Asimov’s Future History Volume 20

by Isaac Asimov

  “Why does he think it’s a high-temperature reaction chamber? I mean, why high-temperature, specifically?”

  Dr. Buth waved his cigar at the objects. “They’re made out of a very crude ceramic, a heavy mass of fired silicon and aluminum oxides, plus a few other things. They’re eroded, of course, and rather fragile now, but to stand up under all the abuse of three or four hundred centuries, they must have been pretty strong when they were made.”

  “Perhaps the ceramic was used because of its structural strength?” Palver said, half questioningly.

  “That’s doubtful. We know they used metals; there are oxides of iron, copper, zinc, chromium, and aluminum everywhere, in deposits that indicate the metals once formed artifacts of some kind. It wouldn’t be logical to use a ceramic, brittle as it is, when metals were used.”

  “So you think the combustion chamber idea is the most likely?”

  Dr. Buth took a long pull at his cigar and looked abstractedly at the glowing ash. “Well, Ober Sutt puts up a good argument for it, but I don’t know...” He waved again with the cigar. “Those things don’t have any bottom, either, and I don’t think they ever did — not connected directly, at least. Sutt counters that by saying that they must have sat on a ceramic plate of some kind, but so far we haven’t found any of those plates, if they exist.”

  Palver looked carefully at the two objects, then shrugged. “What else have you found?”

  “Aside from a few shards,” Dr. Buth said carefully, “that’s all we’ve found below the D-layer. However, as I said, we’ve just begun.”

  Back in Buth’s office, Ducem Palver picked up his carrying case, snapped it shut. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you, Dr. Buth,” he said. “I must admit, however, that the solution of the Origin Question holds little interest for me. The history of the latter part of the First Empire, and that of the Great Interregnum — ah, those are deeply interesting. But, as to how Man came to be spread throughout the galaxy —” He lifted his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side. His blue eyes seemed very deep for a moment. “Well, Man is here. I will leave it to others to find out how he got here, eh?”

  Dr. Buth smiled tolerantly. “It’s just as well that we’re not all interested in the same thing, isn’t it?” He walked over to the transparent wall and looked out at the bleak whiteness of the windswept snowscape. “But to me, the fascinating thing about Man is his peculiar drives. Imagine a time when men had no spaceships, no modern instruments of any kind. What must it have been like to look out at the stars and feel trapped on one single planet?”

  Behind him, Ducem Palver’s voice said: “Perhaps you could draw a parallel from the planet Kaldee. During the Interregnum, they were cut off from the rest of the galaxy; they lost all their history — everything. They knew nothing of the spaceship, nor of the stars themselves. They thought those lights in the sky were nothing more than bits of glass, reflecting the light of their sun. They believed the night sky was a black bowl a few miles above their heads, upon which these pieces of broken glass were fixed.”

  “Oh?” said Dr. Buth without turning. “And how did they feel about their isolation?”

  “They didn’t know they were isolated. They were quite happy, all things considered. They had no burning desire to leave their planet — indeed, they reserved that privilege for the dead.”

  Dr. Buth’s brows drew together. “Then what made primitive Man want to leave? Why wasn’t he happy on one planet? What happened?”

  And suddenly, it seemed as if his whole mind came to a focus on that one question. Why had they decided to conquer space? Why? What caused that odd drive in Man?

  “I’ve got to know,” he said — aloud, but very softly.

  Ducem Palver didn’t even seem to hear.

  After nearly a full minute, Ducem Palver said quietly, “I must be going now. I wish you success, Dr. Buth.”

  “Yes,” said Buth, still looking at the icy plain outside. “Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. Palver. Very much. Good-by.”

  Ducem Palver left him that way, standing, staring at the whiteness of the landscape of Sol III.

  It was an old planet, civilization-wise. Not, thought Dr. Nikol Buth, as old a planet in that respect as Sol III, but old, nonetheless. Before the Interregnum, it had served as the capital of the First Empire, and before that, as the nucleus from which the First Empire had grown. It had once been a mighty world, sheathed in metal and armed with the might of the Galactic Fleet, the center of strength of the First Galactic Empire. And then that Empire had fallen, collapsed in upon itself, and with it had collapsed its capital.

  It had been great once. And now?

  Now it was beautiful. The capital of the Second Empire was far away in space, and this old planet was of no consequence whatever. But it was beautiful.

  It was a garden planet now, filled with green forests and broad sweeps of grass and fields of flowers. It was a place where a young man could relax for a few weeks before returning to the busy work of maintaining the Empire, a place where an old man, freed from the seemingly eternal grind, could find peace in doing other, less strenuous work.

  Dr. Nikol Buth was such a man. He was old now, and the years had not treated him kindly; now, after thirty years of driving himself towards an unattainable goal, he sought only peace. Here, on this garden world, he would find it.

  It wasn’t easy to become a permanent resident here. The planet was an Imperial Protectorate, the personal property of the Emperor himself, although His Imperial Majesty never visited it. Tourists were allowed access to certain parts of it, but there were vast estates reserved for those who had earned the right to spend their last years in quiet and solitude. The right to live here had to be earned, and it had to be granted by the Emperor in person. In his pocket, Dr. Nikol Buth carried a precious document — a signed, sealed Imperial Grant.

  He had landed at the terminal — like all spaces port terminals, a busy place, even here — and had supervised the shipping of his personal effects to his new home at a little village called Mallow and then had taken an aircar there himself.

  At the air depot at Mallow, he had been met by a pleasant young man who had introduced himself as Wilm Faloban —” General factotum and chief of police — for all the need they have of police here.”

  He had quietly checked Buth’s identification papers and his Imperial Grant, then he’d said casually: “You haven’t seen your home yet, I take it?”

  Buth shook his head. “Not directly. Full stereos, of course; it’s quite what I want. I —” He stopped, realizing that he wasn’t making much sense to the young man. He started again:. II really don’t see how I managed to get a place here; think how many must apply each year — hundreds of billions, I suppose.”

  “About that,” agreed Faloban. He opened the door of his ground car. “Hop in,” he said. “‘I’ll drive you out to your place.”

  Buth nodded his thanks and stepped carefully inside the little machine. He had to move carefully these days, had to remember that old bones are brittle and old muscles tear easily. “And how many are accepted?” he continued. “Only a few?”

  Faloban slid into the driver’s seat. “An average of ten thousand a year,” he said. “N ot many are chosen.”

  “I don’t know what I ever did to deserve it,” Buth said.

  Faloban chuckled as he trod on the accelerator and the little vehicle slid smoothly out to the road. “You really great men are all like that. You never think you’ve done anything.”

  “No, no,” said Dr. Buth, “it’s not like that at all. I really never did do anything.”

  Faloban just chuckled again. “You’ll have to talk to your neighbor, old Ducem Palver, on that score. He’s always saying he never did anything, either. Amazing, isn’t it, how the Emperor never picks anyone but ne’er-do-wells?”

  But Dr. Nikol Buth wasn’t listening. Ducem Palver, he was thinking, Ducem Palver. Where have I heard that name before?

  And then he remembered. Aloud,
he said: “Yes, I will have to see Mr. Palver. He’s a near neighbor, you say?”

  “Just a kilometer away. We’ll go right by his place on the way to your new home,” Faloban said.

  It was a woman who opened the door, a short, round, pleasant-faced woman whose halo of white hair seemed almost silvery. She was old, yes, but her face still held the beauty of her youth, modified by the decades of life so that it was changed into a graciousness — almost a regal queenliness.

  “Yes?” Her voice was soft, and her smile kindly.

  “I —” Buth felt the hesitation in his voice and tried to overcome it. “I’m looking for Mr. Ducem Palver. My name is Buth — Dr. Nikol Buth; I... I don’t know if he remembers me, but —”

  The woman stood aside. “Come in, Dr. Buth, come in. I’m Mrs. Palver; I’ll see if my husband is busy.”

  She led him to a chair and made sure he was comfortable before she left to find her husband.

  Queer, thought Buth, I’d never thought of Palver’s having a wife. Still. it’s been thirty years; maybe he married after —

  “Ah! Dr. Buth! How good to see you again!”

  Buth covered his slight start at hearing Palver’s voice by rising quickly to greet his host. A slight twinge in his back warned him against moving quite so rapidly.

  Palver himself had changed, of course. His hair, which had been thick and black, was now thin and gray. His face was still full and round, although it tended to sag a bit. and his eyes seemed to have faded somewhat. Buth had the feeling that they weren’t quite the deep blue they had been three decades before.

  But he showed that he still had the same brisk way about him as he extended his hand and said: “Am I the first to welcome you to Mallow and Forest Glade?”

  Buth took his hand. “Except for a young chap named Faloban, yes. Thank you.”

  “You liked cigars, I think?” Palver went to a panel in the wall, slid it aside, and took out a small cigar humidor. “I don’t use them myself,” he said, “but I like to keep them for friends.”

  Buth accepted the cigar, lit it carefully. “I have to limit myself on these,” he told Palver. “I’m afraid I overdid it for too many years. My lungs aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Well, well” — Palver pulled up a chair and sat down —” how have you been? I didn’t think you’d even remember me — a nobody. What did you ever find on Sol III? I haven’t been following your work, I’m afraid. They kicked me upstairs to rot a while back, you know; haven’t been able to keep up with anything, really.”

  “There wasn’t much to keep up with,” Buth said. “Sol III was a dead end. I couldn’t prove a thing.”

  Palver looked blank. “I don’t think I quite understand.”

  Dr. Buth settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “There’s nothing to understand. I’m a failure, that’s all. No joke, no false modesty — no, nor bitterness, either. I spent thirty years of my life looking for something that wasn’t there to be found, trying to solve a problem that couldn’t be solved.”

  Ducem Palver looked somewhat uncomfortable. Buth noticed it, and realized that it was perfectly possible that Palver didn’t have even the foggiest notion of what he was talking about. Thirty years is a long time to remember a conversation that only lasted an hour. Even Buth himself hadn’t remembered it until Faloban had mentioned Ducem Palver’s name.

  “If you recall,” Buth said swiftly, “my group and I were digging on Sol III, searching beneath the D-layer for anything that might show us that Sol III was the original home of mankind. Above the Destruction Stratum, everything was post-spaceflight; it proved nothing. But we did have hopes for the artifacts below that layer.”

  “I see,” said Palver. “It turned out that they, also, were post-spaceflight?”

  There was a trace of bitterness in Buth’s short laugh. “Oh, no. We didn’t prove anything — not anything. We don’t know, even now, whether those artifacts we found were pre-or post-spaceflight. We don’t even know who made them or how or why.”

  “What about those ceramic things?” Palver asked. “Were those all you found?”

  Buth laughed again, bitterly, almost angrily. “It depends on how you mean that question, ‘Were those all you found?’ If you mean, did we find any more, the answer is an emphatic yes. If you mean, did we find anything else, the answer is almost no. We found plenty of them — to be exact, in thirty years we uncovered twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-five of them!”

  He paused for breath while Palver blinked silently.

  “After the first few thousand, we quit bothering with them. They got in the way. We had classified some two hundred different varieties under about nine group headings. We were beginning to treat them as animals or something, classifying them according to individual and group characteristics.” His voice became suddenly angry. “For thirty years, I worked, trying to find some clue to the mind of pre-spaceflight Man. It was my one drive, the one thing on my mind. I dedicated my life to it.

  “And what did I find? Nothing but ceramic mysteries!”

  He sat silently for a moment, his lips tight, his eyes focused on the hands in his lap.

  Palver said smoothly: “You found nothing else at all?”

  Buth looked up, and a wry smile came over his face. “Oh, yes, there were a few other things, of course, but they didn’t make much sense, either. The trouble was, you see, that nothing but stones and ceramics survived. Metals corroded, plastics rotted. We did find a few bits of polyethylene tetrafluoride, but they had been pressed out of shape.

  “We couldn’t even date the stuff. It was at least twenty thousand years old, and possibly as much as a hundred and fifty thousand. But we had no standards — nothing to go by.

  “We found bones, of course. They had thirty-two teeth in the skulls instead of twenty-eight, but that proved nothing. We found rubble that might have been buildings, but after all those thousands of years, we couldn’t be sure. In one place, we found several tons of gold bricks; it was probably a warehouse of some kind. We deduced from that evidence that they must have had ordinary transmutation, because gold is pretty rare, and it has so few uses that it isn’t worth mining.

  “Obviously, then, they must have had atomic power, which implies spaceflight. But, again, we couldn’t be sure.

  “But, in the long run, the thing that really puzzled us was those ceramic domes. There were so many of them! What could they have been used for? Why were so many needed?” Buth rubbed the back of his neck with a broad palm and laughed a little to himself... We never knew. Maybe we never will.”

  “But see here,” said Palver, genuinely interested, “I though you told me that one of your men — I forget his name — had decided they were used for high-temperature synthesis.”

  “Possibly,” agreed Dr. Buth. “But synthesis of what? Besides there were samples which weren’t badly damaged, and they didn’t show any signs of prolonged exposure to high temperatures. They’d been fused over with a mixture of silicates, but the inside and the outside were the same.”

  “What else would you have to uncover to find out what they were?” Palver asked.

  Buth puffed at his cigar a moment, considering his answer.

  “The connections,” he said at last.

  “Eh?”

  “They were obviously a part of some kind of apparatus,” Buth explained. “There were orifices in them that led from some sort of metallic connection — we don’t know what, because the metal had long ago dissolved into its compounds, gone beyond even the most careful electrolytic reconstruction. And there are holes in flanges at the top and bottom which —” He stopped for a moment and reached into his pocket. “Here... I’ve got a stereo of our prize specimen; I’ll show you what I mean.”

  The small cube of transparency that he took from his pocket held a miniature reproduction of one of the enigmatic objects. He handed it to Ducem Palver. “Now that’s the — No, turn it over; you’ve got it upside down.”

  “How do
you know?” Palver asked, looking at the cube.

  “What?”

  “I said, how do you know it’s upside down?” Palver repeated. “How can you tell?”

  “Oh. Well, we can’t, of course, but it stands to reason that the biggest part would be at the bottom. It would be unstable if you tried to set it on the small end, with the big opening up. Although” — he shrugged —” again, we can’t be sure.”

  Palver looked the little duplicate over, turning it this way and that in his hands. It remained as puzzling as ever. “Maybe it’s a decoration or something,” he said at last.

  “Could be. Ober Sutt, my assistant for twenty years, thought they might have been used for heating homes. That would account for their prevalence. But they don’t show any signs of heat corrosion, and why should they have used such crude methods if they had atomic power?” Again he laughed his short, sharp laugh. “So, after thirty years, we wound up where we started. With nothing.”

  “It’s too bad you didn’t find traces of their writing,” said Palver, handing the stereo crystal back to his visitor.

  “We did, for all the good it did us. As a matter of fact, we found engraving on little tiles that we found near some of the domes. Several of the domes, you see, were surrounded by little square ceramic plates about so big.” He held up his hands to indicate a square about eight centimeters on a side. “We thought they might have been used to line the chamber that the domes were ill, to protect the rest of the building from the heat-at least, we thought that at first, but there weren’t any signs of heat erosion on them, either.

  “They must have been cemented together somehow, because we found engravings of several sets that matched. Here, I’ll show you.”

  He took out his scriber and notebook and carefully drew lines on it. Then he handed it to Ducem Palver.