Foundation and Earth (42 page)

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 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.

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.”