< previous page page_168 next page >

Page 168
laws of nature (and human nature as well) hold true as we have experienced them, it seems likely that the transfer would use up more energy than it would produce. For this reason, perhaps, Asimov has the transfer effected, mysteriously, by aliens in the alternate universe; he thus avoids raising the question of the energy cost of transfer. The human characters can never know the alien situation, and the aliens have alien concerns.
There is a cost involved, however entropy may not be violated after all and that cost becomes the dynamic force behind the narrative. Asimov commented once that when he wrote fiction he was delighted to find that an element he inserted into a story simply because it occurred to him, later came exactly to hand when he needed it. The complication of The Gods Themselves must have delighted him.
All of this interesting, even fascinating, speculation, however, was esoteric and difficult fictional material. Asimov worked it into fiction by focusing on the nature of discovery. The process by which plutonium-186 was introduced into our universe became the substance of the first half of Part I of the novel.
The Gods Themselves, as Asimov promised Ashmead, is divided into three roughly equal sections. The title of the novel is taken from a line in Friedrich von Schiller's play Jungfrau von Orleans (Joan of Arc), "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain,"1 and each of the three parts has a phrase of the quotation as an epigraph. The first part, "Against Stupidity. . . ," describes how Frederick Hallam discovers plutonium-186. An old reagent bottle labeled "Tungsten Metal" that had been on the desk he had inherited when he came to work at the university one day contains a clear iron-gray metal instead of dusty gray pellets. Hallam takes the metal to be analyzed and discovers that it is the impossible plutonium-186. In subsequent days he discovers that the substance, originally non-radioactive, gradually becomes more radioactive; it emits positrons. For safety, the plutonium-186 is powdered, scattered, and mixed with ordinary tungsten and then, when that grows radioactive, with graphite.
Eventually, at a seminar organized to discuss the problem, the possibility is raised that the plutonium-186 may have come from a parallel Universe (which comes to be called the para-Universe) and then that it
f9a522f89232d5b7d27e9f2bbc694306.gif f9a522f89232d5b7d27e9f2bbc694306.gif
1. The German quotation has been translated by Bartlett's Familiar Quotations as "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain," and by The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as "With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain." Asimov must have obtained his translation from another source.

 
< previous page page_168 next page >