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- His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
- That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper-video, and occasionally in
- tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a
- Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a
- star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no
- place in the Galaxy was.
- There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but
- owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last halfcentury in which
- that could be said.
- To Gaal, this trip was the undoubted climax of his young, scholarly life. He had been in space
- before so that the trip, as a voyage and nothing more, meant little to him. To be sure, he had
- traveled previously only as far as Synnax's only satellite in order to get the data on the
- mechanics of meteor driftage which he needed for his dissertation, but space-travel was all one
- whether one travelled half a million miles, or as many light years.
- He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a phenomenon one did
- not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump remained, and would probably remain
- forever, the only practical method of travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space
- could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that
- belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would
- have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through
- hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy,
- something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two
- neighboring instants of time.
- Gaal had waited for the first of those Jumps with a little dread curled gently in his stomach, and
- it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little internal kick which ceased an instant before
- he could be sure he had felt it. That was all.
- And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool production of 12,000 years
- of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate in mathematics freshly obtained and an
- invitation from the great Hari Seldon to come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat
- mysterious Seldon Project.
- What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first sight of Trantor.
- He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled back at announced times and he
- was always there, watching the hard brilliance of the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm
- of a star cluster, like a giant conglomeration of fire-flies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever,
- At one time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light years of
- the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room with an icy tinge, and
- disappearing out of sight two hours later, after another Jump.
- The first sight of Trantor's sun was that of a hard, white speck all but lost in a myriad such, and
- recognizable only because it was pointed out by the ship's guide. The stars were thick here
- near the Galactic center. But with each Jump, it shone more brightly, drowning out the rest,
- paling them and thinning them out.
- An officer came through and said, "View-room will be closed for the remainder of the trip.
- Prepare for landing."
- Gaal had followed after, clutching at the sleeve of the white uniform with the
- Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire on it.
- He said, "Would it be possible to let me stay? I would like to see Trantor."
- The officer smiled and Gaal flushed a bit. It occurred to him that he spoke with a provincial
- accent.
- The officer said, "We'll be landing on Trantor by morning."
- "I mean I want to see it from Space."
- "Oh. Sorry, my boy. If this were a space-yacht we might manage it. But we're spinning down,
- sunside. You wouldn't want to be blinded, burnt, and radiation-scarred all at the same time,
- would you?"
- Gaal started to walk away.
- The officer called after him, "Trantor would only be gray blur anyway, Kid. Why don't you take a
- space-tour once you hit Trantor. They're cheap."
- Gaal looked back, "Thank you very much."
- It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a
- child, and there was a lump in Gaal's throat. He had never seen Trantor spread out in all its
- incredibility, as large as life, and he hadn't expected to have to wait longer.
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