Right, this was it. The immersion bay. Ipan staggered into the array of vessels. The walk down the line, between banks of control panels, took an eternity. Hari concentrated on each step, placing each foot. Ipan’s field of view bobbed as the head seemed to slip around on liquid shoulders.
Here. His own vessel.
Dors’ tiktok was ready for him. It had seen him coming and latched itself to the board, covering the vital controls.
Ipan bent to the tiktok’s punch panel. He jabbed at the keys, remembering the access code.
Ipan’s fingers were too broad. They could not hit a single key at a time.
The room of bleached light was getting fuzzy. He made Ipan try the code again, but the stubby fingers mashed several keys at once.
The blue-white flies flapped at the edges of his vision. Ipan’s hands whacked in frustration at the punch-pad.
Think.Hari looked around. Ipan wasn’t going to last much longer. A desk nearby had a writing slate and pen.
Leave a note? Hope the right people find it…
He made Ipan stagger to the desk, grasp the pen. An idea flickered as he tried to write: I NEED…
He turned and tottered back to the capsule.
Concentrate.
Gripping the pen, he punched down with the butt. It struck a key cleanly. The blue flies flickered in his vision.
The access code was hard to remember now. He worked on it one number at a time. Stab, poke, jab-and it was done. A light winked from red to green.
He fumbled with the latches. Popped it open.
There lay Hari Seldon, peaceful, eyes closed.
Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.
He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan stared woozily at the meaningless lettering.
Hari himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.
He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan’s hands were worse now. It took three stabs with the pen to get the reviving program activated. Lights cycled from green to amber.
Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing all around his head and now they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry air, but there was no substance in it, no help…
Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The lamps up there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.
22.
Hari’s eyes snapped open.
The recovery program was still sending electrostims through his muscles. He let them jump and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even hungry, as he usually did after an immersion. How long had he been in the wilderness? At least five days.
He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Vaddo had gotten some silent alarm but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a tight little conspiracy.
He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes, but they seemed simple enough.
Ipan. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.
But first, Dors. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She looked well.
Vaddo must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the staff could tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple cover story: a couple who wanted a really long immersion. Vaddo had warned them, but no, they wanted it, so…A perfectly plausible story.
Dors’ eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.
He made a pan sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.
Blood was flowing steadily. Hari was surprised to find that he could not pick up the rich, pungent elements in the pan’s blood from smell alone. A human missed so much!
He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan’s breathing was regular. Dors was ready to get out by then, and he helped her disconnect.
“I was hiding in a tree and then-poof!” she said. “What a relief. How did you-”
“Let’s get moving,” he said.
As they left the room, she said, “Who can we trust? Whoever did this-” She stopped when she saw Vaddo. “Oh.”
Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.
“ Youdid this?”
“Ipan.”
“I never would have believed a pan could, could…”
“I doubt anyone’s been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just-well, it came out.”
He picked up Vaddo’s weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Vaddo had not wanted to awaken the rest of the station. That was promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the station personnel lived.
“Wait, what about Vaddo?”
“I’m going to wake up a doctor.”
They did-but Hari took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man Vaddo’s body.
The doctor got angry about that, but Hari had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He didn’t say anything, just gestured with the gun.
He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn’t talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.
And in any case, Vaddo had been dead for some time.
Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.
Alarms were ringing. He got an instant headache. The security officer showed up. He could see from her reaction that she had not been in on the plot. Can’t connect it to the Academic Potentate, then, he thought abstractly.
But how much did that prove? Imperial politics were subtle…Dors looked at him oddly the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought about helping Vaddo first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he knew deeply but could not explain.
But he understood immediately when Dors wanted to go to the station wall and call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the far wild darkness.
Part 6. Ancient Fogs
Galactic prehistory-…the destruction of all earlier records during the expansion of humanity through the Galaxy, with the attendant eras of warfare, leaves in shadow the entire problem of human origins., The enormous changes wrought on so many worlds also erased any evidence for much older, alien civilizations. These societies may have existed, though thereis no firm evidence for them. Some early historians believed that at least one type of remnant might have survived in the Galaxy: the electromagnetic records. These would have to be lodged in plasma streams or the coronal loops of stars, and thus lie beyond the detection of Expansionist technology. Even modem studies have found no such sentient structures. However, the virulent radiation levels at the Galactic core-where energy densities might promise an hospitable abode for magnetically based forms-make such investigations difficult and ambiguous. Another theory holds that cultures might have “written” themselves into pre-Empire computer codes, and thus now reside undetected in some banks of ancient data. Such speculations met with no proof and were discounted. Thus the entire problem of why the Galaxy was empty of advanced life when humanity ventured into it has no resolution…
1.
Voltaire scowled, vexed.
Had she in fact yielded to him, given herself up? Or was this a particularly fine simulation? True Joan, art this thou?
Certainly this fit one of his favorites: a romping play in prickly dry hay, up in the topmost loft of a big old barn, on a hot August day in long-lost Bordeaux.
Twit-wheeecalled a bird. Insects chirped, warm breezes blew woody scents. Her hair trailed over him as she mounted. He felt her adroit twists, delivered with an erotic precision that made him tremble with the need for release.