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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.
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