was going to take the ship to Solaria, and, with the intensity of her resolve, it trembled again.
96.
BLISS clutched wildly at Trevize's arm. "Don't! Don't!"
She clung strongly, holding him back, while Pelorat stood, confused and frozen, in the background.
Trevize was shouting, "Take your hands off the computer! Bliss, don't get in my way. I don't want to hurt you."
Bliss said, in a tone that seemed almost exhausted, "Don't offer violence to the child. I'd have to hurt you-against all instructions."
Trevize's eyes darted wildly from Fallom to Bliss. He said, "Then you get her off, Bliss. Now!"
Bliss pushed him away with surprising strength (drawing it, Trevize thought afterward, from Gaia, perhaps).
"Fallom," she said, "lift your hands."
"No," shrieked Fallom. "I want the ship to go to Solaria. I want it to go there. There." She nodded toward the viewscreen with her head, unwilling to let even one hand release its pressure on the desk for the purpose.
But Bliss reached for the child's shoulders and, as her hands touched Fallom, the youngster began to tremble.
Bliss's voice grew soft. "Now, Fallom, tell the computer to be as it was and come with me. Come with me." Her hands stroked the child, who collapsed in an agony of weeping.
Fallom's hands left the desk, and Bliss, catching her under the armpits, lifted her into a standing position. She turned her, held her firmly against her breast, and allowed the child to smother her wrenching sobs there.
Bliss said to Trevize, who was now standing dumbly in the doorway, "Step out of the way, Trevize, and don't touch either of us as we pass."
Trevize stepped quickly to one side.
Bliss paused a moment, saying in a low voice to Trevize, "I had to get into her mind for a moment. If I've caused any damage, I won't forgive you easily."
It was Trevize's impulse to tell her he didn't care a cubic millimeter of vacuum for Fallom's mind; that it was the computer for which he feared. Against the concentrated glare of Gaia, however (surely it wasn't only Bliss whose sole expression could inspire the moment of cold terror he felt), he kept silent.
He remained silent for a perceptible period, and motionless as well, after Bliss and Fallom had disappeared into their room. He remained so, in fact, until Pelorat said softly, "Golan, are you all right? She didn't hurt you, did she?"
Trevize shook his head vigorously, as though to shake off the touch of paralysis that had afflicted him. "I'm all right. The real question is whether that's all right." He sat down at the computer console, his hands resting on the two handmarks which Fallom's hands had so recently covered.
"Well?" said Pelorat anxiously.
Trevize shrugged. "It seems to respond normally. I might conceivably find something wrong later on, but there's nothing that seems off now." Then, more angrily, "The computer should not combine effectively with any hands other than mine, but in that hermaphrodite's case, it wasn't the hands alone. It was the transducer-lobes, I'm sure-"
"But what made the ship shake? It shouldn't do that, should it?"
"No. It's a gravitic ship and we shouldn't have these inertial effects. But that she-monster-" He paused, looking angry again.
"Yes?"
"I suspect she faced the computer with two self-contradictory demands, and each with such force that the computer had no choice but to attempt to do both things at once. In the attempt to do the impossible, the computer must have released the inertia-free condition of the ship momentarily. At least that's what I think happened."
And then, somehow, his face smoothed out. "And that might be a good thing, too, for it occurs to me now that all my talk about Alpha Centauri and its companion was flapdoodle. I know now where Earth must have transferred its secret."
97.
PELORAT stared, then ignored the final remark and went back to an earlier puzzle. "In what way did Fallom ask for two self-contradictory things?"
"Well, she said she wanted the ship to go to Solaria."
"Yes. Of course, she would."
"But what did she mean by Solaria? She can't recognize Solaria from space. She's never really seen it from space. She was asleep when we left that world in a hurry. And despite her readings in your library, together with whatever Bliss has told her, I imagine she can't really grasp the truth of a Galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars and millions of populated planets. Brought up, as she was, underground and alone, it is all she can do to grasp the bare concept that there are different