by Isaac Asimov
“There will be no trade, no diplomatic relationships, no travel, no communications. They are fenced off, locked out, hermetically sealed away. Out here we have a new universe, a second creation of Man, a higher Man
“They ask us: What will become of Earth? We answer: That is Earth’s problem. Population growth can be controlled. Resources can be efficiently exploited. Economic systems can be revised. We know, for we have done so. If they cannot, let them go the way of the dinosaur, and make room.
“Let them make room, instead of forever demanding room!”
And so an impenetrable curtain swung slowly shut about the Solar System. The stars in Earth’s sky became only stars again, as in the long-dead days before the first ship had penetrated the barrier of light’s speed.
The government that had made war and peace resigned, but there was no one, really, to take their place. The legislature elected Luiz Moreno-ex-Ambassador to Aurora, ex-Secretary without Portfolio-as President pro tem, and the Earth as a whole was too numbed to agree or disagree. There was only a widespread relief that someone existed who would be willing to take the job of trying to guide the destinies of a world in prison.
Very few realized how well-planned an ending this was, or with what calculation Moreno found himself in the president’s chair.
Ernest Keilin said hopelessly from the video screen: “We are only ourselves now. For us, there is no universe and no past-only Earth, and the future.”
That night he heard from Luiz Moreno once again, and before morning he left for the capital.
Moreno’s presence seemed incongruent within the stiffly formal president’s mansion. He was suffering from a cold again, and snuffled when he talked.
Keilin regarded him with a self-terrifying hostility; an almost singeing hatred in which he could feel his fingers begin to twitch in the first gestures of choking. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come-Well, what was the difference; the orders had been plain. If he had not come, he would have been brought.
The new president looked at him sharply: “you have to alter your attitude toward me, Keilin. I know you regard me as one of the Gravediggers of Earth-isn’t that the phrase you used last night?-but you must listen to me quietly for a while. In your present state of suppressed rage, I doubt if you could hear me.”
“I will hear whatever you have to say, Mr. President.”
“Well-the external amenities, at least. That’s hopeful Or do you think a video-tracer is attached to the room?”
Keilin merely lifted his eyebrows.
Moreno said: “It isn’t. We are quite alone. We must be alone; otherwise, how could I tell you safely that it is being arranged for you to be elected president under a constitution now being devised? Eh, what’s the matter?”
Then he grinned at the look of bloodless amazement in Keilin’s face. “Oh, you don’t believe it. Well, it’s past your stopping. And before an hour is up, you’ll understand.”
“I’m to be president?” Keilin struggled with a strange, hoarse voice. Then, more firmly: “You are mad.”
“No. Not I. Those out there, rather. Out there in the Outer Worlds.” There was a sudden vicious intensity in Moreno’s eyes, and face, and voice, so that you forgot he was a little monkey of a man with a perpetual cold. You didn’t notice the wrinkled, sloping forehead. You forgot the baldish head and ill-fitting clothes. There was only the bright and luminous look in his eyes, and the hard incision in his voice. That you noticed.
Keilin reached blindly backward for a chair, as Moreno came closer and spoke with increasing intensity.
“Yes,” said Moreno. “Those out among the Stars. The godlike ones. The stately supermen. The strong, handsome master-race. They are mad. But only we on Earth know it.
“Come, you have heard of the Pacific Project. I know you have. You denounced it to Cellioni once, and called it a fake. But it isn’t a fake. And almost none of it is a secret. In fact, the only secret about it was that almost none of it was a secret.
“You’re no fool, Keilin. You just never stopped to work it all out. And yet you were on the track. You had the feel of it. What was it you said that time you were interviewing me on the program? Some. thing about the attitude of the Outer Worldling toward the Earthman being the only flaw in the former’s stability. That was it, wasn’t it? Or something like that? Very well, then; good! You had the first third of the Pacific Project in your mind at the time, and it was no secret after all, was it?
“Ask yourself, Keilin-what was the attitude of the typical Auroran to a typical Earthman? A feeling of superiority? That’s the first thought, I suppose. But, tell me, Keilin, if he really felt superior, really superior, would it be so necessary for him to call such continuous attention to it? What kind of superiority is it that must be continuously bolstered by the constant repetition of phrases such as ‘apemen,’ ‘submen,’ ‘half-animals of Earth,’ and so on? That is not the calm internal assurance of superiority. Do you waste epithets on earthworms? No, there is something else there.
“Or let us approach it from another tack. Why do Outer World tourists stay in special hotels, travel in inclosed ground-cars, and have rigid, if unwritten, rules against social intermingling? Are they afraid of pollution? Strange, then, that they are not afraid to eat our food and drink our wine and smoke our tobacco.
“You see, Keilin, there are no psychiatrists on the Outer Worlds. The supermen are, so they say, too well adjusted. But here on Earth, as the proverb goes, there are more psychiatrists than plumbers, and they get lots of practice. So it is we, and not they, who know the truth about this Outer World superiority-complex, who know it to be simply a wild reaction against an overwhelming feeling of guilt.
“Don’t you think that can be so? You shake your head as though you disagree. You don’t see that a handful of men who clutch a Galaxy while billions starve for lack of room must feel a subconscious guilt, no matter what? And, since they won’t share the loot, don’t you see that the only way they can justify themselves is to try to convince themselves that Earthmen, after all, are inferior, that they do not deserve the Galaxy, that a new race of men have been created out there and that we here are only the diseased remnants of an old race that should die out like the dinosaur, through the working of inexorable natural laws?
“Ah, if they could only convince themselves of that, they would no longer be guilty, but merely superior. Only, it doesn’t work; it never does. It requires constant bolstering; constant repetition, constant reinforcement. And still it doesn’t quite convince.
“Best of all, if only they could pretend that Earth and its population do not exist at all. When you visit Earth, therefore, avoid Earthmen; or they might make you uncomfortable by not looking inferior enough. Sometimes they might look miserable instead, and nothing more. Or worse still, they might even seem intelligent-as I did, for instance, on Aurora.
“Occasionally, an Outer Worlder like Moreanu did crop up, and was able to recognize guilt for what it was without being afraid to say so out loud. He spoke of the duty the Outer Worlds owed Earth-and so he was dangerous to us. For if the others listened to him and had offered token assistance to Earth, their guilt might have been assuaged in their own minds; and that without any lasting help to Earth. So Moreanu was removed through our web-weaving, and the way left clear to those who were unbending, who refused to admit guilt, and whose reaction could therefore be predicted and manipulated.
“Send them an arrogant note, for instance, and they automatically strike back with a useless embargo that merely gives us the ideal pretext for war. Then lose a war quickly, and you are sealed off by the annoyed supermen. No communication, no contact. You no longer exist to annoy them. Isn’t that simple? Didn’t it work out nicely?”
Keilin finally found his voice, because Moreno gave him time by stopping. He said: “You mean that all this was planned? You did deliberately instigate the war for the purpose of sealing Earth off from the Galaxy? You sent out the men of the Home Fleet to sure death because you w
anted defeat? Why, you’re a monster, a... a-”
Moreno frowned: “Please relax. It was not as simple as you think, and I am not a monster. Do you think the war could simply be instigated? It had to be nurtured gently in just the right way and to just the right conclusion. If we had made the first move, if we had been the aggressor, if we had in any way put the fault on our side-why, they of the Outer Worlds would have occupied Earth and ground it under. They would no longer feel guilty, you see, if we committed a crime against them. Or, again, if we fought a protracted war, or one in which we inflicted damage, they could succeed in shifting the blame.
“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 flowing, 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 Ga
laxy 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 not 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.
The Caves of Steel
3421 A.D.
1: Conversation With A Commissioner
LIJE BALEY HAD just reached his desk when he became aware of R. Sammy watching him expectantly.
The dour lines of his long face hardened. “What do you want?”
“The boss wants you, Lije. Right away. Soon as you come in.”
“All right.”
