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By Root 1735 0

sun, too. The farther we are from any massive object, the easier to control the Jump, to make re-emergence into space at exactly desired co-ordinates. In an emergency, you might risk a Jump when you're only two hundred kilometers off the surface of a planet and just trust to luck that you'll end up safely. Since there is much more safe than unsafe volume in the Galaxy, you can reasonably count on safety. Still, there's always the possibility that random factors will cause you to reemerge within a few million kilometers of a large star or in the Galactic core--and you will find yourself fried before you can blink. The further away you are from mass, the smaller those factors and the less likely it is that anything untoward will happen."

"In that case, I commend your caution. We're not in a tearing hurry."

"Exactly. --Especially since I would dearly love to find the hyper-relay before I make a move. --Or find a way of convincing myself there is no hyper-relay."

Trevize seemed to drift off again into his private concentration and Pelorat said, raising his voice a little to surmount the preoccupation barrier, "How much longer do we have?"

"What?"

"I mean, when would you make the Jump if you had no concerns over the hyper-relay, my dear chap?"

"At our present speed and trajectory, I should say on our fourth day out. I'll work out the proper time on the computer."

"Well, then, you still have two days for your search. May I make a suggestion?"

"Go ahead."

"I have always found in my own work--quite different from yours, of course, but possibly we may generalize--that zeroing in tightly on a particular problem is self-defeating. Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind--not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought--may solve the problem for you."

Trevize looked momentarily annoyed and then laughed. "Well, why not? --Tell me, Professor, what got you interested in Earth? What brought up this odd notion of a particular planet from which we all started?"

"Ah!" Pelorat nodded his head reminiscently. "That's going back a while. Over thirty years. I planned to be a biologist when I was going to college. I was particularly interested in the variation of species on different worlds. The variation, as you know--well, maybe you don't know, so you won't mind if I tell you--is very small. All forms of life throughout the Galaxy--at least all that we have yet encountered--share a water-based protein / nucleic acid chemistry."

Trevize said, "I went to military college, which emphasized nucleonics and gravitics, but I'm not exactly a narrow specialist. I know a bit about the chemical basis of life. We were taught that water, proteins, and nucleic acids are the only possible basis for life."

"That, I think, is an unwarranted conclusion. It is safer to say that no other form of life has yet been found--or, at any rate, been recognized--and let it go at that. What is more surprising is that indigenous species--that is, species found on only a single planet and no other--are few in number. Most of the species that exist, including Homo sapiens in particular, are distributed through all or most of the inhabited worlds of the Galaxy and are closely related biochemically, physiologically, and morphologically. The indigenous species, on the other hand, are widely separated in characteristics from both the widespread forms and from each other."

"Well, what of that?"

"The conclusion is that one world in the Galaxy--one world--is different from the rest. Tens of millions of worlds in the Galaxy--no one knows exactly how many--have developed life. It was simple life, sparse life, feeble life--not very variegated, not easily maintained, and not easily spread. One world, one world alone, developed life in millions of species--easily millions--some of it very specialized, highly developed, very prone to multiplication and to spreading, and including us. We were intelligent enough to form a civilization, to develop hyperspatial flight, and to colonize the Galaxy--and, in spreading through the Galaxy, we took