“But tell me,” Maserd went on. “What else strikes you as odd about that ancient vessel out there?”
“You mean other than how old it must be, or the weird configuration? Well…now that you mention it, I can’t locate any-”
He paused.
“Any habitats?” Maserd finished the sentence for him. “Ever since we found these things, I have been trying to find out where the crews lived. Without success. For the life of me, I cannot understand how they traveled without pilots to navigate them!”
Hari’s breath caught. He held it, in order not to give sound to his sudden understanding. Stifling the thought, he moved to change the subject
“Are these weapons? Warships? Do the Ktlinans hope to rouse an ancient arsenal and use it to defeat the empire? Those energy projectors-”
“May have been formidable, once,” Maserd said. “Horis thinks they were used against the surface of planets. But rest assured, Dr. Seldon. These machines won’t be turned against the Imperial Fleet. Most of them are broken past repair. Activating even a few would be the labor of years. Anyway, the drive systems are so primitive that our naval units could fly rings around them, blasting the frail structures to bits.”
Hari shook his head.
“Then I don’t understand. Sybyl thinks we’ve given her side an unbeatable advantage. One that will make their victory over the empire inevitable.”
Maserd nodded.
“She may be right about that, Professor. But it doesn’t have anything to do with those giant derelicts. The reason for her optimism should be rotating into view soon.”
Hari watched as thePride of Rhodia kept turning. There was a sharp boundary to the orderly ranks of huge, ancient machines. As the formation passed out of sight, Hari pondered what he had just seen.
Robot ships! Needing no habitats because they had no human crews. Positronic brains did the navigating, long ago. Perhaps only a few centuries after starflight was discovered.
He felt glad when the flotilla passed out of view. The murky gloom of the nebula resumed-a field of dusty, stygian blackness.
Then anew glimmer appeared. A more compact swarm of objects that sparkled madly under laser illumination from thePride of Rhodia. Where the first group seemed like a ghost squadron, this one gave Hari an impression of diamond chips, heaped in a dense globe of twinkling brilliance.
“There is the weapon that Sybyl and her friends are crowing about, Professor,” said Maserd. “They’ve already brought several samples aboard.”
“Samples?”
Hari looked around the bridge. Horis Antic could be seen hovering over his instruments, muttering to himself while he kept probing the armada outside. Mors Planch and one of his men were keeping watch, blasters ready in case any of the hostages tried anything. But Sybyl and Gornon Vlimt were nowhere in sight.
“In the conference salon,” Captain Maserd said. “They’ve got several of the devices set up and working. I suspect you won’t like what you’re about to see.”
Hari nodded. Whatever they had found, it could hardly shock him more than the fleet of robot ships.
“Lead on, Captain.” He gestured courteously to the nobleman. With Kers Kantun following close behind, they made their way down the main corridor to an open doorway.
Hari stopped, stared inside, and groaned.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Anything but that.”
They were archives. Extremely old ones. He could tell just by glancing at the objects that lay gleaming on the conference table.
The ancients had excellent data-storage systems, crystalline in nature, that could pack away huge amounts of information in durable containers. And yet, until Hari received from Daneel his own miniature copy ofA Child’s Book of Knowledge, he had never seen a prehistoric unit that was not damaged or completely destroyed.
Now, four of the things sat between Sybyl and Gornon, their shiny cylindrical surfaces perfectly intact, each one clearly large enough to holdA Child’s Book of Knowledge ten thousand times over.
“Maserd, come over here and see what we’ve accomplished while you were away!” Gornon Vlimt commented without looking up from a holo display as he tapped into one archive. It flickered with a blinding array of wonders.
The nobleman glanced at Seldon, clearly concerned about appearing too cozy with the enemy. But when Hari didn’t object, Maserd moved quickly to lean over Gornon’s shoulder, excited and impressed.
“You’ve improved the interface immensely. The images are crisp and the graphics legible.”
“It wasn’t hard,” Vlimt answered. “The designers made this archive so simple, even a dunce could figure it out, given enough time.”
With some reluctance, but driven by curiosity, Hari followed to get a better look. Many of the images he glimpsed had no meaning to him-mysterious objects posed against unknown backgrounds. A few leaped out with sudden familiarity from his recent studies in the little history primer. The pyramids of Egypt, he recognized at once. Others were flat portraits of ancient people and places. Hari knew that prehistoric peoples assigned great importance to such images, created by daubing a cloth surface with smears of natural pigment. Gornon Vlimt also seemed to vest these images with great value, though Hari found them surreal and strange.
Peering at a nearby set of screens, Sybyl gushed over a different panorama, featuring examples of science and technology.
“Of course much of this stuff is pretty crude,” she conceded. “After all, we’ve had twenty millennia to refine the rough edges through trial and error. But the basic theories have changed surprisingly little. And some of the forgotten material is brilliant! There are devices and techniques in here that I never heard of. A dozen Ktlinas would be kept busy for a generation, just absorbing all of this!”
“It’s…” Hari’s mouth worked, knowing his words would be useless, but still feeling compelled to try. “Sybyl, this is more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.”
She greeted his cautionary pleading with a snort.
“You forget who you’re talking to, Seldon. Don’t you recall that half-melted archive we worked on together? The one your mysterious contacts came up with, forty years ago? There was very little of it left intact, except for a pair of ancient simulated beings-those Joan and Voltaire entities we released, per your instructions.”
He nodded. “And do you remember the chaos they helped provoke? Both on Trantor and on Sark?”
“Hey, don’t blame me for that, Academician.You wanted data about human-response patterns from the sims, in order to help develop your psychohistory models. Marq Hillard and I never meant for them to escape into the datasphere.
“Anyway, these archives are something else entirely-carefully indexed accumulations of knowledge that people lovingly put together as a gift to their descendants. Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with theEncyclopedia Galactica Foundation your group is setting up on Terminus? A gathering of wisdom, safeguarding human knowledge against another dark age?”
Hari was caught in a logical trap. How could he explain that the “encyclopedia” part of his Foundation was only a ruse? Or that his Plan involved fighting the dark age with a lot more than mere books?
Of course there was plenty of irony to go around. The “mere books” on the table in front of him could destroy every bit of relevance that was left in the Seldon Plan. They presented a mortal danger to everything he had worked for.
“How many of these things are there?” He tried to ask Maserd, then noticed that the nobleman was leaning past Vlimt, transfixed by images.
“Wait! Go back a few frames. Yes, there! By great Franklin’s ghost, it’sAmerica. I recognize that monument from a coin in our family collection! “
Gornon chuckled. “Phallic and obtrusive,” he commented. “Say, how do you know so much about-”
“I wonder if this archive has a copy ofThe Federalist,” the captain murmured, reaching for a controller pad. “Or possibly even…”