dog intelligence, but for a brief overview:
"At the present time it is believed that dog intelligence surpasses that of the
dolphin, though it still falls far short of man's. However, while the dolphin's
intelligence is nearly useless to us, the dog can be trained as a valuable, simple
household servant, and at last it seems that man is no longer alone on his planet.
To which animal such a rise in intelligence will happen next, we cannot say, any
more than we can be certain that such a change will happen to any other animal."
Question from the class.
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"Oh, well, I'm afraid it's like the big bang theory. We can guess and guess at the
cause of certain phenomena, but since we can't repeat the event in a laboratory, we
will never be quite sure. However, the best guess at present is that some critical
mass of total dog population in a certain ratio to the total mass of dog brain was
reached that pushed the entire species over the edge into a higher order of
intelligence. This change, however, did not affect all dogs equally-- primarily it
affected dogs in civilized areas, leading many to speculate on the possibility that
continued exposure to man was a contributing factor. However, the very fact that
many dogs, mostly in uncivilized parts of the world, were not affected destroys
completely the idea that cosmic radiation or some other influence from outer space
was responsible for the change. In the first place, any such influence would have
been detected by the astronomers constantly watching every wavelength of the night
sky, and in the second place, such an influence would have affected all dogs
equally."
Another question from a student.
"Who knows? But I doubt it. Dogs, being incapable of speech, though many have
learned to write simple sentences in an apparently mnemonic fashion somewhere
between the blind repetition of parrots and the more calculating repetition at high
speeds by dolphins-- um, how did I get into this sentence? I can't get out!"
Student laughter.
"Dogs, I was saying, are incapable of another advance in intelligence,
particularly an advance bringing them to equal intellect with man, because they
cannot communicate verbally and because they lack hands. They are undoubtedly at
their evolutionary peak. It is only fortunate that so many circumstances combined to
place man in the situation he has reached. And we can only suppose that somewhere,
on some other planet, some other species might have an even more fortunate
combination leading to even higher intelligence. But let us hope not!" said the
professor, scratching the ears of his dog, B.F. Skinner. "Right, B.F.? Because man
may not be able to cope with the presence of a more intelligent race!"
Student laughter.
"Owrowrf," said B.F. Skinner, who had once been called Hihiwnkn on a planet where
white hexagons had telepathically conquered time and space; hexagons who had only
been brought to this pass by a solar process they had not quite learned how to
control. What he wished he could say was, "Don't worry, professor. Humanity will
never be fazed by a higher intelligence. It's too damn proud to notice."
But instead he growled a little, lapped some water from a bowl, and lay down in a
corner of the lecture room as the professor droned on.
***
It snowed in September in Kansas in the autumn of the year 2000, and Jim (Don't
call me Jimmy anymore, I'm grown up) was out playing with his dog Robby as the first
flakes fell.
Robby had been uprooting crabgrass with his teeth and paws, a habit much
encouraged by Royce and junie, when Jim yelled, "Snow!" and a flake landed on the
grass in front of the dog. The flake melted immediately, but Robby watched for
another, and another, and another. And he saw the whiteness of the flakes, and the
delicate six-sided figures so spare and strange and familiar and beautiful, and he
wept.
"Mommy!" Jim called out. "It looks like Robby's crying!"
"It's just water in his eyes," Junie called back from the kitchen, where she stood
washing radishes in front of an open window. "Dogs don't cry."
But the snow fell deep all over the city that night, and many dogs stood in the
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snow watching it fall, sharing an unspoken reverie.
"Can't we?" again and again the thought came from a hundred, a thousand minds.
"No, no, no," came the despairing answer. For without fingers of some kind, how
could they ever build the machines that would let them encapsulate again and leave
this planet?
And in their despair, they cursed for the millionth time that fool Mklikluln, Who
had got them into this.
"Death was too good for the bastard," they agreed, and in a worldwide vote they
removed the commendation they had voted him. And then they all went back to having
puppies and teaching them everything they knew.
The puppies had it easier. They had never known their ancestral home, and to them
snowflakes were merely fun, and winter was merely cold. And instead of standing out
in the snow, they curled up in the warmth of their doghouses and slept.
THE ORIGINIST
Leyel Forksa sat before his lector display, reading through an array of recently
published scholarly papers. A holograph of two pages of text hovered in the air
before him. The display was rather larger than most people needed their pages to be,
since Leyel's eyes were no younger than the rest of him. When he came to the end he
did not press the PAGE key to continue, the article. Instead he pressed NEXT.
The two pages he had been reading slid backward about a centimeter, joining a
dozen previously discarded articles, all standing in the air over the lector. With a
soft beep, a new pair of pages appeared in front of the old ones.
Deet spoke up from where she sat eating breakfast. "You're only giving the poor
soul two pages before you consign him to the wastebin?"
"I'm consigning him to oblivion," Leyel answered cheerfully. "No, I'm consigning
him to hell."
"What? Have you rediscovered religion in your old age?"
"I'm creating one. It has no heaven, but it has a terrible everlasting hell for
young scholars who think they can make their reputation by attacking my work."
"Ah, you have a theology," said Deet. "Your work is holy writ, and to attack it is
blasphemy."
"I welcome intelligent attacks. But this young tube-headed professor from-- yes,
of course, Minus University--"
"Old Minus U?"
"He thinks he can refute me, destroy me, lay me in the dust, and all he has
bothered to cite are studies published within the last thousand years."
"The principle of millennial depth is still widely used--"
"The principle of millennial depth is the confession of modern scholars that they
are not willing to spend as much effort on research as they do on academic politics.
I shattered the principle of millennial depth thirty years ago. I proved that it
was--"
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"Stupid and outmoded. But my deare
st darling sweetheart Leyel, you did it by
spending part of the immeasurably vast Forska fortune to search for inaccessible and
forgotten archives in every section of the Empire."
"Neglected and decaying. I had to reconstruct half of them."
"It would take a thousand universities' library budgets to match what you spent on
research for 'Human Origin on the Null Planet.'"
"But once I spent the money, all those archives were open. They have been open for
three decades. The serious scholars all use them, since millennial depth yields
nothing but predigested, preexcreted muck. They search among the turds of rats who
have devoured elephants, hoping to find ivory."
"So colorful an image. My breakfast tastes much better now." She slid her tray
irrto the cleaning slot and glared at him. "Why are you so snappish? You used to
read me sections from their silly little papers and we'd laugh. Lately you're just
nasty."
Leyel sighed. "Maybe it's because I once dreamed of changing the galaxy, and every
day's mail brings more evidence that the galaxy refuses to change."
There. She had said Hari's name. Even though she had too much tact to speak openly
of what bothered him, she was hinting that Leyel's bad humor was because he was
still waiting for Hari Seldon's answer. Maybe so-- Leyel wouldn't deny it. It was
annoying that it had taken Hari so long to respond. Leyel had expected a call the
day Hari got his application. At least within the week. But he wasn't going to give
her the satisfaction of admitting that the waiting bothered him. "The Empire will be
killed by its own refusal to change. I rest my case."
"Well, I hope you have a wonderful morning growling and grumbling about the
stupidity of everyone in origin studies-- except your esteemed self."
"Why are you teasing me about my vanity today? I've always been vain."
"I consider it one of your most endearing traits."
"At least I make an effort to live up to my own opinion of myself."
"That's nothing. You even live up to my opinion of you." She kissed the bald spot
on the top of his head as she breezed by, heading for the bathroom.
Leyel turned his attention to the new essay at the front of the lector display. It
was a name he didn't recognize. Fully prepared to find pretentious writing and
puerile thought, he was surprised to find himself becoming quite absorbed. This
woman had been following a trail of primate studies-- a field so long neglected that
there simply were no papers within the range of millennial depth. Already he knew
she was his kind of scholar. She even mentioned the fact that she was using archives
opened by the Forska Research Foundation. Leyel was not above being pleased at this
tacit expression of gratitude.
It seemed that the woman-- a Dr. Thoren Magolissian-- had been following Leyel's
lead, searching for the principles of human origin rather than wasting time on the
irrelevant search for one particular planet. She had uncovered a trove of primate
research from three millennia ago, which was based on chimpanzee and gorilla studies
dating back to seven thousand years ago. The earliest of these had referred to
original research so old it may have been conducted before the founding of the
Empire-- but those most ancient reports had not yet been located. They probably
didn't exist any more. Texts abandoned for more than five thousand years were very
hard to restore; texts older than eight thousand years were simply unreadable. It
was tragic, how many texts had been "stored" by librarians who never checked them,
never refreshed or recopied them. Presiding over vast archives that had lost every
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scrap of readable information. All neatly catalogued, of course, so you knew exactly
what it was that humanity had lost forever.
Never mind.
Magolissian's article. What startled Leyel was her conclusion that primitive
language capability seemed to be inherent in the primate mind. Even in primates
incapable of speech, other symbols could easily be learned-- at least for simple
nouns and verbs- and the nonhuman primates could come up with sentences and ideas
that had never been spoken to them. This meant that mere production of language, per
se, was prehuman, or at least not the deterinining factor of humanness.
It was a dazzling thought. It meant that the difference between humans and
nonhumans-- the real origin of humans in recognizably human form-- was
postlinguistic. Of course this came as a direct contradiction of one of Leyel's own
assertions in an early paper-- he had said that "since language is what separates
human from beast, historical linguistics may provide the key to human origins" --but
this was the sort of contradiction he welcomed. He wished he could shout at the
other fellow, make him look at Magolissian's article. See? This is how to do it!
Challenge my assumption, not my conclusion, and do it with new evidence instead of
trying to twist the old stuff. Cast a light in the darkness, don't just churn up the
same old sediment at the bottom of the river.
Before he could get into the main body of the article, however, the house computer
informed him that someone was at the door of the apartment. It was a message that
crawled along the bottom of the lector display. Leyel pressed the key that brought
the message to the front, in letters large enough to read. For the thousandth time
he wished that sometime in the decamillennia of human history, somebody had invented
a computer capable of speech.
A moment's wait, while the house computer interrogated the visitor.
The answer appeared on the lector: "Secure courier with a message for Leyel
Forska."
The very fact that the courier had got past house security meant that it was
genuine-- and important. Leyel typed again. "From?"
Another pause. "Hari Seldon of the Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation."
Leyel was out of his chair in a moment. He got to the door even before the house
computer could open it, and without a word took the message in his hands. Fumbling a
bit, he pressed the top and bottom of the black glass lozenge to prove by
fingerprint that it was he, by body temperature and pulse that he was alive to
receive it. Then, when the courier and her bodyguards were gone, he dropped the
message into the chamber of his lector and watched the page appear in the air before
him.
At the top was a three-dimensional version of the logo of Hari's Encyclopedia
Foundation. Soon to be my insignia as well, thought Leyel. Hari Seldon and I, the
two greatest scholars of our time, joined together in a project whose scope
surpasses anything ever attempted by any man or group of men. The gathering together
of all the knowledge of the Empire in a systematic, easily accessible way, to
preserve it through the coming time of anarchy so that a new civilization can
quickly rise out of the ashes of the old. Hari had the vision to foresee the need.
And I, Leyel Forska, have the understanding of all the old archives that will make
the Encyclopedia Galac
tica possible.
Leyel started reading with a confidence born of experience; had he ever really
desired anything and been denied?
My dear friend:
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I was surprised and honored to see an application from you and insisted on writing
your answer personally. It is gratifying beyond measure that you believe in the
Foundation enough to apply to take part. I can truthfully tell you that we have
received no application from any other scholar of your distinction and
accomplishment.
Of course, thought Leyel. There is no other scholar of my stature, except Hari
himself, and perhaps Deet, once her current work is published. At least we have no
equals by the standards that Hari and I have always recognized as valid. Hari
created the science of psychohistory. I transformed and revitalized the field of
originism.
And yet the tone of Hari's letter was wrong. It sounded like-- flattery. That was
it. Hari was softening the coming blow. Leyel knew before reading it what the next
paragraph would say.
Nevertheless, Leyel, I must reply in the negative. The Foundation on Terminus is
designed to collect and preserve knowledge. Your life's work has been devoted to
expanding it. You are the opposite of the sort of researcher we need. Far better for
you to remain on Trantor and continue your inestimably valuable studies, while
lesser men and women exile themselves on Terminus.
Your servant, Hari
Did Hari imagine Leyel to be so vain he would read these flattering words and
preen himself contentedly? Did he think Leyel would believe that this was the real
reason his application was being denied? Could Hari Seldon misknow a man so badly?
Impossible. Hari Seldon, of all people in the Empire, knew how to know other
people. True, his great work in psychohistory dealt with large masses of people,
with populations and probabilities. But Hari's fascination with populations had
grown out of his interest in and understanding of individuals. Besides, he and Hari
had been friends since Hari first arrived on Trantor. Hadn't a grant from Leyel's
own research fund financed most of Hari's original research? Hadn't they held long
conversations in the early days, tossing ideas back and forth, each helping the
other hone his thoughts? They may not have seen each other much in the last-- what,