Isaac Asimov - The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

Our success went to Ruth’s head. In no time she wanted a secretary. At that, she needed one to fend off the screwballs that popped out of the woodwork. So we let her hire a girl to help out. She picked a good typist, about fifty. Ruth is a smart girl, in a lot of ways. Her father showed signs of wanting to see the Pacific, so we raised her salary on condition he’d stay away. The three of us were having too much fun.

The picture opened at the same time in New York and Hollywood. We went to the premiere in great style, with Ruth between us, swollen like a trio of bullfrogs. It’s a great feeling to sit on the floor early in the morning and read reviews that make you feel like floating. It’s a better feeling to have a mintful of money. Johnson and his men were right along with us. I don’t think he could have been too flush in the beginning, and we all got a kick out of riding the crest.

It was a good-sized wave, too. We had all the personal publicity we wanted, and more. Somehow the word was out that we had a new gadget for process photography, and every big studio in town was after what they thought would be a mighty economical thing to have around. The studios that didn’t have a spectacle scheduled looked at the receipts for Alexander and promptly scheduled a spectacle. We drew some very good offers, Johnson said, but we made a series of long faces and broke the news that we were leaving for Detroit the next day, and asked him to hold the fort awhile. I don’t think he thought we actually meant it, but we did. We left the next day.

Back in Detroit we went right to work, helped by the knowledge that we were on the right track. Ruth was kept busy turning away the countless would-be visitors. We admitted no reporters, no salesmen, no one. We had no time. We were using the view camera. Plate after plate were sent to Rochester for developing. A print of each was returned to us, and the plate was held in Rochester for our disposal. We sent to New York for a representative of one of the biggest publishers in the country. We made a deal.

Your main library has a set of the books we published, if you’re interested. Huge, heavy volumes, hundreds of them, each page a razor-sharp blowup from an eight-by-ten negative. A set of those books went to every major library and university in the world. Mike and I got a real kick out of solving some of the problems that have had savants guessing for years. In the Roman volume, for example, we solved the trireme problem with a series of pictures, not only of the interior of a trireme, but a line-of-battle quin-quereme. (Naturally, the professors and amateur yachtsmen weren’t convinced at all.) We had a series of aerial shots of the city of Rome taken a hundred years apart, over a millennium. Aerial views of Ravenna and Londinium, Palmyra and Pompeii, of Eboracum and Byzantium. Oh, we had the time of our lives! We had a volume for Greece and for Rome, for Persia and for Crete, for Egypt and for the Eastern Empire. We had pictures of the Parthenon and the Pharos, pictures of Hannibal and Car-actacus and Vercingetorix, pictures of the Walls of Babylon and the building of the pyramids and the palace of Sargon, pages from the Lost Books of Livy and the plays of Euripides.

Terrifically expensive, a second printing sold at cost to a surprising number of private individuals. If the cost had been less, historical interest would have become even more the fad of the moment.

When the flurry had almost died down, some Italian digging in the hitherto-unexcavated section of ash-buried Pompeii dug into a tiny, buried temple right where our aerial shot had showed it to be. His budget was expanded and he found more ash-covered ruins that agreed with our aerial layout, ruins that hadn’t seen the light of day for almost two thousand years. Everyone promptly wailed that we were the luckiest guessers in captivity; the head of some California cult suspected aloud that we were the reincarnations of two gladiators named Joe.

To get some peace and quiet, Mike and I moved into our studio, lock, stock, and underwear. At our request, the old bank vault had never been removed, and it served well to store our equipment in when we weren’t around. All the mail Ruth couldn’t handle, we disposed of, unread; the old bank building began to look like a well-patronized soup kitchen. We hired burly private detectives to handle the more obnoxious visitors and subscribed to a telegraphic protective service. We had another job to do, another full-length feature.

We stuck to the old historical theme. This time we tried to do what Gibbon did in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . And, I think, we were rather successful, at that. In four hours you can’t completely cover two thousand years, but you can, as we did, show the cracking up of a great civilization, and how painful the process can be. The criticism we drew for virtually ignoring Christ and Christianity was unjust, we think, and unfair. Very few knew then, or know now, that we had included, as a kind of trial balloon, some footage of Christ Himself, and of His times. This footage we had to cut. The Board of Review, as you know, contains both Catholics and Protestants. They — the Board — were up in arms. We didn’t protest very hard when they claimed our “treatment” was irreverent, indecent, and biased and inaccurate “by any Christian standard.” “Why,” they wailed, “it doesn’t even look like Him,” and they were right; it didn’t. Not any picture they ever saw. Then and there we decided that it didn’t pay to tamper with anyone’s religious beliefs. That’s why you’ve never seen anything emanating from us that conflicted even remotely with the accepted historical, sociological, or religious features of Someone Who Knew Better. That Roman picture, by the way — but not accidentally — deviated so little from the textbooks you conned in school that only a few enthusiastic specialists called our attention to what they insisted were errors. We were still in no position to do any mass rewriting of history, because we were unable to reveal just where we got our information.

Johnson, when he saw the Roman epic, mentally kicked high his heels. His men went right to work, and we handled the job as we had the first. One day Kessler, dead earnest, got me in a corner.

“Ed,” he said, “I’m going to find out where you got that footage if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

I told him that some day he would.

“And I don’t mean some day, either; I mean right now. That bushwa about Europe might go once, but not twice. I know better, and so does everyone else. Now, what about it?”

I told him I’d have to consult Mike, and I did. We were up against it. We called a conference.

“Kessler tells me he has troubles. I guess you all know what they are.” They all knew.

Johnson spoke up. “He’s right, too. We know better. Where did you get it?”

I turned to Mike. “Want to do the talking?”

A shake of his head. “You’re doing all right.”

“All right.” Kessler hunched forward a little and Marrs lit another cigarette. “We weren’t lying and we weren’t exaggerating when we said the actual photography was ours. Every frame of film was taken right here in this country, within the past few months. Just how — I won’t mention why or where — we can’t tell you just now.” Kessler snorted in disgust. “Let me finish.”

“We all know that we’re cashing in hand over fist. And we’re going to cash in some more. We have, on our personal schedule, five more pictures. Three of that five we want you to handle as you did the others. The last two of the five will show you both the reason for all the childish secrecy, as Kessler calls it, and another motive that we have so far kept hidden. The last two pictures will show you both our motives and our methods; one is as important as the other. Now — is that enough? Can we go ahead on that basis?”