Asimov, Isaac Buy Jupiter and Other Stories

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IN THE MONKEY'S FINGER, by the way, the writer and editor were modeled on a real pair, arguing
over a real story in a real way.
The story involved wasC-Chute, which had appeared in the October 1951Galaxy (after the argument)
and which was eventually included in my book NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES. I was the
writer, of course, and Horace Gold was the editor.
Though the argument and the story are authentic, the people are caricatured. I am nothing at all like the
writer in the story and Horace is certainly nothing at all like the editor in the story. Horace has his own
peculiarities which are far more interesting than the ones I made' up for fictional purposes, and so have
I-but never mind that.
Of all the stories I have written that have appeared once and then never again, this next is the one I talk
about most. I have discussed it in dozens of talks and mentioned it in print occasionally, for a very good
reason which I'll come to later.
In April 1953 I was in Chicago. I'm not much of a traveler and that was the first time I was ever in
Chicago (and I have returned since then only once) .I was there to attend an American Chemical Society
convention at which I was supposed to present a small paper. That was little fun, so I thought I would
liven things up by going to Evanston, a northern suburb, and visiting the offices ofUniverse Science
Fiction.
This magazine was then edited by Bea Mahaffey, an extraordinarily good-looking young woman. (The
way I usually put it is that science fiction writers voted her, two years running, the editor to whom they
would most like to submit.)
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When I arrived in the office on April 7, 1953, Bea greeted me with great glee and at once asked why I
had not brought a story for her with me.
You want a story? I said, basking in her beauty. .'I'll write you a story. Bring me a typewriter.
Actually, I was just trying to impress her, hoping that she would throw herself into my arms in a spasm of
wild adoration. She didn't. She brought me a typewriter.
I had to come through. Since the task of climbing Mount Everest was much in the news those days (men
had been trying to scale it for thirty years and the seventh attempt to do so had just failed) I thought
rapidly and wrote EVEREST .
Bea read it, liked it, and offered me thirty dollars, which I accepted with alacrity. I promptly spent half of
it on a fancy dinner for the two of us, and labored with so much success to be charming, debonair, and
suave thatthe waitress said to me, longingly, that she wished her son-in-law were like me.
That seemed hopeful and with a light heart I took Bea home to her apartment. I am not sure what I had
in mind, but if I did have anything in mind that was not completely proper (surely not!) I was foiled. Bea
managed to get into that apartment, leaving me standing in the hallway, without my ever having seen the
door open.
EVEREST
In 1952 they were about ready to give up trying to climb Mount Everest. It was the photographs that
kept them going.
As photographs go, they weren't much; fuzzy, streaked, and with just dark blobs against the white to be
interested in. But those dark blobs were living creatures. The men swore to it.
I said, What the hell, they've been talking about creatures skidding along the Everest glaciers for forty
years. It's about time we did something about it.
Jimmy Robbons (pardon me, James Abram Robbons) was the one who pushed me into that position.
He was always nuts on mountain climbing, you see. He was the one who knew all about how the
Tibetans wouldn't go near Everest because it was the mountain of the gods. He could quote me every
mysterious manlike footprint ever reported in the ice twenty-five thousand feet up; he knew by heart
every tall story about the spindly white creatures, speeding along the crags just over the last
heart-breaking camp which the climbers had managed to establish.
It's good to have one enthusiastic creature of the sort at Planetary Survey headquarters.
The last photographs put bite into his words, though. After all, youmight just barely think they were
men.
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Jimmy said, Look, boss, the point isn't that they're there, the point is that they move fast. Look at that
figure. It's blurred.
The camera might have moved.
The crag here is sharp enough. And the men swear it was running. Imagine the metabolism it must have
to run at that oxygen pressure. Look, boss, would you have believed in deep-sea fish if you'd never
heard of them? You have fish which are looking for new niches in environment which they can exploit, so
they go deeper and deeper into the abyss until one day they find they can't return.
They've adapted so thoroughly they can live only under tons of pressure.
Well
Damn it, can't you reverse the picture? Creatures can be forced up a mountain, can't they? They can
learn to stick it out in thinner air and colder temperatures. They can live on moss or on occasional birds,
just as the deep-sea fish in the last analysis live on the upper fauna that slowly go filtering down. Then,
someday, they find they can't go down again. I don't even say they're men. They can be chamois or
mountain goats or badgers or anything.
I said stubbornly, The witnesses said they were vaguely manlike, and the reported footprints are
certainly manlike.
Or bearlike, said Jimmy. You can't tell. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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