The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark

by Robert Silverberg

  Her window opened. Christine looked out and down at him.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Do you know what time it is?”

  “Christine!”

  “Go away.”

  “But—Christine—”

  “You have exactly two seconds to get away from here, whoever you are. Then I’m calling the police.” Her voice was cold and angry. “They’ll sober you up fast enough.”

  “Christine, I’m Thimiroi.”

  “Who? What kind of name is that? I don’t know anybody by that name. I’ve never seen you before in my life.” The window slammed shut. The light went out above him. Thimiroi stood frozen, amazed, dumbstruck.

  Then he began to understand.

  Laliene said, “We all knew, yes. We were told before we ever came here. Nothing is secret to those who operate The Travel. How could it be? They move freely through all of time. They see everything. We were warned in Canterbury that you were going to try an intervention, and that there would be a counter-intervention if you did. So I tried to stop you. To prevent you from getting yourself into trouble.”

  “By throwing your body at me?” Thimiroi said bitterly.

  “By getting you to fall in love with me,” she said. “So that you wouldn’t want to get involved with her.”

  He shook his head in wonder. “All along, throughout the whole trip. Everything you did, aimed at ensnaring me into a romance, just as I thought. What I didn’t realize was that you were simply trying to save me from myself.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you didn’t try hard enough,” Thimiroi said. “No. No, that isn’t it. You tried too hard.”

  “Did I?”

  “Perhaps that was it. At any rate I didn’t want you, not at any point. I wanted her the moment I saw her. It couldn’t have been avoided, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry, Thimiroi.”

  “That you failed?”

  “That you have done such harm to yourself.”

  He stood there wordlessly for a time. “What will happen to me now?” he asked finally.

  “You’ll be sent back for rehabilitation, Kadro says.”

  “When?”

  “It’s up to you. You can stay and watch the show with the rest of us—you’ve paid for it, after all. There’s no harm, Kadro says, in letting you remain in this era another few hours. Or you can let them have you right now.”

  For an instant despair engulfed him. Then he regained his control.

  “Tell Kadro that I think I’ll go now,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Laliene. “That’s probably the wisest thing.”

  He said, “Will Kleph be punished too?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He felt a surge of anger. “Why not? Why is what I did any different from what she did? All right, I had a twentieth-century lover. So did Kleph. You know that. That Wilson man.”

  “It was different, Thimiroi.”

  “Different? How?”

  “For Kleph it was just a little diversion, an illicit adventure. What she was doing was wrong, but it didn’t imperil the basic structure of things. She doesn’t propose to save this Wilson. She isn’t going to intervene with the pattern. You were going to run off with yours, weren’t you? Live with her somewhere far from here, spare her from the calamity, possibly change all time to come? That couldn’t be tolerated, Thimiroi. I’m astonished that you thought it would be. But of course you were in love.”

  Thimiroi was silent again. Then he said, “Will you do me one favor, at least?”

  “What is that?”

  “Send word to her. Her name’s Christine Rawlins. She lives in the big old house right across the street from the one where the Sanciscos are. Tell her to go somewhere else tonight—to move into the Montgomery House, maybe, or even to leave the city. She can’t stay where she is. Her house is almost certainly right in the path of—of—”

  “I couldn’t possibly do that,” Laliene said quietly.

  “No?”

  “It would be intervention. It’s the same thing you’re being punished for.”

  “She’ll die, though!” Thimiroi cried. “She doesn’t deserve that. She’s full of life, full of hopes, dreams—”

  “She’s been dead for hundreds of years,” said Laliene coolly. “Giving her another day or two of life now won’t matter. If the meteor doesn’t get her, the plague will. You know that. You also know that I can’t intervene for her. And you know that even if I tried, she’d never believe me. She’d have no reason to. No matter what you may have told her before, she knows nothing of it now. There’s been a counter-intervention, Thimiroi. You understand that, don’t you? She’s never known you, now. Whatever may have happened between you and she has been unhappened.”

  Laliene’s words struck him like knives.

  “So you won’t do a thing?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Thimiroi. I tried to save you from this. For friendship’s sake. For love’s sake, even. But of course you wouldn’t be swerved at all.”

  Kadro came into the room. He was dressed for the evening’s big event already.

  “Well?” he said. “Has Laliene explained the arrangement? You can stay on through tonight, or you can go back now.”

  Thimiroi looked at him, and back at Laliene, and to Kadro again. It was all very clear. He had gambled and lost. He had tried to do a foolish, romantic, impossible sort of thing, a twentieth-century sort of thing, for he was in many ways a twentieth-century sort of man; and it had failed, as of course, he realized now, it had been destined to do from the start. But that did not mean it had not been worth attempting. Not at all. Not at all.

  “I understand,” Thimiroi said. “I’ll go back now.”

  The chairs had all been arranged neatly before the windows in the upstairs rooms. It was past midnight. There was euphoria in the air, thick and dense. A quarter moon hung over the doomed city, but it was almost hidden now by the thickening clouds. The long season of clear skies was ending. The weather was changing, finally.

  “It will be happening very soon now,” Omerie said.

  Laliene nodded. “I feel almost as though I’ve lived through it several times already.”

  “The same with me,” said Kleph.

  “Perhaps we have,” said Klia, with a little laugh. “Who knows? We go round and round in time, and maybe we travel over the same paths more than once.”

  Denvin said, “I wonder where Thimiroi is now. And what they’re doing to him.”

  “Let’s not talk of Thimiroi,” Antilimoin said. “It’s too sad.”

  “He won’t be able to Travel again, will he?” asked Maitira.

  “Never again. Absolutely forbidden,” Omerie said. “But he’ll be lucky if that’s the worst thing they throw at him. What he did was unforgivable. Unforgivable!”

  “Antilimoin’s right,” said Laliene. “Let’s not talk of Thimiroi.”

  Kleph moved closer to her. “You love him, don’t you?”

  “Loved,” Laliene said.

  “Here. Some more tea.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Laliene smiled grimly. “He wanted me to send a warning to that woman of his, do you know? She lives right across the way. Her house will be destroyed by the shock wave, almost certainly.”

  Lutheena said, looking shocked, “You didn’t think of doing it, did you?”

  “Of course not. But I feel so sad about it, all the same. He loved her, you know. And I loved him. And so, for his sake, entirely for his sake—” Laliene shook her head. “But of course it was inconceivable. I suppose she’s asleep right at this minute, not even suspecting—”

  “Better the meteor than the Blue Death that follows,” said Omerie. “Quicker. The quick deaths are the good ones. What’s the point of hiding from the meteor only to die of the plague?”

  “This is too morbid,” Klia said. “I almost wish we hadn’t come here. We could have skipped it and just gone on to Charlemagne’s coronation—”

  “W
e’ll be there soon enough,” said Kleph. “But we’re here, now. And it’s going to be wonderful—wonderful—”

  “Places, everybody!” Kadro called. “It’s almost time! Ten—nine—eight—”

  Laliene held her breath. This all seemed so familiar, she thought. As though she had been through it many times already. In a moment the impact, and the tremendous sound, and the first flames rising, and the first stunned cries from the city, and the dark shapes moving around in the distance, blind, bewildered—and then the lurid sky, red as blood, the long unending shriek coming as though from a single voice—

  “Now,” said Kadro.

  There was an astounding stillness overhead. The onrushing meteor might almost have been sucking all sound from the city toward which it plummeted. And after the silence the cataclysmic crash, the incredible impact, the earth itself recoiling with the force of the collision.

  Poor Thimiroi, Laliene thought. And that poor woman, too.

  Her heart overflowed with love and sorrow, and her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away from the window, unable to watch, unable to see. Then came the cries. And then the flames.

  THE ASENION SOLUTION

  This one was done basically as a lark. But there was a gesture of reconciliation buried in it, putting to an end a strange episode of unpleasantness between two basically even-tempered and good-natured people who happened to be very old friends.

  The year 1989 marked Isaac Asimov’s fiftieth anniversary as a professional writer. One day in the summer of 1988 I got a letter from the anthologist Martin H. Greenberg, who regarded Isaac virtually as his second father. Very quietly, Marty was going to assemble an anthology called Foundation’s Friends, made up of original stories based on themes that Isaac had made famous; it would be presented to Isaac in October of 1989, during the course of the festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his first story. Did I want to take part? Marty asked me.

  Don’t be silly, I said. Of course I did.

  And sat down and wrote “The Asenion Solution” in September of 1988—coincidentally, the same month when I had agreed to collaborate with Isaac on novel-length versions of his classic story “Nightfall” and two other celebrated Asimov novelettes.

  The character I call “Ichabod Asenion” is only partially based on the real-world individual known as Isaac Asimov. Asenion is brilliant, yes, and lives in a Manhattan penthouse, and that was true of Asimov on both counts. But Asenion is described as ascetic and reclusive, two words that I suspect were never applied, even in jest, to Isaac Asimov. Asenion is a physicist; Isaac’s scientific field was biochemistry before he deviated into writing books. And Asenion is a fanatic horticulturalist. Asimov—I’m only guessing here, but with some confidence—probably didn’t know one plant from another, urban creature that he was, and he certainly didn’t have time to tend to a greenhouse in his apartment, writing as he did three or four books a week. Asenion, then, is a kind of fantasy-Asimov, a figure made up of equal parts of fact and fiction.

  The odd surname, though, is Asimovian, as a few insiders know. “Asenion” was a famous typographical error for “Asimov,” attached to a fan letter of his that was published in one of the science-fiction magazines of the early 1940’s. He took a lot of kidding about it, but remained genial enough to use the name himself in his Robot series. I figured it was good for one more go-round here.

  And the gesture of reconciliation I was talking about a few paragraphs back?

  It has to do with the plutonium-186 plot thread that you will find in the story that follows.

  I knew Isaac Asimov from 1955 or so until his death in 1992, and in all that time there was only one disharmonious moment in what was otherwise a relationship of affection and mutual respect. It occurred when, at a science-fiction convention in New York about 1970, I made a joking reference to the imaginary isotope plutonium-186 during a panel discussion where Isaac was in the audience. I knew, of course, that a heavy element like plutonium couldn’t have so light an isotope as that—that was the whole point of my playful remark. Isaac guffawed when he heard me speak of it. And went home and started writing a story I had requested from him for an anthology I was editing, a story in which he intended to come up with some plausible situation in which plutonium-186 actually could exist.

  And so he did, but one thing led to another and the “story” turned into his first science-fiction novel in a decade and a half, The Gods Themselves. Well and good; I had inspired his return to the field. The only trouble was that Isaac had thought I was serious about plutonium-186, and took an extremely public, though gentle and loving, way of berating me for my scientific ignorance: he dedicated the book to me with a long introduction thanking me because my demonstration of scientific illiteracy at that convention had unwittingly inspired his novel.

  I wasn’t amused. I told him so. He was surprised that the dedication had irritated me, and told me so. We went around and around on it for a little while, and then each of us came to understand the other one’s point. The offending dedication was removed from future editions of the book, the whole squabble was put away, and we went back to being good friends and high admirers of each other’s work and intelligence, and eventually, through a set of circumstances nobody could have predicted, we even wound up becoming collaborators. But all those years I continued to suspect that Isaac still felt guilty/defensive/touchy/uneasy/wronged by our plutonium-186 contretemps.

  So when the time came for me to write a story for a festschrift commemorating his fifty years as a professional author, I thought I’d send Isaac a signal that I carried no lingering bitterness over the misunderstanding, that in fact the whole thing now seemed to me a trifle that could be chuckled over. Thus I wrote “The Asenion Solution,” yoking together Isaac’s celebrated 1948 “thiotimoline” article with good old PU-186, by way of telling him that I bore no lasting resentment. It was fun to do, and, I hope, forever obliterated the one blemish on our long and harmonious friendship.

  Foundation’s Friends duly appeared on the anniversary of the beginning of Isaac’s career and—though I wasn’t at the publication party, 3000 miles from where I live—I hear that Isaac was greatly delighted by the book. Ray Bradbury did a preface for it and the contributors included Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Harry Harrison, Hal Clement, and a lot of other fine writers who had terrific fun running their own variations on Isaac’s classic themes.

  The clever jacket painting showed the various writers in the guise of robots—I’m the world-weary one in the middle, leaning on the bar, and that’s Isaac himself in the samurai helmet down at lower right.

  One thing I didn’t expect, for a story that was just a prank. David Garnett chose it as one of the best science-fiction stories of 1989 for The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook, a British anthology that he edited then. You never can tell about such things.

  ——————

  Fletcher stared bleakly at the small mounds of gray metal that were visible behind the thick window of the storage chamber.

  “Plutonium-186,” he muttered. “Nonsense! Absolute nonsense!”

  “Dangerous nonsense, Lew” said Jesse Hammond, standing behind him. “Catastrophic nonsense.”

  Fletcher nodded. The very phrase, “plutonium-186,” sounded like gibberish to him. There wasn’t supposed to be any such substance. Plutonium-186 was an impossible isotope, too light by a good fifty neutrons. Or a bad fifty neutrons, considering the risks the stuff was creating as it piled up here and there around the world. But the fact that it was theoretically impossible for plutonium-186 to exist did not change the other, and uglier, fact that he was looking at three kilograms of it right this minute. Or that as the quantity of plutonium-186 in the world continued to increase, so did the chance of an uncontrollable nuclear reaction leading to an atomic holocaust.

  “Look at the morning reports,” Fletcher said, waving a sheaf of faxprints at Hammond. “Thirteen grams more turned up at the nucleonics lab of Accra Unive
rsity. Fifty grams in Geneva. Twenty milligrams in—well, that little doesn’t matter. But Chicago, Jesse, Chicago—three hundred grams in a single chunk!”

  “Christmas presents from the Devil,” Hammond muttered.

  “Not the Devil, no. Just decent serious-minded scientific folk who happen to live in another universe where plutonium-186 is not only possible but also perfectly harmless. And who are so fascinated by the idea that we’re fascinated by it that they keep on shipping the stuff to us in wholesale lots! What are we going to do with it all, Jesse? What in God’s name are we going to do with it all?”

  Raymond Nikolaus looked up from his desk at the far side of the room.

  “Wrap it up in shiny red-and-green paper and ship it right back to them?” he suggested.

  Fletcher laughed hollowly. “Very funny, Raymond. Very, very funny.”

  He began to pace the room. In the silence the clicking of his shoes against the flagstone floor seemed to him like the ticking of a detonating device, growing louder, louder, louder…

  He—they, all of them—had been wrestling with the problem all year, with an increasing sense of futility. The plutonium-186 had begun mysteriously to appear in laboratories all over the world—wherever supplies of one of the two elements with equivalent atomic weights existed. Gram for gram, atom for atom, the matching elements disappeared just as mysteriously: equal quantities of tungsten-186 or osmium-186.

  Where was the tungsten and osmium going? Where was the plutonium coming from? Above all, how was it possible for a plutonium isotope whose atoms had only 92 neutrons in its nucleus to exist even for a fraction of a fraction of an instant? Plutonium was one of the heavier chemical elements, with a whopping 94 protons in the nucleus of each of its atoms. The closest thing to a stable isotope of plutonium was plutonium-244, in which 150 neutrons held those 94 protons together; and even at that, plutonium-244 had an inevitable habit of breaking down in radioactive decay, with a half-life of some 76 million years. Atoms of plutonium-186, if they could exist at all, would come dramatically apart in very much less than one 76-millionth of a second.