal to infer merely from the name, Aurora?”

 

            “There’s more,” said Pelorat excitedly. “As far as I could check in my records there is no world in the Galaxy today with the name of ‘Aurora,’ and I’m sure your computer will verify that. As I said, there are all sorts of world and other objects named ‘Dawn’ in various ways, but no one uses the actual word ‘Aurora.”‘

 

            “Why should they? If it’s a pre-Galactic word, it wouldn’t be likely to be popular.”

 

            “But namesdo remain, even when they’re meaningless. If this were the first settled world, it would be famous; it might even, for a while, have been the dominant world of the Galaxy. Surely, there would be other worlds calling themselves ‘New Aurora,’ or ‘Aurora Minor,’ or something like that. And then others-”

 

            Trevize broke in. “Perhaps it wasn’t the first settled world. Perhaps it was never of any importance.”

 

            “There’s a better reason in my opinion, my dear chap.”

 

            “What would that be, Janov?”

 

            “If the first wave of settlements was overtaken by a second wave to which all the worlds of the Galaxy now belong-as Deniador said-then there is very likely to have been a period of hostility between the two waves. The second wave-making up the worlds that now exist-would not use the names given to any of the worlds of the first wave. In that way, we can infer from the fact that the name ‘Aurora’ has never been repeated that therewere two waves of Settlers, and that this is a world of the first wave.”

 

            Trevize smiled. “I’m getting a glimpse of how you mythologists work, Janov. You build a beautiful superstructure, but it may be standing on air. The legends tell us that the Settlers of the first wave were accompanied by numerous robots, and that these were supposed to be their undoing. Now if we could find a robot on this world, I’d be willing to accept all this first-wave supposition, but we can’t expect after twenty thou-”

 

            Pelorat, whose mouth had been working, managed to find his voice. “But, Golan, haven’t I told you?-No, of course, I haven’t. I’m so excited I can’t put things in the right order. Therewas a robot.”

 

  

 

 40.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE rubbed his forehead, almost as though he were in pain. He said, “A robot? There was a robot?”

 

            “Yes,” said Pelorat, nodding his head emphatically.

 

            “How do you know?”

 

            “Why, it was a robot. How could I fail to know one if I see one?”

 

            “Have you ever seen a robot before?”

 

            “No, but it was a metal object that looked like a human being. Head, arms, legs, torso. Of course, when I say metal, it was mostly rust, and when I walked toward it, I suppose the vibration of my tread damaged it further, so that when I reached to touch it-”

 

            “Why should you touch it?”

 

            “Well, I suppose I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. It was an automatic response. As soon as I touched it, it crumbled. But-”

 

            “Yes?”

 

            “Before it quite did, its eyes seemed to glow very faintly and it made a sound as though it were trying to say something.”

 

            “You mean it was stillfunctioning ?”

 

            “Just barely, Golan. Then it collapsed.”

 

            Trevize turned to Bliss. “Do you corroborate all this, Bliss?”

 

            “It was a robot, and we saw it,” said Bliss.

 

            “And was it still functioning?”

 

            Bliss said tonelessly, “As it crumbled, I caught a faint sense of neuronic activity.”

 

            “How can there have been neuronic activity? A robot doesn’t have an organic brain built of cells.”

 

            “It has the computerized equivalent, I imagine,” said Bliss, “and I would detect that.”

 

            “Did you detect a robotic rather than a human mentality?”

 

            Bliss pursed her lips and said, “It was too feeble to decide anything about it except that it was there.”

 

            Trevize looked at Bliss, then at Pelorat, and said, in a tone of exasperation, “This changes everything.”

 

  

 

 PART IV

SOLARIA

 

  

 

 10. Robots

 

  

 

 41.

 

  

 

      TREVIZE seemed lost in thought during dinner, and Bliss concentrated on the food.

 

            Pelorat, the only one who seemed anxious to speak, pointed out that if the world they were on was Aurora and if it was the first settled world, it ought to be fairly close to Earth.

 

            “It might pay to scour the immediate stellar neighborhood,” he said. “It would only mean sifting through a few hundred stars at most.”

 

            Trevize muttered that hit-and-miss was a last resort and he wanted as much information about Earth as possible before attempting to approach it even if he found it. He said no more and Pelorat, clearly squelched, dwindled into silence as well.

 

            After the meal, as Trevize continued to volunteer nothing, Pelorat said tentatively, “Are we to be staying here, Golan?”

 

            “Overnight, anyway,” said Trevize. “I need to do a bit more thinking.”

 

            “Is it safe?”

 

            “Unless there’s something worse than dogs about,” said Trevize, “we’re quite safe here in the ship.”

 

            Pelorat said, “How long would it take to lift off, if thereis something worse than dogs about?”

 

            Trevize said, “The computer is on launch alert. I think we can manage to take off in between two and three minutes. And it will warn us quite effectively if anything unexpected takes place, so I suggest we all get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, I’ll come to a decision as to the next move.”

 

            Easy to say, thought Trevize, as he found himself staring at the darkness. He was curled up, partly dressed, on the floor of the computer room. It was quite uncomfortable, but he was sure that his bed would be no more conducive to sleep at this time and here at least he could take action at once if the computer sounded an alarm.

 

            Then he heard footsteps and automatically sat up, hitting his head against the edge of the desk-not hard enough to do damage, but hard enough to make rubbing and grimacing a necessity.

 

            “Janov?” he said in a muffled voice, eyes tearing.

 

            “No. It’s Bliss.”

 

            Trevize reached over the edge of the table with one hand to make at least semicontact with the computer, and a soft light showed Bliss in a light pink wraparound.

 

            Trevize said, “What is it?”

 

            “I looked in your bedroom and you weren’t there. There was no mistaking your neuronic activity, however, and I followed it. You were clearly awake so I walked in.”

 

            “Yes, but what is it you want?”

 

            She sat down against the wall, knees up, and cradled her chin against them. She said, “Don’t be concerned. I have no designs on what’s left of your virginity.”

 

            “I don’t imagine you do,” said Trevize sardonically. “Why aren’t you asleep? You need it more than we do.”

 

            “Believe me,” she said in a low, heartfelt tone, “that episode with the dogs was very draining.”

 

            “I believe that.”

 

            “But I had to talk to you when Pel was sleeping.”

 

            “About what?”

 

            Bliss said, “When he told you about the robot, you said that that changes everything. What did you mean?”

 

            Trevize said, “Don’t you see that for yourself? We have three sets of coordinates; three Forbidden Worlds. I want to visit all three to learn as much as possible about Earth before trying to reach it.”

 

            He edged a bit closer so that he could speak lower still, then drew away sharply. He said, “Look, I don’t want Janov coming in here looking for us. I don’t know whathe’d think.”

 

            “It’s not likely. He’s sleeping and I’ve encouraged that just a bit. If he stirs, I’ll know.-Go on. You want to visit all three. What’s changed?”

 

            “It wasn’t part of my plan to waste time on any world needlessly. If this world, Aurora, had been without human occupation for twenty thousand years, then it is doubtful that any information of value has survived. I don’t want to spend weeks or months scrabbling uselessly about the planetary surface, fighting off dogs and cats and bulls or whatever else may have become wild and dangerous, just on the hope of finding a scrap of reference material amid the dust, rust, and decay. It may be that on one or both of the other Forbidden Worlds there may be human beings and intact libraries.-So it was my intention to leave this world at once. We’d be out in space now, if I had done so, sleeping in perfect security.”

 

            “But?”

 

            “But if there are robots still functioning on this world, they may have important information that we could use. They would be safer to deal with than human beings would be, since, from what I’ve heard, they must follow orders and can’t harm human beings.”

 

            “So you’ve changed your plan and now you’re going to spend time on this world searching for robots.”

 

            “I don’t want to, Bliss. It seems to me that robots can’t last twenty thousand years without maintenance.-Yet since you’ve seen one with a spark of activity still, it’s clear I can’t rely on my commonsense guesses about robots. I mustn’t lead out of ignorance. Robots may be more enduring than I imagine, or they may have a certain capacity for self-maintenance.”

 

            Bliss said, “Listen to me, Trevize, and please keep this confidential.”

 

            “Confidential?” said Trevize, raising his voice in surprise. “From whom?”

 

            “Sh! From Pel, of course. Look, you don’t have to change your plans. You were right the first time. There are no functioning robots on this world. I detect nothing.”

 

            “You detected that one, and one is as good as-”

 

            “I did not detect that one. It was nonfunctioning;long nonfunctioning.”

 

            “You said-”

 

            “I know what I said. Pel thought he saw motion and heard sound. Pel is a romantic. He’s spent his working life gathering data, but that is a difficult way of making one’s mark in the scholarly world. He would dearly love to make an important discovery of his own. His finding of the word ‘Aurora’ was legitimate and made him happier than you can imagine. He wanted desperately to find more.”

 

            Trevize said, “Are you telling me he wanted to make a discovery so badly he convinced himself he had come upon a functioning robot when he hadn’t?”

 

            “What he came upon was a lump of rust containing no more consciousness than the rock against which it rested.”

 

            “But you supported his story.”

 

            “I could not bring myself to rob him of his discovery. He means so much to me.

 

            Trevize stared at her for a full minute; then he said, “Do you mind explainingwhy he means so much to you? I want to know. I really want to know. To you he must seem an elderly man with nothing romantic about him. He’s an Isolate, and you despise Isolates. You’re young and beautiful and there must 61 other parts of Gaia that have the bodies of vigorous and handsome young am. With them you can have a physical relationship that can resonate through Gaia and bring peaks of ecstasy. So what do you an in Janov?”

 

            Bliss looked at Trevize solemnly. “Don’t you love him?”

 

            Trevize shrugged and said, “I’m fond of him. I suppose you could say, in a nonsexual way, that I love him.”

 

            “You haven’t known him very long, Trevize. Why do you love him, in that nonsexual way of yours?”

 

            Trevize found himself smiling without being aware of it. “He’s such anodd fellow. I honestly think that never in his life has he given a single thought to himself. He was ordered to go along with me, and he went. No objection. He wanted me to go to Trantor, but when I said I wanted to go to Gaia, he never argued. And now he’s come along with me in this search for Earth, though he must know it’s dangerous. I feel perfectly confident that if he had to sacrifice his life for me-or for anyone-he would, and without repining.”

 

            “Would you give your life for him, Trevize?”

 

            “I might, if I didn’t have time to think. If I did have time to think, I would hesitate and I might funk it. I’m not asgood as he is. And because of that, I have this terrible urge to protect and keep him good. I don’t want the Galaxy to teach himnot to be good. Do you understand? And I have to protect him fromyou particularly. I can’t bear the thought of you tossing him aside when whatever nonsense amuses you now is done with.”

 

            “Yes, I thought you’d think something like that. Don’t you suppose I see in Pel what you see in him-and even more so, since I can contact his mind directly? Do I act as though I want to hurt him? Would I support his fantasy of having seen a functioning robot, if it weren’t that I couldn’t bear to hurt him? Trevize, I am used to what you would call goodness, for every part of Gaia is ready to be sacrificed for the whole. We know and understand no other course of action. But we give up nothing in so doing, for each part is the whole, though I don’t expect you to understand that. Pel is something different.”

 

            Bliss was no longer looking at Trevize. It was as though she were talking to herself. “He is an Isolate. He is not selfless because he is a part of a greater whole. He is selfless because he is selfless. Do you understand me? He has all to lose and nothing to gain, and yet he is what he is. He shames me for being what I am without fear of loss, when he is what he is without hope of gain.”

 

            She looked up at Trevize again now, very solemnly. “Do you know how much more I understand about him than you possibly can? And do you think I would harm him in any way?”

 

            Trevize said, “Bliss, earlier today, you said, ‘Come, let us be friends,’ and all I replied was, ‘If you wish.’ That was grudging of me, for I was thinking of what you might do to Janov. It is my turn, now. Come, Bliss, let us be friends. You can keep on pointing out the advantage of Galaxia and I may keep on refusing to accept your arguments, but even so, and despite that, let us be friends.” And he held out his hand.

 

            “Of course, Trevize,” she said, and their hands gripped each other strongly.

 

  

 

 42.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE grinned quietly to himself. It was an internal grin, for the line of his mouth didn’t budge.

 

            When he had worked with the computer to find the star (if any) of the first set of co-ordinates, both Pelorat and Bliss had watched intently and had asked questions. Now they stayed in their room and slept or, at any rate, relaxed, and left the job entirely to Trevize.

 

            In a way, it was flattering, for it seemed to Trevize that by now they had simply accepted the fact that Trevize knew what he was doing and required no supervision or encouragement. For that matter, Trevize had gained enough experience from the first episode to rely more thoroughly on the computer and to feel that it needed, if not none, then at least less supervision.

 

            Another star-luminous and unrecorded on the Galactic map-showed up. This second star was more luminous than the star about which Aurora circled, and that made it all the more significant that the star was unrecorded in the computer.

 

            Trevize marveled at the peculiarities of ancient tradition. Whole centuries might be telescoped or dropped out of consciousness altogether. Entire civilizations might be banished into forgetfulness. Yet out of the midst of these centuries, snatched from those civilizations, might be one or two factual items that would be remembered undistorted-such as these co-ordinates.

 

            He had remarked on this to Pelorat some time before, and Pelorat had at once told him that it was precisely this that made the study of myths and legends so rewarding. “The trick is,” Pelorat had said, “to work out or decide which particular components of a legend represent accurate underlying truth. That isn’t easy and different mythologists are likely to pick different components, depending, usually, on which happen to suit their particular interpretations.” .

 

            In any case, the star was right where Deniador’s co-ordinates, corrected for time, said it would be. Trevize was prepared, at this moment, to wager a considerable sum that the third star would be in place as well. And if it was, Trevize was prepared to suspect that the legend was further correct in stating that there were fifty Forbidden Worlds altogether (despite the suspiciously even number) and to wonder where the other forty-seven might be.

 

            A habitable world, Forbidden World, was found circling the star-and by this time its presence didn’t cause even a ripple of surprise in Trevize’s bosom. He had been absolutely sure it would be there. He set theFar Star into a slow orbit about it.

 

            The cloud layer was sparse enough to allow a reasonable view of the surface from space. The world was a watery one, as almost all habitable worlds were. There was an unbroken tropical ocean and two unbroken polar oceans. In one set of middle latitudes, there was a more or less serpentine continent encircling the world with bays on either side producing an occasional narrow isthmus. In the other set of middle latitudes, the land surface was broken into three large parts and each of the three were thicker north-south than the opposite continent was.

 

            Trevize wished he knew enough climatology to be able to predict, from what he saw, what the temperatures and seasons might be like. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of having the computer work on the problem. The trouble was that climate was not the point at issue.

 

            Much more important was that, once again, the computer detected no radiation that might be of technological origin. What his telescope told him was that the planet was not moth-eaten and that there were no signs of desert. The land moved backward in various shades of green, but there were no signs of urban areas on the dayside, no lights on the nightside.

 

            Was this another planet filled with every kind of life but human?

 

            He rapped at the door of the other bedroom.

 

            “Bliss?” he called out in a loud whisper, and rapped again.

 

            There was a rustling, and Bliss’s voice said, “Yes?”

 

            “Could you come out here? I need your help-”

 

            “If you wait just a bit, I’ll make myself a bit presentable.”

 

            When she finally appeared, she looked as presentable as Trevize had ever seen her. He felt a twinge of annoyance at having been made to wait, however, for it made little difference to him what she looked like. But they were friends now, and he suppressed the annoyance.

 

            She said with a smile and in a perfectly pleasant tone, “What can I do for you, Trevize?”

 

            Trevize waved at the viewscreen. “As you can see, we’re passing over the surface of what looks like a perfectly healthy world with a quite solid vegetation cover over its land area. No lights at night, however, and no technological radiation. Please listen and tell me if there’s any animal life. There was one point at which I thought I could see herds of grazing animals, but I wasn’t sure. It might be a case of seeing what one desperately wants to see.”

 

            Bliss “listened.” At least, a curiously intent look came across her face. She said, “Oh yes-rich in animal life.”

 

            “Mammalian?”

 

            “Must be.”

 

            “Human?”

 

            Now she seemed to concentrate harder. A full minute passed, and then another, and finally she relaxed. “I can’t quite tell. Every once in a while it seemed to me that I detected a whiff of intelligence sufficiently intense to be considered human. But it was so feeble and so occasional that perhaps I, too, was only sensing what I desperately wanted to sense. You see-”

 

            She paused in thought, and Trevize nudged her with a “Well?”

 

            She said, “The thing is I seem to detect something else. It is not something I’m familiar with, but I don’t see how it can be anything but-”

 

            Her face tightened again as she began to “listen” with still greater intensity.

 

            “Well?” said Trevize again.

 

            She relaxed. “I don’t see how it can be anything but robots.”

 

            “Robots!”

 

            “Yes, and if I detect them, surely I ought to be able to detect human beings, too. But I don’t.”

 

            “Robots!” said Trevize again, frowning.

 

            “Yes,” said Bliss, “and I should judge, in great numbers.”

 

  

 

 43.

 

  

 

            PELORAT also said “Robots!” in almost exactly Trevize’s tone when he was told of them. Then he smiled slightly. “You were right, Golan, and I was wrong to doubt you.”

 

            “I don’t remember your doubting me, Janov.”

 

            “Oh well, old man, I didn’t think I ought toexpress it. I just thought, in my heart, that it was a mistake to leave Aurora while there was a chance we might interview some surviving robot. But then it’s clear you knew there would be a richer supply of robots here.”

 

            “Not at all, Janov. I didn’tknow . I merely chanced it. Bliss tells me their mental fields seem to imply they are fully functioning, and it seems to me they can’t very well be fully functioning without human beings about for care and maintenance. However, she can’t spot anything human so we’re still looking. »

 

            Pelorat studied the viewscreen thoughtfully. “It seems to be all forest, doesn’t it?”

 

            “Mostly forest. But there are clear patches that may be grasslands. The thing is that I see no cities, or any lights at night, or anything but thermal radiation at any time.”

 

            “So no human beings after all?”

 

            “I wonder. Bliss is in the galley trying to concentrate. I’ve set up an arbitrary prime meridian for the planet which means that it’s divided into latitude and longitude in the computer. Bliss has a little device which she presses whenever she encounters what seems an unusual concentration of robotic mental activity-I suppose you can’t say ‘neuronic activity’ in connection with robots-or any whiff of human thought. The device is linked to the computer, which thus gets a fix on all the latitudes and longitudes, and we’ll let it make the choice among them and pick a good place for landing.”

 

            Pelorat looked uneasy. “Is it wise to leave the matter of choice to the computer?”

 

            “Why not, Janov? It’s a very competent computer. Besides, when you have no basis on which to make a choice yourself, where’s the harm in at least considering the computer’s choice?”

 

            Pelorat brightened up. “There’s something to that, Golan. Some of the oldest legends include tales of people making choices by tossing cubes to the ground.”

 

            “Oh? What does that accomplish?”

 

            “Each face of the cube has some decision on it-yes-no-perhaps-postpone-and so on. Whichever face happens to come upward on landing would be taken as bearing the advice to be followed. Or they would set a ball rolling about a slotted disc with different decisions scattered among the slots. The decision written on the slot in which the ball ends is to be taken. Some mythologists think such activities represented games of chance rather than lotteries, but the two are much the same thing in my opinion.”

 

            “In a way,” said Trevize, “we’re playing a game of chance in choosing our place of landing.”

 

            Bliss emerged from the galley in time to hear the last comment. She said, “No game of chance. I pressed several ‘maybes’ and then one sure-fire ‘yes,’ and it’s to the ‘yes’ that we’ll be going.”

 

            “What made it a ‘yes’?” asked Trevize.

 

            “I caught a whiff of human thought. Definite. Unmistakable.”

 

  

 

 44.

 

  

 

            IT HAD been raining, for the grass was wet. Overhead, the clouds were scudding by and showing signs of breaking up.

 

            TheFar Star had come to a gentle rest near a small grove of trees. (In case of wild dogs, Trevize thought, only partly in jest.) All about was what looked like pasture land, and coming down from the greater height at which a better and wider view had been possible, Trevize had seen what looked like orchards and grain fields-and this time, an unmistakable view of grazing animals.

 

            There were no structures, however. Nothing artificial, except that the regularity of the trees in the orchard and the sharp boundaries that separated fields were themselves as artificial as a microwave-receiving power station would have been.

 

            Could that level of artificiality have been produced by robots, however? Without human beings?

 

            Quietly, Trevize was putting on his holsters. This time, he knew that both weapons were in working order and that both were fully charged. For a moment, he caught Bliss’s eye and paused.

 

            She said, “Go ahead. I don’t think you’ll have any use for them, but I thought as much once before, didn’t I?”

 

            Trevize said, “Would you like to be armed, Janov?”

 

            Pelorat shuddered. “No, thank you. Between you and your physical defense, and Bliss and her mental defense, I feel in no danger at all. I suppose it is cowardly of me to hide in your protective shadows, but I can’t feel proper shame when I’m too busy feeling grateful that I needn’t be in a position of possibly having to use force.”

 

            Trevize said, “I understand. Just don’t go anywhere alone. If Bliss and I separate, you stay with one of us and don’t dash off somewhere under the spur of a private curiosity.”

 

            “You needn’t worry, Trevize,” said Bliss. “I’ll see to that.”

 

            Trevize stepped out of the ship first. The wind was brisk and just a trifle cool in the aftermath of the rain, but Trevize found that welcome. It had probably been uncomfortably warm and humid before the rain.

 

            He took in his breath with surprise. The smell of the planet was delightful. Every planet had its own odor, he knew, an odor always strange and usually distasteful-perhaps only because it was strange. Might not strange be pleasant as well? Or was this the accident of catching the planet just after the rain at a particular season of the year. Whichever it was-

 

            “Come on,” he called. “It’s quite pleasant out here.”

 

            Pelorat emerged and said, “Pleasant is definitely the word for it. Do you suppose it always smells like this?”

 

            “It doesn’t matter. Within the hour, we’ll be accustomed to the aroma, and our nasal receptors will be sufficiently saturated, for us to smell nothing.”

 

            “Pity,” said Pelorat.

 

            “The grass is wet,” said Bliss, with a shade of disapproval.

 

            “Why not? After all, it rains on Gaia, too!” said Trevize, and as he said that a shaft of yellow sunlight reached them momentarily through a small break in the clouds. There would soon be more of it.

 

            “Yes,” said Bliss, “but we know when and we’re prepared for it.”

 

            “Too bad,” said Trevize; “you lose the thrill of the unexpected.”

 

            Bliss said, “You’re right. I’ll try not to be provincial.”

 

            Pelorat looked about and said, in a disappointed tone, “There seems to be nothing about.”

 

            “Only seems to be,” said Bliss. “They’re approaching from beyond that rise.” She looked toward Trevize. “Do you think we ought to go to meet them?”

 

            Trevize shook his head. “No. We’ve come to meet them across many parsecs. Let them walk the rest of the way. We’ll wait for them here.”

 

            Only Bliss could sense the approach until, from the direction of her pointing finger, a figure appeared over the brow of the rise. Then a second, and a third.

 

            “I believe that is all at the moment,” said Bliss.

 

            Trevize watched curiously. Though he had never seen robots, there was not a particle of doubt in him that that was what they were. They had the schematic and impressionistic shape of human beings and yet were not obviously metallic in appearance. The robotic surface was dull and gave the illusion of softness, as though it were covered in plush.

 

            But how did he know the softness was an illusion? Trevize felt a sudden desire to feel those figures who were approaching so stolidly. If it were true that this was a Forbidden World and that spaceships never approached it-and surely that must be so since the sun was not included in the Galactic map-then theFar Star and the people it carried must represent something the robots had never experienced. Yet they were reacting with steady certainty, as though they were working their way through a routine exercise.

 

            Trevize said, in a low voice, “Here we may have information we can get nowhere else in the Galaxy. We could ask them for the location of Earth with reference to this world, and if they know, they will tell us. Who knows how long these things have functioned and endured? They may answer out of personal memory. Think of that.”

 

            “On the other hand,” said Bliss, “they may be recently manufactured and may know nothing.”

 

            “Or,” said Pelorat, “they may know, but may refuse to tell us.”

 

            Trevize said, “I suspect they can’t refuse unless they’ve been ordered not to tell us, and why should such orders be issued when surely no one on this planet could have expected our coming?”

 

            At a distance of about three meters, the robots stopped. They said nothing and made no further movement.

 

            Trevize, his hand on his blaster, said to Bliss, without taking his eyes from the robot, “Can you tell whether they are hostile?”

 

            “You’ll have to allow for the fact that I have no experience whatsoever with their mental workings, Trevize, but I don’t detect anything that seems hostile.”

 

            Trevize took his right hand away from the butt of the weapon, but kept it near. He raised his left hand, palm toward the robots, in what he hoped would be recognized as a gesture of peace and said, speaking slowly, “I greet you. We come to this world as friends.”

 

            The central robot of the three ducked his head in a kind of abortive bow that might also have been taken as a gesture of peace by an optimist, and replied.

 

            Trevize’s jaw dropped in astonishment. In a world of Galactic communication, one did not think of failure in so fundamental a need. However, the robot did not speak in Galactic Standard or anything approaching it. In fact, Trevize could not understand a word.

 

  

 

 45.

 

  

 

            PELORAT’S surprise was as great as that of Trevize, but there was an obvious element of pleasure in it, too.

 

            “Isn’t that strange?” he said.

 

            Trevize turned to him and said, with more than a touch of asperity in his voice, “It’s not strange. It’s gibberish.”

 

            Pelorat said, “Not gibberish at all. It’s Galactic, but very archaic. I catch a few words. I could probably understand it easily if it were written down. It’s the pronunciation that’s the real puzzle.”

 

            “Well, what did it say?”

 

            “I think it told you it didn’t understand what you said.”

 

            Bliss said, “I can’t tell what it said, but what I sense is puzzlement, which fits. That is, if I can trust my analysis of robotic emotion-or if there is such a thing as robotic emotion.”

 

            Speaking very slowly, and with difficulty, Pelorat said something, and the three robots ducked their head in unison.

 

            “What was that?” said Trevize.

 

            Pelorat said, “I said I couldn’t speak well, but I would try. I asked for a little time. Dear me, old chap, this is fearfully interesting.”

 

            “Fearfully disappointing,” muttered Trevize.

 

            “You see,” said Pelorat, “every habitable planet in the Galaxy manages to work out its own variety of Galactic so that there are a million dialects that are sometimes barely intercomprehensible, but they’re all pulled together by the development of Galactic Standard. Assuming this world to have been isolated for twenty thousand years, the language would ordinarily drift so far from that of the rest of the Galaxy as to be an entirely different language. That it isn’t may be because the world has a social system that depends upon robots which can only understand the language as spoken in the fashion in which they were programmed. Rather than keep reprogramming, the language remained static and we now have what is to us merely a very archaic form of Galactic.”

 

            “There’s an example,” said Trevize, “of how a robotized society can be held static and made, to turn degenerate.”

 

            “But, my dear fellow,” protested Pelorat, “keeping a language relatively unchanged is not necessarily a sign of degeneration. There are advantages to it. Documents preserved for centuries and millennia retain their meaning and give greater longevity and authority to historical records. In the rest of the Galaxy, the language of Imperial edicts of the time of Hari Seldon already begins to sound quaint.”

 

            “And do you know this archaic Galactic?”

 

            “Not to sayknow , Golan. It’s just that in studying ancient myths and legends I’ve picked up the trick of it. The vocabulary is not entirely different, but it is inflected differently, and there are idiomatic expressions we don’t use any longer and, as I have said, the pronunciation is totally changed. I can act as interpreter, but not as a very good one.”

 

            Trevize heaved a tremulous sigh. “A small stroke of good fortune is better than none. Carry on, Janov.”

 

            Pelorat turned to the robots, waited a moment, then looked back at Trevize. “What am I supposed to say?”

 

            “Let’s go all the way. Ask them where Earth is.”

 

            Pelorat said the words one at a time, with exaggerated gestures of his hands.

 

            The robots looked at each other and made a few sounds. The middle one then spoke to Pelorat, who replied while moving his hands apart as though he were stretching a length of rubber. The robot responded by spacing his words as carefully as Pelorat had.

 

            Pelorat said to Trevize, “I’m not sure I’m getting across what I mean by ‘Earth.’ I suspect they think I’m referring to some region on their planet and they say they don’t know of any such region.”

 

            “Do they use the name of this planet, Janov?”

 

            “The closest I can come to what I think they are using as the name is ‘Solaria.’ “

 

            “Have you ever heard of it in your legends?”

 

            “No-any more than I had ever heard of Aurora.”

 

            “Well, ask them if there is any place named Earth in the sky-among the stars. Point upward.”

 

            Again an exchange, and finally Pelorat turned and said, “All I can get from them, Golan, is that there are no places in the sky.”

 

            Bliss said, “Ask those robots how old they are; or rather, how long they have been functioning.”

 

            “I don’t know how to say ‘functioning,”‘ said Pelorat, shaking his head. In fact, I’m not sure if I can say ‘how old.’ I’mnot a very good interpreter.”

 

            “Do the best you can, Pel dear,” said Bliss.

 

            And after several exchanges, Pelorat said, “They’ve been functioning for twenty-six years.”

 

            “Twenty-six years,” muttered Trevize in disgust. “They’re hardly older than you are, Bliss.”

 

            Bliss said, with sudden pride, “It so happens-”

 

            “I know. You’re Gaia, which is thousands of years old.-In any case, these robots cannot talk about Earth from personal experience, and their memorybanks clearly do not include anything not necessary to their functioning. So they know nothing about astronomy.”

 

            Pelorat said, “There may be other robots somewhere on the planet that are primordial, perhaps.”

 

            “I doubt it,” said Trevize, “but ask them, if you can find the words for it, Janov.”

 

            This time there was quite a long conversation and Pelorat eventually broke it off with a flushed face and a clear air of frustration.

 

            “Golan,” he said, “I don’t understand part of what they’re trying to say, but I gather that the older robots are used for manual labor and don’t know anything. If this robot were a human, I’d say he spoke of the older robots with contempt. These three are house robots, they say, and are not allowed to grow old before being replaced. They’re the ones who really know things-their words, not mine.”

 

            “They don’t know much,” growled Trevize. “At least of the things we want to know.”

 

            “I now regret,” said Pelorat, “that we left Aurora so hurriedly. If we had found a robot survivor there, and we surely would have, since the very first one I encountered still had a spark of life left in it, they would know of Earth through personal memory.”

 

            “Provided their memories were intact, Janov,” said Trevize. “We can always go back there and, if we have to, dog packs or not, we will.-But if these robots are only a couple of decades old, there must be those who manufacture them, and the manufacturers must be human, I should think.” He turned to Bliss. “Are yousure you sensed-”

 

            But she raised a hand to stop him and there was a strained and intent look on her face. “Coming now,” she said, in a low voice.

 

            Trevize turned his face toward the rise and there, first appearing from behind it, and then striding toward them, was the unmistakable figure of a human being. His complexion was pale and his hair light and long, standing out slightly from the sides of his head. His face was grave but quite young in appearance. His bare arms and legs were not particularly muscled.

 

            The robots stepped aside for him, and he advanced till he stood in their midst.

 

            He then spoke in a clear, pleasant voice and his words, although used archaically, were in Galactic Standard, and easily understood.

 

            “Greetings, wanderers from space,” he said. “What would you with my robots?”

 

  

 

 46.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE did not cover himself with glory.. He said foolishly, “You speak Galactic?”

 

            The Solarian said, with a grim smile, “And why not, since I am not mute?”

 

            “But these?” Trevize gestured toward the robots.

 

            “These are robots. They speak our language, as I do. But I am Solarian and hear the hyperspatial communications of the worlds beyond so that I have learned your way of speaking, as have my predecessors. My predecessors have left descriptions of the language, but I constantly hear new words and expressions that change with the years, as though you Settlers can settle worlds, but not words. How is it you are surprised at my understanding of your language?”

 

            “I should not have been,” said Trevize. “I apologize. It was just that speaking to the robots, I had not thought to hear Galactic on this world.”

 

            He studied the Solarian. He was wearing a thin white robe, draped loosely over his shoulder, with large openings for his arms. It was open in front, exposing a bare chest and loincloth below. Except for a pair of light sandals, he wore nothing else.

 

            It occurred to Trevize that he could not tell whether the Solarian was male or female. The breasts were male certainly but the chest was hairless and the thin loincloth showed no bulge of any kind.

 

            He turned to Bliss and said in a low voice, “This might still be a robot, but very like a human being in-”

 

            Bliss said, her lips hardly moving, “The mind is that of a human being, not a robot.”

 

            The Solarian said, “Yet you have not answered my original question. I shall excuse the failure and put it down to your surprise. I now ask again and you must not fail a second time. What would you with my robots?”

 

            Trevize said, “We are travelers who seek information to reach our destination. We asked your robots for information that would help us, but they lacked the knowledge.”

 

            “What is the information you seek? Perhaps I can help you.”

 

            “We seek the location of Earth. Could you tell us that?”

 

            The Solarian’s eyebrows lifted. “I would have thought that your first object of curiosity would have been myself. I will supply that information although you have not asked for it. I am Sarton Bander and you stand upon the Bander estate, which stretches as far as your eye can see in every direction and far beyond. I cannot say that you are welcome here, for in coming here, you have violated a trust. You are the first Settlers to touch down upon Solaria in many thousands of years and, as it turns out, you have come here merely to inquire as to the best way of reaching another world. In the old days, Settlers, you and your ship would have been destroyed on sight.”

 

            “That would be a barbaric way of treating people who mean no harm and offer none,” said Trevize cautiously.

 

            “I agree, but when members of an expanding society set foot upon an inoffensive and static one, that mere touch is filled with potential harm. While we feared that harm, we were ready to destroy those who came at the instant of their coming. Since we no longer have reason to fear, we are, as you see, ready to talk.”

 

            Trevize said, “I appreciate the information you have offered us so freely, and yet you failed to answer the question I did ask. I will repeat it. Could you tell us the location of the planet Earth?”

 

            “By Earth, I take it you mean the world on which the human species, and the various species of plants and animals”-his hand moved gracefully about as though to indicate all the surroundings about them-”originated.”

 

            “Yes, I do, sir.”

 

            A queer look of repugnance flitted over the Solarian’s face. He said, “Please address me simply as Bander, if you must use a form of address. Do not address me by any word that includes a sign of gender. I am neither male nor female. I amwhole .”

 

            Trevize nodded (he had been right). “As you wish, Bander. What, then, is the location of Earth, the world of origin of all of us?”

 

            Bander said, “I do not know. Nor do I wish to know. If I did know, or if I could find out, it would do you no good, for Earth no longer exists as a world.-Ah,” he went on, stretching out his arms. “The sun feels good. I am not often on the surface, and never when the sun does not show itself. My robots were sent to greet you while the sun was yet hiding behind the clouds. I followed only when the clouds cleared.”

 

            “Why is it that Earth no longer exists as a world?” said Trevize insistently, steeling himself for the tale of radioactivity once again.

 

            Bander, however, ignored the question or, rather, put it to one side carelessly. “The story is too long,” he said. “You told me that you came with no intent of harm.”

 

            “That is correct.”

 

            “Why then did you come armed?”

 

            “That is merely a precaution. I did not know what I might meet.”

 

            “It doesn’t matter. Your little weapons represent no danger to me. Yet I am curious. I have, of course, heard much of your arms, and of your curiously barbaric history that seems to depend so entirely upon arms. Even so, I have never actually seen a weapon. May I see yours?”

 

            Trevize took a step backward. “I’m afraid not, Bander.”

 

            Bander seemed amused. “I asked only out of politeness. I need not have asked at all.”

 

            It held out its hand and from Trevize’s right holster, there emerged his blaster, while from his left holster, there rose up his neuronic whip. Trevize snatched at his weapons but felt his arms held back as though by stiffly elastic bonds. Both Pelorat and Bliss started forward and it was clear that they were held as well.

 

            Bander said, “Don’t bother trying to interfere. You cannot.” The weapons flew to its hands and it looked them over carefully. “This one,” it said, indicating the blaster, “seems to be a microwave beamer that produces heat, thus exploding any fluid-containing body. The other is more subtle, and, I must confess, I do not see at a glance what it is intended to do. However, since you mean no harm and offer no harm, you don’t need arms. I can, and I do, bleed the energy content of the units of each weapon. That leaves them harmless unless you use one or the other as a club, and they would be clumsy indeed if used for that purpose.”

 

            The Solarian released the weapons and again they drifted through the air, this time back toward Trevize. Each settled neatly into its holster.

 

            Trevize, feeling himself released, pulled out his blaster, but there was no need to use it. The contact hung loosely, and the energy unit had clearly been totally drained. That was precisely the case with the neuronic whip as well.

 

            He looked up at Bander, who said, smiling, “You are quite helpless, Outworlder. I can as easily, if I so desired, destroy your ship and, of course, you.”

 

  

 

 11. Underground

 

  

 

 47.

 

  

 

      TREVIZE felt frozen. Trying to breathe normally, he turned to look at Bliss.

 

            She was standing with her arm protectively about Pelorat’s waist, and, to all appearances, was quite calm. She smiled slightly and, even more slightly, nodded her head.

 

            Trevize turned back to Bander. Having interpreted Bliss’s actions as signifying confidence, and hoping with dreadful earnestness that he was correct, he said grimly, “How did you do that, Bander?”

 

            Bander smiled, obviously in high good humor. “Tell me, little Outworlders, do you believe in sorcery? In magic?”

 

            “No, we do not, little Solarian,” snapped Trevize.

 

            Bliss tugged at Trevize’s sleeve and whispered, “Don’t irritate him. He’s dangerous.”

 

            “I can see he is,” said Trevize, keeping his voice low with difficulty. “You do something, then.”

 

            Her voice barely heard, Bliss said, “Not yet. He will be less dangerous if he feels secure.”

 

            Bander paid no attention to the brief whispering among the Outworlders. It moved away from them uncaringly, the robots separating to let it pass.

 

            Then it looked back and crooked a finger languidly. “Come. Follow me. All three of you. I will tell you a story that may not interest you, but that interests me.” It continued to walk forward leisurely.

 

            Trevize remained in place for a while, uncertain as to the best course of action. Bliss walked forward, however, and the pressure of her arm led Pelorat forward as well. Eventually, Trevize moved; the alternative was to be left standing alone with the robots.

 

            Bliss said lightly, “If Bander will be so kind as to tell the story that may not interest us-”

 

            Bander turned and looked intently at Bliss as though he were truly aware of her for the first time. “You are the feminine half-human,” he said, “aren’t you? The lesser half?”

 

            “The smaller half, Bander. Yes.”

 

            “These other two are masculine half-humans, then?”

 

            “So they are.”

 

            “Have you had your child yet, feminine?”

 

            “My name, Bander, is Bliss. I have not yet had a child. This is Trevize. This is Pel.”

 

            “And which of these two masculines is to assist you when it is your time? Or will it be both? Or neither?”

 

            “Pel will assist me, Bander.”

 

            Bander turned his attention to Pelorat. “You have white hair, I see.”

 

            Pelorat said, “I have.”

 

            “Was it always that color?”

 

            “No, Bander, it became so with age.”

 

            “And how old are you?”

 

            “I am fifty-two years old, Bander,” Pelorat said, then added hastily, “That’s Galactic Standard Years.”

 

            Bander continued to walk (toward the distant mansion, Trevize assumed), but more slowly. It said, “I don’t know how long a Galactic Standard Year is, but it can’t be very different from our year. And how old will you be when you die, Pel?”

 

            “I can’t say. I may live thirty more years.”

 

            “Eighty-two years, then. Short-lived, and divided in halves. Unbelievable, and yet my distant ancestors were like you and lived on Earth.-But some of them left Earth to establish new worlds around other stars, wonderful worlds, well organized, and many.”

 

            Trevize said loudly, “Not many. Fifty.”

 

            Bander turned a lofty eye on Trevize. There seemed less humor in it now. “Trevize. That’s your name.”

 

            “Golan Trevize in full. I say there were fifty Spacer worlds.Our worlds number in the millions.”

 

            “Do you know, then, the story that I wish to tell you?” said Bander softly.

 

            “If the story is that there were once fifty Spacer worlds, we know it.”

 

            “We count not in numbers only, little half-human,” said Bander. “We count the quality, too. There were fifty, but such a fifty that not all your millions could make up one of them. And Solaria was the fiftieth and, therefore, the best. Solaria was as far beyond the other Spacer worlds, as they were beyond Earth.

 

            “We of Solaria alone learned how life was to be lived. We did not herd and flock like animals, as they did on Earth, as they did on other worlds, as they did even on the other Spacer worlds. We lived each alone, with robots to help us, viewing each other electronically as often as we wished, but coming within natural sight of one another only rarely. It is many years since I have gazed at human beings as I now gaze at you but, then, you are only half-humans and your presence, therefore, does not limit my freedom any more than a cow would limit it, or a robot.

 

            “Yet we were once half-human, too. No matter how we perfected our freedom; no matter how we developed as solitary masters over countless robots; the freedom was never absolute. In order to produce young there had to be two individuals in co-operation. It was possible, of course, to contribute sperm cells and egg cells, to have the fertilization process and the consequent embryonic growth take place artificially in automated fashion. It was possible for the infant to live adequately under robotic care. It could all be done, but the half-humans would not give up the pleasure that went with biological impregnation. Perverse emotional attachments would develop in consequence and freedom vanished. Do you see that that had to be changed?”

 

            Trevize said, “No, Bander, because we do not measure freedom by your standards.”

 

            “That is because you do not know what freedom is. You have never lived but in swarms, and you know no way of life but to be constantly forced, in even the smallest things, to bend your wills to those of others or, which is equally vile, to spend your days struggling to force others to bend their wills to yours. Where is any possible freedom there? Freedom is nothing if it is not to live as you wish! Exactly as you wish!

 

            “Then came the time when the Earthpeople began to swarm outward once more, when their clinging crowds again swirled through space. The other Spacers, who did not flock as the Earthpeople did, but who flocked nevertheless, if to a lesser degree, tried to compete.

 

            “We Solarians did not. We foresaw inevitable failure in swarming. We moved underground and broke off all contact with the rest of the Galaxy. We were determined to remain ourselves at all costs. We developed suitable robots and weapons to protect our apparently empty surface, and they did the job admirably. Ships came and were destroyed, and stopped coming. The planet was considered deserted, and was forgotten, as we hoped it would be.

 

            “And meanwhile, underground, we worked to solve our problems. We adjusted our genes gingerly, delicately. We had failures, but some successes, and we capitalized on the successes. It took us many centuries, but we finally became whole human beings, incorporating both the masculine and feminine principles in one body, supplying our own complete pleasure at will, and producing, when we wished, fertilized eggs for development under skilled robotic care.”

 

            “Hermaphrodites,” said Pelorat.

 

            “Is that what it is called in your language?” asked Bander indifferently. “I have never heard the word.”

 

            “Hermaphroditism stops evolution dead in its tracks,” said Trevize. “Each child is the genetic duplicate of its hermaphroditic parent.”

 

            “Come,” said Bander, “you treat evolution as a hit-and-miss affair. We can design our children if we wish. We can change and adjust the genes and, on occasion, we do.-But we are almost at my dwelling. Let us enter. It grows late in the day. The sun already fails to give its warmth adequately and we will be more comfortable indoors.”

 

            They passed through a door that had no locks of any kind but that opened as they approached and closed behind them as they passed through. There were no windows, but as they entered a cavernous room, the walls glowed to luminous life and brightened. The floor seemed bare, but was soft and springy to the touch. In each of the four corners of the room, a robot stood motionless.

 

            “That wall,” said Bander, pointing to the wall opposite the door-a wall that seemed no different in any way from the other three-”is my visionscreen. The world opens before me through that screen but it in no way limits my freedom for I cannot be compelled to use it.”

 

            Trevize said, “Nor can you compel another to use his if you wish to see him through that screen and he does not.”

 

            “Compel?” said Bander haughtily. “Let another do as it pleases, if it is but content that I do as I please. Please note that we do not use gendered pronouns in referring to each other.”

 

            There was one chair in the room, facing the vision-screen, and Bander sat down in it.

 

            Trevize looked about, as though expecting additional chairs to spring from the floor. “May we sit, too?” he said.

 

            “If you wish,” said Bander.

 

            Bliss, smiling, sat down on the floor. Pelorat sat down beside her. Trevize stubbornly continued to stand.

 

            Bliss said, “Tell me, Bander, how many human beings live on this planet?”

 

            “Say Solarians, half-human Bliss. The phrase ‘human being’ is contaminated by the fact that half-humans call themselves that. We might call ourselves whole-humans, but that is clumsy. Solarian is the proper term.”

 

            “How many Solarians, then, live on this planet?”

 

            “I am not certain. We do not count ourselves. Perhaps twelve hundred.”

 

            “Only twelve hundred on the entire world?”

 

            “Fully twelve hundred. You count in numbers again, while we count in quality.-Nor do you understand freedom. If one other Solarian exists to dispute my absolute mastery over any part of my land, over any robot or living thing or object, my freedom is limited. Since other Solarians exist, the limitation on freedom must be removed as far as possible by separating them all to the point where contact is virtually nonexistent. Solaria will hold twelve hundred Solarians under conditions approaching the ideal. Add more, and liberty will be palpably limited so that the result will be unendurable.”

 

            “That means each child must be counted and must balance deaths,” said Pelorat suddenly.

 

            “Certainly. That must be true of any world with a stable population-even yours, perhaps.”

 

            “And since there are probably few deaths, there must therefore be few children.”

 

            “Indeed.”

 

            Pelorat nodded his head and was silent.

 

            Trevize said, “What I want to know is how you made my weapons fly through the air. You haven’t explained that.”

 

            “I offered you sorcery or magic as an explanation. Do you refuse to accept that?”

 

            “Of course I refuse. What do you take me for?”

 

            “Will you, then, believe in the conservation of energy, and in the necessary increase of entropy?”

 

            “That I do. Nor can I believe that even in twenty thousand years you have changed these laws, or modified them a micrometer.”

 

            “Nor have we, half-person. But now consider. Outdoors, there is sunlight.” There was its oddly graceful gesture, as though marking out sunlight all about. “And there is shade. It is warmer in the sunlight than in the shade, and heat flows spontaneously from the sunlit area into the shaded area.”

 

            “You tell me what I know,” said Trevize.

 

            “But perhaps you know it so well that you no longer think about it. And at night, Solaria’s surface is warmer than the objects beyond its atmosphere, so that heat flows spontaneously from the planetary surface into outer space.”

 

            “I know that, too.”

 

            “And day or night, the planetary interior is warmer than the planetary surface. Heat therefore flows spontaneously from the interior to the surface. I imagine you know that, too.”

 

            “And what of all that, Bander?”

 

            “The flow of heat from hotter to colder, which must take place by the second law of thermodynamics, can be used to do work.”

 

            “In theory, yes, but sunlight is dilute, the heat of the planetary surface is even more dilute, and the rate at which heat escapes from the interior makes that the most dilute of all. The amount of heat-flow that can be harnessed would probably not be enough to lift a pebble.”

 

            “It depends on the device you use for the purpose,” said Bander. “Our own tool was developed over a period of thousands of years and it is nothing less than a portion of our brain.”

 

            Bander lifted the hair on either side of its head, exposing that portion of its skull behind its ears. It turned its head this way and that, and behind each ear was a bulge the size and shape of the blunt end of a hen’s egg.

 

            “That portion of my brain, and its absence in you, is what makes the difference between a Solarian and you.”

 

  

 

 48.

 

  

 

            TREVIZE glanced now and then at Bliss’s face, which seemed entirely concentrated on Bander. Trevize had grown quite certain he knew what was going on.

 

            Bander, despite its paean to freedom, found this unique opportunity irresistible. There was no way it could speak to robots on a basis of intellectual equality, and certainly not to animals. To speak to its fellow-Solarians would be, to it, unpleasant, and what communication there must be would be forced, and never spontaneous.

 

            As for Trevize, Bliss, and Pelorat, they might be half-human to Bander, and it might regard them as no more an infringement on its liberty than a robot or a goat would be-but they were its intellectual equals (or near equals) and the chance to speak to them was a unique luxury it had never experienced before.

 

            No wonder, Trevize thought, it was indulging itself in this way. And Bliss (Trevize was doubly sure) was encouraging this, just pushing Bander’s mind ever so gently in order to urge it to do what it very much wanted to do in any case.

 

            Bliss, presumably, was working on the supposition that if Bander spoke enough, it might tell them something useful concerning Earth. That made sense to Trevize, so that even if he had not been truly curious about the subject under discussion, he would nevertheless have endeavored to continue the conversation.

 

            “What do those brain-lobes do?” Trevize asked.

 

            Bander said, “They are transducers. They are activated by the flow of heat and they convert the heat-flow into mechanical energy.”

 

            “I cannot believe that. The flow of heat is insufficient.”

 

            “Little half-human, you do not think. If there were many Solarians crowded together, each trying to make use of the flow of heat, then, yes, the supply would be insufficient. I, however, have over forty thousand square kilometers that are mine, mine alone. I can collect heat-flow from any quantity of those square kilometers with no one to dispute me, so the quantity is sufficient. Do you see?”

 

            “Is it that simple to collect heat-flow over a wide area? The mere act of concentration takes a great deal of energy.”

 

            “Perhaps, but I am not aware of it. My transducer-lobes are constantly concentrating heat-flow so that as work is needed, work is done. When I drew your weapons into the air, a particular volume of the sunlit atmosphere lost some of its excess heat to a volume of the shaded area, so that I was using solar energy for the purpose. Instead of using mechanical or electronic devices to bring that about, however, I used a neuronic device.” It touched one of the transducer-lobes gently. “It does it quickly, efficiently, constantly-and effortlessly.”

 

            “Unbelievable,” muttered Pelorat.

 

            “Not at all unbelievable,” said Bander. “Consider the delicacy of the eye and ear., and how they can turn small quantities of photons and air vibrations into information. That would seem unbelievable if you had never come across it before. The transducer-lobes are no more unbelievable, and would not be so to you, were they not unfamiliar.”

 

            Trevize said, “What do you do with these constantly operating transducerlobes?”

 

            “We run our world,” said Bander. “Every robot on this vast estate obtains its energy from me; or, rather, from natural heat-flow. Whether a robot is adjusting a contact, or felling a tree, the energy is derived from mental transduction-mymental transduction.”

 

            “And if you are asleep?”

 

            “The process of transduction continues waking or sleeping, little half-human,” said Bander. “Do you cease breathing when you sleep? Does your heart stop beating? At night, my robots continue working at the cost of cooling Solaria’s interior a bit. The change is immeasurably small on a global scale and there are only twelve hundred of us, so that all the energy we use does not appreciably shorten our sun’s life or drain the world’s internal heat.”

 

            “Has it occurred to you that you might use it as a weapon?”

 

            Bander stared at Trevize as though he were something peculiarly incomprehensible. “I suppose by that,” he said, “you mean that Solaria might confront other worlds with energy weapons based on transduction? Why should we? Even if we could beat their energy weapons based on other principles-which is anything but certain-what would we gain? The control of other worlds? What do we want with other worlds when we have an ideal world of our own? Do we want to establish our domination over half-humans and use them in forced labor? We have our robots that are far better than half-humans for the purpose. We have everything. We want nothing-except to be left to ourselves. See here-I’ll tell you another story.”

 

            “Go ahead,” said Trevize.

 

            “Twenty thousand years ago when the half-creatures of Earth began to swarm into space and we ourselves withdrew underground, the other Spacer worlds were determined to oppose the new Earth-settlers. So they struck at Earth.”

 

            “At Earth,” said Trevize, trying to hide his satisfaction over the fact that the subject had come up at last.

 

            “Yes, at the center. A sensible move, in a way. If you wish to kill a person, you strike not at a finger or a heel, but at the heart. And our fellow-Spacers, not too far removed from human beings themselves in passions, managed to set Earth’s surface radioactively aflame, so that the world became largely uninhabitable.”

 

            “Ah, that’s what happened,” said Pelorat, clenching a fist and moving it rapidly, as though nailing down a thesis. “I knew it could not be a natural phenomenon. How was it done?”

 

            “I don’t know how it was done,” said Bander indifferently, “and in any case it did the Spacers no good. That is the point of the story. The Settlers continued to swarm and the Spacers-died out. They had tried to compete, and vanished. We Solarians retired and refused to compete, and so we are still here.”

 

            “And so are the Settlers,” said Trevize grimly.

 

            “Yes, but not forever. Swarmers must fight, must compete, and eventually must die. That may take tens of thousands of years, but we can wait. And when it happens, we Solarians, whole, solitary, liberated, will have the Galaxy to ourselves. We can then use, or not use, any world we wish to in addition to our own.”

 

            “But this matter of Earth,” said Pelorat, snapping his fingers impatiently. “Is what you tell us legend or history?”

 

            “How does one tell the difference, half-Pelorat?” said Bander. “All history is legend, more or less.”

 

            “But what do your records say? May I see the records on the subject, Bander?-Please understand that this matter of myths, legends, and primeval history is my field. I am a scholar dealing with such matters and particularly with those matters as related to Earth.”

 

            “I merely repeat what I have heard,” said Bander. “There are no records on the subject. Our records deal entirely with Solarian affairs and other worlds are mentioned in them only insofar as they impinge upon us.”

 

            “Surely, Earth has impinged on you,” said Pelorat.

 

            “That may be, but, if so, it was long, long ago, and Earth, of all worlds, was most repulsive to us. If we had any records of Earth, t am sure they were destroyed out of sheer revulsion.”

 

            Trevize gritted his teeth in chagrin. “By yourselves?” he asked.

 

            Bander turned its attention to Trevize. “There is no one else to destroy them.”

 

            Pelorat would not let go of the matter. “What else have you heard concerning Earth?”

 

            Bander thought. It said, “When I was young, I heard a tale from a robot about an Earthman who once visited Solaria; about a Solarian woman who left with him and became an important figure in the Galaxy. That, however, was, in my opinion, an invented tale.”