Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov [132]
Pelorat looked downcast. “How can there be worse?”
“Easily—when your mind gets sick in the middle of the night and begins searching the vast realm of fantasy for anything that can deepen despair. What if Earth’s ability to hide is ultimate? What if our minds can be clouded? What if we can move right past Earth, with its giant satellite and with its distant ringed gas giant, and never see any of it? What if we have already done so?”
“But if you believe that, why are we—?”
“I don’t say I believe that. I’m talking about mad fancies. We’ll keep on looking.”
Pelorat hesitated, then said, “For how long, Trevize? At some point, surely, we’ll have to give up.”
“Never,” said Trevize fiercely. “If I have to spend the rest of my life going from planet to planet and peering about and saying, ‘Please, sir, where’s Earth?’ then that’s what I’ll do. At any time, I can take you and Bliss and even Fallom, if you wish, back to Gaia and then take off on my own.”
“Oh no. You know I won’t leave you, Golan, and neither will Bliss. We’ll go planet-hopping with you, if we must. But why?”
“Because I must find Earth, and because I will. I don’t know how, but I will. —Now, look, I’m trying to reach a position where I can study the sunlit side of the planet without its sun being too close, so just let me be for a while.”
Pelorat fell silent, but did not leave. He continued to watch while Trevize studied the planetary image, more than half in daylight, on the screen. To Pelorat, it seemed featureless, but he knew that Trevize, bound to the computer, saw it under enhanced circumstances.
Trevize whispered, “There’s a haze.”
“Then there must be an atmosphere,” blurted out Pelorat.
“Not necessarily much of one. Not enough to support life, but enough to support a thin wind that will raise dust. It’s a well-known characteristic of planets with thin atmospheres. There may even be small polar ice caps. A little water-ice condensed at the poles, you know. This world is too warm for solid carbon dioxide. —I’ll have to switch to radar-mapping. And if I do that I can work more easily on the nightside.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I should have tried it first, but with a virtually airless and, therefore, cloudless planet, the attempt with visible light seems so natural.”
Trevize was silent for a long time, while the viewscreen grew fuzzy with radar-reflections that produced almost the abstraction of a planet, something that an artist of the Cleonian period might have produced. Then he said, “Well—” emphatically, holding the sound for a while, and was silent again.
Pelorat said, at last, “What’s the ‘well’ about?”
Trevize looked at him briefly. “No craters that I can see.”
“No craters? Is that good?”
“Totally unexpected,” said Trevize. His face broke into a grin, “And very good. In fact, possibly magnificent.”
63.
FALLOM REMAINED WITH HER NOSE PRESSED against the ship’s porthole, where a small segment of the Universe was visible in the precise form in which the eye saw it, without computer enlargement or enhancement.
Bliss, who had been trying to explain it all, sighed and said in a low voice to Pelorat, “I don’t know how much she understands, Pel dear. To her, her father’s mansion and a small section of the estate it stood upon was all the Universe. I don’t think she was ever out at night, or ever saw the stars.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I really do. I didn’t dare show her any part of it until she had enough vocabulary to understand me just a little—and how fortunate it was that you could speak with her in her own language.”
“The trouble is I’m not very good at it,” said Pelorat apologetically.