Asimov, Isaac - Foundation 08 - Pebble In The Sky Read online

  PEBBLE IN THE SKY

  ISSAC ASIMOV

  contents

  BETWEEN ONE FOOTSTEP AND NEXT

  THE DISPOSAL OF A STRANGER

  ONE WORLD-OR MANY

  THE ROYAL ROAD

  THE INVOLUNTARY VOLUNTEER

  APPREHENSION IN THE NIGHT

  CONVERSATION WITH MADMEN?

  CONVERGENCE AT CHICA

  CONFLICT AT CHICA

  INTERPRETATION OF EVENTS

  THE MIND THAT CHANGED

  THE MIND THAT KILLED

  SPIDER WEB AT WAS14ENN

  SECOND MEETING

  THE ODDS THAT VANISHED

  CHOOSE YOUR SIDE!

  CHANGE YOUR SIDE!

  DUEL

  THE DEADLINE THAT APPROACHED

  THE DEADLINE THAT WAS REACHED

  THE DEADLINE THAT PASSED

  THE BEST IS YET TO BE

  chapter 1 between one footstep and the next

  Two minute's 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 smattering 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 sun like 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 art 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 I 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 a 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 burned and blistered paint of the cabinets and the silvery streaks along the concrete floor. "Yet uranium melts at about 1.800 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.

&nb
sp; "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 ten 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 gone!

  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 afresh and glistening green.

  He looked toward his feet automatically as he, thought that and, with a sharp cry, reached toward them. . . . The little cloth doll that he, had stepped over, a little, breath of reality, a---

  Well, no! He turned it over in his trembling hands, and it was not whole. Yet it was not mangled; it was sliced. Now wasn't that queer! Sliced lengthwise very neatly, so, that the waste-yarn stuffing wasn't stirred a hair. It lay there in interrupted threads, ending flatly.

  The glitter on his left shoe caught Schwartz's eye. Still clutching the doll, he forced his foot over his raised knee. The extreme tip of the sole, the part that extended forward past the, uppers, was smoothly sliced off. Sliced off as, no earthly knife in the hand of an earthly cobbler could have duplicated. The fresh surface, gleamed, almost liquidly in its unbelievable smoothness.

  I Schwartz's confusion had reached up from his spinal cord and touched the cerebrum, where it finally froze him with horror.

  At last, because even the sound of his own voice was a soothing element in a, world otherwise completely mad, he spoke aloud. The voice he heard was low and tense and panting.

  He said, "In the first place, I'm not crazy. I feel inside, just the way I've always felt. . . . Of course, if maybe I were crazy, I wouldn't know it, or would I? No-----" Inside, he felt the hysteria rise and forced it down. "There must be something else possible."

  He considered, "A dream, maybe? How can I tell if it's a dream or not?" He: pinched himself and felt the nip, but shook his head. "I can always dream I feel a pinch. That's no, proof."

  He looked about him despairingly. Could dreams be so clear, so detailed, so lasting? He had read once that most dreams last not more than five, seconds, that they are induced by trifling disturbances to the sleeper, that the apparent length of the dreams is an illusion.

  Cold comfort! He shifted the cuff of his shirt upward and stared at his wrist watch. The second hand turned and turned and turned. If it were a dream, the five seconds was going to stretch madly.

  He looked away and wiped futilely at the cold damp-, ness of his forehead. "What about amnesia?"

  He did not answer himself, but slowly buried his head in both hands.

  If he had lifted his foot and, as he did so, his mind had slipped the well-worn and well-oiled tracks it had followed so faithfully for so long ... If three months later, in the autumn, or a year and three months later, or ten years and three months later, he had put his foot down in this strange place, just as his mind returned ... Why, it would seem a single step, and all this . . . Then where had he been and what had he done in the interval?

  "No!" The word came out in a, loud cry. That couldn't be! Schwartz looked at his shirt. It was the one he had put on that morning, or what should have been that morning, and it was a fresh shirt. He bethought himself, plunged a fist into his jacket pocket, and brought out an apple.

  He bit into, it wildly. It was fresh and still had a lingering coolness from the refrigerator which had held it two hours earlier-or what should have been two hours.

  And the little rag doll, what about that?

  He felt himself, beginning to go, wild. It had to be a dream, or he really was insane.

  It struck him that the time of day had changed. It was late afternoon, or at least the shadows were, lengthening. The quiet desolation, of the place, flooded down upon him suddenly and freezingly.

  He lurched to his feet. Obviously be would have to, find people, any people. And, as obviously, he would have to find a house, and the best way to, do, that would, find a road.

  Automatically he turned in the direction in which the trees seemed thinnest, and walked.

  The slight chill, of evening was creeping inside jacket and the tops of the trees were becoming dim and forbidding when he came upon that straight and impersonal streak of macadam. He lunged toward it with sobbing gratitude and loved the feel of the hardness beneath his feet.

  But along either direction was absolute emptiness, and for a moment he felt the, cold clutch again. He had hoped for cars. It would have been the easiest thing to wave them down and say he said it aloud in his eagerness-,

  "Going toward Chicago, maybe?"

  What if he was nowhere near Chicago? Well, any large city; anyplace he could reach a telephone line. He had only four dollars and twenty-seven cents, in his pocket, but there was always the police ...

  He was walking along the highway, walking along the middle, watching in both directions. The setting of the sun made no, im
pression upon him, or the fact that the first stars were coming out.

  No cars. Nothing! And it was getting to be really dark.

  He thought that first dizziness might be coming, back, because the horizon at his left glimmered. Th. rough the gaps in the trees there was a cold blue shine. It was not the leaping red he imagined a forest fire would be like, but a faint and creeping glow. And the' macadam beneath, his feet seemed to, sparkle ever so faintly. He bent down to touch it, and it felt normal. But there was that tiny glimmer that caught the edges of his eyes.

  He found himself running wildly along the highway, his shoes thudding in blunt and uneven rhythm. He was conscious of the damaged doll in his hand and he tossed it wildly over his head.

  Leering, mocking remnant of life

  And then he stopped in a panic. Whatever it was, it was a proof of his sanity. And he needed it! So, he felt about in -the darkness, crawling on his knees till, he found it, a dark patch on the ultra-faint glow. The stuffing was plumping out and, absently, he forced it back.