The Early Asimov. Volume 2

by Isaac Asimov

  'Yes; at a constant speed of two miles per second.'

  'Good, I've got you!' Sebastian almost laughed his relief. 'Why haven't the astronomers spotted it in all this while?'

  'My God,' responded Hayes, impatiently, 'it's clear you aren't an astronomer. Now, what fool would look to the Southern Celestial Pole for a planet, when they're only found in the ecliptic?'

  'But,' pointed out Sebastian, 'the region is studied just the same. It is photographed.'

  'Surely! For all I know, the super-neutron has been photographed a hundred times - a thousand times if you like -though the Southern Pole is the most poorly watched region of the sky. But what's to differentiate it from a star? With its low albedo, it never passed eleventh magnitude in brightness. After all, it's hard enough to detect any planets in any case. Uranus was spotted many times before Herschel realized it was a planet. Pluto took years to find even when they were looking for it. Remember also that without gravity, it causes no planetary perturbation, and that the absence of these removes the most obvious indication of its presence.'

  'But,' insisted Sebastian, desperately, 'as it approached the sun, its apparent size would increase and it would begin to show a perceptible disc through a telescope. Even if its reflected light were very faint, it would certainly obscure the stars behind it.'

  'True,' admitted Hayes. 'I will not say that a really thorough mapping of the Polar Region would not have uncovered it, but such mapping has been done long ago, and the present cursory searches for novae, special spectral types and so on are by no means thorough. Then, as the super-neutron approaches the sun, it begins to appear only in the dawn and twilight - in evening and morning star fashion - so that observation becomes much more difficult. And so, as a matter of fact, it just has not been observed - and it is what should have been expected.'

  Again a silence, and I became aware that my heart was pounding. It was two o'clock even, and we hadn't been able to shake Hayes' story. We had to prove it a lie fast, or I'd die of sheer suspense. We were all of us watching the clock.

  Levin took up the fight. 'It's an awfully queer coincidence that the super-neutron should be heading straight for the sun. What are the chances against it? Remember, that would be the same thing as reciting the chances against the truth of the story.'

  I interposed, 'That is an illegitimate objection, Mr. Levin. To cite improbability, however great, is not sufficient. Only outright impossibility or citation of inconsistency can serve to disqualify.'

  But Hayes waved his hand, 'It's all right. Let me answer. Taking an individual super-neutron and an individual star, the chances of collision, head on, are all but infinitely small. However, statistically, if you shoot enough super-neutrons into the universe, then, given enough time, every star ought to be hit sooner or later. Space must be swarming with super-neutrons -say one every thousand cubic parsecs - so that in spite of the vast distances between the stars and the relative minuteness of the targets, twenty novae occur in our single Galaxy every year - that is, there are twenty collisions between super-neutrons and stars annually.

  'The situation is no different really from uranium being bombarded with ordinary neutrons. Only one neutron out of a hundred million may score a hit, but, given time, every nucleus is exploded eventually. If there is an outer-universe intelligence directing this bombardment - pure hypothesis, and not part of my argument, please - a year to us is probably an infinitesimal fraction of a second to them. The hits, to them, may be occurring at the rate of billions to their seconds. Energy is being developed, perhaps, to the point where the material this universe composes has become heated to the gaseous state - or whatever passes for the gaseous state there. The universe is expanding, you know - like a gas.'

  'Still, for the very first super-neutron entering our system to head straight for the sun seems-' Levin ended in a weak stammer.

  'Good Lord,' snapped Hayes, 'who told you this was the first? Hundreds may have passed through the system in geologic times. One or two may have passed through in the last thousand years or so. How would we know? Even when one is headed straight for the sun, astronomers don't find it. Perhaps this is the only one that's passed through since the telescope

  was invented, and before then, of course…And never forget

  that, having no gravity, they can go right through the middle of the system, without affecting the planets. Only a hit on the sun registers, and then it's too late.'

  He looked at the clock, '2.05! We ought to see it now against the sun.' He stood up and raised the window shade. The yellow sunlight streamed in and I moved away from the dusty shaft of light. My mouth was dry as desert sand. Murfree was mopping his brow, but beads of sweat stood out all along his cheeks and neck.

  Hayes took out several slips of exposed film-negative and handed them out, 'I came prepared, you see.' He held one up and squinted at the sun. 'There it is,' he remarked placidly, 'My calculations showed it would be in transit with respect to Earth at the time of collision. Rather convenient!'

  I was looking at the sun, too, and felt my heart skip a beat. There, quite clear against the brightness of the sun, was a little, perfectly round, black spot.

  'Why doesn't it vaporize?' stammered Murfree. 'It must be almost in the sun's atmosphere.' I don't think he was trying to disprove Hayes' story. He had gone past that. He was honestly seeking information.

  'I told you,' explained Hayes, 'that it is^ transparent to almost all solar radiation. Only the radiation it absorbs can go into heat and that's a very small percentage of all it receives. Besides, it isn't ordinary matter. It's probably much more re-factory than anything on Earth, and the Solar surface is only at 6,000 degrees Centigrade.'

  He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, 'It's 2.09 Ѕ, gentlemen. The super-neutron has struck and death is on its way. We have eight minutes.'

  We were dumb with something that was just simply unbearable terror. I remember Hayes' voice, quite matter-of-fact, saying, 'Mercury just went!' then a few minutes later, 'Venus has gone!' and lastly, 'Thirty seconds left, gentlemen!'

  The seconds crawled, but passed at last, and another thirty seconds, and still another…

  And on Hayes' face, a look of astonishment grew and spread. He lifted the clock and stared at it, then peered through his film at the sun once more.

  'It's gone!' He turned and faced us, 'It's unbelievable. I had thought of it, but I dared not draw the atomic analogy too far. You know that not all atomic nuclei explode on being hit by a neutron. Some, cadmium, for instance, absorb them one after the other like sponges do water. I -'

  He paused again, drew a deep breath, and continued musingly, 'Even the purest block of uranium contains traces of all other elements. And in a universe of trillions of stars acting like uranium, what does a paltry million of cadmium-like stars amount to - nothing! Yet the sun is one of them! Mankind never deserved that!'

  He kept on talking, but relief had finally penetrated and we listened no longer. In half-hysterical fashion, we elected Gilbert Hayes to the office of Perpetual President by enthusiastic acclamation, and voted the story the whoppingest lie ever told.

  But there's one thing that bothers me. Hayes fills his post well; the Society is more successful than ever - but 1 think he should have been disqualified after all. His story fulfilled the second condition; it sounded like the truth. But I don't think it fulfilled the first condition.

  I think it was the truth!

  ***

  I had series on my mind by now. 'Super-Neutron' was certainly intended to be but the first in a long chain of very clever and very ingenious tales to be told at the meetings of the 'Honorable Society of Ananias.' It didn't work out that way. There was never a second story, not even the beginnings of one, not even the idea for one.

  By the time I was writing 'Super-Neutron,' in February of 1941,1 had heard of uranium fission and had even discussed it in some detail with Campbell. I managed to refer to it in the course of the story as 'the classical uranium fission method for power
.' I also spoke of the metal cadmium as a neutron absorber. It wasn't bad for a story that appeared in 1941, and I sometimes quote it in public to create an impression.

  Notice, though, that in the same paragraph in which I mention fission, I also talk of 'masurium.' Actually, masurium was the name given to element # 43 in 1926, but that discovery had proven a false alarm. The element was really discovered in 1937 and was given the now-accepted name of 'technetium.' It seems, then, that I could look years into the future and see uranium fission,as a practical power source, but I couldn't look a few years into the past and see the correct name for element #43.

  This brings us to March 17, 1941, and one of the key turning points of my literary career.

  By that day, I had written thirty-one stories. Of these I had already sold seventeen and was yet to sell four more. Of all these stories, three perhaps, and no more, were to turn out to be of more than ephemeral value, and those were the three 'positronic robots' stories I had so far written: 'Robbie,' 'Reason' and 'Liar!'

  Looking back on my first three years as a writer, then, I can judge myself to be nothing more than a steady and (perhaps) hopeful third-rater. What's more, that's all I considered myself then, too. Nor did anyone else, at that time, seriously consider me as a potential first-magnitude star in the science fiction heavens - except, maybe, Campbell.

  What are the odds, then, that on March 17, 1941, I would sit down and write something that for thirty years now has been considered by a surprising number of people to be the outstanding short classic of magazine science fiction? It was one of those things that couldn't possibly happen - yet it did.

  It began when I walked into Campbell 's office that day and, as usual, suggested an idea. What it was I don't remember, but whatever it was he turned it down instantly, not because it was such a bad idea but because he had something he wanted to show me that crowded everything else out of his mind. He had come across a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson that went: 'If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God! ' [10]

  Campbell asked me what I thought would happen if the stars would appear at only very long intervals. I had nothing intelligent to suggest.

  'I think men would go mad,' he said thoughtfully.

  We talked about that notion for quite a while, and I went home to write a story on the subject, one that Campbell and I decided from the start was to be called 'Nightfall.'

  I began it that night. I can remember the details exactly: my parents' apartment on Windsor Place in Brooklyn, across the street from the candy store; my own room, just next to the living room, is clear in my mind, with the position of my bed, my desk, my typewriter - and myself getting started.

  In years to come, fans would occasionally vote in polls designed to decide the best science fiction short stories of all time. Quite frequently, 'Nightfall' would finish in first place. Just a couple of years ago, the Science Fiction Writers of America polled their membership to decide the best science fiction short stories ever published, for inclusion in a Hall of Fame anthology. "Nightfall' finished in first place by a sizable margin. And, of course, it has been anthologized a dozen times so far.

  With all this, one might argue that 'Nightfall' is the best (or at least the most popular) short science fiction story ever to appear in the magazines. Well, I often wonder, with a shudder, what might have happened on the evening of March 17, 1941, if some angelic spirit had whispered in my ear, 'Isaac, you are about to start writing the best short science fiction story of our time.'

  I would undoubtedly have frozen solid. I wouldn't have been able to type a word.

  But we don't know the future, and I tapped away blissfully, writing the story and completing it by April 9, 1941. That day, I submitted it to Campbell. He asked for a small revision. I took care of that, and on April 24, 1941, he bought the story.

  It set several records for me. It was the longest story I had yet sold, a little over thirteen thousand words. Since Campbell paid me a bonus (my first one), the word rate was one and a quarter cents a word, and the total check was for $ 166, more than twice as large as any single payment I had ever before received. [11]

  Then, too, 'Nightfall' appeared in the September 1941 issue of Astounding as the lead novelette. For the first time, I made the cover of that magazine, with 'Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov' in large, bold letters.

  Most important of all, the appearance of 'Nightfall' graduated me by common consent (three years after I had begun my career) into the list of first-rank science fiction writers.

  Alas, the story is not included here. It appears (of course) in Nightfall and Other Stories. [12]

  The excitement of writing 'Nightfall' and Campbell 's hearty and unqualified praise of it ought, one might think, to have set me furiously to work at the typewriter, but it didn't. Spring 1941 was a bad time for me.

  I could at any time that half year have left Columbia with a master's degree, but that would have done me no good. I had no job to go to, so I could only mark time and try to raise my value to some prospective employer by going on to the big one, the doctorate.

  But that meant I had to take a series of elaborate, interminable 'qualifying examinations,' which I had to pass in order to be allowed to begin research without which I could not get the Ph.D. Passing was difficult and I didn't feel prepared at all, but I had to try it sometime, and besides, if I didn't fall short by too far, I would be allowed to continue taking courses and to repeat the qualifying examinations at some future date.

  So in May I absented myself from the typewriter, studied earnestly for my qualifyings, took them - and didn't pass. I did well enough to earn the option of a future repeat, and I also received my M.A. as a kind of consolation prize, but I was badly disheartened all the same.

  (And in the larger world outside, though Great Britain had survived air bombardment, Hitler still seemed unstoppable. He invaded the Balkans and was again winning spectacular victories, and that was disheartening, too.)

  It was not till May 24, 1941, that I could bring myself to go back to my writing. I turned out 'Not Final!' which I submitted to Campbell on June 2. It was accepted on the sixth, but without a bonus.

  Not Final! [13]

  Nicholas Orloff inserted a monocle in his left eye with all the incorruptible Briticism of a Russian educated at Oxford and said reproachfully, 'But, my dear Mr. Secretary! Half a billion dollars!'

  Leo Birnam shrugged his shoulders wearily and allowed his lank body to cramp up still farther in the chair, 'The appropriation must go through, commissioner. The Dominion government here at Ganymede is becoming desperate. So far, I've been holding them off, but as secretary of scientific affairs, my powers are small.'

  'I know, but -' and Orloff spread his hands helplessly.

  'I suppose so? agreed Birnam. 'The Empire government finds it easier to look the other way. They've done it consistently up to now. I've tried for a year now to have them understand the nature of the danger that hangs over the entire System, but it seems that it can't be done. But I'm appealing to you, Mr. Commissioner. You're new in your post and can approach this Jovian affair with an unjaundiced eye.'

  Orloff coughed and eyed the tips of his boots. In the three months since he had succeeded Gridley as colonial commissioner he had tabled unread everything relating to 'those damned Jovian D.T.'s.' That had been according to the established cabinet policy which had labeled the Jovian affair as 'deadwood' long before he had entered office.

  But now that Ganymede was becoming nasty, he found himself sent out to Jovopolis with instructions to hold the 'blasted provincials' down. It was a nasty spot.

  Birnam was speaking, 'The Dominion government has reached the point where it needs the money so badly, in fact, that if they don't get it, they're going to publicize everything.'

  Orloff's phlegm broke completely, and he snatched at the monocle as it dropped, 'My dear fellow!'

  'I know w
hat it would mean. I've advised against it, but they're justified. Once the inside of the Jovian affair is out; once the people know about it; the Empire government won't stay in power a week. And when the Technocrats come in, they'll give us whatever we ask. Public opinion will see to that'

  'But you'll also create a panic and hysteria -'

  'Surely! That is why we hesitate. But you might call this an ultimatum. We want secrecy, we need secrecy; but we need money more.'

  'I see.' Orloff was thinking rapidly, and the conclusions he came to were not pleasant. 'In that case, it would be advisable to investigate the case further. If you have the papers concerning the communications with the planet Jupiter -'

  'I have them,' replied Birnam, dryly, 'and so has the Empire government at Washington. That won't do, commissioner. It's the same cud that's been chewed by Earth officials for the last year, and it's gotten us nowhere. I want you to come to Ether Station with me.'

  The Ganymedan had risen from his chair, and he glowered down upon Orloff from his six and a half feet of height.

  Orloff flushed, 'Are you ordering me?'

  'In a way, yes, I tell you there is no time. If you intend acting, you must act quickly or not at all.' Birnam paused, then added, 'You don't mind walking, I hope. Power vehicles aren't allowed to approach Ether Station, ordinarily, and I can use the walk to explain a few of the facts. It's only two miles off.'

  'I'll walk,' was the brusque reply.

  The trip upward to subground level was made in silence, which was broken by Orloff when they stepped into the dimly lit anteroom.

  'It's chilly here.'.

  T know. It's difficult to keep the temperature up to norm this near the surface. But it will be colder outside. Here!'

  Birnam had kicked open a closet door and was indicating the garments suspended from the ceiling. 'Put them on. You'll need them.'

  Orloff fingered them doubtfully, 'Are they heavy enough?'