The Best of Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov(1)

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Kaunas threw his arm up to shade his eyes and screamed, "The Sun!" so
that all the others froze.
Kaunas's face showed a kind of terror, as though it were his Mercurian
sun that he had caught a blinding glimpse of.
Talliaferro thought of his own reaction to the possibility of open air
and his teeth gritted. They were all bent crooked by their ten years away from
Earth.
Kaunas ran to the window, fumbling for the polarizer, and then the
breath came out of him in a huge gasp.
Mandel stepped to his side. "What's wrong?" and the other two joined
them.
The city lay stretched below them and outward to the horizon in broken
stone and brick, bathed in the rising sun, with the shadowed portions toward
them. Talliaferro cast it all a furtive and uneasy glance.
Kaunas, his chest seemingly contracted past the point where he could cry
out, stared at something much closer. There, on the outer window sill, one
corner secured in a trifling imperfection, a crack in the cement, was an
inch-long strip of milky-gray film, and on it were the early rays of the
rising sun.
Mandel, with an angry, incoherent cry, threw up the window and snatched
it away. He shielded it in one cupped hand, staring out of hot and reddened
eyes.
He said, "Wait here!"
There was nothing to say. When Mandel left, they sat down and stared
stupidly at one another.
Mandel was back in twenty minutes. He said quietly (in a voice that gave
the impression, somehow, that it was quiet only because its owner had passed
far beyond the raving stage), "The corner in the crack wasn't overexposed. I
could make out a few words. It is Villiers' paper. The rest is ruined; nothing
can be salvaged. It's gone."
"What next?" said Talliaferro.
Mandel shrugged wearily. "Right now, I don't care. Mass-transference is
gone until someone as brilliant as Villiers works it out again. I shall work
on it but I have no illusions as to my own capacity. With it gone, I suppose
you three don't matter, guilty or not. What's the difference?" His whole body
seemed to have loosened and sunk into despair.
But Talliaferro's voice grew hard. "Now, hold on. In your eyes, any of
the three of us might be guilty. I, for instance. You are a big man in the
field and you will never have a good word to say for me. The general idea may
arise that I am incompetent or worse. I will not be ruined by the shadow of
guilt. Now let's solve this thing."
"I am no detective," said Mandel wearily.
"Then call in the police, damn it."
Ryger said, "Wait a while, Tal. Are you implying that I'm guilty?"
"I'm saying that I'm innocent."
Kaunas raised his voice in fright. "It will mean the Psychic Probe for
each of us. There may be mental damage--"
Mandel raised both arms high in the air. "Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Please!
There is one thing we might do short of the police; and you are right, Dr.
Talliaferro, it would be unfair to the innocent to leave this matter here."
They turned to him in various stages of hostility. Ryger said, "What do
you suggest?"
"I have a friend named Wendell Urth. You may have heard of him, or you
may not, but perhaps I can arrange to see him tonight."
"What if you can?" demanded Talliaferro. "Where does that get us?"
"He's an odd man," said Mandel hesitantly, "very odd. And very brilliant
in his way. He has helped the police before this and he may be able to help us
now."
Part 2
Edward Talliaferro could not forbear staring at the room and its
occupant with the greatest astonishment. It and he seemed to exist in
isolation, and to be part of no recognizable world. The sounds of Earth were
absent in this well-padded, windowless nest. The light and air of Earth had
been blanked out in artificial illumination and conditioning.
It was a large room, dim and cluttered. They had picked their way across
a littered floor to a couch from which book-films had been brusquely cleared
and dumped to one side in a tangle.
The man who owned the room had a large, round face on a stumpy, round
body. He moved quickly about on his short legs, jerking his head as he spoke
until his thick glasses all but bounced off the thoroughly inconspicuous
nubble that served as a nose. His thick-lidded, somewhat protuberant eyes
gleamed in myopic good nature at them all, as he seated himself in his own
chair-desk combination, lit directly by the one bright light in the room.
"So good of you to come, gentlemen. Pray excuse the condition of my
room." He waved stubby fingers in a wide-sweeping gesture. "I am engaged in
cataloguing the many objects of extraterrological interest I have accumulated.
It is a tremendous job. For instance--"
He dodged out of his seat and burrowed in a heap of objects beside the
desk till he came up with a smoky-gray object, semi-translucent and roughly
cylindrical. "This," he said, "is a Callistan object that may be a relic of
intelligent nonhuman entities. It is not decided. Not more than a dozen have
been discovered and this is the most perfect single specimen I know of."
He tossed it to one side and Talliaferro jumped. The plump man stared in
his direction and said, "It's not breakable." He sat down again, clasped his
pudgy fingers tightly over his abdomen and let them pump slowly in and out as
he breathed. " And now what can I do for your'
Hubert Mandel had carried through the introductions and Talliaferro was
considering deeply. Surely it was a man named Wendell Urth who had written a
recent book entitled Comparative Evolutionary Processes on Water-Oxygen
Planets, and surely this could not be the man.
He said, " Are you the author of Comparative Evolutionary Processes, Dr.
Urth?"
A beatific smile spread across Urth's face, "You've read it?"
"Well, no, I haven't, but--"
Urth's expression grew instantly censorious. "Then you should. Right
now. Here, I have a copy--"
He bounced out of his chair again and Mandel cried at once, "Now wait,
Urth, first things first. This is serious."
He virtually forced Urth back into his chair and began speaking rapidly
as though to prevent any further side issues from erupting. He told the whole
story with admirable word-economy.
Urth reddened slowly as he listened. He seized his glasses and shoved
them higher up on his nose. "Mass-transference!" he cried.
"I saw it with my own eyes," said Mandel.
"And you never told me."
"I was sworn to secrecy. The man was--peculiar. I explained that."
Urth pounded the desk. "How could you allow such a discovery to remain
the property of an eccentric, Mandel? The knowledge should have been forced
from him by Psychic Probe, if necessary."
"It would have killed him," protested Mandel.
But Urth was rocking back and forth with his hands clasped tightly to
his cheeks. "Mass-transference. The only way a decent, civilized man should
travel. The only possible way. The only conceivable way. If I had known it. If
I could have been there. But the hotel is nearly thirty miles away."
Ryger, who listened with an expression of annoyance on his face,
interposed, "I understand there's a flitter line direct to Convention Hall. It
could have gotten you there in ten minutes."
Urth stiffened and looked at Ryger strangely. His cheeks bulged. He
jumped to his feet and scurried out of the room.
Ryger said, "What the devil?"
Mandel muttered, "Damn it. I should have warned you."
"About what?"
"Dr. Urth doesn't travel on any sort of conveyance. It's a phobia. He
moves about only on foot."
Kaunas blinked about in the dimness. "But he's an extraterrologist,
isn't he? An expert on life forms of other planets?"
Talliaferro had risen and now stood before a Galactic Lens on a
pedestal. He stared at the inner gleam of the star systems. He had never seen
a Lens so large or so elaborate.
Mandel said, "He's an extraterrologist, yes, but he's never visited any
of the planets on which he is expert and he never will. In thirty years, I
doubt if he's ever been more than a mile from this room."
Ryger laughed. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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