The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction Read online

  “No, I wasn’t. I was born on Washington IV. It’s a lovely planet. There are hundreds of planets out there as fine and varied as Earth once was—but it kind of rankles to think that this insect brood rules Earth.”

  “If you feel so upset about it, why don’t you do something?”

  He knotted his fists together. You should start explaining history and economics just before you ran out to be chopped to bits by a big rampant thing with circular saws for hands?

  “It would cost mankind too much to reconquer this planet. Too difficult. Too many deaths just for sentiment. And think of all those queens squirting eggs at a rate of knots; humans don’t breed that fast. Humanity has learnt to face facts.”

  She laughed without humor.

  “That’s good. Why don’t you learn to face the fact of me?”

  Javlin had nothing to say to that; she would not understand that directly he saw her he knew his hope of keeping his life had died. She was just a liability. Soon he would be dying, panting his juices out into the dust like that game young centaur only it wouldn’t be dust.

  “We fight in two foot of water,” he said. “You know that? The yillibeeth like it. It slows our speed a bit. We might drown instead of having our heads bitten off.”

  ‘I can hear someone coming down the corridor. It may be our armor,” she said coolly.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “You can’t wait to die, Javlin, can you?”

  The bars fell away on the outside of the door, and it opened. The keeper stood there. Ik So Baar had not appeared as he usually did. The creature flung in their armor and weapons and retreated, barring the door again behind him. It never ceased to astonish Javlin that those great dumb brutes of workers had intelligence.

  He stooped to pick up his uniform. The girl’s looked so light and small. He lifted it, looking from it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “It looks so small and new.”

  “I shouldn’t want anything heavier.”

  “You’ve fought in it?”

  “Twice.” There was no need to ask whether she had won.

  “We’d better get the stuff strapped on, then. We shall know when they are getting ready for us; you’ll hear the arena being filled with water. They’re probably saving us for the main events just before noon.”

  “I didn’t know about the two feet of water.”

  “No. I’m a good swimmer. Swam for fish in the river on the slave farm.”

  “You caught fish with your bare hands?” x

  “No, you dive down and stab them with a sharp rock. It takes practice.”

  It was a remembered pleasure. She’d actually swum in one of Earth’s rivers. He caught himself smiling back into her face.

  “Ik So’s place is in the desert,” he said, making his voice cold. “Anyhow, you won’t be able to swim in the arena. Two foot of muddy stinking water helps nobody. And you’ll be chained on to me with a four-foot length of chain.”

  “Let’s get our armor on, then you’d better tell me all you know. Perhaps we can work out a plan of campaign.”

  As he picked up the combined breastplate and shoulder guard, Awn untied her belt and lifted her dress over her head. Underneath she wore only a ragged pair of white briefs. She commenced to take those off.

  Javlin stared at her with surprise—and pleasure. It had been years since he had been within hailing distance of a woman. This one—yes, this one was a beauty.

  “What are you doing that for?” he asked. He hardly recognized his own voice.

  “The less we have on the better in that water. Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”

  He shook his head. Embarrassed, he fumbled on the rest of his kit. At least she wouldn’t look so startling with her breastplate and skirt armor on. He checked his long and short swords, clipping the one into the left belt clip, the other into the right. They were good swords, made by redul armorers to terrestrial specifications. When he turned back to Awn, she was fully accoutered.

  Nodding in approval, he offered her a seat on the bench beside him. They clattered against each other and smiled.

  Another bout had ended in the arena. The cheers and chirrups drifted through the bars to them.

  “I’m sorry you’re involved in this,” he said with care.

  “I was lucky to be involved in it with you.” Her voice was not entirely steady, but she controlled it in a minute. “Can’t I hear water?”

  He had already heard it. An unnatural silence radiated from the great inhuman crowd in the circus as they watched the stuff pour in. It would have great emotional significance for them, no doubt, since they had all lived in water for some years in their previous life stage.

  “They have wide-bore hoses,” he said. His own voice had an irritating tremor. “The arena fills quite rapidly.”

  “Let’s formulate some sort of plan of attack then. These things, these yillibeeths must have some weaknesses.”

  “And some strengths! That’s what you have to watch for.”

  “I don’t see that. You attack their weak points.”

  “We shall be too busy looking out for their strong ones. They have long segmented gray bodies—about twenty segments, I think. Each segment is of chitin or something tough. Each segment bears two legs equipped with razor combs. At tail end and top end they have legs that work like sort of buzz saws, cut through anything they touch. And there are their jaws, of course.”

  The keeper was back. Its antennae flopped through the grating and then it unbolted the door and came in.

  It bore a length of chain as long as the cell was wide. Javlin and Awn did not resist as it locked them together, fitting the bracelets on to Javlin’s right arm and Awn’s left.

  “So.” She stared at the chain. “The yillibeeths don’t sound to have many weak points. They could cut through our swords with their buzz saws?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then they could cut through this chain. Get it severed near one of our wrists, and the other has a better long distance weapon than a sword. A blow over the head with the end of the chain won’t improve their speed. How fast are they?”

  “The buzz saws take up most of their speed. They’re nothing like as fast as the reduls. No, you could say they were pretty sluggish in movement. And the fact that the two of them will also be chained together should help us.”

  “Where are they chained?”

  “By the middle legs.”

  “That gives them a smaller arc of destruction than if they were chained by back or front legs. We are going to slay these beasts yet, Javlin! What a murderous genus it must be to put its offspring in the arena for the public sport.”

  He laughed.

  “Would you feel sentimental about your offspring if you had a million babies?”

  “I’ll tell you that when I’ve had the first of them. I mean, if I have the first of them.”

  He put his hand over hers.

  “No if. We’ll kill the bloody larvae okay.”

  “Get the chain severed, the one of us with the longest bit of chain goes in for the nearest head, the other fends off the other brute. Right?”

  “Right.”

  There was a worker redul at the outer door now, the door that led to the arena. He flung it open and stood there with a flaming torch, ready to drive them out if they did not emerge.

  “We’ve—come to it then,” she said. Suddenly she clung to him.

  “Let’s take it at a run, love,” he said.

  Together, balancing the chain between them, they ran towards the arena. The two yillibeeth were coming out from the far side, wallowing and splashing. The crowd stretched up towards the blue sky of Earth, whistling their heads off. They didn’t know what a man and a woman could do in combination. Now they were going to learn.

  THE BILLIARD BALL

  by Isaac Asimov

  I

  James Priss—I suppose I ought to say Professor James Priss, though everyone i
s sure to know who I mean even without the title—always spoke slowly.

  I know. I interviewed him often enough. He had the greatest mind since Einstein, but it didn’t work quickly. He admitted his slowness often. Maybe it was because he had so great a mind that it didn’t work quickly.

  He would say something in slow abstraction, then he would think, and then he would say something more. Even over trival matters, his giant mind would hover uncertainly, adding a touch here and then another there.

  Would the sun rise tomorrow? I can imagine him wondering. What do we mean by “rise”? Can we be certain that tomorrow will come? Is the term “sun” completely unambiguous in this connection?

  Add to this habit of speech a bland countenance, rather pale, with no expression except for a general look of uncertainty; gray hair, rather thin, neatly combed; business suits of an invariably conservative cut; and you have what Professor James Priss was—a retiring person, completely lacking in magnetism.

  That’s why nobody in the world, except myself, could possibly suspect him of being a murderer. And even I am not sure. After all, he was slow-thinking; he was always slow-thinking. Is it conceivable that at one crucial moment, he managed to think quickly and act at once?

  It doesn’t matter. Even if he murdered, he got away with it. It is far too late now to try to reverse matters, and I wouldn’t succeed in doing so even if I decided to let this be published.

  Edward Bloom was Priss’s classmate in college, and an associate through circumstance for a generation afterward. They were equal in age and in their propensity for the bachelor life, but opposites in everything else that mattered.

  Bloom was a living flash of light; colorful, tall, broad, loud, brash and self-confident He had a mind that resembled a meteor-strike in the sudden and unexpected way it could seize the essential. He was no theoretician, as Priss was; Bloom had neither the patience for it, nor the capacity to concentrate intense thought upon a single abstract point. He admitted that He boasted of it.

  What he did have was an uncanny way of seeing the application of a theory, of seeing the manner in which it could be put to use. In the cold marble blocks of abstract structure, he could see, without apparent difficulty, the intricate design of a marvelous device. The block would fall apart at his touch and leave the device.

  It is a well-known story, and not too badly exaggerated at that, that nothing Bloom ever built had failed to work, or to be patentable, or to be profitable. By the time he was 45, he was one of the richest men on Earth.

  And if Bloom the Technician were adapted to one particular matter more than anything else, it was to the way of thought of Priss the Theoretician. Bloom’s greatest gadgets were built upon Priss’s greatest thoughts, and as Bloom grew wealthy and famous, Priss gained phenomenal respect among his colleagues.

  Naturally, it was to be expected that when Priss advanced his Two-Field Theory, Bloom would set about at once to build the first practical anti-gravity device.

  II

  My job was to find human interest in the Two-Field Theory for the subscribers to Tele-News Press, and you get that by trying to deal with human beings and not with abstract ideas. Since my interviewee” was Professor Priss, that wasn’t easy.

  Naturally, I was going to ask about the possibilities of anti-gravity, which interested everyone; and not about the Two-Field Theory, which no one could understand.

  “Anti-gravity?” Priss compressed his pale lips and considered. “I’m not entirely sure that it is possible. Or ever will be. I haven’t—uh—worked the matter out to my satisfaction. I don’t entirely see whether the Two-Field equations would have a finite solution, which they would have to have, of course, if—” And then he went off into a brown study.

  I prodded him. “Bloom says he thinks such a device can be built.”

  Priss nodded. “Well, yes, but I wonder. Ed Bloom has had an amazing knack at seeing the unobvious in the past. He has an unusual mind. It’s certainly made him rich enough.”

  We were sitting in Priss’s apartment. Ordinary middle-class. I couldn’t help a quick glance this way and that. Priss was not wealthy.

  I don’t think he read my mind. He saw me look. And I think it was on his mind. He said, “Wealth isn’t the usual reward for the pure scientist. Or even a particularly desirable one.”

  Maybe so, at that, I thought. Priss certainly had his own kind of reward. He was the third person in history to win two Nobel Prizes; and the first to have both of them in the sciences and both of them unshared. You can’t complain about that. And if he wasn’t rich, neither was he poor.

  But he didn’t sound like a contented man. Maybe it wasn’t Bloom’s wealth alone that irked Priss. Maybe it was Bloom’s fame among the people of Earth generally; maybe it was the fact that Bloom was a celebrity wherever he went, whereas Priss, outside scientific conventions and faculty clubs, was largely anonymous.

  I can’t say how much of all this was in my eyes or in the way I wrinkled the creases in my forehead, but Priss went on to say, “But we’re friends, you know. We play billiards once or twice a week. I beat him regularly.” (I never published that statement. I checked it with Bloom, who made a long counter-statement that began: “He beat me at billiards. That jackass—” and grew increasingly personal thereafter. As a matter of fact, neither one was a novice at billiards. I watched them play once for a short while, after the statement and counter-statement, and both handled the cue with professional aplomb. What’s more, both played for blood, and there was no friendship in the game that I could see.)

  I said, “Would you care to predict whether Bloom will manage to build an anti-gravity device?”

  “You mean would I commit myself to anything?

  “Hmm. Well, let’s consider, young man. Just what do we mean by anti-gravity? Our conception of gravity is built around Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which is now a century and a half old but which, within its limits, remains firm. We can picture it—”

  I listened politely. I’d heard Priss on the subject before, but if I was to get anything out of him—which wasn’t certain—I’d have to let him work his way through in his own way.

  “We can picture it,” he said, “by imagining the universe to be a flat, thin, super-flexible sheet of untearable rubber. If we picture mass as being associated with weight, as it is on the surface of the Earth, then we would expect a mass, resting upon the rubber sheet, to make an indentation. The greater the mass, the deeper the indentation.

  “In the actual universe,” he went on, “all sorts of masses exist, and so our rubber sheet must be pictured as riddled with indentations. Any object rolling along the sheet would dip into and out of the indentations it passed, veering and changing direction as it did so. It is this veer and change of direction that we interpret as demonstrating the existence of a force of gravity. If the moving object comes close enough to the center of the indentation and is moving slowly enough, it gets trapped and whirls round and round that indentation. In the absence of friction, it keeps up that whirl forever. In other words, what Isaac Newton interpreted as a force, Albert Einstein interpreted as geometrical distortion.”

  He paused at this point. He had been speaking fairly fluently—for him—since he was saying something he had said often before. But now he began to pick his way.

  He said, “So in trying to produce anti-gravity, we are trying to alter the geometry of the universe. If we carry on our metaphor, we are trying to straighten out the indented rubber sheet. We could imagine ourselves getting under the indenting mass and lifting it upward, supporting it so as to prevent it from making an indentation. If we make the rubber sheet flat in that way, then we create a universe—or at least a portion of the universe—in which gravity doesn’t exist. A rolling body would pass the non-indenting mass without altering its direction of travel a bit, and we could interpret this as meaning that the mass was exerting no gravitational force. In order to accomplish this feat, however, we need a mass equivalent to the indenti
ng mass. To produce anti-gravity on Earth in this way, we would have to make use of a mass equal to that of Earth and poise it above our heads, so to speak.”

  I interrupted him. “But your Two-Field Theory—”

  “Exactly . . . General Relativity does not explain both the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field in a single set of equations. Einstein spent half his life searching for that single set—for a Unified Field Theory—and failed. All who followed Einstein also failed. I, however, began with the assumption that there were two fields that could not be unified and followed the consequences, which I can explain, in part, in terms of the rubber-sheet metaphor.”

  Now we came to something I wasn’t sure I had ever heard before. “How does that go?” I asked.

  “Suppose that, instead of trying to lift the indenting mass, we try to stiffen the sheet itself, make it less indentable. It would contract, at least over a small area, and become flatter. Gravity would weaken. And so would mass, for the two are essentially the same phenomenon in terms of the indented universe. If we could make the rubber sheet completely flat, both gravity and mass would disappear altogether.

  “Under the proper conditions, the electromagnetic field could be made to counter the gravitational field and serve to stiffen the indented fabric of the universe. The electromagnetic field is tremendously stronger than the gravitational field, so the former could be made to overcome the latter.”

  I said, uncertainly, “But you say ‘under the proper conditions.’ Can those proper conditions you speak of be achieved, Professor?”

  “That is what I don’t know,” said Priss, thoughtfully and slowly. “If the universe were really a rubber sheet, its stiffness would have to reach an infinite value before it could be expected to remain completely flat under an indenting mass. If that is also so in the real universe, then an infinitely intense electromagnetic field would be required, and that would mean anti-gravity would be impossible.”

  “But Bloom says—”