Pebble in the Sky

by Isaac Asimov

  Ennius said, “It sounds very artificial to me. For one thing, I can’t conceive using nuclear reactions in war or letting them get out of control to this extent in any manner—”

  “Naturally, sir, you tend to underestimate nuclear reactions because you’re living in the present, when they’re so easily controlled. But what if someone—or some army—used such weapons before the defense had been worked out? For instance, it’s like using fire bombs before anyone knew that water or sand would put out fire.”

  “Hmm,” said Ennius, “you sound like Shekt.”

  “Who’s Shekt?” Arvardan looked up quickly.

  “An Earthman. One of the few decent ones—I mean, one that a gentleman can speak to. He’s a physicist. He told me once that Earth might not always have been radioactive.”

  “Ah. . . . Well, that’s not unusual, since the theory is certainly not original with me. It’s part of the Book of the Ancients, which contains the traditional, or mythical, history of prehistoric Earth. I’m saying what it says, in a way, except that I’m putting its rather elliptical phraseology into equivalent scientific statements.”

  “The Book of the Ancients?” Ennius seemed surprised, and a little upset. “Where did you get that?”

  “Here and there. It wasn’t easy, and I only obtained parts. Of course all this traditional information about nonradioactivity, even where completely unscientific, is important to my project. . . . Why do you ask?”

  “Because the book is the revered text of a radical sect of Earthmen. It is forbidden for Outsiders to read it. I wouldn’t broadcast the fact that you did, either, while you’re here. Non-Earthmen, or Outsiders, as they call them, have been lynched for less.”

  “You make it sound as if the Imperial police power here is defective.”

  “It is in cases of sacrilege. A word to the wise, Dr. Arvardan!”

  A melodious chime sounded a vibrant note that seemed to harmonize with the rustling whisper of the trees. It faded out slowly, lingering as though in love with its surroundings.

  Ennius rose. “I believe it is time for dinner. Will you join me, sir, and enjoy such hospitality as this husk of Empire on Earth can afford?”

  An occasion for an elaborate dinner came infrequently enough. An excuse, even a slim one, was not to be missed. So the courses were many, the surroundings lavish, the men polished, and the women bewitching. And, it must be added, Dr. B. Arvardan of Baronn, Sirius, was lionized to quite an intoxicating extent.

  Arvardan took advantage of his dinner audience during the latter portion of the banquet to repeat much of what he had said to Ennius, but here his exposition met with markedly less success.

  A florid gentleman in colonel’s uniform leaned toward him with that marked condescension of the military man for the scholar and said, “If I interpret your expressions rightly, Dr. Arvardan, you are trying to tell us that these hounds of Earth represent an ancient race that may once have been the ancestors of all humanity?”

  “I hesitate, Colonel, to make the flat assertion, but I think there is an interesting chance that it might be so. A year from now I confidently hope to be able to make a definite judgment.”

  “If you find that they are, Doctor, which I strongly doubt,” rejoined the colonel, “you will astonish me beyond measure. I have been stationed on Earth now for four years, and my experience is not of the smallest. I find these Earthmen to be rogues and knaves, every one of them. They are definitely our inferiors intellectually. They lack that spark that has spread humanity throughout the Galaxy. They are lazy, superstitious, avaricious, and with no trace of nobility of soul. I defy you, or anyone, to show me an Earthman who can in any way be an equal of any true man—yourself or myself, for instance—and only then will I grant you that he may represent a race who once were our ancestors. But, until then, please excuse me from making any such assumption.”

  A portly man at the foot of the table said suddenly, “They say the only good Earthman is a dead Earthman, and that even then they generally stink,” and laughed immoderately.

  Arvardan frowned at the dish before him and said, without looking up, “I have no desire to argue racial differences, especially since it is irrelevant in this case. It is the Earthman of prehistory that I speak of. His descendants of today have been long isolated, and have been subjected to a most unusual environment—yet I still would not dismiss them too casually.”

  He turned to Ennius and said, “My Lord, I believe you mentioned an Earthman before dinner.”

  “I did? I don’t recall.”

  “A physicist. Shekt.”

  “Oh yes. Yes.”

  “Affret Shekt, perhaps?”

  “Why, yes. Have you heard of him?”

  “I think I have. It’s been bothering me all through dinner, ever since you mentioned him, but I think I’ve placed him. He wouldn’t be at the Institute of Nuclear Research at—Oh, what’s the name of that damned place?” He struck at his forehead with the heel of his palm once or twice. “At Chica?”

  “You have the right person. What about him?”

  “Only this. There was an article by him in the August issue of Physical Reviews. I noticed it because I was looking for anything that had to do with Earth, and articles by Earthmen in journals of Galactic circulation are very rare. . . . In any case, the point I am trying to make is that the man claims to have developed something he calls a Synapsifier, which is supposed to improve the learning capacity of the mammalian nervous system.”

  “Really?” said Ennius a bit too sharply. “I haven’t heard about it.”

  “I can find you the reference. It’s quite an interesting article; though, of course, I can’t pretend to understand the mathematics involved. What he has done, however, has been to treat some indigenous animal form on Earth—rats, I believe they call them—with the Synapsifier and then put them to solving a maze. You know what I mean: learning the proper pathway through a tiny labyrinth to some food supply. He used non-treated rats as controls and found that in every case the Synapsified rats solved the maze in less than one third the time. . . . Do you see the significance, Colonel?”

  The military man who had initiated the discussion said indifferently, “No, Doctor, I do not.”

  “I’ll explain, then, that I firmly believe that any scientist capable of doing such work, even an Earthman, is certainly my intellectual equal, at least, and, if you’ll pardon my presumption, yours as well.”

  Ennius interrupted. “Pardon me, Dr. Arvardan. I would like to return to the Synapsifier. Has Shekt experimented with human beings?”

  Arvardan laughed. “I doubt it, Lord Ennius. Nine tenths of his Synapsified rats died during treatment. He would scarcely dare use human subjects until much more progress has been made.”

  So Ennius sank back into his chair with a slight frown on his forehead and, thereafter, neither spoke nor ate for the remainder of the dinner.

  Before midnight the Procurator had quietly left the gathering and, with a bare word to his wife only, departed in his private cruiser on the two-hour trip to the city of Chica, with the slight frown still on his forehead and a raging anxiety in his heart.

  Thus it was that on the same afternoon that Arbin Maren brought Joseph Schwartz into Chica for treatment with Shekt’s Synapsifier, Shekt himself had been closeted with none less than the Procurator of Earth for over an hour.

  4

  The Royal Road

  Arbin was uneasy in Chica. He felt surrounded. Somewhere in Chica, one of the largest cities on Earth—they said it had fifty thousand human beings in it—somewhere there were officials of the great outer Empire.

  To be sure, he had never seen a man of the Galaxy; yet here, in Chica, his neck was continually twisting in fear that he might. If pinned down, he could not have explained how he would identify an Outsider from an Earthman, even if he were to see one, but it was in his very marrow to feel that there was, somehow, a difference.

  He looked back over his shoulder as he entered the Institute.
His biwheel was parked in an open area, with a six-hour coupon holding a spot open for it. Was the extravagance itself suspicious? . . . Everything frightened him now. The air was full of eyes and ears.

  If only the strange man would remember to remain hidden in the bottom of the rear compartment. He had nodded violently—but had he understood? He was suddenly impatient with himself. Why had he let Grew talk him into this madness?

  And then somehow the door was open in front of him and a voice had broken in on his thoughts.

  It said, “What do you want?”

  It sounded impatient; perhaps it had already asked him that same thing several times.

  He answered hoarsely, words choking out of his throat like dry powder, “Is this where a man can apply for the Synapsifier?”

  The receptionist looked up sharply and said, “Sign here.”

  Arbin put his hands behind his back and repeated huskily, “Where do I see about the Synapsifier?” Grew had told him the name, but the word came out queerly, like so much gibberish.

  But the receptionist said, with iron in her voice, “I can’t do anything for you unless you sign the register as a visitor. It’s in the rules.”

  Without a word, Arbin turned to go. The young woman behind the desk pressed her lips together and kicked the signal bar at the side of her chair violently.

  Arbin was fighting desperately for a lack of notoriety and failing miserably in his own mind. This girl was looking hard at him. She’d remember him a thousand years later. He had a wild desire to run, run back to the car, back to the farm . . .

  Someone in a white lab coat was coming rapidly out of another room, and the receptionist was pointing to him. “Volunteer for the Synapsifier, Miss Shekt,” she was saying. “He won’t give his name.”

  Arbin looked up. It was still another girl, young. He looked disturbed. “Are you in charge of the machine, miss?”

  “No, not at all.” She smiled in a very friendly fashion, and Arbin felt anxiety ebb slightly.

  “I can take you to him, though,” she went on. Then, eagerly, “Do you really want to volunteer for the Synapsifier?”

  “I just want to see the man in charge,” Arbin said woodenly.

  “All right.” She seemed not at all disturbed by the rebuff. She slipped back through the door from which she had come. There was a short wait. Then, finally, there was the beckon of a finger . . .

  He followed her, heart pounding, into a small anteroom. She said gently, “If you will wait about half an hour or less, Dr. Shekt will be with you. He is very busy just now. . . . If you would like some book films and a viewer to pass the time, I’ll bring them to you.”

  But Arbin shook his head. The four walls of the small room closed about him, and held him rigid, it seemed. Was he trapped? Were the Ancients coming for him?

  It was the longest wait in Arbin’s life.

  Lord Ennius, Procurator of Earth, had experienced no comparable difficulties in seeing Dr. Shekt, though he had experienced an almost comparable excitement. In his fourth year as Procurator, a visit to Chica was still an event. As the direct representative of the remote Emperor, his social standing was, legalistically, upon a par with viceroys of huge Galactic sectors that sprawled their gleaming volumes across hundreds of cubic parsecs of space, but, actually, his post was little short of exile.

  Trapped as he was in the sterile emptiness of the Himalayas, among the equally sterile quarrels of a population that hated him and the Empire he represented, even a trip to Chica was escape.

  To be sure, his escapes were short ones. They had to be short, since here at Chica it was necessary to wear lead-impregnated clothes at all times, even while sleeping, and, what was worse, to dose oneself continually with metaboline.

  He spoke bitterly of that to Shekt.

  “Metaboline,” he said, holding up the vermilion pill for inspection, “is perhaps a true symbol of all that your planet means to me, my friend. Its function is to heighten all metabolic processes while I sit here immersed in the radioactive cloud that surrounds me and which you are not even aware of.”

  He swallowed it. “There! Now my heart will beat more quickly; my breath will pump a race of its own accord; and my liver will boil away in those chemical syntheses that, medical men tell me, make it the most important factory in the body. And for that I pay with a siege of headaches and lassitude afterward.”

  Dr. Shekt listened with some amusement. He gave a strong impression of being nearsighted, did Shekt, not because he wore glasses or was in any way afflicted, but merely because long habit had given him the unconscious trick of peering closely at things, of weighing all facts anxiously before saying anything. He was tall and in his late middle age, his thin figure slightly stooped.

  But he was well read in much of Galactic culture, and he was relatively free of the trick of universal hostility and suspicion that made the average Earthman so repulsive even to so cosmopolitan a man of the Empire as Ennius.

  Shekt said, “I’m sure you don’t need the pill. Metaboline is just one of your superstitions, and you know it. If I were to substitute sugar pills without your knowledge, you’d be none the worse. What’s more, you would even psychosomaticize yourself into similar headaches afterward.”

  “You say that in the comfort of your own environment. Do you deny that your basal metabolism is higher than mine?”

  “Of course I don’t, but what of it? I know that it is a superstition of the Empire, Ennius, that we men of Earth are different from other human beings, but that’s not really so in the essentials. Or are you coming here as a missionary of the anti-Terrestrians?”

  Ennius groaned. “By the life of the Emperor, your comrades of Earth are themselves the best such missionaries. Living here, as they do, cooped up on their deadly planet, festering in their own anger, they’re nothing but a standing ulcer in the Galaxy.

  “I’m serious, Shekt. What planet has so much ritual in its daily life and adheres to it with such masochistic fury? Not a day passes but I receive delegations from one or another of your ruling bodies for the death penalty for some poor devil whose only crime has been to invade a forbidden area, to evade the Sixty, or perhaps merely to eat more than his share of food.”

  “Ah, but you always grant the death penalty. Your idealistic distaste seems to stop short at resisting.”

  “The Stars are my witness that I struggle to deny the death. But what can one do? The Emperor will have it that all the subdivisions of the Empire are to remain undisturbed in their local customs—and that is right and wise, since it removes popular support from the fools who would otherwise kick up rebellion on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays. Besides, were I to remain obdurate when your Councils and Senates and Chambers insist on the death, such a shrieking would arise and such a wild howling and such denunciation of the Empire and all its works that I would sooner sleep in the midst of a legion of devils for twenty years than face such an Earth for ten minutes.”

  Shekt sighed and rubbed the thin hair back upon his skull. “To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know. Yet we are no different from you of the outer worlds, merely more unfortunate. We are crowded here on a world all but dead, immersed within a wall of radiation that imprisons us, surrounded by a huge Galaxy that rejects us. What can we do against the feeling of frustration that burns us? Would you, Procurator, be willing that we send our surplus population abroad?”

  Ennius shrugged. “Would I care? It is the outside populations themselves that would. They don’t care to fall victim to Terrestrial diseases.”

  “Terrestrial diseases!” Shekt scowled. “It is a nonsensical notion that should be eradicated. We are not carriers of death. Are you dead for having been among us?”

  “To be sure,” smiled Ennius, “I do everything to prevent undue contact.”

  “It is because you yourself fear the propaganda created, after all, only by the stupidity of your own bigots.” />
  “Why, Shekt, no scientific basis at all to the theory that Earthmen are themselves radioactive?”

  “Yes, certainly they are. How could they avoid it? So are you. So is everyone on every one of the hundred million planets of the Empire. We are more so, I grant you, but scarcely enough to harm anyone.”

  “But the average man of the Galaxy believes the opposite, I am afraid, and is not desirous of finding out by experiment. Besides—”

  “Besides, you’re going to say, we’re different. We’re not human beings, because we mutate more rapidly, due to atomic radiation, and have therefore changed in many ways. . . . Also not proven.”

  “But believed.”

  “And as long as it is so believed, Procurator, and as long as we of Earth are treated as pariahs, you are going to find in us the characteristics to which you object. If you push us intolerably, is it to be wondered at that we push back? Hating us as you do, can you complain that we hate in our turn? No, no, we are far more the offended than the offending.”

  Ennius was chagrined at the anger he had raised. Even the best of these Earthmen, he thought, have the same blind spot, the same feeling of Earth versus all the universe.

  He said tactfully, “Shekt, forgive my boorishness, will you? Take my youth and boredom as excuse. You see before you a poor man, a young fellow of forty—and forty is the age of a babe in the professional civil service—who is grinding out his apprenticeship here on Earth. It may be years before the fools in the Bureau of the Outer Provinces remember me long enough to promote me to something less deadly. So we are both prisoners of Earth and both citizens of the great world of the mind in which there is distinction of neither planet nor physical characteristics. Give me your hand, then, and let us be friends.”

  The lines on Shekt’s face smoothed out, or, more exactly, were replaced by others more indicative of good humor. He laughed outright. “The words are the words of a suppliant, but the tone is still that of the Imperial career diplomat. You are a poor actor, Procurator.”