Isaac Asimov - Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.pdf

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CONTENTS
BUY JUPITER AND OTHER STORIES
1
DAY OF THE HUNTERS 2
SHAH GUIDO G. 8
BUTTON, BUTTON 14
THE MONKEY'S FINGER 22
EVEREST 28
THE PAUSE
31
LET'S NOT 39
EACH AN EXPLORER
42
BLANK! 50
DOES A BEE CARE?
53
SILLY ASSES 56
BUY JUPITER 58
A STATUE FOR FATHER 61
RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY 65
FOUNDING FATHER
70
EXILE TO HELL 73
KEY ITEM 76
To all the editors, whose careers
at one time or another,
have intersected my own-
good fellows, every one.
In THE EARLY ASIMOV I mentioned the fact that there were eleven
stories that I had never succeeded in selling. What's more, said I in that
book, all eleven stories no longer existed and must remain forever in limbo.
However, Boston University collects all my papers with an assiduity
and determination worthy of a far better cause, and when they first began to
do so back in 1966, I handed them piles and piles of manuscript material I
didn't look through.
Some eager young fan did, though. Boston University apparently allows
the inspection of its literary collections for research purposes, and this
young fan, representing himself as a literary historian, I suppose, got access
to my files. He came across the faded manuscript of Big Game, a thousand-
word short-short which I had listed in THE EARLY ASIMOV as the
eleventh and last of my lost rejections.
Columbia Publications, and reveling in the science fiction boom of the
period, asked me for a story. I must have remembered Big Game, written
eight years earlier, for I produced DAY OF THE HUNTERS, which was an
expanded version of the earlier story, and Had published it in the November
1950 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories.
DAY OF THE HUNTERS
It began the same night it ended. It wasn't much. It just bothered me; it
still bothers me.
You see, Joe Bloch, Ray Manning, and I were squatting around our
favorite table in the corner bar with an evening on our hands and a mess of
chatter to throw it away with. That's the beginning.
Joe Bloch started it by talking about the atomic bomb, and what he
thought ought to be done with it, and how who would have thought it five
years ago. And I said lots of guys thought it five years ago and wrote
stories about it and it was going to be tough on them trying to keep ahead
of the newspapers now. Which led to a general palaver on how lots of
screwy things might come true and a lot of for-instances were thrown
have lots of friends but I have the same lot and none of them know any big-
shot scientists. But he said never mind how he heard, take it or leave it.
And then there wasn't anything to do but talk about time machines, and
how supposing you went back and killed your own grandfather or why
didn't somebody from the future come back and tell us who was going to
win the next war, or if there was going to be a next war, or if there'd be
anywhere on Earth you could live after it, regardless of who wins.
Ray thought just knowing the winner in the seventh race while the sixth
was being run would he something.
But Joe decided different. He said, "The trouble with you guys is you
got wars and races on the mind. Me, I got curiosity. Know what I'd do if I
had a time machine?"
So right away we wanted to know, all ready to give him the old snicker
whatever it was.
He said, "If I had one, I'd go back in time about a couple or five or fifty
million years and find out what happened to the dinosaurs."
Which was too bad for Joe, because Ray and I both thought there was
just about no sense to that at all. Ray said who cared about a lot of
dinosaurs and I said the only thing they were good for was to make a mess
of skeletons for guys who were dopy enough to wear out the floors in
houses, too - all over the place. And then, all of a sudden, like that," and he
snaps his fingers, "there aren't any anymore."
How come, we wanted to know.
But he was just finishing a beer and waving at Charlie for another with a
coin to prove he wanted to pay for it and he just shrugged his shoulders. "I
don't know. That's what I'd find out, though."
That's all. That would have finished it. I would've said something and
Ray would've made a crack, and we all would've had another beer and
maybe swapped some talk about the weather and the Brooklyn Dodgers and
then said so long, and never think of dinosaurs again.
Only we didn't, and now I never have anything on my mind but
dinosaurs, and I feel sick.
Because the rummy at the next table looks up and hollers, "Hey!"
We hadn't seen him. As a general rule, we don't go around looking at
rummies we don't know in bars. I got plenty to do keeping track of the
rummies I do know. This fellow had a bottle before him that was half
empty, and a glass in his hand that was half full.
He said, "Hey," and we all looked at him, and Ray said, "Ask him what
he wants, Joe."

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