by Isaac Asimov
"Yes, friend Giskard, but they may soon be ready—and once they are ready, they will have to strike immediately. Any delay will increase the chance of some leak that will give them away."
"To deduce all this, friend Daneel, from the small indications we have is most praiseworthy. Now tell me the nature of the blow. What is it, precisely, that the Spacers plan?"
"I have come this far, friend Giskard, across very shaky ground, without being certain that my reasoning is entirely sound. But even if we suppose it is, I can go no further. I fear I do not know and cannot imagine what the nature of the blow might be."
Giskard said, "But we cannot take appropriate measures to counteract the blow and resolve the crisis until we know what its nature will be. If we must wait until the blow reveals itself by its results, it will then be too late to do anything."
Daneel said, "If any Spacer knows the nature of the forthcoming event, it would be Amadiro. Could you not force Amadiro to announce it publicly and thus alert the Settlers and make it unusable?"
"I could not do that, friend Daneel, without virtually destroying his mind. I doubt that I could hold it together long enough to allow him to make the announcement. I could not do such a thing."
"Perhaps, then," said Daneel, "we may console ourselves with the thought that my reasoning is wrong and that no blow against Earth is being prepared."
"No," said Giskard. "It is my feeling that you are right and that we must simply wait—helplessly."
17.
Gladia waited, with an almost painful anticipation, for the conclusion of the final Jump. They would then be close enough to Solaria to make out its sun as a disk.
It would just be a disk, of course, a featureless circle of light, subdued to the point where it could be watched unblinkingly after that light had passed through the appropriate filter.
Its appearance would not be unique. All the stars that carried, among their planets, a habitable world in the human sense had a long list of property requirements that ended by making them all resemble one another. They were all single stars—all not much larger or smaller than the sun that shone on Earth—none too active, or too old, or too quiet, or too young, or too hot, or too cool, or too offbeat in chemical composition. All had sunspots and flares and prominences and all looked just about the same to the eye. It took careful spectroheliography to work out the details that made each star unique.
Nevertheless, when Gladia found herself staring at a circle of light that was absolutely nothing more than a circle of light to her, she found her eyes welling with tears. She had never given the sun a thought when she had lived on Solaria; it was just the eternal source of light and heat, rising and falling in a steady rhythm. When she had left Solaria, she had watched that sun disappear behind her with nothing but a feeling of thankfulness. She had no memory of it that she valued.
—Yet she was weeping silently. She was ashamed of herself for being so affected for no reason that she could explain, but that didn't stop the weeping.
She made a stronger effort when the signal light gleamed. It had to be D.G. at the door; no one else would approach her cabin.
Daneel said, "Is he to enter, madam? You seem emotionally moved."
"Yes, I'm emotionally moved, Daneel, but let him in. I imagine it won't come as a surprise to him."
Yet it did. At least, he entered with a smile on his bearded face—and that smile disappeared almost at once. He stepped back and said in a low voice, "I will return later."
"Stay!" said Gladia harshly. "This is nothing. A silly reaction of the moment." She sniffed and dabbed angrily at her eyes. "Why are you here?"
I wanted to discuss Solaria with you. If we succeed with a microadjustment, we'll land tomorrow. If you're not quite up to a discussion now—"
"I am quite up to it. In fact, I have a question for you. Why is it we took three Jumps to get here? One Jump would have been sufficient. One was sufficient when I was taken from Solaria to Aurora twenty decades ago. Surely the technique of space travel has not retrogressed since."
D.G.'s grin returned. "Evasive action. If an Auroran ship was following us, I wanted to—confuse it, shall we say?"
"Why should one follow us?"
"Just a thought, my lady. The Council was a little overeager to help, I thought. They suggested that an Auroran ship join me in my expedition to Solaria."
"Well, it might have helped, mightn't it?"
"Perhaps—if I were quite certain that Aurora wasn't behind all this. I told the Council quite plainly that I would do without—or, rather"—he pointed his finger at Gladia—"just with you. Yet might not the Council send a ship to accompany me even against my wish—out of pure kindness of heart, let us say? Well, I still don't want one; I expect enough trouble without having to look nervously over my shoulder at every moment. So I made, myself hard to follow. —How much do you know about Solaria, my lady?"
"Haven't I told you often enough? Nothing! Twenty decades have passed."
"Now, madam, I'm talking about the psychology of the Solarians. That can't have changed in merely twenty decades. —Tell me why they have abandoned their planet."
"The story, as I've heard it," said Gladia calmly, "is that their population has been steadily declining. A combination of premature deaths and very few births is apparently responsible."
"Does that sound reasonable to you?"
"Of course it does. Births have always been few." Her face twisted in memory. "Solarian custom does not make impregnation easy, either naturally, artificially, or ectogenetically."
"You never had children, madam?"
"Not on Solaria."
"And the premature death?"
"I can only guess. I suppose it arose out of a feeling of failure. Solaria was clearly not working out, even though the Solarians had placed a great deal of emotional fervor into their world's having the ideal society—not only one that was better than Earth had ever had, but more nearly perfect than that of any other Spacer world."
"Are you saying that Solaria was dying of the collective broken heart of its people?"
"If you want to put it in that ridiculous way," said Gladia, displeased.
D.G. shrugged. "It seems to be what you're saying. But would they really leave? Where would they go? How would they live?"
"I don't know."
"But, Madam Gladia, it is well known that Solarians are accustomed to enormous tracts of land, serviced by many thousands of robots, so that each Solarian is left in almost complete isolation. If they abandon Solaria, where can they go to find a society that would humor them in this fashion? Have they, in fact, gone to any of the other Spacer worlds?"
"Not as far as I know. But then, I'm not in their confidence."
"Can they have found a new world for themselves? If so, it would be a raw one and require much in the way of terraforming. Would they be ready for that?"
Gladia shook her head. "I don't know."
"Perhaps they haven't really left."
"Solaria, I understand, gives every evidence of being empty."
"What evidence is that?"
"All interplanetary communication has ceased. All radiation from the planet, except that consistent with robot work or clearly due to natural causes has ceased."
"How do you know that?"
"That is the report on the Auroran news."
"Ah! The report! Could it be that someone is lying?"
"What would be the purpose of such a lie?" Gladia stiffened at the suggestion.
"So that our ships would be lured to the world and destroyed."
"That's ridiculous, D.G." Her voice grew sharper. "What would the Spacers gain by destroying two trading vessels through so elaborate a subterfuge?"
"Something has destroyed two Settler vessels on a supposedly empty planet. How do you explain that?"
"I can't. I presume we are going to Solaria in order to find an explanation."
D.G. regarded her gravely. "Would you be able to guide me to the section of the world
that was yours when you lived on Solaria?"
"My estate?" She returned his stare, astonished.
"Wouldn't you like to see it again?"
Gladia's heart skipped a beat. "Yes, I would, but why my place?"
"The two ships that were destroyed landed in widely different spots on the planet and yet each was destroyed fairly quickly. Though every spot may be deadly, it seems to me that yours might be less so than others."
Why?"
"Because there we might receive help from the robots. You would know them, wouldn't you? They do last more than twenty decades, I suppose. Daneel and Giskard have. And those that were there when you lived on your estate would still remember you, wouldn't they? They would treat you as their mistress and recognize the duty they owed you even beyond that which they would owe to ordinary human beings."
Gladia said, "There were ten thousand robots on my estate. I knew perhaps three dozen by sight. Most of the rest I never saw and they may not have ever seen me. Agricultural robots are not very advanced, you know, nor are forestry robots or mining robots. The household robots would still remember me—if they have not been sold or transferred since I left. Then, too, accidents happen and some robots don't last twenty decades. —Besides, whatever you may think of robot memory, human memory is fallible and I might remember none of them."
"Even so," said D.G., "can you direct me to your estate?"
"By latitude and longitude? No."
"I have charts of Solaria. Would that help?"
"Perhaps approximately. It's in the south-central portion of the northern continent of Heliona."
"And once we're approximately there, can you make use of landmarks for greater precision—if we skim the Solarian surface?"
"By seacoasts, and rivers, you mean?"
"Yes."
"I think I can."
"Good! And meanwhile, see if you can remember the names and appearances of any of your robots. It may prove the difference between living and dying."
18.
D.G. Baley seemed a different person with his officers. The broad smile was not evident, nor the easy indifference to danger. He sat, poring over the charts, with a look of intense concentration on his face.
He said, "If the woman is correct, we've got the estate pinned down within narrow limits—and if we move into the flying mode, we should get it exactly before too long."
"Wasteful of energy, Captain," muttered Jamin Oser, who was second-in-command. He was tall and, like D.G., well bearded. The beard was russet-colored, as were his eyebrows, which arched over bright blue eyes. He looked rather old, but one got the impression that this was due to experience rather than years.
"Can't help it," said D.G. "If we had the antigravity that the technos keep promising us just this side of eternity, it would be different."
He stared at the chart again and said, "She says it would be along this river about sixty kilometers upstream from where it runs into this larger one. If she is correct."
"You keep doubting it," said Chandrus Nadirhaba, whose insigne showed him to be Navigator and responsible for bringing the ship down in the correct spot—or, in any case, the indicated spot. His dark skin and neat mustache accentuated the handsome strength of his face.
"She's recalling a situation over a time gap of twenty decades," said D.G. "What details would you remember of a site you haven't seen for just three decades? She's not a robot. She may have forgotten."
"Then what was the point of bringing her?" muttered Oser. "And the other one and the robot? It unsettles the crew and I don't exactly like it, either."
D.G. looked up, eyebrows bunching together. He said in a low voice, "It doesn't matter on this ship what you don't like or what the crew doesn't like, mister. I have the responsibility and I make the decisions. We're all liable to be dead within six hours of landing unless that woman can save us. "
Nadirhaba said coolly, "If we die, we die. We wouldn't be Traders if we didn't know that sudden death was the other side of big profits. And for this mission, we're all volunteers. Just the same, it doesn't hurt to know where the death's coming from, Captain. If you've figured it out, does it have to be a secret?"
"No, it doesn't. The Solarians are supposed to have left, but suppose a couple of hundred stayed quietly behind just to watch the store, so to speak.
"And what can they do to an armed ship, Captain? Do they have a secret weapon?"
"Not so secret," said D.G. "Solaria is littered with robots. That's the whole reason Settler ships landed on the world in the first place. Each remaining Solarian might have a million robots at his disposal. An enormous army."
Eban Kalaya was in charge of communications. So far he had said nothing, aware as he was of his junior status, which seemed further marked by the fact that he was the only one of the four officers present without facial hair of any kind. Now he ventured a remark. "Robots," he said, "cannot injure human beings."
"So we are told," said D.G. dryly, "but what do we know about robots? What we do know is that two ships have been destroyed and about a hundred human beings—good Settlers all—have been killed on widely separated parts of a world littered with robots. How could it have been done except by robots? We don't know what kind of orders a Solarian might give robots or by what tricks the so-called First Law of Robotics might be circumvented.
"So we," he went on, "have to do a little circumventing of our own. As best as we can tell from the reports reaching us from the other ships before they were destroyed, all the men on board ship debarked on landing. It was an empty world after all and they wanted to stretch their legs, breathe fresh air, and look over the robots they had come to get. Their ships were unprotected and they themselves unready when the attack came.
"That won't happen this time. I'm getting off, but the rest of you are going to stay on board the ship or in its near vicinity."
Nadirhaba's dark eyes glared disapproval. "Why you, Captain? If you need someone to act as bait, anyone else can be spared more easily than you can be."
"I appreciate the thought, Navigator," said D.G., "but I will not be alone. Coming with me as well will be the Spacer woman and her companions. She is the one who is essential. She may know some of the robots; at any rate, some may know her. I am hoping that though the robots may have been ordered to attack us, they won't attack her."
"You mean they'll remember Ol' Missy and fall to their knees," said Nadirhaba dryly.
"If you want to put it that way. That's why I brought her and that's why we've landed on her estate. And I've got to be with her because I'm the one who knows her—somewhat—and I've got to see that she behaves. Once we have survived by using her as a shield and in that way have learned exactly what we're facing, we can proceed on our own. We won't need her any more.
Oser said, "And then what do we do with her? Jettison her into space?"
D.G. roared, "We take her back to Aurora!"
Oser said, "I'm bound to tell you, Captain, that the crew would consider that a wasteful and unnecessary trip. They will feel that we can simply leave her on this blasted world. It's where she comes from, after all."
"Yes," said D.G. "That will be the day, won't it, when I take orders from the crew."
"I'm sure you won't," said Oser, "but the crew has its opinions and an unhappy crew makes for a dangerous voyage."
6. THE CREW
19.
Gladia stood on the soil of Solaria. She smelled the vegetation—not quite the odors of Aurora—and at once she crossed the gap of twenty decades.
Nothing, she knew, could bring back associations in the way that odors could. Not sights, not sounds.
Just that faint, unique smell brought back childhood the freedom of running about, with a dozen robots watching her carefully—the excitement of seeing other children sometimes, coming to a halt, staring shyly, approaching one another a half-step at a time, reaching out to touch, and then a robot saying, "Enough, Miss Gladia," and being led away—looking over the shoulder at the other chil
d, with whom there was another set of attendant robots in charge.
She remembered the day that she was told that only by holovision would she see other human beings thereafter. Viewing, she was told—not seeing. The robots said "seeing" as though it were a word they must not say, so that they had to whisper it. She could see them, but they were not human.
It was not so bad at first. The images she could talk to were three-dimensional, free-moving. They could talk, run, turn cartwheels if they wished—but they could not be felt. And then she was told that she could actually see someone whom she had often viewed and whom she had liked. He was a grown man, quite a bit older than she was, though he looked quite young, as one did on Solaria. She would have permission to continue to see him—if she wished—whenever necessary.
She wished. She remembered how it was—exactly how it was on that first day. She was tongue-tied and so was he. They circled each other, afraid to touch. —But it was marriage.
Of course it was. And then they met again—seeing, viewing, because it was marriage. They would finally touch each other. They were supposed to.
It was the most exciting day of her life—until it took place.
Fiercely, Gladia stopped her thoughts. Of what use to go on? She so warm and eager; he so cold and withdrawn. He continued to be cold. When he came to see her, at fixed intervals, for the rites that might (or might not) succeed in impregnating her, it was with such clear revulsion that she was soon longing for him to forget. But he was a man duty and he never forgot.
Then came the time, years of dragging unhappiness later, when she found him dead, his skull crushed, and herself as the only possible suspect. Elijah Baley had saved her then and she had been taken away from Solaria and sent to Aurora.
Now she was back, smelling Solaria.
Nothing else was familiar. The house in the distance bore no resemblance to anything she remembered even faintly. In twenty decades it had been modified, torn down, rebuilt. She could not even gain any sense of familiarity with the ground itself.
She found herself reaching backward to touch the Settler ship that had brought her to this world that smelled like home but was home in no other way—just to touch something that was familiar by comparison.
