The white powder was confined within a thin-walled, transparent capsule. The capsule was heat-sealed into a double strip of parafilm. Along that strip of parafilm were other capsules at six-inch intervals.
The strip moved. Each capsule in the course of events rested for one minute on a metal jaw immediately beneath a mica window. On another portion of the face of the radiation counter a number clicked out upon an unrolling cylinder of paper. The capsule moved on; the next took its place.
The number printed at 1:45 P.M. was 308. A minute later 256 appeared. A minute later, 391. A minute later, 477. A minute later, 202. A minute later, 251. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000. A minute later, 000.
Shortly after 2 P.M. Mr. Alexander Johannison passed by the counter and the comer of one eye stubbed itself over the row of figures. Two steps past the counter he stopped and returned.
He ran the paper cylinder backward, then restored its position and said, “Nuts!”
He said it with vehemence. He was tall and thin, with big-knuckled hands, sandy hair, and light eyebrows. He looked tired and, at the moment, perplexed.
Gene Damelli wandered his way with the same easy carelessness he brought to all his actions. He was dark, hairy, and on the short side. His nose had once been broken and it made him look curiously unlike the popular conception of the nuclear physicist.
Damelli said, “My damned Geiger won't pick up a thing, and I'm not in the mood to go over the wiring. Got a cigarette?”
Johannison held out a pack. “What about the others in the building?”
“I haven't tried them, but I guess they haven't all gone.”
“Why not? My counter isn't registering either.”
“No kidding. You see? All the money invested, too. It doesn't mean a thing. Let's step out for a Coke.”
Johannison said with greater vehemence than he intended, “No! I'm going to see George Duke. I want to see his machine. If it's off-”
Damelli tagged along. “It won't be off, Alex. Don't be an ass.”
George Duke listened to Johannison and watched him disapprovingly over rimless glasses. He was an old-young man with little hair and less patience.
He said, “I'm busy.”
“Too busy to tell me if your rig is working, for heaven's sake?”
Duke stood up. “Oh, hell, when does a man have time to work around here?” His slide rule fell with a thud over a scattering of ruled paper as he rounded his desk.
He stepped to a cluttered lab table and lifted the heavy gray leaden top from a heavier gray leaden container. He reached in with a two-foot-long pair of tongs, and took out a small silvery cylinder.
Duke said grimly, “Stay where you are.”
Johannison didn't need the advice. He kept his distance. He had not been exposed to any abnormal dosage of radioactivity over the past month but there was no sense getting any closer than necessary to “hot” cobalt.
Still using the tongs, and with arms held well away from his body, Duke brought the shining bit of metal that contained the concentrated radioactivity up to the window of his counter. At two feet, the counter should have chattered its head off. It didn't.
Duke said, “Guk!” and let the cobalt container drop. He scrabbled madly for it and lifted it against the window again. Closer.
There was no sound. The dots of light on the scaler did, not show. Numbers did not step up and up.
Johannison said, “Not even background noise.” Damelli said, “Holy jumping Jupiter!”
Duke put the cobalt tube back into its leaden sheath, as gingerly as ever, and stood there, glaring.
Johannison burst into Bill Everard's office, with Damelli at his heels. He spoke for excited minutes, his bony hands knuckly white on Everard's shiny desk. Everard listened, his smooth, fresh-shaven cheeks turning pink and his plump neck bulging out a bit over his stiff, white collar.
Everard looked at Damelli and pointed a questioning thumb at Johannison. Damelli shrugged, bringing his hands forward, palms upward, and corrugating his forehead.
Everard said, “I don't see how they can all go wrong.”
“They have, that's all,” insisted Johannison. “They all went dead at about two o'clock. That's over an hour ago now and none of them is back in order. Even George Duke can't do anything about it. I'm telling you, it isn't the counters.”
“You're saying it is.”
“I'm saying they're not working. But that's not their fault. There's nothing for them to work on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there isn't any radioactivity in this place. In this whole building. Nowhere.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Listen, if a hot cobalt cartridge won't start up a counter, maybe there's something wrong with every counter we try. But when that same cartridge won't discharge a gold-leaf electroscope and when it won't even fog a photographic film, then there's something wrong with the cartridge.”
“All right,” said Everard, “so it's a dud. Somebody made a mistake and never filled it.”
“The same cartridge was working this morning, but never mind that. Maybe cartridges can get switched somehow. But I got that hunk of pitchblende from our display box on the fourth floor and that doesn't register either. You're not going to tell me that someone forgot to put the uranium in it.”
Everard rubbed his ear. “What do you think, Damelli?”
Damelli shook his head. “I don't know, boss. Wish I did.”
Johannison said, “It's not the time for thinking. It's a time for doing. You've got to call Washington.”
“What about?” asked Everard. “About the A-bomb supply.”
“What?”
“That might be the answer, boss. Look, someone has figured out a way to stop radioactivity, all of it. It might be blanketing the country, the whole U.S.A. If that's being done, it can only be to put our A-bombs out of commission. They don't know where we keep them, so they have to blank out the nation. And if that's right, it means an attack is due. Any minute, maybe. Use the phone, boss!”
Everard's hand reached for the phone. His eyes and Johannison's met and locked.
He said into the mouthpiece, “An outside call, please.”
It was five minutes to four. Everard put down the phone.
“Was that the commissioner?” asked Johannison.
“Yes,” said Everard. He was frowning.
“All right. What did he say?”
“'Son,'“ said Everard, “he said to me, 'What A-bombs?'“
Johannison looked bewildered. “What the devil does he mean, 'What A-bombs?' I know! They've already found out they've got duds on their hands, and they won't talk. Not even to us. Now what?”
“Now nothing,” said Everard. He sat back in his chair and glowered at the physicist. “ Alex, I know the kind of strain you're under; so I'm not going to blow up about this. What bothers me is, how did you get me started on this nonsense?”
Johannison paled. “This isn't nonsense. Did the commissioner say it was?”
“He said I was a fool, and so I am. What the devil do you mean coming here with your stories about A-bombs? What are A-bombs? I never heard of them.”
“You never heard of atom bombs? What is this? A gag?”
“I never heard of them. It sounds like something from a comic strip.”
Johannison turned to Damelli, whose olive complexion had seemed to deepen with worry. “Tell him, Gene.”
Damelli shook his head. “Leave me out of this.”
“All right.” Johannison leaned forward, looking at the line of books in the shelves about Everard's head. “I don't know what this is all about, but I can go along with it. Where's Glasstone?”
“Right there,” said Everard.
“No. Not the Textbook of Physical Chemistry. I want his Sourcebook on Atomic Energy.”
“Never heard of it.”
“What are you talking about? It's been here in your shelf since I've been here.”
“Never heard of it,” said Everard stubbornly.
“I suppose you haven't heard of Kamen's Radioactive Tracers in Biology either?”
“No.”
Johannison shouted, “All right. Let's use Glasstone's Textbook then. It will do.”
He brought down the thick book and flipped the pages. First once, then a second time. He frowned and looked at the copyright page. It said: Third Edition, 1956. He went through the first two chapters page by page. It was there, atomic structure, quantum numbers, electrons and their shells, transition series-but no radioactivity, nothing about that.
He turned to the table of elements on the inside front cover. It took him only a few seconds to see that there were only eighty-one listed, the eighty-one nonradioactive ones.
Johannison's throat felt bricky-dry. He said huskily to Everard, “I suppose you never heard of uranium.”
“What's that?” asked Everard coldly. “ A trade name?” Desperately, Johannison dropped Glasstone and reached for the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. He used the index. He looked up radioactive series, uranium, plutonium, isotopes. He found only the last. With fumbling, jittery fingers he turned to the table of isotopes. Just a glance. Only the stable isotopes were listed.
He said pleadingly, “All right. I give up. Enough's enough. You've set up a bunch of fake books just to get a rise out of me, haven't you?” He tried to smile.
Everard stiffened. “Don't be a fool, Johannison. You'd better go home. See a doctor.”
“There's nothing wrong with me.”
“You may not think so, but there is. You need a vacation, so take one. Damelli, do me a favor. Get him into a cab and see that he gets home.”
Johannison stood irresolute. Suddenly he screamed, “Then what are all the counters in this place for? What do they do?”
“I don't know what you mean by counters. If you mean computers, they're here to solve our problems for us.”
Johannison pointed to a plaque on the wall. “All right, then. See those initials. A! E! C! Atomic! Energy! Commission!” He spaced the words, staccato.
Everard pointed in turn. “ Air! Experimental! Commission! Get him home, Damelli.”
Johannison turned to Damelli when they reached the sidewalk. Urgently he whispered, “Listen, Gene, don't be a setup for that guy. Everard's sold out. They got to him some way. Imagine them setting up the faked books and trying to make me think I'm crazy.”
“You heard him. He never heard of A-bombs. Uranium's a trade name. How can he be all right?”
“If it comes to that, I never heard of A-bombs or uranium.”
He lifted a finger. “Taxi!” It whizzed by.
Johannison got rid of the gagging sensation. “Gene! You were there when the counters quit. You were there when the pitchblende went dead. You came with me to Everard to get the thing straightened out.”
“If you want the straight truth, Alex, you said you had something to discuss with the boss and you asked me to come along, and that's all I know about it. Nothing went wrong as far as I know, and what the devil would we be doing with this pitchblende? We don't use any tar in the place. -Taxi!”
A cab drew up to the curb.
Damelli opened the door, motioned Johannison in. Johannison entered, then, with red-eyed fury, fumed, snatched the door out of Damelli's hand, slammed it closed, and shouted an address at the cab driver. He leaned out the window as the cab pulled away, leaving Damelli stranded and staring.
Johannison cried, “Tell Everard it won't work. I'm wise to all of you.”
He fell back into the upholstery, exhausted. He was sure Damelli had heard the address he gave. Would they get to the FBI first with some story about a nervous breakdown? Would they take Everard's word against his? They couldn't deny the stopping of the radioactivity. They couldn't deny the faked books.
But what was the good of it? An enemy attack was on its way and men like Everard and Damelli-How rotten with treason was the country?
He stiffened suddenly. “Driver!” he cried. Then louder, “Driver!”
The man at the wheel did not turn around. The traffic passed smoothly by them.
Johannison tried to struggle up from his seat, but his head was swimming.
“Driver!” he muttered. This wasn't the way to the FBI. He was being taken home. But how did the driver know where he lived?
A planted driver, of course. He could scarcely see and there was a roaring in his ears.
Lord, what organization! There was no use fighting! He blacked out!
He was moving up the walk toward the small, two-story, brick-fronted house in which Mercedes and he lived. He didn't remember getting out of the cab.
He fumed. There was no taxicab in sight. Automatically, he felt for his wallet and keys. They were there. Nothing had been touched.
Mercedes was at the door, waiting. She didn't seem surprised at his return. He looked at his watch quickly. It was nearly an hour before his usual homecoming.
He said, “Mercy, we've got to get out of here and-”
She said huskily, “I know all about it, Alex. Come in.” She looked like heaven to him. Straight hair, a little on the blond side, parted in the middle and drawn into a horse tail; wide-set blue eyes with that slight Oriental tilt, full lips, and little ears set close to the head. Johannison's eyes devoured her.
But he could see she was doing her best to repress a certain tension.
He said, “Did Everard call you? Or Damelli?” She said, “We have a visitor.”
He thought, They've got to her.
He might snatch her out of the doorway. They would run, try to make it to safety. But how could they? The visitor would be standing in the shadows of the hallway. It would be a sinister man, he imagined, with a thick, brutal voice, and foreign accent, standing there with a hand in his jacket pocket and a bulge there that was bigger than his hand.
Numbly he stepped inside.
“In the living room,” said Mercedes. A smile flashed momentarily across her face. “I think it's all right.”
The visitor was standing. He had an unreal look about him, the unreality of perfection. His face and body were flawless and carefully devoid of individuality. He might have stepped off a billboard.
His voice had the cultured and unimpassioned sound of the professional radio announcer. It was entirely free of accent.
He said, “It was quite troublesome getting you home, Dr. Johannison.”
Johannison said, “Whatever it is, whatever you want, I’m not cooperating.”
Mercedes broke in. “No, Alex, you don't understand. We've been talking. He says all radioactivity has been stopped.”
“Yes, it has, and how I wish this collar-ad could tell me how it was done! Look here, you, are you an American?”
“You still don't understand, Alex,” said his wife. “It's stopped all over the world. This man isn't from anywhere on Earth. Don't look at me like that, Alex. It's true. I know it's true. Look at him.”
The visitor smiled. It was a perfect smile. He said, “This body in which I appear is carefully built up according to specification, but it is only matter. It's under complete control.” He held out a hand and the skin vanished. The muscles, the straight tendons, and crooked veins were exposed. The walls of the veins disappeared and blood flowed smoothly without the necessity of containment. All dissolved to the appearance of smooth gray bone. That went also.
Then all reappeared.
Johannison muttered, “Hypnotism!”
“Not at all,” said the visitor, calmly.
Johannison said, “Where are you from?”
The visitor said, “That's hard to explain. Does it matter?”
“I've got to understand what's going on,” cried Johannison. “Can't you see that?”
“Yes, I can. It's why I'm here. At this moment I am speaking to a hundred and more of your people all over your planet. In different bodies, of course, since different segments of your people have different preferences and standards as far as bodily appearance is concerned!”
Fleetingly, Johannison wondered if he was mad after all. He said, “ Are you from-from Mars? Any place like that? Are you taking over? Is this war?”
“You see,” said the visitor, “that sort of attitude is what we're trying to correct. Your people are sick, Dr. Johannison, very sick. For tens of thousands of your years we have known that your particular species has great possibilities. It has been a great disappointment to us that your development has taken a pathological pathway. Definitely pathological.” He shook his head.
Mercedes interrupted, “He told me before you came that he was trying to cure us.”
“Who asked him?” muttered Johannison. The visitor only smiled. He said, “I was assigned the job a long time ago, but such illnesses are always hard to treat. For one thing, there is the difficulty in communication.”
“We're communicating,” said Johannison stubbornly. “Yes. In a manner of speaking, we are. I'm using your concepts, your code system. It's quite inadequate. I couldn't even explain to you the true nature of the disaster of your species. By your concepts, the closest approach I can make is that it is a disease of the spirit.”
“Huh.”
“It's a kind of social ailment that is very ticklish to handle. That's why I've hesitated for so long to attempt a direct cure. It would be sad if, through accident, so gifted a potentiality as that of your race were lost to us. What I've tried to do for millennia has been to work indirectly through the few individuals in each generation who had natural immunity to the disease. Philosophers, moralists, warriors, and politicians. All those who had a glimpse of world brotherhood. All those who--”
“All right. You failed. Let it go at that. Now suppose you tell me about your people, not mine.”
“What can I tell you that you would understand?”
“Where are you from? Begin with that.”
“You have no proper concept. I'm not from anywhere in the yard.”
“What yard?”
“In the universe, I mean. I'm from outside the universe.”
Mercedes interrupted again, leaning forward. “ Alex, don't you see what he means? Suppose you landed on the New Guinea coast and talked to some natives through television somehow. I mean to natives who had never seen or heard of anyone outside their tribe. Could you explain how television worked or how it made it possible for you to speak to many men in many places at once? Could you explain that the image wasn't you yourself but merely an illusion that you could make disappear and reappear? You couldn't even explain where you came from if all the universe they knew was their own island.”
“Well, then, we're savages to him. Is that it?” demanded Johannison.
The visitor said, “Your wife is being metaphorical. Let me finish. I can no longer try to encourage your society to cure itself. The disease has progressed too far. I am going to have to alter the temperamental makeup of the race.”
“How?”
“There are neither words nor concepts to explain that either. You must see that our control of physical matter is extensive. It was quite simple to stop all radioactivity. It was a little more difficult to see to it that all things, including books, now suited a world in which radioactivity did not exist. It was still more difficult, and took more time, to wipe out all thought of radioactivity from the minds of men. Right now, uranium does not exist on Earth. No one ever heard of it.”
“I have,” said Johannison. “How about you, Mercy?”
“I remember, too,” said Mercedes.
“You two are omitted for a reason,” said the visitor, ''as are over a hundred others, men and women, all over the world.”
“No radioactivity,” muttered Johannison. “Forever?”
“For five of your years,” said the visitor. “It is a pause, nothing more. Merely a pause, or call it a period of anesthesia, so that I can operate on the species without the interim danger of atomic war. In five years the phenomenon of radioactivity will return, together with all the uranium and thorium that currently do not exist. The knowledge will not return, however. That is where you will come in. You and the others like you. You will re-educate the world gradually.”
“That's quite a job. It took fifty years to get us to this point. Even allowing for less the second time, why not simply restore knowledge? You can do that, can't you?”
“The operation,” said the visitor, “will be a serious one. It will take anywhere up to a decade to make certain there are no complications. So we want re-education slowly, on purpose.”
Johannison said, “How do we know when the time comes? I mean when the operation's over.”
The visitor smiled. “When the time comes, you will know. Be assured of that.”
“Well, it's a hell of a thing, waiting five years for a gong to ring in your head. What if it never comes? What if your operation isn't successful?”
The visitor said seriously, “Let us hope that it is.”
“But if it isn't? Can't you clear our minds temporarily, too? Can't you let us live normally till it's time?”
“No. I'm sorry. I need your minds untouched. If the operation is a failure, if the cure does not work out, I will need a small reservoir of normal, untouched minds out of which to bring about the growth of a new population on this planet on whom a new variety of cure may be attempted. At all costs, your species must be preserved. It is valuable to us. It is why I am spending so much time trying to explain the situation to you. If I had left you as you were an hour ago, five days, let alone five years, would have completely ruined you.”
And without another word he disappeared.
Mercedes went through the motions of preparing supper and they sat at the table almost as though it had been any other day.
Johannison said, “Is it true? Is it all real?”
“I saw it, too,” said Mercedes. “I heard it.”
“I went through my own books. They're all changed. When this-pause is over, we'll be working strictly from memory, all of us who are left. We'll have to build instruments again. It will take a long time to get it across to those who won't remember.” Suddenly he was angry, “And what for, I want to know. What for?”
“Alex,” Mercedes began timidly, “he may have been on Earth before and spoken to people. He's lived for thousands and thousands of years. Do you suppose he's what we've been thinking of for so long as-as-''
Johannison looked at her. “As God? Is that what you're trying to say? How should I know? All I know is that his people, whatever they are, are infinitely more advanced than we, and that he's curing us of a disease.”
Mercedes said, “Then I think of him as a doctor or what's equivalent to it in his society.”
“A doctor? All he kept saying was that the difficulty of communication was the big problem. What kind of a doctor can't communicate with his patients? A vet! An animal doctor!”
He pushed his plate away.
His wife said, “Even so. If he brings an end to war-”
“Why should he want to? What are we to him? We're animals. We are animals to him. Literally. He as much as said so. When I asked him where he was from, he said he didn't come from the 'yard' at all. Get it? The barnyard. Then he changed it to the 'universe.' He didn't come from the 'universe' at all. His difficulty in communication gave him away. He used the concept for what our universe was to him rather than what it was to us. So the universe is a barnyard and we're--horses, chickens, sheep. Take your choice.”
Mercedes said softly, “'The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want...'“
“Stop it, Mercy. That's a metaphor; this is reality. If he's a shepherd, then we're sheep with a queer, unnatural desire, and ability, to kill one another. Why stop us?”
“He said-”
“I know what he said. He said we have great potentialities. We're very valuable. Right?”
“Yes.”
“But what are the potentialities and values of sheep to a shepherd? The sheep wouldn't have any idea. They couldn't. Maybe if they knew why they were coddled so, they'd prefer to live their own lives. They'd take their own chances with wolves or with themselves.”
Mercedes looked at him helplessly.
Johannison cried, “It's what I keep asking myself now. Where are we going? Where are we going? Do sheep know? Do we know? Can we know?”
They sat staring at their plates, not eating.
Outside, there was the noise of traffic and the calling of children at play. Night was falling and gradually it grew dark.
=====
One memory I have concerning THE PAUSE reinforces my constant delight that I am at the writing end of things and am not part of any other facet of the literary game.
I was in the offices of Farrar, Straus & Young at a time when the anthology was in the early stage of production and the woman who was the in-house editor was agonizing over the title of the anthology. It was supposed to be In Time To Come, but she thought that lacked something and was wondering about alternatives.
“What do you think, Dr. Asimov?” she asked and looked at me pleadingly. (People often think I have the answers, when sometimes I don't even have the questions.)
I thought desperately and said, “Leave out the first word and make it Time to Come. That strengthens the concept 'time' and makes the title seem more science-fictional.”
She cried out at once, “Just the thing,” and Time to Come was indeed the title of the anthology when it appeared.
Well, did the change in title improve sales? How would they ever know? How could they be sure it didn't actually hurt sales?
I'm very glad I'm not an editor.
While all this writing was going on, my professional labors at the medical school were doing very well. In 1951 I had been promoted to assistant professor of biochemistry, and I now had the professorial status to add to my doctorate. This double dose of title didn't seem to add to my dignity in the least, however. I continued to have a “bouncing, jovial, effervescent manner,” as Sprague would say, and I still do to this day, as anyone who meets me will testify, despite the fact that my “wavy brown hair,” while still wavy, is longer and less brown than it used to be.
All that effervescing made it possible for me to get along very well with the students, but perhaps not always so well with a few of the faculty members. Fortunately, everyone was quite aware that I was a science fiction writer. It helped! It seemed to reconcile them to the fact that I was an eccentric and they thereupon forgave me a great deal.
As for myself, I made no attempt to conceal the fact. Some people in the more staid callings use pseudonyms when they succumb to the temptation to write what they fear is trash. Since I never thought of science fiction as trash, and since I was writing and selling long before I had become a faculty member, I had no choice but to use my own peculiar name on my stories.
Nor did I intend to get the school itself into anything that would hurt its dignity.
I had sold my first book, PEBBLE IN THE SKY, some six weeks before I had accepted the job at the medical school. What I did not know was that Doubleday was going to exploit my new professional position in connection with the book. It was only when I saw the book jacket, toward the end of 1949, that I saw what was to be on the back cover.
Along with a very good likeness of myself at the age of twenty-five (which breaks my heart now when I look at it) there was a final sentence, which read: “Dr. Asimov lives in Boston, where he is engaged in cancer research at Boston University School of Medicine.”
I thought about that for quite a while, then decided to do the straightforward thing. I asked to see Dean James Faulkner, and I put it to him frankly. I was a science fiction writer, I said, and had been for years. My first book was coming out under my own name, and my association with the medical school would be mentioned. Did he want my resignation?
The dean, a Boston Brahmin with a sense of humor, said, “Is it a good book?”
Cautiously, I said, “The publishers think so.”
And he said, “In that case the medical school will be glad to be identified with it.”
That took care of that and never, in my stay at the medical school, did I get into trouble over my science fiction. In fact, it occurred to some of the people at the school to put me to use. In October 1954 the people running the Boston University Graduate Journal asked me for a few hundred words of science fiction with which to liven up one of their issues. I obliged with LET'S NOT, which then appeared in the December 1954 issue.
Professor Charles Kittredge ran in long, unsteady strides. He was in time to bat the glass from the lips of Associate
Professor Heber Vandermeer. It was almost like an exercise in slow motion.
Vandermeer, whose absorption had apparently been such that he had not heard the thud of Kittredge's approach, looked at once startled and ashamed. His glance sank to the smashed glass and the puddling liquid that surrounded it.
“Potassium cyanide. I'd kept a bit, when we left. Just.” m case...
“How would that have helped? And it's one glass gone, too. Now it's got to be cleaned up....No, I'll do it.”
Kittredge found a precious fragment of cardboard to scoop up the glass fragments and an even more precious scrap of cloth to soak up the poisonous fluid. He left to discard the glass and, regretfully, the cardboard and cloth into one of the chutes that would puff them to the surface, a half mile up.
He returned to find Vandermeer sitting on the cot, eyes fixed glassily on the wall. The physicist's hair had turned quite white and he had lost weight, of course. There were no fat men in the Refuge. Kittredge, who had been long, thin, and gray to begin with, had, in contrast, scarcely changed.
Vandermeer said, “Remember the old days, Kitt.”
“I try not to.”
“It's the only pleasure left,” said Vandermeer. “Schools were schools. There were classes, equipment, students, air, light, and people. People.”
“ A school's a school as long as there is one teacher and one student.”
“You're almost right,” mourned Vandermeer. “There are two teachers. You, chemistry. I, physics. The two of us, everything else we can get out of the books. And one graduate student. He'll be the first man ever to get his Ph.D. down here. Quite a distinction. Poor Jones.”
Kittredge put his hands behind his back to keep them steady. “There are twenty other youngsters who will live to be graduate students someday.”
Vandermeer looked up. His face was gray. “What do we teach them meanwhile? History? How man discovered what makes hydrogen go boom and was happy as a lark while it went boom and boom and boom? Geography? We can describe how the winds blew the shining dust everywhere and the water currents carried the dissolved isotopes to all the deeps and shallows of the ocean.”
Kittredge found it very hard. He and Vandermeer were the only qualified scientists who got away in time. The responsibility of the existence of a hundred men, women, and children was theirs as they hid from the dangers and rigors of the surface and from the terror Man had created here in this bubble of life half a mile below the planet's crust.
Desperately, he tried to put nerve into Vandermeer. He said, as forcefully as he could, “You know what we must teach them. We must keep science alive so that someday we can repopulate the Earth. Make a new start.”
Vandermeer did not answer that. He turned his face to the wall.
Kittredge said, “Why not? Even radioactivity doesn't last forever. Let it take a thousand years, five thousand. Someday the radiation level on Earth's surface will drop to bearable amounts.”
“Someday.”
“Of course. Someday. Don't you see that what we have here is the most important school in the history of man? If we succeed, you and I, our descendants will have open sky and free-running water again. They'll even have,” and he smiled wryly, “graduate schools such as those we remember.”
Vandermeer said. “I don't believe any of it. At first, when it seemed better than dying, I would have believed anything. But now, it just doesn't make sense. So we'll teach them all we know, down here, and then we die... down here.”
“But before long I ones will be teaching with us, and then there'll be others. The youngsters who hardly remember the old ways will become teachers, and then the youngsters who were born here will teach. This will be the critical point. Once the native-born are in charge, there will be no memories to destroy morale. This will be their life and they will have a goal to strive for, something to fight for...a whole world to win once more. If, Van, if we keep alive the knowledge of physical science on the graduate level. You understand why, don't you?”
“Of course I understand,” said Vandermeer irritably, “but that doesn't make it possible.”
“Giving up will make it impossible. That's for sure.”
“Well. I’ll try,” said Vandermeer in a whisper.
So Kittredge moved to his own cot and closed his eves and wished desperately that he might be standing in his protective suit on the planet's surface. Just for a little while. Just for a little while. He would stand beside the shell of the ship that had been dismantled and cannibalized to create the bubble of life here below. Then he could rouse his own courage just after sunset by looking up and seeing; once more, just once more as it gleamed through the thin, cold atmosphere of Mars, the bright, dead evening star that was Earth.
=====
Some people accuse me of getting every last bit of mileage out of everything I write. It's not a deliberate policy of mine, actually, but I must admit that the mileage does seem to mount up. Even as long ago as 1954 it was happening.
I had written LET'S NOT for my school, and, of course, I was not paid for it and didn't expect to be. Shortly thereafter, though, Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press asked me for an introduction for a new anthology he was planning, All A bout the Future, which was slated for publication in 1955.
I did not really like to refuse because I liked Martin Greenberg, even though he was years behind in his royalty payments. On the other hand, I did not wish to reward him with more material, so I compromised.
“How about a little story instead?” I said, and offered him LET'S NOT. He ran it as one of the introductions (the other, a more conventional one, was by Robert A. Heinlein) and, wonder of wonders, paid me ten dollars.
In that same year another turning point was hitting me. (Odd how many turning points there are in one's life, and how difficult it is to recognize them when they come.)
I had been writing nonfiction to a small extent ever since the days of my doctoral dissertation. There were scientific papers dealing with my research, for instance. These were not many, because I was not long in finding out that I was not really an enthusiastic researcher. Then, too, writing the papers was a dreadful chore, since scientific writing is abhorrently stylized and places a premium on poor quality.
The textbook was more enjoyable but in writing it I had been constantly hampered and tied down because of my two collaborators-wonderful men, both, but with styles different from my own. My frustration led me to a desire to write a biochemistry book on my own, not for medical students but for the general public. I looked upon it as only a dream, however, for I could not really see past my own science fiction.
However, my collaborator, Bill Boyd, had written a popular book on genetics, Genetics and the Races of Man (Little-Brown, 1950), and in 1953 there came from New York one Henry Schuman, owner of a small publishing house named after himself. He tried to persuade Bill to write a book for him but Bill was busy and, being a kindhearted soul, tried to let Mr. Schuman down easily by introducing him to me, with the suggestion that he get me to write a book.
Of course, I agreed and wrote the book promptly. When publication time rolled around, however, Henry Schuman had sold his firm to another small firm, Abelard. When my book appeared, then, it was THE CHEMICALS OF LIFE (Abelard-Schuman, 1954) .
It was the first nonfiction hook that ever appeared with my name on it and no other; the first nonfiction book I ever wrote for the general public.
What's more, it had turned out to be a very easy task, much easier than my science fiction. I took only ten weeks to write the book, never spending more than an hour or two a day on it, and it was intense fun. I instantly began to think of other, similar nonfiction books I could do, and that began a course of action that was to fill my life-though I did not have any inkling at the time that this would happen.
That same year, too, it began to look as though a second offspring was on its way. This one also caught us by surprise and created a serious problem.
When we had first moved into our Waltham apartment, in the spring of 1951, there were just the two of us. We slept in one bedroom, and the other bedroom was the office. My book THE CURRENTS OF SPACE (Doubleday, 1952) was written in that second bedroom.
After David was born and grew large enough to need a room of his own, he got the second bedroom and my office was moved into the master bedroom, and that's where THE CAVES OF STEEL (Doubleday. 1953) was written.
Then, on February 19, 1955, my daughter, Robyn Joan, was born, and I moved into the corridor in anticipation. It was the only place left to me. The fourth of my Lucky Start novels was begun on the very day she was brought home from the hospital. It was LUCKY STARR AND THE BIG SUN OF MERCURY (Doubleday, 1956) and it was dedicated “To Robyn Joan, who did her best to interfere.”
The interfering was entirely too efficient. With a child in each bedroom and me in the corridor it was bad enough, but eventually Robyn Joan would be large enough to need a room of her own, so we made up our mind to look for a house.
That was traumatic. I had never lived in a house. For all my thirty-five years of life, I had lived in a series of rented apartments. What had to be, however, had to be. In January 1956 we found a house in Newton, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, and on March 12, 1956, we moved in.
On March 16, 1956, Boston had one of its worst blizzards in memory, and three feet of snow fell. Having never had to shovel snow before, I found myself starting with a lulu in a deep, broad driveway. I had barely dug myself out when, on March 20, 1956, a second blizzard struck and four more feet fell.
The melting snow packed against the outer walls of the house found its way past the wood and into the basement and we had a small flood. -Heavens, how we wished ourselves back in the apartment.
But we survived that, and then came a graver worry for me at least. My life had changed so radically, what with two children, a house, and a mortgage, that I began to wonder if I would still be able to write. (My novel THE NAKED SUN, Doubleday, 1957, had been finished two days
before the move.) You know, one gets such a feeling that a writer is a delicate plant who must be carefully nurtured or he will wither, that any traumatic change in one's way of life is bound to give the feeling of all the blossoms being lopped off.
What with the blizzards and the snow-shoveling and the basement pumping and everything else, I didn't get a chance to try to write for a while.
But then Bob Lowndes asked me to do a story for Future, and in June 1956 I began my first writing job in the new house. It was the first heat wave of the season but the basement was cool, so I set up my typewriter there in the unique luxury of being able to feel cool in a heat wave.
There was no trouble. I could still write. I turned out EACH AN EXPLORER and it appeared in issue #30 of Future (the issues of this magazine were so irregular at this time that it was not felt safe to put a month-designation on the issues).
Herman Chouns was a man of hunches. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong--about fifty-fifty. Still, considering that one has the whole universe of possibilities from which to pull a right answer, fifty-fifty begins to look pretty good.
Chouns wasn't always as pleased with the matter as might be expected. It put too much of a strain on him. People would huddle around a problem, making nothing of it, then turn to him and say, “What do you think, Chouns? Turn on the old intuition.”
And if he came up with something that fizzled, the responsibility for that was made clearly his.
His job, as field explorer, rather made things worse. “Think that planet's worth a closer look?” they would say. “What do you think, Chouns?”
So it was a relief to draw a two-man spot for a change (meaning that the next trip would be to some low-priority place, and the pressure would be off) and, on top of it, to get Allen Smith as partner.
Smith was as matter-of-fact as his name. He said to Chouns the first day out, “The thing about you is that the memory files in your brain are on extraspecial can. Faced with a problem, you remember enough little things that maybe the rest of us don't come up with to make a decision. Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn't.”
He rubbed his hair slickly back as he said that. He had light hair that lay down like a skull cap.
Chouns, whose hair was very unruly, and whose nose was snub and a bit off-center, said softly (as was his way) , “I think maybe it's telepathy.”
“What!”
“Nuts!” said Smith, with loud derision (as was his way).” Scientists have been tracking psionics for a thousand years and gotten nowhere. There's no such thing: no precognition; no telekinesis; no clairvoyance; and no telepathy.”
“I admit that, but consider this. If I get a picture of what each of a group of people are thinking--even though I might not be aware of what was happening-I could integrate the information and come up with an answer. I would know more than any single individual in the group, so I could make a better judgment than the others-sometimes.”
“Do you have any evidence at all for that?” Chouns turned his mild brown eyes on the other. “Just a hunch.”
They got along well. Chouns welcomed the other's refreshing practicality, and Smith patronized the other's speculations. They often disagreed but never quarreled,
Even when they reached their objective, which was a globular cluster that had never felt the energy thrusts of a human-designed nuclear reactor before, increasing tension did not worsen matters.
Smith said, “Wonder what they do with all this data back on Earth. Seems a waste sometimes.”
Chouns said, “Earth is just beginning to spread out. No telling how far humanity will move out into the galaxy, given a million years or so. All the data we can get on any world will come in handy someday,”
“You sound like a recruiting manual for the Exploration Teams, Think there'll be anything interesting in that thing?” He indicated the visi-plate on which the no-longer distant cluster was centered like spilled talcum powder.
“Maybe. I've got a hunch-” Chouns stopped, gulped, blinked once or twice, and then smiled weakly.
Smith snorted, “Let's get a fix on the nearest stargroups and make a random pass through the thickest of it. One gets you ten, we find a McKomin ratio under 0.2,”
“You'll lose,” murmured Chouns. He felt the quick stir of excitement that always came when new worlds were about to be spread beneath them. It was a most contagious feeling, and it caught hundreds of youngsters each year. Youngsters, such as he had been once, flocked to the Teams, eager to see the worlds their descendants someday would call their own, each an explorer--
They got their fix (made their first close-quarters hyperspatial jump into the cluster, and began scanning stars for planetary systems. The computers did their work; the information files grew steadily, and all proceeded in satisfactory routine-until at system 23, shortly after completion of the jump, the ship's hyperatomic motors failed.
Chouns muttered, “Funny. The analyzers don't say what's wrong.”
He was right. The needles wavered erratically, never stopping once for a reasonable length of time, so that no diagnosis was indicated. And, as a consequence, no repairs could be carried through.
“Never saw anything like it,” growled Smith. “We'll have to shut everything off and diagnose manually.”
“We might as well do it comfortably,” said Chouns, who was already at the telescopes. “Nothing's wrong with the ordinary spacedrive, and there are two decent planets in this system.”
“Oh? How decent and which ones?”
“The first and second out of four: Both water-oxygen. The first is a bit warmer and larger than Earth; the second a bit colder and smaller. Fair enough?”
“Life?”
“Both. Vegetation, anyway.” Smith grunted. There was nothing in that to surprise anyone; vegetation occurred more often than not on water-oxygen worlds. And, unlike animal life, vegetation could be seen telescopically-or, more precisely, spectroscopically. Only four photochemical pigments had ever been found in any plant form, and each could be detected by the nature of the light it reflected.
Chouns said, “Vegetation on both planets is chlorophyll type, no less. It'll be just like Earth; real homey.”
Smith said, “Which is closer?”
“Number two, and we're on our way. I have a feeling it's going to be a nice planet.”
“I'll judge that by the instruments, if you don't mind,” said Smith.
But this seemed to be one of Chouns's correct hunches.
The planet was a tame one with an intricate ocean network that insured a climate of small temperature range. The mountain ranges were low and rounded, and the distribution of vegetation indicated high and widespread fertility.
Chouns was at the controls for the actual landing.
Smith grew impatient. “What are you picking and choosing for? One place is like another.”
“I’m looking for a bare spot, “ said Chouns. “No use burning up an acre of plant life.”
“What if you do?”
“What if I don't?” said Chouns, and found his bare spot.
It was only then, after landing, that they realized a small part of what they had tumbled into.
“Jumping space-warps,” said Smith.
Chouns felt stunned. Animal life was much rarer than vegetation, and even the glimmerings of intelligence were far rarer still; yet here, not half a mile away from landing point, was a clustering of low, thatched huts that were obviously the product of a primitive intelligence.
“Careful, “ said Smith dazedly.
“I don't think there's any harm,” said Chouns. He stepped out onto the surface of the planet with firm confidence; Smith followed.
Chouns controlled his excitement with difficulty. “This is terrific. No one's ever reported anything better than caves or woven tree-branches before.”
“I hope they're harmless.”
“It's too peaceful for them to be anything else. Smell the air.”
Coming down to landing, the terrain-to all points of horizon, except where a low range of hills broke the even line--had been colored a soothing pale pink, dappled against the chlorophyll green. At closer quarters the pale pink broke up into individual flowers, fragile and fragrant. Only the areas in the immediate neighborhood of the huts were amber with something that looked like a cereal grain.
Creatures were emerging from the huts, moving closer to the ship with a kind of hesitating trust. They had four legs and a sloping body which stood three feet high at the shoulders. Their heads were set firmly on those shoulders, with bulging eyes (Chouns counted six) set in a circle and capable of the most disconcertingly independent motion. (That makes up for the immovability of the head, thought Chouns.)
Each animal had a tail that forked at the end, forming two sturdy fibrils that each animal held high. The fibrils maintained a rapid tremor that gave them a hazy, blurred look.
“Come on,” said Chouns. “They won't hurt us; I'm sure of it.”
The animals surrounded the men at a cautious distance. Their tails made a modulated humming noise.
“They might communicate that way,” said Chouns. “ And I think it's obvious they're vegetarians.” He pointed toward one of the huts, where a small member of the species sat on its haunches, plucking at the amber grain with his tails, and flickering an ear of it through his mouth like a man sucking a series of maraschino cherries off a toothpick.
“Human beings eat lettuce,” said Smith, “but that doesn't prove anything.”
More of the tailed creatures emerged, hovered about the men for a moment, then vanished off into the pink and green.
“Vegetarians,” said Chouns firmly. “Look at the way they cultivate the main crop.”
The main crop, as Chouns called it, consisted of a coronet of soft green spikes, close to the ground. Out of the center of the coronet grew a hairy stem which, at two-inch intervals, shot out fleshy, veined buds that almost pulsated, they seemed so “Vitally alive. The stem ended at the tip with the pale pink blossoms that, except for the color, were the most Earthly thing about the plants.
The plants were laid out in rows and files with geometric precision. The soil about each was well loosened and powdered with a foreign substance that could be nothing but fertilizer. Narrow passageways, just wide enough for an animal to pass along, crisscrossed the field, and each passageway was lined with narrow sluiceways, obviously for water.
The animals were spread through the fields now, working diligently, heads bent. Only a few remained in the neighborhood of the two men.
Chouns nodded. “They're good farmers.”
“Not bad,” agreed Smith. He walked briskly toward the nearest of the pale pink blooms and reached for one; but six inches short of it he was stopped by the sound of tail vibrations keening to shrillness, and by the actual touch of a tail upon his arm. The touch was delicate but firm, interposing itself between Smith and the plants.
Smith fell back. “What in Space---” He had half reached for his blaster when Chouns said, “No cause for excitement; take it easy.”
Half a dozen of the creatures were now gathering about the two, offering stalks of grain humbly and gently, some using their tails, some nudging it forward with their muzzles.
Chouns said, “They're friendly enough. Picking a bloom might be against their customs; the plants probably have to be treated according to rigid rules. Any culture that has agriculture probably has fertility rites, and Lord knows what that involves. The rules governing the cultivation of the plants must be strict, or there wouldn't be those accurate measured rows. ...Space, won't they sit up back home when they hear this?”
The tail humming shot up in pitch again, and the creatures near them fell back. Another member of the species was emerging from a larger hut in the center of the group.
“The chief, I suppose,” muttered Chouns. The new one advanced slowly, tail high, each fibril encircling a small black object. At a distance of five feet its tail arched forward.
“He's giving it to us,” said Smith in astonishment, “and Chouns, for God's sake, look at it.”
Chouns was doing so, feverishly. He choked out, “They're Gamow hyperspatial sighters. Those are ten-thousand-dollar instruments.”
Smith emerged from the ship again, after an hour within. He shouted from the ramp in high excitement, “They work. They're perfect. We're rich.”
Chouns called back, “I've been checking through their huts. I can't find any more.”
“Don't sneeze at just two. Good Lord, these are as negotiable as a handful of cash.”
But Chouns still looked about, arms akimbo, exasperated. Three of the tailed creatures had dogged him from hut to hut-patiently, never interfering, but remaining always between him and the geometrically cultivated pale pink blossoms. Now they stared multiply at him.
Smith said, “It's the latest model, too. Look here.” He pointed to the raised lettering which said Model X-20. Gamow Products. Warsaw. European Sector.
Chouns glanced at it and said impatiently, “What interests me is getting more. I know there are more Gamow sighters somewhere, I want them.” His cheeks were flushed and his breathing heavy.
The sun was setting; the temperature dropped below the comfortable point. Smith sneezed twice, then Chouns.
“We'll catch pneumonia,” snuffled Smith.
“I’ve got to make them understand,” said Chouns stubbornly. He had eaten hastily through a can of pork sausage, had gulped down a can of coffee, and was ready to try again.
He held the sighter high. “More,” he said, “more,” making encircling movements with his arms. He pointed to one sighter, then to the other, then to the imaginary additional ones lined up before him. “More.”
Then, as the last of the sun dipped below the horizon, a vast hum arose from all parts of the field as every creature in sight ducked its head, lifted its forked tail, and vibrated it into screaming invisibility in the twilight.
“What in Space,” muttered Smith uneasily. “Hey, look at the blooms!” He sneezed again.
The pale pink flowers were shriveling visibly. Chouns shouted to make himself heard above the hum, “It may be a reaction to sunset. You know, the blooms close at night. The noise may be a religious observance of the fact.”
A soft flick of a tail across his wrist attracted Chouns's instant attention. The tail he had felt belonged to the nearest creature; and now it was raised to the sky, toward a bright object low on the western horizon. The tail bent downward to point to the sighter, then up again to the star.
Chouns said excitedly, “Of course-the inner planet; the other habitable one. These must have come from there.” Then, reminded by the thought, he cried in sudden shock, “Hey, Smith, the hyperatomic motors are still out.”
Smith looked shocked, as though he had forgotten, too; then he mumbled, “Meant to tell you-they're allright.”
“You fixed them?”
“Never touched them. But when I was testing the sighters I used the hyperatomics and they worked. I didn't pay any attention at the time; I forgot there was anything wrong. Anyway, they worked.”
“Then let's go,” said Chouns at once. The thought of sleep never occurred to him.
Neither one slept through the six-hour trip. They remained at the controls in an almost drug-fed passion. Once again they chose a bare spot on which to land.
It was hot with an afternoon subtropical heat; and a broad, muddy river moved placidly by them. The near bank was of hardened mud, riddled with large cavities.
The two men stepped out onto planetary surface and Smith cried hoarsely, “Chouns, look at that!”
Chouns shook off the other's grasping hand. He said, “The same plants! I'll be damned.”
There was no mistaking the pale pink blossoms, the stalk with its veined buds, and the coronet of spikes below. Again there was the geometric spacing, the careful planting and fertilization, the irrigation canals.
Smith said, “We haven't made a mistake and circled-”
“Oh, look at the sun; it's twice the diameter it was be-
fore. And look there.”
Out of the nearest burrows in the river bank smoothly tan and sinuous objects, as limbless as snakes, emerged. They were a foot in diameter, ten feet in length. The two ends were equally featureless, equally blunt. Midway along their upper portions were bulges. All the bulges, as though on signal, grew before their eyes to fat ovals, split in two to form lipless, gaping mouths that opened and closed with a sound like a forest of dry sticks clapping together.
Then, just as on the outer planet, once their curiosities were satisfied and their fears calmed, most of the creatures drifted away toward the carefully cultivated field of plants.
Smith sneezed. The force of expelled breath against the sleeve of his jacket raised a powdering of dust.
He stared at that with amazement, then slapped himself and said, “Damn it, I'm dusty.” The dust rose like a pale pink fog. “You, too,” he added, slapping Chouns.
Both men sneezed with abandon.
“Picked it up on the other planet, I suppose,” said Chouns.
“We can work up an allergy.”
“Impossible.” Chouns held up one of the sighters and shouted at the snake-things, “Do you have any of these?”
For a while there was nothing in answer but the splashing of water, as some of the snake things slid into the river and emerged with silvery clusters of water life, which they tucked beneath their bodies toward some hidden mouth.
But then one snake-thing, longer than the others, came thrusting along the ground, one blunt end raised questingly some two inches, weaving blindly side to side. The bulb in its center swelled gently at first, then alarmingly, splitting in two with an audible pop. There, nestling within the two halves, were two more sighters, the duplicates of the first two.
Chouns said ecstatically, “Lord in heaven, isn't that beautiful?”
He stepped hastily forward. reaching out for the objects. The swelling that held them thinned and lengthened, forming what were almost tentacles. They reached out toward him.
Chouns was laughing. They were Gamow sighters all right; duplicates, absolute duplicates, of the first two. Chouns fondled them.
Smith was shouting, “Don't you hear me? Chouns, damn it, listen to me.”
Chouns said, “What?” He was dimly aware that Smith had been yelling at him for over a minute.
“Look at the flowers, Chouns.”
They were closing, as had those on the other planet, and among the rows the snake-things reared upward, balancing on one end and swaying with a queer, broken rhythm. Only the blunt ends of them were visible above the pale pink.
Smith said, “You can't say they're closing up because of nightfall. It's broad day.”
Chouns shrugged. “Different planet, different plant. Come on! We've only got two sighters here; there must be more.”
“Chouns, let's go home.” Smith firmed his legs into two stubborn pillars and the grip he held on Chouns's collar tightened.
Chouns's reddened face turned back toward him indignantly. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting ready to knock you out if you don't come back with me at once, into the ship.”
For a moment Chouns stood irresolute; then a certain wildness about him faded, a certain slackening took place, and he said, “All right. “
They were halfway out of the starcluster. Smith said, “How are you?”
Chouns sat up in his bunk and rumpled his hair. “Normal, I guess; sane again. How long have I been sleeping?”
“Twelve hours.”
“What about you?”
“I've catnapped.” Smith turned ostentatiously to the instruments and made some minor adjustments. He said self-consciously, “Do you know what happened back there on those planets?”
Chouns said slowly, “Do you?”
“I think so.”
“Oh? May I hear?”
Smith said, “It was the same plant on both planets. You'll grant that?”
“I most certainly do.”
“It was transplanted from one planet to the other, somehow. It grows on both planets perfectly well; but occasionally-to maintain vigor, I imagine-there must be crossfertilization, the two strains mingling. That sort of thing happens on Earth often enough.”
“Crossfertilization for vigor? Yes.”
“But we were the agents that arranged for the mingling. We landed on one planet and were coated with pollen. Remember the blooms closing? That must have been just after they released their pollen; and that's what was making us sneeze, too. Then we landed on the other planet and knocked the pollen off our clothes. A new hybrid strain win start up. We were just a pair of two-legged bees, Chouns, doing our duty by the flowers.”
Chouns smiled tentatively. “ An inglorious role, in a way.”
“Hen, that's not it. Don't you see the danger? Don't you see why we have to get back home fast?”
“Why?”
“Because organisms don't adapt themselves to nothing. Those plants seem to be adapted to interplanetary fertilization. We even got paid off, the way bees are; not with nectar, but with Gamow sighters.”
“Well?”
“Well, you can't have interplanetary fertilization unless something or someone is there to do the job. We did it this time, but we were the first humans ever to enter the cluster. So, before this, it must be nonhumans who did it; maybe the same nonhumans who transplanted the blooms in the first place. That means that somewhere in this cluster there is an intelligent race of beings; intelligent enough for space travel. And Earth must know about that.”
Slowly Chouns shook his head. Smith frowned. “You find flaws somewhere in the reasoning?”
Chouns put hi!; head between his own palms and looked miserable. “Let's say you've missed almost everything.”
“What have I missed?” demanded Smith angrily.
“Your crossfertilization theory is good, as far as it goes, but you haven't considered a few points. When we approached that stellar system our hyperatomic motor went out of order in a way the automatic controls could neither diagnose nor correct. After we landed we made no effort to adjust them. We forgot about them, in fact; and when you handled them later you found they were in perfect order, and were so unimpressed by that that you didn't even mention it to me for another few hours.
“Take something else: How conveniently we chose landing spots near a grouping of animal life on both planets. Just luck? And our incredible confidence in the good will of the creatures. We never even bothered checking atmospheres for trace poisons before exposing ourselves.
“And what bothers me most of all is that I went completely crazy over the Gamow sighters. Why? They're valuable, yes, but not that valuable--and I don't generally go overboard for a quick buck.”
Smith had kept an uneasy silence during all that. Now he said, “I don't see that any of that adds up to anything.”
“Get off it, Smith; you know better than that. Isn't it obvious to you that we were under mental control from the outside?”
Smith's mouth twisted and caught halfway between derision and doubt. “ Are you on the psionic kick again?”
“Yes; facts are facts. I told you that my hunches might be a form of rudimentary telepathy.”
“Is that a fact, too? You didn't think so a couple of days ago.”
“I think so now. Look, I'm a better receiver than you, and I was more strongly affected. Now that it's over, I understand more about what happened because I received more. Understand?”
“No,” said Smith harshly.
“Then listen further. You said yourself the (Gamow sighters were the nectar that bribed us into pollination. You said that.”
“All right.”
“Well, then, where did they come from? They were Earth products; we even read the manufacturer's name and model on them, letter by letter. Yet, if no human beings have ever been in the cluster, where did the sighters come from? Neither one of us worried about that, then; and you don't seem to worry about it even now.”
“Well--”
“What did you do with the sighters after we got on board ship, Smith? You took them from me; I remember that.”
“I put them in the safe,” said Smith defensively. “Have you touched them since?”
“No.”
“Have I?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“You have my word I didn't. Then why not open the safe now?”
Smith stepped slowly to the safe. It was keyed to his fingerprints, and it opened. Without looking he reached in. His expression altered and with a sharp cry he first stared at the contents, then scrabbled them out.
He held four rocks of assorted color, each of them roughly rectangular.
“They used our own emotions to drive us,” said Chouns softly, as though insinuating the words into the other's stubborn skull one at a time. “They made us think the hyperatomics were wrong so we could land on one of the planets; it didn't matter which, I suppose. They made us think we had precision instruments in our hand after we landed on one so we would race to the other.”
“Who are 'they'?” groaned Smith. “The tails or the snakes? Or both?”
“Neither,” said Chouns. “It was the plants.”
“The plants? The flowers?”
“Certainly. We saw two different sets of animals tending the same species of plant. Being animals ourselves, we assumed the animals were the masters. But why should we assume that? It was the plants that were being taken care of.”
“We cultivate plants on Earth, too, Chouns.”
“But we eat those plants,” said Chouns.
“And maybe those creatures eat their plants, too.”
“Let's say I know they don't,” said Chouns. “They maneuvered us well enough. Remember how careful I was to find a bare spot on which to land.”
“I felt no such urge.”
“You weren't at the controls; they weren't worried about you. Then, too, remember that we never noticed the pollen, though we were covered with it-not till we were safely on the second planet. Then we dusted the pollen off, on order.”
“I never heard anything so impossible.”
“Why is it impossible? We don't associate intelligence with plants, because plants have no nervous systems; but these might have. Remember the fleshy buds on the stems? Also, plants aren't free-moving; but they don't have to be if they develop psionic powers and can make use of free-moving animals. They get cared for, fertilized, irrigated, pollinated, and so on. The animals tend them with single-minded devotion and are happy over it because the plants make them feel happy.”
“I'm sorry for you,” said Smith in a monotone. “If you try to tell this story back on Earth, I'm sorry for you.”
“I have no illusions,” muttered Chouns, “yet-what can I do but try to warn Earth. You see what they do to animals.”
“They make slaves of them, according to you.”
“Worse than that. Either the tailed creatures or the snake-things, or both, must have been civilized enough to have developed space travel once; otherwise the plants couldn't be on both planets. But once the plants developed psionic powers (a mutant strain, perhaps), that came to an end. Animals at the atomic stage are dangerous. So they were made to forget; they were reduced to what they are. -Damn it, Smith, those plants are the most dangerous things in the universe. Earth must be informed about them, because some other Earthmen may be entering that cluster.”
Smith laughed. “You know, you're completely off base. If those plants really had us under control, why would they let us get away to warn the others?”
Chouns paused. “I don't know.” Smith's good humor was restored. He said, “For a minute you had me going, I don't mind telling you.”
Chouns rubbed his skull violently. Why were they let go? And for that matter, why did he feel this horrible urgency to warn Earth about a matter with which Earthmen would not come into contact for millennia perhaps?
He thought desperately and something came glimmering. He fumbled for it, but it drifted away. For a moment he thought desperately that it was as though the thought had been pushed away: but then that feeling, too, left.
He knew only that the ship had to remain at full thrust, that they had to hurry.
So. after uncounted years, the proper conditions had come about again. The protospores from two planetary strains of the mother plant met and mingled, sifting together into the clothes and hair and ship of the new animals. Almost at once the hybrid spores formed; the hybrid spores that alone had all the capacity and potentiality of adapting themselves to a new planet.
The spores waited quietly, now, on the ship which, with the last impulse of the mother plant upon the minds of the creatures aboard, was hurtling them at top thrust toward a new and ripe world where free-moving creatures would tend their needs.
The spores waited with the patience of the plant (the all-conquering patience no animal can ever know) for their arrival on a new world--each, in its own tiny way, an explorer--
=====
The stories in this book have not been much anthologized. That is the very reason I have chosen them, and it was one of the points Doubleday urged on me. EACH AN EXPLORER has, however, been anthologized twice, once by Judith Merril in 1957 and once by Vic Ghidalia in 1973.
That still isn't much, though. Some of my stories tend to appear many times. A little story I wrote called THE FUN THEY HAD has appeared, to date, at least forty-two times since it was first published, in 1951, and is currently in press for eight more appearances. It may have appeared in other places, too, but I only have forty-two in my library.
You can find the story, if you wish, in my book EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH (Doubleday, 1957). That's one of the forty-two places.
Editors are always trying to think up gimmicks. Sometimes I am the victim.
On November 14, 1956, I was in the office of Infinity Science Fiction, talking to the editor, Larry Shaw. We got along well together, he and I,* [* I mustn't make that sound exceptional. I get along with nearly everyone.] and I often dropped in to see him when I visited New York.
That day he had an idea. He was to give me the title for a story-the least inspirational title he could think of-and I was to write a short-short, on the spot, based on that title. Then he would give the same title to two other writers and they would do the same.
I asked, cautiously, what the title was, and he said, “Blank.”
“Blank?” I said.
“Blank,” he said.
So I thought a little and wrote the following story, with the title of BLANK! (with an exclamation point).
Randall Garrett wrote a story entitled Blank? with a question mark, and Harlan Ellison wrote one called Blank with no punctuation at all.
“Presumably,” said August Pointdexter, “there is such a thing as overweening pride. The Greeks called it hubris, and considered it to be defiance of the gods, to be followed always by ate, or retribution.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes uneasily.
“Very pretty,” said Dr. Edward Barron impatiently. “Has that any connection with what I said?” His forehead was high and had horizontal creases in it that cut in sharply when he raised his eyebrows in contempt.
“Every connection,” said Pointdexter. “To construct a time machine is itself a challenge to fate. You make it worse by your flat confidence. How can you be sure that your time-travel machine will operate through all of time without the possibility of paradox?”
Barron said, “I didn't know you were superstitious. The simple fact is that a time machine is a machine like any other machine, no more and no less sacrilegious. Mathematically, it is analogous to an elevator moving up and down its shaft. What danger of retribution lies in that?”
Pointdexter said energetically, “An elevator doesn't involve paradoxes. You can't move from the fifth floor to the fourth and kill your grandfather as a child.”
Dr. Barron shook his head in agonized impatience. “I was waiting for that. For exactly that. Why couldn't you suggest that I would meet myself or that I would change history by telling McClellan that Stonewall Jackson was going to make a flank march on Washington, or anything else? Now I'm asking you point blank. Will you come into the machine with me?”
Pointdexter hesitated. “I...I don't think so.”
“Why do you make things difficult? I've explained already that time is invariant. If I go into the past it will be because I've already been there. Anything I decided to do and proceed to do. I will have already done in the past all along, so I'll be changing nothing and no paradoxes will result. If I decided to kill my grandfather as a baby, and did it I would not be here. But I am here. Therefore I did not kill my grandfather. No matter how I try to kill him and plan to kill him, the fact is I didn't kill him and so I won't kill him. Nothing would change that. Do you understand what I'm explaining?”
“I understand what you say, but are you right?”
“Of course I'm right. For God's sake, why couldn't you have been a mathematician instead of a machinist with a college education?” In his impatience, Barron could scarcely hide his contempt. “Look, this machine is only possible because certain mathematical relationships between space and time hold true. You understand that, don't you, even if you don't follow the details of the mathematics? The machine exists, so the mathematical relations I worked out have some correspondence in reality. Right? You've seen me send rabbits a week into the future. You've seen them appear out of nothing. You've watched me send a rabbit a week into the past one week after it appeared. And they were unharmed.”
“All right. I admit all that.”
“Then will you believe me if I tell you that the equations upon which this machine is based assume that time is composed of particles that exist in an unchanging order; that time is invariant. If the order of the particles could be changed in any way-any way at all-the equations would be invalid and this machine wouldn't work; this particular method of time travel would be impossible.”
Pointdexter rubbed his eyes again and looked thoughtful. “I wish I knew mathematics.”
Barron said, “Just consider the facts. You tried to send the rabbit two weeks into the past when it had arrived only one week in the past. That would have created a paradox, wouldn't it? But what happened? The indicator stuck at one week and wouldn't budge. You couldn't create a paradox. Will you come?”
Pointdexter shuddered at the edge of the abyss of agreement and drew back. He said, “No.”
Barron said, “I wouldn't .ask you to help if I could do this alone, but you know it takes two men to operate the machine for intervals of more than a month. I need someone to control the Standards so that we can return with precision. And you're the one I want to use. We share the-the glory of this thing now. Do you want to thin it out, but in a third person? Time enough for that after we've established ourselves as the first time travelers in history. Good Lord, man, don't you want to see where we'll be a hundred years from now, or a thousand; don't you want to see Napoleon, or Jesus, for that matter? We'll be like--like”--Barron seemed carried away--“like gods.”
“Exactly,” mumbled Pointdexter. “Hubris. Time travel isn't godlike enough to risk being stranded out of my own time.”
“Hubris. Stranded. You keep making up fears. We're just moving along the particles of time like an elevator along the floors of a building. Time travel is actually safer because an elevator cable can break, whereas in the time machine there'll be no gravity to pun us down destructively. Nothing wrong can possibly happen. I guarantee it,” said Barron, tapping his chest with the middle finger of his right hand. “I guarantee it.”
“Hubris,” muttered Pointdexter, but fell into the abyss of agreement nevertheless, overborne at last.
Together they entered the machine.
Pointdexter did not understand the controls in the sense Barron did, for he was no mathematician, but he knew how they were supposed to be handled.
Barron was at one set, the Propulsions. They supplied the drive that forced the machine along the time axis. Pointdexter was at the Standards that kept the point of origin fixed so that the machine could move back to the original starting point at any time.
Pointdexter's teeth chattered as the first motion made itself felt in his stomach, Like an elevator's motion it was, but not quite, It was something more subtle, yet very real. He said, “What if--”
Barron snapped out, “Nothing can go wrong. Please!” And at once there was a jar and Pointdexter fell heavily against the wall.
Barron said, “What the devil!”
“What happened?” demanded Pointdexter breathlessly. “I don't know, but it doesn't matter. We're only twenty-two hours into the future. Let's step out and check.”
The door of the machine slid into its recessed panel and the breath went out of Pointdexter's body in a panting whoosh. He said, “There's nothing there.”
Nothing. No matter. No light. Blank!
Pointdexter screamed. “The Earth moved. We forgot that. In twenty-two hours, it moved thousands of miles through space, traveling around the sun.”
“No,” said Barron faintly, “I didn't forget that. The machine is designed to follow the time path of Earth wherever that leads. Besides, even if Earth moved, where is the sun? Where are the stars?”
Barron went back to the controls. Nothing budged. Nothing worked. The door would no longer slide shut. Blank!
Pointdexter found it getting difficult to breathe, difficult to move. With effort he said, “What's wrong, then?”
Barron moved slowly toward the center of the machine. He said painfully, “The particles of time. I think we happened to stall...between two...particles.”
Pointdexter tried to clench a fist but couldn't. “Don't understand.”
“Like an elevator. Like an elevator.” He could no longer sound the words, but only move his lips to shape them. “Like an elevator, after all...stuck between the floors.”
Pointdexter could not even move his lips. He thought: Nothing can proceed in nontime. All motion is suspended, all consciousness, all everything. There was an inertia about themselves that had carried them along in time for a minute or so, like a body leaning forward when an automobile comes to a sudden halt-but it was dying fast.
The light within the machine dimmed and went out. Sensation and awareness chilled into nothing.
One last thought, one final, feeble, mental sigh: Hubris, ate!
Then thought stopped, too.
Stasis! Nothing! For all eternity, where even eternity was meaningless, there would only be-blank!
=====
All three Blanks were published in the June 1957 issue of Infinity and the idea of the gimmick, I suppose, was to let the reader compare them and note how three different imaginations took off from a single, nondescript title.
Perhaps you wish you could have all three stories here, so that you could make the comparison yourself. Well, you can't.
In the first place, I'd have to get permissions from Randall and from Harlan and I don't want to have to go through that, In the second place, you underestimate my self-centered nature. I don't want their stories included with mine!
Then, too, I must explain that I always dismantle magazines with my stories in them, because I just can't manage to keep intact those magazines containing my stories. There are too many magazines and not enough room. I take out my own particular stories and bind them into volumes for future reference (as in the preparation of this book). Actually, I am running out of room for the volumes.
Anyway, when it came to dismantling the June 1957 Infinity I abstracted only BLANK! and discarded Blank? and Blank.
Or, perhaps, you don't underestimate my self-centered nature and expect me as a matter of course, to do that sort of thing.
Back in the middle 1950s, when some of the less affluent science fiction magazines (not that any of them were really affluent) asked me for a story, it was my practice to request the rates that Astounding and Galaxy paid if any magazine expected a story written especially for them. They would do so, quite confident that if I said a story was written especially for them, it was, and that it had not been slipped out of the bottom of the barrel. (There are times when having a reputation as being too dumb to be crooked comes in handy.)
The corollary of that, of course, is that if a story of mine is ever rejected by Editor A, it is incumbent upon me to tell this to Editor B when I offer it anew. In the first place, a rejection of a story with my name on it must give rise to thoughts such as “Wow! This story must be a stinker!” and it's only fair to give the second editor a chance to agree. Secondly, even if the second editor accepts the story he need not feel called upon to pay me more than his own standard fees. It meant an occasional loss of a few dollars but it made me more comfortable inside my wizened little soul.
Anyway, DOES A BEE CARE? was written in October 1956, after I had discussed it with Robert P. Mills, of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who had taken over the editorship of a new sister magazine of F & SF, which was to be called Venture Science Fiction.
I guess the execution fell short of the promise, because Mills rejected it and it was deemed unworthy both for Venture and for F & SF. So I passed it on to If: Worlds of Science Fiction with the word of the rejection and I got less than top rates for it. It appeared in the June 1957 issue.
Now the sad part is that I can never tell what there is about a story that makes the difference between acceptance and rejection, or which editor, the rejecting one or the accepting one, is correct. That's why I'm not an editor and never intend to be.
But you can judge for yourself.
The ship began as a metal skeleton. Slowly a shining skin was layered on without and odd-shaped vitals were crammed within.
Thornton Hammer, of all the individuals (but one) involved in the growth, did the least physically. Perhaps that was why he was most highly regarded. He handled the mathematical symbols that formed the basis for lines on drafting paper, which, in turn, formed the basis for the fitting together of the various masses and different forms of energy that went into the ship.
Hammer watched now through close-fitting spectacles somberly. Their lenses caught the light of the fluorescent tubes above and sent them out again as highlights. Theodore Lengyel, representing Personnel of the corporation that was footing the bill for the project, stood beside him and said, as he pointed with a rigid, stabbing finger:
“There he is. That's the man.” Hammer peered. “You mean Kane?”
“The fellow in the green overalls, holding a wrench.”
“That's Kane. Now what is this you've got against him?”
“I want to know what he does. The man's an idiot.” Lengyel had a round, plump face and his jowls quivered a bit.
Hammer turned to look at the other, his spare body assuming an air of displeasure along every inch. “Have you been bothering him?”
“Bothering him? I've been talking to him. It's my job to talk to the men, to get their viewpoints, to get information out of which I can build campaigns for improved morale.”
“How does Kane disturb that?”
“He's insolent. I asked him how it felt to be working on a ship that would reach the moon. I talked a little about the ship being a pathway to the stars. Perhaps I made a little speech about it, built it up a bit, when he turned away in the rudest possible manner. I called him back and said, 'Where are you going?' And he said, 'I get tired of that kind of talk. I'm going out to look at the stars.'”
Hammer nodded. “All right. Kane likes to look at the stars.”
“It was daytime. The man's an idiot. I've been watching him since and he doesn't do any work.”
“I know that.”
“Then why is he kept on?”
Hammer said with a sudden, tight fierceness, “Because I want him around. Because he's my luck.”
“You luck?” faltered Lengyel. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that when he's around I think better. When he passes me, holding his damned wrench, I get ideas. It's happened three times. I don't explain it; I'm not interested in explaining it. It's happened. He stays.”
“You're joking.”
“No, I'm not. Now leave me alone.”
Kane stood there in his green overalls, holding his wrench.
Dimly he was aware that the ship was almost ready. It was not designed to carry a man, but there was space for a man. He knew that the way he knew a lot of things; like keeping out of the way of most people most of the time; like carrying a wrench until people grew used to him carrying a wrench and stopped noticing it. Protective coloration consisted of little things, really-like carrying the wrench.
He was full of drives he did not fully understand, like looking at the stars. At first, many years back, he had just looked at the stars with a vague ache. Then, slowly, his attention had centered itself on a certain region of the sky, then to a certain pinpointed spot. He didn't know why that certain spot. There were no stars in that spot. There was nothing to see.
That spot was high in the night sky in the late spring and in the summer months and he sometimes spent most of the night watching the spot until it sank toward the southwestern horizon. At other times in the year he would stare at the spot during the day.
There was some thought in connection with that spot which he couldn't quite crystallize. It had grown stronger, come nearer to the surface as the years passed, and it was almost bursting for expression now. But still it had not quite come clear.
Kane shifted restlessly and approached the ship. It was almost complete, almost whole. Everything fitted just so. Almost.
For within it, far forward, was a hole a little larger than a man; and leading to that hole was a pathway a little wider than a man. Tomorrow that pathway would be filled with the last of the vitals, and before that was done the hole had to be filled, too. But not with anything they planned.
Kane moved still closer and no one paid any attention to him. They were used to him.
There was a metal ladder that had to be climbed and a catwalk that had to be moved along to enter the last opening. He knew where the opening was as exactly as if he had built the ship with his own hands. He climbed the ladder and moved along the catwalk. There was no one there at the mo--
He was wrong. One man.
That one said sharply, “What are you doing here?” Kane straightened and his vague eyes stared at the speaker. He lifted his wrench and brought it down on the speaker's head lightly. The man who was struck (and who had made no effort to ward off the blow) dropped, partly from the effect of the blow.
Kane let him lie there, without concern. The man would not remain unconscious for long, but long enough to allow Kane to wriggle into the hole. When the man revived he would recall nothing about Kane or about the fact of his own unconsciousness. There would simply be five minutes taken out of his life that he would never find and never miss.
It was dark in the hole and, of course, there was no ventilation, but Kane paid no attention to that. With the sureness of instinct, he clambered upward toward the hold that would receive him, then lay there, panting, fitting the cavity neatly, as though it were a womb.
In two hours they would begin inserting the last of the vitals, close the passage, and leave Kane there, unknowingly. Kane would be the sole bit of flesh and blood in a thing of metal and ceramics and fuel.
Kane was not afraid of being prematurely discovered. No one in the project knew the hole was there. The design didn't call for it. The mechanics and construction men weren't aware of having put it in.
Kane had arranged that entirely by himself. He didn't know how he had arranged it but he knew he had. He could watch his own influence without knowing how it was exerted. Take the man Hammer, for instance, the leader of the project and the most clearly influenced. Of all the indistinct figures about Kane, he was the least indistinct. Kane would be very aware of him at times, when he passed near him in his slow and hazy journeys about the grounds. It was all that was necessary--passing near him.
Kane recalled it had been so before, particularly with theoreticians. When Lise Meitner decided to test for barium among the products of the neutron bombardment of uranium, Kane had been there, an unnoticed plodder along a corridor nearby.
He had been picking up leaves and trash in a park in 1904 when the young Einstein had passed by, pondering. Einstein's steps had quickened with the impact of sudden thought. Kane felt it like an electric shock.
But he didn't know how it was done. Does a spider know architectural theory when it begins to construct its first web?
It went further back. The day the young Newton had stared at the moon with the dawn of a certain thought, Kane had been there. And further back still.
The panorama of New Mexico, ordinarily deserted, was alive With human ants crawling about the metal shaft lancing upward. This one was different from all the similar structures that had preceded it.
This would go free of Earth more nearly than any other. It would reach out and circle the moon before falling back. It would be crammed with instruments that would photograph the moon and measure its heat emissions, probe for radioactivity, and test by microwave for chemical structure. It would, by automation, do almost everything that could be expected of a manned vehicle. And it would learn enough to make certain that the next ship sent out would be a manned vehicle.
Except that, in a way, this first one was a manned vehicle after all.
There were representatives of various governments, of various industries, of various social and economic groupings. There were television cameras and feature writers.
Those who could not be there watched in their homes and heard numbers counted backward in painstaking monotone in the manner grown traditional in a mere three decades.
At zero the reaction motors came to life and ponderously the ship lifted.
Kane heard the noise of the rushing gases, as though from a distance, and felt the gathering acceleration press against him.
He detached his mind, lifting it up and outward, freeing it from direct connection with his body in order that he might be unaware of the pain and discomfort.
Dizzily, he knew his long journey was nearly over. He would no longer have to maneuver carefully to avoid having people realize he was immortal. He would no longer have to fade into the background, no longer wander eternally from place to place, changing names and personality, manipulating minds.
It had not been perfect, of course. The myths of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman had arisen, but he was still here. He had not been disturbed.
He could see his spot in the sky. Through the mass and solidity of the ship he could see it. Or not “see” really. He didn't have the proper word.
He knew there was a proper word, though. He could not say how he knew a fraction of the things he knew, except that as the centuries had passed he had gradually grown to know them with a sureness that required no reason.
He had begun as an ovum (or as something for which “ovum” was the nearest word he knew), deposited on Earth before the first cities had been built by the wandering hunting creatures since called “men.” Earth had been chosen carefully by his progenitor. Not every world would do.
What world would? What was the criterion? That he still didn't know.
Does an ichneumon wasp study ornithology before it finds the one species of spider that will do for her eggs, and stings it just so in order that it may remain alive?
The ovum spilt him forth at length and he took the shape of a man and lived among men and protected himself against men. And his one purpose was to arrange to have men travel along a path that would end with a ship and within the ship a hole and within the hole, himself.
It had taken eight thousand years of slow striving and stumbling.
The spot in the sky became sharper now as the ship moved out of the atmosphere. That was the key that opened his mind. That was the piece that completed the puzzle.
Stars blinked within that spot that could not be seen by a man's eye unaided. One in particular shone brilliantly and Kane yearned toward it. The expression that had been building within him for so long burst out now.
“Home,” he whispered.
He knew? Does a salmon study cartography to find the headwaters of the fresh-water stream in which years before it had been born?
The final step was taken in the slow maturing that had taken eight thousand years, and Kane was no longer larval, but adult.
The adult Kane fled from the human flesh that had protected the larva, and fled the ship, too. It hastened onward, at inconceivable speeds, toward home, from which someday it, too, might set off on wanderings through space to fertilize some planet with its ovum.
It sped through Space, giving no thought to the ship carrying an empty chrysalis. It gave no thought to the fact that it had driven a whole world toward technology and space travel in order only that the thing that had been Kane might mature and reach its fulfillment.
Does a bee care what has happened to a flower when the bee has done and gone its way?
=====
Going through DOES A BEE CARE? makes me think of the many editors with whom I have dealt, and with the way in which they sometimes vanish into limbo.
There had been editors whom, for a period of time, I saw frequently, and with whom I felt quite close. Then, for one reason or another, they left their positions and vanished out of my ken. I haven't seen Horace Gold for many years, for instance-and I haven't seen James L. Quinn, who bought DOES A BEE CARE? and a few other stories of mine.
He had a southern accent, I remember, and was a delightful person-and now I don't know where he is or even if he is still alive.
The next story, SILLY ASSES, is one that I had better say very little about or the commentary will be longer than the story. I wrote it on July 29, 1957, and it was rejected by two different magazines before Bob Lowndes kindly made a home for it. It appeared in the February 1958 issue of Future.
Naron of the long-lived Rigellian race was the fourth of his line to keep the galactic records.
He had the large book which contained the list of the numerous races throughout the galaxies that had developed intelligence, and the much smaller book that listed those races that had reached maturity and had qualified for the Galactic Federation. In the first book, a number of those listed were crossed out; those that, for one reason or another, had failed. Misfortune, biochemical or biophysical shortcomings, social maladjustment took their toll. In the smaller book, however, no member listed had yet blanked out.
And now Naron, large and incredibly ancient, looked up as a messenger approached.
“Naron,” said the messenger. “Great One!”
“Well, well, what is it? Less ceremony.”
“ Another group of organisms has attained maturity.”
“Excellent. Excellent. They are coming up quickly now. Scarcely a year passes without a new one. And who are these?”
The messenger gave the code number of the galaxy and the coordinates of the world within it.
“Ah, yes,” said Naron. “I know the world.” And in flowing script he noted it in the first book and transferred its name into the second, using, as was customary, the name by which the planet was known to the largest fraction of its populace. He wrote: Earth.
He said, “These new creatures have set a record. No other group has passed from intelligence to maturity so quickly. No mistake, I hope.”
“None, sir,” said the messenger. “They have attained to thermonuclear power, have they?”
“Yes. sir.”
“Well, that's the criterion.” Naron chuckled. “And soon their ships will probe out and contact the Federation.”
“Actually, Great One,” said the messenger, reluctantly, “the Observers tell us they have not yet penetrated space.”
Naron was astonished. “Not at all? Not even a space station?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“But if they have thermonuclear power, where then do they conduct their tests and detonations?”
“On their own planet, sir.”
Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?”
“Yes, sir.”
Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the smaller book. It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy.
“Silly asses,” he muttered.
=====
This is another story with a moral, I'm afraid. But, you see, the nuclear danger had escalated when both the United States and the Soviet Union developed the fusion H-bomb, and I was bitter again.
As 1957 ended another turning point was upon me. It came about in this wise:
When Walker, Boyd, and I wrote our textbook we all spent school time freely on it (though naturally much of the work overflowed into evenings and weekends) .It was a scholarly endeavor and part of our job.
When I wrote THE CHEMICALS OF LIFE I felt that that, too, was a scholarly endeavor, and worked on it during school hours without any qualms. I worked on other books of the sort during school hours, too.* [* I must stress. again. that I never worked on science fiction during school hours.] By the end of 1957 I had in this fashion written seven nonfiction books for the general public.
Meanwhile, though, James Faulkner, the sympathetic dean, and Burnham S. Walker, the sympathetic department head, had resigned their positions and there had come replacements-who viewed me without sympathy.
Dean Faulkner’s replacement did not approve of my activities, and he had a point, I suppose. In my eagerness to write nonfiction I had completely abandoned research, and he thought it was research on which the school's reputation depended. To an extent that is true, but it is not always true, and in my case it wasn't.
We had a conference and I presented my view in a frank and straightforward manner, as my unworldly father had always taught me to do.
“Sir,” I said, ''as a writer I am outstanding and my work will reflect luster on the school. As a researcher, however, I am merely competent, and if there is one thing Boston University School of Medicine does not need, it is another merely competent researcher.”
I supose [sic] I might have been more diplomatic, for that seemed to end the discussion. I was taken off the payroll and the spring semester of 1958 was the last in which I taught regular classes, after nine years at that game.
It didn't bother me very much. Concerning the school salary I cared nothing. Even after two pay raises it only came to sixty-five hundred dollars a year, and my writing earned me considerably more than that already.
Nor did I worry about losing the chance to do research; I had abandoned that already. As for teaching, my nonfiction books (and even my science fiction) were forms of teaching that satisfied me with their great variety far more than teaching a limited subject matter could. I didn't even fear missing the personal interaction of lecturing, since from 1950 onward I had been establishing myself as a professional lecturer and was beginning to earn respectable fees in that manner.
However, it was the new dean's intention to deprive me of my title, too, and kick me out of the school altogether. That I would not allow. I maintained that I had earned tenure, for I had become an associate professor in 1955, and could not be deprived of the title without cause. The fight went on for two years and I won. I retained the title, and I still retain the title right now. I am still associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.
What's more, the school is now happy about it. My adversary retired at last and has since died. (He wasn't really a bad fellow; we just didn't see eye to eye.) And lest I give a false impression, let me state emphatically that, except for that one period involving just one or two people, the school, and everyone in it, has always treated me with perfect kindness.
I still do not teach and am not on the payroll, but that is my own choice. I have been asked to come back in one way or another a number of times, but have explained why I cannot. I do give lectures at school when requested, and on May 19, 1974, I gave the commencement address at the medical school-so all is well, you see.
Nevertheless, when I found I had time on my hands, with no classes to take care of and no commuting to do, I found that my impulse was to put that extra time into nonfiction, with which I had fallen completely and helplessly and hopelessly in love.
Remember, too, that on October 4, 1957, Sputnik I had gone into orbit, and in the excitement that followed I grew very fervent concerning the importance of writing science for the layman. What's more, the publishers were now fiercely interested in it as well, and in no time at all I found I had been hounded into so many projects that it became difficult and even impossible to find time to work on major science fiction projects, and, alas, it has continued so to the present day.
Mind you, I didn't quit science fiction altogether. No year has passed that hasn't seen me write something, even if only a couple of short pieces. On January 14, 1958, as I was getting ready to start my last semester and before the full impact of my decision had struck home, I wrote the following story for Bob Mills and his (alas) short-lived Venture. It appeared in the May 1958 issue.