Pebble in the Sky (Galactic Empire, #3)

by Isaac Asimov

If you push us intolerably, is it to be wondered at that we push back? Hating us as you do, can you complain that we hate in our turn? No, no, we are far more the offended

Hate is the incorrect response here - sorrow at their plight and a hearty financial deterrent is best proscribed

That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

Arbin said, “Where do you come from? Are you an—an Outsider?” “What’s an Outsider?” Arbin shrugged and left. But that night had had a great importance for Schwartz, for it was during that short mile toward the shiningness that the strangeness in his mind had coalesced into the Mind Touch. It was what he called it, and the closest he had come, either then or thereafter, to describing it. He had been alone in the darkling purple. His own footsteps against the springy pavement were muted. He hadn’t seen anybody. He hadn’t heard anybody. He hadn’t touched anything. Not exactly . . . It had been something like a touch, but not anywhere on his body. It was in his mind. . . . Not exactly a touch, but a presence—a somethingness there like a velvety tickle. Then there had been two—two touches, distinct, apart. And the second—how could he tell them apart?—had grown louder (no, that wasn’t the right word); it had grown distincter, more definite. And then he knew it was Arbin. He knew it five minutes, at least, before he caught the sound of the biwheel, ten minutes before he laid eyes on Arbin. Thereafter it occurred again and again with increasing frequency. It began to dawn on him that he always knew when Arbin, Loa, or Grew was within a hundred feet of himself, even when he had no reason for knowing, even when he had every reason to suppose the opposite. It was a hard thing to take for granted, yet it began to seem so natural.

Atlantis - stupid CRAB verdsion of piss - Mind Touch

Delicately, inside, Schwartz felt the faint echo of each of Grew’s intense words as they sparked directly from mind to mind. Schwartz felt the mental contacts growing stronger with the days. Maybe, soon, he could hear those tiny words in his mind even when the person thinking them wasn’t talking. And now, for the first time, he finally thought of an alternative to insanity. Had he passed through time, somehow? Slept through, perhaps? He said huskily, “How long since it’s all happened, Grew? How long since the time when there was only one planet?” “What do you mean?” He was suddenly cautious. “Are you a member of the Ancients?” “Of the what? I’m not a member of anything, but wasn’t Earth once the only planet? . . . Well, wasn’t it?”

“That is so. It happens. Our domestic animals exist in greater variety than on any other inhabited world. The orange you ate is a mutated variety, which exists nowhere else. It is this, among other things, which makes the orange so unacceptable for export. Outsiders suspect it as they suspect us—and we ourselves guard it as a valuable property peculiar to ourselves. And of course what applies to animals and plants applies also to microscopic life.” And now, indeed, Arvardan felt the thin pang of fear enter. He said, “You mean—bacteria?” “I mean the whole domain of primitive life. Protozoa, bacteria, and the self-reproducing proteins that some people call viruses.” “And what are you getting at?”

With nothing to do for twenty-four hours but brood on imprisonment, he could have been courting madness. As it was, he could Touch the jailers as they passed, reach out for guardsmen in the adjacent corridors, extend the furthest fibrils of his mind even to the Captain of the Hall in his distant office. He turned the minds over delicately and probed them. They fell apart like so many walnuts—dry husks out of which emotions and notions fell in a sibilant rain.

“Was it the Secretary? Stocky man with a pug nose?” Schwartz had no way of telling the physical appearance of those he Touched only by mind, but—secretary? There had been just a glimpse of a Touch, a powerful one of a man of power, and it seemed he had been a secretary.

“He can sense minds, Arvardan. How much I could do with him. And to be here—to be helpless . . .” “What—what—what—” Arvardan popped wildly. And even Pola’s face somehow gained interest. “Can you really?” she asked Schwartz. He nodded at her. She had taken care of him, and now they would kill her. Yet she was a traitor.

He said, “You mean by my reading their minds? How would that help? Of course I can do more than read minds. How’s that, for instance?” It was a light push, but Arvardan yelped at the sudden pain of it. “I did that,” said Schwartz. “Want more?” Arvardan gasped, “You can do that to the guards? To the Secretary? Why did you let them bring you here? Great Galaxy, Shekt, there’ll be no trouble. Now, listen, Schwartz—

“I know, but it’s the chance we take. Try it now, Schwartz. Have him move his arm when he comes to.” Shekt’s voice was pleading. The Secretary moaned as he lay there, and Schwartz felt the reviving Mind Touch. Silently, almost fearfully, he let it gather strength—then spoke to it. It was a speech that included no words; it was the silent speech you send to your arm when you want it to move, a speech so silent you are not yourself aware of it. And Schwartz’s arm did not move; it was the Secretary’s that did. The Earthman from the past looked up with a wild smile, but the others had eyes only for Balkis—Balkis, that recumbent figure, with a lifting head, with eyes from which the glaze of unconsciousness was vanishing, and an arm which peculiarly and incongruously jerked outward at a ninety-degree angle. Schwartz bent to his task.