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

what it started. Could it allow enough of the Galaxy to survive and thus risk a later punishment?

“Yet before I am an Earthman, I am a man. Must trillions die for the sake of millions? Must a civilization spreading over a Galaxy crumble for the sake of the resentment, however justified, of a single planet? And will we be better off for all that? The power in the Galaxy will reside still on those worlds with the necessary resources—and we have none. Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth.

“And besides, is there an advantage to Humanity to exchange the tyranny of a Galaxy for the tyranny of Earth? No—no—There must be a way out for all men, a way to justice and freedom.”

His hands stole to his face, and behind their gnarled fingers he rocked gently to and fro.

Arvardan had heard all this in a numbed haze. He mumbled, “There is no treason in what you have done, Dr. Shekt. I will go to Everest immediately. The Procurator will believe me. He must believe me.”

There was the sound of running footsteps, the flash of a frightened face into the room, the door left swinging open.

“Father—Men are coming up the walk.”

Dr. Shekt went gray. “Quickly, Dr. Arvardan, through the garage.” He was pushing violently. “Take Pola, and don’t worry about me. I’ll hold them back.”

But a man in a green robe waited for them as they turned. He wore a thin smile and carried, with a casual ease, a neuronic whip. There was a thunder of fists at the main door, a crash, and the sound of pounding feet.

“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan in a feeble defiance of the armed green-robe. He had stepped before Pola.

“I?” said Green-robe harshly. “I am merely the humble Secretary of His Excellency, the High Minister.” He advanced. “I almost waited too long. But not quite. Hmm, a girl, too. Injudicious—”

Arvardan said evenly, “I am a Galactic citizen, and I dispute your right to detain me—or, for that matter, to enter this house—without legal authority.”

“I”—and the Secretary tapped his chest gently with his free hand—“am all the right and authority on this planet. Within a short time I will be all the right and authority in the Galaxy. We have all of you, you know—even Schwartz.”

“Schwartz!” cried Dr. Shekt and Pola, nearly together.

“You are surprised? Come, I will bring you to him.”

The last thing Arvardan was conscious of was that smile, expanding—and the flash of the whip. He toppled through a crimson sear of pain into unconsciousness.

16

Choose Your Side!

For the moment Schwartz was resting uneasily on a hard bench in one of the small sub-basement rooms of the Chica “Hall of Correction.”

The Hall, as it was commonly termed, was the great token of the local power of the High Minister and those surrounding him. It lifted its gloominess in a rocky, angular height that overshadowed the Imperial barracks beyond it, just as its shadow clutched at the Terrestrial malefactor far more than did the un-exerted authority of the Empire.

Within its walls many an Earthman in past centuries had waited for the judgment that came to one who falsified or evaded the quotas of production, who lived past his time, or connived at another’s such crime, or who was guilty of attempting subversion of the local government. Occasionally, when the petty prejudices of Terrestrial justice made particularly little sense to the sophisticated and usually blasé Imperial government of the time, a conviction might be set aside by the Procurator, but this meant insurrection, or, at the very least, wild riots.

Ordinarily, where the Council demanded death, the Procurator yielded. After all, it was only Earthmen who suffered—

Of all this, Joseph Schwartz, very naturally, knew nothing. To him, immediate optical awareness consisted of a small room, its walls transfused with but a dim light, its furniture consisting of two hard benches and a table, plus a small recess in the wall that served as washroom and sanitary convenience combined. There was no window for a glimpse of sky, and the drift of air into the room through the ventilating shaft was feeble.

He rubbed the hair that circled his bald spot and sat up ruefully. His attempt to escape to nowhere (for where on Earth was he safe?) had been short, not sweet, and had ended here.

At least there was the Mind Touch to play with.

But was that bad or good?

At the farm it had been a queer, disturbing gift, the nature of which he did not know, the possibilities of which he did not think of. Now it was a flexible gift to be investigated.

With nothing to do for twenty-four hours but brood on imprisonment, he could have been courting madness. As it was, he could Touch the jailers as they passed, reach out for guardsmen in the adjacent corridors, extend the furthest fibrils of his mind even to the Captain of the Hall in his distant office.

He turned the minds over delicately and probed them. They fell apart like so many walnuts—dry husks out of which emotions and notions fell in a sibilant rain.

He learned much in the process of Earth and Empire—more than he had, or could have, in all two months on the farm.

Of course one of the items that he learned, over and over again, beyond any chance of mistaking, was just this:

He was condemned to death!

There was no escape, no doubt, no reservation.

It might be today; it might be tomorrow. But he would die!

Somehow it sank in and he accepted it almost gratefully.

The door opened, and he was on his feet, in tense fear. One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason. This was it!

No—it wasn’t. The entering Mind Touch held nothing of death in it. It