Pebble In The Sky te-1

by Isaac Asimov

  The High Minister writhed in his chair. "If our opponent deserves too much credit, he will win."

  "Impossible. He is already defeated. And in that respect we must give credit to the excellent Natter."

  "And who is Natter?"

  "An insignificant agent who must be used to the limit after this. His actions yesterday could not have been improved upon. His long-range assignment has been to watch Shekt. For the purpose, he keeps a fruit stand across the street from the Institute. For the last week he has been specifically instructed to watch the development of the Schwartz affair.

  "He was on hand when the man, known to him through photographs and through a glimpse at the time he was first brought to the Institute, escaped, He observed every action, himself unobserved, and it is his report that details yesterday's events. With incredible intuition, he decided that the entire purpose of the 'escape' was to arrange a meeting with Arvardan. He felt himself to be not in a position, single-handed, to exploit that meeting, so he decided to prevent it. The cabbies, to whom the Shekt girl had described Schwartz as being sick, speculated on Radiation Fever. Natter seized on that with the swiftness of genius. As soon as he observed the meeting in the department store, he reported the case of fever and the local authorities at Chica were, praised be Earth, intelligent enough to co-operate quickly.

  "The store was emptied, and the camouflage which they counted upon to hide their conversation was stripped from them. They were alone and very conspicuous in the store. Natter went further. He approached them and talked them into allowing him to escort Schwartz back to the Institute. They agreed. What could they do?…So that the day ended without a single word passing between Arvardan and Schwartz.

  "Nor did he commit the folly of arresting Schwartz. The two are still in ignorance of their detection and will yet lead us to bigger game

  "And Natter went further still. He notified the Imperial garrison, and that is beyond praise. It presented Arvardan with a situation he could not possibly have counted upon. He must either reveal himself to be an Outsider and destroy his usefulness, which apparently depends upon conducting himself upon Earth as though he were an Earthman, or he must keep the fact secret and subject himself to whatever unpleasantness might result. He took the more heroic alternative, and even broke the arm of an officer of the Empire, in his passion for realism. That, at least, must be remembered in his favor.

  "It is significant that his actions were as they were. Why should he, an Outsider, expose himself to the neuronic whip for an Earthgirl if the matter at stake was not supremely important?"

  Both fists of the High Minister were on the desk before him. He glowered savagely, the long, smooth lines of his face crumpled in distress. "It is well for you, Balkis, from such meager details, to construct the spider web you do. It is skillfully done, and I feel that it is as you say. Logic leaves us no other alternative…But it means that they are too close, Balkis. They are too close…And they will have no mercy this time."

  Balkis shrugged. "They cannot be too close, or, in a case of such potential destructiveness for all the Empire, they would have already struck…And their time is running short. Arvardan must still meet with Schwartz if anything is to be accomplished, and so I can predict for you the future."

  "Do so-do so."

  "Schwartz must be sent away now and events allowed to quiet down from their current high pitch."

  "But where will he be sent?"

  "We know that too. Schwartz was brought to the Institute by a man, obviously a farmer. Descriptions reached us from both Shekt's technician and from Natter. We went through the registration data of every farmer within sixty miles of Chica, and Natter identified one Arbin Maren as the man. The technician supported that decision independently. We investigated the man quietly, and it seems that is is supporting a father-in-law, a helpless cripple. in evasion of the Sixty."

  The High Minister pounded the table. "Such cases are entirely too frequent, Balkis. The laws must be tightened-"

  "It is not now the point, Your Excellency. What is important is the fact that since the farmer is violating the customs, he can be blackmailed."

  "Oh…"

  "Shekt, and his Outsider allies, need a tool for just such a case-that is, where Schwartz must remain in seclusion for a longer period than he can safely stay hidden in the Institute. This farmer, probably helpless and innocent, is perfect' for the purpose. Well, he will be watched. Schwartz will never be out of sight…Now, eventually another meeting between him and Arvardan will have to be arranged, and that time we will be prepared. Do you understand everything now?"

  "I do."

  "Well, praise Earth. Then I will leave you now." And, with a sardonic smile, he added, "With your permission, of course. "

  And the High Minister, completely oblivious to the sarcasm, waved a hand in dismissal.

  The Secretary, on his way to his own small office, was alone, and, when alone, his thoughts sometimes escaped from beneath his firm control and disported themselves in the secrecy of his mind.

  They concerned themselves very little with Dr. Shekt, Schwartz, Arvardan-least of all with the High Minister.

  Instead there was the picture of a planet, Trantor-from whose huge, planet-wide metropolis all the Galaxy was ruled. And there was the picture of a palace whose spires and sweeping arches he had never seen in reality; that no other Earthman had ever seen. He thought of the invisible lines of power and glory that swept from sun to sun in gathering strings, ropes, and cables to that central palace and to that abstraction, the Emperor, who was, after all, merely a man.

  His mind held that thought fixedly-the thought of that power which could alone bestow a divinity during life-concentrated in one who was merely human.

  Merely human! Like himself!

  He could be…

  11. The Mind That Changed

  The coming of the change was dim in Joseph Schwartz's mind. Many times, in the absolute quiet of the night-how much more quiet the nights were now; were they ever noisy and bright and clanging with the life of energetic millions? -in the new quiet, he traced it back. He would have liked to say that here, here was the moment.

  There was first that old, shattering day of fear when he was alone in a strange world-a day as misty in his mind now as the memory of Chicago itself. There was the trip to Chica, and its strange, complicated ending. He thought of that often.

  Something about a machine-pills he had taken. Days of recuperation and then the escape, the wandering, the inexplicable events that last hour in the department store. He couldn't possibly remember that part correctly. Yet, in the two months since, how clear everything was, how unfaulted his memory.

  Even then things had begun to seem strange. He had been sensitive to atmosphere. The old doctor and his daughter had been uneasy, even frightened. Had he known that then? Or had it just been a fugitive impression, strengthened by the hindsight of his thoughts since?

  But then, in the department store, just before that big man had reached out and trapped him-just before that-he had become conscious of the coming snatch. The warning had not been soon enough to save him, but it was a definite indication of the change.

  And, since then, the headaches. No, not quite headaches. Throbbings, rather, as though some hidden dynamo in his brain had started working and, with its unaccustomed action, was vibrating every bone of his skull. There had been nothing like it in Chicago-supposing his fantasy of Chicago had meaning-or even during his first few days here in reality.

  Had they done something to him that day in Chica? The machine? The pills-that had been anesthetic. An operation? And his thoughts, having reached that point for the hundredth time, stopped once more.

  He had left Chica the day after his abortive escape, and now the days passed easily.

  There had been Grew in his wheel chair, repeating words and pointing, or making motions, just as the girl, Pola, had done before him. Until one day Grew stopped speaking nonsense and began talking English. Or no, he himself-he,
Joseph Schwartz-had stopped speaking English and had begun talking nonsense. Except that it wasn't nonsense, any more.

  It was so easy. He learned to read in four days. He surprised himself. He had had a phenomenal memory once, in Chicago, or it seemed to him that he had. But he had not been capable of such feats. Yet Grew did not seem surprised.

  Schwartz gave it up.

  Then, when the autumn had become really golden, things were clear again, and he was out in the fields working. It was amazing, the way he picked it up. There it was again-he never made a mistake. There were complicated machines that he could run without trouble after a single explanation.

  He waited for the cold weather and it never quite came. The winter was spent in clearing ground, in fertilizing, in preparing for the spring planting in a dozen ways.

  He questioned Grew, tried to explain what snow was, but the latter only stared and said, "Frozen water falling like rain, eh? Oh! The word for that is snow! I understand it does that on other planets but not on Earth."

  Schwartz watched the temperature thereafter and found that it scarcely varied from day to day-and yet the days shortened, as would be expected from a northerly location, say as northerly as Chicago. He wondered if he was on Earth.

  He tried reading some of Grew's book films but gave up. People were people still, but the minutiae of daily life, the knowledge of which was taken for granted, the historical and sociological allusions that meant nothing to him, forced him back.

  The puzzles continued. The uniformly warm rains, the wild instructions he received to remain away from certain regions. For instance, there had been the evening that he had finally become too intrigued by the shining horizon, the blue glow to the south…

  He had slipped off after supper, and when not a mile had passed, the almost noiseless whir of the biwheel engine came up behind him and Arbin's angry shout rang out in the evening air. He had stopped and had been taken back.

  Arbin had paced back and forth before him and had said, "You must stay away from anywhere that it shines at night."

  Schwartz had asked mildly, "Why?"

  And the answer came with biting incision, "Because it is forbidden." A long pause, then, "You really don't know what it's like out there, Schwartz?"

  Schwartz spread his hands.

  Arbin said, "Where do you come from? Are you an-an Outsider?"

  "What's an Outsider?"

  Arbin shrugged and left.

  But that night had had a great importance for Schwartz, for it was during that short mile toward the shiningness that the strangeness in his mind had coalesced into the Mind Touch. It was what he called it, and the closest he had come, either then or thereafter, to describing it.

  He had been alone in the darkling purple. His own footsteps against the springy pavement were muted. He hadn't seen anybody. He hadn't heard anybody. He hadn't touched anything.

  Not exactly…It had been something like a touch, but not anywhere on his body. It was in his mind…Not exactly a touch, but a presence-a somethingness there like a velvety tickle.

  Then there had been two-two touches, distinct, apart. And the second-how could he tell them apart?-had grown louder (no, that wasn't the right word); it had grown distincter, more definite.

  And then he knew it was Arbin. He knew it five minutes, at least, before he caught the sound of the biwheel, ten minutes before he laid eyes on Arbin.

  Thereafter it occurred again and again with increasing frequency.

  It began to dawn on him that he always knew when Arbin, Loa, or Grew was within a hundred feet of himself, even when he had no reason for knowing, even when he had every reason to suppose the opposite. It was a hard thing to take for granted, yet it began to seem so natural.

  He experimented, and found that he knew exactly where any of them were, at any time. He could distinguish between them, for the Mind Touch differed from person to person. Not once had he the nerve to mention it to the others.

  And sometimes he would wonder what that first Mind Touch on the road to the Shiningness had been. It had been neither Arbin, Loa, nor Grew. Well? Did it make a difference?

  It did later. He had come across the Touch again, the same one, when he brought in the cattle one evening. He came to Arbin then and said:

  "What about that patch of woods past the South Hills, Arbin?"

  "Nothing about it," was the gruff answer. "It's Ministerial Ground."

  "What's that?"

  Arbin seemed annoyed. "It's of no importance to you, is it? They call it Ministerial Ground because it is the property of the High Minister."

  "Why isn't it cultivated?"

  "It's not intended for that." Arbin's voice was shocked. "It was a great Center. In ancient days. It is very sacred and must not be disturbed. Look, Schwartz, if you want to remain here safely, curb your curiosity and tend to your job."

  "But if it's so sacred, then nobody can live there?"

  "Exactly. You're right."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure…And you're not to trespass. It will mean the end for you."

  "I won't."

  Schwartz walked away, wondering and oddly uneasy. It was from that wooded ground that the Mind Touch came, quite powerfully, and now something additional had been added to the sensation. It was an unfriendly Touch, a threatening Touch.

  Why? Why?

  And still he dared not speak. They would not have believed him, and something unpleasant would happen to him as a consequence. He knew that too. He knew too much, in fact.

  He was younger these days, also. Not so much in the physical sense, to be sure. He was thinner in his stomach and broader in his shoulders. His muscles were harder and springier and his digestion was better. That was the result of work in the open. But it was something else he was chiefly conscious of. It was his way of thinking.

  Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

  But to Schwartz experience remained, and it was with a sharp delight that he found he could understand things at a bound, that he gradually progressed from following Arbin's explanations to anticipating them, to leaping on ahead. As a result, he felt young in a far more subtle way than any amount of physical excellence could account for.

  Two months passed, and it all came out-over a game of chess with Grew in the arbor.

  Chess, somehow, hadn't changed, except for the names of the pieces. It was as he remembered it, and therefore it was always a comfort to him. At least, in this one respect, his poor memory did not play him false.

  Grew told him of variations of chess. There was fourhanded chess, in which each player had a board, touching each other at the corners, with a fifth board filling the hollow in the center as a common No Man's Land. There were three-dimensional chess games in which eight transparent boards were placed one over the other and in which each piece moved in three dimensions as they formerly moved in two, and in which the number of pieces and pawns were doubled, the win coming only when a simultaneous check of both enemy kings occurred. There were even the popular varieties, in which the original position of the chessmen were decided by throws of the dice, or where certain squares conferred advantages or disadvantages to the pieces upon them, or where new pieces with strange properties were introduced.

  But chess itself, the original and unchangeable, was the same-and the tournament between Schwartz and Grew had completed its first fifty games.

  Schwartz had a bare knowledge of the moves when he began, so that he lost constantly in the first games. But that had changed and losing games were becoming rarer. Gradually Grew had grown slow and cautious, had taken to smoking his pipe into glowing embers in the intervals between moves, and had finally subsided into rebellious and querulous losses.
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br />   Grew was White and his pawn was already on King 4.

  "Let's go," he urged sourly. His teeth were clamped hard on his pipe and his eyes were already searching the board tensely.

  Schwartz took his seat in the gathering twilight and sighed. The games were really becoming uninteresting as more and more he became aware of the nature of Grew's moves before they could be made. It was as if Grew had a misty window in his skull. And the fact that he himself knew, almost instinctively, the proper course of chess play to take was simply of a piece with the rest of his problem.

  They used a "night-board," one that glowed in the darkness in a checkered blue-and-orange glimmer. The pieces, ordinary lumpish figures of a reddish clay in the sunlight, were metamorphosed at night. Half were bathed in a creamy whiteness that lent them the look of cold and shining porcelain, and the others sparked in tiny glitters of red.

  The first moves were rapid. Schwartz's own King's Pawn met the enemy advance head on. Grew brought out his King's Knight to Bishop 3; Schwartz countered with Queen's Knight to Bishop 3. Then the White Bishop leaped to Queen's Knight 5, and Schwartz's Queen's Rook's Pawn slid ahead a square to drive it back to Rook 4. He then advanced his other Knight to Bishop 3.

  The shining pieces slid across the board with an eery volition of their own as the grasping fingers lost themselves in the night.

  Schwartz was frightened. He might be revealing insanity, but he had to know. He said abruptly, "Where am I?"

  Grew looked up in the midst of a deliberate move of his Queen's Knight to Bishop 3 and said, "What?"

  Schwartz didn't know the word for "country," or "nation." He said, "What world is this?" and moved his Bishop to King 2.

  "Earth," was the short reply, and Grew castled with great emphasis, first the tall figurine that was the King, moving, and then the lumpish Rook topping it and resting on the other side.

  That was a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer. The word Grew had used Schwartz translated in his mind as "Earth." But what was "Earth"? Any planet is "Earth" to those that live on it. He advanced his Queen's Knight's Pawn two spaces, and again Grew's Bishop had to retreat, to Knight 3 this time. Then Schwartz and Grew, each in turn, advanced the Queen's Pawn one space, each freeing his Bishop for the battle in the center that was soon to begin.