Trantor Falls

Sarns did not sigh. He said, “Well, in any case this has taken our discussion rather far from the purpose at hand, which is, after all, merely to arrange an armistice between your forces and the students and staff of the University, so both we and you may return to what we consider our proper pursuits. “

“Aye, that’s so,” Gilmer said.

As he had not sighed, Sarns did not smile. Show a barbarian a short-term objective and he won’t look past it, he thought. “Would you care to examine our facilities here, so you can see how harmless we are under normal circumstances?” he said.

“Why not? Lead on, Dean Sarns, and let’s see what you’ve turned into soldiers. Who knows? Maybe I’ll try to recruit you...Gilmer laughed. So, without reservation, did Yokim Sarns. He hadn’t suspected Gilmer could say anything that funny.

What first struck Gilmer inside the University was the quiet. Almost everyone went around in soft-soled shoes, soundless on the metal flooring. Gilmer’s boots clanged resoundingly as ever, even raised echoes that ran down the corridors ahead of him. But both clang and echoes were tiny pebbles dropped into an ocean of stillness.

The people were as strange as the place, Gilmer thought. Those who had fought his men were still in gray like Sarns. The rest wore soft pastels that made them seem to flit like spirits along the hallways. Their low voices added to the impression that they really weren’t quite there.

Half-remembered childhood tales of ghosts rose in Gilmer’s mind. He shivered and made sure he stayed close to his guides. “What are they doing in there?” he asked, pointing. His voice caused echoes too, echoes that swiftly died.

Sarns glanced into the laboratory. “Something pertaining to neurobiology,” he said. “One moment.” He ducked inside. “That’s right—they’re working to improve the efficiency of sleep-inducers.”

Somehow the Dean pitched his voice so that it was clear but raised no reverberations. Gilmer resolved to imitate him. “And what’s going on there?” the Emperor of the Galaxy asked. Then he frowned, for he’d managed only a hoarse whisper that sounded filled with dread.

To his relief, Sarns appeared to take no notice. “That’s a psychostatistics research group,” the Dean answered casually. He walked on, assuming Gilmer knew what psychostatistics was.

Gilmer didn’t, but was not about to let on. He pointed to another doorway. Some people in that room were working with computers, others with what looked like chunks of rock. “What are they up to?” he asked. He still could not match Yokim Sarns’s easy tone.

“Ahh, that’s one of our most fascinating projects. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.” Gilmer, who wasn’t at all sure, waited for Sarns to go on: “Using ancient inscriptions and voice synthesizers, that team of linguists is attempting to reconstruct the mythical language called English, from which our modern Galactic tongue arose thousands of years ago.”

“Oh,” was all Gilmer said. He’d never heard of English, either. Well, too bad, he thought. He knew about a lot of things these soft academics had never heard of, things like field-stripping a blast-pistol, like small-unit actions.

Yokim Sarns might have plucked the thought from his head, and then twisted it in a way he did not like: “Mainly, though, we fought you so we could protect what you’re coming to now: the Library.”

“Everything humanity has ever learned is preserved here,” said Sarns’s aide Maryan Drabel.

Gilmer caught the note of pride in her voice. “ Are you in charge of it?” he asked.

She nodded and smiled. Gilmer cut ten years off the guess he’d made of her age from her grim face and drab clothing. She said, “This chamber here is the accessing room. Students and researchers come here first, to get a printout of the book-films and journal articles available in our files on the topics that interest them.”

“Where are all your book-films?” Gilmer craned his neck. He’d visited libraries on other planets once or twice, and found himself wading in film cases. He didn’t see any here. Suspicion grew in him. Was all this some kind of colossal bluff, designed to conceal who knew what? If it was, the whole University would pay.

But Maryan Drabel only laughed. “You’re not ready to see book-films yet. Before a student can even begin to view films, he or she needs to have some idea of what’s in them: more than a title can provide. What we’re coming to now is the Abstracts Section, where people weed through their possible reading lists with summaries of the documents that seem promising to them.”

More people fiddling with more computers. Gilmer almost succeeded in suppressing his yawn. Maryan Drabel went on. “We also have an acquisition and cataloguing division, which integrates new book-films into our collection. “

“New book-films?” Gilmer said. “You mean people still write them?”