Asimov, Isaac Pebble in the Sky ISBN 13: 9780765319135

Pebble in the Sky - Softcover

9780765319135: Pebble in the Sky
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil―so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty.

Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.

This is young Isaac Asimov's first novel, full of wonders and ideas, the book that launched the novels of the Galactic Empire, culminating in the Foundation books and novels. It is also one of that select group of SF adventures that since the early 1950s has hooked generations of teenagers on reading science fiction. This is Golden Age SF at its finest.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Born in Russia, Isaac Asimov lived in Boston and in New York City for most of his life. He died in 1992 at the age of seventy-two.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Two minutes before he disappeared forever from the face of the Earth he knew, Joseph Schwartz strolled along the pleasant streets of suburban Chicago quoting Browning to himself.
In a sense this was strange, since Schwartz would scarcely have impressed any casual passerby as the Browning-quoting type. He looked exactly what he was: a retired tailor, thoroughly lacking in what the sophisticates of today call a “formal education.” Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a smattering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight.
For instance, he had read Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra twice when he was younger, so, of course, knew it by heart. Most of it was obscure to him, but those first three lines had become one with the beating of his heart these last few years. He intoned them to himself, deep within the silent fortress of his mind, that very sunny and very bright early summer day of 1949:
“Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made...”
Schwartz felt that to its fullness. After the struggles of youth in Europe and those of his early manhood in the United States, the serenity of a comfortable old age was pleasant. With a house of his own and money of his own, he could, and did, retire. With a wife in good health, two daughters safely married, a grandson to soothe these last best years, what had he to worry about?
There was the atom bomb, of course, and this somewhat lascivious talk about World War III, but Schwartz was a believer in the goodness of human nature. He didn’t think there would be another war. He didn’t think Earth would ever see again the sunlike hell of an atom exploded in anger. So he smiled tolerantly at the children he passed and silently wished them a speedy and not too difficult ride through youth to the peace of the best that was yet to be.
He lifted his foot to step over a Raggedy Ann doll smiling through its neglect as it lay there in the middle of the walk, a foundling not yet missed. He had not quite put his foot down again... In another part of Chicago stood the Institute for Nuclear Research, in which men may have had theories upon the essential worth of human nature but were half ashamed of them, since no quantitative instrument had yet been designed to measure it. When they thought about it, it was often enough to wish that some stroke from heaven would prevent human nature (and damned human ingenuity) from turning every innocent and interesting discovery into a deadly weapon.
Yet, in a pinch, the same man who could not find it in his conscience to curb his curiosity into the nuclear studies that might someday kill half of Earth would risk his life to save that of an unimportant fellow man.
It was the blue glow behind the chemist’s back that first attracted the attention of Dr. Smith.
He peered at it as he passed the half-open door. The chemist, a cheerful youngster, was whistling as he tipped up a volumetric flask, in which the solution had already been made up to volume. A white powder tumbled lazily through the liquid, dissolving in its own good time. For a moment that was all, and then Dr. Smith’s instinct, which had stopped him in the first place, stirred him to action.
He dashed inside, snatched up a yardstick, and swept the contents of the desk top to the floor. There was the deadly hiss of molten metal. Dr. Smith felt a drop of perspiration slip to the end of his nose.
The youngster stared blankly at the concrete floor along which the silvery metal had already frozen in thin splash marks. They still radiated heat strongly.
He said faintly, “What happened?”
Dr. Smith shrugged. He wasn’t quite himself either. “I don’t know. You tell me.... What’s been doing here?”
“Nothing’s been doing here,” the chemist yammered. “That was just a sample of crude uranium. I’m making an electrolytic copper determination.... I don’t know what could have happened.”
“Whatever happened, young man, I can tell you what I saw. That platinum crucible was showing a corona. Heavy radiation was taking place. Uranium, you say?”
“Yes, but crude uranium, and that isn’t dangerous. I mean, extreme purity is one of the most important qualifications for fission, isn’t it?” He touched his tongue to his lips quickly. “Do you think it was fission, sir? It’s not plutonium, and it wasn’t being bombarded.”
“And,” said Dr. Smith thoughtfully, “it was below the critical mass. Or, at least, below the critical masses we think we know.” He stared at the soapstone desk, at the burned and blistered paint of the cabinets and the silvery streaks along the concrete floor. “Yet uranium melts at about 1800 degrees Centigrade, and nuclear phenomena are not so well known that we can afford to talk too glibly. After all, this place must be fairly saturated with stray radiations. When the metal cools, young man, it had better be chipped up, collected, and thoroughly analyzed.”
He gazed thoughtfully about him, then stepped to the opposite wall and felt uneasily at a spot about shoulder height.
“What’s this?” he said to the chemist. “Has this always been here?”
“What, sir?” The young man stepped up nervously and glanced at the spot the older man indicated. It was a tiny hole, one that might have been made by a thin nail driven into the wall and withdrawn—but driven through plaster and brick for the full thickness of the building’s wall, since daylight could be seen through it.
The chemist shook his head, “I never saw that before. But I never looked for it, either, sir.”
Dr. Smith said nothing. He stepped back slowly and passed the thermostat, a parallelopiped of a box made out of thin sheet iron. The water in it moved swirlingly as the stirrer turned in motor-driven monomania, while the electric bulbs beneath the water, serving as heaters, flicked on and off distractingly, in time with the clicking of the mercury relay.
“Well, then, was this here?” And Dr. Smith scraped gently with his fingernail at a spot near the top of the wide side of the thermostat. It was a neat, tiny circle drilled through the metal. The water did not quite reach it.
The chemist’s eyes widened. “No, sir, that wasn’t there ever before. I’ll guarantee that.”
“Hmm. Is there one on the other side?”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I mean, yes, sir!”
“All right, come round here and sight through the holes.... Shut the thermostat off, please. Now stay there.” He placed his finger on the hole in the wall. “What do you see?” he called out.
“I see your finger, sir. Is that where the hole is?”
Dr. Smith did not answer. He said, with a calmness he was far from feeling, “Sight through in the other direction.... Now what do you see?”
“Nothing now.”
“But that’s the place where the crucible with the uranium was standing. You’re looking at the exact place, aren’t you?”
Reluctantly, “I think so, sir.”<

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherOrb Books
  • Publication date2010
  • ISBN 10 0765319136
  • ISBN 13 9780765319135
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780008372354: Pebble in the Sky

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780008372354
Publisher: HarperVoyager, 2019
Softcover

  • 9780593160046: Pebble in the Sky (Galactic Empire)

    Del Rey, 2020
    Softcover

  • 9780765319128: Pebble in the Sky

    Tor Books, 2008
    Hardcover

  • 9780553293425: Pebble in the Sky (The Empire Novels)

    Spectra, 1991
    Softcover

  • 9780385419536: Pebble in the Sky (The Isaac Asimov Collection Edition)

    Doubleday, 1986
    Hardcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Asimov, Isaac
Published by Orb Books (2010)
ISBN 10: 0765319136 ISBN 13: 9780765319135
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0765319136

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 53.30
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.50
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Asimov, Isaac
Published by Orb Books (2010)
ISBN 10: 0765319136 ISBN 13: 9780765319135
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
LibraryMercantile
(Humble, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # newMercantile_0765319136

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 60.68
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Asimov, Isaac
Published by Orb Books (2010)
ISBN 10: 0765319136 ISBN 13: 9780765319135
New Softcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0765319136

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 60.28
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Asimov, Isaac
Published by Orb Books (2010)
ISBN 10: 0765319136 ISBN 13: 9780765319135
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0765319136

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 61.08
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Asimov, Isaac
Published by Orb Books (2010)
ISBN 10: 0765319136 ISBN 13: 9780765319135
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0765319136

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 63.87
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds