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

approached, and a man’s very soul grew haggard and pale.

Arvardan looked at his watch. It was almost midnight, and there were only six hours left.

He looked about him now in a dazed and hopeless way. They were all here now—even the Procurator, at last. Pola was next to him, her warm little fingers on his wrist and that look of fear and exhaustion on her face that more than anything else infuriated him against all the Galaxy.

Maybe they all deserved to die, the stupid, stupid—stupid—

He scarcely saw Shekt and Schwartz. They sat on his left. And there was Balkis, the damnable Balkis, with his lips still swollen, one cheek green, so that it must hurt like the devil to talk—and Arvardan’s own lips stretched into a furious, aching smile at the thought and his fists clenched and writhed. His own bandaged cheek ached less at the thought.

Facing all of them was Ennius, frowning, uncertain, almost ridiculous, dressed as he was in those heavy, shapeless, lead-impregnated clothes.

And he was stupid, too. Arvardan felt a thrill of hatred shoot through him at the thought of these Galactic trimmers who wanted only peace and ease. Where were the conquerors of three centuries back? Where? . . .

Six hours left—

Ennius had received the call from the Chica garrison some eighteen hours before and he had streaked half around the planet at the summons. The motives that led him to that were obscure but nonetheless forceful. Essentially, he told himself, there was nothing to the matter but a regrettable kidnaping of one of those green-robed curiosities of superstitious hagridden Earth. That, and these wild and undocumented accusations. Nothing, certainly, that the colonel on the spot could not have handled.

And yet there was Shekt—Shekt was in this—And not as the accused, but as an accuser. It was confusing.

He sat now facing them, thinking, quite conscious that his decision in this case might hasten a rebellion, perhaps weaken his own position at court, ruin his chances at advancement—As for Arvardan’s long speech just now about virus strains and unbridled epidemics, how seriously could he take it? After all, if he took action on the basis of it, how credible would the matter sound to his superiors?

And yet Arvardan was an archaeologist of note.

So he postponed the matter in his mind by saying to the Secretary, “Surely you have something to say in this matter?”

“Surprisingly little,” said the Secretary with easy confidence. “I would like to ask what evidence exists for supporting the accusation?”

“Your Excellency,” said Arvardan with snapping patience, “I have already told you that the man admitted it in every detail at the time of our imprisonment day before yesterday.”

“Perhaps,” said the Secretary, “you choose to credit that, Your Excellency, but it is simply an additional unsupported statement. Actually the only facts to which outsiders can bear witness to are that I was the one violently taken prisoner, not they; that it was my life that was in peril, not theirs. Now I would like my accuser to explain how he could find all this out in the nine weeks that he has been on the planet, when you, the Procurator, in years of service here, have found nothing to my disadvantage?”

“There is reason in what the Brother says,” admitted Ennius heavily. “How do you know?”

Arvardan replied stiffly, “Prior to the accused’s confession I was informed of the conspiracy by Dr. Shekt.”

“Is that so, Dr. Shekt?” The Procurator’s glance shifted to the physicist.

“That is so, Your Excellency.”

“And how did you find out?”

Shekt said, “Dr. Arvardan was admirably thorough and accurate in his description of the use to which the Synapsifier was put and in his remarks concerning the dying statements of the bacteriologist, F. Smitko. This Smitko was a member of the conspiracy. His remarks were recorded and the recording is available.”

“But, Dr. Shekt, the dying statements of a man known to be in delirium—if what Dr. Arvardan said is true—cannot be of very great weight. You have nothing else?”

Arvardan interrupted by striking his fist on the arm of his chair and roaring, “Is this a law court? Has someone been guilty of violating a traffic ordinance? We have no time to weigh evidence on an analytical balance or measure it with micrometers. I tell you we have till six in the morning, five and a half hours, in other words, to wipe out this enormous threat. . . . You knew Dr. Shekt previous to this time, Your Excellency. Have you known him to be a liar?”

The Secretary interposed instantly, “No one accused Dr. Shekt of deliberately lying, Your Excellency. It is only that the good doctor is aging and has, of late, been greatly concerned over his approaching sixtieth birthday. I am afraid that a combination of age and fear have induced slight paranoiac tendencies, common enough here on Earth. . . . Look at him! Does he seem to you quite normal?”

He did not, of course. He was drawn and tense, shattered by what had passed and what was to come.

Yet Shekt forced his voice into normal tones, even into calmness. He said, “I might say that for the last two months I have been under the continual watch of the Ancients; that my letters have been opened and my answers censored. But it is obvious that all such complaints would be attributed to the paranoia spoken of. However, I have here Joseph Schwartz, the man who volunteered as a subject for the Synapsifier one day when you were visiting me at the Institute.”

“I remember.” There was a feeble gratitude in Ennius’s mind that the subject had, for the moment, veered. “Is that the man?”

“Yes.”

“He looks none the worse for the experience.”

“He is far the better. The exposure to the Synapsifier was uncommonly successful, since he had a photographic memory to begin with, a fact I did not know at the time. At any rate, he now has a mind which is sensitive to the thoughts of others.”

Ennius leaned far forward in his chair and cried in a shocked