The M.C. turned to Brent. “Your check will be on the house, of course. The management is grateful.”
The pale young man said: “I’m a little more grateful than the management.”
“Thank you,” Caren said simply.
Brent grinned at her. “You can return the favor by coming to our table after you change, Miss Ames. We’re right over there.”
She looked uncertain for a moment. “I don’t usually—”
“Just this time, Miss Ames,” the M.C. said.
Her smile was brilliant as she turned and left the floor. “See you in a few minutes Mr.-.”
“Brent. Shane Brent.”
By that time the foreman was back on his feet, pale and shaking. He didn’t understand what had happened. His friends led him back through the tables and out the door. He was protesting plaintively.
~ * ~
She sat quietly at the table between them and talked generalities in a quiet, cultured voice. Her between-acts dress was dark and conservative, her blond hair pulled back with determined severity.
She rebuffed the clumsy verbal advances of Hiram Lee very politely. By the time Shane Brent sat through the next show, enthralled anew by her artistry, Hiram Lee had his head on the table and was snoring softly.
During the dull act which followed Caren’s, two heavily built men came over to the table and shook their heads sadly. “Poor ole Hiram! Tch! Tch! You mind, mister, if we lug ole Hiram back with us to Solaray. The poor boy needs a nice soft bunk.”
Hiram protested feebly, but walked unsteadily between them, half supported by them as he left. Caren came back a few moments later.
They sat and talked of many things. At last she smiled and said: “I was silly when I was afraid to sit with you. Usually such things become a bit . . . messy.”
He grinned. “I’m harmless. It does seem a little funny to me to find somebody like you in . . . this place.”
Her eyes hardened. “I know how it goes from here on. Caren, you’re too nice for a place like this. Let me take you away with me. I know the whole routine, Mr. Brent.”
“It’s not like that, Caren. Honestly. If I’ve asked a clumsy question, I’m sorry. It wasn’t a buildup.”
She looked into his eyes for long seconds. “All right, Shane. I believe you. I’ll tell you how it happened. I was trained for ballet. When I was nineteen I married a very rich and very weak young man. After two years life became impossible. I managed to get a divorce. Every minute I spend on Earth is spent keeping out of his way. He manages to queer me in every dancing job I get. He has a weak heart. They won’t accept him for space travel. I’m safe here. I can keep this job. But I can’t ever go back.”
She didn’t ask for pity as she told him. It was as though she spoke of someone else.
“What kind of a career can you have here, Caren?”
She smiled and for once it wasn’t a pretty smile. “I can make a living here. Some day there will be other cities beside Allada. Some day there will be a civilization on Venus which will be cultured enough so that my kind of career can exist here. But I won’t live to see it.”
“What do you want out of your life?” he asked gently.
“Peace. Freedom to do as I please.” Her eyes were troubled.
“Is that all?” he asked insistently.
“No!” she flared. “I want more than that, but I don’t know what I want. I’m just restless.” She stopped and looked at him for long moments. “You are too, Shane. Aren’t you?”
He tried to pass it off lightly. “Things have been a little dull lately.”
“Take me for a walk through the city, Shane. When I feel like this I have to walk it off.”
They walked to the edge of the wire near the constant sparking and crackling as the electricity crisped the searching tendrils. Above them the strange stars shone dimly through the constant heavy mist.
She stood with her head tilted back, her eyes half shut. On an impulse he reached out and unclasped the heavy pin that bound her hair so tightly. It fell in a shining flood over her shoulders.
“Why—” she said, startled.
“It just had to be. I feel like we’ve both been caught up in something outside of us and we’re being hurtled along. Everything from here on will be because it has to be.”
Without another word she came quickly into his arms. She was as intensely alive as during the intricate figures of her strange dance.
~ * ~
Once again the pretty clerk pointed out the small room to Shane Brent. He walked slowly, reluctantly, shut the door quietly behind him. In a short time he had a closed circuit to Central Assignment and moments later the alert face of Frank Allison filled the screen.
“What’s the matter, Shane? You look done in. Rough night?”
“You could call it that I guess.”
“How about Lee?”
“Everything is set, Frank. He’ll leave on Flight Seven a week from today. Have somebody meet him and get him cleared and out to the school, will you?”
“Sure thing. What else have you got on your mind? From your tone that isn’t all you called about.”
“It isn’t. I’ve got an exec for you, Frank.”
“Good! A competent man?”
“I guess so. At least he’s had the proper background for it.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense. Who is the man?”
“Me,” Shane said flatly.
Frank Allison looked at him for long seconds, no trace of expression on his face. “Are you serious, Shane?”
“Completely, Frank.”
Allison moved away from the screen. Shane waited impatiently. In a few moments Allison was back and Shane was mildly shocked to see that the man was smiling broadly. “I had a little detail to attend to, Shane. I had to collect ten bucks. You see, I had a bet with West. We had you picked for the job for the last seven months, but in order for you to qualify for it, the idea had to originate with you. If it didn’t, Psycho wouldn’t approve your arbitrary assignment to the spot. Congratulations!”
Shane Brent wanted to laugh as he realized Allison had been playing almost the same game with him that he had been playing with Hiram Lee.
“I won’t be back, Frank,” he said quietly.
Allison sobered. “I had hoped you would, Shane. It’s your privilege to make your own choice. I had hoped that seven years from now, with your experience on this project, you’d be fitted to come in here and take my job.”
“I’m sorry, Frank,” Shane said.
Allison sighed. “So be it. When will you be in?”
“I’ll wait until she can come with me. It’ll be Flight Eight probably. I’ll confirm.”
There was deep affection in Allison’s smile. “Whoever she is, boy, I’m sure that she’s a very lovely person. See you when you get here.”
The screen darkened. He stood for a moment and looked at its opaque dead grayness. He didn’t see the screen. He saw, instead, a distant planet. He saw himself standing in a clearing, his hands hardened with pioneer labor. Above him was an alien sky. Beside him was a tall girl. Her hair of purest gold blew in the soft breeze.
Shane Brent turned and walked quickly from the small room. Caren would be waiting.
<
~ * ~
Kindred worlds established by Mother Earth were scattered throughout the universe by 4200. The home planet was proud of the far-flung colonies and the commerce of many alien places was immense. The Golden Age had swung to its peak. But, pendulum-like, there were signs that Earth, at the height of its glory, was facing another decisive crisis. Many heard the bell tolling the knell for the Empire, yet few recognized the tune.
MOTHER EARTH
by Isaac Asimov
B
ut can you be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Gustav Stein, who delivered himself of that mocking question with a whiskered smile and a gentle wipe at
the gray mustache from the neighborhood of which he had just removed an empty glass, was not an historian. He was a physiologist.
But his companion was an historian, and he accepted the gentle thrust with a smile of his own.
Stein’s apartment was, for Earth, quite luxurious. It lacked the empty privacy of the Outer Worlds, of course, since from its window there stretched outward a phenomenon that belonged only to the home planet—a city. A large city, full of people, rubbing shoulders, mingling sweat—
Nor was Stein’s apartment fitted with its own power and its own utility supply. It lacked even the most elementary quota of positronic robots. In short, it lacked the dignity of self-sufficiency, and like all things on Earth, it was merely part of a community, a pendant unit of a cluster, a portion of a mob.
But Stein was an Earthman by birth and used to it. And after all, by Earth standards, the apartment was still luxurious.
It was just that looking outward through the same windows before which lay the city, one could see the stars and among them the Outer Worlds, where there were no cities but only gardens; where the lawns were streaks of emerald, where all human beings were kings, and where all good Earthmen earnestly and vainly hoped to go some day.
Except for a few who knew better—like Gustav Stein.
~ * ~
The Friday evenings with Edward Field belonged to that class of ritual which comes with age and quiet life. It broke the week pleasantly for two elderly bachelors, and gave them an innocuous reason to linger over the sherry and the stars. It took them away from the crudities of life, and, most of all, it let them talk.
Field, especially, as a lecturer, scholar and man of modest means quoted chapter and verse from his still uncompleted history of Terrestrian Empire.
“I wait for the last act,” he explained. “Then I can call it the ‘Decline and Fall of Empire’ and publish it.”
“You must expect the last act to come soon, then.”
“In a sense, it has come already. It is just that it is best to wait for all to recognize that fact. You see, there are three times when an Empire or an Economic System or a Social Institution falls, you skeptic—”
Field paused for effect and waited patiently for Stein to say, “And those times are?”
“First,” Field ticked off a right forefinger, “there is the time when just a little nub shows up that points an inexorable way to finality. It can’t be seen or recognized until the finality arrives, when the original nub becomes visible to hindsight.”
“And you can tell what that little nub is?”
“I think so, since I already have the advantage of a century and a half of hindsight. It came when the Sirian sector colony, Aurora, first obtained permission of the Central Government at Earth to introduce positronic robots into their community life. Obviously, looking back at it, the road was clear for the development of a thoroughly mechanized society based upon robot labor and not human labor. And it is this mechanization that has been and will yet be the deciding factor in the struggle between the Outer Worlds and Earth.”
“It is?” murmured the physiologist. “How infernally clever you historians are. What and where is the second time the Empire fell?”
“The second point in time,” and Field gently bent his right middle finger backward, “arrives when a signpost is raised for the expert so large and plain that it can be seen even without the aid of perspective. And that point has been passed, too, with the first establishment of an immigration quota against Earth by the Outer Worlds. The fact that Earth found itself unable to prevent an action so obviously detrimental to itself was a shout for all to hear, and that was fifty years ago.”
“Better and better. And the third point?”
“The third point?” Down went the ring finger. “That is the least important. That is when the signpost becomes a wall with a huge ‘The End’ scrawled upon it. The only requirement for knowing that the end has come then is neither perspective nor training, but merely the ability to listen to the video.”
“I take it that the third point in time has not yet come.”
“Obviously not, or you would not need to ask. Yet it may come soon, for instance, if there is war.”
“Do you think there will be?”
Field avoided commitment. “Times are unsettled, and a good deal of futile emotion is sweeping Earth on the immigration question. And if there should be a war, Earth would be defeated quickly and lastingly, and the wall would be erected.”
“Can you be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Field smiled. He said: “You may know something I do not. For instance, they talk about something called the ‘Pacific Project.’”
“I never heard of it.” Stein refilled the two glasses, “Let us speak of other things.”
He held up his glass to the broad window so that the far stars flickered rosily in the clear liquid and said: “To a happy ending to Earth’s troubles.”
Field held up his own, “To the Pacific Project.”
Stein sipped gently and said: “But we drink to two different things.”
“Do we?”
~ * ~
It is quite difficult to describe any of the Outer Worlds to a native Earthman, since it is not so much a description of a world that is required as a description of a state of mind. The Outer Worlds—some fifty of them, orginally colonies, later dominions, later nations—differ extremely among themselves in a physical sense. But the state of mind is somewhat the same throughout.
It is something that grows out of a world not originally congenial to mankind, yet populated by the cream of the difficult, the different, the daring, the deviant.
If it is to be expressed in a word, that word is “individuality.”
There is the world of Aurora, for instance, three parsecs from Earth. It was the first planet settled outside the Solar System, and represented the dawn of interstellar travel. Hence its name.
It had air and water to start with, perhaps, but on Earthly standards, it was rocky and infertile. The plant life that did exist, sustained by a yellow-green pigment completely unrelated to chlorophyll, and not as efficient, gave the comparatively fertile regions a decidedly bilious and unpleasant appearance to unaccustomed eyes. No animal life higher than unicellular, and the equivalent of bacteria, as well, were present. Nothing dangerous naturally, since the two biological systems, of Earth and Aurora, were chemically unrelated.
Aurora became, quite gradually, a patchwork. Grains and fruit trees came first; shrubs, flowers, and grass afterward. Herds of livestock followed. And, as if it were necessary to prevent too close a copy of the mother planet, positronic robots also came to build the mansions, carve the landscapes, lay the power units. In short, to do the work, and turn the planet green and human.
There was the luxury of a new world and unlimited mineral resources. There was the splendid excess of atomic power laid out on new foundations with merely thousands, not billions, to service. There was the vast flowering of physical science, in worlds where there was room for it.
Take the home of Franklin Maynard, for instance, who, with his wife, three children, and twenty-seven robots lived on an estate more than forty miles away, in distance, from the nearest neighbor. Yet by community-wave he could, if he wished, share the living room of any of the seventy-five million on Aurora—with each singly; with all simultaneously.
Maynard knew every inch of his valley. He knew just where it ended, sharply, and gave way to the alien crags, along whose undesirable slopes the angular, sharp leaves of the native furze clung sullenly—as if in hatred of the softer matter that had usurped its place in the sun.
Maynard did not have to leave that valley. He was a deputy in the Gathering, and a member of the Foreign Agents Committee, but he could transact all business, but the most extremely essential, by community-wave, without ever sacrificing that precious privacy he had to have in a way no Earthman could understa
nd.
Even the present business could be performed by community-wave. The man, for instance, who sat with him in his living room, was Charles Hijkman, and he, actually, was sitting in his own living room on an island in an artificial lake stocked with fifty varieties of fish, which happened to be twenty-five hundred miles distant, in space.
The connection was an illusion, of course. If Maynard were to reach out a hand, he could feel the invisible wall.
Even the robots were quite accustomed to the paradox, and when Hijkman raised a hand for a cigarette, Maynard’s robot made no move to satisfy the desire, though a half-minute passed before Hijkman’s own robot could do so.
Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Page 20
