Isaac Asimov: Buy Jupiter and Other Stories

Having thus become prolific in books and having made a start in the direction of automobiles and offspring, I was ready for anything and began to accept all kinds of assignments.

Among the many science fiction magazines of the early 1950s, for instance, there was one called Marvel Science Fiction. It was the reincarnation of an earlier Marvel that had published nine issues between 1938 and 1941. The earlier magazine had specialized in stories that accented sex in a rather heavy-handed and foolish manner. [In a very indirect way this eventually led to my writing a story called Playboy and the Slime God which appeared in the March 1961 Amazing stories and was then included in my collection NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES under the much better title What Is This Thing Called Love?

After Marvel was revived in 1950 (it lasted only for another half-dozen issues) I was asked for a story. I might have recalled the unsavory history of the magazine and refused to supply one, but I thought of a story I couldn’t resist writing because, as all who know me are aware, I am an incorrigible punster.[I once asked a girl named Dawn if she had ever used one of those penny weighing machines on a trip to Florida she was telling me about. She said, “No. Why?”and I said because there was a song written about it. She said, “What are you talking about?” and I said, “Haven’t you heard ’Weigh Dawn Upon the Swanee river’?” and she chased me for five blocks before I got away.]The story was SHAH GUIDO G.and it appeared in the November 1951 issue of Marvel.

Once every year Philo Plat returned to the scene of his crime. It was a form of penance. On each anniversary he climbed the barren crest and gazed along the miles of smashed metal, concrete, and bones.

The area was desolate. The metal crumplings were still stainless and unrusted, their jagged teeth raised in futile anger. Somewhere among it all were the skeletons of the thousands who had died, of all ages and both sexes. Their skully sightlessness, for all he knew, was turning empty, curse-torn eye holes at him.

The stench had long since gone from the desert, and the lizards held their lairs untroubled. No man approached the fenced-off burial ground where what remained of bodies lay in the gashed crater carved out in that final fall.

Only Plat came. He returned year after year and always, as though to ward off so many Evil Eyes, he took his gold medal with him. It hung suspended bravely from his neck as he stood on the crest. On it was inscribed simply, “To the Liberator!”

This time, Fulton was with him. Fulton had been a Lower One once in the days before the crash; the days when there had been Higher Ones and Lower Ones.

Fulton said, “I am amazed you insist on coming here, Philo.”

Plat said, “I must. You know the sound of the crash was heard for hundreds of miles; seismographs registered it around the world. My ship was almost directly above it; the shock vibrations caught me and flung me miles. Yet all I can remember of sound is that one composite scream as Atlantis began its fall.”

“It had to be done.”

“Words,” sighed Plat. “There were babies and guiltless ones.”

“No one is guiltless.”

“Nor am I. Ought I to have been the executioner?”

“Someone had to be.” Fulton was firm. ’Consider the world now, twenty-five years later. Democracy re-established, education once more universal, culture available for the masses, and science once more advancing. Two expeditions have already landed on Mars.”

“I know. I know. But that, too, was a culture. THC called it Atlantis because it was an island that ruled the world. It was an island in the sky, not the sea. It was a city and a world all at once, Fulton. You never saw its crystal covering and its gorgeous buildings. It was a single jewel carved of stone and metal. It was a dream.”

“It was concentrated happiness distilled out of the little supply distributed to billions of ordinary folk who lived on the Surface.”

“Yes, you are right. Yes, it had to be. But it might have been so different, Fulton. You know,” he seated himself on the hard rock, crossed his arms upon his knees and cradled his chin in them, “I think, sometimes, of how it must have been in the old days, when there were nations and wars upon the Earth. I think of how much a miracle it must have seemed to the peoples when the United Nations first became a real world government, and what Atlantis must have meant to them.

“It was a capital city that governed Earth but was not of it. It was a black disc in the air, capable of appearing anywhere on Earth at any height; belonging to no one nation, but to all the planet; the product of no one nation’s ingenuity but the first great achievement of all the race – and then, what it became!”

Fulton said, “Shall we go? We’ll want to get back to the ship before dark.”

Plat went on, “In a way. I suppose it was inevitable. The human race never did invent an institution that didn’t end as a cancer. Probably in prehistoric times, the medicine man who began as the repository of tribal wisdom ended as the last bar to tribal advance. In ancient Rome, the citizen army -”

Fulton was letting him speak – patiently. It was a queer echo of the past. And there had been other eyes upon him in those days, patiently waiting, while he talked.

“- the citizen army that defended the Romans against all comers from Veii to Carthage, became the professional Praetorian Guard that sold the Imperium and levied tribute on all the Empire. The Turks developed the Janissaries as their invincible advance guard against Europe and the Sultan ended as a slave of his Janissary slaves. The barons of medieval Europe protected the serfs against the Northmen and the Magyars, then remained six hundred years longer as a parasite aristocracy that contributed nothing.”

Plat became aware of the patient eyes and said, “Don’t you understand me?”

One of the bolder technicians said, “With your kind permission, Higher One, we must needs be at work.”

“Yes, I suppose you must.”

The technician felt sorry. This Higher One was queer, but he meant well. Though he spoke a deal of nonsense, he inquired after their families, told them they were fine fellows, and that their work made them better than the Higher Ones.

So he explained, “You see, there is another shipment of granite and steel for the new theater and we will have to shift the energy distribution. It is becoming very hard to do that. The Higher Ones will not listen.”

“Now that’s what I mean. You should make them listen.”

But they just stared at him, and at that moment an idea crawled gently into Plat’s unconscious mind.

Leo Spinney waited for him on the crystal level. He was Plat’s age but taller and much more handsome. Plat’s face was thin, his eyes were china-blue, and he never smiled. Spinney was straight-nosed with brown eyes that seemed to laugh continuously.

Spinney called, “We’ll miss the game.”

“I don’t want to go, Leo. Please.”

Spinney said, “With the technicians again? Why do you waste your time?”

Plat said, “They work. I respect them. What right have we to idle?”

“Ought I to ask questions of the world as it is when it suits me so well’?”

“If you do not, someone will ask questions for you someday.”

“That will be someday, not this day. And, frankly, you had better come. The Sekjen has noticed that you are never present at the games and he doesn’t like it. Personally, I think people have been telling him of your talks to the technicians and your visits to the Surface. He might even think you consort with Lower Ones.”