Takeoff! (30 page)

Well, finally, we circled around her and started closin’ in. We figured we had her this time, but she just waited until we were really close—just stood there, chompin’ grass until we were almost on top of her—and then she took a flyin’ leap between me and the Old Man and tore up the rise toward the Kid.

Well, clanged if that Kid didn’t have his rope out. That mare is comin’ at him at a full gallop, and he just sits there, waitin’, with his lasso ready.

The Old Man bellows at him “Tad! Don’t you rope that horse. She’ll break a leg at that speed!”

But the stupid young sprite don’t even hear—all he sees is that horse.

And when she gets close enough, he throws the loop over her neck.

Now, you know as well as I do that that would have killed any ordinary horse. But not this baby. She comes down on all fours and skids herself to a stop as if she’d had air brakes. Didn’t even tighten the loop much. Then she just stands there, meek and peaceful as you please, while we ride up.

The Old Man tries to chew the Kid out for usin’ a rope, but there ain’t much he can really say. That horse had made fools out of the rest of us, and the Kid had caught her slicker’n a whistle, so the Old Man had to pretty much let it go.

Well, we led that mare back to the ranch and put her in the corral, and the Old Man gave orders to break her to saddle.

Three days later, there wasn’t a man on the ranch that didn’t have bruises allover him. Jake Moffat had a busted arm, Ed Lowey had a dislocated shoulder, and I had a sprained ankle. There wasn’t a man in the outfit that had stayed on that mare more than thirty seconds.

The Kid wanted to try—he was the only one who could get close enough to her to put a saddle on her. But the Old Man said No, and he said it loud and hard.

And then, one mornin’, we hear a ruckus at the corral. I limp over on my game leg as fast as I can, and the rest of the boys come, too’ as best their bruises will let ‘em.

And there’s the Kid, sit tin’ on that golden horse, holdin’ on for dear life, while she cavorts around the place. But he sticks with her, and finally she gentles down and trots around as nice as you please. Some of the boys said she wasn’t buckin’ as hard by a long shot as she had when they were on her, but I figure that’s just a mite of jealousy creepin’ in.

Well, of course, when the Old Man hears about it, he gives the Kid all kinds of hell for disobeyin’ orders, but, again, there ain’t much he can really say. Actually, he’s pretty proud of the Kid, and he can’t help showin’ it.

That evenin’, a bunch of the boys decide they’re gonna take the Kid in to town and show him a real good time. They figure it’s worth a little celebration.

Oh, you saw it, Morty? Yeah, they had him in here, all right. Sam knows the Kid ain’t old enough to drink, but he let on that he didn’t.

The Kid said something about losin’ a few bucks at Blackjack. Said it wasn’t his lucky night.

Where’d they go from here, Mort? Oh? Well, I guess that bunch
really
painted the town red, eh? Bet Mabel and the girls were glad to see ‘em, huh?

Yeah, I know he did a lot of braggin’ about his gold horse. That’s why he decided to ride her into town the next day—just to show off that horse.

What happened? Well, that night in town hadn’t done him much good, I guess, ‘cause he climbed on, that filly took one leap into the air, and the Kid hit the ground. Knocked colder than an Amarillo blizzard—busted his collar bone and his left arm and had a concussion for a week.

The horse cleared that corral fence like she was flyin’ and took off. We ain’t seen her since.

Was she a mutation? Well, she must’ve been. The Kid said that that spot on her forehead was the nub of a horn, and who in the
Hell
ever heard of a horse with a horn?

...NO CONNECTIONS

By Randall Garrett

Isaac Asimov is, I think I dare say , more widely known to the general public than any other science fiction writer [His only rivals are Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. A. B. C. ?], but not, I fear, for his science fiction. For the past two decades his straight science articles and other works, ranging from Biblical commentary to learned discussions of Shakespeare, have outgrossed his science fiction wordage by a ratio of—at a guesstimate—something like a hundred to one.

Twenty years ago, he was merely one of the top science fiction writers in the world. For my money, he still is.

The basic gimmick of this story actually was given to me by John Pomeroy, whose “Progress Report” belongs in a collection like this one. I think the gimmick came from Dr. Albert Einstein’s remark, “If I had it to do allover again, I’d have become a plumber.”

When John suggested it, I thought, “Mmmmm. Given a hundred thousand years, that ought to put the action somewhere in the middle of Isaac’s Second Empire. What the hell—why not?”

“Imitation,” said Ducem Palver, “is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, isn’t it?”

Dr. Nikol Buth inspected what was left of his cigar and decided that between the ash and the chewed stub there was not enough tobacco to make further puffing worthwhile. He dropped it into the disposal and watched the bright flash of light that marked the question that Palver had asked.

“In a way, I suppose—if you can call it imitation to take a hint from a myth and develop something from it.”

Ducem Palver leaned back in his chair. His blue eyes seemed to twinkle beneath his slightly arched brows, although there was no obvious trace of a smile on his round face. “Then,” he said, “you consider mathematical treatment of vast numbers of human beings to be a myth?”

Dr. Buth considered that for a moment. He hardly knew how to speak to his visitor. Palver, he knew, occupied some small post in the Imperium—Imperial Librarian, Third Class—but Buth wasn’t sure just how important the man was nor exactly why he had come. Nor did he know how much Palver knew of archaeology.

Buth said: “I realize that people once believed in such a thing—seven or eight hundred years ago. But the barbaric period of the Interregnum, before the establishment of the Second Galactic Empire, was hardly a period of vast scientific knowledge.” He gestured with one hand. “Oh, I’ll grant you that there may just possibly be something to the old story that a mathematical treatment of the actions of vast masses of human beings was worked out by a scientist of the First Empire and then lost during the Interregnum—but I don’t believe it.”

“Oh?” Palver’s face was bland. “Why not?”

“It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Discoveries are never lost, really. We still have all the technological knowledge that the First Empire had, and much more; myths and legends, on the other hand, have no basis, except in easily explained exaggerations.”

Palver looked the slightest bit defensive. “Why do you call them legends? It seems to me to be a bit too pat to say that those arts which were not lost were real and that those which were lost are legendary.”

Dr. Nikol Buth had long since made up his mind that Ducem Palver was nothing but another small-time, officious bureaucrat who had decided, for some reason, to make a thirty thousand light-year trip from the Imperial capital just to get in his, Buth’s, hair. Inwardly, he sighed. He had walked on eggs before.

Outwardly, he was all smiles. “I’ll admit it sounds odd when you put it that way. But look at it from another angle. We have fairly accurate information on the history of the First Empire; the last ten thousand years of its existence are very accurately documented, thanks to the information found in the old Imperial Library. And we have no mention of ’lost arts’ or anything else like that. None of the records is in the least mysterious. We know that one nonhuman race was found, for instance. Nothing mysterious there; we know what happened to them, how they escaped the First Imperial Government, and their eventual fate.”

Dr. Buth fished in his pocket for another cigar and found none. He got up and walked over to the humidor on his desk, saying: “On the other hand, the records of the Interregnum are scanty, inaccurate, and, in some cases, patently falsified. And it is during the Interregnum that we find legends of supermen, of mental giants who can control the minds of others, and of ‘lost’ sciences which can do wonders.”

Buth lit his cigar, and Ducem Palver nodded his head slowly.

“I see,” the librarian said at last. “Then you don’t believe that a mathematical treatment of the future actions of a mass of people could be formulated?”

“I didn’t say that,” Dr. Buth said, somewhat testily. “I said that I did not believe it was ever done in the past.” Then he forced a smile back onto his face and into his voice. “Not having any such thing as a mathematical system of prediction, I can hardly predict what may be done in the future along those lines.”

Ducem Palver steepled his hands pontifically. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Dr. Buth—however, I understood that you had evolved such a system.”

Dr. Buth exhaled a cloud of smoke slowly. “Tell me, Mr. Palver, why is the Imperial Government interested in this?”

Palver .chuckled deprecatingly. “I am sorry, Dr. Buth. I didn’t intend to lead you to believe that the Imperium was interested. In so far as I know, they are not.” He paused, and his blue eyes seemed to sparkle for a moment with an inner, barely hidden mirth. “Ah, I see that you’re disappointed. I don’t blame you; it would be quite a feather in your cap to have your work recognized by the Imperium, would it not? I’m truly sorry if I misled you.”

Buth shook his head. “Think nothing of it. As a matter of fact, I should be...uh...rather embarrassed if my work came to Imperial notice at this time. But...”

“...But, then, why am I here?” Palver finished for him. “Purely out of personal curiosity, my dear sir, nothing more. Naturally, the records of your published works are on file in the Imperial Library; my position at the Library is that of Keeper of the Files. Have you ever seen the Files?”

Dr. Buth shrugged. “No—but I’ve read descriptions.”

“I’m sure you have. It’s a vast operation to feed all the information of the galaxy into that one great machine to be correlated, cross-indexed, filtered, digested, and abstracted so that it may be available at any time. Only about one billionth of the total information flowing into that machine ever comes to my direct notice, and even then it is fleetingly glanced over and forgotten.

“But my hobby, you see, is History.” He pronounced the word with a respect touching on reverence. “I’m especially interested in the-as you pointed out-incomplete history of the Interregnum. Therefore, when your mathematical theories of archaeology came to my attention, I was interested. It happens that my vacation period came due some weeks ago, so I decided to come here, to Sol III, to...ah...have a chat, as it were.”

Dr. Buth dropped some cigar ash into the dispenser and watched it flare into oblivion. “Well, I’m afraid you may find you’ve come for nothing, Mr. Palver. We’re not investigating Interregnum history, you see.”

Ducem Palver’s blue eyes widened slightly and a faint look of puzzlement came over his cherubic face. “But I understood that you were working on pre-Imperial civilization.”

Dr. Nikol Buth smiled tolerantly. “That’s right, Mr. Palver. Pre-First-Imperial. We’re digging back more than thirty thousand years; we’re looking for the origin of the human race.”

Palver’s face regained its pleasant impassivity. “I see. Hm-m-m.”

“Do you know anything of the Origin Question, Mr. Palver?” Buth asked.

“Some,” admitted Palver. “I believe there are two schools of thought, aren’t there?”

Buth nodded. “The Merger Theory, and the Radiation Theory. According to the Merger Theory, mankind is the natural product of evolution on all worlds with a water-oxygen chemistry and the proper temperatures and gravitational intensities. But according to the Radiation Theory, mankind evolved on only one planet in the galaxy and spread out from that planet after the invention of the first crude hyperspace drive. I might point but that the Merger Theory has been all but abandoned by modern scholars.”

“And yourself?” Palver asked.

“I agree. The Merger Theory is too improbable; it requires too many impossible coincidences. The Radiation Theory is the only probable-one might almost say the only possible-explanation for the existence of Man in the galaxy.”

Palver leaned over and picked up the carrying case which he had placed beside his chair. “I transdeveloped a copy of your ‘Transformations of Symbolic Psychology and Their Application to Human Migration” It was, in fact, this particular work which decided me to come here to Sol III. I’m not much of a mathematician, myself, you understand, but this reminded me so much of the old legends that...well, I was interested.”

Dr. Buth chuckled. “There have been, I recall, legends of invisibility, too—you know, devices which would render a human being invisible to the human eye so that he could go where he pleased, undetected. If you had heard that I had written a paper on the transparency of glass, would you be interested?”

“I see the connection, of course,” said Ducem Palver. “Just how does it apply here?”

“The legend,” Buth said, puffing vigorously on his cigar, “concerns a mathematical system which can predict the actions of vast masses of people—the entire population of the galaxy.

“My work has nothing to do with prediction whatever—unless you want to call it prediction in reverse. I evolved the” system in order to work backwards, into the past; to discover, not what the human race was
going to do
, but what it
had done
. You see, there is one fatal flaw in any mathematical prediction system; if people know what they are supposed to do, they will invariably try to do something else, and that can’t be taken into account in the system. It becomes a positive feedback which automatically destroys the system, you see.”

Palver nodded wordlessly, waiting for Dr. Buth to continue.

“But that flaw doesn’t apply to my work because there can’t be any such feedback into the past. What I have done is trace the human race backwards in time—back more than thirty millennia, through the vast migrations, the movements through the galaxy from one star to another, taking every lead and tracing them all back to their single focal point.”