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

days. It is very sacred and must not be disturbed. Look, Schwartz, if you want to remain here safely, curb your curiosity and tend to your job.”

“But if it’s so sacred, then nobody can live there?”

“Exactly. You’re right.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. . . . And you’re not to trespass. It will mean the end for you.”

“I won’t.”

Schwartz walked away, wondering and oddly uneasy. It was from that wooded ground that the Mind Touch came, quite powerfully, and now something additional had been added to the sensation. It was an unfriendly Touch, a threatening Touch.

Why? Why?

And still he dared not speak. They would not have believed him, and something unpleasant would happen to him as a consequence. He knew that too. He knew too much, in fact.

He was younger these days, also. Not so much in the physical sense, to be sure. He was thinner in his stomach and broader in his shoulders. His muscles were harder and springier and his digestion was better. That was the result of work in the open. But it was something else he was chiefly conscious of. It was his way of thinking.

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

But to Schwartz experience remained, and it was with a sharp delight that he found he could understand things at a bound, that he gradually progressed from following Arbin’s explanations to anticipating them, to leaping on ahead. As a result, he felt young in a far more subtle way than any amount of physical excellence could account for.

Two months passed, and it all came out—over a game of chess with Grew in the arbor.

Chess, somehow, hadn’t changed, except for the names of the pieces. It was as he remembered it, and therefore it was always a comfort to him. At least, in this one respect, his poor memory did not play him false.

Grew told him of variations of chess. There was four-handed chess, in which each player had a board, touching each other at the corners, with a fifth board filling the hollow in the center as a common No Man’s Land. There were three-dimensional chess games in which eight transparent boards were placed one over the other and in which each piece moved in three dimensions as they formerly moved in two, and in which the number of pieces and pawns were doubled, the win coming only when a simultaneous check of both enemy kings occurred. There were even the popular varieties, in which the original position of the chessmen were decided by throws of the dice, or where certain squares conferred advantages or disadvantages to the pieces upon them, or where new pieces with strange properties were introduced.

But chess itself, the original and unchangeable, was the same—and the tournament between Schwartz and Grew had completed its first fifty games.

Schwartz had a bare knowledge of the moves when he began, so that he lost constantly in the first games. But that had changed and losing games were becoming rarer. Gradually Grew had grown slow and cautious, had taken to smoking his pipe into glowing embers in the intervals between moves, and had finally subsided into rebellious and querulous losses.

Grew was White and his pawn was already on King 4.

“Let’s go,” he urged sourly. His teeth were clamped hard on his pipe and his eyes were already searching the board tensely.

Schwartz took his seat in the gathering twilight and sighed. The games were really becoming uninteresting as more and more he became aware of the nature of Grew’s moves before they could be made. It was as if Grew had a misty window in his skull. And the fact that he himself knew, almost instinctively, the proper course of chess play to take was simply of a piece with the rest of his problem.

They used a “night-board,” one that glowed in the darkness in a checkered blue-and-orange glimmer. The pieces, ordinary lumpish figures of a reddish clay in the sunlight, were metamorphosed at night. Half were bathed in a creamy whiteness that lent them the look of cold and shining porcelain, and the others sparked in tiny glitters of red.

The first moves were rapid. Schwartz’s own King’s Pawn met the enemy advance head on. Grew brought out his King’s Knight to Bishop 3; Schwartz countered with Queen’s Knight to Bishop 3. Then the White Bishop leaped to Queen’s Knight 5, and Schwartz’s Queen’s Rook’s Pawn slid ahead a square to drive it back to Rook 4. He then advanced his other Knight to Bishop 3.

The shining pieces slid across the board with an eery volition of their own as the grasping fingers lost themselves in the night.

Schwartz was frightened. He might be revealing insanity, but he had to know. He said abruptly, “Where am I?”

Grew looked up in the midst of a deliberate move of his Queen’s Knight to Bishop 3 and said, “What?”

Schwartz didn’t know the word for “country,” or “nation.” He said, “What world is this?” and moved his Bishop to King 2.

“Earth,” was the short reply, and Grew castled with great emphasis, first the tall figurine that was the King, moving, and then the lumpish Rook topping it and resting on the other side.

That was a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer. The word Grew had used Schwartz translated in his mind as “Earth.” But what was “Earth”? Any planet is “Earth” to those that live on it. He advanced his Queen’s Knight’s Pawn two spaces, and again Grew’s Bishop had to retreat, to Knight 3 this time. Then Schwartz and Grew, each in turn, advanced the Queen’s Pawn one space, each freeing his Bishop for the battle in the center that was soon to begin.

Schwartz asked, as calmly and casually as he