Foundation and Earth f-7

by Isaac Asimov

  “Several things. In the first place, they’re very archaic. They might be thousands of years old. In the second, there’s no radiation but thermals.”

  “What are thermals?”

  “Thermal radiation is given off by any object warmer than its surroundings. It’s a familiar signature that everything yields and it consists of a broad band of radiation following a fixed pattern depending on temperature. That is what the entry stations are radiating. If there are working human devices aboard the stations, there is bound to be a leakage of nonthermal, nonrandom radiation. Since only thermals are present we can assume that either the stations are empty, and have been, perhaps, for thousands of years; or, if occupied, it is by people with a technology so advanced in this direction that they leak no radiation.”

  “Perhaps,” said Pelorat, “the planet has a high civilization, but the entry stations are empty because the planet has been left so strictly alone for so long by our kind of Settlers that they are no longer concerned about any approach.”

  “Perhaps. —Or perhaps it is a lure of some sort.”

  Bliss entered, and Trevize, noting her out of the corner of his eyes, said grumpily, “Yes, here we are.”

  “So I see,” said Bliss, “and still in an unchanged orbit. I can tell that much.”

  Pelorat explained hastily. “Golan is being cautious, dear. The entry stations seem unoccupied and we’re not sure of the significance of that.”

  “There’s no need to worry about it,” said Bliss indifferently. “There are no detectable signs of intelligent life on the planet we’re orbiting.”

  Trevize bent an astonished glare at her. “What are you talking about? You said—”

  “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—ever-changing, 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 unders
tand 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.

  The Far 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.”

  The Far 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.

  The Far Star came to rest at the bottom of a small rise, a hill in the generally flat 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 cloudly. 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 an empty 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 I must 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.”