Pebble In The Sky te-1

by Isaac Asimov

  But now things might be different,…Or could they be different? How far could he trust the words of a dying madman, three quarters incoherent?

  What was the use? In any case, he dared do nothing. He could only wait. He was getting old, and, as Ennius had said, that was a dangerous pastime on Earth. The Sixty was almost upon him, and there were few exceptions to its inevitable grasp.

  And even on this miserable, burning mud ball of Earth, he wanted to live.

  He went to bed once more at that point, and just before falling asleep he wondered feebly if his call to Ennius might have been tapped by the Ancients. He did not know at the time that the Ancients had other sources of information.

  It was morning before Shekt's young technician had completely made up his mind.

  He admired Shekt, but he knew well that the secret treatment of a non-authorized volunteer was against the direct order of the Brotherhood. And that order had been given the status of a Custom, which made disobedience a capital offense.

  He reasoned it out. After all, who was this man who had been treated? The campaign for volunteers had been carefully worked out. It was designed to give enough information about the Synapsifier to remove suspicion on the part of possible Imperial spies without giving any real encouragement to volunteers. The Society of Ancients sent their own men for treatment. and that was enough.

  Who had sent this man, then? The Society of Ancients in secret? In order to test Shekt's reliability?

  Or was Shekt a traitor? He had been closeted with someone earlier in the day-someone in bulky clothes, such as Outsiders wore in fear of radioactive poisoning.

  In either case Shekt might go down in doom, and why should he himself be dragged down as well? He was a young man with nearly four decades of life before him. Why should he anticipate the Sixty?

  Besides, it would mean promotion for him…And Shekt was so old, the next Census would probably get him anyway, so it would involve very little harm for him. Practically none at all.

  The technician had decided. His hand reached for the communicator, and he punched the combination that would lead directly to the private room of the High Minister of all Earth, who, under the Emperor and Procurator, held the power of life and death over every man on Earth.

  It was evening again before the misty impressions within Schwartz's skull sharpened through the pink pain. He remembered the trip to the low, huddling structures by the lakeside, the long crouching wait in the rear of the car.

  And then-what? What? His mind yanked away at the sluggish thoughts…Yes, they had come for him. There was a room, with instruments and dials, and two pills… That was it. They had given him pills, and he had taken them cheerfully. What had he to lose? Poisoning would have been a favor.

  And then-nothing.

  Wait! There had been flashes of consciousness…People bending over him…Suddenly he remembered the cold motion of a stethoscope over his chest…A girl had been feeding him.

  It flashed upon him that he had been operated upon and, in panic, he flung the bed sheets from him and sat up.

  A girl was upon him, hands on his shoulders, forcing him back onto the pillows. She spoke soothingly, but he did not understand her. He tensed himself against the slim arms, but uselessly. He had no strength.

  He held his hands before his face. They seemed normal. He moved his legs and heard them brush against the sheets. They couldn't have been amputated..

  He turned to the girl and said, without much hope, "Can you understand me? Do you know where I am?" He scarcely recognized his own voice.

  The girl smiled and suddenly poured out a rapid patter of liquid sound. Schwartz groaned. Then an older man entered, the one who had given him the pills. The man and the girl spoke together, the girl turning to him after a while, pointing to his lips and making little gestures of invitation to him.

  "What?" he said.

  She nodded eagerly, her pretty face glowing with pleasure, until, despite himself, Schwartz felt glad to look at it.

  "You want me to talk?" he asked.

  The man sat down upon his bed and motioned him to open his mouth. He said, " Ah-h-h," and Schwartz repeated "Ah-h-h" while the man's fingers massaged Schwartz's Adam's apple.

  "What's the matter?" said Schwartz peevishly, when the pressure was removed. " Are you surprised I can talk? What do you think I am?"

  The days passed, and Schwartz learned a few things. The man was Dr. Shekt-the first human being he knew by name since he had stepped over the rag doll. The girl was his daughter, Pola. Schwartz found that he no longer needed to shave. The hair on his face never grew. It frightened him. Did it ever grow?

  His strength came back quickly. They were letting him put on clothes and walk about now, and were feeding him something more than mush.

  Was his trouble amnesia, then? Were they treating him for that? Was all this world normal and natural, while the world he thought he remembered was only the fantasy of an amnesic brain?

  And they never let him step out of the room, not even into the corridor. Was he a prisoner, then? Had he committed a crime?

  There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. There never was a man so helpless as one who cannot remember.

  Pola amused herself by teaching him words. He was not at all amazed at the ease with which he picked them up and remembered. He remembered that he had had a trick memory in the past; that memory, at least, seemed accurate. In two days he could understand simple sentences. In three he could make himself understood.

  On the third day, however, he did become amazed. Shekt taught him numbers and set him problems. Schwartz would give answers, and Shekt would look at a timing device and record with rapid strokes of his stylus. But then Shekt explained the term "logarithm" to him and asked for the logarithm of two.

  Schwartz picked his words carefully. His vocabulary was still minute and he reinforced it with gestures. "I-not-say. Answer-not-number."

  Shekt nodded his head excitedly and said, "Not number. Not this, not that; part this, part that."

  Schwartz understood quite well that Shekt had confirmed his statement that the answer was not an even number but a fraction and therefore said, "Point three zero one zero three -and-more-numbers."

  "Enough!"

  Then came the amazement. How had he known the answer to that? Schwartz was certain that he had never heard of logarithms before, yet in his mind the answer had come as soon as the question was put. He had no idea of the process by which it had been calculated. It was as if his mind were an independent entity, using him only as its mouthpiece.

  Or had he once been a mathematician, in the days before his amnesia?

  He found it exceedingly difficult to wait the days out. Increasingly he felt he must venture out into the world and force an answer from it somehow. He could never learn in the prison of this room, where (the thought suddenly came to him) he was but a medical specimen.

  The chance came on the sixth day. They were beginning to trust him too much, and one time when Shekt left he did not lock the door. Where usually the door so neatly closed itself that the very crack of its joining the wall became invisible, this time a quarter inch of space showed.

  He waited to make sure Shekt was not returning on the instant, and then slowly put his hand over the little gleaming light as he had seen them often do. Smoothly and silently the door slid open…The corridor was empty.

  And so Schwartz "escaped."

  How was he to know that for the six days of his residence there the Society of Ancients had its agents watching the hospital, his room, himself?

  6. Apprehension In The Night

  The Procurator's palace was scarcely less a fairyland at night. The evening flowers (none native to Earth) opened their fat white blossoms in festoons that extended their delicate fragrance to the very walls of the palace. Under the polarized light of the moon, the artificial silicate strands woven cleverly int
o the stainless aluminum alloy of the palace structure sparked a faint violet against the metallic sheen of their surroundings.

  Ennius looked at the stars. They were the real beauty to him, since they were the Empire.

  Earth's sky was of an intermediate type. It had not the unbearable glory of the skies of the Central Worlds, where star elbowed star in such blinding competition that the black of night was nearly lost in a coruscant explosion of light. Nor did it possess the lonely grandeur of the skies of the Periphery, where the unrelieved blackness was broken at great intervals by the dimness of an orphaned star-with the milky lens shape of the Galaxy spreading across the sky, the individual stars thereof lost in diamond dust.

  On Earth two thousand stars were visible at one time. Ennius could see Sirius, round which circled one of the ten most populous planets of the Empire. There was Arcturus, capital of the sector of his birth. The sun of Trantor, the Empire's capital world, was lost somewhere in the Milky Way. Even under a telescope it was just part of a general blaze.

  He felt a soft hand on his shoulder, and his own went up to meet it.

  "Flora?" he whispered.

  "It had better be," came his wife's half-amused voice. "Do you know that you haven't slept since you returned from Chica? Do you know further that it is almost dawn?… Shall I have breakfast sent out here?"

  "Why not?" He smiled fondly up at her and felt in the darkness for the brown ringlet that hovered next her cheek. He tugged at it. "And must you wait up with me and shadow the most beautiful eyes in the Galaxy?"

  She freed her hair and replied gently, "You are trying to shadow them yourself with your sugar syrup, but I've seen you this way before and am not in the tiniest hoodwinked. What worries you tonight, dear?"

  "Why, that which always worries me. That I have buried you here uselessly, when there's not a viceregal society in the Galaxy you could not grace."

  "Besides that! Come, Ennius, I will not be played with."

  Ennius shook his head in the shadows and said, "I don't know. I think an accumulation of little puzzling things has finally sickened me. There's the matter of Shekt and his Synapsifier. And there's this archaeologist, Arvardan, and his theories. And other things, other things. Oh, what's the use, Flora-I'm doing no good here at all."

  "Surely this time of the morning isn't quite the moment for putting your morale to the test."

  But Ennius was speaking through clenched teeth. "These Earthmen! Why should so few be such a burden to the Empire? Do you remember, Flora, when I was first appointed to the Procuracy, the warnings I received from old Faroul, the last Procurator, as to the difficulties of the position?… He was right. If anything, he did not go far enough in his warnings. Yet I laughed at him at the time and privately thought him the victim of his own senile incapacity. I was young, active, daring. I would do better…" He paused, lost in himself, then continued, apparently at a disconnected point. "Yet so many independent pieces of evidence seem to show that these Earthmen are once again being misled into dreams of rebellion."

  He looked up at his wife. "Do you know that it is the doctrine of the Society of Ancients that Earth was at one time the sole home of Humanity, that it is the appointed center of the race, the true representation of Man?"

  "Why, so Arvardan told us two evenings ago, didn't he?" It was always best at these times to let him talk himself out.

  "Yes, so he did," said Ennius gloomily, "but even so, he spoke only of the past. The Society of Ancients speaks of the future as well. Earth, once more, they say, will be the center of the race. They even claim that this mythical Second Kingdom of Earth is at hand; they warn that the Empire will be destroyed in a general catastrophe which will leave Earth triumphant in all its pristine glory"-and his voice shook-"as a backward, barbarous, soil-sick world. Three times before this same nonsense has raised rebellion, and the destruction brought down upon Earth has never served in the least to shake their stupid faith."

  "They are but poor creatures," said Flora, "these men of Earth. What should they have, if not their Faith? They are certainly robbed of everything else-of a decent world, of a decent life. They are even robbed of the dignity of acceptance on a basis of equality by the rest of the Galaxy. So they retire to their dreams. Can you blame them?"

  "Yes, I can blame them," cried Ennius with energy. "Let them turn from their dreams and fight for assimilation. They don't deny they are different. They simply wish to replace 'worse' by 'better,' and you can't expect the rest of the Galaxy to let them do that. Let them abandon their cliquishness, their outdated and offensive 'Customs.' Let them be men, and they will be considered men. Let them be Earthmen and they will be considered only as such.

  "But never mind that. For instance, what's going on with the Synapsifier? Now there's a little thing that is keeping me from sleep." Ennius frowned thoughtfully at the dullness which was overcoming the polished darkness of the eastern sky.

  "The Synapsifier?…Why, isn't that the instrument Dr. Arvardan spoke of at dinner? Did you go to Chica to see about that?"

  Ennius nodded.

  "And what did you find out there?"

  "Why nothing at all," said Ennius. "I know Shekt. I know him well. I can tell when he's at ease; I can tell when he isn't. I tell you, Flora, that man was dying of apprehension all the time he was speaking to me. And when I left he broke into a sweat of thankfulness. It is an unhappy mystery, Flora."

  "But will the machine work?"

  "Am I a neurophysicist? Shekt says it will not. He called me up to tell me that a volunteer was nearly killed by it. But I don't believe that. He was excited! He was more than that. He was triumphant! His volunteer had lived and the experiment had been successful, or I've never seen a happy man in my life…Now why do you suppose he lied to me, then? Do you suppose that the Synapsifier is in operation? Do you suppose that it can be creating a race of geniuses?"

  "But then why keep it secret?"

  "Ah! Why? It isn't obvious to you. Why has Earth failed in its rebellions? There are fairly tremendous odds against it, aren't there? Increase the average intelligence of the Earthman. Double it. Triple it. And where may your odds be then?"

  "Oh, Ennius."

  "We may be in the position of apes attacking human beings. What price numerical odds?"

  "You're really jumping at shadows. They couldn't hide a thing like that. You can always have the Bureau of Outer Provinces send in a few psychologists and keep testing random samples of Earthmen. Surely any abnormal rise in I.Q. could be detected instantly."

  "Yes. I suppose so…But that may not be it. I'm not sure of anything, Flora, except that a rebellion is in the cards. Something like the Uprising of 750, except that it will probably be worse."

  "Are we prepared for it? I mean, if you're so certain-"

  "Prepared?" Ennius's laughter was a bark. "I 'am. The garrison is in readiness and fully supplied. Whatever can possibly be done with the material at hand. I have done. But, Flora, I don't want to have a rebellion. I don't want my Procuracy to go down in history as the Procuracy of the Rebellion. I don't want my name linked with death and slaughter. I'll be decorated for it, but a century from now the history books will call me a bloody tyrant. What about the Viceroy of Santanni in the sixth century? Could he have done other than he did, though millions died? He was honored then, but who has a good word for him now? I would rather be known as the man who prevented a rebellion and saved the worthless lives of twenty million fools." He sounded quite hopeless about it.

  "Are you so sure you can't, Ennius-even yet?" She sat down beside him and brushed her finger tips along the line of his jaw.

  He caught them and held them tightly. "How can I? Everything works against me. The Bureau itself rushes into the struggle on the side of the fanatics of Earth by sending this Arvardan here."

  "But, dear, I don't see that this archaeologist will do anything so awful. I'll admit he sounds like a faddist, but what harm can he do?"

  "Why, isn't it plain! He wants to be allowed to
prove that Earth is the original home of Humanity. He wants to bring scientific authority to the aid of subversion."

  "Then stop him.'.

  "I can't. There you have it, frankly. There's a theory about that viceroys can do anything, but that just isn't so. That man, Arvardan, has a writ of permission from the Bureau of Outer Provinces. It is approved by the Emperor. That supersedes me completely. I could do nothing without appealing to the Central Council, and that would take months… And what reasons could I give? If I tried to stop him by force, on the other hand, it would be an act of rebellion; and you know how ready the Central Council is to remove any executive they think is overstepping the line, ever since the Civil War of the eighties. And then what? I'd be replaced by someone who wouldn't be aware of the situation at all, and Arvardan would go ahead anyway.

  "And that still isn't the worst, Flora. Do you know how he intends to prove the antiquity of Earth? Suppose you guess."

  Flora laughed gently. "You're making fun of me, Ennius. How should I guess? I'm no archaeologist. I suppose he'll try to dig up old statues or bones and date them by their radioactivity or something like that."

  "I wish it were like that. What Arvardan intends to do, he told me yesterday, is to enter the radioactive areas on Earth. He intends to find human artifacts there, show that they exist from a time previous to that at which Earth's soil became radioactive-since he insists the radioactivity is manmade-and date it in that fashion."

  "But that's almost what I said."

  "Do you know what it means to enter the radioactive areas? They're Forbidden. It's one of the strongest Customs these Earthmen have. No one can enter the Forbidden Areas, and all radioactive areas are Forbidden."

  "But then that's good. Arvardan will be stopped by the men of Earth themselves."

  "Oh, fine. He'll be stopped by the High Minister! And then how will we ever convince him that all this was not a Government-sponsored project, that the Empire is not conniving at deliberate sacrilege?"

  "The High Minister can't be that touchy."