Galaxy's Isaac Asimov Collection VOlume 2 by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XV

BALEY could feel the vague aroma of Yeast Town growing stronger. He did not find it as unpleasant as some did—Jessie, for instance. Actually, he rather liked it. It had pleasant connotations.

Every time he smelled raw yeast, the alchemy of sense-perception carried him more than three decades into the past. He was a ten-year-old again, visiting his uncle Boris, who was a yeast farmer. Uncle Boris always had a little supply of yeast-delectables — small cookies, chocolaty things filled with sweet liquid, hard confections in the shape of cats and dogs. Young as he was, he knew that Uncle Boris shouldn’t really have had them to give away and he always ate them very quietly, sitting in a corner with his back to the center of the room. He would eat them quickly for fear of being caught.

They tasted all the better for that.

Poor Uncle Boris! He had had an accident and died. They had never told him exactly how, and he had cried bitterly, because he thought Uncle Boris had been arrested for smuggling yeast out of the plant. He expected to be arrested and executed himself. Years later, he had poked carefully through police files and learned the truth. Uncle Boris had fallen beneath the treads of a transport. It was a disillusioning ending to a romantic myth. Yet the myth would always arise in his mind, at least momentarily, whenever his nostrils caught a whiff of raw yeast.

Yeast Town was not the official name of any part of New York City. It could be found in no gazetteer and on no official map. What was called Yeast Town in popular speech was, to the Post Office, merely the boroughs of Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton. It was a broad strip across what had once been Medieval New Jersey, dotted with residential areas, particularly in Newark Center and Trenton Center, but given over mostly to the many-layered farms in which a thousand varieties of yeast grew and multiplied.

One-fifth of the City’s productive population worked in the yeast farms—another fifth worked in the subsidiary industries. Beginning with the mountains of wood and coarse cellulose that were dragged into the City from the tangled forests of the Alleghenies—through the vats of acid that hydrolized it to glucose—the carloads of niter and phosphate rock that were the most important additives—down to the jars of organics supplied by the chemical laboratories—it all came to only one thing: yeast and more yeast.

Without yeast, six of Earth’s eight billions would starve in a year.

Baley felt cold at the thought. Three days before, the possibility had existed as deeply as it did now. But, three days before, it would never have occurred to him.

THEY whizzed out of the Motorway through an exit on the Newark outskirts. The thinly populated avenues, flanked on either side by the featureless blocks that were the farms, offered little to check their speed.

“What time is it, Daneel?” asked Baley.

“Sixteen-oh-five,” replied R. Daneel.

“Then he’ll be at work, if he’s on day-shift.

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