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He probably set a personal record for acceleration and even so it was a near thing. He felt the snap of jaws close on the heel of one foot, and for just a moment he was held fast before the teeth slid off the tough ceramoid.
He was not skilled at climbing trees. He had not climbed one since he was ten and, as he recalled, that had been a clumsy effort. In this case, though, the trunk was not quite vertical, and the bark was gnarled and offered handholds. What was more, he was driven by necessity, and it is remarkable what one can do if the need is great enough.
Trevize found himself sitting in a crotch, perhaps ten meters above the ground. For the moment he was totally unaware that he had scraped one hand and that it was oozing blood. At the base of the tree, five dogs now sat on their haunches, staring upward, tongues lolling, all looking patiently expectant.
What now?
37.
TREVIZE WAS NOT IN A POSITION TO THINK ABOUT the situation in logical detail. Rather, he experienced flashes of thought in odd and distorted sequence which, if he had eventually sorted them out, would have come to this—
Bliss had earlier maintained that in terraforming a planet, human beings would establish an unbalanced economy, which they would be able to keep from falling apart only by unending effort. For instance, no Settlers had ever brought with them any of the large predators. Small ones could not be helped. Insects, parasites—even small hawks, shrews, and so on.
Those dramatic animals of legend and vague literary accounts—tigers, grizzly bears, orcs, crocodiles? Who would carry them from world to world even if there were sense to it? And where would there be sense to it?
It meant that human beings were the only large predators, and it was up to them to cull those plants and animals that, left to themselves, would smother in their own overplenty.
And if human beings somehow vanished, then other predators must take their place. But what predators? The most sizable predators tolerated by human beings were dogs and cats, tamed and living on human bounty.
What if no human beings remained to feed them? They must then find their own food—for their survival and, in all truth, for the survival of those they preyed on, whose numbers had to be kept in check lest overpopulation do a hundred times the damage that predations would do.
So dogs would multiply, in their variations, with the large ones attacking the large, untended herbivores; the smaller ones preying on birds and rodents. Cats would prey by night as dogs did by day; the former singly, the latter in packs.
And perhaps evolution would eventually produce more varieties, to fill additional environmental niches. Would some dogs eventually develop sea-going characteristics to enable them to live on fish; and would some cats develop gliding abilities to hunt the clumsier birds in the air as well as on the ground?
In flashes, all this came to Trevize while he struggled with more systematic thought to tell him what he might do.
The number of dogs kept growing. He counted twenty-three now surrounding the tree and there were others approaching. How large was the pack? What did it matter? It was large enough already.
He withdrew his blaster from its holster, but the solid feel of the butt in his hand did not give him the sense of security he would have liked. When had he last inserted an energy unit into it and how many charges could he fire? Surely not twenty-three.
What about Pelorat and Bliss? If they emerged, would the dogs turn on them? Were they safe even if they did not emerge? If the dogs sensed the presence of two human beings inside the ruins, what could stop them from attacking them there? Surely there would be no doors or barriers to hold them off.
Could Bliss stop them, and even drive them away? Could she concentrate her powers through hyperspace to the desired pitch of intensity? For how long could she maintain them?
Should he call for help then? Would they come running if he yelled, and would the dogs flee under Bliss’s glare? (Would it take a glare or was it simply a mental action undetectable to onlookers without the ability?) Or, if they appeared, would they then be torn apart under the eyes of Trevize, who would be forced to watch, helplessly, from the relative safety of his post in the tree?
No, he would have to use his blaster. If he could kill one dog and frighten them off for just a while, he could scramble down the tree, yell for Pelorat and Bliss, kill a second dog if they showed signs of returning, and all three could then hustle into the ship.
He adjusted the intensity of the microwave beam to the three-quarter mark. That should be ample to kill a dog with a loud report. The report would serve to frighten the dogs away, and he would be conserving energy.
He aimed carefully at a dog in the middle of the pack, one who seemed (in Trevize’s own imagination, at least) to exude a greater malignancy than the rest—perhaps only because he sat more quietly and, therefore, seemed more cold-bloodedly intent on his prey. The dog was staring directly at the weapon now, as though it scorned the worst Trevize could do.
It occurred to Trevize that he had never himself fired a blaster at a human being, or seen anyone else do it. There had been firing at water-filled dummies of leather and plastic during training; with the water almost instantaneously heated to the boiling point, and shredding the covering as it exploded.
But who, in the absence of war, would fire at a human being? And what human being would withstand a blaster and force its use? Only here, on a world made pathological by the disappearance of human beings—
With that odd ability of the brain to note something utterly beside the point, Trevize was aware of the fact that a cloud had hidden the sun—and then he fired.
There was an odd shimmer of the atmosphere on a straight line from the muzzle of the blaster to the dog; a vague sparkle that might have gone unnoticed if the sun were still shining unhindered.
The dog must have felt the initial surge of heat, and made the smallest motion as though it were about to leap. And then it exploded, as a portion of its blood and cellular contents vaporized.
The explosion made a disappointingly small noise, for the dog’s integument was simply not as tough as that of the dummies they had practiced on. Flesh, skin, blood, and bone were scattered, however, and Trevize felt his stomach heave.
The dogs started back, some having been bombarded with uncomfortably warm fragments. That was only a momentary hesitation, however. They crowded against each other suddenly, in order to eat what had been provided. Trevize felt his sickness increase. He was not frightening them; he was feeding them. At that rate, they would never leave. In fact, the smell of fresh blood and warm meat would attract still more dogs, and perhaps other smaller predators as well.
A voice called out, “Trevize. What—”
Trevize looked outward. Bliss and Pelorat had emerged from the ruins. Bliss had stopped short, her arms thrown out to keep Pelorat back. She stared at the dogs. The situation was obvious and clear. She had to ask nothing.
Trevize shouted, “I tried to drive them off without involving you and Janov. Can you hold them off?”
“Barely,” said Bliss, not shouting, so that Trevize had trouble hearing her even though the dogs’ snarling had quieted as though a soothing sound-absorbent blanket had been thrown over them.
Bliss said, “There are too many of them, and I am not familiar with their pattern of neuronic activity. We have no such savage things on Gaia.”
“Or on Terminus. Or on any civilized world,” shouted Trevize. “I’ll shoot as many of them as I can and you try to handle the rest. A smaller number will give you less trouble.”
“No, Trevize. Shooting them will just attract others. —Stay behind me, Pel. There’s no way you can protect me. —Trevize, your other weapon.”
“The neuronic whip?”
“Yes. That produces pain. Low power. Low power!”
“Are you afraid of hurting them?” called out Trevize in anger. “Is this a time to consider the sacredness of life?”
“I’m considering Pel’s. Also mine. D
o as I say. Low power, and shoot at one of the dogs. I can’t hold them much longer.”
The dogs had drifted away from the tree and had surrounded Bliss and Pelorat, who stood with their backs to a crumbling wall. The dogs nearest the two made hesitant attempts to come closer still, whining a bit as though trying to puzzle out what it was that held them off when they could sense nothing that would do it. Some tried uselessly to scramble up the wall and attack from behind.
Trevize’s hand was trembling as he adjusted the neuronic whip to low power. The neuronic whip used much less energy than the blaster did, and a single power-cartridge could produce hundreds of whip-like strokes but, come to think of it, he didn’t remember when he had last charged this weapon, either.
It was not so important to aim the whip. Since conserving energy was not as critical, he could use it in a sweep across the mass of dogs. That was the traditional method of controlling crowds that showed signs of turning dangerous.
However, he followed Bliss’s suggestion. He aimed at one dog and fired. The dog fell over, its legs twitching. It emitted loud, high-pitched squeals.
The other dogs backed away from the stricken beast, ears flattening backward against their heads. Then, squealing in their turn, they turned and left, at first slowly, then more rapidly, and finally, at a full race. The dog who had been hit, scrambled painfully to its legs, and limped away whimpering, much the last of them.
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.
38.
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.”
Trevize said, “But doesn’t it seem obvious to you, that the human mind is qualitatively different from everything else, and that if it were absent, the sum total of all other consciousness could not replace it. Would it not be true, then, that human beings are a special case and must be treated as such? They should not be fused even with one another, let alone with nonhuman objects.”
“Yet you decided in favor of Galaxia.”
“For an overriding reason I cannot make out.”
“Perhaps that overriding reason was a glimpse of the effect of unbalanced ecologies? Might it not have been your reasoning that every world in the Galaxy is on a knife-edge, with instability on either side, and that only Galaxia could prevent such disasters as are taking place on this world—to say nothing of the continuing interhuman disasters of war and administrative failure.”
“No. Unbalanced ecologies were not in my mind at the time of my decision.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I may not know what it is I’m foreseeing, but if something is suggested afterward, I would recognize it if that were indeed what I foresaw. —As it seems to me I may have foreseen dangerous animals on this world.”
