Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov [32]
"You mean, we won't know when we are off the planet and out in space?"
"It's exactly what I mean, because even as I speak to you, we have taken off. We will be cutting through the upper atmosphere in a very few minutes and within half an hour we will be in outer space."
3.
PELORAT SEEMED TO SHRINK A LITTLE AS HE stared at Trevize. His long rectangle of a face grew so blank that, without showing any emotion at all, it radiated a vast uneasiness.
Then his eyes shifted right--left.
Trevize remembered how he had felt on his own first trip beyond the atmosphere.
He said, in as matter-of-fact a manner as he could, "Janov," (it was the first time he had addressed the professor familiarly, but in this case experience was addressing inexperience and it was necessary to seem the older of the two) "we are perfectly safe here. We are in the metal womb of a warship of the Foundation Navy. We are not fully armed, but there is no place in the Galaxy where the name of the Foundation will not protect us. Even if some ship went mad and attacked, we could move out of its reach in a moment. And I assure you I have discovered that I can handle the ship perfectly."
Pelorat said, "It is the thought, Go--Golan, of nothingness--"
"Why, there's nothingness all about Terminus. There's just a thin layer of very tenuous air between ourselves on the surface and the nothingness just above. All we're doing is to go past that inconsequential layer."
"It may be inconsequential, but we breathe it."
"We breathe here, too. The air on this ship is cleaner and purer, and will indefinitely remain cleaner and purer than the natural atmosphere of Terminus."
"And the meteorites?"
"What about meteorites?"
"The atmosphere protects us from meteorites. Radiation, too, for that matter."
Trevize said, "Humanity has been traveling through space for twenty millennia, I believe--"
"Twenty-two. If we go by the Hallblockian chronology, it is quite plain that, counting the--"
"Enough! Have you heard of meteorite accidents or of radiation deaths? --I mean, recently? --I mean, in the case of Foundation ships?"
"I have not really followed the news in such matters, but I am a historian, my boy, and--"
"Historically, yes, there have been such things, but technology improves. There isn't a meteorite large enough to damage us that can possibly approach us before we take the necessary evasive action. Four meteorites--coming at us simultaneously from the four directions drawn from the vertices of a tetrahedron--might conceivably pin us down, but calculate the chances of that and you'll find that you'll die of old age a trillion trillion times over before you will have a fifty-fifty chance of observing so interesting a phenomenon."
"You mean, if you were at the computer?"
"No," said Trevize in scorn. "If I were running the computer on the basis of my own senses and responses, we would be hit before I ever knew what was happening. It is the computer itself that is at work, responding millions of times faster than you or I could." He held out his hand abruptly. "Janov, come let me show you what the computer can do, and let me show you what space is like."
Pelorat stared, goggling a bit. Then he laughed briefly. "I'm not sure I wish to know, Golan."
"Of course you're not sure, Janov, because you don't know what it is that is waiting there to be known. Chance it! Come! Into my room!"
Trevize held the other's hand, half leading him, half drawing him. He said, as he sat down at the computer, "Have you ever seen the Galaxy, Janov? Have you ever looked at it?"
Pelorat said, "You mean in the sky?"
"Yes, certainly. Where else?"
"I've seen it. Everyone has seen it. If one looks up, one sees it."
"Have you ever stared at it on a dark, clear night, when the Diamonds are below the horizon?"
The "Diamonds" referred to those few stars that were luminous enough