from science fiction by
Isaac Asimov

“I offered to present scientific backing for your beliefs. And I did!”

The Cultist’s eyes narrowed bitterly. “Yes, you did—with a fox’s subtlety, for your pretended explanation backed our beliefs, and at the same time removed all necessity for them. You made of the Darkness and of the Stars a natural phenomenon, and removed all its real significance. That was blasphemy.”

“If so, the fault isn’t mine. The facts exist. What can I do but state them?”

“Your ‘facts’ are a fraud and a delusion.”

Aton stamped angrily. “How do you know?”

And the answer came with the certainty of absolute faith. “I know!”

Graham passed a finger over his throat and went through the pantomime of choking to death as unobtrusively as possible. June smiled, nodded, threw him a delicate kiss, and did nothing.

Graham decided to pass a stern, lonely, woman-less life and to have nothing but villainesses in his stories forever after.

“The rules and system of the Administrative set-up must be sufficiently all-embracing and rigid, so that in case of incompetent officials, and sometimes one is appointed . . . you may laugh, but there are incompetent scientists, and news men, and captains too . . . in case of incompetent officials, I say, little harm will be done. For at the worst, the system can move by itself.”

“Yes,” grunted the captain, sourly, “and if a capable administrator should be appointed? He is then caught by the same rigid web and is forced into mediocrity.”

“Not at all,” replied Antyok, warmly. “A capable man can work within the limits of the rules and accomplish what he wishes.”

He would say, “We fit each other, Livvy, and that’s the key fact. When you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and one piece fits another, that’s it. There are no other possibilities, and of course there are no other girls.”

There was an element of secrecy involved in a home library. It breathed of intellectual anarchy.

“If you do not co-operate, you will go to jail directly. You will not see a lawyer, you will not be charged, you will not have a trial. You will simply stay in jail.”

“Oh, no,” said Foster, “you’re bluffing. This is not the twentieth century, you know.”

I reached Marsport for the usual three-day layover before the short hop to Earth.

Ordinarily, Hilda, God bless her, as sweet a wife as any man ever had, would be there waiting for me and we’d have a nice sedate time of it—a nice little interlude for the two of us. The only trouble with that is that Marsport is the rowdiest spot in the System, and a nice little interlude isn’t exactly what fits in. Only, how do I explain that to Hilda, hey?

Well, this time, my mother-in-law, God bless her (for a change) got sick just two days before I reached Marsport, and the night before landing, I got a spacegram from Hilda saying she would stay on Earth with her mother and wouldn’t meet me this one time.

I ’grammed back my loving regrets and my feverish anxiety concerning her mother and when I landed, there I was——

I was in Marsport without Hilda!

“Now you hang on, I’ll get it over with if I have to swim the Grand Canal to the icecap in my underwear, see? If I have to claw Phobos out of the sky. If I have to cut myself in pieces and mail myself parcel post.”

“Gee,” she said, “if I thought I was going to have to wait——”

I winced. She just wasn’t the type to respond to poetry. Actually, she was a simple creature of action—— But after all, if I was going to be drifting through low-gravity in a sea of jasmine perfume with Flora, poetry-response is not the type of qualification I would consider most indispensable.

The typical science fiction fan was an early teen-ager or even a pre-teener who worshipped science the way almost all his peers worshipped baseball. He dreamed of rocket-ships and new electronic marvels as others dreamed of home-runs and double-plays. And where his comrades shot cattle-rustlers with vigor, he himself flasted down the treacherous, be-tentacled monsters of Ganymede.

In short, among others, he was I!

At the start, we (myself and the others) had very little company in our specialized reveries. You can imagine the laughter to which we were subjected when sensible, hard-headed, practical, every-day people discovered we were reading crazy stories about atomic bombs, television, guided missiles, and rockets to the moon. All this was obvious crackpotism that could never come to pass, you see.

Even over trivial 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?

“I’m not surprised you find humans astonishing. They do not obey the Three Laws.”

“That is, indeed, a shortcoming,” said R. Daneel, gravely, “and I think humans themselves are puzzled by humans.”