Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (best novels of all time .txt) 📗

permission. This will remove any suspicion—or should—that the Imperial Government has any hand in this silly violation of their customs. At the same time you will have stopped Arvardan without having appeared in the mess yourself. Then have the Bureau send out two good psychologists—or, better, ask for four, so they’ll be sure to send at least two—and have them check on the Synapsifier possibility. . . . And anything else can be taken care of by our soldiers, while we allow posterity to take care of itself.

“Now why don’t you sleep right here? We can put the chair back down, you can use my fur piece as a blanket, and I’ll have a breakfast tray wheeled out when you awake. Things will seem different in the sun.”

And so it was that Ennius, after waking the night through, fell asleep five minutes before sunrise.

Thus it was eight hours later that the High Minister first learned of Bel Arvardan and his mission from the Procurator himself.

7

Conversation with Madmen?

As for Arvardan, he was concerned only with making holiday. His ship, the Ophiuchus, was not to be expected for at least a month, therefore he had a month to spend as lavishly as he might wish.

So it was that on the sixth day after his arrival at Everest, Bel Arvardan left his host and took passage on the Terrestrial Air Transport Company’s largest jet Stratospheric, traveling between Everest and the Terrestrial capital, Washenn.

If he took a commercial liner, rather than the speedy cruiser placed at his service by Ennius, it was done deliberately, out of the reasonable curiosity of a stranger and an archaeologist toward the ordinary life of men inhabiting such a planet as Earth.

And for another reason too.

Arvardan was from the Sirian Sector, notoriously the sector above all others in the Galaxy where anti-Terrestrian prejudice was strong. Yet he had always liked to think he had not succumbed to that prejudice himself. As a scientist, as an archaeologist, he couldn’t afford to. Of course he had grown into the habit of thinking of Earthmen in certain set caricature types, and even now the word “Earthman” seemed an ugly one to him. But he wasn’t really prejudiced.

At least he didn’t think so. For instance, if an Earthman ever wished to join an expedition of his or work for him in any capacity—and had the training and the ability—he would be accepted. If there were an opening for him, that was. And if the other members of the expedition didn’t mind too much. That was the rub. Usually the fellow workers objected, and then what could you do?

He pondered the matter. Now certainly he would have no objection to eating with an Earthman, or even bunking with one in case of need—assuming the Earthman were reasonably clean, and healthy. In fact, he would in all ways treat him as he would treat anyone else, he thought. Yet there was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn’t help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

But here was his chance to test himself. He was in a plane with only Earthmen about him, and he felt perfectly natural, almost. Well, just a little self-conscious.

Arvardan looked about at the undistinguished and normal faces of his fellow passengers. They were supposed to be different, these Earthmen, but could he have told these from ordinary men if he had met them casually in a crowd? He didn’t think so. The women weren’t bad-looking . . . His brows knit. Of course even tolerance must draw the line somewhere. Intermarriage, for instance, was quite unthinkable.

The plane itself was, in his eyes, a small affair of imperfect construction. It was, of course, atomic-powered, but the application of the principle was far from efficient. For one thing, the power unit was not well shielded. Then it occurred to Arvardan that the presence of stray gamma rays and a high neutron density in the atmosphere might well strike Earthmen as less important than it might strike others.

Then the view caught his eyes. From the dark wine-purple of the extreme stratosphere, Earth presented a fabulous appearance. Beneath him the vast and misted land areas in sight (obscured here and there by the patches of sun-bright clouds) showed a desert orange. Behind them, slowly receding from the fleeing stratoliner, was the soft and fuzzy night line, within whose dark shadow there was the sparking of the radioactive areas.

His attention was drawn from the window by the laughter among the others. It seemed to center about an elderly couple, comfortably stout and all smiles.

Arvardan nudged his neighbor. “What’s going on?”

His neighbor paused to say, “They’ve been married forty years, and they’re making the Grand Tour.”

“The Grand Tour?”

“You know. All around the Earth.”

The elderly man, flushed with pleasure, was recounting in voluble fashion his experiences and impressions. His wife joined in periodically, with meticulous corrections involving completely unimportant points; these being given and taken in the best of humor. To all this the audience listened with the greatest attention, so that to Arvardan it seemed that Earthmen were as warm and human as any people in the Galaxy.

And then someone asked, “And when is it that you’re scheduled for the Sixty?”

“In about a month,” came the ready, cheerful answer. “Sixteenth November.”

“Well,” said the questioner, “I hope you have a nice day for it. My father reached his Sixty in a damned pouring rain. I’ve never seen one like it since. I was going with him—you know, a fellow likes company on a day like that—and he complained about the rain every step of the way. We had an open biwheel, you see, and we got soaked. ‘Listen,’ I said,