Foundation and Earth f-7

by Isaac Asimov

  “Good. That’s where we’ll go, then; the smaller city. And maybe we’ll find something. We’ve had two misses, but maybe we’ll find something this time.”

  “Perhaps it will be three times lucky.”

  Trevize raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get that phrase?”

  “It’s an old one,” said Pelorat. “I found it in an ancient legend. It means success on the third try, I should think.”

  “That sounds right,” said Trevize. “Very well, then—three times lucky, Janov.”

  15

  MOSS

  66.

  Trevize looked grotesque in his space suit. The only part of him that remained outside were his holsters—not the ones that he strapped around his hips ordinarily, but more substantial ones that were part of his suit. Carefully, he inserted the blaster in the right-hand holster, the neuronic whip in the left. Again, they had been recharged and this time, he thought grimly, nothing would take them away from him.

  Bliss smiled. “Are you going to carry weapons even on a world without air or—Never mind! I won’t question your decisions.”

  Trevize said, “Good!” and turned to help Pelorat adjust his helmet, before donning his own.

  Pelorat, who had never worn a space suit before, said, rather plaintively, “Will I really be able to breathe in this thing, Golan?”

  “I promise you,” said Trevize.

  Bliss watched as the final joints were sealed, her arm about Fallom’s shoulder. The young Solarian stared at the two space-suited figures in obvious alarm. She was trembling, and Bliss’s arm squeezed her gently and reassuringly.

  The airlock door opened, and the two stepped inside, their bloated arms waving a farewell. It closed. The mainlock door opened and they stepped clumsily onto the soil of a dead world.

  It was dawn. The sky was clear, of course, and purplish in color, but the sun had not yet risen. Along the lighter horizon where the sun would come, there was a slight haze.

  Pelorat said, “It’s cold.”

  “Do you feel cold?” said Trevize, with surprise. The suits were well insulated and if there was a problem, now and then, it was with the need for getting rid of body heat.

  Pelorat said, “Not at all, but look—” His radioed voice sounded clear in Trevize’s ear, and his finger pointed.

  In the purplish light of dawn, the crumbling stone front of the building they were approaching was sheathed in hoar frost.

  Trevize said, “With a thin atmosphere, it would get colder at night than you would expect, and warmer in the day. Right now it’s the coldest part of the day and it should take several hours before it gets too hot for us to remain in the sun.”

  As though the word had been a cabalistic incantation, the rim of the sun appeared above the horizon.

  “Don’t look at it,” said Trevize conversationally. “Your face-plate is reflective and ultraviolet-opaque, but it would still be dangerous.”

  He turned his back to the rising sun and let his long shadow fall on the building. The sunlight was causing the frost to disappear, even as he watched. For a few moments, the wall looked dark with dampness and then that disappeared, too.

  Trevize said, “The buildings don’t look as good down here as they looked from the sky. They’re cracked and crumbling. That’s the result of the temperature change, I suppose, and of having the water traces freeze and melt each night and day for maybe as much as twenty thousand years.”

  Pelorat said, “There are letters engraved in the stone above the entrance, but crumbling has made them difficult to read.”

  “Can you make it out, Janov?”

  “A financial institution of some sort. At least I make out a word which may be ‘bank.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “A building in which assets were stored, withdrawn, traded, invested, loaned—if it’s what I think it is.”

  “A whole building devoted to it? No computers?”

  “Without computers taking over altogether.”

  Trevize shrugged. He did not find the details of ancient history inspiring.

  They moved about, with increasing haste, spending less time at each building. The silence, the deadness, was completely depressing. The slow millennial-long collapse into which they had intruded made the place seem like the skeleton of a city, with everything gone but the bones.

  They were well up in the temperate zone, but Trevize imagined he could feel the heat of the sun on his back.

  Pelorat, about a hundred meters to his right, said sharply, “Look at that.”

  Trevize’s ears rang. He said, “Don’t shout, Janov. I can hear your whispers clearly no matter how far away you are. What is it?”

  Pelorat, his voice moderating at once, said, “This building is the ‘Hall of the Worlds.’ At least, that’s what I think the inscription reads.”

  Trevize joined him. Before them was a three-story structure, the line of its roof irregular and loaded with large fragments of rock, as though some sculptured object that had once stood there had fallen to pieces.

  “Are you sure?” said Trevize.

  “If we go in, we’ll find out.”

  They climbed five low, broad steps, and crossed a space-wasting plaza. In the thin air, their metal-shod footsteps made a whispering vibration rather than a sound.

  “I see what you mean by ‘large, useless, and expensive,’ ” muttered Trevize.

  They entered a wide and high hall, with sunlight shining through tall windows and illuminating the interior too harshly where it struck and yet leaving things obscure in the shadow. The thin atmosphere scattered little light.

  In the center was a larger than life-size human figure in what seemed to be a synthetic stone. One arm had fallen off. The other arm was cracked at the shoulder and Trevize felt that if he tapped it sharply that arm, too, would break off. He stepped back as though getting too near might tempt him into such unbearable vandalism.

  “I wonder who that is?” said Trevize. “No markings anywhere. I suppose those who set it up felt that his fame was so obvious he needed no identification, but now—” He felt himself in danger of growing philosophical and turned his attention away.

  Pelorat was looking up, and Trevize’s glance followed the angle of Pelorat’s head. There were markings—carvings—on the wall which Trevize could not read.

  “Amazing,” said Pelorat. “Twenty thousand years old, perhaps, and, in here, protected somewhat from sun and damp, they’re still legible.”

  “Not to me,” said Trevize.

  “It’s in old script and ornate even for that. Let’s see now—seven—one—two—” His voice died away in a mumble, and then he spoke up again. “There are fifty names listed and there are supposed to have been fifty Spacer worlds and this is ‘The Hall of the Worlds.’ I assume those are the names of the fifty Spacer worlds, probably in the order of establishment. Aurora is first and Solaria is last. If you’ll notice, there are seven columns, with seven names in the first six columns and then eight names in the last. It is as though they had planned a seven-by-seven grid and then added Solaria after the fact. My guess, old chap, is that that list dates back to before Solaria was terraformed and populated.”

  “And which one is this planet we’re standing on? Can you tell?”

  Pelorat said, “You’ll notice that the fifth one down in the third column, the nineteenth in order, is inscribed in letters a little larger than the others. The listers seem to have been self-centered enough to give themselves some pride of place. Besides—”

  “What does the name read?”

  “As near as I can make out, it says Melpomenia. It’s a name I’m totally unfamiliar with.”

  “Could it represent Earth?”

  Pelorat shook his head vigorously, but that went unseen inside his helmet. He said, “There are dozens of words used for Earth in the old legends. Gaia is one of them, as you know. So is Terra, and Erda, and so on. They’re all short. I don’t know of any long name used for it, or anythin
g even resembling a short version of Melpomenia.”

  “Then we’re standing on Melpomenia, and it’s not Earth.”

  “Yes. And besides—as I started to say earlier—an even better indication than the larger lettering is that the co-ordinates of Melpomenia are given as 0, 0, 0, and you would expect co-ordinates to be referred to one’s own planet.”

  “Co-ordinates?” Trevize sounded dumbfounded. “That list gives the co-ordinates, too?”

  “They give three figures for each and I presume those are co-ordinates. What else can they be?”

  Trevize did not answer. He opened a small compartment in the portion of the space suit that covered his right thigh and took out a compact device with wire connecting it to the compartment. He put it up to his eyes and carefully focused it on the inscription on the wall, his sheathed fingers making a difficult job out of something that would ordinarily have been a moment’s work.

  “Camera?” asked Pelorat unnecessarily.

  “It will feed the image directly into the ship’s computer,” said Trevize.

  He took several photographs from different angles, then said, “Wait! I’ve got to get higher. Help me, Janov.”

  Pelorat clasped his hands together, stirrup-fashion, but Trevize shook his head. “That won’t support my weight. Get on your hands and knees.”

  Pelorat did so, laboriously, and, as laboriously, Trevize, having tucked the camera into its compartment again, stepped on Pelorat’s shoulders and from them on to the pedestal of the statue. He tried to rock the statue carefully to judge its firmness, then placed his foot on one bent knee and used it as a base for pushing himself upward and catching the armless shoulder. Wedging his toes against some unevenness at the chest, he lifted himself and, finally, after several grunts, managed to sit on the shoulder. To those long-dead who had revered the statue and what it represented, what Trevize did would have seemed blasphemy, and Trevize was sufficiently influenced by that thought to try to sit lightly.

  “You’ll fall and hurt yourself,” Pelorat called out anxiously.

  “I’m not going to fall and hurt myself, but you might deafen me.” Trevize unslung his camera and focused once more. Several more photographs were taken and then he replaced the camera yet again and carefully lowered himself till his feet touched the pedestal. He jumped to the ground and the vibration of his contact was apparently the final push, for the still intact arm crumbled, and produced a small heap of rubble at the foot of the statue. It made virtually no noise as it fell.

  Trevize froze, his first impulse being that of finding a place to hide before the watchman came and caught him. Amazing, he thought afterward, how quickly one relives the days of one’s childhood in a situation like that—when you’ve accidentally broken something that looks important. It lasted only a moment, but it cut deeply.

  Pelorat’s voice was hollow, as befitted one who had witnessed and even abetted an act of vandalism, but he managed to find words of comfort. “It’s—it’s all right, Golan. It was about to come down by itself, anyway.”

  He walked over to the pieces on the pedestal and floor as though he were going to demonstrate the point, reached out for one of the larger fragments, and then said, “Golan, come here.”

  Trevize approached and Pelorat, pointing at a piece of stone that had clearly been the portion of the arm that had been joined to the shoulder, said, “What is this?”

  Trevize stared. There was a patch of fuzz, bright green in color. Trevize rubbed it gently with his suited finger. It scraped off without trouble.

  “It looks a lot like moss,” he said.

  “The life-without-mind that you mentioned?”

  “I’m not completely sure how far without mind. Bliss, I imagine, would insist that this had consciousness, too—but she would claim this stone also had it.”

  Pelorat said, “Do you suppose that moss stuff is what’s crumbling the rock?”

  Trevize said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped. The world has plenty of sunlight and it has some water. Half what atmosphere it has is water vapor. The rest is nitrogen and inert gases. Just a trace of carbon dioxide, which would lead one to suppose there’s no plant life—but it could be that the carbon dioxide is low because it is virtually all incorporated into the rocky crust. Now if this rock has some carbonate in it, perhaps this moss breaks it down by secreting acid, and then makes use of the carbon dioxide generated. This may be the dominant remaining form of life on this planet.”

  “Fascinating,” said Pelorat.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Trevize, “but only in a limited way. The co-ordinates of the Spacer worlds are rather more interesting but what we really want are the coordinates of Earth. If they’re not here, they may be elsewhere in the building—or in another building. Come, Janov.”

  “But you know—” began Pelorat.

  “No, no,” said Trevize impatiently. “We’ll talk later. We’ve got to see what else, if anything, this building can give us. It’s getting warmer.” He looked at the small temperature reading on the back of his left glove. “Come, Janov.”

  They tramped through the rooms, walking as gently as possible, not because they were making sounds in the ordinary sense, or because there was anyone to hear them, but because they were a little shy of doing further damage through vibration.

  They kicked up some dust, which moved a short way upward and settled quickly through the thin air, and they left footmarks behind them.

  Occasionally, in some dim corner, one or the other would silently point out more samples of moss that were growing. There seemed a little comfort in the presence of life, however low in the scale, something that lifted the deadly, suffocating feel of walking through a dead world, especially one in which artifacts all about showed that once, long ago, it had been an elaborately living one.

  And then, Pelorat said, “I think this must be a library.”

  Trevize looked about curiously. There were shelves and, as he looked more narrowly, what the corner of his eye had dismissed as mere ornamentation, seemed as though they might well be book-films. Gingerly, he reached for one. They were thick and clumsy and then he realized they were only cases. He fumbled with his thick fingers to open one, and inside he saw several discs. They were thick, too, and seemed brittle, though he did not test that.

  He said, “Unbelievably primitive.”

  “Thousands of years old,” said Pelorat apologetically, as though defending the old Melpomenians against the accusation of retarded technology.

  Trevize pointed to the spine of the film where there were dim curlicues of the ornate lettering that the ancients had used. “Is that the title? What does it say?”

  Pelorat studied it. “I’m not really sure, old man. I think one of the words refers to microscopic life. It’s a word for ‘microorganism,’ perhaps. I suspect these are technical microbiological terms which I wouldn’t understand even in Standard Galactic.”

  “Probably,” said Trevize morosely. “And, equally probably, it wouldn’t do us any good even if we could read it. We’re not interested in germs. —Do me a favor, Janov. Glance through some of these books and see if there’s anything there with an interesting title. While you’re doing that, I’ll look over these book-viewers.”

  “Is that what they are?” said Pelorat, wondering. They were squat, cubical structures, topped by a slanted screen and a curved extension at the top that might serve as an elbow rest or a place on which to put an electro-notepad—if they had had such on Melpomenia.

  Trevize said, “If this is a library, they must have book-viewers of one kind or another, and this seems as though it might suit.”

  He brushed the dust off the screen very gingerly and was relieved that the screen, whatever it might be made of, did not crumble at his touch. He manipulated the controls lightly, one after another. Nothing happened. He tried another book-viewer, then another, with the same negative results.

  He wasn’t surprised. Even if the device were to remain in working order for twenty
millennia in a thin atmosphere and was resistant to water vapor, there was still the question of the power source. Stored energy had a way of leaking, no matter what was done to stop it. That was another aspect of the all-embracing, irresistible second law of thermodynamics.

  Pelorat was behind him. “Golan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a book-film here—”

  “What kind?”

  “I think it’s a history of space flight.”

  “Perfect—but it won’t do us any good if I can’t make this viewer work.” His hands clenched in frustration.

  “We could take the film back to the ship.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to adapt it to our viewer. It wouldn’t fit and our scanning system is sure to be incompatible.”

  “But is all that really necessary, Golan? If we—”

  “It is really necessary, Janov. Now don’t interrupt me. I’m trying to decide what to do. I can try adding power to the viewer. Perhaps that is all it needs.”

  “Where would you get the power?”

  “Well—” Trevize drew his weapons, looked at them briefly, then settled his blaster back into its holster. He cracked open his neuronic whip, and studied the energy-supply level. It was at maximum.

  Trevize threw himself prone upon the floor and reached behind the viewer (he kept assuming that was what it was) and tried to push it forward. It moved a small way and he studied what he found in the process.

  One of those cables had to carry the power supply and surely it was the one that came out of the wall. There was no obvious plug or joining. (How does one deal with an alien and ancient culture where the simplest taken-for-granted matters are made unrecognizable?)

  He pulled gently at the cable, then harder. He turned it one way, then the other. He pressed the wall in the vicinity of the cable, and the cable in the vicinity of the wall. He turned his attention, as best he could, to the half-hidden back of the viewer and nothing he could do there worked, either.

  He pressed one hand against the floor to raise himself and, as he stood up, the cable came with him. What he had done that had loosened it, he hadn’t the slightest idea.