I opened my mouth to answer, but Doc Lowndes got in there ahead of me. “Oh, damn it, woman,” he exploded. “Isaac didn’t write that letter. Alexis Carrel did. Isaac came in much later.”
The woman looked at her notes, then back at us. Her look wasn’t surprised. Mostly it was-what’s the word I want? Yes: pitying. She looked at us as though she were sorry for us. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, politely enough. “I have it all here.”
“You have it wrong,” Doc told her, and began to try to set her straight.
I wouldn’t have bothered, though the facts were simple enough. Albert Einstein had written to the President claiming that Hitler’s people were on the verge of inventing what he called “an atomic bomb,” and he wanted FDR to start a project so the U.S.A. could build one first. Dr. Alexis Carrel heard about it. He was a biochemist and he didn’t want to see America wasting its time on some atomic-power will-o’-the-wisp. So he persuaded his friend Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh to take a quite different letter to President Roosevelt.
It wasn’t that easy for Lindbergh, because there was a political problem. Lindbergh was certainly a famous man. He was the celebrated Lone Eagle, the man who had flown the Atlantic in nineteen twenty-something all by himself, first man ever to do it. But a decade and a bit later things had changed for Lindbergh. He had unfortunately got a reputation for being soft on the Nazis, and besides he was deeply involved in some right-wing Republican organizations-the America First Committee, the Liberty League, things like that-which had as their principal objective in life leaving Hitler alone and kicking that satanic Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the White House.
All the same, Lindbergh had a lot of powerful friends. It took two months of pulling hard on a lot of strings to arrange it, but he finally got an appointment for five minutes of the President’s time on a slow Thursday morning in Warm Springs, Georgia. And the President actually read Carrel’s letter.
Roosevelt wasn’t a scientist and didn’t even have any scientists near him-scientists weren’t a big deal, back in the thirties. So FDR didn’t really know the difference between a fissioning atomic nucleus and a disease organism, except that he could see that it was cheaper to culture germs in Petri dishes than to build billion-dollar factories to make this funny-sounding, what-do-you-call-it, nuclear explosive stuff, plutonium. And FDR was a little sensitive about starting any new big-spending projects for a while. So Einstein was out, and Carrel was in.
By the time Isaac got drafted and assigned to the secret research facility it was called the Pasadena Project; but by the time Doc got to that point the Saturday Evening Post woman was beginning to fidget. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Lowndes?” she said, glancing at her notes. “But I think my editors would want me to get this sort of thing from Dr. Asimov himself. Excuse me,” she finished, already turning away, with the stars of hero worship beginning to shine in her eyes.
Doc looked at me ruefully. “Reporters,” he said.
I nodded. Then I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. “Let’s listen to what he does tell her,” I suggested, and we trailed after her.
It wasn’t easy to get near Isaac. Apart from the reporters, there were all the public relations staffs of our various publishers and institutes-Don Wollheim ‘s own publishing company, Cyril’s publishers, Bob Lowndes’s, The New York Times, because Damon was the editor of their Book Review. Even my own publisher had chipped in, as well as the galleries that sold Hannes Bok’s paintings and Johnny Michel’s weird silk screens of tomato cans and movie stars’ faces. But it was the U.S. Information Agency that produced most of the muscle, because Isaac was their boy. What was surrounding Isaac was a mob. The reporter was a tough lady, though. An elbow here, a side-slither there, and she was in the front row with her hand up. “Dr. Asimov? Weren’t you the one who wrote the letter to President Roosevelt that started the Pasadena Project?”
“Good lord, no!” Isaac said, “No, it was a famous biochemist of the time, Dr. Alexis Carrel. He was responding to a letter Albert Einstein had written, and-What is it?”
The man from the Daily News had his hand up. “Could you spell that, please, Dr. Asimov?”
“E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. He was a physicist, very well known at the time. Anyway, the President accepted Dr. Carrel’s proposal and they started the Pasadena Project. I happened to be drafted into it, as a very young biochemist, just out of school.”
“But you got to be pretty important,” the woman said loyally. Isaac shrugged. Someone from another videopaper asked him to say more about his experiences, and Isaac, giving us all a humorously apologetic look, did as requested.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t want to dwell on the weapons systems. Everybody knows that it was our typhus bomb that made the Japanese surrender, of course. But it was the peacetime uses that I think are really important. Look around at my old friends here.” He swept a generous arm around the dais, including us all. “If it hadn’t been for the Pasadena Project some of us wouldn’t be here now-do you have any idea how much medicine advanced as a result of what we learned? Antibiotics in 1944, antivirals in 1948, the cancer cure in 1950, the cholesterol antagonist in 1953?”
A California woman got in: “Are you sure the President made the right decision? There are some people who still think that atomic power is a real possibility.”
“Ah, you’re talking about old Eddy Teller.” Isaac grinned. “He’s all right. It’s just that he’s hipped on this one subject. It’s really too bad. He could have done important work, I think, if he’d gone in for real science in 1940, instead of fooling around with all that nuclear stuff.”
There wasn’t any question that Isaac was the superstar, with Cyril getting at least serious second-banana attention, but it wasn’t all the superstars. Quite. Each one of the rest of us got a couple of minutes before the cameras, saying how much each of us had influenced each other and how happy we all were to be seeing each other again. I was pretty sure that most of us would wind up as faces on the cutting-room floor, but what we said, funnily enough, was all pretty true.
And then it was over. People began to leave.
I saw Isaac coming out of the men’s room as I was looking for the woman with my coat. He paused at the window, gazing out at the darkling sky. A big TWA eight-engined plane was coming in, nonstop, probably from someplace like Havana. It was heading toward Idlewild, hardly higher than we were, as I tapped him on the shoulder.
“I didn’t know celebrities went to the toilet,” I told him.
He looked at me tolerantly. “Matter of fact, I was just calling Janet,” he said. “Anyway, how are things going with you, Fred? You’ve been publishing a lot of books. How many, exactly?”
I gave him an honest answer. “I don’t exactly know. I used to keep a list. I’d write the name and date and publisher for each new book on the wall of my office-but then my wife painted over the wall and I lost my list.”
“Approximately how many?”
“Over a hundred, anyway. Depends what you count. The novels, the short-story collections, the nonfiction books”
“Over a hundred,” he said. “And some of them have been dramatized, and book-clubbed, and translated into foreign languages?” He pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “I guess you’re happy about the way your life has gone?”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” And then I gave him another look, because there was something about his tone that startled me. “What are you saying, Eye? Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am!” he said quickly. “Only-well, to tell you the truth, there’s just one thing. Every once in a while I find myself thinking that if things had gone a different way, I might’ve been a pretty successful writer.”
Plato’s Cave
by Poul Anderson
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The message reached Earth as a set of shortwave pulses. A communications satellite relayed it, along with hundreds more, to a groundside clearing station. Since it designated itself private, the station passed it directly on to its recipient, the global headquarters of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation. There a computer programmed with its highly secret code converted digital signals to sight and sound. An image leaped into being, so three-dimensionally complete that startlement brought a gasp from Henry Matsumoto.
The robot shown was no surprise-humanoid but large, bulkily armored, intended for hard labor under tricky conditions. The background, though, was spectacular. Nothing blocked that from view but a couple of structural members. Needing no air, drink, food, little of anything except infrequent refuelings, robots when by themselves traveled in spacecraft quite accurately describable as “barebones. “ At one edge of the screen, a slice of Jupiter’s disc glowed huge, its tawniness swirled with clouds and spotted with storms that could have swallowed Earth whole. Near the lower edge was a glimpse of Io. The sights flitted swiftly past, for the ship was in close orbit around the moon, but the plume of one volcanic outburst upon it dominated the desolation for just this instant, geyserlike above a furious sulfury spout.