Asimov’s Future History Volume 19

by Isaac Asimov

  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 sir, 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 anything 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 coordinates, 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.”

  “Fasc
inating,” 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 co-ordinates 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. 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.

  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 whatev
er 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.