by Isaac Asimov
Pelorat’s long face seemed to grow longer as he buried his chin in his neck. “I won’t deny I feel nervous, Golan, but I’d be ashamed to abandon you. I would disown myself if I did so.”
“Bliss?”
“Gaia will not abandon you, Trevize, whatever you do. If Earth should prove dangerous, Gaia will protect you as far as it can. And in any case, in my role as Bliss, I will not abandon Pel, and if he clings to you, then I certainly cling to him.”
Trevize said grimly, “Very well, then. I’ve given you your chance. We go on together.”
“Together,” said Bliss.
Pelorat smiled slightly, and gripped Trevize’s shoulder. “Together. Always.”
29.
BLISS SAID, “LOOK AT THAT, PEL.”
She had been making use of the ship’s telescope by hand, almost aimlessly, as a change from Pelorat’s library of Earth-legendry.
Pelorat approached, placed an arm about her shoulders and looked at the viewscreen. One of the gas giants of the Comporellian planetary system was in sight, magnified till it seemed the large body it really was.
In color it was a soft orange streaked with paler stripes. Viewed from the planetary plane, and more distant from the sun than the ship itself was, it was almost a complete circle of light.
“Beautiful,” said Pelorat.
“The central streak extends beyond the planet, Pel.”
Pelorat furrowed his brow and said, “You know, Bliss, I believe it does.”
“Do you suppose it’s an optical illusion?”
Pelorat said, “I’m not sure, Bliss. I’m as much a space-novice as you are. —Golan!”
Trevize answered the call with a rather feeble “What is it?” and entered the pilot-room, looking a bit rumpled, as though he had just been napping on his bed with his clothes on—which was exactly what he had been doing.
He said, in a rather peevish way, “Please! Don’t be handling the instruments.”
“It’s just the telescope,” said Pelorat. “Look at that.”
Trevize did. “It’s a gas giant, the one they call Gallia, according to the information I was given.”
“How can you tell it’s that one, just looking?”
“For one thing,” said Trevize, “at our distance from the sun, and because of the planetary sizes and orbital positions, which I’ve been studying in plotting our course, that’s the only one you could magnify to that extent at this time. For another thing, there’s the ring.”
“Ring?” said Bliss, mystified.
“All you can see is a thin, pale marking, because we’re viewing it almost edge-on. We can zoom up out of the planetary plane and give you a better view. Would you like that?”
Pelorat said, “I don’t want to make you have to recalculate positions and courses, Golan.”
“Oh well, the computer will do it for me with little trouble.” He sat down at the computer as he spoke and placed his hands on the markings that received them. The computer, finely attuned to his mind, did the rest.
The Far Star, free of fuel problems or of inertial sensations, accelerated rapidly, and once again, Trevize felt a surge of love for a computer-and-ship that responded in such a way to him—as though it was his thought that powered and directed it, as though it were a powerful and obedient extension of his will.
It was no wonder the Foundation wanted it back; no wonder Comporellon had wanted it for itself. The only surprise was that the force of superstition had been strong enough to cause Comporellon to be willing to give it up.
Properly armed, it could outrun or outfight any ship in the Galaxy, or any combination of ships—provided only that it did not encounter another ship like itself.
Of course, it was not properly armed. Mayor Branno, in assigning him the ship, had at least been cautious enough to leave it unarmed.
Pelorat and Bliss watched intently as the planet, Gallia, slowly, slowly, tipped toward them. The upper pole (whichever it was) became visible, with turbulence in a large circular region around it, while the lower pole retired behind the bulge of the sphere.
At the upper end, the dark side of the planet invaded the sphere of orange light, and the beautiful circle became increasingly lopsided.
What seemed more exciting was that the central pale streak was no longer straight but had come to be curved, as were the other streaks to the north and south, but more noticeably so.
Now the central streak extended beyond the edges of the planet very distinctly and did so in a narrow loop on either side. There was no question of illusion; its nature was apparent. It was a ring of matter, looping about the planet, and hidden on the far side.
“That’s enough to give you the idea, I think,” said Trevize. “If we were to move over the planet, you would see the ring in its circular form, concentric about the planet, touching it nowhere. You’ll probably see that it’s not one ring either but several concentric rings.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it possible,” said Pelorat blankly. “What keeps it in space?”
“The same thing that keeps a satellite in space,” said Trevize. “The rings consist of tiny particles, every one of which is orbiting the planet. The rings are so close to the planet that tidal effects prevent it from coalescing into a single body.”
Pelorat shook his head. “It’s horrifying when I think of it, old man. How is it possible that I can have spent my whole life as a scholar and yet know so little about astronomy?”
“And I know nothing at all about the myths of humanity. No one can encompass all of knowledge. —The point is that these planetary rings aren’t unusual. Almost every single gas giant has them, even if it’s only a thin curve of dust. As it happens, the sun of Terminus has no true gas giant in its planetary family, so unless a Terminian is a space traveler, or has taken University instruction in astronomy, he’s likely to know nothing about planetary rings. What is unusual is a ring that is sufficiently broad to be bright and noticeable, like that one. It’s beautiful. It must be a couple of hundred kilometers wide, at least.”
At this point, Pelorat snapped his fingers. “That’s what it meant.”
Bliss looked startled. “What is it, Pel?”
Pelorat said, “I came across a scrap of poetry once, very ancient, and in an archaic version of Galactic that was hard to make out but that was good evidence of great age. —Though I shouldn’t complain of the archaism, old chap. My work has made me an expert on various varieties of Old Galactic, which is quite gratifying even if it is of no use to me whatever outside my work. —What was I talking about?”
Bliss said, “An old scrap of poetry, Pel dear.”
“Thank you, Bliss,” he said. And to Trevize, “She keeps close track of what I say in order to pull me back whenever I get off-course, which is most of the time.”
“It’s part of your charm, Pel,” said Bliss, smiling.
“Anyway, this scrap of poetry purported to describe the planetary system of which Earth was part. Why it should do so, I don’t know, for the poem as a whole does not survive; at least, I was never able to locate it. Only this one portion survived, perhaps because of its astronomical content. In any case, it spoke of the brilliant triple ring of the sixth planet ‘both brade and large, sae the woruld shronk in comparisoun.’ I can still quote it, you see. I didn’t understand what a planet’s ring could be. I remember thinking of three circles on one side of the planet, all in a row. It seemed so nonsensical, I didn’t bother to include it in my library. I’m sorry now I didn’t inquire.” He shook his head. “Being a mythologist in today’s Galaxy is so solitary a job, one forgets the good of inquiring.”
Trevize said consolingly, “You were probably right to ignore it, Janov. It’s a mistake to take poetic chatter literally.”
“But that’s what was meant,” said Pelorat, pointing at the screen. “That’s what the poem was speaking of. Three wide rings, concentric, wider than the planet itself.”
Trevize said, “I never heard of such a thing. I don’t
think rings can be that wide. Compared to the planet they circle, they are always very narrow.”
Pelorat said, “We never heard of a habitable planet with a giant satellite, either. Or one with a radioactive crust. This is uniqueness number three. If we find a radioactive planet that might be otherwise habitable, with a giant satellite, and with another planet in the system that has a huge ring, there would be no doubt at all that we had encountered Earth.”
Trevize smiled. “I agree, Janov. If we find all three, we will certainly have found Earth.”
“If!” said Bliss, with a sigh.
30.
THEY WERE BEYOND THE MAIN WORLDS OF THE planetary system, plunging outward between the positions of the two outermost planets so that there was now no significant mass within 1.5 billion kilometers. Ahead lay only the vast cometary cloud which, gravitationally, was insignificant.
The Far Star had accelerated to a speed of 0.1 c, one tenth the speed of light. Trevize knew well that, in theory, the ship could be accelerated to nearly the speed of light, but he also knew that, in practice, 0.1 c was the reasonable limit.
At that speed, any object with appreciable mass could be avoided, but there was no way of dodging the innumerable dust particles in space, and, to a far greater extent even, individual atoms and molecules. At very fast speeds, even such small objects could do damage, scouring and scraping the ship’s hull. At speeds near the speed of light, each atom smashing into the hull had the properties of a cosmic ray particle. Under that penetrating cosmic radiation, anyone on board ship would not long survive.
The distant stars showed no perceptible motion in the viewscreen, and even though the ship was moving at thirty thousand kilometers per second, there was every appearance of its standing still.
The computer scanned space to great distances for any oncoming object of small but significant size that might be on a collision course, and the ship veered gently to avoid it, in the extremely unlikely case that that would be necessary. Between the small size of any possible oncoming object, the speed with which it was passed, and the lack of inertial effect as the result of the course change, there was no way of telling whether anything ever took place in the nature of what might be termed a “close call.”
Trevize, therefore, did not worry about such things, or even give it the most casual thought. He kept his full attention on the three sets of co-ordinates he had been given by Deniador, and, particularly, on the set which indicated the object closest to themselves.
“Is there something wrong with the figures?” asked Pelorat anxiously.
“I can’t tell yet,” said Trevize. “Co-ordinates in themselves aren’t useful, unless you know the zero point and the conventions used in setting them up—the direction in which to mark off the distance, so to speak, what the equivalent of a prime meridian is, and so on.”
“How do you find out such things?” said Pelorat blankly.
“I obtained the co-ordinates of Terminus and a few other known points, relative to Comporellon. If I put them into the computer, it will calculate what the conventions must be for such co-ordinates if Terminus and the other points are to be correctly located. I’m only trying to organize things in my mind so that I can properly program the computer for this. Once the conventions are determined, the figures we have for the Forbidden Worlds might possibly have meaning.”
“Only possibly?” said Bliss.
“Only possibly, I’m afraid,” said Trevize. “These are old figures after all—presumably Comporellian, but not definitely. What if they are based on other conventions?”
“In that case?”
“In that case, we have only meaningless figures. But—we just have to find out.”
His hands flickered over the softly glowing keys of the computer, feeding it the necessary information. He then placed his hands on the handmarks on the desk. He waited while the computer worked out the conventions of the known co-ordinates, paused a moment, then interpreted the co-ordinates of the nearest Forbidden World by the same conventions, and finally located those co-ordinates on the Galactic map in its memory.
A starfield appeared on the screen and moved rapidly as it adjusted itself. When it reached stasis, it expanded with stars bleeding off the edges in all directions until they were almost all gone. At no point could the eye follow the rapid change; it was all a speckled blur. Until finally, a space one tenth of a parsec on each side (according to the index figures below the screen) was all that remained. There was no further change, and only half a dozen dim sparks relieved the darkness of the screen.
“Which one is the Forbidden World?” asked Pelorat softly.
“None of them,” said Trevize. “Four of them are red dwarfs, one a near-red dwarf, and the last a white dwarf. None of them can possibly have a habitable world in orbit about them.”
“How do you know they’re red dwarfs just by looking at them?”
Trevize said, “We’re not looking at real stars; we’re looking at a section of the Galactic map stored in the computer’s memory. Each one is labeled. You can’t see it and ordinarily I couldn’t see it either, but as long as my hands are making contact, as they are, I am aware of a considerable amount of data on any star on which my eyes concentrate.”
Pelorat said in a woebegone tone, “Then the co-ordinates are useless.”
Trevize looked up at him, “No, Janov. I’m not finished. There’s still the matter of time. The co-ordinates for the Forbidden World are those of twenty thousand years ago. In that time, both it and Comporellon have been revolving about the Galactic Center, and they may well be revolving at different speeds and in orbits of different inclinations and eccentricities. With time, therefore, the two worlds may be drifting closer together or farther apart and, in twenty thousand years, the Forbidden World may have drifted anywhere from one-half to five parsecs off the mark. It certainly wouldn’t be included in that tenth-parsec square.”
“What do we do, then?”
“We have the computer move the Galaxy twenty thousand years back in time relative to Comporellon.”
“Can it do that?” asked Bliss, sounding rather awe-struck.
“Well, it can’t move the Galaxy itself back in time, but it can move the map in its memory banks back in time.”
Bliss said, “Will we see anything happen?”
“Watch,” said Trevize.
Very slowly, the half-dozen stars crawled over the face of the screen. A new star, not hitherto on the screen, drifted in from the left hand edge, and Pelorat pointed in excitement. “There! There!”
Trevize said, “Sorry. Another red dwarf. They’re very common. At least three fourths of all the stars in the Galaxy are red dwarfs.”
The screen settled down and stopped moving.
“Well?” said Bliss.
Trevize said, “That’s it. That’s the view of that portion of the Galaxy as it would have been twenty thousand years ago. At the very center of the screen is a point where the Forbidden World ought to be if it had been drifting at some average velocity.”
“Ought to be, but isn’t,” said Bliss sharply.
“It isn’t,” agreed Trevize, with remarkably little emotion.
Pelorat released his breath in a long sigh. “Oh, too bad, Golan.”
Trevize said, “Wait, don’t despair. I wasn’t expecting to see the star there.”
“You weren’t?” said Pelorat, astonished.
“No. I told you that this isn’t the Galaxy itself, but the computer’s map of the Galaxy. If a real star is not included in the map, we don’t see it. If the planet is called ‘Forbidden’ and has been called so for twenty thousand years, the chances are it wouldn’t be included in the map. And it isn’t, for we don’t see it.”
Bliss said, “We might not see it because it doesn’t exist. The Comporellian legends may be false, or the co-ordinates may be wrong.”
“Very true. The computer, however, can now make an estimate as to what the co-ordinates ought to be at this time, now that
it has located the spot where it may have been twenty thousand years ago. Using the co-ordinates corrected for time, a correction I could only have made through use of the star map, we can now switch to the real starfield of the Galaxy itself.”
Bliss said, “But you only assumed an average velocity for the Forbidden World. What if its velocity was not average? You would not now have the correct co-ordinates.”
“True enough, but a correction, assuming average velocity, is almost certain to be closer to its real position, than if we had made no time correction at all.”
“You hope!” said Bliss doubtfully.
“That’s exactly what I do,” said Trevize. “I hope. —And now let’s look at the real Galaxy.”
The two onlookers watched tensely, while Trevize (perhaps to reduce his own tensions and delay the zero moment) spoke softly, almost as though he were lecturing.
“It’s more difficult to observe the real Galaxy,” he said. “The map in the computer is an artificial construction, with irrelevancies capable of being eliminated. If there is a nebula obscuring the view, I can remove it. If the angle of view is inconvenient for what I have in mind, I can change the angle, and so on. The real Galaxy, however, I must take as I find it, and if I want a change I must move physically through space, which will take far more time than it would take to adjust a map.”
And as he spoke, the screen showed a star cloud so rich in individual stars as to seem an irregular heap of powder.
Trevize said, “That’s a large angle view of a section of the Milky Way, and I want the foreground, of course. If I expand the foreground, the background will tend to fade in comparison. The co-ordinate spot is close enough to Comporellon so that I should be able to expand it to about the situation I had on the view of the map. Just let me put in the necessary instructions, if I can hold on to my sanity long enough. Now.”
