by Isaac Asimov
“Yet it is possible. Consider for yourself the steps of the argument.”
“If that were so, we would have to go to Earth. We would have to be there and somehow prevent the disaster.”
“Yes, that is so.”
“But we cannot go unless Lady Gladia goes and that is not likely.”
“If you can influence the captain to take this ship to Earth, Madam Gladia would have no choice but to go as well.”
Giskard said, “I cannot without harming him. He is firmly set on going to his own planet of Baleyworld. We must maneuver his trip to Earth – if we can – after he has done whatever he plans in Baleyworld.”
“Afterward may be too late.”
“I cannot help that. I must not harm a human being.”
“If it is too late – Friend Giskard, consider what that would mean.”
“I cannot consider what that would mean. I know only that I cannot harm a human being.”
“Then the First Law is not enough and we must –”
He could go no farther and both robots lapsed into helpless silence.
30.
Baleyworld came slowly into sharper view as the ship approached it. Gladia watched it intently in her cabin’s viewer; it was the first time she had ever seen a Settler world.
She had protested this leg of the journey when she had first been made aware of it by D.G., but he shrugged it off with a small laugh. “What would you have, my lady? I must lug this weapon of your people” – he emphasized “your” slightly –” to my people. And I must report to them, too.”
Gladia said coldly, “Your permission to take me along to Solaria was granted you by the Auroran Council on the condition that you bring me back.”
“Actually that is not so, my lady. There may have been some informal understanding to that effect, but there is nothing in writing. No formal agreement.”
“An informal understanding would bind me – or any civilized individual, D.G.”
“I’m sure of that, Madam Gladia, but we Traders live by money and by written signatures on legal documents. I would never, under any circumstances, violate a written contract or refuse to do that for which I have accepted payment.”
Gladia’s chin turned upward. “Is that a hint that I must pay you in order to be taken home?”
“Madam!”
“Come, come, D.G. Don’t waste mock indignation on me. If I am to be kept prisoner on your planet, say so and tell me why. Let me know exactly where I stand.”
“You are not my prisoner and win not be. In fact, I will honor this unwritten understanding. I will take you home – eventually. First, however, I must go to Baleyworld and you must come with me.”
“Why must I come with you?”
“The people of my world will want to see you. You are the heroine of Solaria. You saved us. You can’t deprive them of a chance of shouting themselves hoarse for you. Besides, you were the good friend of the Ancestor.”
“What do they know – or think they know – of that?” Gladia said sharply.
D.G. grinned. “Nothing to your discredit, I assure you. You are a legend and legends are larger than life – though I admit it would be easy for a legend to be larger than you, my lady – and a good deal nobler. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t want you on the world because you couldn’t live up to the legend. You’re not tall enough, beautiful enough, majestic enough. But when the story of Solaria comes out, you will suddenly meet all requirements. In fact, they may not want to let you go. You must remember we are talking of Baleyworld, the planet on which the story of the Ancestor is taken more seriously than on any other – and you are part of the story.”
“You are not to use that as an excuse to keep me in prison.”
“I promise you I won’t. And I promise I will get you home – when I can – when I can.”
Gladia did not remain as indignant somehow as she felt she had every right to be. She did want to see what a Settler world was like and, after all, this was Elijah Baley’s peculiar world. His son had founded it. He himself had spent his last decades here. On Baleyworld, there would be remnants of him – the name of the planet, his descendants, his legend.
So she watched the planet – and thought of Elijah.
31.
The watching brought her little and she felt disappointed. There was not much to be seen through the cloud layer that covered the planet. From her relatively small experience as a space traveler it seemed to her that the cloud layer was denser than usual for inhabited planets. They would be landing within hours, now, and
The signal light flashed and Gladia scrambled to push the HOLD button in answer. A few moments more and she pushed the ENTER button.
D.G. came in, smiling. “Inconvenient moment, my lady?”
“Not really,” said Gladia. “Simply a matter of putting on my gloves and inserting my nose plugs. I suppose I should wear them all the time, but both grow tiresome and, for some reason, I grow less concerned about infection.”
“Familiarity breeds contempt, my lady.”
“Let’s not call it contempt,” said Gladia, who found herself smiling.
“Thank you,” said D.G. “We’ll be landing soon, madam, and I have brought you a coverall, carefully sterilized and placed inside this plastic bag so that it has since been untouched by Settler hands. It’s simple to put on. You’ll have no trouble and you’ll find it covers everything but the nose and eyes.”
“Just for me, D.G.?”
“No, no, my lady. We all wear such things when outdoors at this season of the year. It is winter in our capital city at the present time and it is cold. We live on a rather cold world – heavy cloud cover, much precipitation, often snow.”
“Even in the tropical regions?”
“No, there it rends to be hot and dry. The population clusters in the cooler regions, however. We rather like it. It’s bracing and stimulating. The seas, which were seeded with Earth species of life, are fertile, so that fish and other creatures have multiplied abundantly. There’s no food shortage, consequently, even though land agriculture is limited and we’ll never be the breadbasket of the Galaxy. – The summers are short but quite hot and the beaches are then well populated, although you might find them uninteresting since we have a strong nudity taboo.”
“It seems like peculiar weather.”
“A matter of land-sea distribution, a planetary orbit that is a bit more eccentric than most, and a few other things. Frankly, I don’t bother with it.” He shrugged. “It’s not my field of interest.”
“You’re a Trader. I imagine you’re not on the planet often.”
“True, but I’m not a Trader in order to escape. I like it here. And yet perhaps I would like it less if I were here more. If we look at it that way, Baleyworld’s harsh conditions serve an important purpose. They encourage trading. Baleyworld produces men who scour the seas for food and there’s a certain similarity between sailing the seas and sailing through space. I would say fully a third of all the Traders plying the space lanes are Baleypeople.”
“You seem in a semimanic state, D.G.,” said Gladia.
“Do I? I think of myself right now as being in a good humor. I have reason to be. So have you.”
“Oh?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? We got off Solaria alive. We know exactly what the Solarian danger is. We’ve gained control of an unusual weapon that should interest OUT military. And you will be the heroine of Baleyworld. The world officials already know the outline of events and are eager to greet you. For that matter, you’re the heroine of this ship. Almost every man on board volunteered to bring you this coverall. They are all anxious to get close and bathe in your aura, so to speak.”
“Quite a change,” said Gladia dryly.
“Absolutely. Niss – the crewman whom your Daneel chastised –”
“I remember well, D.G.”
“He is anxious to apologize to you. And bring his four mates so that they, too, might apologize. And to kick, in you presence, the one of them w
ho made an improper suggestion. He is not a bad person, my lady.”
“I am certain he isn’t. Assure him he is forgiven and the incident forgotten. And if you’ll arrange matters, I will – will shake hands with him and perhaps some of the others before debarking. But you mustn’t let them crowd about me.”
“I understand, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be a certain amount of crowding in Baleytown – that’s the capital city of Baleyworld. There’s no way of stopping various government officials from trying to gain political advantage by being seen with you, while grinning away and bowing.”
“Jehoshaphat! As your Ancestor would say.”
“Don’t say that once we land, madam. It’s an expression reserved for him. It is considered bad taste for anyone else to say it. – There’ll be speeches and cheering and all kinds of meaningless formalities. I’m sorry, my lady.”
She said thoughtfully, “I could do without it, but I suppose there’s no way of stopping it.”
“No way, my lady.”
“How long will it continue?”
“Till they get tired. Several days, perhaps, but there’ll be a certain variety to it.”
“And how long do we stay on the planet?”
“Till I get tired. I’m sorry, my lady, but I have much to do – places to go – friends to see –”
“Women to make love to.”
“Alas for human frailty,” said D.G., grinning broadly.
“You’re doing everything but slobber.”
“A weakness. I can’t bring myself to slobber.”
Gladia smiled. “You’re not totally committed to sanity, are you?”
“I never claimed to be. But, leaving that aside, I also have to consider such dull matters as the fact that my officers and crew would want to see their families and friends, catch up on their sleep, and have a little planetside fun. – and if you want to consider the feelings of inanimate objects, the ship will have to be repaired, refurbished, refreshed, and refueled. Little things like that.”
“How long will all those little things take?”
“It could be months. Who knows?”
“And what do I do meanwhile?”
“You could see our world, broaden your horizons.”
“But your world is not exactly the playground of the Galaxy.”
“Too true, but we’ll try to keep you interested.” He looked at his watch. “One more warning, madam. Do not refer to your age.”
“What cause would I have to do that?”
“It might show up in some casual reference. You’ll be expected to say a few words and you might say, for instance, ‘In all my more than twenty-three decades of life, I have never been so glad to see anyone as I am to see the people of Baleyworld.’ If you’re tempted to say anything like that initial clause, resist it.”
“I will. I have no intention of indulging in hyperbole in any case. – But, as a matter of idle curiosity, why not?”
“Simply because it is better for them not to know your age.”
“But they do know my age, don’t they? They know I was your Ancestor’s friend and they know how long ago he lived. Or are they under the impression” – she looked at him narrowly –” that 1’m a distant descendant of the Gladia?”
“No, no, they know who you are and how old you are, but they know it only with their heads” – he tapped his forehead –” and few people have working heads, as you may have noticed.”
“Yes, I have. Even on Aurora.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want the Settlers to be special in this respect. Well, then, you have the appearance of” – he paused judiciously –” forty, maybe forty-five, and they’ll accept you as that in their guts, which is where the average person’s real thinking mechanism is located. If you don’t rub it in about your real age.”
“Does it really make a difference?”
“Does it? Look, the average Settler really doesn’t want robots. He has no liking for robots, no desire for robots. There we are satisfied to differ from the Spacers. Long life is different. Forty decades is considerably more than ten.”
“Few of us actually reach the forty-decade mark.”
“And few of us actually reach the ten-decade mark. We teach the advantage of short life-quality versus quantity, evolutionary speed, ever-changing world – but nothing really makes people happy about living ten decades when they imagine they could live forty, so past a point the propaganda produces a backlash and it’s best to keep quiet about it. They don’t often see Spacers, as you can imagine, and so they don’t have occasion to grind their teeth over the fact that Spacers look young and vigorous even when they are twice as old as the oldest Settler who ever lived. They’ll see that in you and if they think about it, it will unsettle them.”
Gladia said bitterly, “Would you like to have me make a speech and tell them exactly what forty decades means? Shall I tell them for how many years one outlives the springtime of hope, to say nothing of friends and acquaintances. Shall I tell them of the meaninglessness of children and family; of the endless comings and goings of one husband after another, of the misty blurring of the informal matings between and alongside; of the coming of the time when you’ve seen all you want to see, and heard all you want to hear, and find it impossible to think a new thought, of how you forget what excitement and discovery are all about, and learn each year how much more intense boredom can become?”
“Baleypeople wouldn’t believe that. I don’t think I do. Is that the way all Spacers feel or are you making it up?”
“I only know for certain how I myself feel, but I’ve watched others dim as they aged; I’ve watched their dispositions sour, and their ambitions narrow, and their indifferences broaden.”
D.G.’s lips pressed together and he looked somber. “Is the suicide rate high among Spacers? I’ve never heard that it is.”
“It’s virtually zero.”
“But that doesn’t fit what you’re saying.”
“Consider! We’re surrounded by robots who are dedicated to keeping us alive. There’s no way we can kill ourselves when our sharp-eyed and active robots are forever about us. I doubt that any of us would even think of trying. I wouldn’t dream of it myself, if only because I can’t bear the thought of what it would mean to all my household robots and, even more so, to Daneel and Giskard.”
“They’re not really alive, you know. They don’t have feelings.”
Gladia shook her head. “You say that only because you’ve never lived with them. – In any case, I think you overestimate the longing for prolonged life among your people. You know my age, you look at my appearance, yet it doesn’t bother you.”
“Because I’m convinced that the Spacer worlds must dwindle and die, that it is the Settler worlds that are the hope of humanity’s future, and that it is our short-lived characteristic that ensures it. Listening to what you’ve just said, assuming it is all true, makes me the more certain.”
“Don’t be too sure. You may develop your own insuperable problems – if you haven’t already.”
“That is undoubtedly possible, my lady, but for now I must leave you. The ship is coasting in for a landing and I must stare intelligently at the computer that controls it or no one will believe that I am the captain.”
He left and she remained in gloomy abstraction for a while, her fingers plucking at the plastic that enclosed the coverall.
She had come to a sense of equilibrium on Aurora, a way of allowing life to pass quietly. Meal by meal, day by day, season by season, it had been passing and the quiet had insulated her, almost, from the tedious waiting for the only adventure that remained, the final one of death.
And now she had been to Solaria and had awakened the memories of a childhood that had long passed on a world that had long passed, so that the quiet had been shattered – perhaps forever – and so that she now lay uncovered and bare to the horror of continuing life.
What could substitute for the vanished quiet?
S
he caught Giskard’s dimly glowing eyes upon her and she said, “Help me on with this, Giskard.”
32.
It was cold. The sky was gray with clouds and the air glittered with a very light snowfall. Patches of powdery snow were swirling in the fresh breeze and off beyond the landing field Gladia could see distant heaps of snow.
There were crowds of people gathered here and there, held off by barriers from approaching too closely. They were all wearing coveralls of different types and colors and they all seemed to balloon outward, turning humanity into a crowd of shapeless objects with eyes. Some were wearing visors that glittered transparently over their faces.
Gladia pressed her mittened hand to her face. Except for her nose, she felt warm enough. The coverall did more than insulate; it seemed to exude warmth of its own.
She looked behind her. Daneel and Giskard were within reach, each in a coverall.
She had protested that at first. “They don’t need coveralls. They’re not sensitive to cold.”
“I’m sure they’re not,” D.G. had said, “but you say you won’t go anywhere without them and we can’t very well have Daneel sitting there exposed to the cold. It would seem against nature. Nor do we wish to arouse hostility by making it too clear you have robots.”
“They must know I’ve got robots with me and Giskard’s face will give him away – even in a coverall.”
“They might know,” said D.G., “but the chances are they won’t think about it if they’re not forced to – so let’s not force it. “
Now D.G. was motioning her into a ground-car that had a transparent roof and sides. “They’ll want to see you as we travel, my lady,” he said, smiling.
Gladia seated herself at one side and D.G. followed on the other. “I’m co-hero,” he said,
“Do you value that?”
“Oh, yes. It means a bonus for my crew and a possible promotion for me. I don’t scorn that.”
Daneel and Giskard entered, too, and sat down in seats that faced the two human beings. Daneel faced Gladia; Giskard faced D.G.