Foundation's Edge f-6 Read online

  “Oh, that!”

  “Yes, that! That’s my monomania at the moment. I’ve been looking for that hyper-relay as though I were on my old scow of a training ship, studying every part of the ship by eye, looking for something that stood out from the rest. I had forgotten that this ship is a developed product of thousands of years of technological evolution. Don’t you see?”

  “No, Golan.”

  “We have a computer aboard. How could I have forgotten?”

  He waved his hand and passed into his own room, urging Pelorat along with him.

  “I need only try to communicate,” he said, placing his hands onto the computer contact.

  It was a matter of trying to reach Terminus, which was now some thousands of kilometers behind.

  Reach! Speak! It was as though nerve endings sprouted and extended, reaching outward with bewildering speed—the speed of light, of course—to make contact.

  Trevize felt himself touching—well, not quite touching, but sensing—well, not quite sensing, but—it didn’t matter, for there wasn’t a word for it.

  He was aware of Terminus within reach and, although the distance between himself and it was lengthening by some twenty kilometers per second, contact persisted as though planet and ship were motionless and separated by a few meters.

  He said nothing. He clamped shut. He was merely testing the principle of communication; he was not actively communicating.

  Out beyond, eight parsecs away, was Anacreon, the nearest large planet—in their backyard, by Galactic standards. To send a message by the same light-speed system that had just worked for Terminus—and to receive an answer as well—would take fifty-two years.

  Reach for Anacreon! Think Anacreon! Think it as clearly as you can. You know its position relative to Terminus and the Galactic core; you’ve studied its planetography and history; you’ve solved military problems where it was necessary to recapture Anacreon (in the impossible case—these days—that it was taken by an enemy).

  Space! You’ve been on Anacreon. Picture it! Picture it! You will sense being on it via hyper-relay.

  Nothing! His nerve endings quivered and came to rest nowhere.

  Trevize pulled loose. “There’s no hyper-relay on board the Far Star, Janov. I’m positive. —And if I hadn’t followed your suggestion, I wonder how long it would have taken me to reach this point.”

  Pelorat, without moving a facial muscle, positively glowed. “I’m so pleased to have been of help. Does this mean we Jump?”

  “No, we still wait two more days, to be safe. We have to get away from mass, remember? —Ordinarily, considering that I have a new and untried ship with which I am thoroughly unacquainted, it would probably take me two days to calculate the exact procedure—the proper hyperthrust for the first Jump, in particular. I have a feeling, though, the computer will do it all.”

  “Dear me! That leaves us facing a rather boring stretch of time, it seems to me.”

  “Boring?” Trevize smiled broadly. “Anything but! You and I, Janov, are going to talk about Earth.”

  Pelorat said, “Indeed? You are trying to please an old man? That is kind of you. Really it is.”

  “Nonsense! I’m trying to please myself. Janov, you have made a convert. As a result of what you have told me, I realize that Earth is the most important and the most devouringly interesting object in the Universe.”

  2.

  It must surely have struck Trevize at the moment that Pelorat had presented his view of Earth. It was only because his mind was reverberating with the problem of the hyper-relay that he hadn’t responded at once. And the instant the problem had gone, he had responded.

  Perhaps the one statement of Hari Seldon’s that was most often repeated was his remark concerning the Second Foundation being “at the other end of the Galaxy” from Terminus. Seldon had even named the spot. It was to be “at Star’s End.”

  This had been included in Gaal Dornick’s account of the day of the trial before the Imperial court. “The other end of the Galaxy”—those were the words Seldon had used to Dornick and ever since that day their significance had been debated.

  What was it that connected one end of the Galaxy with “the other end”? Was it a straight line, a spiral, a circle, or what?

  And now, luminously, it was suddenly clear to Trevize that it was no line and no curve that should—or could—be drawn on the map of the Galaxy. It was more subtle than that.

  It was perfectly clear that the one end of the Galaxy was Terminus. It was at the edge of the Galaxy, yes—our Foundation’s edge—which gave the word “end” a literal meaning. It was, however, also the newest world of the Galaxy at the time Seldon was speaking, a world that was about to be founded, that had not as yet been in existence for a single moment.

  What would be the other end of the Galaxy, in that light? The other Foundation’s edge? Why, the oldest world of the Galaxy? And according to the argument Pelorat had presented—without knowing what he was presenting—that could only be Earth. The Second Foundation might well be on Earth.

  Yet Seldon had said the other end of the Galaxy was “at Star’s End.” Who could say he was not speaking metaphorically? Trace the history of humanity backward as Pelorat did and the line would stretch back from each planetary system, each star that shone down on an inhabited planet, to some other planetary system, some other star from which the first migrants had come, then back to a star before that—until finally, all the lines stretched back to the planet on which humanity had originated. It was the star that shone upon Earth that was “Star’s End.”

  Trevize smiled and said almost lovingly, “Tell me more about Earth, Janov.”

  Pelorat shook his head. “I have told you all there is, really. We will find out more on Trantor.”

  Trevize said, “No, we won’t, Janov. We’ll find out nothing there. Why? Because we’re not going to Trantor. I control this ship and I assure you we’re not.”

  Pelorat’s mouth fell open. He struggled for breath for a moment and then said, woebegone, “Oh, my dear fellow!”

  Trevize said, “Come on, Janov. Don’t look like that. We’re going to find Earth.”

  “But it’s only on Trantor that—”

  “No, it’s not. Trantor is just someplace you can study brittle films and dusty documents and turn brittle and dusty yourself.”

  “For decades, I’ve dreamed—”

  “You’ve dreamed of finding Earth.”

  “But it’s only—”

  Trevize stood up, leaned over, caught the slack of Pelorat’s tunic, and said, “Don’t repeat that, Professor. Don’t repeat it. When you first told me we were going to look for Earth, before ever we got onto this ship, you said we were sure to find it because, and I quote your own words, ‘I have an excellent possibility in mind.’ Now I don’t ever want to hear you say ‘Trantor’ again. I just want you to tell me about this excellent possibility.”

  “But it must be confirmed. So far, it’s only a thought, a hope, a vague possibility.”

  “Good! Tell me about it!”

  “You don’t understand. You simply don’t understand. It is not a field in which anyone but myself has done research. There is nothing historical, nothing firm, nothing real. People talk about Earth as though it’s a fact, and also as though it’s a myth. There are a million contradictory tales—”

  “Well then, what has your research consisted of?”

  “I’ve been forced to collect every tale, every bit of supposed history, every legend, every misty myth. Even fiction. Anything that includes the name of Earth or the idea of a planet of origin. For over thirty years, I’ve been collecting everything I could find from every planet of the Galaxy. Now if I could only get something more reliable than all of these from the Galactic Library at—But you don’t want me to say the word.”

  “That’s right. Don’t say it. Tell me instead that one of these items has caught your attention, and tell me your reasons for thinking why it, of them all, should be legiti
mate.”

  Pelorat shook his head. “There, Golan, if you will excuse my saying so, you talk like a soldier or a politician. That is not the way history works.”

  Trevize took a deep breath and kept his temper. “Tell me how it works, Janov. We’ve got two days. Educate me.”

  “You can’t rely on any one myth or even on any one group. I’ve had to gather them all, analyze them, organize them, set up symbols to represent different aspects of their content—tales of impossible weather, astronomic details of planetary systems at variance with what actually exists, place of origin of culture heroes specifically stated not to be native, quite literally hundreds of other items. No use going through the entire list. Even two days wouldn’t be enough. I spent over thirty years, I tell you.

  “I then worked up a computer program that searched through all these myths for common components and sought a transformation that would eliminate the true impossibilities. Gradually I worked up a model of what Earth must have been like. After all, if human beings all originated on a single planet, that single planet must represent the one fact that all origin myths, all culture-hero tales, have in common. —Well, do you want me to go into mathematical detail?”

  Trevize said, “Not at the moment, thank you, but how do you know you won’t be misled by your mathematics? We know for a fact that Terminus was founded only five centuries ago and that the first human beings arrived as a colony from Trantor but had been assembled from dozens—if not hundreds—of other worlds. Yet someone who did not know this could assume that Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin, neither of whom were born on Terminus, came from Earth and that Trantor was really a name that stood for Earth. Certainly, if the Trantor as described in Seldon’s time were searched for—a world with all its land surface coated with metal—it would not be found and it might be considered an impossible myth.”

  Pelorat looked pleased. “I withdraw my earlier remark about soldiers and politicians, my dear fellow. You have a remarkable intuitive sense. Of course, I had to set up controls. I invented a hundred falsities based on distortions of actual history and imitating myths of the type I had collected. I then attempted to incorporate my inventions into the model. One of my inventions was even based on Terminus’s early history. The computer rejected them all. Every one. To be sure, that might have meant I simply lacked the fictional talents to make up something reasonable, but I did my best.”

  “I’m sure you did, Janov. And what did your model tell you about Earth?”

  “A number of things of varying degrees of likelihood. A kind of profile. For instance, about 90 percent of the inhabited planets in the Galaxy have rotation periods of between twenty-two and twenty-six Galactic Standard Hours. Well—”

  Trevize cut in. “I hope you didn’t pay any attention to that, Janov. There’s no mystery there. For a planet to be habitable, you don’t want it to rotate so quickly that air circulation patterns produce impossibly stormy conditions or so slowly that temperature variation patterns are extreme. It’s a property that’s self-selective. Human beings prefer to live on planets with suitable characteristics, and then when all habitable planets resemble each other in these characteristics, some say, ‘What an amazing coincidence,’ when it’s not amazing at all and not even a coincidence.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Pelorat calmly, “that’s a well-known phenomenon in social science. In physics, too, I believe—but I’m not a physicist and I’m not certain about that. In any case, it is called the ‘anthropic principle.’ The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them. But the question is: Where is the planet that served as a model? Which planet rotates in precisely one Galactic Standard Day of twenty-four Galactic Standard Hours?”

  Trevize looked thoughtful and thrust out his lower lip. “You think that might be Earth? Surely Galactic Standard could have been based on the local characteristics of any world, might it not?”

  “Not likely. It’s not the human way. Trantor was the capital world of the Galaxy for twelve thousand years—the most populous world for twenty thousand years—yet it did not impose its rotation period of 1.08 Galactic Standard Days on all the Galaxy. And Terminus’s rotation period is 0.91 GSD, and we don’t enforce ours on the planets dominated by us. Every planet makes use of its own private calculations in its own Local Planetary Day system, and for matters of interplanetary importance converts—with the help of computers—back and forth between LPD and GSD. The Galactic Standard Day must come from Earth!”

  “Why is it a must?”

  “For one thing, Earth was once the only inhabited world, so naturally its day and year would be standard and would very likely remain standard out of a social inertia as other worlds were populated. Then, too, the model I produced was that of an Earth that rotated on its axis in just twenty-four Galactic Standard Hours and that revolved about its sun in just one Galactic Standard Year.”

  “Might that not be coincidence?”

  Pelorat laughed. “Now it is you who are talking coincidence. Would you care to lay a wager on such a thing happening by coincidence?”

  “Well well,” muttered Trevize.

  “In fact, there’s more to it. There’s an archaic measure of time that’s called the month—”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It, apparently, about fits the period of revolution of Earth’s satellite about Earth. However—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, one rather astonishing factor of the model is that the satellite I just mentioned is huge—over one quarter the diameter of the Earth itself.”

  “Never heard of such a thing, Janov. There isn’t a populated planet in the Galaxy with a satellite like that.”

  “But that’s good,” said Pelorat with animation. “If Earth is a unique world in its production of variegated species and the evolution of intelligence, then we want some physical uniqueness.”

  “But what could a large satellite have to do with variegated species, intelligence, and all that?”

  “Well now, there you hit a difficulty. I don’t really know. But it’s worth examination, don’t you think?”

  Trevize rose to his feet and folded his arms across his chest. “But what’s the problem, then? Look up the statistics on inhabited planets and find one that has a period of rotation and of revolution that are exactly one Galactic Standard Day and one Galactic Standard Year in length, respectively. And if it also has a gigantic satellite, you’d have what you want. I presume, from your statement that you ‘have an excellent possibility in mind,’ that you’ve done just this, and that you have your world.”

  Pelorat looked disconcerted. “Well, now, that’s not exactly what happened. I did look through the statistics, or at least I had it done by the astronomy department and—well, to put it bluntly, there’s no such world.”

  Trevize sat down again abruptly. “But that means your whole argument falls to the ground.”

  “Not quite, it seems to me.”

  “What do you mean, not quite? You produce a model with all sorts of detailed descriptions and you can’t find anything that fits. Your model is useless, then. You must start from the beginning.”

  “No. It just means that the statistics on populated planets are incomplete. After all, there are tens of millions of them and some are very obscure worlds. For instance, there is no good data on the population of nearly half. And concerning six hundred and forty thousand populated worlds there is almost no information other than their names and sometimes the location. Some galactographers have estimated that there may be up to ten thousand inhabited planets that aren’t listed at all. The worlds prefer it that way, presumably. During the Imperial Era, it might have helped them avoid taxation.”

  “And in the centuries that followed,” said Trevize cynically. “It might have helped them serve as home bases for pirates, and that might have, on occasion, proved more enriching than ordinary trade.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” s
aid Pelorat doubtfully.

  Trevize said, “Just the same, it seems to me that Earth would have to be on the list of inhabited planets, whatever its own desires. It would be the oldest of them all, by definition, and it could not have been overlooked in the early centuries of Galactic civilization. And once on the list, it would stay on. Surely we could count on social inertia there.”

  Pelorat hesitated and looked anguished. “Actually, there—there is a planet named Earth on the list of inhabited planets.”

  Trevize stared. “I’m under the impression that you told me a while ago that Earth was not on the list?”

  “As Earth, it is not. There is, however, a planet named Gaia.”

  “What has that got to do with it? Gahyah?”

  “It’s spelled G-A-I-A. It means ‘Earth.’ ”

  “Why should it mean Earth, Janov, any more than anything else? The name is meaningless to me.”

  Pelorat’s ordinarily expressionless face came close to a grimace. “I’m not sure you’ll believe this—If I go by my analysis of the myths, there were several different, mutually unintelligible, languages on Earth.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. After all, we have a thousand different ways of speaking across the Galaxy—”

  “Across the Galaxy, there are certainly dialectical variations, but these are not mutually unintelligible. And even if understanding some of them is a matter of difficulty, we all share Galactic Standard.”

  “Certainly, but there is constant interstellar travel. What if some world was in isolation for a prolonged period?”

  “But you’re talking of Earth. A single planet. Where’s the isolation?”

  “Earth is the planet of origin, don’t forget, where humanity must at one time have been primitive beyond imagining. Without interstellar travel, without computers, without technology at all, struggling up from nonhuman ancestors.”

  “This is so ridiculous.”