He added, conversationally, "I don't bother with the outside myself.
The last time I was in the open was three years ago.
You see it once, you know and that's all there is to it. Here's your ticket.
Special elevator in the rear.
It's marked
'To the Tower.'
Just take it."
The elevator was of the new sort that ran by gravitic repulsion.
Gaal entered and others flowed in behind him.
The operator closed a contact.
For a moment, Gaal felt suspended in space as gravity switched to zero, and then he had weight again in small measure as the elevator accelerated upward. Deceleration followed and his feet left the floor. He squawked against his will.
The operator called out, "Tuck your feet under the railing.
Can't you read the sign?"
The others had done so. They were smiling at him as he madly and vainly tried to clamber back down the wall.
Their shoes pressed upward against the chromium of the railings that stretched across the floor in parallels set two feet apart.
He had noticed those railings on entering and had ignored them.
Then a hand reached out and pulled him down.
He gasped his thanks as the elevator came to a halt.
He stepped out upon an open terrace bathed in a white brilliance that hurl his eyes.
The man, whose helping hand he had just now been the recipient of, was immediately behind him.
The man said, kindly, "Plenty of seats."
Gaal closed his mouth; he had been gaping; and said,
"It certainly seems so."
He started for them automatically, then stopped. He said,
"If you don't mind, I'll just stop a moment at the railing.
I - I want to look a bit."
The man waved him on, good-naturedly, and Gaal leaned out over the shoulder-high railing and bathed himself in all the panorama.
He could not see the ground. It was lost in the ever increasing complexities of man-made structures.
He could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to almost uniform grayness, and he knew it was so over all the land-surface of the planet.
There was scarcely any motion to be seen - a few pleasure-craft lazed against the sky-but all the busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world. There was no green to be seen; no green, no soil, no life other than man.
Somewhere on the world, he realized vaguely, was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, green with trees, rainbowed with flowers.
It was a small island amid an ocean of steel, but it wasn't visible from where he stood.
It might be ten thousand miles away. He did not know. Before very long, he must have his tour! He sighed noisily, and realized finally that he was on Trantor at last; on the planet which was the center of all the Galaxy and the kernel of the human race.
He saw none of its weaknesses. He saw no ships of food landing.
He was not aware of a jugular vein delicately connecting the forty billion of Trantor with the rest of the Galaxy. He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.
He came away a little blank-eyed.
His friend of the elevator was indicating a seat next to himself and Gaal took it.
The man smiled.
"My name is Jerril.
First time on Trantor?"
"Yes, Mr. Jerril."
"Thought so.
Jerril's my first name.
Trantor gets you if you've got the poetic temperament.
Trantorians never come up here, though.
They don't like it.
Gives them nerves."
"Nerves! - My name's Gaal, by the way. Why should it give them nerves?
It's glorious."
"Subjective matter of opinion, Gaal.