Isaac Asimov - Pebble In The Sky

He turned it.

"Pola," he cried. "You're Pola, aren't you? The girl who-"

She was nodding. He hadn't recognized her Touch as such. He had never been aware of it that time two months ago. At that time his mental progression had reached only the stage of sensitivity to "atmosphere." In the brilliance of hindsight, he remembered that well.

But from the contents he could still learn much. The one past the girl was Dr. Shekt; the one furthest of all was Dr. Bel Arvardan. He could filch their names, sense their despair, taste the last dregs of horror and fright in the young girl's mind.

For a moment he pitied them, and then he remembered who they were and what they were. And he hardened his heart.

Let them die!

The other three had been there for the better part of an hour. The room in which they were left was evidently one used for assemblies of several hundred. The prisoners were lost and lonely in its size. Nor was there anything to say. Arvardan's throat bummed dryly and he turned his head from side to side with a futile restlessness. It was the only part of his body that he could move.

Shekt's eyes were closed and his lips were colorless and pinched.

Arvardan whispered fiercely, "Shekt. Shekt, I say!"

"What?…What?" A feeble whisper at best.

"What are you doing? Going to sleep? Think, man, think!"

"Why? What is there to think of?"

"Who is this Joseph Schwartz?"

Pola's voice sounded, thin and weary. "Don't you remember, Bel? That time in the department store, when I first met you-so long ago?"

Arvardan wrenched wildly and found he could lift his head two aching inches. A bit of Pola's face was just visible.

"Pola! Pola!" If he could have moved toward her-as for two months he might have and hadn't. She was looking at him, smiling so wanly that it might be a statue's smile, and he said, "We'll win out yet. You'll see."

But she was shaking her head-and his neck gave way, its tendons in panging agony.

"Shekt," he said again. "Listen to me. How did you meet this Schwartz? Why was he a patient of yours?"

"The Synapsifier. He came as a volunteer."

"And was treated?"

"Yes."

Arvardan revolved that in his mind. "What made him come to you?"

"I don't know."

"But then-Maybe he is an Imperial agent."

(Schwartz followed his thought well and smiled to himself. He said nothing, and he meant to keep on saying nothing.)

Shekt stirred his head. " An Imperial agent? You mean because the High Priest's Secretary says he is. Oh, nonsense. And what difference does it make? He's as helpless as we…Listen, Arvardan, maybe, if we tell some sort of concerted story, they might wait. Eventually we might-"

The archaeologist laughed hollowly, and his throat burned at the friction. "We might live, you mean. With the Galaxy dead and civilization in ruins? Live? I might as well die!"

"I'm thinking of Pola," muttered Shekt.

"I am too," said the other. "Ask her…Pola, shall we surrender? Shall we try to live?"

Pola's voice was firm. "I have chosen my side. I don't want to die, but if my side dies, I'll go with it."

Arvardan felt somehow triumphant. When he brought her to Sirius, they might call her an Earthgirl, but she was their equal, and he would, with a great and good pleasure, smash teeth into the throat of any- And he remembered that he wasn't likely to bring her to Sirius-to bring anyone to Sirius. There wasn't likely to be a Sirius.

Then, as though to escape from the thought, to escape anywhere, he shouted, "You! Whatchername! Schwartz!"

Schwartz raised his head for a moment and allowed a glance to ooze out toward the other. He still said nothing.

"Who are you?" demanded Arvardan. "How did you get mixed up in this? What's your part in it?"

And at the question, all the injustice of everything descended on Schwartz. All the harmlessness of his past, all the infinite horror of the present burst in upon him, so that he said in a fury, "1? How did I get mixed up in it? Listen. I was once a nobody. An honest man, a hard-working tailor. I hurt nobody, I bothered nobody, I took care, of my family. And then, for no reason, for no reason-I came here."

"To Chica?" asked Arvardan, who did not quite follow.

"No, not to Chica!" shouted Schwartz in wild derision. "I came to this whole mad world…Oh, what do I care if you believe me or not? My world is in the past. My world had land and food and two billion people, and it was the only world."

Arvardan fell silent before the verbal assault. He turned to Shekt. "Can you understand him?"

"Do you realize," said Shekt in feeble wonder, "that he has a vermiform appendix, which is three and a half inches long? Do you remember, Pola? And wisdom teeth. And hair on his face."

"Yes, yes," shouted Schwartz defiantly. '.And I wish I had a tail I could show you. I'm from the past. I traveled through time. Only I don't know how, and I don't know why. Now leave me alone." He added suddenly, "They will soon be here for us. This wait is just to break us."

Arvardan said suddenly, "Do you know that? Who told you?"

Schwartz did not answer.

"Was it the Secretary? Stocky man with a pug nose?" Schwartz had no way of telling the physical appearance of those he Touched only by mind, but-secretary? There had been just a glimpse of a Touch, a powerful one of a man of power, and it seemed he had been a secretary.

"Balkis?" he asked in curiosity.

"What?" said Arvardan, but Shekt interrupted, "That's the name of the Secretary."

"Oh-What did he say?"

"He didn't say anything," said Schwartz. "I know. It's death for an of us, and there's no way out."

Arvardan lowered his voice. "He's mad, wouldn't you say?"

"I wonder…His skull sutures, now. They were primitive, very primitive."

Arvardan was amazed. "You mean-Oh, come, it's impossible."

"I've always supposed so." For the moment Shekt's voice was a feeble imitation of normality, as though the presence of a scientific problem had switched his mind to that detached and objective groove in which personal matters disappeared. "They've calculated the energy required to displace matter along the time axis and a value greater than infinity was arrived at, so the project has always been looked upon as impossible. But others have talked of the possibility of 'time faults,' analogous to geological faults, you know. Space ships have disappeared, for one thing, almost in fun view. There's the famous case of Hor Devallow in ancient times, who stepped into his house one day and never came out, and wasn't inside, either…And then there's the planet, which you'll find in the Galactography books of the last century, which was visited by three expeditions that brought back fun descriptions-and then was never seen again.

"Then there are certain developments in nuclear chemistry that seem to deny the law of conservation of mass-energy. They've tried to explain that by postulating the escape of some mass along the time axis. Uranium nuclei, for instance, when mixed with copper and barium in minute but definite proportions, under the influence of light gamma irradiation, set up a resonating system-"

"Father," said Pola, "don't! There's no use-"

But Arvardan's interruption was peremptory. "Wait, now. Let me think. I'm the one who can settle this. Who better? Let me ask him a few questions…Look, Schwartz."

Schwartz looked up again.

"Yours was the only world in the Galaxy?"

Schwartz nodded, then said dully, "Yes."

"But you only thought that. I mean you didn't have space travel, so you couldn't check up. There might have been many other inhabited worlds."

"I have no way of telling that."

"Yes, of course. A pity. What about atomic power?"

"We had an atomic bomb. Uranium-and plutonium-I guess that's what made this world radioactive. There must have been another war after all-after I left…Atomic bombs." Somehow Schwartz was back in Chicago, back in his old world, before the bombs. And he wits sorry. Not for himself, but for that beautiful world…