PART II. SOLARIA
5. THE ABANDONED WORLD
19
For the fifth time in her life, Gladia found herself on a spaceship. She did not remember, offhand, exactly how long ago it had been that she and Santirix had gone together to the world of Euterpe because its rain forests were widely recognized as incomparable, especially under the romantic glow of its bright satellite, Gemstone.
The rain forest had, indeed, been lush and green, with the trees carefully planted in rank and file and the animal life thoughtfully selected so as to provide color and delight, while avoiding venomous or other unpleasant creatures.
The satellite, fully 150 kilometers in diameter, was close enough to Euterpe to shine like a brilliant dot of sparkling light. It was so close to the planet that one could see it sweep west to east across the sky, outstripping the planet's slower rotational motion. It brightened as it rose toward zenith and dimmed as it dropped toward the horizon again. One watched it with fascination the first night, with less the second, and with a vague discontent the third - assuming the sky was clear on those nights, which it usually wasn't.
The native Euterpans, she noted, never looked at it, though they praised it loudly to the tourists, of course.
On the whole, Gladia had enjoyed the trip well enough, but what she remembered most keenly was the joy of her return to Aurora and her decision not to travel again except under dire need. (Come to think of it, it had to be at least eight decades ago.)
For a while, she had lived with the uneasy fear that her husband would insist on another trip, but he never mentioned one. It might well be, she sometimes thought at that time, that he had come to the same decision she had and feared she might be the one to want to travel.
It didn't make them unusual to avoid trips. Aurorans generally - Spacers generally, for that matter - tended to be stay-at-homes. Their worlds, their establishments, were too comfortable. After all, what pleasure could be greater than that of being taken care of by your own robots, robots who knew your every signal, and, for that matter, knew your ways and desires even without being told.
She stirred uneasily. Was that what D.G. had meant when he spoke of the decadence of a roboticized society?
But now she was back again in space, after all that time. And on an Earth ship, too.
She hadn't seen much of it, but the little she had glimpsed made her terribly uneasy. It seemed to be nothing but straight lines, sharp angles, and smooth surfaces. Everything that wasn't stark had been eliminated, apparently. It was as though nothing must exist but functionality. Even though she didn't know what was exactly functional about any particular object on the ship, she felt it to be all that was required, that nothing was to be allowed to interfere with taking the shortest distance between two points.
On everything Auroran (on everything Spacer, one might almost say, though Aurora was the most advanced in that respect), everything existed in layers. Functionality was at the bottom - one could not entirely rid one's self of that, except in what was pure ornament - but overlying that there was always something to satisfy the eyes and the senses, generally; and overlying that, something to satisfy the spirit.
How much better that was! - Or did it represent such an exuberance of human creativity that Spacers could no longer live with the unadorned Universe - and was that bad? Was the future to belong to these from-here-to-there geometrizers? Or was it just that the Settlers had not yet learned the sweetnesses of life?
But then, if life had so many sweetnesses to it, why had she found so few for herself?
She had nothing really to do on board this ship but to ponder and reponder such questions. This D.G., this Elijah descended barbarian, had put it into her head, with his calm assumption that the Spacer worlds were dying, even though he could see all about him even during the shortest stay on Aurora (surely, he would have to) that it was deeply embedded in wealth and security.
She had tried to escape her own thoughts by staring at the holofilms she had been supplied with and watching, with moderate curiosity, the images flickering and capering on the projection surface, as the adventure story (all were adventure stories) hastened from - event to event with little time left for conversation and none for thought - or enjoyment, either. Very like their furniture.
D.G. stepped in when she was in the middle of one of the films, but had stopped really paying attention. She was not caught by surprise. Her robots, who guarded her doorway, signaled his coming in ample time and would not have allowed him to enter if she were not in a position to receive him. Daneel entered with him.
D.G. said, "How are you doing?" Then, as her hand touched a contact and the images faded, shriveled, and were gone. He said, "You don't have to turn it off. I'll watch it with you."
"That's not necessary," she said. "I've had enough."
"Are you - comfortable?"
"Not entirely. I am - isolated."
"Sorry! But then, I was isolated on Aurora. They would allow none of my men to come with me."
"Are you having your revenge?"
"Not at all. For one thing, I allowed you two robots of your choice to accompany you. For another, it is not I but my crew who enforce this. They don't like either Spacers or robots. But why do you mind? Doesn't this isolation lessen your fear of infection?"
Gladia's eyes were haughty, but her voice sounded weary. "I wonder if I haven't grown too old to fear infection. In many ways, I think I have lived long enough. Then, too, I have my gloves, my nose filters, and - if necessary - my mask. And besides, I doubt that you will trouble to touch me."
"Nor will anyone else," said D.G. with a sudden edge of grimness to his voice, as his hand wandered to the object at the right side of his hip.
Her eyes followed the motion. "What is that?" she asked.
D.G. smiled and his beard seemed to glitter in the light. There were occasional reddish hairs among the brown. "A weapon," he said and drew it. He held it by a molded hilt that bulged above his hand as though the force of his grip were squeezing it upward. In front, facing Gladia, a thin cylinder stretched some fifteen centimeters forward. There was no opening visible.
"Does that kill people?" Gladia extended her hand toward it.
D.G. moved it quickly away. "Never reach for someone's weapon, my lady. That is worse than bad manners, for any Settler is trained to react violently to such a move and you may be hurt."
Gladia, eyes wide, withdrew her hand and placed both behind her back. She said, "Don't threaten harm. Daneel has no sense of humor in that respect. On Aurora, no one is barbarous enough to carry weapons."
"Well," said D.G., unmoved by the adjective, "we don't have robots to protect us. - And this is not a killing device. It is, in some ways, worse. It emits a kind of vibration that stimulates those nerve endings responsible for the sensation of pain. It hurts a good deal worse than anything you can imagine. No one would willingly endure it twice and someone carrying this weapon rarely has to use it. We call it a neuronic whip."
Gladia frowned. "Disgusting! We have our robots, but they never hurt anyone except in unavoidable emergency and then minimally."
D.G. shrugged. "That sounds very civilized, but a bit of pain - a bit of killing, even - is better than the decay of spirit brought about by robots. Besides, a neuronic whip is not intended to kill and your people have weapons on their spaceships that can bring about wholesale death and destruction.
"That's because we've fought wars early in our history, when our Earth heritage was still strong, but we've learned better."
"You used those weapons on Earth even after you supposedly learned better."
"That's - " she began and closed her mouth as though to bite off what she was about to say next.
D.G. nodded. "I know. You were about to say 'That's different.' Think of that, my lady, if you should catch yourself wondering why my crew doesn't like Spacers. Or why I don't. - But you are going to be useful to me, my lady, and I won't let my emotions get in the way."
"How am I going to be useful to you?"
"You are a Solarian."
"You keep saying that. More than twenty decades have passed. I don't know what Solaria is like now. I know nothing about it. What was Baleyworld like twenty decades ago?"
"It didn't exist twenty decades ago, but Solaria did and I shall gamble that you will remember something useful."
He stood up, bowed his head briefly in, a gesture of politeness that was almost mocking, and was gone.
20
Gladia maintained a thoughtful and troubled silence for a while and then she said, "He wasn't at all polite, was he?"
Daneel said, "Madam Gladia, the Settler is clearly under tension. He is heading toward a world on which two ships like his have been destroyed and their crews killed. He is going, into great danger, as is his crew."
"You always defend any human being, Daneel," said Gladia resentfully. "The danger exists for me, too, and I am not facing it voluntarily, but that does not force me into rudeness."
Daneel said nothing.
Gladia said, "Well, maybe it does. I have been a little rude, haven't I?"
"I don't think the Settler minded," said Daneel. "Might I suggest, madam, that you prepare yourself for bed. It is quite late."
"Very well. I'll prepare myself for bed, but I don't think I feel relaxed enough to sleep, Daneel."
"Friend Giskard assures me you will, madam, and he is usually right about such things."
And she did sleep.
21
Daneel and Giskard stood in the darkness of Gladia's cabin.
Giskard said, "She will sleep soundly, friend Daneel, and she needs the rest. She faces a dangerous trip."
"It seemed to me, friend Giskard," said Daneel, "that you influenced her to agree to go. I presume you had a reason."
"Friend Daneel, we know so little about the nature of the crisis that is now facing the Galaxy that we cannot safely refuse any action that might increase our knowledge. We must know what is taking place on Solaria and the only way we can do so is to go there - and the only way we can go is for us to arrange for Madam Gladia to go. As for influencing her, that required scarcely a touch. Despite her loud statements to the contrary, she was eager to go. There was an overwhelming desire within her to see Solaria. It was a pain within her that would not cease until she went."
"Since you say so, it is so, yet I find it puzzling. Had she not frequently made it plain that her life on Solaria was unhappy, that she had completely adopted Aurora and never wished to go back to her original home?"
"Yes, that was there, too. It was quite plainly in her mind. Both emotions, both feelings existed together and simultaneously. I have observed something of this sort in human minds frequently; two opposite emotions simultaneously present."
"Such a condition does not seem logical, friend Giskard."
"I agree and I can only conclude that human beings are not, at all times or in all respects, logical. That must be one reason that it is so difficult to work out the Laws governing human behavior. - In Madam Gladia's case, I have now and then been aware of this longing for Solaria. Ordinarily, it was well hidden, obscured by the far more intense antipathy she also felt for the world. When the news arrived that Solaria had been abandoned by its people, however, her feelings changed."
"Why so? What had the abandonment to do with the youthful experiences that led Madam Gladia to her antipathy? Or, having held in restraint her longing for the world the decades when it was a working society, why she lose that restraint once it became an abandoned planet and newly long for a world which must now be something utterly strange to her?"
"I cannot explain, friend Daneel, since the more knowledge I gather of the human mind, the more despair I feel at being unable to understand it. It is not an unalloyed advantage to see into that mind and I often envy you the simplicity of behavior control that results from your inability to see below the surface."
Daneel persisted. "Have you guessed an explanation, friend Giskard?"
"I suppose she feels a sorrow for the empty planet. She deserted it twenty decades ago - "
"She was driven out."
"It seems to her, now, to have been a desertion and I imagine she plays with the painful thought that she had set an example; that if she had not left, no one else would have and the planet would still be populated and happy. Since I cannot read her thoughts, I am only groping backward, perhaps inaccurately, from her emotions."
"But she could not have set an example, friend Giskard. Since it is twenty decades since she left, there can be no verifiable causal connection between the much earlier event and the much later one."
"I agree, but human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason. - In any case, Madam Gladia felt so sharply the longing to return that I felt it was necessary to release the inhibitory effect that kept her from agreeing to go. It required the merest touch. Yet though I feel it necessary for her to go, since that means she will take us there, I have the uneasy feeling, that the disadvantages might, just possibly, be greater than the advantages."
"In what way, friend Giskard?"
"Since the Council was eager to have Madam Gladia accompany the Settler, it may have been for the purpose of having Madam Gladia absent from Aurora during a crucial period when the defeat of Earth and its Settler worlds is being prepared."
Daneel seemed to be considering that statement. At least it was only after a distinct pause that he said, "What purpose would be served, in your opinion, in having Madam Gladia absent?"
"I cannot decide that, friend Daneel. I want your opinion."
"I have not considered this matter."
"Consider it now!" If Giskard had been human, the remark would have been an order.
There was an even longer pause and then Daneel said, "Friend Giskard, until the moment that Dr. Mandamus appeared in Madam Gladia's establishment, she had never shown any concern about international affairs. She was a friend of Dr. Fastolfe and of Elijah Baley, but this friendship was one of personal affection and did not have an ideological basis. Both of them, moreover, are now gone from us. She has an antipathy toward Dr. Amadiro and that is returned, but this is also a personal matter. The antipathy is two centuries old and neither has done anything material about it but have merely each remained stubbornly antipathetic. There can be no reason for Dr. Amadiro - who is now the dominant influence in the Council - to fear Madam Gladia or to go to the trouble of removing her."
Giskard said, "You overlook the fact, that in removing Madam Gladia, he also removes you and me. He would, perhaps, feel quite certain Madam Gladia would not leave without us, so can it be us he considers dangerous?"
"In the course of our existence, friend Giskard, we have never, in any way, given any appearance of having endangered Dr. Amadiro. What cause has he to fear us? He does not know of your abilities or of how you have made use of them. Why, then, should he take the trouble to remove us, temporarily, from Aurora?"
"Temporarily, friend Daneel? Why do you assume it is a temporary removal he plans? He knows, it may be, more than the Settler does of the trouble on Solaria and knows, also, that the Settler and his crew will be surely destroyed and Madam Gladia and you and I with them. Perhaps the destruction of the Settler's ship is his main aim, but he would consider the end of Dr. Fastolfe's friend and Dr. Fastolfe's robots to be an added bonus."
Daneel said, "Surely he would not risk war with the Settler worlds, for that may well come if the Settler's ship is destroyed and the minute pleasure of having us destroyed, when added in, would not make the risk worthwhile."
"Is it not possible, friend Daneel, that war is exactly what Dr. Amadiro has in mind; that it involves no risk in his estimation, so, that getting rid of us at the same time adds to his pleasure without increasing a risk that does not exist?"
Daneel said calmly, "Friend Giskard, that is not reasonable. In any war fought under present conditions, the Settlers would win. They are better suited, psychologically, to the rigors of war. They are more scattered and can, therefore, more successfully carry on hit-and-run tactics. They have comparatively little to lose in their relatively primitive worlds, while the Spacers have much to lose in their comfortable, highly organized ones. If the Settlers were willing to offer to exchange destruction of one of their worlds for one of the Spacers, the Spacers would have to surrender, at once."
"But would such a war be fought under present conditions? What if the Spacers had a new weapon that could be used to defeat the Settlers quickly? Might that not be the very crisis we are now facing?"
"In that case, friend Giskard, the victory could be better and more effectively gained in a surprise attack. Why go to the trouble of instigating a war, which the Settlers might begin by a surprise raid on Spacer worlds that would do considerable damage?"
"Perhaps the Spacers need to test the weapon and the destruction of a series of ships on Solaria represents the testing."
"The Spacers would have been most uningenious if they could not have found a method of testing that would not give away the new weapon's existence."
It was now Giskard's turn to consider. "Very well, then friend Daneel, how would you explain this trip we are on? How would you explain the Council's willingness - even eagerness - to have us accompany the Settler? The Settler said they would order Gladia to go and, in effect, they did."
"I have not considered the matter, friend Giskard."
"Then consider it now." - Again it had the flavor of an order.
Daneel said, "I will do so."
There was silence, one that grew protracted, but Giskard by no word or sign showed any impatience as he waited.
Finally, Daneel said - slowly, as though he were feeling his way along strange avenues of thought - I do not think that Baleyworld - or any of the Settler worlds - has a clear right to appropriate robotic property on Solaria. Even though the Solarians have themselves left or have, perhaps, died out, Solaria remains a Spacer world, even if an unoccupied one - Certainly, the remaining forty-nine Spacer worlds would reason so. Most of all, Aurora would reason so - if it felt in command of the situation."
Giskard considered that. "Are you now saying, friend Daneel, that the destruction of the two Settler ships was the Spacer way of enforcing their proprietorship of Solaria?"
Daneel said, "No, that would not be the way if Aurora, the leading Spacer power, felt in command of the situation. Aurora would then simply have announced that Solaria, empty or not, was off-limits to Settler vessels and would have threatened reprisals against the home worlds if any Settler vessel entered the Solarian planetary system. And they would have established a cordon of ships and sensory stations about that planetary system. There was no such warning, no such action, friend Giskard. Why, then, destroy ships that might have been kept away from the world quite easily in the first place?"
"But the ships were destroyed, friend Daneel. Will you make use of the basic illogicality of the human mind as an explanation?"
"Not unless I have to. Let us for the moment take that destruction simply as given. Now consider the consequence - The captain of a single Settler vessel approaches Aurora, demands permission to discuss the situation with the Council, insists on taking an Auroran citizen with him to investigate events on Solaria, - and the Council gives in to everything. If destroying the ships without prior warning is too strong an action for Aurora, giving in to the Settler captain so cravenly is far too weak an action. Far from seeking a war, Aurora, in giving in, seems to be willing to do anything at all to ward off the possibility of war."
"Yes," said Giskard, "I see that this is a possible way of interpreting events. But what follows?"
"It seems to me," said Daneel, "that the Spacer worlds are not yet so weak that they must behave with such servility - and, even if they were, the pride of centuries of overlordship would keep them from doing so. It must be something other than weakness that is driving them. I have pointed out that they cannot be deliberately instigating a war, so it is much more likely that they are playing for time."
"To what end, friend Daneel?"
"They want to destroy the Settlers, but they are not yet prepared. They let this Settler have what he wants to avoid a war until they are ready to fight one on their own terms. I am only surprised that they did not offer to send an Auroran warship with him. If this analysis is correct - and I think it is - Aurora cannot possibly have had anything to do with the incidents on Solaria. They would not indulge in pinpricks, that could only serve to alert the Settlers before they are ready with something devastating."
"Then how account for these pinpricks, as you call them, friend Daneel?"
"We will find out perhaps when we land on Solaria. It may be that Aurora is as curious as we are and the Settlers are and that that is another reason why they have cooperated with the captain, even to the point of allowing Madam Gladia to accompany him."
It was now Giskard's turn to remain silent. Finally he said, "And what is this mysterious devastation that they plan?"
"Earlier, we spoke of a crisis arising from the Spacer plan to defeat Earth, but we used Earth in its general sense, implying the Earthpeople together with their descendents on the Settler worlds. However, if we seriously suspect the preparation of a devastating blow that will allow the Spacers to defeat their enemies at a stroke, we can perhaps refine our view. Thus, they cannot be planning a blow at a Settler world. Individually, the Settler worlds are dispensable and the remaining Settler worlds will promptly strike back. Nor can they be planning a blow at several or at all the Settler worlds. There are too many of them; they are too diffusely spread. It is not likely that all the strikes will succeed and those Settler worlds that survive will, in fury and despair, bring devastation upon the Spacer worlds."
"You reason, then, friend Daneel, that it will be a blow at Earth itself."
"Yes, friend Giskard. Earth contains the vast majority of the short-lived human beings; it is the perennial source of emigrants to the Settler worlds and is the chief raw material for the founding of new ones; it is the revered homeland of all the Settlers. If Earth were somehow destroyed, the Settler movement might never recover."
"But would not the Settler worlds then retaliate as strongly and as forcefully as they would if one of themselves were destroyed? That would seem to me to be inevitable."
"And to me, friend Giskard. Therefore, it seems to me that unless the Spacer worlds have gone insane, the blow would have to be a subtle one; one for which the Spacer worlds would seem to bear no responsibility."
"Why not such a subtle blow against the Settler worlds, which hold most of the actual war potential of the Earthpeople?"
"Either because the Spacers feel the blow against Earth would be more psychologically devastating or because the nature of the blow is such that it would work only against Earth and not against the Settler worlds. I suspect the latter, since Earth is a unique world and has a society that is not like that of any other world - Settler or, for that matter, Spacer."
"To summarize, then, friend Daneel, you come to the conclusion that the Spacers are planning a subtle blow against Earth that will destroy it without evidence of themselves as the cause, and one that would not work against any other world, and that they are not yet ready to launch that blow."
"Yes, friend Giskard, but they may soon be ready - and once they are ready, they will have to strike immediately. Any delay will increase the chance of some leak that will give them away."
"To deduce all this, friend Daneel, from the small indications we have is most praiseworthy. Now tell me the nature of the blow. What is it, precisely, that the Spacers plan?"
"I have come this far, friend Giskard, across very shaky ground, without being certain that my reasoning is entirely sound. But even if we suppose it is, I can go no further. I fear I do not know and cannot imagine what the nature of the blow might be."
Giskard said, "But we cannot take appropriate measures to counteract the blow and resolve the crisis until we know what its nature will be. If we must wait until the blow reveals itself by its results, it will then be too late to do anything."
Daneel said, "If any Spacer knows the nature of the forthcoming event, it would be Amadiro. Could you not force Amadiro to announce it publicly and thus alert the Settlers and make it unusable?"
"I could not do that, friend Daneel, without virtually destroying his mind. I doubt that I could hold it together long enough to allow him to make the announcement. I could not do such a thing."
"Perhaps, then," said Daneel, "we may console ourselves with the thought that my reasoning is wrong and that no blow against Earth is being prepared."
"No," said Giskard. "It is my feeling that you are right and that we must simply wait - helplessly."
22
Gladia waited, with an almost painful anticipation, for the conclusion of the final Jump. They would then be close enough to Solaria to make out its sun as a disk.
It would just be a disk, of course, a featureless circle of light, subdued to the point where it could be watched unblinkingly after that light had passed through the appropriate filter.
Its appearance would not be unique. All the stars that carried, among their planets, a habitable world in the human sense had a long list of property requirements that ended by making them all resemble one another. They were all single stars - all not much larger or smaller than the sun that shone on Earth - none too active, or too old, or too quiet, or too young, or too hot, or too cool, or too offbeat in chemical composition. All had sunspots and flares and prominences and all looked just about the same to the eye. It took careful spectroheliography to work out the details that made each star unique.
Nevertheless, when Gladia found herself staring at a circle of light that was absolutely nothing more than a circle of light to her, she found her eyes welling with tears. She had never given the sun a thought when she had lived on Solaria; it was just the eternal source of light and heat, rising and falling in a steady rhythm. When she had left Solaria, she had watched that sun disappear behind her with nothing but a feeling of thankfulness. She had no memory - of it that she valued.
Yet she was weeping silently. She was ashamed of herself for being so affected for no reason that she could explain, but that didn't stop the weeping.
She made a stronger effort when the signal light gleamed. It had to be D.G. at the door; no one else would approach her cabin.
Daneel said, "Is he to enter, madam? You seem emotionally moved."
"Yes, I'm emotionally moved, Daneel, but let him in. I imagine it won't come as a surprise to him."
Yet it did. At least, he entered with a smile on his bearded face - and that smile disappeared almost at once. He stepped back and said in a low voice, "I will return later."
"Stay!" said Gladia harshly. "This is nothing. A silly reaction of the moment." She sniffed and dabbed angrily at her eyes. "Why are you here?"
"I wanted to discuss Solaria with you. If we succeed with a microadjustment, we'll land tomorrow. If you're not quite up to a discussion now - "
"I am quite up to it. In fact, I have a question for you. Why is it we took dime Jumps to get here? One Jump would have been sufficient. One was sufficient when I was taken from Solaria to Aurora twenty decades ago. Surely the technique of space travel has not retrogressed since."
D.G.'s grin returned. "Evasive action. If an Auroran ship was following us, I wanted to - confuse it, shall we say."
"Why should one follow us?"
"Just a thought, my lady. The Council was a little overeager to help, I thought. They suggested that an Auroran ship join me in my expedition to Solaria."
"Well, it might have helped, mightn't it?"
"Perhaps - if I were quite certain that Aurora wasn't behind all this. I told the Council quite plainly that I would do without - or, rather" - he pointed his finger at Gladia - "Just with you. Yet might not the Council send a ship to accompany me even against my wish - out of pure kindness of heart, let us say? Well, I still don't want one; I expect enough trouble without having to look nervously over my shoulder at every moment. So I made myself hard to follow. - How much do you know about Solaria, my lady?"
"Haven't I told you often enough? Nothing! Twenty decades have passed."
"Now, madam, I'm talking about the psychology of the Solarians. That can't have changed in merely twenty decades. - Tell me why they have abandoned their planet."
"The story, as I've heard it," said Gladia calmly, "is that their population has been steadily declining. A combination of premature deaths and very few births is apparently responsible."
"Does that sound reasonable to you?"
"Of course it does. Births have always been few." Her face twisted in memory. "Solarian custom does not make impregnation easy, either naturally, artificially, or ectogenetically."
"You never had children, madam?"
"Not on Solaria."
"And the premature death?"
"I can only guess. I suppose it arose out of a feeling of failure. Solaria was clearly not working out, even though the Solarians had placed a great deal of emotional fervor into their world's having the ideal society - not only one that was better than Earth had ever had, but more nearly perfect than that of any other Spacer world."
"Are you saying that Solaria was dying of the collective broken heart of its people?"
"If you want to put it in that ridiculous way," said Gladia, displeased.
D.G. shrugged. "It seems to be what you're saying. But would they really leave? Where would they go? How would they live?"
"I don't know."
"But, Madam Gladia, it is well known that Solarians are accustomed to enormous tracts of land, serviced by many thousands of robots, so that each Solarian is left in almost complete isolation. If they abandon Solaria, where can they go to find a society that would humor them in this fashion? Have they, in fact, gone to any of the other Spacer worlds?"
"Not as far as I know. But then, I'm not in their confidence."
"Can they have found a new world for themselves? If so, it would be a raw one and require much in the way of terraforming. Would they be ready for that?"
Gladia shook her head. "I don't know."
"Perhaps they haven't really left."
"Solaria, I understand, gives every evidence of being empty."
"What evidence is that?"
"All interplanetary communication has ceased. All radiation from the planet, except that consistent with robot work or clearly due to natural causes has ceased."
"How do you know that?"
"That is the report on the Auroran news."
"Ah! The report! Could it be that someone is lying?"
"What would be the purpose of such a lie?" Gladia stiffened at the suggestion.
"So that our ships would be lured to the world and destroyed."
"That's ridiculous, D.G." Her voice grew sharper. "What would the Spacers gain by destroying two trading vessels through so elaborate a subterfuge?"
"Something has destroyed two Settler vessels on a supposedly empty planet. How do you explain that?"
"I can't. I presume we are going to Solaria in order to find an explanation."
D.G. regarded her gravely. "Would you be able to guide me to the section of the world that was yours when you lived on Solaria?"
"My estate?" She returned his stare, astonished.
"Wouldn't you like to see it again?"
Gladia's heart skipped a beat. "Yes, I would, but why my place?"
"The two ships that were destroyed landed in widely different spots on the planet and yet each was destroyed fairly quickly. Though every spot may be deadly, it seems to me that yours might be less so than others."
"Why?"
"Because there we might receive help from the robots. You would know them, wouldn't you? They do last more than twenty decades, I suppose. Daneel and Giskard have. And those that were there when you lived on your estate would still remember you, wouldn't they? They would treat you as their mistress and recognize the duty they owed you even beyond that which they would owe to ordinary human beings."
Gladia said, "There were ten thousand robots on my estate. I knew perhaps three dozen by sight. Most of the rest I never saw and they may not have ever seen me. Agricultural robots are not very advanced, you know, nor are forestry robots or mining robots. The household robots would still remember me - if they have not been sold or transferred since I left. Then, too, accidents happen and some robots don't last twenty decades. - Besides, whatever you may think of robot memory, human memory is fallible and I might remember none of them."
"Even so," said D.G., "can you direct me to your estate?"
"By latitude and longitude? No."
"I have charts of Solaria. Would that help?"
"Perhaps approximately. It's in the south-central portion of the northern continent of Heliona."
"And once we're approximately there, can you make use of landmarks for greater precision - if we skim the Solarian surface?"
"By seacoasts and rivers, you mean?"
"Yes."
"I think I can."
"Good! And meanwhile, see if you can remember the names and appearances of any of your robots. It may prove the difference between living and dying."
23
D.G. Baley seemed a different person with his officers. The broad smile was not evident, nor the easy indifference to danger. He sat, poring over the charts, with a look of intense concentration on his face.
He said, "If the woman is correct, we've got the estate pinned down within narrow limits - and if we move into the flying mode, we should get it exactly before too long."
"Wasteful of energy, Captain," muttered Jamin Oser, who was second-in-command. He was tall and, like D.G., well bearded. The beard was russet-colored, as were his eyebrows, which arched over bright blue eyes. He looked rather old, but one got the impression that this was due to experience rather than years.
"Can't help it," said D.G. "If we had the antigravity that the technos keep promising us just this side of eternity, it would be different." He stared at the chart again and said, "She says it would be along this river about sixty kilometers upstream from where it runs into this larger one. If she is correct."
"You keep doubting it," said Chandrus Nadirhaba, whose insigne showed him to be Navigator and responsible for bringing the ship down in the correct spot - or, in any case, the indicated spot. His dark skin and neat mustache accentuated the handsome strength of his face.
"She's recalling a situation over a time gap of twenty decades," said D.G. "What details would you remember of a site you haven't seen for just three decades? She's not a robot. She may have forgotten."
"Then what was the point of bringing her?" muttered Oser. "And the other one and the robot? It unsettles the crew and I don't exactly like it, either."
D.G. looked up, eyebrows bunching together. He said in a low voice, "It doesn't matter on this ship what you don't like or what the crew doesn't like, mister. I have the responsibility and I make the decisions. We're all liable to be dead within six hours of landing unless that woman can save us."
Nadirhaba said coolly, "If we die, we die. We wouldn't be Traders if we didn't know that sudden death was the other side of big profits. And for this mission, we're all volunteers. Just the same, it doesn't hurt to know where the death's coming from, Captain. If you've figured it out, does it have to be a secret?"
"No, it doesn't. The Solarians are supposed to have left, but suppose a couple of hundred stayed quietly behind just to watch the store, so to speak."
"Not so secret," said D.G. "Solaria is littered with robots. That's the whole reason Settler ships landed on the world in the first place. Each remaining Solarian might have a trillion robots at his disposal. An enormous army."
Eban Kalaya was in charge of communications. So far he had said nothing, aware as he was of his Junior status, which seemed further marked by the fact that he was the only one of the four officers present without facial hair of any kind. Now he ventured a remark. "Robots," he said, "cannot injure human beings."
"So we are told," said D.G. dryly, "but what do we know about robots? What we do know is that two ships have been destroyed and about a hundred human beings - good Settlers all - have been killed on widely separated parts of a world littered with robots. How could it have been done except by robots? We don't, know what kind of orders a Solarian might give robots or by what tricks the so-called First Law of Robotics might be circumvented.
"So we," he went on, "have to do a little circumventing of our own. As best as we can tell from the reports reaching us from the other ships before they were destroyed, all the men on board ship debarked on landing. It was an empty world after all and they wanted to stretch their legs, breathe fresh air, and look over the robots they had come to get. Their ships were unprotected and they themselves unready when the attack came.
"That won't happen this time. I'm getting off, but the rest of you are going to stay on board the ship or, in its near vicinity."
Nadirhaba's dark eyes glared disapproval. "Why you, Captain? If you need someone to act as bait, anyone, else can be spared more easily than you can be."
"I appreciate the thought, Navigator," said D.G., "but I will not be alone. Coming with me well be the Spacer woman and her companions. She is the one who is essential. She may know some of the robots; at any rate, some may know her. I am hoping that though the robots may have been ordered to attack us, they won't attack her."
"You mean they'll remember Ol' Missy and fall to their knees," said Nadirhaba dryly.
"If you want to put it that way. That's why I brought her and that's why we've landed on her estate. And I've got to be with her because I'm the one who knows her - somewhat - and I've got to see that she behaves. Once we have survived by using her as a shield and in that way have learned exactly what we're facing, we can proceed on our own. We won't need her any more."
Oser said, "And then what do we do with her? Jettison her into space?"
D.G. roared, "We take her back to Aurora!"
Oser said, "I'm bound to tell you, Captain, that the crew would consider that a wasteful and unnecessary trip. They will feel that we can simply leave her on this blasted world. It's where she comes from, after all."
"Yes," said D.G. "That will be the day, won't it, when I take orders from the crew."
"I'm sure you won't," said Oser, "but the crew has its opinions and an unhappy crew makes for a dangerous voyage."