Prelude to Foundation

He looked up at her, blinking. “Yes, it does. I’ve sampled it here and there. It’s 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 different 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 in passing. Names aren’t given and there seems no interest in those other worlds except insofar as they directly impinge on the local world they speak of… at least as far as I can see from what I’ve read. In one place, they talked about ‘The Fifty.’ I don’t know what they meant. Fifty leaders? Fifty cities? It seemed to me to be fifty worlds.”

“Did they give a name to their own world, this world that seems to preoccupy them entirely?” asked Dors. “If they don’t call it Earth, what do they call it?”

“As you’d expect, they call it ‘the world’ or ‘the planet.’ Sometimes they call it ‘the Oldest’ or ‘the World of the Dawn,’ which has a poetic significance, I presume, that isn’t clear to me. I suppose one ought to read the Book entirely through and some matters will then grow to make more sense.” He looked down at the Book in his hand with some distaste. “It would take a very long time, though, and I’m not sure that I’d end up any the wiser.”

Dors sighed. “I’m sorry, Hari. You sound so disappointed.”

“That’s because I am disappointed. It’s my fault, though. I should not have allowed myself to expect too much.-At one point, come to think of it, they referred to their world as ‘Aurora.’ ”

“Aurora?” said Dors, lifting her eyebrows.

“It sounds like a proper name. It doesn’t make any sense otherwise, as far as I can see. Does it mean anything to you, Dors?”

“Aurora.” Dors thought about it with a slight frown on her face. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a planet with that name in the course of the history of the Galactic Empire or during the period of its growth, for that matter, but I won’t pretend to know the name of every one of the twenty-five million worlds. We could look it up in the University library-if we ever get back to Streeling. There’s no use trying to find a library here in Mycogen. Somehow I have a feeling that all their knowledge is in the Book. If anything isn’t there, they aren’t interested.”

Seldon yawned and said, “I think you’re right. In any case, there’s no use reading any more and I doubt that I can keep my eyes open any longer. Is it all right if I put out the light?”

“I would welcome it, Hari. And let’s sleep a little later in the morning.”

Then, in the dark, Seldon said softly, “Of course, some of what they say is ridiculous. For instance, they refer to a life expectancy on their world of between three and four centuries.”

“Centuries?”

“Yes, they count their ages by decades rather than by years. It gives you a queer feeling, because so much of what they say is perfectly matter-of-fact that when they come out with something that odd, you almost find yourself trapped into believing it.”