Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  Until then you’re going to be working with those little things and you’ll probably end up the most important person here.”

  Sam said, “But will we leave their world to them?”

  Gentry said, “We’ll have to if we expect to get anything out of them, won’t we? The Commander thinks we’re going to build elaborate settlements in orbit about this world and shift all operations to them except for a skeleton crew in this Dome to maintain direct contact with the insects-or whatever we’ll decide to call them. It will cost a great deal of money, and take time and labor, but it’s going to be worth it. No one will question that.”

  Sam said “Good!”

  Gentry stared at him again, longer and more thoughtfully than before.

  “My boy,” he said, “it seems that what happened came about because you did not fear the supposed hallucination. Your mind remained open, and that was the whole difference. Why was that? Why weren’t you afraid?”

  Sam flushed. “I’m not sure, sir. As I look back on it, though, it seemed to me I was puzzled as to why I was sent here. I had been doing my best to study neurophysiology through my computerized courses, and I knew very little about astrophysics. The Central Computer had my record, all of it, the full details of everything I had ever studied and I couldn’t imagine why I had been sent here.

  “Then, when you first mentioned the hallucinations, I thought, ‘That must be it. I was sent here to look into it.’ I just made up my mind that was the thing I had to do. I had no time to be afraid, Dr. Gentry. I had a problem to solve and I-I had faith in the Central Computer. It wouldn’t have sent me here, if I weren’t up to it.”

  Gentry shook his head. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had that much faith in that machine. But they say faith can move mountains, and I guess it did in this case.”

  The Instability

  Professor Firebrenner had explained it carefully. “Time-perception depends on the structure of the Universe. When the Universe is expanding, we experience time as going forward; when it is contracting, we experience it going backward. If we could somehow force the Universe to be in stasis, neither expanding nor contracting, time would stand still.”

  “But you can’t put the Universe in stasis,” said Mr. Atkins, fascinated.

  “I can put a little portion of the Universe in stasis, however. “ said the professor. “ Just enough to hold a ship. Time will stand still and we can move forward or backward at will and the entire trip will last less than an instant. But all the parts of the Universe will move while we stand still, while we are nailed to the fabric of the Universe. The Earth moves about the Sun, the Sun moves about the core of the Galaxy, the Galaxy moves about some center of gravity, all the Galaxies move.

  “I calculated those motions and I find that 27.5 million years in the future, a red dwarf star will occupy the position our Sun does now. If we go 27.5 million years into the future, in less than an instant that red dwarf star will be near our spaceship and we can come home after studying it a bit.”

  Atkins said, “Can that be done?”

  “I’ve sent experimental animals through time, but I can’t make them automatically return. If you and I go, we can then manipulate the controls so that we can return.”

  “And you want me along?”

  “Of course. There should be two. Two people would be more easily believed than one alone. Come, it will be an incredible adventure.”

  Atkins inspected the ship. It was a 2217 Glenn-fusion model and looked beautiful. “Suppose,” he said, “that it lands inside the red dwarf star.”

  “It won’t,” said the professor, “but if it does, that’s the chance we take.”

  “But when we get back, the Sun and Earth will have moved on. We’ll be in space.”

  “Of course, but how far can the Sun and Earth move in the few hours it will take us to observe the star? With this ship we will catch up to our beloved planet. Are you ready, Mr. Atkins?”

  “Ready,” sighed Atkins.

  Professor Firebrenner made the necessary adjustments and nailed the ship to the fabric of the

  Universe while 27.5 million years passed. And then, in less than a flash, time began to move forward again in the usual way, and everything in the Universe moved forward with it.

  Through the viewing port of their ship, Professor Firebrenner and Mr. Atkins could see the small orb of the red dwarf star.

  The professor smiled. “You and I, Atkins,” he said, “are the first ever to see, close at hand, any star other than our own Sun.”

  They remained two-and-a-half hours during which they photographed the star and its spectrum and as many neighboring stars as they could, made special coronagraphic observations, tested the chemical composition of the interstellar gas, and then Professor Firebrenner said, rather reluctantly, “I think we had better go home now.”

  Again, the controls were adjusted and the ship was nailed to the fabric of the Universe. They went 27.5 million years into the past, and in less than a flash, they were back where they started.

  Space was black. There was nothing.

  Atkins said, “What happened? Where are the Earth and Sun?”

  The professor frowned. He said, “ Going back in time must be different. The entire Universe must have moved.”

  “Where could it move?”

  “I don’t know. Other objects shift position within the Universe, but the Universe as a whole must move in an upper-dimensional direction. We are here in the absolute vacuum, in primeval Chaos.”

  “But we’re here. It’s not primeval Chaos anymore.”

  “Exactly. That means we’ve introduced an instability at this place where we exist, and that means -”

  Even as he said that, a Big Bang obliterated them. A new Universe came into being and began to expand.

  Alexander The God

  Alexander Hoskins grew seriously interested in computers at the age of fourteen and quickly realized that he was interested in nothing much else.

  His teachers encouraged him and excused him from classes in order that he might concentrate on this hobby of his. His father, who worked for IBM, encouraged him, too, got him some necessary equipment and explained some knotty points to him.

  Alexander built his own computer in a room above the garage, programmed and reprogrammed it and, at the age of sixteen, could no longer find a book that told him anything he didn’t know about computers. Nor could he find a book that dealt with some of the things he had found out entirely on his o w n.

  He thought about it deeply and decided not to tell his father of some of the things his computer could do. Already, the boy had become aware that the greatest conqueror of ancient times had been Alexander the Great, and Alexander felt his own name was no accident.

  Alexander was particularly interested in computer memory and worked out systems for cramming data into volume-much data into little volume. With each improvement, he squeezed more and more data into less and less volume.

  Solemnly, he then named his computer Bucephalus, after the faithful horse of Alexander the

  Great, the horse who had carried him through all his triumphant battles.

  There were computers that could accept spoken commands and give spoken responses, but none could do it as well as Bucephalus. There were also computers that could scan and store the written word, but none could do it as well as Bucephalus. Alexander tested this by having Bucephalus scan the Encyclopedia Britannica and store it all in its memory.

  By the time he was eighteen, Alexander had established an information-handling business for students and small businessmen and had become self-supporting. He moved into his own apartment in the city and was from that point on independent of his parents.

  In his own apartment he could remove the earphone attachment. With privacy, he could speak to Bucephalus openly, though he carefully adjusted the computer’s voice to low intensity. He did not want neighbors to wonder who was in the apartment with him.

  He said, “Bucephalus, Alexan
der the Great had conquered the ancient world by the time he was thirty. I want to do the same thing. That gives me twelve more years.”

  Bucephalus knew all about Alexander the Great, since the Encyclopedia had given him all the details.

  He said, “ Alexander the Great was the son of the King of Macedon and by the time he was your age, he had led his father’s cavalry to victory at the great battle at Chaeronea.”

  Alexander said, “No, no. I’m not talking about battles and phalanxes and things like that. I want to conquer the world by coming to own it.”

  “How could you own it, Alexander?”

  “You and I, Bucephalus,” said Alexander, “are going to study the stock market.”

  The New York Times had long since put all its microfilmed records into computerized form and for

  Alexander it was not at all a difficult task to tap into that information.

  For days, weeks, months, Bucephalus transferred over a century of data on the stock market into its own memory banks-all the stocks listed, all the shares sold for each on each day, the ups and downs, even the applicable news on the financial pages. Alexander was forced to extend the computer’s memory circuits and to work out a daring new system for information retrieval. Reluctantly, he sold a simplified version of one of the circuits he had developed to IBM and in this way became quite well-to-do. He bought a neighboring apartment in which he might eat and sleep. The first apartment was now given over entirely to Bucephalus.

  When he was twenty, Alexander felt he was ready to start his campaign.

  “Bucephalus,” he said, “I am ready, and so are you. You know everything there is to know about the stock market. You have in your memory every transaction and every event, and you keep it all up to date to the very second because you are hooked into the computer at the New York Stock Exchange, and you will soon be hooked into the exchanges in London, Tokyo, and elsewhere.”

  “Yes, Alexander,” said Bucephalus, “but what is it you wish me to do with all the information?”

  “I am certain,” said Alexander, his eyes gleaming in steely, determined fashion, “that the values and fluctuations of the Market are not random. I feel that nothing is. You must go through all the data, studying all the values and all the changes in the values and all the rates of changes of the values, until you can analyze them into cycles and combinations of cycles.”

  “Are you referring to a Fourier analysis?” asked Bucephalus. “Explain that to me.”

  Bucephalus presented him with a printout from the Encyclopedia together with supplements from other information in his memory banks.

  Alexander glanced at it briefly, and said, “Yes, that’s the sort of thing.” “To what end, Alexander?”

  “Once you have the cycles, Bucephalus, you will be able to predict the course of the stock market in the following day, week, month, according to the swing of the cycles, and you will be able to direct me in my investments. I will quickly grow rich. You will also direct me how to obscure my own involvement so that the world will not know how rich I am, or who it is who has such an influential finger on world events.”

  “To what end, Alexander?”

  “So that when I am rich enough, when I control the Earth’s financial institutions, its commerce, its business, its resources, I will have done in reality what Alexander the Great did only in part. I will be Alexander the Really Great. “ His eyes glittered with delight at the thought.

  By the time Alexander was twenty-two, he was satisfied that Bucephalus had worked out the complicated set of cycles that would serve to predict the behavior of the stock market.

  Bucephalus was less certain. He said, “In addition to the natural cycles that control such things, there are also unpredictable events in the world of politics and international affairs. There are unpredictable turns of weather, disease, and scientific advance.”

  Alexander said, “Not at all, Bucephalus. All such things also go in cycles. You will study the general news columns of the New York Times and absorb it all in order to allow for these supposedly unpredictable events. You will then find they are predictable. Other great newspapers, here and abroad, will be yours to study. They are all microfilmed and computerized and we can go back for a century or more. Besides, you do not have to be totally accurate. If you are right eighty-five percent of the time, that will do, for now.”

  It did do. When Bucephalus felt that the stock market would go up or that it would go down, he was invariably right. When he pointed to particular stocks that were headed for long-term rises or declines, he was almost always right.

  By the time Alexander was twenty-four he was worth five million dollars and his income had risen to tens of thousands of dollars per day. What’s more, his books were so complicated and the money so laundered that it would have taken another computer just like Bucephalus to track it all down and force Alexander to pay more than a pittance to the I.R.S.

  It was not even difficult. Bucephalus had entered all the tax statutes into its memory as well as a score of textbooks on corporation management. Thanks to Bucephalus, Alexander controlled a dozen corporations without any sign of that control being visible.

  Bucephalus said, “ Are you rich enough, Alexander?”

  “Surely you jest,” said Alexander. “I am as yet a financial pipsqueak, a batboy in the minor leagues. When I am a billionaire, I will be a power in the financial set, but I will still be only one among a handful. It is only when I am a multitrillionaire that I will be able to control governments and force my will upon the world. And I have only six years left.”

  Bucephalus’s understanding of the stock market, and of the ways of the world, grew each year.

  His advice remained always useful and his deviousness in threading financial tentacles through the centers of world power remained always skillful.

  Yet he grew doubtful, too. “There may be trouble, Alexander,” he said. “Nonsense,” said Alexander. “ Alexander the Really Great cannot be stopped.”

  By the time Alexander was twenty-six, he was a billionaire. The entire apartment building was now his and all of it was given over to Bucephalus, and to all the offshoots of its enormous memory. The tentacles of Bucephalus now stretched invisibly outward to all the computers in the world. Softly, gently, all of them responded to Alexander’s will as expressed through Bucephalus.

  Bucephalus said, “It grows more difficult somehow, Alexander. My estimates of future development are not as good as they have been.”

  Alexander said impatiently, “You are dealing with more and more variables. There is nothing to worry about. I shall double your complexity, then double it again.”

  “It is not complexity that is needed,” said Bucephalus. “ All the cycles that I have worked out in ever-increasing complexity predict the future in fine detail only because things that now take place are the same as have taken place in the past, so that the response is the same. If something entirely new happens, then all the cycles will fail-”

  Alexander said, peremptorily, “There is nothing new under the sun. Go through history and you’ll find that there are only changes in detail. I will conquer the world, but I am only one more conqueror in a long line stretching back to Sargon of Agade. The development of a high-tech society repeats certain advances in medieval China and in the ancient Hellenistic kingdoms. The Black Death was a repetition of the earlier plagues in the times of Marcus Aurelius and of Pericles. Even the devastation of the wars of nations in the twentieth century repeats the devastation of the wars of religion in the sixteenth and,seventeenth centuries. The differences in detail can be allowed for and, in any case, I order you to continue, and you must obey my orders.”

  “I must,” agreed Bucephalus.

  By the time Alexander was twenty-eight, he was the richest man who had ever lived, with assets that even Bucephalus could not estimate closely. Certainly it was over a hundred billion and his income was in the tens of millions a day.

  No nation was any longer truly independe
nt and nowhere could any sizable group of human beings take any action that would seriously discommode Alexander.

  There was peace in the world because Alexander did not wish any of his property destroyed. There was firm order in the world because Alexander did not wish to be disturbed. For the same reason, there was no freedom. All must do exactly as Alexander willed.

  “I am almost there, Bucephalus,” said Alexander. “In two more years, it will be completely beyond the power of any human being to discommode me. I will then reveal myself, and all of human science will be bent to one task, and one task only, that of making me immortal. I will no longer be even Alexander the Really Great. I will become Alexander the God and all human beings will worship me.”

  Bucephalus said, “But I have gone as far as I can go. I may no longer be able to protect you from the viscissitudes of chance.”

  “That can’t be so, Bucephalus,” said Alexander, impatiently. “Do not quail. Weigh all the variables and arrange to pour into my hands whatever of Earth’s wealth still exists outside it.”

  “I don’t think I can, Alexander,” said Bucephalus. “I have discovered a factor in human history that I cannot weigh. It is something completely new that does not fit into any of the cycles.”

  “There can be nothing new,” said Alexander, now in a fury. “Do not hang back. I order you to proceed.”

  “Very well, then,” said Bucephalus, with a remarkably human sigh.

  Alexander knew that Bucephalus was straining at this one last, greatest task, and he was confident that at any moment, it would be accomplished. The world would then be his entirely and through all eternity. “What is this something new?” he asked with a flicker of curiosity.

  “Myself,” said Bucephalus, in a whisper. “Nothing like me has ever before exis-”

  And before the last syllable could be expressed, Bucephalus went dark as every last chip and circuit within itself fused as a result of his mighty effort to encompass himself as part of history. In the economic and financial chaos that followed, Alexander was wiped out.