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

was a guard with a metal rod held ready in his hand. Schwartz knew what it was.

“Come with me,” he said sharply.

Schwartz followed him, speculating on this odd power of his. Long before his guard could use his weapon, long before he could possibly know he should, he could be struck down without a sound, without a giveaway moment. His Mind was in Schwartz’s mental hands. A slight squeeze and it would be over.

But why? There would be others. How many could he handle at once? How many pairs of hands were in his mind?

He followed, docilely.

It was a large, large room that he was brought into. Two men and a girl occupied it, stretched out corpsewise on high, high benches. Yet not corpses—since three active minds were much in evidence.

Paralyzed! Familiar? . . . Were they familiar?

He was stopping to look, but the guard’s hard hand was on his shoulder. “Get on.”

There was a fourth slab, empty. There was no death in the guard’s mind, so Schwartz climbed on. He knew what was coming.

The guard’s steely rod touched each of his limbs. They tingled and left him, so that he was nothing but a head, floating on nothingness.

He turned it.

“Pola,” he cried. “You’re Pola, aren’t you? The girl who—”

She was nodding. He hadn’t recognized her Touch as such. He had never been aware of it that time two months ago. At that time his mental progression had reached only the stage of sensitivity to “atmosphere.” In the brilliance of hindsight, he remembered that well.

But from the contents he could still learn much. The one past the girl was Dr. Shekt; the one furthest of all was Dr. Bel Arvardan. He could filch their names, sense their despair, taste the last dregs of horror and fright in the young girl’s mind.

For a moment he pitied them, and then he remembered who they were and what they were. And he hardened his heart.

Let them die!

The other three had been there for the better part of an hour. The room in which they were left was evidently one used for assemblies of several hundred. The prisoners were lost and lonely in its size. Nor was there anything to say. Arvardan’s throat burned dryly and he turned his head from side to side with a futile restlessness. It was the only part of his body that he could move.

Shekt’s eyes were closed and his lips were colorless and pinched.

Arvardan whispered fiercely, “Shekt. Shekt, I say!”

“What? . . . What?” A feeble whisper at best.

“What are you doing? Going to sleep? Think, man, think!”

“Why? What is there to think of?”

“Who is this Joseph Schwartz?”

Pola’s voice sounded, thin and weary. “Don’t you remember, Bel? That time in the department store, when I first met you—so long ago?”

Arvardan wrenched wildly and found he could lift his head two aching inches. A bit of Pola’s face was just visible.

“Pola! Pola!” If he could have moved toward her—as for two months he might have and hadn’t. She was looking at him, smiling so wanly that it might be a statue’s smile, and he said, “We’ll win out yet. You’ll see.”

But she was shaking her head—and his neck gave way, its tendons in panging agony.

“Shekt,” he said again. “Listen to me. How did you meet this Schwartz? Why was he a patient of yours?”

“The Synapsifier. He came as a volunteer.”

“And was treated?”

“Yes.”

Arvardan revolved that in his mind. “What made him come to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But then—Maybe he is an Imperial agent.”

(Schwartz followed his thought well and smiled to himself. He said nothing, and he meant to keep on saying nothing.)

Shekt stirred his head. “An Imperial agent? You mean because the High Priest’s Secretary says he is. Oh, nonsense. And what difference does it make? He’s as helpless as we. . . . Listen, Arvardan, maybe, if we tell some sort of concerted story, they might wait. Eventually we might—”

The archaeologist laughed hollowly, and his throat burned at the friction. “We might live, you mean. With the Galaxy dead and civilization in ruins? Live? I might as well die!”

“I’m thinking of Pola,” muttered Shekt.

“I am too,” said the other. “Ask her. . . . Pola, shall we surrender? Shall we try to live?”

Pola’s voice was firm. “I have chosen my side. I don’t want to die, but if my side dies, I’ll go with it.”

Arvardan felt somehow triumphant. When he brought her to Sirius, they might call her an Earthgirl, but she was their equal, and he would, with a great and good pleasure, smash teeth into the throat of any—

And he remembered that he wasn’t likely to bring her to Sirius—to bring anyone to Sirius. There wasn’t likely to be a Sirius.

Then, as though to escape from the thought, to escape anywhere, he shouted, “You! Whatchername! Schwartz!”

Schwartz raised his head for a moment and allowed a glance to ooze out toward the other. He still said nothing.

“Who are you?” demanded Arvardan. “How did you get mixed up in this? What’s your part in it?”

And at the question, all the injustice of everything descended on Schwartz. All the harmlessness of his past, all the infinite horror of the present burst in upon him, so that he said in a fury, “I? How did I get mixed up in it? Listen. I was once a nobody. An honest man, a hard-working tailor. I hurt nobody, I bothered nobody, I took care of my family. And then, for no reason, for no reason—I came here.”

“To Chica?” asked Arvardan, who did not quite follow.

“No, not to Chica!” shouted Schwartz in wild derision. “I came to this whole mad world. . . . Oh, what do I care if you believe me or not? My world is in the past. My world had land and food and two billion people, and it was the only world.”

Arvardan fell silent before the verbal assault. He turned to Shekt. “Can you understand him?”

“Do you realize,” said Shekt in feeble wonder, “that he has a vermiform appendix, which is three and a half inches long? Do you