Foundation's Edge

by Isaac Asimov

  He remembered, with a sinking feeling, the volumes taken up by a fully described program in printout, and he could recall the behavior of Technical Sergeant Krasnet at the console of the ship’s computer. He played it as though it were the most complex musical instrument in the Galaxy, and did it all with an air of nonchalance, as though he were bored at its simplicity—yet even he had had to consult the volumes at times, swearing at himself in embarrassment.

  Hesitantly Trevize placed a finger on the circle of light and at once the light spread out to cover the desk top. On it were the outline of two hands: a right and a left. With a sudden, smooth movement, the desk top tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees.

  Trevize took the seat before the desk. No words were necessary. It was clear what he was expected to do.

  He placed his hands on the outlines on the desk, which were positioned for him to do so without strain. The desk top seemed soft, nearly velvety, where he touched it—and his hands sank in.

  He stared at his hands with astonishment, for they had not sunk in at all. They were on the surface, his eyes told him. Yet to his sense of touch it was as though the desk surface had given way, and as though something were holding his hands softly and warmly.

  Was that all?

  Now what?

  He looked about and then closed his eyes in response to a suggestion.

  He had heard nothing. He had heard nothing!

  But inside his brain, as though it were a vagrant thought of his own, there was the sentence, “Please close your eyes. Relax. We will make connection.”

  Through the hands?

  Somehow Trevize had always assumed that if one were going to communicate by thought with a computer, it would be through a hood placed over the head and with electrodes against the eyes and skull.

  The hands?

  But why not the hands? Trevize found himself floating away, almost drowsy, but with no loss of mental acuity. Why not the hands?

  The eyes were no more than sense organs. The brain was no more than a central switchboard, encased in bone and removed from the working surface of the body. It was the hands that were the working surface, the hands that felt and manipulated the Universe.

  Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference.

  And as he and the computer held hands, their thinking merged and it no longer mattered whether his eyes were open or closed. Opening them did not improve his vision nor did closing them dim it.

  Either way, he saw the room with complete clarity—not just in the direction in which he was looking, but all around and above and below.

  He saw every room in the spaceship and he saw outside as well. The sun had risen and its brightness was dimmed in the morning mist, but he could look at it directly without being dazzled, for the computer automatically filtered the light waves.

  He felt the gentle wind and its temperature, and the sounds of the world about him. He detected the planet’s magnetic field and the tiny electrical charges on the wall of the ship.

  He became aware of the controls of the ship, without even knowing what they were in detail. He knew only that if he wanted to lift the ship, or turn it, or accelerate it, or make use of any of its abilities, the process was the same as that of performing the analogous process to his body. He had but to use his will.

  Yet his will was not unalloyed. The computer itself could override. At the present moment, there was a formed sentence in his head and he knew exactly when and how the ship would take off. There was no flexibility where that was concerned. Thereafter, he knew just as surely, he would himself be able to decide.

  He found—as he cast the net of his computer-enhanced consciousness outward—that he could sense the condition of the upper atmosphere; that he could see the weather patterns; that he could detect the other ships that were swarming upward and the others that were settling downward. All of this had to be taken into account and the computer was taking it into account. If the computer had not been doing so, Trevize realized, he need only desire the computer to do so—and it would be done.

  So much for the volumes of programming; there were none. Trevize thought of Technical Sergeant Krasnet and smiled. He had read often enough of the immense revolution that gravitics would make in the world, but the fusion of computer and mind was still a state secret. It would surely produce a still greater revolution.

  He was aware of time passing. He knew exactly what time it was by Terminus Local and by Galactic Standard.

  How did he let go?

  And even as the thought entered his mind, his hands were released and the desk top moved back to its original position—and Trevize was left with his own unaided senses.

  He felt blind and helpless as though, for a time, he had been held and protected by a superbeing and now was abandoned. Had he not known that he could make contact again at any time, the feeling might have reduced him to tears.

  As it was he merely struggled for re-orientation, for adjustment to limits, then rose uncertainly to his feet and walked out of the room.

  Pelorat looked up. He had adjusted his Reader, obviously, and he said, “It works very well. It has an excellent Search Program. —Did you find the controls, my boy?”

  “Yes, Professor. All is well.”

  “In that case, shouldn’t we do something about takeoff? I mean, self-protection? Aren’t we supposed to strap ourselves in or something? I looked about for instructions, but I didn’t find anything and that made me nervous. I had to turn to my library. Somehow when I am at my work—”

  Trevize had been pushing his hands at the professor as though to dam and stop the flood of words. Now he had to speak loudly in order to override him. “None of that is necessary, Professor. Antigravity is the equivalent of non-inertia. There is no feeling of acceleration when velocity changes, since everything on the ship undergoes the change simultaneously.”

  “You mean, we won’t know when we are off the planet and out in space?”

  “It’s exactly what I mean, because even as I speak to you, we have taken off. We will be cutting through the upper atmosphere in a very few minutes and within half an hour we will be in outer space.”

  3.

  PELORAT SEEMED TO SHRINK A LITTLE AS HE stared at Trevize. His long rectangle of a face grew so blank that, without showing any emotion at all, it radiated a vast uneasiness.

  Then his eyes shifted right—left.

  Trevize remembered how he had felt on his own first trip beyond the atmosphere.

  He said, in as matter-of-fact a manner as he could, “Janov,” (it was the first time he had addressed the professor familiarly, but in this case experience was addressing inexperience and it was necessary to seem the older of the two) “we are perfectly safe here. We are in the metal womb of a warship of the Foundation Navy. We are not fully armed, but there is no place in the Galaxy where the name of the Foundation will not protect us. Even if some ship went mad and attacked, we could move out of its reach in a moment. And I assure you I have discovered that I can handle the ship perfectly.”

  Pelorat said, “It is the thought, Go—Golan, of nothingness—”

  “Why, there’s nothingness all about Terminus. There’s just a thin layer of very tenuous air between ourselves on the surface and the nothingness just above. All we’re doing is to go past that inconsequential layer.”

  “It may be inconsequential, but we breathe it.”

  “We breathe here, too. The air on this ship is cleaner and purer, and will indefinitely remain cleaner and purer than the natural atmosphere of Terminus.”

  “And the meteorites?”

  “What about meteorites?”

  “The atmosphere protects us from meteorites. Radiation, too, for that matter.”

  Trevize said, “Humanity has been traveling through space for twenty millennia
, I believe—”

  “Twenty-two. If we go by the Hallblockian chronology, it is quite plain that, counting the—”

  “Enough! Have you heard of meteorite accidents or of radiation deaths? —I mean, recently? —I mean, in the case of Foundation ships?”

  “I have not really followed the news in such matters, but I am a historian, my boy, and—”

  “Historically, yes, there have been such things, but technology improves. There isn’t a meteorite large enough to damage us that can possibly approach us before we take the necessary evasive action. Four meteorites—coming at us simultaneously from the four directions drawn from the vertices of a tetrahedron—might conceivably pin us down, but calculate the chances of that and you’ll find that you’ll die of old age a trillion trillion times over before you will have a fifty-fifty chance of observing so interesting a phenomenon.”

  “You mean, if you were at the computer?”

  “No,” said Trevize in scorn. “If I were running the computer on the basis of my own senses and responses, we would be hit before I ever knew what was happening. It is the computer itself that is at work, responding millions of times faster than you or I could.” He held out his hand abruptly. “Janov, come let me show you what the computer can do, and let me show you what space is like.”

  Pelorat stared, goggling a bit. Then he laughed briefly. “I’m not sure I wish to know, Golan.”

  “Of course you’re not sure, Janov, because you don’t know what it is that is waiting there to be known. Chance it! Come! Into my room!”

  Trevize held the other’s hand, half leading him, half drawing him. He said, as he sat down at the computer, “Have you ever seen the Galaxy, Janov? Have you ever looked at it?”

  Pelorat said, “You mean in the sky?”

  “Yes, certainly. Where else?”

  “I’ve seen it. Everyone has seen it. If one looks up, one sees it.”

  “Have you ever stared at it on a dark, clear night, when the Diamonds are below the horizon?”

  The “Diamonds” referred to those few stars that were luminous enough and close enough to shine with moderate brightness in the night sky of Terminus. They were a small group that spanned a width of no more than twenty degrees, and for large parts of the night they were all below the horizon. Aside from the group, there was a scattering of dim stars just barely visible to the unaided eye. There was nothing more but the faint milkiness of the Galaxy—the view one might expect when one dwelt on a world like Terminus which was at the extreme edge of the outermost spiral of the Galaxy.

  “I suppose so, but why stare? It’s a common sight.”

  “Of course it’s a common sight,” said Trevize. “That’s why no one sees it. Why see it if you can always see it? But now you’ll see it, and not from Terminus, where the mist and the clouds are forever interfering. You’ll see it as you’d never see it from Terminus—no matter how you stared, and no matter how clear and dark the night. How I wish I had never been in space before, so that—like you—I could see the Galaxy in its bare beauty for the first time.”

  He pushed a chair in Pelorat’s direction. “Sit there, Janov. This may take a little time. I have to continue to grow accustomed to the computer. From what I’ve already felt, I know the viewing is holographic, so we won’t need a screen of any sort. It makes direct contact with my brain, but I think I can have it produce an objective image that you will see, too. —Put out the light, will you? —No, that’s foolish of me. I’ll have the computer do it. Stay where you are.”

  Trevize made contact with the computer, holding hands warmly and intimately.

  The light dimmed, then went out completely, and in the darkness, Pelorat stirred.

  Trevize said, “Don’t get nervous, Janov. I may have a little trouble trying to control the computer, but I’ll start easy and you’ll have to be patient with me. Do you see it? The crescent?”

  It hung in the darkness before them. A little dim and wavering at first, but getting sharper and brighter.

  Pelorat’s voice sounded awed. “Is that Terminus? Are we that far from it?”

  “Yes, the ship’s moving quickly.”

  The ship was curving into the night shadow of Terminus, which appeared as a thick crescent of bright light. Trevize had a momentary urge to send the ship in a wide arc that would carry them over the daylit side of the planet to show it in all its beauty, but he held back.

  Pelorat might find novelty in this, but the beauty would be tame. There were too many photographs, too many maps, too many globes. Every child knew what Terminus looked like. A water planet—more so than most—rich in water and poor in minerals, good in agriculture and poor in heavy industry, but the best in the Galaxy in high technology and in miniaturization.

  If he could have the computer use microwaves and translate it into a visible model, they would see every one of Terminus’s ten thousand inhabited islands, together with the only one of them large enough to be considered a continent, the one that bore Terminus City and—

  Turn away!

  It was just a thought, an exercise of the will, but the view shifted at once. The lighted crescent moved off toward the borders of vision and rolled off the edge. The darkness of starless space filled his eyes.

  Pelorat cleared his throat. “I wish you would bring back Terminus, my boy. I feel as though I’ve been blinded.” There was a tightness in his voice.

  “You’re not blind. Look!”

  Into the field of vision came a filmy fog of pale translucence. It spread and became brighter, until the whole room seemed to glow.

  Shrink!

  Another exercise of will and the Galaxy drew off, as though seen through a diminishing telescope that was steadily growing more powerful in its ability to diminish. The Galaxy contracted and became a structure of varying luminosity.

  Brighten!

  It grew more luminous without changing size, and because the stellar system to which Terminus belonged was above the Galactic plane, the Galaxy was not seen exactly edge-on. It was a strongly fore-shortened double spiral, with curving dark-nebula rifts streaking the glowing edge of the Terminus side. The creamy haze of the nucleus—far off and shrunken by the distance—looked unimportant.

  Pelorat said in an awed whisper, “You are right. I have never seen it like this. I never dreamed it had so much detail.”

  “How could you? You can’t see the outer half when Terminus’s atmosphere is between you and it. You can hardly see the nucleus from Terminus’s surface.”

  “What a pity we’re seeing it so nearly head-on.”

  “We don’t have to. The computer can show it in any orientation. I just have to express the wish—and not even aloud.”

  Shift co-ordinates!

  This exercise of will was by no means a precise command. Yet as the image of Galaxy began to undergo a slow change, his mind guided the computer and had it do what he wished.

  Slowly the Galaxy was turning so that it could be seen at right angles to the Galactic plane. It spread out like a gigantic, glowing whirlpool, with curves of darkness, and knots of brightness, and a central all-but-featureless blaze.

  Pelorat asked, “How can the computer see it from a position in space that must be more than fifty thousand parsecs from this place?” Then he added, in a choked whisper, “Please forgive me that I ask. I know nothing about all this.”

  Trevize said, “I know almost as little about this computer as you do. Even a simple computer, however, can adjust co-ordinates and show the Galaxy in any position, starting with what it can sense in the natural position, the one, that is, that would appear from the computer’s local position in space. Of course, it makes use only of the information it can sense to begin with, so when it changes to the broadside view we would find gaps and blurs in what it would show. In this case, though—”

  “Yes?”

  “We have an excellent view. I suspect that the computer is outfitted with a complete map of the Galaxy and can therefore view it from any angle w
ith equal ease.”

  “How do you mean, a complete map?”

  “The spatial co-ordinates of every star in it must be in the computer’s memory banks.”

  “Every star?” Pelorat seemed awed.

  “Well, perhaps not all three hundred billion. It would include the stars shining down on populated planets, certainly, and probably every star of spectral class K and brighter. That means about seventy-five billion, at least.”

  “Every star of a populated system?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be pinned down; perhaps not all. There were, after all, twenty-five million inhabited systems in the time of Hari Seldon—which sounds like a lot but is only one star out of every twelve thousand. And then, in the five centuries since Seldon, the general breakup of the Empire didn’t prevent further colonization. I should think it would have encouraged it. There are still plenty of habitable planets to expand into, so there may be thirty million now. It’s possible that not all the new ones are in the Foundation’s records.”

  “But the old ones? Surely they must all be there without exception.”

  “I imagine so. I can’t guarantee it, of course, but I would be surprised if any long-established inhabited system were missing from the records. Let me show you something—if my ability to control the computer will go far enough.”

  Trevize’s hands stiffened a bit with the effort and they seemed to sink further into the clasp of the computer. That might not have been necessary; he might only have had to think quietly and casually: Terminus!

  He did think that and there was, in response, a sparkling red diamond at the very edge of the whirlpool.

  “There’s our sun,” he said with excitement. “That’s the star that Terminus circles.”

  “Ah,” said Pelorat with a low, tremulous sigh.

  A bright yellow dot of light sprang into life in a rich cluster of stars deep in the heart of the Galaxy but well to one side of the central haze. It was rather closer to the Terminus edge of the Galaxy than to the other side.