by Isaac Asimov
Murray said, 'Does that ever happen?'
'Certainly. A century doesn't pass in which some interesting item doesn't appear somewhere.'
'Something that you could have thought of yourself, but had not done so yet?'
'Yes.'
Murray said, 'Do you actually think there's a chance of my obliging you in this manner?'
'In the next century? Virtually none. In the long run, though, your success is certain, since you will be engaged eternally.'
Murray said, 'I will be thinking through eternity? Forever?'
'Yes.'
'To what end?'
'I have told you. To find new knowledge.'
'But beyond that. For what purpose am I to find new knowledge?'
'It was what you did in your Universe-bound life. What was its purpose then?'
Murray said, 'To gain new knowledge that only I could gain. To receive the praise of my fellows. To feel the satisfaction of accomplishment knowing that I had only a short time allotted me for the purpose. - Now I would gain only what you could gain yourself if you wished to take a small bit of trouble. You cannot praise me; you can only be amused. And there is no credit or satisfaction in accomplishment when I have all eternity to do it in.'
The Voice said, 'And you do not find thought and discovery worth while in itself? You do not find it requiring no further purpose?'
'For a finite time, yes. Not for all eternity.'
'I see your point. Nevertheless, you have no choice.'
'You say I am to think. You cannot make me do so.'
The Voice said, 'I do not wish to constrain you directly. I will not need to. Since you can do nothing but think, you will think. You do not know how not to think.'
'Then I will give myself a goal. I will invent a purpose.'
The Voice said tolerantly, 'That you can certainly do.'
'I have already found a purpose.'
'May I know what it is?'
'You know already. I know we are not speaking in the ordinary fashion. You adjust my nexus in such a way that I believe I hear you and I believe I speak, but you transfer thoughts to me and from me directly. And when my nexus changes with my thoughts you are at once aware of them and do not need my voluntary transmission.'
The Voice said, 'You are surprisingly correct. I am pleased. - But it also pleases me to have you tell me your thoughts voluntarily.'
'Then I will tell you. The purpose of my thinking will be to discover a way to disrupt this nexus of me that you have created. I do not want to think for no purpose but to amuse you. I do not want to think forever to amuse you. I do not want to exist forever to amuse you. All my thinking will be directed towards ending the nexus. That would amuse me.' The Voice said, 'I have no objection to that. Even concentrated thought on ending your own existence may, in spite of you, come up with something new and interesting. And, of course, if you succeed in this suicide attempt you will have accomplished nothing, for I would instantly reconstruct you and in such a way as to make your method of suicide impossible. And if you found another and still more subtle fashion of disrupting yourself, I would reconstruct you with that possibility eliminated, and so on. It could be an interesting game, but you will nevertheless exist eternally. It is my will.'
Murray felt a quaver but the words came out with a perfect calm. 'Am I in hell then, after all? You have implied there is none, but if this were hell you would lie as part of the game of hell.'
The Voice said, 'In that case, of what use is it to assure you that you are not in hell? Nevertheless, I assure you. There is here neither heaven nor hell. There is only myself.'
Murray said, 'Consider, then, that my thoughts may be useless to you. If I come up with nothing useful, will it not be worth your while to - disassemble me and take no further trouble with me?'
'As a reward? You want Nirvana as the prize of failure and you intend to assure me failure? There is no bargain there. You will not fail. With all eternity before you, you cannot avoid having at least one interesting thought, however you try against it.'
'Then I will create another purpose for myself. I will not try to destroy myself. I will set as my goal the humiliation of you. I will think of something you have not only never thought of but never could think of. I will think of the last answer, beyond which there is no knowledge further.'
The Voice said, 'You do not understand the nature of the infinite. There may be things I have not yet troubled to know. There cannot be anything I cannot know.'
Murray said thoughtfully, 'You cannot know your beginning. You have said so. Therefore you cannot know your end. Very well, then. That will be my purpose and that will be the last answer. I will not destroy myself. I will destroy you - if you do not destroy me first.'
The Voice said, 'Ah! You come to that in rather less than average time. I would have thought it would have taken you longer. There is not one of those I have with me in this existence of perfect and eternal thought that does not have the ambition of destroying me. It cannot be done.'
Murray said, 'I have all eternity to think of a way of destroying you.'
The Voice said, equably, 'Then try to think of it.' And it was gone.
But Murray had his purpose now and was content.
For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want - but an end?
For what else had the Voice been searching for countless billions of years? And for what other reason had intelligence been created and certain specimens salvaged and put to work, but to aid in that great search? And Murray intended that it would be he, and he alone, who would succeed.
Carefully, and with the thrill of purpose, Murray began to think.
He had plenty of time.
Introduction to THE LAST SHUTTLE
This story was written in honour of the First Shuttle, the 'Columbia', which made such a magnificent flight in April 1981. In anticipation of its success, a newspaper in Florida whose circulation region included Cape Canaveral asked me to write a story for them. They gave me the title, 'The Last Shuttle', and when I asked them if they had any significance in mind with respect to that title, they said, 'No! Write anything you please, as long as it fits that title.' So I did, and it appeared in the 10 April 1981 issue of the newspaper supplement entitled Today.
14
The Last Shuttle
Virginia Ratner sighed. 'There had to be a last time, I suppose.'
Her eyes were troubled as she looked out over the sea, shimmering in the warm sunshine. 'At least we have a nice day for it, though I suppose a sleet storm would match my mood better.'
Robert Gill, who was there as senior officer of the Terrestrial Space Agency, regarded her without favour. 'Please don't mope. You've said it yourself. There had to be a last time.'
'But why with me as pilot?'
'Because you're the best pilot we have and we want this to be a snappy finish with nothing going wrong. Why am 7 the one who must dismantle the Agency? Happy ending!'
'Happy ending?' Virginia studied the busy loading of freight and the lineup of passengers. The last of both.
She had been piloting shuttles for twenty years, knowing all the time there would have to be a last time. You would think the knowledge would have aged her, but there was no grey in her hair, no lines in her face. Perhaps a life under constantly changing gravitational intensity had something to do with it.
She looked rebellious. 'It seems to me that it would be dramatic irony - or maybe dramatic justice - if this last shuttle blew up on takeoff. A protest on the part of Earth itself.'
Gill shook his head. 'Strictly speaking, I should report that - but you're just suffering an acute attack of nostalgia.'
'Well, report me. It would tab me as dangerously unstable and I would be disqualified as pilot. I can take my place as one of the six hundred sixteen last passengers and make it six hundred seventeen. Someone else can pilot the shuttle and enter the history books as the person who--'
'I have no intention of reporting you. For one
thing, nothing will happen. Shuttle lift-offs are trouble-free.'
'Not always.' Virginia Ratner looked grim. 'There was the case of Enterprise Sixty.'
'Is that supposed to be a stop-news bulletin? That was a hundred seventy years ago and there hasn't been a space-related casualty since. Now, with antigravity assistance, we don't even have the chance of having an eardrum broken. The roar of rocket takeoff is forever gone. - Listen, Ratner, you'd better go up into the observation deck. It's less than thirty minutes to lift-off.'
'So? Surely you're going to inform me that lift-offs fully automated and that I'm not really needed.'
'You know that without my telling you, but your presence on the bridge is a matter of regulations - and tradition.'
'It seems to me that you're nostalgic now - for a time when a pilot made a difference and wasn't simply immortalized for doing nothing but presiding over the final dismantling of something that was so great.'
Then she added, 'But I'll go,' and moved up the central tube as though she were a fluff of down rising in an updraught.
She remembered her salad days on the shuttle run when antigrav was experimental and required ground installations larger than the shuttle itself and when, even so, it usually worked jerkily or not at all, and space-hands preferred the old-fashioned elevators.
Now the antigrav process had been miniaturized till each ship carried its own. It was never-fail and it was used for the passengers who took it for granted, and for the inanimate cargo which could then be moved into place with the help of frictionless air-jets and magnetic levitation by crewmen who knew perfectly well how to manhandle large objects without weight but with full inertia.
No other vehicles ever built by human beings were as magnificent, as complex, as intricately computerized as the shuttles had been, for no other ships had ever had to fight Earth's gravity - except for those early ships which, without antigrav, had had to depend on chemical rockets for every last bit of power. Primitive dinosaurs!
As for the ship that dwelt in space alone, kicking off from a space settlement to a power station or from a factory to a food processor's - even from the Moon - they had little or no gravity to contend with, so they were simple, almost fragile, things.
She was in the pilot room now with its array of computerized instruments giving her the exact status of every functioning device on board, the site of each packing case, the number and disposition of every person among the crew and passengers. (Not one of those must be left behind. To leave one would be unthinkable!) There was a three-hundred-sixty-degree television view of the panorama outside the ship and she regarded it thoughtfully. She was viewing the place from which human entry into space had taken place in the old, heroic days. It was from here that people had hurtled upwards to build the first space structures - power stations that limped - automated factories that required constant maintenance - space settlements that barely housed ten thousand people.
Now the vast, crowded technological centre was gone. Bit by bit it had been pulled down until only the one instalment remained for the departure of the last shuttle. That instalment would remain standing, after the ship was gone, to rust and decay as a final sad memorial of all thai had been.
How could the people of Earth so forget the past?
All she could see was land and sea - all deserted. There was no sign of human structure, no people. Just green vegetation, yellow sand, blue water.
It was time! Her practised eye saw the ship was full. prepared, smoothly working. The countdown was ticking off the final minute, the navigational satellite overhead � as signalling clear space and there was no need (she knew there would be none) to touch the manual control.
The ship lifted silently, smoothly, and all that had been worked for, over a period of two hundred years, was finally accomplished. Out in space, humanity waited on the Moon, on Mars, among the asteroids, in myriads of space settlements.
The last group of Earthpeople rose to join them. Three million years of hominid occupation of Earth was over; ten thousand years of Earthly civilization was done; four centuries of busy industrialization was ended.
Earth was returned to its wilderness and its wildlife by a humanity grateful to its mother planet and ready to retire it to the rest it deserved. It would remain forever as a monument to humanity's origin.
The last shuttle lifted through the wisps of the upper atmosphere and the Earth stretched below it and would now be shrinking as the shuttle receded.
It had been solemnly agreed by the fifteen billion residents of space that human feet would never stand on it again.
Earth was free! Free at last!
Introduction to LEST WE REMEMBER
This is rather a unique case. Some Hollywood people insisted they wanted to do a television series to be entitled 'Isaac Asimov Presents'. I doubted it very much, but I went along with it through story conferences galore. I gave them six ideas; they chose one. I wrote a story around that idea and called it 'Lest We Remember'. They paid me for it generously, and then they actually wrote a screenplay based on the story, and it turned out the television people liked the result. The only step remaining was to go into production, and I was flabbergasted, for I honestly didn't believe that anything ever worked out in Hollywood. Well, I was right. With only that one last step to take, it was never taken. After a long while, I asked if I might have the story back. They granted the request with good grace and I submitted it to George Scithers. He took it and it appeared in the February 1982 Asimov's.
Now, I have it in this collection, and I must tell you that it's not typical of me. I wrote it with a television audience in mind and it seems to me that as a result the dialogue is crisper and more 'with it' somehow. I can almost believe that every once in a while I get a faint whiff of Neil Simon.
15
Lest We Remember
1
The problem with John Heath, as far as John Heath was concerned, was that he struck a dead average. He was sure of it. What was worse, he felt that Susan suspected it.
It meant he would never make a true mark in the world, never climb to the top of Quantum Pharmaceuticals, where he was a steady cog among the junior executives - never make the Quantum Leap.
Nor would he do it anywhere else, if he changed jobs.
He sighed inwardly. In just two more weeks he was going to be married and for her sake he yearned to be upwardly mobile. After all, he loved her madly and wanted to shine in her eyes.
But then, that was dead average for a young man about to be married.
Susan Collins looked at John lovingly. And why not? He was reasonably good-looking and intelligent and a steady, affectionate fellow besides. If he didn't blind her with his brilliance, he at least didn't upset her with an erraticism he didn't possess.
She patted the pillow she had placed behind his head when he sat down in the armchair and handed him his drink, making sure he had a firm grip before she let go.
She said, 'I'm practising to treat you well, Johnny. I've got to be an efficient wife.'
John sipped at his drink. 'I'm the one who'll have to be on my toes, Sue. Your salary is higher than mine.'
'It's all going to go into one pocket once we're married. It will be the firm of Johnny and Sue keeping one set of books.'
'You'll have to keep it,' said John, despondently. 'I'm bound to make mistakes if I try.'
'Only because you're sure you will. - When are your friends coming?'
'Nine, I think. Maybe nine-thirty. And they're not exactly friends. They're Quantum people from the research labs.'
'You're sure they won't expect to be fed?'
'They said after dinner. I'm positive about that. It's business.'
She looked at him quizzically. 'You didn't say that before.'
'Say what before?'
'That it was business. Are you sure?'
John felt confused. Any effort to remember precisely always left him confused. 'They said so - I think.'
Susan's look was that of goo
d-natured exasperation, rather like the one she would have given a friendly puppy who is completely unaware its paws are muddy. 'If you really thought', she said, 'as often as you say "I think" you wouldn't be so perennially uncertain. Don't you see it can't be business? If it was business, wouldn't they see you at business?'
'It's confidential,' said John. 'They didn't want to see me at work. Not even at my apartment.'
'Why here, then?'
'Oh, I suggested that. I thought you ought to be around, anyway. They're going to have to deal with the firm of Johnny and Sue, right?'
'It depends', said Susan, 'on what the confidential is all about. Did they give you any hints?'
'No, but it couldn't hurt to listen. It could be something that would give me a boost in standing at the firm.'
'Why you?' asked Susan.
John looked hurt, 'Why not me?'
'It just strikes me that someone at your job level doesn't require all that confidentiality and that--'
She broke off when the intercom buzzed. She dashed off to answer and came back to say, 'They're on the way up.'
2
Two of them were at the door. One was Boris Kupfer, whom John had already spoken to - large and restless, with a clear view of bluish stubble on his chin.
The other was David Anderson, smaller and more composed. His quick eyes moved this way and that, however, missing nothing.
'Susan,' said John, uncertainly, still holding the door open. 'These are the two colleagues of mine that I told you about. 'Boris--' He hit a blank in his memory banks and stopped.
'Boris Kupfer,' said the larger man morosely, jingling some change in his pockets, 'and David Anderson here. It's very kind of you, Miss--'
'Susan Collins.'
'It's very kind of you to make your place of residence available to Mr Heath and to us for a private conference. We apologize for trespassing on your time and your privacy in this manner - and if you could leave us to ourselves for a while, we will be further grateful.'
