by Isaac Asimov
It didn’t look broken or torn away. The end seemed quite smooth and it had left a smooth spot in the wall where it had been attached.
Pelorat said softly, “Golan, may I—”
Trevize waved a peremptory arm at the other. “Not now, Janov. Please!”
He was suddenly aware of the green material caking the creases on his left glove. He must have picked up some of the moss behind the viewer and crushed it. His glove had a faint dampness to it, but it dried as he watched, and the greenish stain grew brown.
He turned his attention toward the cable, staring at the detached end carefully. Surely there were two small holes there. Wires could enter.
He sat on the floor again and opened the power unit of his neuronic whip. Carefully, he depolarized one of the wires and clicked it loose. He then, slowly and delicately, inserted it into the hole, pushing it in until it stopped. When he tried gently to withdraw it again, it remained put, as though it had been seized. He suppressed his first impulse to yank it out again by force. He depolarized the other wire and pushed it into the other opening. It was conceivable that that would close the circuit and supply the viewer with power.
“Janov,” he said, “you’ve played about with book-films of all kinds. See if you can work out a way of inserting that book into the viewer.”
“Is it really nece—”
“Please, Janov, you keep trying to ask unnecessary questions. We only have so much time. I don’t want to have to wait far into the night for the building to cool off to the point where we can return.”
“It must go in this way,” said Janov, “but—”
“Good,” said Trevize. “If it’s a history of space flight, then it will have to begin with Earth, since it was on Earth that space flight was invented. Let’s see if this thing works now.”
Pelorat, a little fussily, placed the book-film into the obvious receptacle and then began studying the markings on the various controls for any hint as to direction.
Trevize spoke in a low voice, while waiting, partly to ease his own tension. “I suppose there must be robots on this world, too—here and there—in reasonable order to all appearances—glistening in the near-vacuum. The trouble is their power supply would long since have been drained, too, and, even if repowered, what about their brains? Levers and gears might withstand the millennia, but what about whatever microswitches or subatomic gizmos they had in their brains? They would have to have deteriorated, and even if they had not, what would they know about Earth. What would they—”
Pelorat said, “The viewer is working, old chap. See here.”
In the dim light, the book-viewer screen began to flicker. It was only faint, but Trevize turned up the power slightly on his neuronic whip and it grew brighter. The thin air about them kept the area outside the shafts of sunlight comparatively dim, so that the room was faded and shadowy, and the screen seemed the brighter by contrast.
It continued to flicker, with occasional shadows drifting across the screen.
“It needs to be focused,” said Trevize.
“I know,” said Pelorat, “but this seems the best I can do. The film itself must have deteriorated.”
The shadows came and went rapidly now, and periodically there seemed something like a faint caricature of print. Then, for a moment, there was sharpness and it faded again.
“Get that back and hold it, Janov,” said Trevize.
Pelorat was already trying. He passed it going backward, then again forward, and then got it and held it.
Eagerly, Trevize tried to read it, then said, in frustration, “Can you make it out, Janov?”
“Not entirely,” said Pelorat, squinting at the screen. “It’s about Aurora. I can tell that much. I think it’s dealing with the first hyperspatial expedition—the ‘prime outpouring,’ it says.”
He went forward, and it blurred and shadowed again. He said finally, “All the pieces I can get seem to deal with the Spacer worlds, Golan. There’s nothing I can find about Earth.”
Trevize said bitterly, “No, there wouldn’t be. It’s all been wiped out on this world as it has on Trantor. Turn the thing off.”
“But it doesn’t matter—” began Pelorat, turning it off.
“Because we can try other libraries? It will be wiped out there, too. Everywhere. Do you know—” He had looked at Pelorat as he spoke, and now he stared at him with a mixture of horror and revulsion. “What’s wrong with your face-plate?” he asked.
67.
Pelorat automatically lifted his gloved hand to his face-plate and then took it away and looked at it.
“What is it?” he said, puzzled. Then, he looked at Trevize and went on, rather squeakily, “There’s something peculiar about your face-plate, Golan.”
Trevize looked about automatically for a mirror. There was none and he would need a light if there were. He muttered, “Come into the sunlight, will you?”
He half-led, half-pulled Pelorat into the shaft of sunlight from the nearest window. He could feel its warmth upon his back despite the insulating effect of the space suit.
He said, “Look toward the sun, Janov, and close your eyes.”
It was at once clear what was wrong with the face-plate. There was moss growing luxuriantly where the glass of the face-plate met the metallized fabric of the suit itself. The face-plate was rimmed with green fuzziness and Trevize knew his own was, too.
He brushed a finger of his glove across the moss on Pelorat’s face-plate. Some of it came off, the crushed green staining the glove. Even as he watched it glisten in the sunlight, however, it seemed to grow stiffer and drier. He tried again, and this time, the moss crackled off. It was turning brown. He brushed the edges of Pelorat’s face-plate again, rubbing hard.
“Do mine, Janov,” he said. Then, later, “Do I look clean? Good, so do you. —Let’s go. I don’t think there’s more to do here.”
The sun was uncomfortably hot in the deserted airless city. The stone buildings gleamed brightly, almost achingly. Trevize squinted as he looked at them and, as far as possible, walked on the shady side of the thoroughfares. He stopped at a crack in one of the building fronts, one wide enough to stick his little finger into, gloved as it was. He did just that, looked at it, muttered, “Moss,” and deliberately walked to the end of the shadow and held that finger out in the sunlight for a while.
He said, “Carbon dioxide is the bottleneck. Anywhere they can get carbon dioxide—decaying rock—anywhere—it will grow. We’re a good source of carbon dioxide, you know, probably richer than anything else on this nearly dead planet, and I suppose traces of the gas leak out at the boundary of the face-plate.”
“So the moss grows there.”
“Yes.”
It seemed a long walk back to the ship, much longer and, of course, hotter than the one they had taken at dawn. The ship was still in the shade when they got there, however; that much Trevize had calculated correctly, at least.
Pelorat said, “Look!”
Trevize saw. The boundaries of the mainlock were outlined in green moss.
“More leakage?” said Pelorat.
“Of course. Insignificant amounts, I’m sure, but this moss seems to be a better indicator of trace amounts of carbon dioxide than anything I ever heard of. Its spores must be everywhere and wherever a few molecules of carbon dioxide are to be found, they sprout.” He adjusted his radio for ship’s wavelength and said, “Bliss, can you hear me?”
Bliss’s voice sounded in both sets of ears. “Yes. Are you ready to come in? Any luck?”
“We’re just outside,” said Trevize, “but don’t open the lock. We’ll open it from out here. Repeat, don’t open the lock.”
“Why not?”
“Bliss, just do as I ask, will you? We can have a long discussion afterward.”
Trevize brought out his blaster and carefully lowered its intensity to minimum, then gazed at it uncertainly. He had never used it at minimum. He looked about him. There was nothing suitably fragile to test it
on.
In sheer desperation, he turned it on the rocky hillside in whose shadow the Far Star lay. —The target didn’t turn red-hot. Automatically, he felt the spot he had hit. Did it feel warm? He couldn’t tell with any degree of certainty through the insultated fabric of his suit.
He hesitated again, then thought that the hull of the ship would be as resistant, within an order of magnitude at any rate, as the hillside. He turned the blaster on the rim of the lock and flicked the contact briefly, holding his breath.
Several centimeters of the moss-like growth browned at once. He waved his hand in the vicinity of the browning and even the mild breeze set up in the thin air in this way sufficed to set the light skeletal remnants that made up the brown material to scattering.
“Does it work?” said Pelorat anxiously.
“Yes, it does,” said Trevize. “I turned the blaster into a mild heat ray.”
He sprayed the heat all around the edge of the lock and the green vanished at the touch. All of it. He struck the mainlock to create a vibration that would knock off what remained and a brown dust fell to the ground—a dust so fine that it even lingered in the thin atmosphere, buoyed up by wisps of gas.
“I think we can open it now,” said Trevize, and, using his wrist controls, he tapped out the emission of the radio-wave combination that activated the opening mechanism from inside. The lock gaped and had not opened more than halfway when Trevize said, “Don’t dawdle, Janov, get inside. —Don’t wait for the steps. Climb in.”
Trevize followed, sprayed the rim of the lock with his toned-down blaster. He sprayed the steps, too, once they had lowered. He then signaled the close of the lock and kept on spraying till they were totally enclosed.
Trevize said, “We’re in the lock, Bliss. We’ll stay here a few minutes. Continue to do nothing!”
Bliss’s voice said, “Give me a hint. Are you all right? How is Pel?”
Pel said, “I’m here, Bliss, and perfectly well. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“If you say so, Pel, but there’ll have to be explanations later. I hope you know that.”
“It’s a promise,” said Trevize, and activated the lock light.
The two space-suited figures faced each other.
Trevize said, “We’re pumping out all the planetary air we can, so let’s just wait till that’s done.”
“What about the ship air? Are we going to let that in?”
“Not for a while. I’m as anxious to get out of the space suit as you are, Janov. I just want to make sure that we get rid of any spores that have entered with us—or upon us.”
By the not entirely satisfactory illumination of the lock light, Trevize turned his blaster on the inner meeting of lock and hull, spraying the heat methodically along the floor, up and around, and back to the floor.
“Now you, Janov.”
Pelorat stirred uneasily, and Trevize said, “You may feel warm. It shouldn’t be any worse than that. If it grows uncomfortable, just say so.”
He played the invisible beam over the face-plate, the edges particularly, then, little by little, over the rest of the space suit.
He muttered, “Lift your arms, Janov.” Then, “Rest your arms on my shoulder, and lift one foot—I’ve got to do the soles—now the other. —Are you getting too warm?”
Pelorat said, “I’m not exactly bathed in cool breezes, Golan.”
“Well, then, give me a taste of my own medicine. Go over me.”
“I’ve never held a blaster.”
“You must hold it. Grip it so, and, with your thumb, push that little knob—and squeeze the holster tightly. Right. —Now play it over my face-plate. Move it steadily, Janov, don’t let it linger in one place too long. Over the rest of the helmet, then down the cheek and neck.”
He kept up the directions, and when he had been heated everywhere and was in an uncomfortable perspiration as a result, he took back the blaster and studied the energy level.
“More than half gone,” he said, and sprayed the interior of the lock methodically, back and forth over the wall, till the blaster was emptied of its charge, having itself heated markedly through its rapid and sustained discharge. He then restored it to its holster.
Only then did he signal for entry into the ship. He welcomed the hiss and feel of air coming into the lock as the inner door opened. Its coolness and its convective powers would carry off the warmth of the space suit far more quickly than radiation alone would do. It might have been imagination, but he felt the cooling effect at once. Imagination or not, he welcomed that, too.
“Off with your suit, Janov, and leave it out here in the lock,” said Trevize.
“If you don’t mind,” said Pelorat, “a shower is what I would like to have before anything else.”
“Not before anything else. In fact, before that, and before you can empty your bladder, even, I suspect you will have to talk to Bliss.”
Bliss was waiting for them, of course, and with a look of concern on her face. Behind her, peeping out, was Fallom, with her hands clutching firmly at Bliss’s left arm.
“What happened?” Bliss asked severely. “What’s been going on?”
“Guarding against infection,” said Trevize dryly, “so I’ll be turning on the ultraviolet radiation. Break out the dark glasses. Please don’t delay.”
With ultraviolet added to the wall illumination, Trevize took off his moist garments one by one and shook them out, turning them in one direction and another.
“Just a precaution,” he said. “You do it, too, Janov. —And, Bliss, I’ll have to peel altogether. If that will make you uncomfortable, step into the next room.”
Bliss said, “It will neither make me uncomfortable, nor embarrass me. I have a good notion of what you look like, and it will surely present me with nothing new. —What infection?”
“Just a little something that, given its own way,” said Trevize, with a deliberate air of indifference, “could do great damage to humanity, I think.”
68.
It was all done. The ultraviolet light had done its part. Officially, according to the complex films of information and instructions that had come with the Far Star when Trevize had first gone aboard back on Terminus, the light was there precisely for purposes of disinfection. Trevize suspected, however, that the temptation was always there, and sometimes yielded to, to use it for developing a fashionable tan for those who were from worlds where tans were fashionable. The light was, however, disinfecting, however used.
They took the ship up into space and Trevize maneuvered it as close to Melpomenia’s sun as he might without making them all unpleasantly uncomfortable, turning and twisting the vessel so as to make sure that its entire surface was drenched in ultraviolet.
Finally, they rescued the two space suits that had been left in the lock and examined them until even Trevize was satisfied.
“All that,” said Bliss, at last, “for moss. Isn’t that what you said it was, Trevize? Moss?”
“I call it moss,” said Trevize, “because that’s what it reminded me of. I’m not a botanist, however. All I can say is that it’s intensely green and can probably make do on very little light-energy.”
“Why very little?”
“The moss is sensitive to ultraviolet and can’t grow, or even survive, in direct illumination. Its spores are everywhere and it grows in hidden corners, in cracks in statuary, on the bottom surface of structures, feeding on the energy of scattered photons of light wherever there is a source of carbon dioxide.”
Bliss said, “I take it you think they’re dangerous.”
“They might well be. If some of the spores were clinging to us when we entered, or swirled in with us, they would find illumination in plenty without the harmful ultraviolet. They would find ample water and an unending supply of carbon dioxide.”
“Only 0.03 percent of our atmosphere,” said Bliss.
“A great deal to them—and 4 percent in our exhaled breath. What if spores grew in our nostrils, an
d on our skin? What if they decomposed and destroyed our food? What if they produced toxins that killed us? Even if we labored to kill them but left some spores alive, they would be enough, when carried to another world by us, to infest it, and from there be carried to other worlds. Who knows what damage they might do?”
Bliss shook her head. “Life is not necessarily dangerous because it is different. You are so ready to kill.”
“That’s Gaia speaking,” said Trevize.
“Of course it is, but I hope I make sense, nevertheless. The moss is adapted to the conditions of this world. Just as it makes use of light in small quantities but is killed by large; it makes use of occasional tiny whiffs of carbon dioxide and may be killed by large amounts. It may not be capable of surviving on any world but Melpomenia.”
“Would you want me to take a chance on that?” demanded Trevize.
Bliss shrugged. “Very well. Don’t be defensive. I see your point. Being an Isolate, you probably had no choice but to do what you did.”
Trevize would have answered, but Fallom’s clear high-pitched voice broke in, in her own language.
Trevize said to Pelorat, “What’s she saying?”
Pelorat began, “What Fallom is saying—”
Fallom, however, as though remembering a moment too late that her own language was not easily understood, began again. “Was there Jemby there where you were?”
The words were pronounced meticulously, and Bliss beamed. “Doesn’t she speak Galactic well? And in almost no time.”
Trevize said, in a low voice, “I’ll mess it up if I try, but you explain to her, Bliss, that we found no robots on the planet.”
“I’ll explain it,” said Pelorat. “Come, Fallom.” He placed a gentle arm about the youngester’s shoulders. “Come to our room and I’ll get you another book to read.”
“A book? About Jemby?”
“Not exactly—” And the door closed behind them.
“You know,” said Trevize, looking after them impatiently, “we waste our time playing nursemaid to that child.”
