Isaac Asimov - Foundation and Earth

The noise vanished in the distance, and Bliss said, “We had better get into the ship. They will come back. Or others will.”

Trevize thought that never before had he manipulated the ship’s entry mechanism so rapidly. And it was possible he might never do so again.

Night had fallen before Trevize felt something approaching the normal. The small patch of syntho-skin on the scrape on his hand had soothed the physical pain, but there was a scrape on his psyche for which soothing was not so easy.

It was not the mere exposure to danger. He could react to that as well as any ordinarily brave person might. It was the totally unlooked-for direction from which the danger had come. It was the feeling of the ridiculous. How would it look if people were to find out he had been treed by snarling dogs ? It would scarcely be worse if he had been put to flight by the whirring of angry canaries.

For hours, he kept listening for a new attack on the part of the dogs, for the sound of howls, for the scratch of claws against the outer hull.

Pelorat, by comparison, seemed quite cool. “There was no question in my mind, old chap, that Bliss would handle it, but I must say you fired the weapon well.”

Trevize shrugged. He was in no mood to discuss the matter.

Pelorat was holding his library—the one compact disc on which his lifetime of research into myths and legends were stored—and with it he retreated into his bedroom where he kept his small reader.

He seemed quite pleased with himself. Trevize noticed that but didn’t follow it up. Time for that later when his mind wasn’t quite as taken up with dogs.

Bliss said, rather tentatively, when the two were alone, “I presume you were taken by surprise.”

“Quite,” said Trevize gloomily. “Who would think that at the sight of a dog—a dog —I should run for my life.”

“Twenty thousand years without men and it would not be quite a dog. Those beasts must now be the dominant large predators.”

Trevize nodded. “I figured that out while I was sitting on the tree branch being a dominated prey. You were certainly right about an unbalanced ecology.”

“Unbalanced, certainly, from the human standpoint—but considering how efficiently the dogs seem to be going about their business, I wonder if Pel may be right in his suggestion that the ecology could balance itself, with various environmental niches being filled by evolving variations of the relatively few species that were once brought to the world.”

“Oddly enough,” said Trevize, “the same thought occurred to me.”

“Provided, of course, the unbalance is not so great that the process of righting itself takes too long. The planet might become completely nonviable before that.”

Trevize grunted.

Bliss looked at him thoughtfully, “How is it that you thought of arming yourself?”

Trevize said, “It did me little good. It was your ability—”

“Not entirely. I needed your weapon. At short notice, with only hyperspatial contact with the rest of Gaia, with so many individual minds of so unfamiliar a nature, I could have done nothing without your neuronic whip.”

“My blaster was useless. I tried that.”

“With a blaster, Trevize, a dog merely disappears. The rest may be surprised, but not frightened.”

“Worse than that,” said Trevize. “They ate the remnants. I was bribing them to stay.”

“Yes, I see that might be the effect. The neuronic whip is different. It inflicts pain, and a dog in pain emits cries of a kind that are well understood by other dogs who, by conditioned reflex, if nothing else, begin to feel frightened themselves. With the dogs already disposed toward fright, I merely nudged their minds, and off they went.”

“Yes, but you realized the whip was the more deadly of the two in this case. I did not.”

“I am accustomed to dealing with minds. You are not. That’s why I insisted on low power and aiming at one dog. I did not want so much pain that it killed a dog and left him silent. I did not want the pain so dispersed as to cause mere whimpering. I wanted strong pain concentrated at one point.”

“And you got it, Bliss,” said Trevize. “It worked perfectly. I owe you considerable gratitude.”

“You begrudge that,” said Bliss thoughtfully, “because it seems to you that you played a ridiculous role. And yet, I repeat, I could have done nothing without your weapons. What puzzles me is how you can explain your arming yourself in the face of my assurance that there were no human beings on this world, something I am still certain is a fact. Did you foresee the dogs?”

“No,” said Trevize. “I certainly didn’t. Not consciously, at least. And I don’t habitually go armed, either. It never even occurred to me to put on weapons at Comporellon. —But I can’t allow myself to trip into the trap of feeling it was magic, either. It couldn’t have been. I suspect that once we began talking about unbalanced ecologies earlier, I somehow had an unconscious glimpse of animals grown dangerous in the absence of human beings. That is clear enough in hindsight, but I might have had a whiff of it in foresight. Nothing more than that.”

Bliss said, “Don’t dismiss it that casually. I participated in the same conversation concerning unbalanced ecologies and I didn’t have that same foresight. It is that special trick of foresight in you that Gaia values. I can see, too, that it must be irritating to you to have a hidden foresight the nature of which you cannot detect; to act with decision, but without clear reason.”

“The usual expression on Terminus is ‘to act on a hunch.’ ”

“On Gaia we say, ‘to know without thought.’ You don’t like knowing without thought, do you?”

“It bothers me, yes. I don’t like being driven by hunches. I assume the hunch has reason behind it, but not knowing the reason makes me feel I’m not in control of my own mind—a kind of mild madness.”

“And when you decided in favor of Gaia and Galaxia, you were acting on a hunch, and now you seek the reason.”

“I have said so at least a dozen times.”

“And I have refused to accept your statement as literal truth. For that I am sorry. I will oppose you in this no longer. I hope, though, that I may continue to point out items in Gaia’s favor.”

“Always,” said Trevize, “if you, in turn, recognize that I may not accept them.”

“Does it occur to you, then, that this Unknown World is reverting to a kind of savagery, and perhaps to eventual desolation and uninhabitability, because of the removal of a single species that is capable of acting as a guiding intelligence? If the world were Gaia, or better yet, a part of Galaxia, this could not happen. The guiding intelligence would still exist in the form of the Galaxy as a whole, and ecology, whenever unbalanced, and for whatever reason, would move toward balance again.”

“Does that mean that dogs would no longer eat?”

“Of course they would eat, just as human beings do. They would eat, however, with purpose, in order to balance the ecology under deliberate direction, and not as a result of random circumstance.”

Trevize said, “The loss of individual freedom might not matter to dogs, but it must matter to human beings. —And what if all human beings were removed from existence, everywhere, and not merely on one world or on several? What if Galaxia were left without human beings at all? Would there still be a guiding intelligence? Would all other life forms and inanimate matter be able to put together a common intelligence adequate for the purpose?”

Bliss hesitated. “Such a situation,” she said, “has never been experienced. Nor does there seem any likelihood that it will ever be experienced in the future.”