Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov [85]
The noise vanished in the distance, and Bliss said, “We had better get into the ship. They will come back. Or others will.”
Trevize thought that never before had he manipulated the ship’s entry mechanism so rapidly. And it was possible he might never do so again.
38.
NIGHT HAD FALLEN BEFORE TREVIZE FELT SOMETHING approaching the normal. The small patch of syntho-skin on the scrape on his hand had soothed the physical pain, but there was a scrape on his psyche for which soothing was not so easy.
It was not the mere exposure to danger. He could react to that as well as any ordinarily brave person might. It was the totally unlooked-for direction from which the danger had come. It was the feeling of the ridiculous. How would it look if people were to find out he had been treed by snarling dogs? It would scarcely be worse if he had been put to flight by the whirring of angry canaries.
For hours, he kept listening for a new attack on the part of the dogs, for the sound of howls, for the scratch of claws against the outer hull.
Pelorat, by comparison, seemed quite cool. “There was no question in my mind, old chap, that Bliss would handle it, but I must say you fired the weapon well.”
Trevize shrugged. He was in no mood to discuss the matter.
Pelorat was holding his library—the one compact disc on which his lifetime of research into myths and legends were stored—and with it he retreated into his bedroom where he kept his small reader.
He seemed quite pleased with himself. Trevize noticed that but didn’t follow it up. Time for that later when his mind wasn’t quite as taken up with dogs.
Bliss said, rather tentatively, when the two were alone, “I presume you were taken by surprise.”
“Quite,” said Trevize gloomily. “Who would think that at the sight of a dog—a dog—I should run for my life.”
“Twenty thousand years without men and it would not be quite a dog. Those beasts must now be the dominant large predators.”
Trevize nodded. “I figured that out while I was sitting on the tree branch being a dominated prey. You were certainly right about an unbalanced ecology.”
“Unbalanced, certainly, from the human standpoint—but considering how efficiently the dogs seem to be going about their business, I wonder if Pel may be right in his suggestion that the ecology could balance itself, with various environmental niches being filled by evolving variations of the relatively few species that were once brought to the world.”
“Oddly enough,” said Trevize, “the same thought occurred to me.”
“Provided, of course, the unbalance is not so great that the process of righting itself takes too long. The planet might become completely nonviable before that.”
Trevize grunted.
Bliss looked at him thoughtfully, “How is it that you thought of arming yourself?”
Trevize said, “It did me little good. It was your ability—”
“Not entirely. I needed your weapon. At short notice, with only hyperspatial contact with the rest of Gaia, with so many individual minds of so unfamiliar a nature, I could have done nothing without your neuronic whip.”
“My blaster was useless. I tried that.”
“With a blaster, Trevize, a dog merely disappears. The rest may be surprised, but not frightened.”
“Worse than that,” said Trevize. “They ate the remnants. I was bribing them to stay.”
“Yes, I see that might be the effect. The neuronic whip is different. It inflicts pain, and a dog in pain emits cries of a kind that are well understood by other dogs who, by conditioned reflex, if nothing else, begin to feel frightened themselves. With the dogs already disposed toward fright, I merely nudged their minds, and off they went.”
“Yes, but you realized the whip was the more deadly of the two in this case. I did not.”
“I am accustomed to dealing with minds. You are not. That’s why I insisted on low power and aiming at one dog. I did not want so much pain that it killed a dog and left him silent. I did not want the pain so dispersed as to cause mere whimpering. I wanted strong pain concentrated at one point.