The Early Asimov. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  The flivver stopped on a dime before a huge double door and Prosser tumbled out, followed by the other two at a more leisurely pace.

  “Through here! Through here!” he said. He shoved the door open and led them down the corridor and up a narrow flight of stairs onto a wall-hugging passageway that circled a huge three-level room. Orloff recognized the gleaming quartz-and-steel pipe-sprouting ellipsoid two levels below as an atomic generator.

  He adjusted his monocle and watched the scurrying activity below. An earphoned man on a high stool before a control board studded with dials looked up and waved. Prosser waved back and grinned.

  Orloff said, “You create your force fields here?”

  “That’s right! Ever see one?”

  “No.” The commissioner smiled, ruefully. “I don’t even know what one is, except that it can be used as a meteor shield.”

  Prosser said, “It’s very simple. Elementary matter. All matter is composed of atoms. Atoms are held together by interatomic forces. Take away atoms. Leave interatomic forces behind. That’s a force field.”

  Orloff looked blank, and Birnam chuckled deep in his throat and scratched the back of his ear.

  “That explanation reminds me of our Ganymedan method of suspending an egg a mile high in the air. It goes like this. You find a mountain just a mile high and put the egg on top. Then, keeping the egg where it is, you take the mountain away. That’s all.”

  The colonial commissioner threw his head back to laugh, and the irascible Dr. Prosser puckered his lips in a pursed symbol of disapproval.

  “Come, come. No joke, you know. Force fields most important. Got to be ready for the Jovians when they come:’

  A sudden rasping bur from below sent Prosser back from the railing.

  “Get behind screen here,” he babbled. “The twenty-millimeter field is going up. Bad radiation.”

  The bur muted almost into silence, and the three walked out onto the passageway again. There was no apparent change, but Prosser shoved his hand out over the railing and said, “Feel!”

  Orloff extended a cautious finger, gasped, and slapped out with the palm of his hand. It was like pushing against very soft sponge rubber or superresilient steel springs.

  Birnam tried, too. “That’s better than anything we’ve done yet, isn’t it?” He explained to Orloff, “ A twenty-millimeter screen is one that can hold an atmosphere of a pressure of twenty millimeters of mercury against a vacuum without appreciable leakage.”

  The commissioner nodded, “I see! You’ d need a seven-hundred-sixty-millimeter screen to hold Earth’s atmosphere then.”

  “Yes! That would be a unit atmosphere screen. Well, Prosser, is this what got you excited?”

  “This twenty-millimeter screen? Of course not. I can go up to two hundred fifty millimeters using the activated vanadium pentasulphide in the praseodymium breakdown. But it’s not necessary. Technician would do it and blow up the place. Scientist checks on theory and goes slow.” He winked. ‘We’re hardening the field now. Watch!”

  “Shall we get behind the screen?”

  “Not necessary now. Radiation bad only at beginning…

  The burring waxed again, but not as loudly as before. Prosser shouted to the man at the control board, and a spreading wave of the hand was the only reply.

  Then the control man waved a clenched fist and Prosser cried, “We’ve passed fifty millimeters! Feel the field!”

  Orloff extended his hand and poked it curiously. The sponge rubber had hardened! He tried to pinch it between finger and thumb so perfect was the illusion, but here the “rubber… faded to unresisting air.

  Prosser tch-tched impatiently. “No resistance at right angles to force. Elementary mechanics, that is…

  The control man was gesturing again. “Past seventy,” explained Prosser. “We’re slowing down now. Critical point is 83.42.”

  He hung over the railing and kicked out with his feet at the other two. “Stay away! Dangerous!”

  And then he yelled, “Careful! The generator’s bucking!”

  The bur had risen to a hoarse rnaximum and the control man worked frantically at his switches. From within the quartz heart of the central atomic generator, the sullen red glow of the bursting atoms had brightened dangerously.

  There was a break in the bur, a reverberant roar, and a blast of air that threw Orloff hard against the wall.

  Prosser dashed up. There was a cut over his eye. “Hurt? No? Good, good! I was expecting something of the sort. Should have warned you. Let’s go down. Where’s Birnam?”

  The tall Ganymedan picked herself up off the floor and brushed at his clothes. “Here I am. What blew up?”

  “Nothing blew up. Something buckled. Come on, down we go.” He debbed at his forehead with a handkerchief and led the way downward.

  The control man removed his earphones as he approached and got off his stool. He looked tired, and his dirt-smeared face was greasy with perspiration.

  “The damn thing started going at 82.8, boss. It almost caught me.”

  “It did, did it?” growled Prosser. “Within limits of error, isn’t it? How’s the generator? Hey, Stoddard!”

  The technician addressed replied from his station at the generator, “Tube 5 died. It’ll take two days to replace.”

  Prosser turned in satisfaction and said, “It worked. Went exactly as presumed. Problem solved, gentlemen. Trouble over. Let’s get back to my office. I want to eat. And then I want to sleep.”

  He did not refer to the subject again until once more behind the desk in his office, and then he spoke between huge bites of a liver-and-onion sandwich.

  He addressed Birnam, “Remember the work on space strain last June. It Hopped, but we kept at it. Finch got a lead last week and I developed it. Everything fell into place. Slick as goose grease. Never saw anything like it.”

  “Go ahead,” said Birnam, calmly. He knew Prosser sufficiently well to avoid showing impatience.

  “You saw what happened. When a field tops 83.42 millimeters, it becomes unstable. Space won’t stand the strain. It buckles and the field blows. Boom/”

  Birnam’s mouth dropped open and the arms of Orloff’s chair creaked under sudden pressure. Silence for a while, and then Birnam said unsteadily, “You mean force fields stronger than that are impossible?”

  “They’re possible. You can create them. But the denser they are, the more unstable they are. If I had turned on the two-hundred-and-fifty-millimeter field, it would have lasted one tenth of a second. Then, blooie! Would have blown up the Station! And myself! Technician would have done it. Scientist is warned by theory. Works carefully, the way I did. No harm done.”

  Orloff tucked his monocle into his vest pocket and said tremulously, “But if a force field is the same thing as interatomic forces, why is it that steel has such a strong interatomic binding force without bucking space? There’s a Haw there.”

  Prosser eyed him in annoyance. “No Haw. Critical strength depends on number of generators. In steel, each atom is a force-field generator. That means about three hundred billion trillion generators for every ounce of matter. If we could use that many-As it is, one hundred generators would be the practical limit. That only raises the critical point to ninety-seven or thereabout.”

  He got to his feet and continued with sudden fervor, “No. Problem’s over, I tell you. Absolutely impossible to create a force field capable of holding Earth’s atmosphere for more than a hundredth of a second. Jovian atmosphere entirely out of question. Cold figures say that; backed by experiment. Space won’t stand it!

  “Let the Jovians do their damnedest. They can’t get out! That’s final! That’s final! That’s final!”

  Orloff said, “Mr. Secretary, can I send a spacegram anywhere in the Station? I want to tell Earth that I’m returning by the next ship and that the Jovian problem is liquidated-entirely and for good.”

  Birnam said nothing, but the relief of his face as he shook hands with the colonial commissioner, tra
nsfigured the gaunt homeliness of it unbelievably.

  And Dr. Prosser repeated, with a birdlike jerk of his head, “That’s final!”

  Hal Tuttle looked up as Captain Everett of the spaceship Transparent, newest ship of the Comet Space Lines, entered his private observation room in the nose of the ship.

  The captain said, “ A spacegram has just reached me from the home offices at Tucson. We’re to pick up Colonial Commissioner Orloff at Jovopolis, Ganymede, and take him back to Earth.”

  “Good. We haven’t sighted any ships?”

  “No, no! We’re way off the regular space lanes. The first the System will know of us will be the landing of the Transparent on Ganymede. It will be the greatest thing in space travel since the first trip to the Moon.” His voice softened suddenly, “What’s wrong, Hal? This is your triumph, after all:’

  Hal Tuttle looked up and out into the blackness of space. “I suppose it is. Ten years of work, Sam. I lost an arm and an eye in that first explosion, but I don’t regret them. It’s the reaction that’s got me. The problem is solved; my lifework is finished. “

  “So is every steel-hulled ship in the System.”

  Tuttle smiled. “Yes. It’s hard to realize, isn’t it?” He gestured outward. “You see the stars? Part of the time, there’s nothing between them and us. It gives me a queazy feeling.” His voice brooded, “Nine years I worked for nothing. I wasn’t a theoretician, and never really knew where I was headed-just tried everything. I tried a little too hard and space wouldn’t stand it. I paid an arm and an eye and started fresh.”

  Captain Everett balled his fist and pounded the hull-the hull through which the stars shone unobstructed. There was the muffled thud of flesh striking an unyielding surface-but no response whatever from the invisible wall.

  Tuttle nodded, “It’s solid enough, now-though it flicks on and off eight hundred thousand times a second. I got the idea from the stroboscopic lamp. You know them-they flash on and off so rapidly that it gives all the impression of steady illumination.

  “And so it is with the hull. It’s not on long enough to buckle space. It’s not off long enough to allow appreciable leakage of the atmosphere. And the net effect is a strength better than steel.”

  He paused and added slowly, “And there’s no telling how far we can go. Speed up the intermission effect. Have the field flick off and on millions of times per second-billions of times. You can get fields strong enough to hold an atomic explosion. My lifework!”

  Captain Everett pounded the other’s shoulder. “Snap out of it, man. Think of the landing on Ganymede. The devil! It will be great publicity. Think of Orloff’s face, for instance, when he finds he is to be the first passenger in history ever to travel in a spaceship with a force-field hull. How do you suppose he’ll feel?”

  Hal Tuttle shrugged. “I imagine he’ll be rather pleased.”

  ***

  With “Not Final!” I completed my third year as a writer-three years since my initial trip to Campbell’s office. In that time I had earned just a hair short of a thousand dollars (not as bad as it sounds in days when college tuition was only four hundred dollars a year) and I had about a quarter of that in my savings account.

  Still, you can see that there was nothing in that financial record to lead me to think that writing was a possible way of making a living-especially since I had no dream of ever writing anything but magazine science fiction.

  On June 10, 1941, in the course of a talk with Fred Pohl, I mentioned my frustration at not being able to make a sale to Unknown. Fred said he had a good idea for a fantasy, and from that it was a short step to an agreement to go halfies. We’ d talk the idea over, I would write it, and we’d split the sale, if any, fifty-fifty.

  Fred must have been willing because (as I found out three days later) his magazines were doing poorly and he was being relieved of his editorial position.

  It was too bad, of course, but not an irredeemable catastrophe. Pohl had had nearly two years of valuable editorial experience, and the time would come when this would stand him in good stead in a much more important and longer-enduring role as editor of Galaxy, which during the 1950s and 1960s was to compete with Astounding for leadership in the field.

  As for myself, I could scarcely complain. Pohl had accepted eight of my stories (over a quarter of those I had written and nearly half of those I had sold up to then).of these, six had already been published and one (“Super-Neutron”) was safely slated for publication in the forthcoming issue of Astonishing. That left the ninth, “Christmas on Ganymede.” It was not yet paid for, nor had it actually been set in type, and, regretfully, Pohl had to return it. However, I sold it within two weeks to Thrilling Wonder Stories for a little more than Pohl would have been able to pay me, so no harm was done even there.-and though I regretted the loss of a market, Pohl had safely seen me through the period during which I developed to the point where Campbell and Astounding itself could become my major market.

  At first, when “Christmas on Ganymede” was returned, I thought it was because the Pohl magazines had been suspended altogether. If the publishers had intended that, they changed their minds. Astonishing continued a couple of years, until it was killed by the World War II paper shortage. Super Science Stories survived World War II and even a little past the 1940s, and was yet to publish one more story of mine.

  But back to June 10-Taking Fred’s fantasy idea, I wrote the story entirely on my own, calling it “Legal Rights.” Once again, though, a collaboration didn’t succeed. On July 8, Campbell rejected it, the first rejection I had received from him in half a year.

  By that time, though, Fred was agenting again. I gave him the story, rather shamefacedly, and forgot about it. He changed the name to “Legal Rites” (much better) and rewrote it quite a bit. Seven years later, he actually sold it.

  Legal Rites

  (with James MacCreigh)

  I

  Already the stars were out, though the sun had just dipped under the horizon, and the sky of the west was a blood-stuck gold behind the Sierra Nevadas.

  “Hey!” squawked Russell Harley. “Come back!”

  But the one-lunged motor of the old Ford was making too much noise; the driver didn’t hear him. Harley cursed as he watched the old car careen along the sandy ruts on its half-flat tires. Its taillight was saying a red no to him. No, you can’t get away tonight; no, you’ll have to stay here and fight it out.

  Harley grunted and climbed back up the porch stairs of the old wooden house. It was well made, anyhow. The stairs, though half a century old, neither creaked beneath him nor showed cracks.

  Harley picked up the bags he’d dropped when he experienced his abrupt change of mind-fake leather and worn out, they were-and carted them into the house. He dumped them on a dust-jacketed sofa and looked around.

  It was stifling hot, and the smell of the desert outside had permeated the room. Harley sneezed.

  “Water,” he said out loud. “That’s what I need.”

  He’d prowled through every room on the ground floor before he stopped still and smote his head. Plumbing-naturally there’d be no plumbing in this hole eight miles out on the desert! A well was the best he could hope for

  If that.

  It was getting dark. No electric lights either, of course. He blundered irritatedly through the dusky rooms to the back of the house. The screen door shrieked metallically as he opened it. A bucket hung by the door. He picked it up, tipped it, shook the loose sand out of it. He looked over the “back yard”-about thirty thousand visible acres of hilly sand, rock and patches of sage and flame-tipped ocotillo.

  No well.

  The old fool got water from somewhere, he thought savagely. Obstinately he climbed down the back steps and wandered out into the desert. Overhead the stars were blinding, a million billion of them, but the sunset was over already and he could see only hazily. The silence was murderous. Only a faint whisper of breeze over the sand, and the slither of his shoes.

  He c
aught a glimmer of starlight from the nearest clump of sage and walked to it. There was a pool of water, caught in the angle of two enormous boulders. He stared at it doubtfully, then shrugged. It was water. It was better than nothing. He dipped the bucket in the little pool. Knowing nothing of the procedure, he filled it with a quart of loose sand as he scooped it along the bottom. When he lifted it, brimful, to his lips, he spat out the first mouthful and swore violently.

  Then he used his head. He set the bucket down, waited a second for the sand grains to settle, cupped water in his hands, lifted it to his lips…

  Pat. HISS. Pat. HISS. Pat. HISS-

  ”What the hell!” Harley stood up, looked around in abrupt puzzlement. It sounded like water dripping from somewhere, onto a redhot stove, Hashing into sizzling steam. He saw nothing, only the sand and the sage and the pool of tepid, sickly water.

  Pat. HISS

  Then he saw it, and his eyes bulged. Out of nowhere it was dripping, a drop a second, a sticky, dark drop that was thicker than water, that fell to the ground lazily, in slow defiance of gravity. And when it struck each drop sizzled and skittered about, and vanished. It was perhaps eight feet from him, just visible in the starlight.

  And then, “Get off my land!” said the voice from nowhere.

  Harley got. By the time he got to Rebel Butte three hours later, he was barely managing to walk, wishing desperately that he’d delayed long enough for one more good drink of water, despite all the fiends of hell. But he’d run the first three miles. He’d had plenty of encouragement. He remembered with a shudder how the clear desert air had taken milkly shape around the incredible trickle of dampness and had advanced on him threateningly.

  And when he got to the first kerosene-lighted saloon of Rebel Butte, and staggered inside, the saloonkeeper’s fascinated stare at the front of his shoddy coat showed him strong evidence that he hadn’t been suddenly taken with insanity, or drunk on the unaccustomed sensation of fresh desert air. All down the front of him it was, and the harder he rubbed the harder it stayed, the stickier it got. Blood!