Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Earth

Pelorat shook his head. “It’s horrifying when I think of it, old man. How is it possible that I can have spent my whole life as a scholar and yet know so little about astronomy?”

“And I know nothing at all about the myths of humanity. No one can encompass all of knowledge. —The point is that these planetary rings aren’t unusual. Almost every single gas giant has them, even if it’s only a thin curve of dust. As it happens, the sun of Terminus has no true gas giant in its planetary family, so unless a Terminian is a space traveler, or has taken University instruction in astronomy, he’s likely to know nothing about planetary rings. What is unusual is a ring that is sufficiently broad to be bright and noticeable, like that one. It’s beautiful. It must be a couple of hundred kilometers wide, at least.”

At this point, Pelorat snapped his fingers. “ That’s what it meant.”

Bliss looked startled. “What is it, Pel?”

Pelorat said, “I came across a scrap of poetry once, very ancient, and in an archaic version of Galactic that was hard to make out but that was good evidence of great age. —Though I shouldn’t complain of the archaism, old chap. My work has made me an expert on various varieties of Old Galactic, which is quite gratifying even if it is of no use to me whatever outside my work. —What was I talking about?”

Bliss said, “An old scrap of poetry, Pel dear.”

“Thank you, Bliss,” he said. And to Trevize, “She keeps close track of what I say in order to pull me back whenever I get off-course, which is most of the time.”

“It’s part of your charm, Pel,” said Bliss, smiling.

“Anyway, this scrap of poetry purported to describe the planetary system of which Earth was part. Why it should do so, I don’t know, for the poem as a whole does not survive; at least, I was never able to locate it. Only this one portion survived, perhaps because of its astronomical content. In any case, it spoke of the brilliant triple ring of the sixth planet ‘both brade and large, sae the woruld shronk in comparisoun.’ I can still quote it, you see. I didn’t understand what a planet’s ring could be. I remember thinking of three circles on one side of the planet, all in a row. It seemed so nonsensical, I didn’t bother to include it in my library. I’m sorry now I didn’t inquire.” He shook his head. “Being a mythologist in today’s Galaxy is so solitary a job, one forgets the good of inquiring.”

Trevize said consolingly, “You were probably right to ignore it, Janov. It’s a mistake to take poetic chatter literally.”

“But that’s what was meant,” said Pelorat, pointing at the screen. “That’s what the poem was speaking of. Three wide rings, concentric, wider than the planet itself.”

Trevize said, “I never heard of such a thing. I don’t think rings can be that wide. Compared to the planet they circle, they are always very narrow.”

Pelorat said, “We never heard of a habitable planet with a giant satellite, either. Or one with a radioactive crust. This is uniqueness number three. If we find a radioactive planet that might be otherwise habitable, with a giant satellite, and with another planet in the system that has a huge ring, there would be no doubt at all that we had encountered Earth.”

Trevize smiled. “I agree, Janov. If we find all three, we will certainly have found Earth.”

“If!” said Bliss, with a sigh.

They were beyond the main worlds of the planetary system, plunging outward between the positions of the two outermost planets so that there was now no significant mass within 1.5 billion kilometers. Ahead lay only the vast cometary cloud which, gravitationally, was insignificant.

The Far Star had accelerated to a speed of 0.1  c , one tenth the speed of light. Trevize knew well that, in theory, the ship could be accelerated to nearly the speed of light, but he also knew that, in practice, 0.1  c was the reasonable limit.

At that speed, any object with appreciable mass could be avoided, but there was no way of dodging the innumerable dust particles in space, and, to a far greater extent even, individual atoms and molecules. At very fast speeds, even such small objects could do damage, scouring and scraping the ship’s hull. At speeds near the speed of light, each atom smashing into the hull had the properties of a cosmic ray particle. Under that penetrating cosmic radiation, anyone on board ship would not long survive.

The distant stars showed no perceptible motion in the viewscreen, and even though the ship was moving at thirty thousand kilometers per second, there was every appearance of its standing still.

The computer scanned space to great distances for any oncoming object of small but significant size that might be on a collision course, and the ship veered gently to avoid it, in the extremely unlikely case that that would be necessary. Between the small size of any possible oncoming object, the speed with which it was passed, and the lack of inertial effect as the result of the course change, there was no way of telling whether anything ever took place in the nature of what might be termed a “close call.”

Trevize, therefore, did not worry about such things, or even give it the most casual thought. He kept his full attention on the three sets of co-ordinates he had been given by Deniador, and, particularly, on the set which indicated the object closest to themselves.

“Is there something wrong with the figures?” asked Pelorat anxiously.

“I can’t tell yet,” said Trevize. “Co-ordinates in themselves aren’t useful, unless you know the zero point and the conventions used in setting them up—the direction in which to mark off the distance, so to speak, what the equivalent of a prime meridian is, and so on.”

“How do you find out such things?” said Pelorat blankly.

“I obtained the co-ordinates of Terminus and a few other known points, relative to Comporellon. If I put them into the computer, it will calculate what the conventions must be for such co-ordinates if Terminus and the other points are to be correctly located. I’m only trying to organize things in my mind so that I can properly program the computer for this. Once the conventions are determined, the figures we have for the Forbidden Worlds might possibly have meaning.”

“Only possibly?” said Bliss.

“Only possibly, I’m afraid,” said Trevize. “These are old figures after all—presumably Comporellian, but not definitely. What if they are based on other conventions?”

“In that case?”

“In that case, we have only meaningless figures. But—we just have to find out.”

His hands flickered over the softly glowing keys of the computer, feeding it the necessary information. He then placed his hands on the handmarks on the desk. He waited while the computer worked out the conventions of the known co-ordinates, paused a moment, then interpreted the co-ordinates of the nearest Forbidden World by the same conventions, and finally located those co-ordinates on the Galactic map in its memory.

A starfield appeared on the screen and moved rapidly as it adjusted itself. When it reached stasis, it expanded with stars bleeding off the edges in all directions until they were almost all gone. At no point could the eye follow the rapid change; it was all a speckled blur. Until finally, a space one tenth of a parsec on each side (according to the index figures below the screen) was all that remained. There was no further change, and only half a dozen dim sparks relieved the darkness of the screen.

“Which one is the Forbidden World?” asked Pelorat softly.

“None of them,” said Trevize. “Four of them are red dwarfs, one a near-red dwarf, and the last a white dwarf. None of them can possibly have a habitable world in orbit about them.”