Asimov’s Future History Volume 13

by Isaac Asimov

  “Economics is on the side of humanity now. The Galaxy wants cheap kyrt, and if they find it or even if they imagine they will shortly find it, they will want Florina evacuated, not only out of humanity, but out of a desire to turn the tables, at long last, on the kyrt-gouging Sarkites.”

  “Bluff!” growled Fife.

  “Do you think so, Abel?” demanded Junz. “If you help the Squires, Trantor will be looked on not as the saviors of the kyrt trade but of the kyrt monopoly. Can you chance that?”

  “Can Trantor chance a war?” demanded Fife.

  “War? Nonsense! Squire, in one year your holdings on Florina will be worthless, nova or not. Sell out. Sell out all Florina. Trantor can pay for it.”

  “Buy a planet?” said Abel in dismay.

  “Why not? Trantor has the funds, and its gain in good will among the people of the universe will pay it back a thousandfold. If telling them that you are saving hundreds of millions of lives is not enough, tell them that you will bring them cheap kyrt. That will do it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Abel.

  Abel looked at the Squire. Fife’s eyes fell.

  After a long pause he too said, “I’ll think about it.”

  Junz laughed harshly. “Don’t think too long. The kyrt story will break quickly enough. Nothing can stop it. After that, neither one of you will have freedom of action. You can each strike a better bargain now.”

  The Townman seemed beaten. “It’s really true?” he kept repeating. “Really true? No more Florina?”

  “It’s true,” said Junz.

  Terens spread his arms, let them fall against his side. “If you want the papers I got from Rik, they’re filed among vital statistic files in my home town. I picked the dead files, records a century back and more. No one would ever look there for any reason.”

  “Look,” said Junz, “I’m sure we can make an agreement with the I. S. B. We’ll need a man on Florina, one who knows the Florinian people, who can tell us how to explain the facts to them, how best to organize the evacuation, how to pick the most suitable planets of refuge. Will you help us?”

  “And beat the game that way, you mean? Get away with murder? Why not?” There were sudden tears in the Townman’s eyes. “But I lose anyway. I will have no world, no home. We all lose. The Florinians lose their world, the Sarkites lose their wealth, the Trantorians their chance to get that wealth. There are no winners at all.”

  “Unless,” said Junz gently, “you realize that in the new Galaxy — a Galaxy safe from the threat of stellar instability, a Galaxy with kyrt available to all, and a Galaxy in which political unification will be so much closer — there will be winners after all. One quadrillion winners The people of the Galaxy, they are the victors.”

  Epilog: A Year After

  “RIK! RIK!” SELIM Junz hurried across the port grounds toward the ship, hands outstretched. “And Lona! I’d never have recognized either of you. How are you? How are you?”

  “As well as we could wish. Our letter reached you, I see,” said Rik.

  “Of course. Tell me, what do you think of it all?” They were walking back together, toward Junz’s offices.

  Valona said sadly, “We visited our old town this morning. The fields are so empty.” Her clothing was now that of a woman of the Empire, rather than that of a peasant of Florina.

  “Yes, it must be dreary for a person who has lived here. It grows dreary even for me, but I will stay as long as I can. The radiation recordings of Florina’s sun are of tremendous theoretical interest.”

  “So much evacuation in less than a year! It speaks for excellent organization.”

  “We’re doing our best, Rik. Oh, I think I should be calling you by your real name.”

  “Please don’t. I’ll never be used to it. I’m Rik. That’s still the only name I remember.”

  Junz said, “Have you decided whether you’re going to return to Spatio-analysis?”

  Rik shook his head. “I’ve decided, but the decision is, no. I’ll never remember enough. That part’s gone forever. It doesn’t bother me, though. I’ll be returning to Earth …. By the way, I rather hoped I’d see the Townman.”

  “I think not. He decided to go off today. I think he’d rather not see you. He feels guilty, I think. You have no grudge against him?”

  Rik said, “No. He meant well, and he changed my life in many ways for the better. For one thing, I met Lana.” His arm went about her shoulder.

  Valona looked at him and smiled.

  “Besides,” Rik went on, “he cured me of something. I’ve found out why I was a Spatio-analyst. I know why nearly a third of all Spatio-analysts are recruited from the one planet, Earth. Anyone living on a radioactive world is bound to grow up in fear and insecurity. A misstep can mean death and our planet’s own surface is the greatest enemy we have.

  “That makes for a sort of anxiety bred into us, Dr. Junz, a fear of planets. We’re only happy in space; that’s the only place we can feel safe.”

  “And you don’t feel that way any longer, Rik?”

  “I certainly don’t. I don’t even remember feeling that way. That’s it, you see. The Townman had set his psychic probe to remove feelings of anxiety and he hadn’t bothered to set the intensity controls. He thought he had a recent, superficial trouble to deal with. Instead there was this deep, ingrained anxiety he knew nothing of. He got rid of all of it. In a sense, it was worth getting rid of it even though so much else went with it. I don’t have to stay in space now. I can go back to Earth. I can work there and Earth needs men. It always will.”

  “You know,” Junz said, “why can’t we do for Earth what we’re doing for Florina? There’s no need to bring up Earthmen in such fear and insecurity. The Galaxy is big.”

  “No,” said Rik vehemently. “It’s a different case. Earth has its past, Dr. Junz. Many people may not believe it, but we of Earth know that Earth was the original planet of the human race.”

  “Well, perhaps. I can’t say, one way or the other.”

  “It was. It’s a planet that can’t be abandoned; it mustn’t be abandoned. Someday we’ll change it, change its surface back to what it once must have been. Till then — we’re staying.”

  Valona said softly, “And I’m an Earthwoman now.”

  Rik was looking out at the horizon. Upper City was as garish as ever, but the people were gone.

  He said, “How many are left on Florina?”

  “About twenty million,” said Junz. “We work slower as we go along. We have to keep our withdrawals balanced. The people that are left must always maintain themselves as an economic unit in the months that are left. Of course, resettlement is in its earliest stages. Most of the evacuees are still in temporary camps on neighboring worlds. There is unavoidable hardship.”

  “When will the last person leave?”

  “Never, really.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Townman has applied unofficially for permission to remain. It’s been granted, also unofficially. It won’t be a matter of public record.”

  “Remain?” Rik was shocked. “But for the sake of all the Galaxy, why?”

  “I didn’t know,” said Junz, “but I think you explained it when you talked of Earth. He feels as you do. He says he can’t bear the thought of leaving Florina to die alone.”

  Pebble in the Sky

  827 G.E. (12411 A.D.)

  One: Between One Footstep and the Next

  TWO MINUTES BEFORE he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant streets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself.

  In a sense this was strange, since Schwartz would scarcely have impressed any casual passer-by as the Browning-quoting type. He looked exactly what he was: a retired tailor, thoroughly lacking in what the sophisticates of today call a “formal education.” Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a sm
attering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight.

  For instance, he had read Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra twice when he was younger, so, of course, knew it by heart. Most of it was obscure to him, but those first three lines had become one with the beating of his heart these last few years. He intoned them to himself, deep within the silent fortress of his mind, that very sunny and very bright early summer day of 1949:

  “Grow old along with me!

  The best is yet to be,

  The last of life, for which the first was made...”

  Schwartz felt that to its fullness. After the struggles of youth in Europe and those of his early manhood in the United States, the serenity of a comfortable old age was pleasant. With a house of his own and money of his own, he could, and did, retire. With a wife in good health, two daughters safely married, a grandson to soothe these last best years, what had he to worry about?

  There was the atom bomb, of course, and this somewhat lascivious talk about World War III, but Schwartz was a believer in the goodness of human nature. He didn’t think there would be another war. He didn’t think Earth would ever see again the sunlike hell of an atom exploded in anger. So he smiled tolerantly at the children he passed and silently wished them a speedy and not too difficult ride through youth to the peace of the best that was yet to be.

  He lifted his foot to step over a Raggedy Ann doll smiling through its neglect as it lay there in the middle of the walk, a foundling not yet missed. He had not quite put his foot down again...

  In another part of Chicago stood the Institute for Nuclear Research, in which men may have had theories upon the essential worth of human nature but were half ashamed of them, since no quantitative instrument had yet been designed to measure it. When they thought about it, it was often enough to wish that some stroke from heaven would prevent human nature (and damned human ingenuity) from turning every innocent and interesting discovery into a deadly weapon.

  Yet, in a pinch, the same man who could not find it in his conscience to curb his curiosity into the nuclear studies that might someday kill half of Earth would risk his life to save that of an unimportant fellow man.

  It was the blue glow behind the chemist’s back that first attracted the attention of Dr. Smith.

  He peered at it as he passed the half-open door. The chemist, a cheerful youngster, was whistling as he tipped up a volumetric flask, in which the solution had already been made up to volume. A white powder tumbled lazily through the liquid, dissolving in its own good time. For a moment that was all, and then Dr. Smith’s instinct, which had stopped him in the first place, stirred him to action.

  He dashed inside, snatched up a yardstick, and swept the contents of the desk top to the floor. There was the deadly hiss of molten metal. Dr. Smith felt a drop of perspiration slip to the end of his nose.

  The youngster stared blankly at the concrete floor along which the silvery metal had already frozen in thin splash marks. They still radiated heat strongly.

  He said faintly, “What happened?” Dr. Smith shrugged. He wasn’t quite himself either. “I don’t know. You tell me.... What’s been doing here?”

  “Nothing’s been doing here,” the chemist yammered. “That was just a sample of crude uranium. I’m making an electrolytic copper determination.... I don’t know what could have happened.”

  “Whatever happened, young man, I can tell you what I saw. That platinum crucible was showing a corona. Heavy radiation was taking place. Uranium, you say?”

  “Yes, but crude uranium, and that isn’t dangerous. I mean, extreme purity is one of the most important qualifications for fission, isn’t it?” He touched his tongue to his lips quickly. “Do you think it was fission, sir? It’s not plutonium, and it wasn’t being bombarded.”

  “And,” said Dr. Smith thoughtfully, “it was below the critical mass. Or, at least, below the critical masses we think we know.” He stared at the soapstone desk, at the bummed and blistered paint of the cabinets and the silvery streaks along the concrete floor. “Yet uranium melts at about 1800 degrees Centigrade, and nuclear phenomena are not so well known that we can afford to talk too glibly. After all, this place must be fairly saturated with stray radiations. When the metal cools, young man, it had better be chipped up, collected, and thoroughly analyzed.”

  He gazed thoughtfully about him, then stepped to the opposite wall and felt uneasily at a spot about shoulder height.

  “What’s this?” he said to the chemist. “Has this always been here?”

  “What, sir?” The young man stepped up nervously and glanced at the spot the older man indicated. It was a tiny hole, one that might have been made by a thin nail driven into the wall and withdrawn–but driven through plaster and brick for the full thickness of the building’s wall, since daylight could be seen through it.

  The chemist shook his head, “I never saw that before. But I never looked for it, either, sir.”

  Dr. Smith said nothing. He stepped back slowly and passed the thermostat, a parallelopiped of a box made out of thin sheet iron. The water in it moved swirlingly as the stirrer turned in motor-driven monomania, while the electric bulbs beneath the water, serving as heaters, flicked on and off distractingly, in time with the clicking of the mercury relay.

  “Well, then, was this here?” And Dr. Smith scraped gently with his fingernail at a spot near the top of the wide side of the thermostat. It was a neat, tiny circle drilled through the metal. The water did not quite reach it.

  The chemist’s eyes widened. “No, sir, that wasn’t there ever before. I’ll guarantee that.”

  “Hmm. Is there one on the other side?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. I mean, yes, sir!”

  “All right, come round here and sight through the holes.... Shut the thermostat off, please. Now stay there.” He placed his finger on the hole in the wall. “What do you see?” he called out.

  “I see your finger, sir. Is that where the hole is?”

  Dr. Smith did not answer. He said, with a calmness he was far from feeling, “Sight through in the other direction.... Now what do you see?”

  “Nothing now.”

  “But that’s the place where the crucible with the uranium was standing. You’re looking at the exact place, aren’t you?”

  Reluctantly, “I think so, sir.”

  Dr. Smith said frostily, with a quick glance at the name plate on the still-open door, “Mr. Jennings, this is absolutely top-secret. I don’t want you ever to speak about this to anyone. Do you understand?”

  “Absolutely, sir!”

  “Then let’s get out of here. We’ll send in the radiation men to check the place, and you and I will spend a siege in the infirmary.”

  “Radiation burns, you mean?” The chemist paled.

  “We’ll find out.”

  But there were no serious signs of radiation burns in either. Blood counts were normal and a study of the hair roots revealed nothing. The nausea that developed was eventually tabbed as psychosomatic and no other symptoms appeared.

  Nor, in all the Institute, was anyone found, either then or in the future, to explain why a crucible of crude uranium, well below critical size, and under no direct neutronic bombardment, should suddenly melt and radiate that deadly and significant corona.

  The only conclusion was that nuclear physics had queer and dangerous crannies left in it.

  Yet Dr. Smith never brought himself to tell all the truth in the report he eventually prepared. He made no mention of the holes in the laboratory, no mention of the fact that the one nearest the spot where the crucible had been was barely visible, the one on the other side of the thermostat was a trace larger, while the one in the wall, three times as far away from that fearful spot, could have had a nail thrust through it.

  A beam expanding in a straight line could travel several miles before the Earth’s curvature made the surface fall away from it sufficiently to prevent further damage, and then it would be te
n feet across. After that, flashing emptily into space, expanding and weakening, a queer strain in the fabric of the cosmos.

  He never told anyone of that fancy.

  He never told anyone that he called for the morning papers next day, while still in the infirmary, and searched the columns with a definite purpose in mind.

  But so many people in a giant metropolis disappear every day. And nobody had gone screaming to the police with vague tales of how, before his eyes, a man (or would it be half a man?) had disappeared. At least no such case was reported.

  Dr. Smith forced forgetfulness, eventually.

  To Joseph Schwartz it had happened between one step and the next. He had lifted his right foot to clear the Raggedy Ann doll and for a moment he had felt dizzy–as though for the merest trifle of time a whirlwind had lifted him and turned him inside out. When he placed his right foot down again, all the breath went out of him in a gasp and he felt himself slowly crumple and slide down to the grass.

  He waited a long time with his eyes closed–and then he opened them.

  It was true! He was sitting on grass, where previously he had been walking on concrete.

  The houses were gone/The white houses, each with its lawn, squatting there, row on row, all goner

  And it was not a lawn he was sitting on, for the grass was growing rank, untended, and there were trees about, many of them, with more on the horizon.

  That was when the worst shock of all came, because the leaves on those trees were ruddy, some of them, and in the curve of his hand he felt the dry brittleness of a dead leaf. He was a city man, but he knew autumn when he saw it.

  Autumn! Yet when he had lifted his right foot it had been a June day, with everything a fresh and glistening green.