Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov [91]
Dors Venabili laughed softly. "I think you're afraid I will wake during the night and read parts of the Book before you have a chance to. Is that it?"
"Well," said Seldon, trying not to look ashamed, "that may be it. Even friendship only goes so far and this is my book and it's my psychohistory."
"I agree," said Dors, "and I promise you that we won't quarrel over that. By the way, you were about to say something earlier when I interrupted you. Remember?"
Seldon thought briefly. "No."
In the dark, he thought only of the Book. He gave no thought to the hand-on-thigh story. In fact, he had already quite forgotten it, consciously at least.
48.
Venabili woke up and could tell by her timeband that the night period was only half over. Not hearing Hari's snore, she could tell that his cot was empty. If he had not left the apartment, then he was in the bathroom.
She tapped lightly on the door and said softly, "Hari?"
He said, "Come in," in an abstracted way and she did.
The toilet lid was down and Seldon, seated upon it, held the Book open on his lap. He said, quite unnecessarily, "I'm reading."
"Yes, I see that. But why?"
"I couldn't sleep. I'm sorry."
"But why read in here?"
"If I had turned on the room light, I would have woken you up."
"Are you sure the Book can't be illuminated?"
"Pretty sure. When Raindrop Forty-Three described its workings, she never mentioned illumination. Besides, I suppose that would use up so much energy that the battery wouldn't last the life of the Book." He sounded dissatisfied.
Dors said, "You can step out, then. I want to use this place, as long as I'm here."
When she emerged, she found him sitting cross-legged on his cot, still reading, with the room well lighted.
She said, "You don't look happy. Does the Book disappoint you?..
He looked up at her, blinking. "Yes, it does. I've sampled it here and there. Its all I've had time to do. The thing is a virtual encyclopedia and the index is almost entirely a listing of people and places that are of little use for my purposes. It has nothing to do with the Galactic Empire or the pre-Imperial Kingdoms either. It deals almost entirely with a single world and, as nearly as I can make out from what I have read, it is an endless dissertation on internal politics."
"Perhaps you underestimate its age. It may deal with a period when there was indeed only one world . . . one inhabited world."
"Yes, I know," said Seldon a little impatiently. "That's actually what I want-provided I can be sure its history, not legend. I wonder. I don't want to believe it just because I want to believe it."
Dors said, "Well, this matter of a single-world origin is much in the air these days. Human beings are a single species spread all over the Galaxy, so they must have originated somewhere. At least that's the popular view at present. You can't have independent origins producing the same species on different worlds."
"But I've never seen the inevitability of that argument," said Seldon. "If human beings arose on a number of worlds as a number of diferent species, why couldn't they have interbred into some single intermediate species?"
"Because species can't interbreed. That's what makes them species."
Seldon thought about it a moment, then dismissed it with a shrug. "Well, I'll leave it to the biologists."
"They're precisely the ones who are keenest on the Earth hypothesis."
"Earth? Is that what they call the supposed world of origin?"
"That's a popular name for it, though there's no way of telling what it was called, assuming there was one. And no one has any clue to what its location might be."
"Earth!" said Seldon, curling his lips. "It sounds like a belch to me. In any case, if the book deals with the original world, I didn't come across it. How do you spell the word?"
She told him and he checked the Book quickly. "There you are. The name is not listed in the index, either by that spelling or any reasonable alternative."
"Really?"
"And they do mention other worlds