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  “It’s very important.” She went to a chair and sat down across from them. “It really can’t wait. Please-just let me talk until I’m finished, and then you can say whatever you want.” She paused. “I wasn’t at Deb’s. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I left the subsection.”

  Her father started; her mother reached for his hand.

  “Not to run strips, I swear,” Amy added hastily. She lowered her eyes, afraid to look directly at them, then told them about her first meeting with Shakira, the run that had ended in disaster, the encounter on the street in Hempstead, what Shakira had said about the group that went Outside, and the challenge she had met that night by facing the open space beyond the City. She wasn’t telling the story very well, having to pause every so often to fill in a detail, but by the time she reached the end, she was sure she had mentioned all the essentials.

  Her parents said nothing throughout, and were silent when she finished. At last she forced herself to raise her head. Her father looked stunned, her mother bewildered.

  “You went Outside?” Alysha whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you terrified?”

  “I was never so scared in my life, but I had to-I-”

  Her father sagged against the couch. “You deliberately disobeyed us.” He sounded more exasperated than angry. “You lied and told us you’d be with Debora Lister. You left the subsection to meet a dubious young woman who’s a damned strip-runner herself, and-”

  “She isn’t,” Amy protested…She doesn’t run any more, and she wouldn’t have with me if I hadn’t insisted-I told you. That was my fault.”

  “At least you’re admitting your guilt,” he said…I let you have your say, so allow me to finish. Now she wants you to traipse around Outside with that group of hers. I forbid it-do you hear? You’re not to have anything more to do with her, and if she calls or comes here, I’ll tell her so myself. I’ll have to be firmer with you, Amy. Since you can’t be honest with us about your doings, you’ll be restricted to this apartment again, and-”

  “Rick.” Alysha’s voice was low, but firm…Let me speak. If joining those people means so much to Amy, then maybe she should.” Ricardo’s face paled as he turned toward his wife…I know she disobeyed us, but I think I can understand why she felt it necessary. Anyway, how much trouble can she get into if a City detective’s with them? They seem harmless enough.”

  “Harmless?” her husband said…Going Outside, deluding themselves that-”

  “Let her go, Rick.” Alysha pressed his hand between both of hers…That young woman told her the truth. You know it’s true-you can see what the Department’s statistical projections show, whether you’ll admit it to yourself or not. If there’s any chance that those people with Elijah Baley can leave Earth, maybe it’s better if Amy goes with them.”

  Amy drew in her breath, startled that her mother was taking her side and confronting her father in her presence. “You’d accept that?” Ricardo asked…What if the Spacers actually allow those people off Earth-not that I think it’s likely, but what if they do? You’re saying you’d be content never to see your daughter again.”

  “I wouldn’t be content-you know better than that. But how can I cling to her if she has a chance, however small, at something else? I know what her life will be here, perhaps better than you do. I’d rather know she’s doing something meaningful to her somewhere else, even if that means we’ll lose her, than to have to go through life pretending I don’t see her frustrations and disappointments. “

  Ricardo heaved a sigh. “I can’t believe I’m hearing you say this.”

  “Oh, Rick.” She released his hand. “You would have expected me to say and do the unexpected years ago.” She smiled at that phrase. “How conventional we’ve become since then.” She gazed at him silently for a bit. “Maybe I’ll go with Amy when she meets that group. I should see what kind of people they are, after all. Maybe I’ll even take a step Outside myself.”

  Her husband frowned, looking defeated. “This is a fine situation,” he said. “Not only do I have a disobedient daughter, but now my wife’s against me, too. If my co-workers hear you’re both wandering around with that group of Baley’s, it may not do me much good in the Department.”

  “Really?” Amy’s mother arched her brows. “They always knew we were both a bit, shall we say, eccentric, and that didn’t bother you once. Perhaps you should come with us to meet Mr. Baley’s group. It’d be wiser to have your colleagues think you’re going along with our actions, however odd or amusing they may find them, than to believe there’s a rift between us.” Her mouth twisted a little. “You know what they say-happy families make for a better City.”

  Ricardo turned toward Amy. “You’d do it again? Go Outside, I mean. You’d actually go through that again?”

  “Yes, I would,” Amy replied. “I know it’ll be hard, but I’d try.”

  “It’s late,” her father said. “I can’t think about this now. “ He stood up and took Alysha by the arm as she rose. “We’ll discuss this tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to consider it. Good night, Amy. “

  “Good night. “

  Her mother was whispering to her father as Amy went to her room. Her father had backed down for now, and her mother was almost certain to bring him around. She undressed for bed, convinced she had won her battle.

  She stretched out, tired and ready to sleep, and soon drifted into a dream. She was on the strips again, riding through an open arch to the Outside, but she wasn’t afraid this time.

  The City slept. The strips and expressways continued to move, carrying the few who were awake-young lovers who had crept out to meet each other, policemen on patrol, hospital workers heading home after a night shift, and restless souls drawn to wander the caverns of New York.

  Amy stood on a strip, a sprinkling of people around her. Four boys raced past her, leaping from strip to strip; for a moment, she was tempted to join their race. She had come out at night a few times before, to practice some moves when the strips were emptier, returning to her subsection before her parents awoke. More riders began to fill the slowest strip; the City was waking. Her parents would be up by the time she got back, but she was sure they would understand why she had been drawn out here tonight.

  Her parents had come with her to meet Elijah Baley and his group. The detective was a tall, dark-haired man with a long, solemn face, but he had brightened a little when Shakira introduced her new recruits. Amy’s mother and father had not gone Outside with them; perhaps they would next time. She knew what an effort it would be for them, and hoped they could find the courage to take that step. They would be with her when the group met again; they had promised that much. When she was able to face the openness without fear, to stride across the ground bravely as Shakira did, maybe she would lead them Outside herself.

  She leaped up, spun around in a dervish, and ran along the strip. The band hummed under her feet; she could hear its music again. She bounded forward, did a handspring, then jumped to the next strip. She danced across the gray bands until she reached the expressway, then hauled herself aboard.

  Her hands tightened around the pole as she recalled her first glimpse of daylight. The whiteness of the snow had been blinding, and above it all, in the painfully clear blue sky, was a bright ball of flame, the naked sun. She had known she was standing on a ball of dirt clad only in a thin veil of air, a speck that was hurtling through a space more vast and empty than anything she could see. The terror had seized her then, driving her back inside, where she had cowered on the floor, sick with fear and despair. But there had also been Shakira’s strong arms to help her up, and Elijah Baley’s voice telling her of his own former fears. Amy had not gone Outside again that day, but she had stood in the open doorway and forced herself to take one more breath of wintry air.

  It was a beginning. She had to meet the challenge if she was ever to lead others Outside, or to follow the hopeful settlers to another world.

  She left
the expressway and danced along the strips, showing her form, imagining that she was running one last race. She was near the Hempstead street where she had met Shakira.

  The street was nearly empty, its store windows darkened. Amy left the strips and hurried toward the tunnel, running along the passageway until her breath came in short, sharp gasps. When she reached the end, she hesitated for only a moment, then pressed her hand against the wall.

  The opening appeared. The muted hum from the distant strips faded behind her, and she was Outside, alone, with the morning wind in her face. The sky was a dark dome above her. She looked east and saw dawn brightening the cave of stars.

  The Asenion Solution

  by Robert Silverberg

  Fletcher stared bleakly at the small mounds of gray that were visible behind the thick window of the storage chamber.

  “Plutonium-186,” he muttered. “Nonsense! Absolute nonsense!”

  “Dangerous nonsense, Lew,” said Jesse Hammond, standing behind him. “Catastrophic nonsense.”

  Fletcher nodded. The very phrase, “plutonium-186,” sounded like gibberish to him. There wasn’t supposed to be any such substance. Plutonium-186 was an impossible isotope, too light by a good fifty neutrons. Or a bad fifty neutrons, considering the risks the stuff was creating as it piled up here and there around the world. But the fact that it was theoretically impossible for plutonium-186 to exist did not change the other, and uglier, fact that he was looking at three kilograms of it right this minute. Or that as the quantity of plutonium-186 in the world continued to increase, so did the chance of an uncontrollable nuclear reaction leading to an atomic holocaust.

  “Look at the morning reports,” Fletcher said, waving a sheaf of faxprints at Hammond. “Thirteen grams more turned up at the nucleonics lab of Accra University. Fifty grams in Geneva. Twenty milligrams in-well, that little doesn’t matter. But Chicago, Jesse, Chicago-three hundred grams in a single chunk!”

  “Christmas presents from the Devil,” Hammond muttered.

  “Not the Devil, no. Just decent serious-minded scientific folk who happen to live in another universe where plutonium-186 is not only possible but also perfectly harmless. And who are so fascinated by the idea that we’re fascinated by it that they keep on shipping the stuff to us in wholesale lots! What are we going to do with it all, Jesse? What in God’s name are we going to do with it all?”

  Raymond Nikolaus looked up from his desk at the far side of the room.

  “Wrap it up in shiny red and green paper and ship it right back to them?” he suggested.

  Fletcher laughed hollowly. ”Very funny, Raymond. Very, very funny.”

  He began to pace the room. In the silence the clicking of his shoes against the flagstone floor seemed to him like the ticking of a detonating device, growing louder, louder, louder…

  He-they, all of them-had been wrestling with the problem all year, with an increasing sense of futility. The plutonium-186 had begun mysteriously to appear in laboratories all over the world-wherever supplies of one of the two elements with equivalent atomic weights existed. Gram for gram, atom for atom, the matching elements disappeared just as mysteriously: equal quantities of tungsten-186 or osmium-186.

  Where was the tungsten and osmium going? Where was the plutonium coming from? Above all, how was it possible for a plutonium isotope whose atoms had only 92 neutrons in its nucleus to exist even for a fraction of a fraction of an instant? Plutonium was one of the heavier chemical elements, with a whopping 94 protons in the nucleus of each of its atoms. The closest thing to a stable isotope of plutonium was plutonium-244, in which 150 neutrons held those 94 protons together; and even at that, plutonium-244 had an inevitable habit of breaking down in radioactive decay, with a half-life of some 76 million years. Atoms of plutonium-186, if they could exist at all, would come dramatically apart in very much less than one seventy-six millionth of a second.

  But the stuff that was turning up in the chemistry labs to replace the tungsten-186 and the osmium-186 had an atomic number of 94, no question about that. And element 94 was plutonium. That couldn’t be disputed either. The defining characteristic of plutonium was the presence of 94 protons in its nucleus. If that was the count, plutonium was what that element had to be.

  This impossibly light isotope of plutonium, this plutonium-186, had another impossible characteristic about it: not only was it stable, it was so completely stable that it wasn’t even radioactive. It just sat there, looking exceedingly unmysterious, not even deigning to emit a smidgen of energy. At least, not when first tested. But a second test revealed positron emission, which a third baffled look confirmed. The trouble was that the third measurement showed an even higher level of radioactivity than the second one. The fourth was higher than the third. And so on and so on.

  Nobody had ever heard of any element, of whatever atomic number or weight, that started off stable and then began to demonstrate a steadily increasing intensity of radioactivity. No one knew what was likely to happen, either, if the process continued unchecked, but the possibilities seemed pretty explosive. The best suggestion anyone had was to turn it to powder and mix it with nonradioactive tungsten. That worked for a little while, until the tungsten turned radioactive too. After that graphite was used, with somewhat better results, to damp down the strange element’s output of energy. There were no explosions. But more and more plutonium-186 kept arriving.

  The only explanation that made any sense-and it did not make very much sense-was that it was coming from some unknown and perhaps even unknowable place, some sort of parallel universe, where the laws of nature were different and the binding forces of the atom were so much more powerful that plutonium-186 could be a stable isotope.

  Why they were sending odd lumps of plutonium-186 here was something that no one could begin to guess. An even more important question was how they could be made to stop doing it. The radioactive breakdown of the plutonium-186 would eventually transform it into ordinary osmium or tungsten, but the twenty positrons that each plutonium nucleus emitted in the course of that process encountered and annihilated an equal number of electrons. Our universe could afford to lose twenty electrons here and there, no doubt. It could probably afford to go on losing electrons at a constant rate for an astonishingly long time without noticing much difference. But sooner or later the shift toward an overall positive charge that this electron loss created would create grave and perhaps incalculable problems of symmetry and energy conservation. Would the equilibrium of the universe break down? Would nuclear interactions begin to intensify? Would the stars-even the Sun-erupt into supernovas?

  “This can’t go on,” Fletcher said gloomily.

  Hammond gave him a sour look. “So? We’ve been saying that for six months now.”

  “It’s time to do something. They keep shipping us more and more and more, and we don’t have any idea how to go about telling them to cut it out.”

  “We don’t even have any idea whether they really exist,” Raymond Nikolaus put in.

  “Right now that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the stuff is arriving constantly, and the more of it we have, the more dangerous it is. We don’t have the foggiest idea of how to shut off the shipments. So we’ve got to find some way to get rid of it as it comes in.”

  “And what do you have in mind, pray tell?” Hammond asked.

  Fletcher said, glaring at his colleague in a way that conveyed the fact that he would brook no opposition, “I’m going to talk to Asenion.”

  Hammond guffawed. “Asenion? You’re crazy!”

  “No. He is. But he’s the only person who can help us.”

  It was a sad case, the Asenion story, poignant and almost incomprehensible. One of the finest minds atomic physics had ever known, a man to rank with Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Meitner. A Harvard degree at twelve, his doctorate from MIT five years later, after which he had poured forth a dazzling flow of technical papers that probed the deepest mysteries of the nuclear binding forces. As the
twenty-first century entered its closing decades he had seemed poised to solve once and for all the eternal riddles of the universe. And then, at the age of twenty-eight, without having given the slightest warning, he walked away from the whole thing.

  “I have lost interest,” he declared. “Physics is no longer of any importance to me. Why should I concern myself with these issues of the way in which matter is constructed? How tiresome it all is! When one looks at the Parthenon, does one care what the columns are made of, or what sort of scaffolding was needed to put them in place? That the Parthenon exists, and is sublimely beautiful, is all that should interest us. So too with the universe. I see the universe, and it is beautiful and perfect. Why should I pry into the nature of its scaffolding? Why should anyone?”

  And with that he resigned his professorship, burned his papers, and retreated to the thirty-third floor of an apartment building on Manhattan’s West Side, where he built an elaborate laboratory-greenhouse in which he intended to conduct experiments in advanced horticulture.

  “Bromeliads,” said Asenion. “I will create hybrid bromeliads. Bromeliads will be the essence and center of my life from now on.”

  Romelmeyer, who had been Asenion’s mentor at Harvard, attributed his apparent breakdown to overwork, and thought that he would snap back in six or eight months. Jantzen, who had had the rare privilege of being the first to read his astonishing dissertation at MIT, took an equally sympathetic position, arguing that Asenion must have come to some terrifying impasse in his work that had compelled him to retreat dramatically from the brink of madness. “Perhaps he found himself looking right into an abyss of inconsistencies when he thought he was about to find the ultimate answers,” Jantzen suggested. “What else could he do but run? But he won’t run for long. It isn’t in his nature.”

  Burkhardt, of Cal Tech, whose own work had been carried out in the sphere that Asenion was later to make his own, agreed with Jantzen’s analysis. “He must have hit something really dark and hairy. But he’ll wake up one morning with the solution in his head, and it’ll be goodbye horticulture for him. He’ll turn out a paper by noon that will revolutionize everything we think we know about nuclear physics, and that’ll be that.”