The Early Asimov. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  “But we didn’t. We merely imprisoned Auroran smugglers, and were obviously within our rights. They had to go to war over it because only so could they protect their superiority, which in turn protected them against the horrors of guilt. And we lost quickly. Scarcely an Auroran died. The guilt grew deeper and resulted in exactly the peace treaty our psychiatrists had predicted.

  “And as for sending men out to die, that is a commonplace in every war-and a necessity. It was necessary to fight a battle, and, naturally, there were casualties.”

  “But why?” interrupted Keilin, wildly. “Why? Why? Why does all this gibberish seem to make sense to you? What have we gained? What can we possibly gain out of the present situation?”

  “Gained, man? You ask what we’ve gained? Why, we’ve gained the universe. What has held us back so far? You know what Earth has needed these last centuries. You yourself once outlined it forcefully to Cellioni. We need a positronic robot society and an atomic power technology. We need chemical farming and we need population control. Well, what’s prevented that, eh? Only the customs of centuries which said robots were evil since they deprived human beings of jobs, that population control was merely the murder of unborn children, and so on. And worse, there was always the safety valve of emigration either actual or hoped-for.

  “But now we cannot emigrate. We’re stuck here. Worse than that, we have been humiliatingly defeated by a handful of men out in the stars, and we’ve had a humiliating treaty of peace forced upon us. What Earthman wouldn’t subconsciously burn for revenge? Self-preservation has frequently knuckled under to that tremendous yearning to ‘get even.’

  “And that is the second third of the Pacific Project, the recognition of the revenge motive. As simple as that.

  “And how can we know that this is really so? Why, it has been demonstrated in history scores of times. Defeat a nation, but don’t crush it entirely, and in a generation or two or three it will be stronger than it was before. Why? Because in the interval, sacrifices will have been made for revenge that would not have been made for mere conquest.

  “Think! Rome beat Carthage rather easily the first time, but was almost defeated the second. Every time Napoleon defeated the European coalition, he laid the groundwork for another just a little bit harder to defeat, until he himself was crushed by the eighth. It took four years to defeat Wilhelm of medieval Germany, and six much more dangerous years to stop his successor, Hitler.

  “There you are! Until now, Earth needed to change its way of life only for greater comfort and happiness. A minor item like that could always wait. But now it must change for revenge, and that will not wait. And I want that change for its own sake.

  “Only-I am not the man to lead. I am tarred with the failure of yesteryear, and will remain so until, long after I am bone-dust, Earth learns the truth. But you… .you, and others like you, have always fought for the road to modernization. You will be in charge. It may take a hundred years. Grandchildren of men unborn may be the first to see its completion. But at least you will see the start.

  “Eh, what do you say?” Keilin was fumbling at the dream. He seemed to see it in a misty distance-a new and reborn Earth. But the change in attitude was too extreme. It could not be done just yet. He shook his head.

  He said: “What makes you think the Outer Worlds would allow such a change, supposing what you say to be true? They will be watching, I am sure, and they will detect a growing danger and put a stop to it. Can you deny that?”

  Moreno threw his head back and laughed noiselessly. He gasped out: “But we have still a third left of the Pacific Project, a last, subtle and ironic third-

  “The Outer Worlders call the men of Earth the subhuman dregs of a great race, but we are the men of Earth. Do you realize what that means? We live on a planet upon which, for a billion years, life-the life that has culminated in Mankind-has been adapting itself. There is not a microscopic part of Man, not a tiny working of his mind, that has not as its reason some tiny facet of the physical make-up of Earth, or of the biological make-up of Earth’s other life-forms, or of the sociological make-up of the society about him.

  “No other planet can substitute for Earth, in Man’s present shape.

  “The Outer Worlders exist as they do, only because pieces of Earth have been transplanted. Soil has been brought out there; plants; animals; men. They keep themselves surrounded by an artificial Earthborn geology which has within it, for instance, those traces of cobalt, zinc, and copper which human chemistry must have. They surround themselves by Earth-born bacteria and algae which have the ability to make those inorganic traces available in just the right way and in just the right quantity.

  “And they maintain that situation by continued imports-luxury imports, they call it-from Earth.

  “But on the Outer Worlds, even with Terrestrian soil laid down to bedrock, they cannot keep rain from falling and rivers from flow ing, so that there is an inevitable, if slow, admixture with the native soil; an inevitable contamination of Terrestrian soil bacteria with the native bacteria, and an exposure, in any case, to a different atmosphere and to solar radiations of different types. Terrestrian bacteria disappear or change. And then plant life changes. And then animal life.

  “No great change, mind you. Plant life would not become poisonous or nonnutritious in a day, or year, or decade. But already, the men of the Outer Worlds can detect the loss or change of the trace compounds that are responsible for that infinitely elusive thing we call ‘flavor.’ It has gone that far.

  “And it will go further. Do you know, for instance, that on Aurora, nearly one half the native bacterial species known have protoplasm based on a fluorocarbon rather than hydrocarbon chemistry? Can you imagine the essential foreignness of such an environment?

  “Well, for two decades now, the bacteriologists and physiologists of Earth have studied various forms of Outer World Life-the only portion of the Pacific Project that has been truly secret-and the transplanted Terrestrian life is already beginning to show certain changes on the subcellular level. Even among the humans.

  “And here is the irony. The Outer Worlders, by their rigid racism and unbending genetic policies are consistently eliminating from among themselves any children that show signs of adapting themselves to their respective planets in any way that departs from the norm. They are maintaining-they must maintain as a result of their own thought processes-an artificial criterion of ‘healthy’ humanity, which is based on Terrestrian chemistry and not their own.

  “But now that Earth has been cut off from them; now that not even a trickle of Terrestrian soil and life will reach them, change will be piled on change. Sicknesses will come, mortality will increase, child abnormalities will become more frequent-”

  “And then?” asked Keilin, suddenly caught up.

  “And then? Well, they are physical scientists-leaving such inferior sciences as biology to us. And they cannot abandon their sensation of superiority and their arbitrary standard of human perfection. They will never detect the change till it is too late to fight it. Not all mutations are clearly visible, and there will be an increasing revolt against the mores of those stiff Outer World societies. There will be a century of increasing physical and social turmoil which will prevent any interference on their part with us.

  “We will have a century of rebuilding and revitalization, and at the end of it, we shall face an outer Galaxy which will either be dying or changed. In the first case, we will build a second Terrestrian Empire, more wisely and with greater knowledge than we did the first; one based on a strong and modernized Earth.

  “In the second case, we will face perhaps ten, twenty, or even all fifty Outer Worlds, each with a slightly different variety of Man. Fifty humanoid species, no longer united against us, each increasingly adapted to its own planet, each with a sufficient tendency toward atavism to love Earth, to regard it as the great and original Mother.

  “And racism will be dead, for variety will then be the great fact of Humanity, and n
ot uniformity. Each type of Man will have a world of its own, for which no other world could quite substitute, and on which no other type could live quite as well. And other worlds can be settled to breed still newer varieties, until out of the grand intellectual mixture, Mother Earth will finally have given birth not to merely a Terrestrian, but to a Galactic Empire.”

  Keilin said, fascinated, “You foresee all this so certainly.”

  “Nothing is truly certain; but the best minds on Earth agree on this. There may be unforeseen stumbling blocks on the way, but to remove those will be the adventure of our great-grandchildren. Of our adventure, one phase has been successfully concluded; and another phase is beginning. Join us, Keilin.”

  Slowly, Keilin began to think that perhaps Moreno was not a monster after all

  ***

  What interests me most about “Mother Earth” is that it seems to show clear premonitions of the novels Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, which I was to write in the 1950s.

  One thing about the story that I can’t explain is the fact that I have two characters in it, one of whom is named Moreno and one Moreanu. I haven’t the slightest idea why I used such similar names. There was no significance in it, I assure you, only carelessness. There was also a Maynard.

  Somehow, in reading and rereading the manuscript, the sloppiness of the situation never struck me. It did, however, just as soon as I saw the story in print. Why Campbell didn’t notice and make me change the names, I haven’t the faintest idea.

  I had no sooner sold “Mother Earth” than I began a new “Foundation” story entitled “…And Now You Don’t.” It was to be the last. Like “The Mule,” it was fifty thousand words long, and I didn’t finish it till March 29, 1949. I submitted it to Campbell the next day and he took it at once. At two cents a word, it netted me a check for one thousand dollars, the first four-figure check I ever received.

  It appeared as a three-part serial in the November 1949, December 1949, and January 1950 issues of Astounding, and it made up the final two thirds of my book Second Foundation.

  By then, though, a great change was coming over the field of science fiction. The atom bomb had altered science fiction from a disregarded field of crazy stories into a literature of dreadful perception. Slowly, it was mounting in readership and esteem. New magazines were about to come into being, and the large publishing houses were about to consider putting out regular lines of hardback science fiction novels (hitherto the domain of small specialty houses no more affluent than the magazines and no more hopeful as a source of income).

  The matter of hardback novels was of particular interest to Doubleday amp; Company, Inc. (though, of course, I didn’t know it at the time).On February 5, 1949, while I was working on the last of the “Foundation” stories, I attended a meeting of the Hydra Club-a group of science fiction professionals who lived in New York. There I met a Doubleday editor, Walter I. Bradbury, for the first time. It was he who was trying to build up a science fiction line for Doubleday, and he expressed some interest in “The Mule.”

  I paid little attention to this, however. The thought of publishing a book, a real book, as opposed to magazine stories, was so outlandish that I simply couldn’t cram it into my head.

  But Fred Pohl could. He had been in the Army, serving in Italy and rising to the rank of sergeant. After discharge, he became an agent again. I had indignantly told him the story of Merwin’s rejection of “Grow Old with Me,” so when Bradbury continued searching, Pohl suggested to him that he look at that story of mine.

  Bradbury was interested and, after considerable trouble, Pohl managed to pry the story out of me. (“It’s no good,” I kept saying-having never really recovered from the double rejection.)

  But on March 24, 1949, I received the word that Bradbury wanted “Grow Old with Me” if I would expand it to seventy thousand words. What’s more, he paid me a $250 option, which I could keep even if the revision was unsatisfactory. That was the first time anyone had paid me anything in advance, and I was flabbergasted.

  On April 6, I began the revision, and on May 25. 1949, I finished it and retitled it Pebble in the Sky. On May 29, Doubleday accepted it, and I had to grasp the fact that I was going to have a book published.

  But even as I struggled with that, another change was taking place simultaneously.

  There was still the matter of a job. All the time I was working for Professor Elderfield, I was still searching for one that I could take after that temporary position reached its natural end in May 1949. I was having no success at all.

  But then, on January 13, 1949, Professor William C. Boyd of Boston University School of Medicine was visiting New York, and we met.

  Professor Boyd was a science fiction reader of long standing and had liked my stories. For a couple of years we had been corresponding and we had grown quite friendly. Now he told me that there was an opening in the biochemistry department at his school and would I be interested? I was interested, of course, but Boston is twice as far from New York as Philadelphia is, and I hated to leave New York again.

  I refused the offer, but not very hard.

  And I continued to look for a job, and I continued to fail.

  I therefore reconsidered my refusal of the position at Boston University School of Medicine and wrote a letter to Professor Boyd, saying that perhaps I might be interested, after all.

  On March 9, 1949, I traveled to Boston for the first time in my life (on a sleeper-but I didn’t sleep).I met Professor Burnham S. Walker, head of the department of biochemistry, the next day and he offered me a position on the faculty at five thousand per year. I saw no way out of my jobless dilemma but to accept.

  Did I have to? Was there no chance that I might have made my living as a writer?

  How could I honestly come to a decision that I could? In mid-1949, I had been writing for exactly eleven years. In all that time, my total earnings had come to $7,821.75, averaging a little over $710 per year, or $13.70 per week. In my better years, such as the seventh (mid-1944 to mid-1945, when I had sold four stories, including “The Mule”), I had earned $1,600, and in the tenth and eleventh together I had earned $3,300. It looked as though, even in good years, I could not count on much more than thirty dollars per week, and that just wasn’t enough.

  Of course, now that I was going to be publishing a book-

  But books were unknown quantities. Besides, the book sale had come too late. By the time Bradbury accepted Pebble in the Sky, I was committed to the new job, and two days later, on June 1, 1949, I left for Boston.

  It is at this point I must come to a halt, for the multiple changes put a final end to the first stage of my writing career.

  I had left Campbell, this time forever. Oh, I saw him occasionally, and we corresponded, but the steady drizzle of near-weekly visits was never to take place again. Though I wrote for him and continued to publish in Astounding, new magazines appeared, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950, and others. My market broadened, and the word rate went up still further, to three cents and even four cents a word.

  The appearance of my first book, Pebble in the Sky, on January 19, 1950, introduced a new dimension to my self-image, to my prestige in the field, and to my earnings. Other books followed-some new novels, some collections of older stories.

  My position at Boston University School of Medicine led me to publish non-fiction. The first attempt was a textbook for medical students called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. This was begun in 1950 in collaboration with Professors Walker and Boyd. It went through three editions and, though rather a failure, allowed me to discover that I enjoyed non-fiction writing at least as much as fiction writing and helped me start on a new phase of my writing career.

  With all this taken into account, it is not surprising that my earnings as a writer began to rise rapidly almost as soon as I came to Boston. By 1952 I was making considerably more money as a writer than as a professor, and the discrepancy grew lar
ger-in favor of writing-each succeeding year. By 1957, I’d decided (still somewhat to my surprise) that I had been a writer all along and that that was all I was.

  On July I, 1958, I gave up my salary and my duties but, with the agreement of the school, kept my title, which was then Associate Professor of Biochemistry. I keep that title to this day. I give an occasional lecture at the school when asked to do so, and I also lecture elsewhere when asked to do so (and charge a fee). For the rest, I became a full-time free-lance writer.

  Writing is easy now, and is ever more satisfying. I keep what amounts to a seventy-hour week, if you count all the ancillary jobs of proofreading, indexing, research, and so on. I average seven or eight books a year, and this book, The Early Asimov, is my 125th book.

  And yet, I must admit there has never been, since 1949, anything like the real excitement of those first eleven “Campbell years,” when I wrote only in my spare time, and sometimes not even then, when every submission meant unbearable suspense, when every rejection meant misery and every acceptance ecstasy, and every fifty-dollar check was the wealth of Croesus.

  And on July 11, 1971, John Campbell, at the still-early age of sixty-one, while watching television, died at 7:30 P.M. quietly and peacefully, Without any pain at all.

  There is no way at all to express how much he meant to me and how much he did for me except, perhaps, to write this book evoking, once more, those days of a quarter century ago.

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