Foundation's Edge

turn on and off. The ship may be unknown, of course, but if it is a ship whose energy pattern is on record in Terminus—as ours is—it can be identified as soon as detected.”

Pelorat said, “It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“You may be right. Sooner or later, however, we must move through hyperspace or we will be condemned to remain within a parsec or two of Terminus for the rest of our lives. We will then be unable to engage in interstellar travel to any but the slightest degree. In passing through hyperspace, on the other hand, we undergo a discountinuity in ordinary space. We pass from here to there—and I mean across a gap of hundreds of parsecs sometimes—in an instant of experienced time. We are suddenly enormously far away in a direction that is very difficult to predict and, in a practical sense, we can no longer be detected.”

“I see that. Yes.”

“Unless, of course, they have planted a hyper-relay on board. A hyper-relay sends out a signal through hyperspace—a signal characteristic of this ship—and the authorities on Terminus would know where we are at all times. That answers your question, you see. There would be nowhere in the Galaxy we could hide and no combination of Jumps through hyperspace would make it possible for us to evade their instruments.”

“But, Golan,” said Pelorat softly, “don’t we want Foundation protection?”

“Yes, Janov, but only when we ask for it. You said the advance of civilization meant the continuing restriction of privacy. —Well, I don’t want to be that advanced. I want freedom to move undetected as I wish—unless and until I want protection. So I would feel better, a great deal better, if there weren’t a hyper- relay on board.”

“Have you found one, Golan?”

“No, I have not. If I had, I might be able to render it inoperative somehow.”

“Would you know one if you saw it?”

“That’s one of the difficulties. I might not be able to recognize it. I know what a hyper-relay looks like generally and I know ways of testing a suspicious object—but this is a late-model ship, designed for special tasks. A hyper-relay may have been incorporated into its design in such a way as to show no signs of its presence.”

“On the other hand, maybe there is no hyper-relay present and that’s why you haven’t found it.”

“I don’t dare assume that and I don’t like the thought of making a Jump until I know.”

Pelorat looked enlightened. “That’s why we’ve just been drifting through space. I’ve been wondering why we haven’t Jumped. I’ve heard about Jumps, you know. Been a little nervous about it, actually—been wondering when you’d order me to strap myself in or take a pill or something like that.”

Trevize managed a smile. “No need for apprehension. These aren’t ancient times. On a ship like this, you just leave it all to the computer. You give it your instructions and it does the rest. You won’t know that anything has happened at all, except that the view of space will suddenly change. If you’ve ever seen a slide show, you’ll know what happens when one slide is suddenly projected in place of another. Well, that’s what the Jump will seem like.”

“Dear me. One won’t feel anything? Odd! I find that somewhat disappointing.”

“I’ve never felt anything and the ships I’ve been in haven’t been as advanced as this baby of ours. —But it’s not because of the hyper-relay that we haven’t Jumped. We have to get a bit further away from Terminus—and from the 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 coordinates. 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 many other forms of life—forms related to each other and to ourselves—along with us.”

“If you stop to think of it,” said Trevize rather indifferently, “I suppose that stands to reason. I mean, here we are in a human Galaxy. If we assume that it all started on some one world, then that one world would have to be different. But why not? The chances of life developing in that riotous fashion must be very slim indeed—perhaps one in a hundred million—so the chances are that it happened in one life-bearing world out of a hundred million. It had to be one.”

“But what is it that made that particular one world so different from the others?” said Pelorat excitedly. “What were the conditions that made it unique?”

“Merely chance, perhaps. After all, human beings and the life-forms they brought with them now exist on tens of millions of planets, all of which can support life, so all those worlds must be good enough.”

“No! Once the human species had evolved, once it had developed a technology, once it had toughened itself in the hard struggle for survival, it could then adapt to life on any world that is in the least hospitable—on Terminus, for instance. But can you imagine intelligent life having developed on Terminus? When Terminus was first occupied by human beings in the days of the Encyclopedists, the highest form of plant life it