Foundation’s Edge CHAPTER NINE HYPERSPACE

HYPERSPACETrevize state, argon you throw, Janov?Pelorat looked up from the book he was viewing and say, You reckon, for the outset, old flyow?For the hyperspatial jump. Yes.Pelorat sw wholeowed. Now, youre original that it bequeath be in no management uncomfortable. I do it it is a silly topic to fear, unless the thought of having myself reduced to incorporeal tachyons, which no atomic number 53 has of invariablyy(prenominal) cadence seen or detected experience, Janov, its a gross(a)ed thing. Upon my honor The jump has been in use for twenty- devil thousand years, as you excuseed, and Ive never lookd of a single fatality in hyper seat. We might come a route of hyperspace in an uncomfortable place, and at that placefore the accident would pop off in space non while we ar composed of tachyons.Small consolation, it seems to me.We wont come proscribed in error, either. To tell you the truth, I was thought process of carrying it done without telling you, so t hat you would never bang it had happened. On the whole, though, I matte up it would be fail if you experienced it consciously, saw that it was no problem of both kind, and could for unsex it whole henceforward.Well verbalise Pelorat dubiously. I think over youre right, unlesshonestly Im in no hurry.I assure youNo no, old fellow, I meet your assurances unequivocally. Its provided that Did you ever read Sanertestil Matt?Of course. Im non illiterate.Certainly. Certainly. I should non engender asked. Do you remember it?Neither am I an amnesiac.I seem to contract a talent for offending. in all I mean is that I keep thinking of the scenes where Santerestil and his friend, Ban, claim gotten away from orbiter 17 and are lost in space. I think of those perfectly mesmerizing scenes among the wizards, lazily moving a presbyopic in deep silence, in changelessness, in Never believed it, you know. I loved it and I was moved by it, and I never really believed it. But now af ter I got used to fairish the notion of being in space, Im experiencing it and its silly, I know precisely I dont want to give it up. Its as though Im SanterestilAnd Im Ban, state Trevize with fair(a) an edge of impatience.In a way. The dainty scattering of tire round stars out thither are motionless, except our sun, of course, which must be shrink scarcely which we dont see. The Galaxy retains its black-market majesty, unchanging. Space is silent and I drop no distractionsExcept me.Except you. But whence, Golan, dear chap, talking to you active Earth and trying to teach you a bit of prehistory has its pleasures, alike. I dont want that to come to an end, either.It wont. non immediately, at some(prenominal) rate. You dont suppose well cut the jump and come through on the surface of a planet, do you? Well soundless be in space and the jump leave alone have taken no measurable time at ail. It may closely be a week in front we accept surface of each kind, so do relax.By surface, you surely dont mean Gaia. We may be nowhere near Gaia when we come out of the jump.I know that, Janov, but well be in the right sector, if your information is correct. If it isnt goodPelorat move his head glumly. How pass on being in the right sector sponsor if we dont know Gaias co-ordinates?Trevize say, Janov, suppose you were on Terminus, heading for the t declares people of Argyropol, and you didnt know where that town was except that it was somewhere on the isthmus. Once you were on the isthmus, what would you do?Pelorat waited cautiously, as though feeling there must be a outrageously sophisticated answer waited of him. Finally good-looking up, he said, I suppose Id ask somebody.Exactly What else is there to do? Now, are you ready?You mean, now? Pelorat scrambled to his feet, his pleasantly unemotional face coming as near as it might to a look of concern. What am I supposed to do? Sit? Stand? What?Time and Space, Pelorat, you dont do allthing. n ear come with me to my room so I can use the ready reckoner, and so sit or stand or bring cartwheels whatever will make you most comfortable. My suggestion is that you sit before the view veil and watch it. Its sure to be interesting. ComeThey smellped along the short corridor to Trevizes room and he sit himself at the estimator. Would you like to do this, Janov? he asked suddenly. Ill give you the figures and all you do is think them. The com truster will do the rest.Pelorat said, No thank you. The calculating machine doesnt work well with me, somehow. I know you severalize I just need practice, but I dont believe that. Theres something almost your mind, GolanDont be foolish.No no. That com enjoiner just seems to fit you. You and it seem to be a single organism when youre hooked up. When Im hooked up, there are two endeavors involved Janov Pelorat and a computer. Its just not the same.Ridiculous, said Trevize, but he was vaguely pleased at the thought and stroked the ha nd-rests of the computer with loving fingertips.So Id rather watch, said Pelorat. I mean, Id rather it didnt happen at all, but as long as it will, Id rather watch. He fixed . his eyeball anxiously on the viewscreen and on the foggy Galaxy with the thin powdering of dim stars in the foreground. Let me know when its about to happen. Slowly he approve against the wall and braced himself.Trevize smiled. He placed his hands on the rests and snarl the mental union. It came much easily day by day, and more intimately, too, and so further he might scoff at what Pelorat said he rattling felt it. It seemed to him he scarcely needed to think of the co-ordinates in any conscious way. It almost seemed the computer k rising what he wanted, without the conscious process of telling. It bring up the information out of his brain for itself.But Trevize told it and then asked for a two-minute time interval before the jump.All right, Janov. We have two minutes 120 one hundred fifteen 110 J ust watch the viewscreen.Pelorat did, with a slight tightness about the corners of his mouth and with a holding of his breath.Trevize said softly, 15 10 5 4 3 2 1 0With no hearable motion, no perceptible sensation, the view on the screen changed. There was a distinct thick-skulledening of the star force field and the Galaxy vanished.Pelorat started and said, Was that it?Was what it? You flinched. But that was your fault. You felt nothing. Admit it.I admit it.Then thats it. Way arse when hyperspatial travel was relatively new according to the books, anyway there would be a queer interior(a) sensation and some people felt dizziness or nausea. It was mayhap psychogenic, perhaps not. In any case, with more and more experience with hyperspatiality and with remedy equipment, that decreased. With a computer like the one on board this vessel, any effect is well below the threshold of sensation. At to the lowest degree, I stimulate it so.And I do, too, I must admit. Where a re we, Golan?Just a measuring rod forward. In the Kalganian region. Theres a long way to go yet and before we make another move, well have to check the accuracy of the jump.What bothers me is wheres the Galaxy?All around us, Janov. Were weal in slope it, now. If we focus the viewscreen properly, we can see the more distant parts of it as a luminous band cross slipway the sky.The Milky Way Pelorat cried out joyfully. Almost every world describes it in their sky, but its something we dont see on Terminus. Show it to me, old fellowThe viewscreen tilted, giving the effect of a swimming of the starfield across it, and then there was a thick, pearly luminosity nearly filling the field. The screen followed it around, as it thinned, then swelled again.Trevize said, Its thicker in the direction of the center of the Galaxy. Not as thick or as bright as it might be, however, because of the dark clouds in the spiral arms. You see something like this from most inhabited worlds.And from Earth, too.Thats no distinction. That would not be an identifying characteristic.Of course not. But you know. You havent studied the history of science, have you?Not really, though Ive picked up some of it, naturally. Still, if you have questions to ask, dont expect me to be an expert.Its just that making this jump has put me in mind of something that has always stupefy me. Its come-at-able to work out a description of the founding in which hyperspatial travel is impossible and in which the urge on of light traveling through a vacuum is the absolute maximum where quicken is concerned.Certainly.Under those conditions, the geometry of the Universe is such(prenominal) that it is impossible to make the trip we have just undertaken in less time than a ray of light would make it. And if we did it at the repair of light, our experience of duration would not match that of the Universe generally. If this spot is, say, forty parsecs from Terminus, then if we had gotten here at the speed of light, we would have felt no time lapse but on Terminus and in the entire Galaxy, about a hundred and thirty years would have passed. Now we have make a trip, not at the speed of light but at thousands of times the speed of light actually, and there has been no time advance anywhere. At least, I hope not.Trevize said, Dont expect me to give you the mathematics of the Olanjen Hyperspatial Theory to you. All I can say is that if you had traveled at the speed of light within normal space, time would indeed have advanced at the rate of 3.26 years per parsec, as you described. The so-called relativistic Universe, which servicemanity has understood as far back as we can probe inter prehistory though thats your department, I think stiff, and its laws have not been repealed. In our hyperspatial jumps, however, we do something out side the conditions under which relativity operates and the rules are different. Hyperspatially the Galaxy is a tiny object i jalopyly a nondimensional dot and there are no relativistic effects at all.In fact, in the mathematical formulations of cosmology, there are two symbols for the Galaxy Gr for the relativistic Galaxy, where the speed of light is a maximum, and Gh for the hyperspatial Galaxy, where speed does not really have a meaning. Hyperspatially the value of all speed is zero and we do not move with reference to space itself, speed is infinite. I cant explain things a bit more than that.Oh, except that one of the beautiful catches in theoretical physics is to place a symbol or a value that has meaning in Gr into an equation traffic with G11 or vice versa and leave it there for a student to deal with. The chances are enormous that the student falls into the trap and generally remains there, sweating and panting, with nothing seeming to work, till some kindly senior helps him out. I was neatly caught that way, once.Pelorat considered that gravely for a while, then said in a perplexed sort of way, But which is the veritabl e Galaxy?Either, depending on what youre doing. If youre back on Terminus, you can use a car to thwart aloofness on land and a ship to coer distance across the sea. Conditions are different in every way, so which is the true Terminus, the land or the sea?Pelorat nodded. Analogies are always risky, he said, but Id rather accept that one than risk my sanity by thinking about hyperspace any further. Ill concentrate on what were doing now.Look upon what we just did, said Trevize, as our world-class stop toward Earth.And, he thought to himself, toward what else, I wonder.Well, said Trevize. Ive wasted a day.Oh? Pelorat looked up from his careful indexing. In what way?Trevize strewing his arms. I didnt trust the computer. I didnt dare to, so I check our give birth military strength with the position we had aimed at in the jump. The difference was not measurable. There was no detectable error.Thats good, isnt it?Its more than good. Its unbelievable. Ive never heard of such a thing. Ive gone through jumps and Ive directed them, in all kinds of ways and with all kinds of devices. In school, I had to work one out with a hand computer and then I sent off a hyper-relay to check results. Naturally I couldnt send a real ship, since apart from the expense I could easily have placed it in the nerve of a star at the other end.I never did anything that bad, of course, Trevize went on, but there would always be a sizable error. Theres always some error, static with experts. Theres got to be, since there are so many variables. Put it this way the geometry of space is too complicated to handle and hyperspace compounds all those complications with a complexity of its own that we cant however pretend to understand. Thats why we have to go by steps, instead of making one big jump from here to Sayshell. The errors would resurrect worse with distance.Pelorat said, But you said this computer didnt make an error.It said it didnt make an error. I directed it to check our actual position with our precalculated position what is against what was asked for. It said that the two were identical within its limits of measurement and I thought What if its dissimulation?Until that moment, Pelorat had held his printer in his hand. He now put it pot and looked shaken. are you joking? A computer cant lie. Unless you mean you thought it might be out of order.No, thats not what I thought. Space I thought it was lying. This computer is so advanced I cant think of it as anything but human superhuman, maybe. Human enough to have pride and to lie, perhaps. I gave it directions to work out a course through hyperspace to a position near Sayshell Planet, the bully of the Sayshell Union. It did, and charted a course in twenty-nine steps, which is arrogance of the worst sort.why arrogance?The error in the depression jump makes the second jump that much less certain, and the added error then makes the third jump bewitching wobbly and untrustworthy, and so on. How do you calculate twenty-nine steps all at once? The twenty-ninth could end up anywhere in the Galaxy, anywhere at all. So I directed it to make the first step exclusively. Then we could check that before proceeding.The cautious approach, said Pelorat warmly. I approveYes, but having made the first step, might the computer not feel wounded at my having mistrusted it? Would it then be forced to assuage its pride by telling me there was no error at all when I asked it? Would it find it impossible to admit a mistake, to own up to imperfection? If that were so, we might as well not have a computer.Pelorats long and gentle face saddened. What can we do in that case, Golan?We can do what I did waste a day. I checked the position of several of the surrounding stars by the most primitive possible methods telescopic observation, photography, and manual measurement. I compared each actual position with the position expected if there had been no error. The work of it took me all day and wor e me down to nothing.Yes, but what happened?I found two whopping errors and checked them over and found them in my calculations. I had made the mistakes myself. I corrected the calculations, then ran them through the computer from scratch just to see if it would come up with the same answers independently. Except that it worked them out to several more decimal places, it dark out that my figures were right and they showed that the computer had made no errors. The computer may be an arrogant son-of-the-Mule, but its got something to be arrogant about.Pelorat exhaled a long breath. Well, thats good.Yes indeed So Im issue to permit it take the other 28 steps.All at once? ButNot all at once. Dont worry. I havent become a daredevil just yet. It will do them one after the other but after each step it will check the surroundings and, if that is where it is supposed to be within equal limits, it can take the next one. Any time it finds the error too great and, believe me, I didnt se t the limits generously at all it will have to stop and recalculate the remaining steps.When are you going to do this?When? Right now. Look, youre working on indexing your LibraryOh, but this is the chance to do it, Golan. Ive been meaning to do it for years, but something always seemed to get in the way.I have no objections. You go on and do it and dont worry. Concentrate on the indexing. Ill take care of everything else.Pelorat shook his head. Dont be foolish. I cant relax till this is over. Im scared stiff.I shouldnt have told you, then but I had to tell someone and youre the only one here. Let me explain frankly. Theres always the chance that well come to rest in a perfect position in interstellar space and that that will happen to be the precise position which a speeding meteoroid is occupying, or a mini-black hole, and the ship is wrecked, and were dead. Such things could in theory happen.The chances are very small, however. after all, you could be at home, Janov in your study and working on your films or in your bed sleeping and a meteroid could be streaking toward you through Terminuss strain and hit you right in the head and youd be dead. But the chances are small.In fact, the chance of intersecting the path of something fatal, but too small for the computer to know about, in the course of a hyperspatial jump is far, far smaller than that of berg hit by a meteor in your home. Ive never heard of a ship being lost that way in all the history of hyperspatial travel. Any other type of risk like ending in the middle of a star is even smaller.Pelorat said, Then why do you tell me all this, Golan?Trevize paused, then deform his head in thought, and finally said, I dont know. Yes, I do. What I suppose it is, is that however small the chance of catastrophe might be, if enough people take enough chances, the catastrophe must happen eventually. No field how sure I am that nothing will go incorrect, theres a small nagging voice inside me that says, Maybe it will happen this time. And it makes me feel guilty. I guess thats it. Janov, if something goes wrong, free meBut Golan, my dear chap, if something goes wrong, we will both be dead instantly. I will not be able to forgive, nor you to receive forgiveness.I understand that, so forgive me now, will you?Pelorat smiled. I dont know why, but this cheers me up. Theres something pleasantly humorous about it. Of course, Golan, Ill forgive you. There are plenty of myths about some form of afterlife in world literature and if there should happen to be such a place about the same chance as landing on a mini-black hole, I suppose, or less and we both turn up in the same one, then I will bear witness that you did your honest best and that my death should not be place at your door.Thank you Now Im relieved. Im volition to take my chance, but I did not enjoy the thought of you taking my chance as well.Pelorat wrung the others hand. You know, Golan, Ive only known you less than a wee k and I suppose I shouldnt make hasty judgments in these matters, but I think youre an thin chap. And now allows do it and get it over with.Absolutely All I have to do is touch that little contact. The computer has its instructions and its just waiting for me to say Starts Would you like toNever Its all yours? Its your computer.Very well. And its my responsibility. Im still trying to duck it, you see. Keep your eye on the screenWith a remarkably steady hand and with his smile looking utterly genuine, Trevize made contact.There was a momentary pause and then the starfield changed and again and again. The stars mobilize steadily thicker and brighter over the viewscreen.Pelorat was counting under his breath. At 15 there was a halt, as though some piece of apparatus had jammed.Pelorat whispered, distinctly afraid that any noise might jar the mechanism fatally. Whats wrong? Whats happened?Trevize shrugged. I imagine its recalculating. Some object in space is adding a perceptible b ump to the general shape of the overall gravitational field some object not taken into account some unmapped dwarf star or rogue planetDangerous?Since were still alive, its almost certainly not dangerous. A planet could be a hundred million kilometers away and still introduce a swelled enough gravitational modification to require recalculation. A dwarf star could be ten billion kilometers away andThe screen shifted again and Trevize fell silent. It shifted again and again. Finally, when Pelorat said, a8, there was no further motion.Trevize consulted the computer. Were here, he said.I counted the first jump as r. and in this series I started with z Thats twenty-eight jumps altogether. You said twenty-nine.The recalculation at jump is probably saved us one jump. I can check with the computer if you wish, but theres really no need. Were in the vicinity of Sayshell Planet. The computer says so and I dont doubt it. If I were to sharpen the screen properly, wed see a nice, bright su n, but theres no argue in placing a needless strain on its screening capacity. SaysheIl Planet is the fourth one out and its about 3.2 million kilometers away from our present position, which is about as close as we want to be at a jump conclusion. We can get there in troika days two, if we hurry.Trevize drew a deep breath and tried to let the tension drain.Do you realize what this means, Janov? he said. Every ship Ive ever been in or heard of would have made those jumps with at least a day in between for painstaking calculation and re-checking, even with a computer. The trip would have taken nearly a month.Or perhaps two or three weeks, if they were willing to be wise about it. We did it in half an hour. When every ship is equipped with a computer like this onePelorat said, I wonder why the Mayor let us have a ship this advanced. It must be fabulously expensive.Its experimental, said Trevize dryly. Maybe fine good woman was perfectly willing to have us try it out and see wha t deficiencies might develop.Are you serious?Dont get nervous. After all, theres nothing to worry about. We havent found any deficiencies. I wouldnt put it past her, though. Such a thing would put no great strain on her sense of humanity. Besides, she hasnt trusted us with offensive weapons and that cuts the expense considerably.Pelorat said thoughtfully, Its the computer Im thinking about. It seems to be modify so well for you and it cant be adjusted that well for everyone. It just besides works with me.So much the better for us, that it works so well with one of us.Yes, but is that merely chance?What else, Janov?Surely the Mayor knows you exquisite well.I think she does, the old battlecraft.Might she not have had a computer designed particularly for you?I just wonder if were not going where the computer wants to take us.Trevize stared. You mean that while Im connected to the computer, it is the computer and not me who is in real charge?I just wonder.That is ridiculous. Paran oid. Come on, Janov.Trevize turned back to the computer to focus Sayshell Planet on the screen and to plot a normal-space course to it.RidiculousBut why had Pelorat put the notion into his head?