Foundation and Earth

by Isaac Asimov

  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 the Far 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 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 to express 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’t know. 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.

  The Far 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 the Far 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 say know, 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.”