Isaac Asimov - Buy Jupiter

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Buy Jupiter and Other Stories
Copyright © 1975 by Isaac Asimov
CONTENTS
BUY JUPITER AND OTHER STORIES
DAY OF THE HUNTERS
SHAH GUIDO G.
BUTTON, BUTTON
THE MONKEY'S FINGER
EVEREST
THE PAUSE
LET'S NOT
EACH AN EXPLORER
BLANK!
DOES A BEE CARE?
SILLY ASSES
BUY JUPITER
A STATUE FOR FATHER
RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY
FOUNDING FATHER
EXILE TO HELL
KEY ITEM
THE PROPER STUDY
2430 A.D.
THE GREATEST ASSET
TAKE A MATCH
THIOTIMOLINE TO THE STARS
LIGHT VERSE
To all the editors, whose careers
at one time or another,
have intersected my own--
good fellows, every one.
In THE EARLY ASIMOV I mentioned the fact that there were eleven stories that I had never succeeded
in selling. What’ s more, said I in that book, all eleven stories no longer existed and must remain forever in
limbo.
However, Boston University collects all my papers with an assiduity and determination worthy of a far
better cause, and when they first began to do so back in 1966, I handed them piles and piles of manuscript
material I didn’t look through.
Some eager young fan did, though. Boston University apparently allows the inspection of its literary
collections for research purposes, and this young fan, representing himself as a literary historian, I suppose,
got access to my files. He came across the faded manuscript of Big Game, a thousand-word short-short which
I had listed in THE EARLY ASIMOV as the eleventh and last of my lost rejections.
Having read THE EARLY ASIMOV, the fan recognized the value of the find. He promptly had it
reproduced and sent me a copy. And I promptly saw to it that it got into print. It appeared in BEFORE THE
GOLDEN AGE.
When I read the manuscript of Big Game, however, I discovered that, in a way, it bad never been lost. I
had salvaged it. Back in early 1950, Robert W. Lowndes, then publishing several science fiction magazines
for Columbia Publications, and reveling in the science fiction boom of the period, asked me for a story. I must
have remembered Big Game, written eight years earlier, for I produced DAY OF THE HUNTERS, which was
an expanded version of the earlier story, and Had published it in the November 1950 issue of Future
Combined with Science Fiction Stories.
DAY OF THE HUNTERS
It began the same night it ended. It wasn’t much. It just bothered me; it still bothers me.
You see, Joe Bloch, Ray Manning, and I were squatting around our favorite table in the corner bar with
an evening on our hands and a mess of chatter to throw it away with. That’s the beginning.
Joe Bloch started it by talking about the atomic bomb, and what he thought ought to be done with it, and
how who would have thought it five years ago. And I said lots of guys thought it five years ago and wrote
stories about it and it was going to be tough on them trying to keep ahead of the newspapers now. Which led
to a general palaver on how lots of screwy things might come true and a lot of for-instances were thrown
about.
Ray said he heard from somebody that some big-shot scientist had sent a block of lead back in time for
about two seconds or two minutes or two thousandths of a second - he didn’t know which. He said the
scientist wasn’t saying anything to anybody because he didn’t think anyone would believe him.
So I asked, pretty sarcastic, how he came to know about it. - Ray may have lots of friends but I have the
same lot and none of them know any big-shot scientists. But he said never mind how he heard, take it or
leave it.
And then there wasn’t anything to do but talk about time machines, and how supposing you went back
and killed your own grandfather or why didn’t somebody from the future come back and tell us who was
going to win the next war, or if there was going to be a next war, or if there’d be anywhere on Earth you could
live after it, regardless of who wins.
Ray thought just knowing the winner in the seventh race while the sixth was being run would he
something.
But Joe decided different. He said, “The trouble with you guys is you got wars and races on the mind.
Me, I got curiosity. Know what I’d do if I had a time machine?”
So right away we wanted to know, all ready to give him the old snicker whatever it was.
He said, “If I had one, I’d go back in time about a couple or five or fifty million years and find out what
happened to the dinosaurs.”
Which was too bad for Joe, because Ray and I both thought there was just about no sense to that at all.
Ray said who cared about a lot of dinosaurs and I said the only thing they were good for was to make a mess
of skeletons for guys who were dopy enough to wear out the floors in museums; and it was a good thing they
did get out of the way to make room for human beings. Of course Joe said that with some human beings he
knew, and he gives us a hard look, we should’ve stuck to dinosaurs, but we pay no attention to that.
“You dumb squirts can laugh and make like you know something, but that’s because you don’t ever
have any imagination,” he says. “Those dinosaurs were big stuff. Millions of all kinds - big as houses, and
dumb as houses, too - all over the place. And then, all of a sudden, like that,” and he snaps his fingers, “there
aren’t any anymore.”
How come, we wanted to know.
But he was just finishing a beer and waving at Charlie for another with a coin to prove he wanted to pay
for it and he just shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. That’s what I’d find out, though.”
That’s all. That would have finished it. I would’ve said something and Ray would’ve made a crack, and
we all would’ve had another beer and maybe swapped some talk about the weather and the Brooklyn
Dodgers and then said so long, and never think of dinosaurs again.
Only we didn’t, and now I never have anything on my mind but dinosaurs, and I feel sick.
Because the rummy at the next table looks up and hollers, “Hey!”
We hadn’t seen him. As a general rule, we don’t go around looking at rummies we don’t know in bars. I
got plenty to do keeping track of the rummies I do know. This fellow had a bottle before him that was half
empty, and a glass in his hand that was half full.
He said, “Hey,” and we all looked at him, and Ray said, “Ask him what he wants, Joe.”
Joe was nearest. He tipped his chair backward and said, “What do you want?”
The rummy said, “Did I hear you gentlemen mention dinosaurs?”
He was just a little weavy, and his eyes looked like they were bleeding, and you could only tell his shirt
was once white by guessing, but it must’ve been the way he talked. It didn’t sound rummy, if you know what I
mean.
Anyway, Joe sort of eased up and said, “Sure. Something you want to know?”
He sort of smiled at us. It was a funny smile; it started at the mouth and ended just before it touched the
eyes. He said, “Did you want to build a time machine and go back to find out what happened to the
dinosaurs?”
I could see Joe was figuring that some kind of confidence game was coming up. I was figuring the same
thing. Joe said, “Why? You aiming to offer to build one for me?”
The rummy showed a mess of teeth and said. “No, sir. I could but I won’t. You know why? Because I
built a time machine for myself a couple of years ago and went back to the Mesozoic Era and found out what
happened to the dinosaurs.”
Later on, I looked up how to spell “Mesozoic,” which is why I got it right. in case you’re wondering, and
I found nut that the Mesozoic Era is when a11 the dinosaurs were doing whatever dinosaurs do. Rut of
course at the time this is just so much double-talk to me, and mostly I was thinking we had a lunatic talking
to us. Joe claimed afterward that he knew about this Mesozoic thing, but he’ll have to talk lots longer and
louder before Ray and I believe him.
But that did it just the same. We said to the rummy to come over to our table. I guess I figured we could
listen to him for a while and maybe get some of the bottle, and the others must have figured the same. But he
held his bottle tight in his right hand when he sat down and that’s where he kept it. it. [sic]
Ray said, “Where’d you build a time machine?”
“At Midwestern University. My daughter and I worked on it together.”
He sounded like a college guy at that.
I said, “Where is it now? In your pocket?”
He didn’t blink; he never jumped at us no matter how wise we cracked. Just kept talking to himself out
loud, as if the whiskey had limbered up his tongue and he didn’t care if we stayed or not.
He said, “I broke it up. Didn’t want it. Had enough of it.”
We didn’t believe him. We didn’t believe him worth a darn. You better get that straight. It stands to
reason, because if a guy invented a time machine, he could clean up millions - he could clean up all the
money in the world, just knowing what would happen to the stock market and the races and elections. He
wouldn’t throw a11 that away, I don’t care what reasons he had. - Besides, none of us were going to believe
in time travel anyway, because what if you did kill your own grandfather.
Well, never mind.
Joe said, “Yeah, you broke it up. Sure you did. What’s your name?”
But he didn’t answer that one, ever. We asked him a few more times, and then we ended up calling him
“Professor.”
He finished off his glass and filled it again very slow. He didn’t offer us any, and we all sucked at our
beers.
So I said, “Well, go ahead. What happened to the dinosaurs?”
But he didn’t tell us right away. He stared right at the middle of the table and talked to it.
“I don’t know how many times Carol sent me back - just a few minutes or hours - before I made the big
jump. I didn’t care about the dinosaurs; I just wanted to see how far the machine would take me on the
supply of power I had available. I suppose it was dangerous, but is life so wonderful? The war was on them -
One more life?”
He sort of coddled his glass as if he was thinking about things in general, then he seemed to skip a part
in his mind and keep right on going.
“It was sunny,” he said, “sunny and bright; dry and hard. There were no swamps, no ferns. None of the
accoutrements of the Cretaceous we associate with dinosaurs,” - anyway, I think that’s what he said. I didn’t
always catch the big words, so later on I’ll just stick in what I can remember. I checked all the spellings, and I
must say that for all the liquor he put away, he pronounced them without stutters.
That’s maybe what bothered us. He sounded so familiar with everything, and it all just rolled off his
tongue like nothing.
He went on, “It was a late age, certainly the Cretaceous. The dinosaurs were already on the way out - all
except those little ones, with their metal belts and their guns.”
I guess Joe practically dropped his nose into the beer altogether. He skidded halfway around the glass,
when the professor let loose that statement sort of sadlike.
Joe sounded mad. “What little ones, with whose metal belts and which guns?”
The professor looked at him for just a second and then let his eyes slide back to nowhere. “THC were
little reptiles, standing four feet high. They stood on their hind legs with a thick tail behind, and they had
little forearms with fingers. Around their waists were strapped wide metal belts, and from these hung guns. -
And they weren’t guns that shot pellets either; they were energy projectors.”
“They were what’!” I asked. “Say, when was this? Millions of years ago?”
“That’s right,” he said. “They were reptiles. They had scales and no eyelids and they probably laid
eggs. But they used energy guns. There were five of them. They were on me as soon as I got out of the
machine. There must have been millions of them all over Earth - millions. Scattered all over. They must have
been the Lords of Creation then.”
I guess it was then that Ray thought he had him, because he developed that wise look in his eyes that
makes you feel like conking him with an empty beer mug, because a full one would waste beer. He said,
“Look, P’fessor, millions of them, huh? Aren’t there guys who don’t do anything but find old bones and mess
around with them till they figure out what some dinosaur looked like. The museums are full of these here
skeletons, aren’t they? Well, where’s there one with a metal belt on him. If there were millions, what’s become
of them? Where are the hones?”
The professor sighed. It was a real, sad sigh. Maybe he realized for the first time he was just speaking to
three guys in overalls in a barroom. Or maybe he didn’t care.
He said, “You don’t find many fossils. Think how many animals lived on Earth altogether. Think how
many billions and trillions. And then think how few fossils we find. - And these lizards were intelligent.
Remember that. They’re not going to get caught in snow drifts or mud, or fall into lava, except by big accident.
Think how few fossil men there are - even of these subintelligent apemen of a million years ago.”
He looked at his half-full glass and turned it round and round.
He said, “What would fossils show anyway? Metal belts rust away and leave nothing. Those little
lizards were warm-blooded. I know that, but you couldn’t prove it from petrified bones. What the devil? A
million years from now could you tell what New York looks like from a human skeleton? Could you tell a
human from a gorilla by the bones and figure out which one built an atomic bomb and which one ate
bananas in a zoo?”
“Hey,” said Joe, plenty objecting, “any simple bum can tell a gorilla skeleton from a man’s. A man’s got
a larger brain. Any fool can tell which one was intelligent.”
“Really?” The professor laughed to himself, as if all this was so simple and obvious, it was just a crying
shame to waste time on it. “You judge everything from the type of brain human beings have managed to
develop. Evolution has different ways of doing things. Birds fly one way; bats Ay another way. Life has
plenty of tricks for everything. - How much of your brain do you think you use. About a fifth. That’s what the
psychologists say. As far as they know, as far as anybody knows, eighty per cent of your brain has no use at
all. Everybody just works on way-low gear, except maybe a few in history. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance.
Archimedes, Aristotle, Gauss, Galois, Einstein -”
I never heard of any of them except Einstein, but I didn’t let on. He mentioned a few more, but I’ve put in
all I can remember. Then he said, “Those little reptiles had tiny brains, maybe quarter-size, maybe even less,
but they used it all - every hit of it. Their hones might not show it, but they were intelligent; intelligent as
humans. And they were boss of all Earth.”
And then Joe came up with something that was really good. For a while I was sure that he had the
professor and I was awfully glad he came out with it. He said, “Look, P’fessor, if those lizards were so
damned hot, why didn’t they leave something behind? Where are their cities and their buildings and all the
sort of stuff we keep finding of the cavemen, stone knives and things. Hell, if human beings got the heck off of
Earth, think of the stuff we’d leave behind us. You couldn’t walk a mile without falling over a city. And roads
and things.”
But the professor just couldn’t he stopped. He wasn’t even shaken up. He just came right back with,
“You’re still judging other forms of life by human standards. We build cities and roads and airports and the
rest that goes with us - but they didn’t. They were built on a different plan. Their whole way of life was
different from the ground up. They didn’t live in cities. They didn’t have our kind of art. I’m not sure what
they did have because it was so alien I couldn’t grasp it - except for their guns. Those would be the same.
Funny, isn’t it. - For all I know, maybe we stumble over their relics every day and don’t even know that’s
what they are.”
I was pretty sick of it by that time. You just couldn’t get him. The cuter you’d be, the cuter he’d be.
I said, “Look here. How do you know so much about those things? What did you do; live with them? Or
did they speak English? Or maybe you speak lizard talk. Give us a few words of lizard talk.”
I guess I was getting mad, too. You know how it is. A guy tells you something you don’t believe because
it’s all cockeyed, and you can’t get him to admit he’s lying.
But the professor wasn’t mad. He was just filling the glass again, very slowly. “No,” he said, “I didn’t
talk and they didn’t talk. They just looked at me with their cold, hard, staring eyes - snake’s eyes - and I knew
what they were thinking, and I could see that they knew what I was thinking. Don’t ask me how it happened.
It just did. Everything. I knew that they were out on a hunting expedition and I knew they weren’t going to let
me go.”
And we stopped asking questions. We just looked at him, then Ray said, “What happened? How did
you get away?”
“That was easy. An animal scurried past on the hilltop. It was long - maybe ten feet - and narrow and
ran close to the ground. The lizards got excited. I could feel the excitement in waves. It was as if they forgot
about me in a single hot flash of blood lust - and off they went. I got back in the machine, returned, and broke
it up.”
It was the flattest sort of ending you ever heard. Joe made a noise in his throat. “Well, what happened to
the dinosaurs?”
“Oh, you don’t see? I thought it was plain enough. - It was those little intelligent lizards that did it. They
were hunters - by instinct and by choice. It was their hobby in life. It wasn’t for food; it was for fun.”
“And they just wiped out all the dinosaurs on the Earth?”
“All that lived at the time, anyway; all the contemporary species. Don’t you think it’s possible? How
long did it take us to wipe out bison herds by the hundred million? What happened to the dodo in a few
years? Supposing we really put our minds to it, how long would the lions and the tigers and the giraffes last?
Why, by the time I saw those lizards there wasn’t any big game left - no reptile more than fifteen feet maybe.
All gone. Those little demons were chasing the little, scurrying ones, and probably crying their hearts out for
the good old days.”
And we all kept quiet and looked at our empty beer bottles and thought about it. All those dinosaurs -
big as houses - killed by little lizards with guns. Killed for fun.
Then Joe leaned over and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, easylike, and shook it. He said,
“Hey, P’fessor, but if that’s so, what happened to the little lizards with the guns? Huh? - Did you ever go
back to find out?”
The professor looked up with the kind of look in his eyes that he’d have if he were lost.
“You still don’t see! It was already beginning to happen to them. I saw it in their eyes. They were
running out of big game- the fun was going nut of it. So what did you expect them to do? They turned to other
game - the biggest and most dangerous of all - and really had fun. They hunted that game to the end.”
“What game?” asked Ray. He didn’t get it, but Joe and I did.
“Themselves,” said the professor in a loud voice. “They finished off all the others and began on
themselves - till not one was left.”
And again we stopped and thought about those dinosaurs - big as houses - all finished off by little
lizards with guns. Then we thought about the little lizards and how they had to keep the guns going even
when there was nothing to use them on but themselves.
Joe said, “Poor dumb lizards.”
“Yeah,” said Ray, “poor crackpot lizards.”
And then what happened really scared us. Because the professor jumped up with eyes that looked as if
they were trying to climb right out of their sockets and leap at us. He shouted, “You damned fools. Why do
you sit there slobbering over reptiles dead a hundred million years. That was the first intelligence on Earth
and that’s how it ended. That’s done. But we’re the second intelligence - and how the devil do you think we’re
going to end?”
He pushed the chair over and headed for the door. But then he stood there just before leaving altogether
and said: “Poor dumb humanity! Go ahead and cry about that.”
=====
The story, alas, seems to have a moral, and, in fact, ends by pounding that moral over the reader’s head.
That is bad. Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can’t resist the impulse to
improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.
Occasionally I overflow and forget this good maxim. DAY OF THE HUNTERS was written not long
after the Soviet Union had exploded its first fission bomb. It had been bad enough till then, knowing that the
United States might be tempted to use fission bombs if sufficiently irritated (as in 1945). Now, for the first
time, the possibility of a real nuclear war, one in which both sides used fission bombs, had arisen.
We’ve grown used to that situation now and scarcely think of it, but in 1950 there were many who
thought a nuclear war was inevitable, and in short order, too. I was pretty bitter about that - and the
bitterness shows in the story.* [* Mankind's suicide seems now, a quarter century after DAY OF THE
HUNTERS was written, to be more likely than ever, but for different reasons.]
DAY OF THE HUNTERS is also told in the framework of a conversation, by the way. This one takes
place in a bar. Wodehouse’s stories about Mulliner, the stories set in Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague de Camp
and Fletcher Pratt, and Clarke’s stories about the White Hart were all set in bars, and I’d read them a11 and
loved them.
It was inevitable, therefore, that someday I would tell a story in the form of a bar conversation. The only
trouble is that I don’t drink and have hardly ever sat in a bar, so I probably have it all wrong.
My stay in Boston quickly proved to be no barrier to my literary career. (In fact, nothing since my
concentration on my doctoral research in 1947 has proved to be a barrier.)
After two months in a small sublet apartment (of slum quality) very close to the school, we moved to the
suburbs - if you want to call it that. Neither my wife nor I could drive a car when we came to Boston so we
had to find a place on the bus lines. We got one in the rather impoverished town of Somerville - an attic
apartment of primitive sort that was unbelievably hot in the summer.
There I wrote my second novel, THE STARS, LIKE DUST (Doubleday, 1951), and while there a small,
one-man publishing firm, Gnome Press, put out a collection of my positronic robot stories, I, ROBOT, in 1950,
and the first portion of my Foundation stories as FOUNDATION in 1951.* [* Gnome Press did not do well
with these books or with FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE and SECOND FOUNDATION, which they
published in 1951 and 1952. To my great relief, therefore, Doubleday, playing the role of White Knight on my
behalf, pressured Gnome Press into relinquishing these books in 1962. Doubleday handled them thereafter
and succeeded in earning (and is still continuing to earn) very substantial sums out of all of them for myself
and for themselves.]
In 1950 I learned to drive an automobile, and in 1951 we even had a son, rather to our surprise. After
nine years of marriage we had rather come to the opinion that we were doomed to he childless. Late in 1950,
however, it turned out that the explanation to some rather puzzling physiological manifestations was that
my wife was pregnant. The first person to tell me that that must be so, I remember, was Evelyn Gold (she was
then Mrs. Horace Gold). I laughed and said, “No, no,” but it was yes, yes, and David was horn on August 20,
1951.
Having thus become prolific in books and having made a start in the direction of automobiles and
offspring, I was ready for anything and began to accept all kinds of assignments.
Among the many science fiction magazines of the early 1950s, for instance, there was one called Marvel
Science Fiction. It was the reincarnation of an earlier Marvel that had published nine issues between 1938 and
1941. The earlier magazine had specialized in stories that accented sex in a rather heavy-handed and foolish
manner.* [* In a very indirect way this eventually led to my writing a story called Playboy and the Slime God
which appeared in the March 1961 Amazing stories and was then included in my collection NIGHTFALL
AND OTHER STORIES under the much better title What Is This Thing Called Love?
After Marvel was revived in 1950 (it lasted only for another half-dozen issues) I was asked for a story. I
might have recalled the unsavory history of the magazine and refused to supply one, but I thought of a story I
couldn’t resist writing because, as all who know me are aware, I am an incorrigible punster.* [* I once asked a
girl named Dawn if she had ever used one of those penny weighing machines on a trip to Florida she was
telling me about. She said, “No. Why?” and I said because there was a song written about it. She said, “What
are you talking about?” and I said, “Haven’t you heard ’Weigh Dawn Upon the Swanee river’?” and she
chased me for five blocks before I got away.] The story was SHAH GUIDO G. and it appeared in the
November 1951 issue of Marvel.
SHAH GUIDO G.
Once every year Philo Plat returned to the scene of his crime. It was a form of penance. On each
anniversary he climbed the barren crest and gazed along the miles of smashed metal, concrete, and bones.
The area was desolate. The metal crumplings were still stainless and unrusted, their jagged teeth raised
in futile anger. Somewhere among it all were the skeletons of the thousands who had died, of all ages and
both sexes. Their skully sightlessness, for all he knew, was turning empty, curse-torn eye holes at him.
The stench had long since gone from the desert, and the lizards held their lairs untroubled. No man
approached the fenced-off burial ground where what remained of bodies lay in the gashed crater carved out
in that final fall.
Only Plat came. He returned year after year and always, as though to ward off so many Evil Eyes, he
took his gold medal with him. It hung suspended bravely from his neck as he stood on the crest. On it was
inscribed simply, “To the Liberator!”
This time, Fulton was with him. Fulton had been a Lower One once in the days before the crash; the
days when there had been Higher Ones and Lower Ones.
Fulton said, “I am amazed you insist on coming here, Philo.”
Plat said, “I must. You know the sound of the crash was heard for hundreds of miles; seismographs
registered it around the world. My ship was almost directly above it; the shock vibrations caught me and
flung me miles. Yet all I can remember of sound is that one composite scream as Atlantis began its fall.”
“It had to be done.”
“Words,” sighed Plat. “There were babies and guiltless ones.”
“No one is guiltless.”
“Nor am I. Ought I to have been the executioner?”
“Someone had to be.” Fulton was firm. ’Consider the world now, twenty-five years later. Democracy
re-established, education once more universal, culture available for the masses, and science once more
advancing. Two expeditions have already landed on Mars.”
“I know. I know. But that, too, was a culture. THC called it Atlantis because it was an island that ruled
the world. It was an island in the sky, not the sea. It was a city and a world all at once, Fulton. You never saw
its crystal covering and its gorgeous buildings. It was a single jewel carved of stone and metal. It was a
dream.”
“It was concentrated happiness distilled out of the little supply distributed to billions of ordinary folk
who lived on the Surface.”
“Yes, you are right. Yes, it had to be. But it might have been so different, Fulton. You know,” he seated
himself on the hard rock, crossed his arms upon his knees and cradled his chin in them, “I think, sometimes,
of how it must have been in the old days, when there were nations and wars upon the Earth. I think of how
much a miracle it must have seemed to the peoples when the United Nations first became a real world
government, and what Atlantis must have meant to them.
“It was a capital city that governed Earth but was not of it. It was a black disc in the air, capable of
appearing anywhere on Earth at any height; belonging to no one nation, but to all the planet; the product of
no one nation’s ingenuity but the first great achievement of all the race - and then, what it became!”
Fulton said, “Shall we go? We’ll want to get back to the ship before dark.”
Plat went on, “In a way. I suppose it was inevitable. The human race never did invent an institution that
didn’t end as a cancer. Probably in prehistoric times, the medicine man who began as the repository of tribal
wisdom ended as the last bar to tribal advance. In ancient Rome, the citizen army -”
Fulton was letting him speak - patiently. It was a queer echo of the past. And there had been other eyes
upon him in those days, patiently waiting, while he talked.
“- the citizen army that defended the Romans against all comers from Veii to Carthage, became the
professional Praetorian Guard that sold the Imperium and levied tribute on all the Empire. The Turks
developed the Janissaries as their invincible advance guard against Europe and the Sultan ended as a slave
of his Janissary slaves. The barons of medieval Europe protected the serfs against the Northmen and the
Magyars, then remained six hundred years longer as a parasite aristocracy that contributed nothing.”
Plat became aware of the patient eyes and said, “Don’t you understand me?”
One of the bolder technicians said, “With your kind permission, Higher One, we must needs be at
work.”
“Yes, I suppose you must.”
The technician felt sorry. This Higher One was queer, but he meant well. Though he spoke a deal of
nonsense, he inquired after their families, told them they were fine fellows, and that their work made them
better than the Higher Ones.
So he explained, “You see, there is another shipment of granite and steel for the new theater and we will
have to shift the energy distribution. It is becoming very hard to do that. The Higher Ones will not listen.”
“Now that’s what I mean. You should make them listen.”
But they just stared at him, and at that moment an idea crawled gently into Plat’s unconscious mind.
Leo Spinney waited for him on the crystal level. He was Plat’s age but taller and much more handsome.
Plat’s face was thin, his eyes were china-blue, and he never smiled. Spinney was straight-nosed with brown
eyes that seemed to laugh continuously.
Spinney called, “We’ll miss the game.”
“I don’t want to go, Leo. Please.”
Spinney said, “With the technicians again? Why do you waste your time?”
Plat said, “They work. I respect them. What right have we to idle?”
“Ought I to ask questions of the world as it is when it suits me so well’?”
“If you do not, someone will ask questions for you someday.”
“That will be someday, not this day. And, frankly, you had better come. The Sekjen has noticed that you
are never present at the games and he doesn’t like it. Personally, I think people have been telling him of your
talks to the technicians and your visits to the Surface. He might even think you consort with Lower Ones.”
Spinney laughed heartily, but Plat said nothing. It would not hurt them if they consorted with Lower
Ones a bit more, learned something of their thinking. Atlantis had its guns and its battalions of Waves. It
might learn someday that that was not enough. Not enough to save the Sekjen.
The Sekjen! Plat wanted to spit. The full title was “Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Two
centuries before it had been an elective office; an honorable one. Now a man like Guido Garshthavastra could
fill it because he could prove he was the son of his equally worthless father.
“Guido G.” was what the Lower Ones on the Surface called him. And usually, with bitterness, “Shah
Guido G.,” because “Shah” had been the title of a line of despotic oriental kings. The Lower Ones knew him
for what he was. Plat wanted to tell Spinney that, but it wasn’t time yet.
The real games were held in the upper stratosphere, a hundred miles above Atlantis, though the
Sky-Island was itself twenty miles above sea-level. The huge amphitheater was filled and the radiant globe in
its center held all eyes. Each tiny one-man cruiser high above was represented by its own particular glowing
symbol in the color that belonged to the fleet of which it was part. The little sparks reproduced in exact
miniature the motions of the ships.
The game was starting as Plat and Spinney took their seats. The little dots were already flashing toward
one another. skimming and missing, veering.
A large scoreboard blazoned the progress of the battle in conventional symbology that Plat did not
understand. There was confused cheering for either fleet and for particular ships.
High up under a canopy was the Sekjen, the Shah Guido G. of the Lower Ones. Plat could barely see
him but he could make out clearly the smaller replica of the game globe that was there for his private use.
Plat was watching the game for the first time. He understood none of the finer points and wondered at
the reason for the particular shouts. Yet he understood that the dots were ships and that the streaks of light
that licked out from them on frequent occasions represented energy beams which, one hundred miles above,
were as real as flaring atoms could make them. Each time a dot streaked, there was a clamor in the audience
that died in a great moan as a target dot veered and escaped.
And then there was a general yell and the audience, men and women up to the Sekjen himself
clambered to its feet. One of the shining dots had been hit and was going down - spiraling,, spiraling. A
hundred miles above, a real ship was doing the same; plunging down into the thickening air that would heat
and consume its specially designed magnesium alloy shell to harmless powdery ash before it could reach the
surface of the Earth.
Plat turned away. “I’m leaving, Spinney.”
Spinney was marking his scorecard and saying, “That’s five ships the Greens have lost this week.
We’ve got to have more.” He was on his feet, calling wildly, “Another one!”
The audience was taking up the shout, chanting it.
Plat said, “A man died in that ship.”
“You bet. One of the Green’s hest too. Damn good thing.” “Do you realize that a man died.”
“They’re only Lower Ones. What’s bothering you?”
Plat made his slow way out among the rows of people. A few looked at him and whispered. Most had
eyes for nothing but the game globe. There was perfume all about him and in the distance, occasionally heard
amid the shouts, there was a faint wash of gentle music. As he passed through a main exit, a yell trembled
the air behind him.
Plat fought the nausea grimly.
He walked two miles, then stopped.
Steel girders were swaying at the end of diamagnetic beams and the coarse sound of orders yelled in
Lower accents filled the air.
There was always building going on upon Atlantis. Two hundred years ago, when Atlantis had been
the genuine seat of government, its lines had been straight, its spaces broad. But now it was much more than
that. It was the Xanadu pleasure dome that Coleridge spoke of.
The crystal roof had been lifted upward and outward many times in the last two centuries. Each time it
had been thickened so that Atlantis might more safely climb higher; more safely withstand the possible
blows of meteoric pebbles not yet entirely burnt by the thin wisps of air.
And as Atlantis became more useless and more attractive, more and more of the Higher Ones left their
estates and factories in the hands of managers and foremen and took up permanent residence on the
Sky-Island. All built larger, higher, more elaborately.
And here was still another structure.
Waves were standing by in stolid, duty-ridden obedience. The name applied to the females - if, Plat
thought sourly, they could be called that - was taken from the Early English of the days when Earth was
divided into nations. There, too, conversion and degeneration had obtained. The old Waves had done paper
work behind the lines. These creatures, still called Waves, were front-line soldiers.
It made sense, Plat knew. Properly trained, women were more single-minded, more fanatic, less given to
doubts and remorse than ever men could be.
They always had Waves present at the scene of any building, because the building was done by Lower
Ones, and Lower Ones on Atlantis had to he guarded. Just as those on the Surface had to he cowed. In the
last fifty years alone, the long-range atomic artillery that studded the underside of Atlantis had been doubled
and tripled.
He watched the girder come softly down, two men yelling directions to each other as it settled in place.
Soon there would be no further room for new buildings on Atlantis.
The idea that had nudged his unconscious mind earlier in the day gently touched his conscious mind.
Plat’s nostrils flared.
Plat’s nose twitched at the smell of oil and machinery. More than most of the perfume-spoiled Higher
Ones, he was used to odors of all sorts. He had been on the Surface and smelled the pungence of its growing
fields and the fumes of its cities.
He said to the technician, “I am seriously thinking of building a new house and would like your advice
as to the best possible location.”
The technician was amazed and electrified. “Thank you, Higher One. It has become so difficult to
arrange the available power.”
“It is why l come to you.”
They talked at length, Plat asked a great many questions and when he returned to crystal level his mind
was a maze of speculation. Two days passed in an agony of doubt. Then he remembered the shining dot,
spiraling and spiraling, and the young, wondering eyes upon his own as Spinnev said, “They’re only Lower
Ones.”
He made up his mind and applied for audience with the Sekjen.
The Sekjen’s drawling voice accentuated the boredom he did not care to hide. He said. “The Plats are of
good family, yet you amuse yourself with technicians. I am told you speak to them as equals. I hope that it will
not become necessary to remind you that your estates on the Surface require your care.”
That would have meant exile from Atlantis, of course.
Plat said, “It is necessary to watch the technicians, Sire. They are of Lower extraction.”
The Sekjen frowned. “Our Wave Commander has her job she takes care of such matters.”
“She docs her best, I have no doubt, Sire, but I have made friends with the technicians. They are not safe.
Would I have any other reason to soil my hands with them, but the safety of Atlantis.”
The Sekjen listened. First, doubtfully; then, with fear on his soft face. He said, “I shall have them in
custody -”
“Softly, Sire,” said Plat. “We cannot do without them meanwhile, since none of us can man the guns
and the antigravs. It would be better to give them no opportunity for rebellion. In two weeks the new theater
will be dedicated with games and feasting.”
“And what do they intend then?” “I am not yet certain, Sire. But I know enough to recommend that a
division of Waves be brought to Atlantis. Secretly, of course, and at the last minute so that it will be too late
for the rebels to change any plans they have made. They will have to drop them altogether, and the proper
moment, once lost, may never be regained. Thereafter, I will learn more. If necessary, we will train new men. It
would be a pity, Sire, to tell anyone of this in advance. If the technicians learn our countermeasures
prematurely, matters may go badly.”
The Sekjen, with his jeweled hand to his chin, mused - and believed.
Shah Guido G., thought Philo Plat. In history, you’ll go down as Shah Guido G.
Philo Plat watched the gaiety from a distance. Atlantis’s central squares were crawling black with
people. That was good. He himself had managed to get away only with difficulty. And none too soon, since
the Wave Division had already cross-hatched the sky with their ships.
They were maneuvering edgily now, adjusting themselves into final position over Atlantis’s huge,
raised air field, which was well able to take their ships all at once.
The cruisers were descending now vertically, in parade formation. Plat looked quickly toward the city
proper. The populace had grown quieter as they watched the unscheduled demonstration, and it seemed to
him that he had never seen so many Higher Ones upon the Sky-Island at one time. For a moment, a last
misgiving arose. There was still time for a warning.
And even as he thought that he knew that there wasn’t. The cruisers were dropping speedily. He would
have to go hurry if he were himself to escape in his own little craft. He wondered sickly, even as he grasped
the controls, whether his friends on the Surface had received his yesterday’s warning, or would believe it if
they had received it. If they could not act quickly the Higher Ones would yet recover from the first blow,
devastating though it was.
He was in the air when the Waves landed, seven thousand five hundred tear-drop ships covering the
airfield like a descending net. Plat drove his ship upward, watching -
And Atlantis went dark. It was like a candle over which a mighty hand was suddenly cupped. One
moment it blazed the night into brilliance for fifty miles around; the next it was black against blackness.
To Plat the thousands of screams blended into one thin, lost shriek of fear. He Red, and the shock
vibrations of Atlantis’s crash to Earth caught his ship and hurled it far.
He never stopped hearing that scream.
Fulton was staring at Plat. He said, “Have you ever told this to anyone?”
Plat shook his head.
Fulton’s mind went back a quarter century, too. “We got your message, of course. It was hard to believe,
as you expected. Many feared a trap even after report of the Fall arrived. But - well, it’s history. The Higher
Ones that remained, those on the Surface, were demoralized and before they could recover, they were done.
“But tell me,” he turned to Plat with sudden, hard curiosity. “What was it you did’! We’ve always
assumed you sabotaged the power stations.”
“I know. The truth is so much less romantic, Fulton. The world would prefer to believe its myth. Let it.”
“May I have the truth?”
“If you will. As I told you, the Higher Ones built and built to saturation. The antigrav energy beams had
to support a weight in buildings, guns, and enclosing shell that doubled and tripled as the years went on.
Any requests the technicians might have made for newer or bigger motors were turned down, since the
Higher Ones would rather have the room and money for their mansions and there was always enough
power for the moment.
“The technicians, as I said, had already reached the stage where they were disturbed at the construction
of single buildings. I questioned them and found exactly how little margin of safety remained. They were
waiting only for the completion of the new theater to make a new request. They did not realize, however, that,
at my suggestion, Atlantis would be called upon to support the sudden additional burden of a division of
Wave cavalry in their ships. Seven thousand five hundred ships, fully rigged!
“When the Waves landed, by then almost two thousand tons, the antigrav power supply was
overloaded. The motors failed and Atlantis was only a vast rock, ten miles above the ground. What could
such a rock do but fall.”
Plat arose. Together they turned back toward their ship.
Fulton laughed harshly. “You know, there is a fatality in names.” “What do you mean?”
“Why, that once more in history Atlantis sank beneath the Waves.”
=====
摘要：

BuyJupiterandOtherStoriesCopyright©1975byIsaacAsimovCONTENTSBUYJUPITERANDOTHERSTORIESDAYOFTHEHUNTERSSHAHGUIDOG.BUTTON,BUTTONTHEMONKEY'SFINGEREVERESTTHEPAUSELET'SNOTEACHANEXPLORERBLANK!DOESABEECARE?SILLYASSESBUYJUPITERASTATUEFORFATHERRAIN,RAIN,GOAWAYFOUNDINGFATHEREXILETOHELLKEYITEMTHEPROPERSTUDY2430A...

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