Foundation and Earth

Trevize said, "Are you getting ready to suggest that this planet is Earth and that Aurora is an alternate name for it because it represents the dawn of life and of man?"

Pelorat said, "I couldn't go that far, Golan."

Trevize said, with a trace of bitterness, "There is, after all, no radioactive surface, no giant satellite, no gas giant with huge rings."

"Exactly. But Deniador, back on Comporellon, seemed to think this was one of the worlds that was once inhabited by the first wave of Settlers-the Spacers. If it were, then its name, Aurora, might indicate it to have been the first of those Spacer worlds. We might, at this very moment, be resting on the oldest human world in the Galaxy except for Earth itself. Isn't that exciting?"

"Interesting, at any rate, Janov, but isn't that a great deal to infer merely from the name, Aurora?"

"There's more," said Pelorat excitedly. "As far as I could check in my records there is no world in the Galaxy today with the name of 'Aurora,' and I'm sure your computer will verify that. As I said, there are all sorts of world and other objects named 'Dawn' in various ways, but no one uses the actual word 'Aurora."'

"Why should they? If it's a pre-Galactic word, it wouldn't be likely to be popular."

"But names do remain, even when they're meaningless. If this were the first settled world, it would be famous; it might even, for a while, have been the dominant world of the Galaxy. Surely, there would be other worlds calling themselves 'New Aurora,' or 'Aurora Minor,' or something like that. And then others-"

Trevize broke in. "Perhaps it wasn't the first settled world. Perhaps it was never of any importance."

"There's a better reason in my opinion, my dear chap."

"What would that be, Janov?"

"If the first wave of settlements was overtaken by a second wave to which all the worlds of the Galaxy now belong-as Deniador said-then there is very likely to have been a period of hostility between the two waves. The second wave-making up the worlds that now exist-would not use the names given to any of the worlds of the first wave. In that way, we can infer from the fact that the name 'Aurora' has never been repeated that there were two waves of Settlers, and that this is a world of the first wave."

Trevize smiled. "I'm getting a glimpse of how you mythologists work, Janov. You build a beautiful superstructure, but it may be standing on air. The legends tell us that the Settlers of the first wave were accompanied by numerous robots, and that these were supposed to be their undoing. Now if we could find a robot on this world, I'd be willing to accept all this first-wave supposition, but we can't expect after twenty thou-"

Pelorat, whose mouth had been working, managed to find his voice. "But, Golan, haven't I told you? No, of course, I haven't. I'm so excited I can't put things in the right order. There was a robot."

40.

TREVIZE rubbed his forehead, almost as though he were in pain. He said, "A robot? There was a robot?"

"Yes," said Pelorat, nodding his head emphatically.

"How do you know?"

"Why, it was a robot. How could I fail to know one if I see one?"

"Have you ever seen a robot before?"

"No, but it was a metal object that looked like a human being. Head, arms, legs, torso. Of course, when I say metal, it was mostly rust, and when I walked toward it, I suppose the vibration of my tread damaged it further, so that when I reached to touch it-"

"Why should you touch it?"

"Well, I suppose I couldn't quite believe my eyes. It was an automatic response. As soon as I touched it, it crumbled. But-"

"Yes?"

"Before it quite did, its eyes seemed to glow very faintly and it made a sound as though it were trying to say something."

"You mean it was still functioning?"

"Just barely, Golan. Then it collapsed."

Trevize turned to Bliss. "Do you corroborate all this, Bliss?"

"It was a robot, and we saw it," said Bliss.

"And was it still functioning?"

Bliss said tonelessly, "As it crumbled, I caught a faint sense of neuronic activity."

"How can there have been neuronic activity? A robot doesn't have an organic brain built of cells."

"It has the computerized equivalent, I imagine," said Bliss, "and I would detect that."

"Did you detect a robotic rather than a human mentality?"

Bliss pursed her lips and said, "It was too feeble to decide anything about it except that it was there."

Trevize looked at Bliss, then at Pelorat, and said, in a tone of exasperation, "This changes everything."

Part Four Solaria

Chapter 10 Robots

TREVIZE seemed lost in thought during dinner, and Bliss concentrated on the food.

Pelorat, the only one who seemed anxious to speak, pointed out that if the world they were on was Aurora and if it was the first settled world, it ought to be fairly close to Earth.

"It might pay to scour the immediate stellar neighborhood," he said. "It would only mean sifting through a few hundred stars at most."