by Isaac Asimov
“Mythical? I don’t work in that area of prehistory, but most historians think there was such a place.”
“Sure, but ‘earth’ just means ‘dirt’ in the oldest languages, correct?”
‘Well, we had to come from somewhere.” She thought a moment, then allowed slowly, “I think that natural state might be a pleasant place to visit, but...”
“I want to try the pans.”
“What? An immersion?” Her eyebrows lifted in mild alarm.
“As long as we’re here, why not?”
“I don’t... well, I’ll think about it.”
“You can bailout at any time, they say.” She nodded, pursed her lips. “Um.”
“We’ll feel at home–the way pans do.”
“You believe everything you read in a brochure?”
“I did some research. It’s a well-developed tech.” Her lips had a skeptical tilt. “Um.”
He knew by now better than to press her. Let time do his work. The canine, quite large and alert, snuffled at his hand and slurred, “Goood naaaght, suuur.” He stroked it. In its eyes he saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality.
Significant evidence, he thought. We have a deep past together. Perhaps that was why he wanted to immerse in a pan. To go far back, beyond the vexing state of being human.
2.
“We’re certainly related, yes,” Expert Specialist Vaddo said. He was a big man, tanned and muscular and casually confident. He was a safari guide and immersion specialist, with a biology background. He did research using immersion techniques, but keeping the station going soaked up most of his time, he said.
Hari looked skeptical. “You think pans were with us back on an Earth?”
“Sure. Had to be.”
“They could not have arisen from genetic tinkering with our own kind?”
“Doubtful. Genetic inventory shows that they come from a small stable, probably a zoo set up here. Or else an accidental crash.”
Dors asked, “Is there any chance this world could have been the original Earth?”
Vaddo chuckled. “No fossil record, no ruins. Anyway, the local fauna and flora have a funny keypattern in their genetic helix, a bit different from our DNA. Extra methyl group on the purine rings. We can live here, eat the food, but neither we nor the pans are native.”
Vaddo made a good case. Pans certainly looked quasihuman. Ancient records referred to a classification, that was all: Pan troglodytes, whatever that meant in a long-lost tongue. They had hands with thumbs, the same number of teeth as humans, no tails.
Vaddo waved a big hand at the landscape below the station. “They were dumped here along with plenty of other related species, on top of a biosphere that supported the usual grasses and trees, very little more.”
“How long ago?” Dors asked.
“Over thirteen thousand years, that’s for sure.”
“Before Trantor’s consolidation. But other planets don’t have pans,” Dors persisted.
Vaddo nodded. “I guess in the early Empire days nobody thought they were useful.”
“Are they?” Hari asked.
“Not that I can tell.” Vaddo shrugged. “We haven’t tried training them much, beyond research purposes. Remember, they’re supposed to be kept wild. The original Emperor’s Boon stipulated that.”
“Tell me about your research,” Hari said. In his experience, no scientist ever passed up a chance to sing his own song. He was right.
They had taken human DNA and pan DNA–Vaddo said, waxing on enthusiastically–then unzipped the double helix strands in both. Linking one human strand with a pan strand made a hybrid.
Where the strands complemented, the two then tightly bound in a partial, new double helix. Where they differed, bonding between the strands was weak, intermittent, with whole sections flapping free.
Then they spun the watery solutions in a centrifuge, so the weak sections ripped apart. Closely linked DNA was 98.2 percent of the total. Pans were startlingly like humans. Less than two percent difference, about the same that separated men and women–yet they lived in forests and invented nothing.
The typical difference between individual people’s DNA was a tenth of a percentage point, Vaddo said. Roughly, then, pans were twenty times more different from humans than particular people differed among themselves–genetically.
But genes were like levers, supporting vast weights by pivoting about a small fulcrum.
“So you think they came before us?” Dors was impressed. “On Earth?”
Vaddo nodded vigorously. “They must have been related, but we don’t come from them. We parted company, genetically, six million years ago.”
“And do they think like us?” Hari asked.
“Best way to tell is an immersion,” Vaddo said. “Very best way.”
He smiled invitingly and Hari wondered if Vaddo got a commission on immersions. His sales pitch was subtle, shaped for an academic’s interest, but still a sales pitch.
Vaddo had already made available to Hari the vast stores of data on pan movements, population dynamics, and behaviors. It was a rich source, millennia old. With some modeling, here might be fertile ground for a simple description of pans as protohumans, using a truncated version of psychohistory.
“Describing the life history of a species mathematically is one thing,” Dors said. “But living in it...”
“Come now,” Hari said. Even though he knew the entire Excursion Station was geared to sell the guests safaris and immersions, he was intrigued. “I need a change, you said. Get out of stuffy old Trantor, you said.”
Vaddo smiled warmly. “It’s completely safe.”
Dors smiled at Hari tolerantly. Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes. “Oh, all right.”
3.
He spent mornings studying the pan data banks. The mathematician in him pondered how to represent their dynamics with a trimmed-down psychohistory. The marble of fate rattling down a cracked slope. So many paths, variables...
To get all this he had to kowtow to the station chief. A woman named Yakani, she seemed cordial, but displayed a large portrait of the Academic Potentate upon her office wall. Hari mentioned it and Yakani gushed on about “her mentor,” who had helped her run a primate studies center on a verdant planet some decades before.
“She will bear watching,” Dors said.
“You don’t think the Potentate would–”
“The first assassination attempt–remember the tab? I learned from the Imperials that some technical aspects of it point to an academic laboratory.”
Hari frowned. “Surely my own faction would not oppose–”
“She is as ruthless as Lamurk, but more subtle.”
“My, you are suspicious.”
“I must be.”
In the afternoons they took treks. Dors did not like the dust and heat and they saw few animals. “What self-respecting beast would want to be seen with these overdressed Primitivists?” she said.
He liked the atmosphere of this world and relaxed into it, but his mind kept on working. He thought about this as he stood on the sweeping verandah, drinking pungent fruit juice as he watched a sunset. Dors stood beside him silently.
Planets were energy funnels, he thought. At the bottom of their gravitational wells, plants captured barely a tenth of a percent of the sunlight that fell on a world’s surface. They built organic molecules with a star’s energy. In turn, plants were prey for animals, who could harvest roughly a tenth of the plant’s stored energy. Grazers were themselves prey to meateaters, who could use about a tenth of the flesh-stored energy. So, he estimated, only about one part in a hundred thousand of the lancing sunlight energy wound up in the predators.
Wasteful! Yet nowhere in the whole Galaxy had a more efficient engine evolved. Why not?
Predators were invariably more intelligent than their prey, and they sat atop a pyramid of ve
ry steep slopes. Omnivores had a similar balancing act. Out of that rugged landscape had come humanity.
That fact had to matter greatly in any psychohistory. The pans, then, were essential to finding the ancient keys to the human psyche.
Dors said, “I hope immersion isn’t, well, so hot and sticky.”
“Remember, you’ll see the world through different eyes.”
“Just so I can come back whenever I want and have a nice hot bath.”
“Compartments?” Dors shied back. “They look more like caskets.”
“They have to be snug, madam.”
Ex Spec Vaddo smiled amiably–which, Hari sensed, probably meant he wasn’t feeling amiable at all. Their conversation had been friendly, the staff here was respectful of the noted Or. Seldon, but after all, basically he and Dors were just more tourists. Paying for a bit of primitive fun, all couched in proper scholarly terms, but–tourists.
“You’re kept in fixed status, all body systems running slow but normal,” the Ex Spec said, popping out the padded networks for their inspection. He ran through the controls, emergency procedures, safeguards.
“Looks comfortable enough,” Dors observed grudgingly.
“Come on,” Hari chided. “You promised we would do it.”
“You’ll be meshed into our systems at all times,” Vaddo said.
“Even your data library?” Hari asked.
“Sure thing.”
The team of Ex Specs booted them into the stasis compartments with deft, sure efficiency. Tabs, pressers, magnetic pickups were plated onto his skull to pick up thoughts directly. The very latest tech.
“Ready? Feeling good?” Vaddo asked with his professional smile.
Hari was not feeling good (as opposed to feeling well), and he realized part of it was this Ex Spec. He had always distrusted bland, assured people. Both Vaddo and the security chief, Yakani, seemed to be unremarkable Greys. But Dors’ wariness had rubbed off. Something about them bothered him, but he could not say why.
Oh, well, Dors was probably right. He needed a vacation. What better way to get out of yourself?
“Good, yes. Ready, yes.”
The suspension tech was ancient and reliable. It suppressed neuromuscular responses, so the customer lay dormant, only his mind engaged with the pan.
Magnetic webs capped over his cerebrum. Through electromagnetic inductance they interwove into layers of the brain. They routed signals along tiny thread-paths, suppressing many brain functions and blocking physiological processes.
All this, so that the massively parallel circuitry of the brain could be inductively linked out, thought by thought. Then it was transmitted to chips embedded in the pan subject. Immersion.
The technology had ramified throughout the Empire, quite famously. The ability to distantly manage minds had myriad uses. The suspension tech, however, found its own odd applications.
On some worlds, and in certain Trantorian classes, women were wedded, then suspended for all but a few hours of the day. Their wealthy husbands awoke them from freeze-frame states only for social and sexual purposes. Over a half century, the wives experienced a heady whirlwind of places, friends, parties, vacations, passionate hours–but their total accumulated time was only a few years. Their husbands died in what seemed to the wives like short order, indeed, leaving a wealthy widow of perhaps thirty. Such women were highly sought, and not only for their money. They were uniquely sophisticated, seasoned by a long “marriage.” Often these widows returned the favor, wedding husbands whom they revived for similar uses.
All this Hari had taken in with the sophisticated veneer he had cultivated on Trantor. So he thought his immersion would be comfortable, interesting, the stuff of stim-party talk.
He had thought that he would in some sense visit another, simpler, mind.
He did not expect to be swallowed whole.
4.
A good day. Plenty of fat grubs to eat in a big moist log. Dig them out with my nails, fresh tangy sharp crunchy.
Biggest, he shoves me aside. Scoops out plenty rich grubs. Grunts. Glowers.
My belly rumbles. I back off and eye Biggest. He’s got pinched-up face so I know not to fool with him.
I walk away, I squat down. Get some picking from a fem. She finds some fleas, cracks them in her teeth.
Biggest rolls the log around some to knock a few grubs loose, finishes up. He’s strong. Ferns watch him. Over by the trees a bunch of fems chatter, suck their teeth. Everybody’s sleepy now in early afternoon, lying in the shade. Biggest, though, he waves at me and Hunker and off we go.
Patrol. Strut tall, step out proud. I like it fine. Better than humping, even.
Down past the creek and along to where the hoof smells are. That’s the shallow spot. We cross and go into the trees sniff-sniffing and there are two Strangers.
They don’t see us yet. We move smooth, quiet. Biggest picks up a branch and we do, too. Hunker is sniffing to see who these Strangers are and he points off to the hill. Just like I thought, they’re Hillies. The worst. Smell bad.
Hillies come onto our turf. Make trouble. We make it back.
We spread out. Biggest, he grunts and they hear him. I’m already moving, branch held up. I can run pretty far without going all-fours. The Strangers cry out, big-eyed. We go fast and then we’re on them.
They have no branches. We hit them and kick and they grab at us. They are tall and quick. Biggest slams one to the ground. I hit that one so Biggest knows real well I’m with him. Hammer hard, I do. Then I go quick to help Hunker.
His Stranger has taken his branch away. I club the Stranger. He sprawls. I whack him good and Hunker jumps on him and it is wonderful.
The Stranger tries to get up and I kick him solid. Hunker grabs back his branch and hits again and again with me helping hard.
Biggest, his Stranger gets up and starts to run. Biggest whacks his ass with the branch, roaring and laughing.
Me, I got my skill. Special. I pick up rocks. I’m the best thrower, better than Biggest even.
Rocks are for Strangers. My buddies, them I’ll scrap with, but never use rocks. Strangers, though, they deserve to get rocks in the face. I love to bust a Stranger that way.
I throw one clean and smooth. Catch the Stranger on the leg. He stumbles. I smack him good with a sharp-edged rock in the back.
He runs fast then. I can see he’s bleeding. Big red drops in the dust.
Biggest laughs and slaps me and I know I’m in good with him.
Hunker is clubbing his Stranger. Biggest takes my club and joins in. The blood allover the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I j urnp up and down on him. We keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger corning back. Strangers are brave sometimes, but they know when they have lost.
The Stranger stops moving. I give him one more kick.
No reaction. Dead maybe.
We scream and dance and holler out our joy.
5.
Hari shook his head to clear it. That helped a little.
“You were that big one?” Dors asked. “I was the female, over by the trees.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t tell.”
“It was... different, wasn’t it?”
He laughed dryly. “Murder usually is.”
“When you went off with the, well, leader–”
“My pan thinks of him as ‘Biggest.’ We killed another pan.”
They were in the plush reception room of the immersion facility. Hari stood and felt the world tilt a little and then right itself. “I think I’ll stick to historical research for a while.”
Dors smiled sheepishly. “I... I rather liked it.”
He thought a moment, blinked. “So did I,” he said, surprising himself.
“Not the murder–”
“No, of course not. But... the feel.”
She grinned. “Can’t get that on Trantor, Professor.”
He spent two days coasting through cool lattices of data in the formidable sta
tion library. It was well equipped and allowed interfaces with several senses. He patrolled through cool digital labyrinths.
Some data was encrusted with age, quite literally. In the vector spaces portrayed on huge screens, the research data of millennia ago were covered with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily broken or averted, of course, by present methods. But the chunky abstracts, reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy interpretation. Occasionally some facets of pan behavior were carefully hidden away in appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior, especially. How could he use this?
He navigated through the 3D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he follow a strategy of analogy?
Pans shared nearly all their genes with humans, so pan dynamics should be a simpler version of human dynamics. Could he then analyze pan troop interactions as a reduced case of psychohistory?
Security Chief Yakani opened confidential files which implied that pans had been genetically modified about ten thousand years before. To what end Hari could not tell. There were other altered creatures, “raboons” particularly. Yakani took such an interest in his work that he became suspicious she was keeping an eye on him for the Potentate.
At sunset of the second day he sat with Dors watching bloodred shafts spike through orange-tinged clouds. This world was gaudy beyond good taste, and he liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled, anticipating dinner.
He remarked to Dors, “It’s tempting, using pans to build a sort of toy model of psychohistory.”
“But you have doubts.”
“They’re like us but they have, well, uh...”
“Base, animalistic ways?” She smirked, then kissed him. “My prudish Hari.”
“We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we’re a lot smarter, too.”
Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. “They live intensely, you’ll have to give them that.”