Isaac Asimov: Buy Jupiter and Other Stories

“And what do they intend then?” “I am not yet certain, Sire. But I know enough to recommend that a division of Waves be brought to Atlantis. Secretly, of course, and at the last minute so that it will be too late for the rebels to change any plans they have made. They will have to drop them altogether, and the proper moment, once lost, may never be regained. Thereafter, I will learn more. If necessary, we will train new men. It would be a pity, Sire, to tell anyone of this in advance. If the technicians learn our countermeasures prematurely, matters may go badly.”

The Sekjen, with his jeweled hand to his chin, mused – and believed.

Shah Guido G., thought Philo Plat. In history, you’ll go down as Shah Guido G.

Philo Plat watched the gaiety from a distance. Atlantis’s central squares were crawling black with people. That was good. He himself had managed to get away only with difficulty. And none too soon, since the Wave Division had already cross-hatched the sky with their ships.

They were maneuvering edgily now, adjusting themselves into final position over Atlantis’s huge, raised air field, which was well able to take their ships all at once.

The cruisers were descending now vertically, in parade formation. Plat looked quickly toward the city proper. The populace had grown quieter as they watched the unscheduled demonstration, and it seemed to him that he had never seen so many Higher Ones upon the Sky-Island at one time. For a moment, a last misgiving arose. There was still time for a warning.

And even as he thought that he knew that there wasn’t. The cruisers were dropping speedily. He would have to go hurry if he were himself to escape in his own little craft. He wondered sickly, even as he grasped the controls, whether his friends on the Surface had received his yesterday’s warning, or would believe it if they had received it. If they could not act quickly the Higher Ones would yet recover from the first blow, devastating though it was.

He was in the air when the Waves landed, seven thousand five hundred tear-drop ships covering the airfield like a descending net. Plat drove his ship upward, watching -

And Atlantis went dark. It was like a candle over which a mighty hand was suddenly cupped. One moment it blazed the night into brilliance for fifty miles around; the next it was black against blackness.

To Plat the thousands of screams blended into one thin, lost shriek of fear. He Red, and the shock vibrations of Atlantis’s crash to Earth caught his ship and hurled it far.

He never stopped hearing that scream.

Fulton was staring at Plat. He said, “Have you ever told this to anyone?”

Plat shook his head.

Fulton’s mind went back a quarter century, too. “We got your message, of course. It was hard to believe, as you expected. Many feared a trap even after report of the Fall arrived. But – well, it’s history. The Higher Ones that remained, those on the Surface, were demoralized and before they could recover, they were done.

“But tell me,” he turned to Plat with sudden, hard curiosity. “What was it you did’! We’ve always assumed you sabotaged the power stations.”

“I know. The truth is so much less romantic, Fulton. The world would prefer to believe its myth. Let it.”

“May I have the truth?”

“If you will. As I told you, the Higher Ones built and built to saturation. The antigrav energy beams had to support a weight in buildings, guns, and enclosing shell that doubled and tripled as the years went on. Any requests the technicians might have made for newer or bigger motors were turned down, since the Higher Ones would rather have the room and money for their mansions and there was always enough power for the moment.

“The technicians, as I said, had already reached the stage where they were disturbed at the construction of single buildings. I questioned them and found exactly how little margin of safety remained. They were waiting only for the completion of the new theater to make a new request. They did not realize, however, that, at my suggestion, Atlantis would be called upon to support the sudden additional burden of a division of Wave cavalry in their ships. Seven thousand five hundred ships, fully rigged!

“When the Waves landed, by then almost two thousand tons, the antigrav power supply was overloaded. The motors failed and Atlantis was only a vast rock, ten miles above the ground. What could such a rock do but fall.”

Plat arose. Together they turned back toward their ship.

Fulton laughed harshly. “You know, there is a fatality in names.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, that once more in history Atlantis sank beneath the Waves.”

Now that you’ve read the story, you’ll notice that the whole thing is for the purpose of that final lousy pun, right? In fact, one person came up to me and, in tones of deep disgust, said, “Why,SHAH GUIDO G.is nothing but a shaggy-dog story.”

“Right,” I said, “and if you divide the title into two parts instead of three, you getSHAHGUI DOG,so don’t you think I know it?”

In other words, the title is a pun, too.

With David on his way, we obviously couldn’t remain in that impossible Somerville apartment. Since I could now drive a car, we were no longer bound to the bus lines and could look farther afield. In the spring of 1951 we moved into an apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts, therefore. It was a great improvement over the earlier apartment, though it, too, was pretty hot in the summer.

There were two very small built-in bookcases in the living room of the apartment and I began using that for a collection of my own books in chronological order. I got up to seventeen books while I was in that apartment. When my biochemistry textbook came out in 1952 I placed it with the rest in its proper order. It received no preferential treatment. I saw no way in which a scientific textbook could lay claim to greater respectability than a science fiction novel.

If I had ambitions, in fact, it was not toward respectability. I kept wanting to write funny material.

Humor is a funny thing, however -

All right, humor is a peculiar thing, if you have a prejudice against a witty play on words. There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn’t.

Naturally, then, humor isn’t something a man should lightly undertake; especially in the early days of his career when he has not yet learned to handle his tools. – And yet almost every beginning writer tries his hand at humor, convinced that it is an easy thing to do.

I was no exception. By the time I had written and submitted four stories, and had, as yet, sold none, I already felt it was time to write a funny story. I did. It was Ring Around the Sun, something I actually managed to sell and which was eventually included in THE EARLY ASIMOV.

I didn’t think it was successfully funny even at the time it was written. Nor did I think several other funny stories I tried my hand at, such as Christmas on Ganymede (also inTHE EARLY ASIMOV)and Robot AL-76 Goes Astray (included inTHE REST OF THE ROBOTS,Doubleday, 1964) were really funny.

It wasn’t till 1952 that (in my own mind only; I say nothing about yours) I succeeded. I wrote two stories,BUTTON, BUTTONandTHE MONKEY’S FINGER,in which I definitely thought I had managed to do it right. I was giggling all the way through each one, and I managed to unload both on Startling Stories, where they appeared in successive issues,BUTTON, BUTTONin the January 1953 issue andTHE MONKEY’S FINGERin the February 1953 issue.