“In other words, gentlemen, while you are right that any change in the course of past events, however trifling, would have incalculable consequences, and while I also believe that you are right in supposing that any random change is much more likely to be for the worse than for the better, I must point out that you are nevertheless wrong in your final conclusions.
“Because THIS is the world in which the Greek chemistry text WAS sent back.
“This has been a Red Queen’s race, if you remember your ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ In the Red Queen’s country, one had to run as fast as one could merely to stay in the same place. And so it was in this case! Tywood may have thought he was creating a new world, but it was I who prepared the translations, and I took care that only such passages as would account for the queer scraps of knowledge the ancients apparently got from nowhere would be included
“And my only intention, for all my racing, was to stay in the same place.”
Three weeks passed; three months; three years. Nothing happened. When nothing happens, you have no proof. We gave up trying to explain, and we ended, the Boss and I, by doubting it ourselves.
The case never ended. Boulder could not be considered a criminal without being considered a world savior as well, and vice versa. He was ignored. And in the end, the case was neither solved, nor closed out; merely put in a file all by itself, under the designation “?” and buried in the deepest vault in Washington.
The Boss is in Washington now; a big wheel. And I’m Regional Head of the Bureau.
Boulder is still assistant professor, though. Promotions are slow at the University.
“The Red Queen’s Race,” my fifty-eighth story, was the first to be written by Dr. Asimov.
In September I began another story, “Mother Earth,” and submitted it to Campbell on October 12, 1948. After a comparatively small revision of the ending, he took that one, too.
Mother Earth
“But can you be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Gustav Stein, who delivered himself of that mocking question with a whiskered smile and a gentle wipe at the gray mustache from the neighborhood of which he had just removed an empty glass, was not an historian. He was a physiologist.
But his companion was an historian, and he accepted the gentle thrust with a smile of his own.
Stein’s apartment was, for Earth, quite luxurious. It lacked the empty privacy of the Outer Worlds, of course, since from its window there stretched outward a phenomenon that belonged only to the home planet-a city. A large city, full of people, rubbing shoulders, mingling sweat
Nor was Stein’s apartment fitted with its own power and its own utility supply. It lacked even the most elementary quota of positronic robots. In short, it lacked the dignity of self-sufficiency, and like all things on Earth, it was merely part of a community, a pendant unit of a cluster, a portion of a mob.
But Stein was an Earthman by birth and used to it. And after all, by Earth standards the apartment was still luxurious.
It was just that looking outward through the same windows before which lay the city, one could see the stars and among them the Outer Worlds, where there were no cities but only gardens; where the lawns were streaks of emerald, where all human beings were kings, and where all good Earthmen earnestly and vainly hoped to go some day.
Except for a few who knew better-like Gustav Stein.
The Friday evenings with Edward Field belonged to that class of ritual which comes with age and quiet life. It broke the week pleasantly for two elderly bachelors, and gave them an innocuous reason to linger over the sherry and the stars. It took them away from the crudities of life, and, most of all, it let them talk.
Field, especially, as a lecturer, scholar and man of modest means quoted chapter and verse from his still uncompleted history of Terrestrian Empire.
“I wait for the last act, “ he explained. “Then I can call it the ‘Decline and Fall of Empire’ and publish it.”
“You must expect the last act to come soon, then.”
“In a sense, it has come already. It is just that it is best to wait for all to recognize that fact. You see, there are three times when an Empire or an Economic System or a Social Institution falls, you skeptic-”
Field paused for effect and waited patiently for Stein to say, “ And those times are?”
“First,” Field ticked off a right forefinger, “there is the time when just a little nub shows up that points an inexorable way to finality. It can’t be seen or recognized until the finality arrives, when the original nub becomes visible to hindsight.”
“And you can tell what that little nub is?”
“I think so, since I already have the advantage of a century and a half of hindsight. It came when the Sirian sector colony, Aurora, first obtained permission of the Central Government at Earth to introduce positronic robots into their community life. Obviously, looking back at it, the road was clear for the development of a thoroughly mechanized society based upon robot labor and not human labor. And it is this mechanization that has been and will yet be the deciding factor in the struggle between the Outer Worlds and Earth.”
“It is?” murmured the physiologist. “How infernally clever you historians are. What and where is the second time the Empire fell?”
“The second point in time,” and Field gently bent his right middle finger backward, “arrives when a signpost is raised for the expert so large and plain that it can be seen even without the aid of perspective. And that point has been passed, too, with the first establishment of an immigration quota against Earth by the Outer Worlds. The fact that Earth found itself unable to prevent an action so obviously detrimental to itself was a shout for all to hear, and that was fifty years ago.”
“Better and better. And the third point?”
“The third point?” Down went the ring finger. “That is the least important. That is when the signpost becomes a wall with a huge ‘The End’ scrawled upon it. The only requirement for knowing that the end has come, then, is neither perspective nor training, but merely the ability to listen to the video.”
“I take it that the third point in time has not yet come.”
“Obviously not, or you would not need to ask. Yet it may come soon; for instance, if there is war.”
“Do you think there will be?”
Field avoided commitment. “Times are unsettled, and a good deal of futile emotion is sweeping Earth on the immigration question. And if there should be a war, Earth would be defeated quickly and lastingly, and the wall would be erected.”
“Can you be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Field smiled. He said: “You may know something I do not. For instance, they talk about something called the ‘Pacific Project.’ “
“I never heard of it.” Stein refilled the two glasses, “Let us speak of other things.”
He held up his glass to the broad window So that the far stars flickered rosily in the clear liquid and said: “To a happy ending to Earth’s troubles.”
Field held up his own, “To the Pacific Project.”
Stein sipped gently and said: “But we drink to two different things.”
“Do we?”
It is quite difficult to describe any of the Outer Worlds to a native Earthman, since it is not So much a description of a world that is required as a description of a state of mind. The Outer Worlds-some fifty of them, originally colonies, later dominions, later nations-differ extremely among themselves in a physical sense. But the state of mind is somewhat the same throughout.
It is something that grows out of a world not originally congenial to mankind, yet populated by the cream of the difficult, the different, the daring, the deviant.
If it is to be expressed in a word, that word is “individuality.”
There is the world of Aurora, for instance, three parsecs from Earth. It was the first planet settled outside the Solar System, and represented the dawn of interstellar travel. Hence its name.
It had air and water to start with, perhaps, but on Earthly standards it was rocky and infertile. The plant life that did exist, sustained by a yellow-green pigment completely unrelated to chlorophyll and not as efficient, gave the comparatively fertile regions a decidedly bilious and unpleasant appearance to unaccustomed eyes. No animal life higher than unicellular, and the equivalent of bacteria as well, were present. Nothing dangerous, naturally, since the two biological systems, of Earth and Aurora, were chemically unrelated.
Aurora became, quite gradually, a patchwork. Grains and fruit trees came first; shrubs, flowers, and grass afterward. Herds of livestock followed. And, as if it were necessary to prevent too close a copy of the mother planet, positronic robots also came to build the mansions, carve the landscapes, lay the power units. In short, to do the work, and turn the planet green and human.
There was the luxury of a new world and unlimited mineral resources. There was the splendid excess of atomic power laid out on new foundations with merely thousands, or, at most, millions, not billions, to service. There was the vast flowering of physical science, in worlds where there was room for it.