He was a simulacron, of course, but so cleverly contrived that the human beings dealing with him had long since given up thinking of the real energy-entities, waiting in white-hot blaze in their field-enclosure “ship” miles from Earth.
The simulacron, with a majestic golden beard and deep brown, wide-set eyes, said gently, “We understand your hesitations and suspicions, and we can only continue to assure you we mean you no harm. We have, I think, presented you with proof that we inhabit the coronal haloes of O-spectra stars; that your own sun is too weak for us; while your planets are of solid matter and therefore completely and eternally alien to us.”
The Terrestrial Negotiator (who was Secretary of Science and, by common consent, had been placed in charge of negotiations with the aliens) said, “But you have admitted we are now on one of your chief trade routes.”
“Now that our new world of Kimmonoshek has developed new fields of protonic fluid, yes.”
The Secretary said, “Well, here on Earth, positions on trade routes can gain military importance out of proportion to their intrinsic value. I can only repeat, then, that to gain our confidence you must tell us exactly why you need Jupiter.”
And as always, when that question or a form of it was asked, the simulacron looked pained. “Secrecy is important. If the Lamberj people-”
“Exactly,” said the Secretary. “To us it sounds like war. You and what you call the Lamberj people-”
The simulacron said hurriedly, “But we are offering you a most generous return. You have only colonized the inner planets of your system and we are not interested in those. We ask for the world you call Jupiter, which, I understand, your people can never expect to live on, or even land on. Its size” (he laughed indulgently) “is too much for you.”
The Secretary, who disliked the air of condescension, said stiffly, “The Jovian satellites are practical sites for colonization, however, and we intend to colonize them shortly.”
“But the satellites will not be disturbed in any way. They are yours in every sense of the word. We ask only Jupiter itself, a completely useless world to you, and for that the return we offer is generous. Surely you realize that we could take your Jupiter, if we wished, without your permission. It is only that we prefer payment and a legal treaty. It will prevent disputes in the future. As you see, I'm being completely frank.”
The Secretary said stubbornly, “Why do you need Jupiter?”
“The Lamberj-”
“ Are you at war with the Lamberj?”
“It's not quite-”
“Because you see that if it is war and you establish some sort of fortified base on Jupiter, the Lamberj may, quite properly, resent that, and retaliate against us for granting you permission. We cannot allow ourselves to be involved in such a situation.”
“Nor would I ask you to be involved. My word that no harm would come to you. Surely” (he kept coming back to it) “the return is generous. Enough power boxes each year to supply your world with a full year of power requirement.”
The Secretary said, “On the understanding that future increases in power consumption will be met.”
“Up to a figure five times the present total. Yes.”
“Well, then, as I have said, I am a high official of the government and have been given considerable powers to deal with you-but not infinite power. I, myself, am inclined to trust you, but I could not accept your terms without understanding exactly why you want Jupiter. If the explanation is plausible and convincing, I could perhaps persuade our government and, through them, our people, to make the agreement. If I tried to make an agreement without such an explanation, I would simply be forced out of office and Earth would refuse to honor the agreement. You could then, as you say, take Jupiter by force, but you would be in illegal possession and you have said you don't wish that.”
The simulacron clicked its tongue impatiently. “I cannot continue forever in this petty bickering. The Lamberj-” Again he stopped, then said, “Have I your word of honor that this is all not a device inspired by the Lamberj people to delay us until-”
“My word of honor,” said the Secretary.
The Secretary of Science emerged, mopping his forehead and looking ten years younger. He said softly, “I told him his people could have it as soon as I obtained the President's formal approval. I don't think he'll object, or Congress, either. Good Lord, gentlemen, think of it; free power at our fingertips in return for a planet we could never use in any case.”
The Secretary of Defense, growing purplish with objection, said, “But we had agreed that only a Mizzarett-Lamberj war could explain their need for Jupiter. Under those circumstances, and comparing their military potential with ours, a strict neutrality is essential.”
“But there is no war, sir,” said the Secretary of Science. “The simulacron presented an alternate explanation of their need for Jupiter so rational and plausible that I accepted at once. I think the President will agree with me, and you gentlemen, too, when you understand. In fact, I have here their plans for the new Jupiter, as it will soon appear.”
The others rose from their seats, clamoring. “ A new Jupiter?” gasped the Secretary of Defense.
“Not so different from the old, gentlemen,” said the Secretary of Science. “Here are the sketches provided in form suitable for observation by matter beings such as ourselves.”
He laid them down. The familiar banded planet was there before them on one of the sketches: yellow, pale green, and light brown with curled white streaks here and there and all against the speckled velvet background of space. But across the bands were streaks of blackness as velvet as the background, arranged in a curious pattern.
“That,” said the Secretary of Science, “is the day side of the planet. The night side is shown in this sketch.” (There, Jupiter was a thin crescent enclosing darkness, and within that darkness were the same thin streaks arranged in similar pattern, but in a phosphorescent glowing orange this time.)
“The marks,” said the Secretary of Science, “are a purely optical phenomenon, I am told, which will not rotate with the planet, but will remain static in its atmospheric fringe.”
“But what is it?” asked the Secretary of Commerce. “You see,” said the Secretary of Science, “our solar system is now on one of their major trade routes. As many as seven of their ships pass within a few hundred million miles of the system in a single day, and each ship has the major planets under telescopic observation as they pass. Tourist curiosity, you know. Solid planets of any size are a marvel to them.”
“What has that to do with these marks?”
“That is one form of their writing. Translated, those marks read: 'Use Mizzarett Ergone Vertices For Health and Glowing Heat.'“
“You mean Jupiter is to be an advertising billboard?” exploded the Secretary of Defense.
“Right. The Lamberj people, it seems, produce a competing ergone tablet, which accounts for the Mizzarett anxiety to establish full legal ownership of Jupiter-in case of Lamberj lawsuits. Fortunately, the Mizzaretts are novices at the advertising game, it appears.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the Secretary of the Interior.
“Why, they neglected to set up a series of options on the other planets. The Jupiter billboard will be advertising our system, as well as their own project. And when the competing Lamberj people come storming in to check on the Mizzarett title to Jupiter, we will have Saturn to sell to them. With its rings. As we will be easily able to explain to them, the rings will make Saturn much the better spectacle.”
“And therefore,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, suddenly beaming, “worth a much better price.”
And they all suddenly looked very cheerful.
=====
BUY JUPITER was not my original title for the story. I am usually indignant when an editor changes the title I have given a story, and change it back when it appears in one of my own collections and then mutter about it in the commentary. --But not this time.
I called the story It Pays, an utterly undistinguished title. Bob Mills, without even consulting me, quietly changed it to BUY JUPITER and I fell in love with that as soon as the change came to my attention. To a punster like myself, it is the perfect title for the story-so perfect that I have given it to this entire collection, which, as you know, is BUY JUPITER AND OTHER STORIES.
Bob Mills gets the credit.
During those early years in which, with a certain amount of uneasy horror, I was watching my science fiction writing begin to fall off, I would occasionally get into a state of blue funk.
Could it be that I could no longer write science fiction at all? Suppose I wanted to write science fiction--could I?
I was driving down to Marshfield, Massachusetts, on July 23, 1958, to begin a three-week vacation which I dreaded (1 dread all vacations) .I deliberately set about thinking up a plot to keep my mind off that vacation and to see if I could. A STATUE FOR FATHER was the result. I sold it to a new magazine, Satellite Science Fiction, and it appeared in the February 1959 issue.
First time? Really? But of course you have heard of it. Yes, I was sure you had.
If you're really interested in the discovery, believe me, I'll be delighted-to tell you. It's a story I've always liked to tell, but not many people give me the chance. I've even been advised to keep the story under wraps. It interferes with the legends growing up about my father.
Still, I think the truth is valuable. There's a moral to it. A man can spend his life devoting his energies solely to the satisfaction of his own curiosity and then, quite accidentally, without ever intending anything of the sort, find himself a benefactor of humanity.
Dad was just a theoretical physicist, devoted to the investigation of time travel. I don't think he ever gave a thought to what time travel might mean to Homo sapiens. He was just curious about the mathematical relationships that governed the universe, you see.
Hungry? All the better. I imagine it will take nearly half an hour. They will do it properly for an official such as yourself. It’s a matter of pride.
To begin with, Dad was poor as only a university professor can be poor. Eventually, though, he became wealthy. In the last years before his death he was fabulously rich, and as for myself and my children and grandchildren-well, you can see for yourself.
They've put up statues to him, too. The oldest is on the hillside right here where the discovery was made. You can just see it out the window. Yes. Can you make out the inscription? Well, we're standing at a bad angle. No matter.
By the time Dad got into time-travel research the whole problem had been given up by most physicists as a bad job. It had begun with a splash when the Chrono-funnels were first set up.
Actually, they're not much to see. They're completely irrational and uncontrollable. What you see is distorted and wavery , two feet across at the most, and it vanishes quickly. Trying to focus on the past is like trying to focus on a feather caught in a hurricane that has gone mad.
They tried poking grapples into the past but that was just as unpredictable. Sometimes it was carried off successfully for a few seconds with one man leaning hard against the grapple. But more often a pile driver couldn't push it through. Nothing was ever obtained out of the past until--Well, I'll get to that.
After fifty years of no progress, physicists just lost interest. The operational technique seemed a complete blind alley; a dead end. I can't honestly say I blame them as I look back on it. Some of them even tried to show that the funnels didn't actually expose the past, but there had been too many sightings of living animals through the funnels-animals now extinct.
Anyway, when time travel was almost forgotten, Dad stepped in. He talked the government into giving him a grant to set up a Chrono-funnel of his own, and tackled the matter all over again.
I helped him in those days. I was fresh out of college, with my own doctorate in physics.
However, our combined efforts ran into bad trouble after a year or so. Dad had difficulty in getting his grant renewed. Industry wasn't interested and the university decided he was besmirching their reputation by being so single-minded in investigating a dead field. The dean of the graduate school, who understood only the financial end of scholarship, began by hinting that he switch to more lucrative fields and ended by forcing him out.
Of course, the dean-still alive and still counting grant-dollars when Dad died-probably felt quite foolish, I imagine, when Dad left the school a million dollars free and clear in his will, with a codicil canceling the bequest on the ground that the dean lacked vision. But that was merely posthumous revenge. For years before that
1 don't wish to dictate, but please don't have any more of the breadsticks. The clear soup, eaten slowly to prevent a too-sharp appetite, will do.
Anyway, we managed somehow. Dad kept the equipment we had bought with the grant money, moved it out of the university and set it up here.
Those first years on our own were brutal, and I kept urging him to give up. He never would. He was indomitable, always managing to find a thousand dollars somewhere when we needed it.
Life went on, but he allowed nothing to interfere with his research. Mother died; Dad mourned and returned to his task. I married, had a son, then a daughter, couldn't always be at his side. He carried on without me. He broke his leg and worked with the cast impeding him for months.
So I give him an the credit. I helped, of course. I did consulting work on the side and carried on negotiation with Washington. But he was the life and soul of the project.
Despite an that, we weren't getting anywhere. An the money we managed to scrounge might just as well have been poured into one of the Chrono-funnels-not that it would have passed through.
After an, we never once managed to get a grapple through a funnel. We came near on only one occasion. We had the grapple about two inches out the other end when focus changed. It snapped off clean and somewhere in the Mesozoic there is a man-made piece of steel rod rusting on a riverbank.
Then one day, the crucial day, the focus held for ten long minutes-something for which the odds were less than one in a trillion. Lord, the frenzies of excitement we experienced as we set up the cameras. We could see living creatures just the other side of the funnel, moving energetically.
Then, to top it off, the Chrono-funnel grew permeable, until you might have sworn there was nothing but air between the past and ourselves. The low permeability must have been connected with the long holding of focus, but we've never been able to prove that it did.
Of course, we had no grapple handy, wouldn't you know. But the low permeability was clear enough because something just fen through, moving from the Then into the Now. Thunderstruck, acting simply on blind instinct, I reached forward and caught it.
At that moment we lost focus, but it no longer left us embittered and despairing. We were both staring in wild surmise at what I held. It was a mass of caked and dried mud, shaved off clean where it had struck the borders of the Chrono-funnel, and on the mud cake were fourteen eggs about the size of duck eggs.
I said, “Dinosaur eggs? Do you suppose they really are?”
Dad said, “Maybe. We can't tell for sure.”
“Unless we hatch them,” I said in sudden, almost uncontrollable excitement. I put them down as though they were platinum. They felt warm with the heat of the primeval sun. I said, “Dad, if we hatch them, we'll have creatures that have been extinct for over a hundred million years. It will be the first case of something actually brought out of the past. If we announce this-”
I was thinking of the grants we could get, of the publicity, of all that it would mean to Dad. I was seeing the look of consternation on the dean's face.
But Dad took a different view of the matter. He said firmly. “Not a word, son. If this gets out, we'll have twenty research teams on the trail of the Chrono-funnels, cutting off my advance. No, once I've solved the riddle of the funnels, you can make all the announcements you want. Until then-we keep silent. Son, don't look like that. I'll have the answer in a year. I'm sure of it.
I was a little less confident, but those eggs, I felt convinced, would arm us with all the proof we'd need. I set up a large oven at bloodheat; I circulated air and moisture. I rigged up an alarm that would sound at the first signs of motion within the eggs.
They hatched at 3 A.M. nineteen days later, and there they were-fourteen wee kangaroos with greenish scales, clawed hindlegs, plump little thighs, and thin, whiplash tails.
I thought at first they were tyrannosauri, but they were too small for that species of dinosaur. Months passed, and I could see they weren't going to grow any larger than moderate-sized dogs.
Dad seemed disappointed, but I held on, hoping he would let me use them for publicity .One died before maturity and one was killed in a scuffle. But the other twelve survived-five males and seven females. I fed them on chopped carrots, boiled eggs, and milk, and grew quite fond of them. They were fearfully stupid and yet gentle. And they were truly beautiful. Their scales
Oh, well, it's silly to describe them. Those original publicity pictures have made their rounds. Though, come to think of it, I don't know about Mars--Oh, there, too. Well, good.
But it took a long time for the pictures to make an impression on the public, let alone a sight of the creatures in the flesh. Dad remained intransigent. A year passed, two, and finally three. We had no luck whatsoever with the Chrono-funnels. The one break was not repeated, and still Dad would not give in.
Five of our females laid eggs and soon I had over fifty of the creatures on my hands.
“What shall we do with them?” I demanded. “Kill them off,” he said.
Well, I couldn't do that, of course. Henri, is it almost ready? Good.
We had reached the end of our resources when it happened. No more money was available. I had tried everywhere, and met with consistent rebuffs. I was even glad because it seemed to me that Dad would have to give in now. But with a chin that was firm and indomitably set, he coolly set up another experiment.
I swear to you that if the accident had not happened the truth would have eluded us forever. Humanity would have been deprived of one of its greatest boons.
It happens that way sometimes. Perkin spots a purple tinge in his gunk and comes up with aniline dyes. Remsen puts a contaminated finger to his lips and discovers saccharin. Goodyear drops a mixture on the stove and finds the secret of vulcanization.
With us, it was a half-grown dinosaur wandering into the main research lab. They had become so numerous I hadn't been able to keep track of them.
The dinosaur stepped right across two contact points which happened to be open-just at the point where the plaque immortalizing the event is now located. I'm convinced that such a happenstance couldn't occur again in a thousand years. There was a blinding flash, a blistering short circuit, and the Chrono-funnel which had just been set up vanished in a rainbow of sparks.
Even at the moment, really, we didn't know exactly what we had. All we knew was that the creature had short-circuited and perhaps destroyed two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment and that we were completely ruined financially. All we had to show for it was one thoroughly roasted dinosaur. We were slightly scorched ourselves, but the dinosaur got the full concentration of field energies. We could smell it. The air was saturated with its aroma. Dad and I looked at each other in amazement. I picked it up gingerly in a pair of tongs. It was black and charred on the outside, but the burnt scales crumbled away at a touch, carrying the skin with it. Under the char was white, firm flesh that resembled chicken.
I couldn't resist tasting it, and it resembled chicken about the way Jupiter resembles an asteroid.
Believe me or not, with our scientific work reduced to rubble about us, we sat there in seventh heaven and devoured dinosaur. Parts were burnt, parts were nearly raw. It hadn't been dressed. But we didn't stop until we had picked the bones clean.
Finally I said, “Dad, we've got to raise them gloriously and systematically for food purposes.”
Dad had to agree. We were completely broke.
I got a loan from the bank by inviting the president to dinner and feeding him dinosaur.
It has never failed to work. No one who has once tasted what we now call “dinachicken” can rest content with ordinary fare. A meal without dinachicken is a meal we choke down to keep body and soul together. Only dinachicken is food.
Our family still owns the only herd of dinachickens in existence and we are the only suppliers for the worldwide chain of restaurants-this is the first and oldest-which has grown up about it.
Poor Dad! He was never happy, except for those unique moments when he was actually eating dinachicken. He continued working on the Chrono-funnels and so did twenty other research teams which, as he had predicted would happen, jumped in. Nothing ever came of any of it, though, to this day. Nothing except dinachicken.
Ah, Pierre, thank you. A superlative job/ Now, sir, if you will allow me to carve. No salt, now, and just a trace of the sauce. That’s right....Ah, that is precisely the expression I always see on the face of a man who experiences his first taste of the delight.
A grateful humanity contributed fifty thousand dollars to have the statue on the hillside put up, but even that tribute failed to make Dad happy.
All he could see was the inscription: The Man Who Gave Dinachicken to the World.
You see, to his dying day, he wanted only one thing, to find the secret of time travel. For all that he was a benefactor of humanity, he died with his curiosity unsatisfied.
=====
My original title had been Benefactor of Humanity, which I thought carried a fine flavor of irony, and I chafed when Leo Margulies of Satellite changed that title. When The Saturday Evening Post asked permission to reprint the story (and it appeared in the March-April 1973 issue of that magazine) I made it a condition that they restore the original title. But then, when I saw my own title in print, I thought about it and decided that Leo's title was better. So it appears here as A STATUE FOR FATHER again.
Bob Mills, by the way, whom I mentioned in connection with BUY JUPITER, was a very close friend of mine when he was working with F & SF and with Venture. He is not one of those with whom I have lost contact, either. He has sold his soul to the devil and is now an agent, but we see each other now and then and are as friendly as ever.
It was Bob who contributed to my switch to nonfiction, too. Since I hated writing research pieces, I began, in 1953, to write imaginative pieces on chemistry for the Journal of Chemical Education. I had done about half a dozen before it occurred to me that I was getting nothing for them and was not reaching my audience.
I began writing nonfiction articles for the science fiction magazines, therefore; articles that gave me far more scope and far more variety than any scholarly journal could. The first of these was Hemoglobin and the Universe, which appeared in the February 1955 Astounding.
In September 1957, however, Bob Mills called me up and asked if I would do a regular science article for Venture. I agreed with alacrity and the first of these, Fecundity Limited, appeared in the January 1958 Venture. Alas, Venture lasted only a very few more issues before folding, but I was then asked to do the same column for F & SF. The first of these was Dust of Ages, which appeared in the November 1958 issue of that magazine.
The F & SF series lasted and flourished. The request had been for a fifteen-hundred-word column at first and that was the length of all those in Venture and the first in F & SF. The request came quickly to raise the wordage to four thousand and, beginning with Catching Up With Newton, in the December 1958 issue of F & SF, they were the longer length.
The F & SF series has been amazingly successful. My two hundredth article in the series appeared in the June 1975 issue of F & SF. So far I have not missed an issue, and it may be the longest series of items by one author (other than the editor) ever to have appeared in a science fiction magazine. These articles are periodically collected by Doubleday into books of essays, of which at this time of writing there have been eleven.
Most important of all, though, is the fun I get out of these monthly articles. To this day I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other Writing assignment I get. I am constantly anywhere from one to two months ahead of deadline, because I can't wait, but the editors don't seem to mind.
In a way it was Bob Mills who helped establish my present article-writing style, one of intense informality that has managed to leak across into my fiction collections too (as this book bears witness) .While I wrote that column for him he constantly referred to me as “the God Doctor,” while I called him “the Kindly Editor,” and we had fun kidding each other in the footnotes till he resigned his post. (No, that was not cause-and-effect.)
Anyway, the articles helped confirm me in my nonfiction and made it even harder to get to fiction. Bob, you must understand, did not approve of my not writing fiction. Sometimes he suggested plots for stories in an attempt to lure me into writing, and sometimes I liked his suggestions. For instance, one of his suggestions ended as UNTO THE FOURTH GENERATION, which appeared in the
April 1959 issue of F & SF and was then included in NIGHTFALL AND OTHER STORIES. That story is one of my
personal favorites.
I thought he had suggested another winner when I wrote up one of his ideas in RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY. I wrote it on November 1, 1958, submitted to him on November 2, and had it rejected on November 3. Kindly Editor, indeed!
Eventually I found a home for it, though, and it appeared in the September 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe Science Fiction.
“There she is again,” said Lillian Wright as she adjusted the venetian blinds carefully. “There she is, George.”
“There who is?” asked her husband, trying to get satisfactory contrast on the TV so that he might settle down to the ball game.
“Mrs. Sakkaro,” she said, and then, to forestall her husband's inevitable “Who's that?” added hastily, “The new neighbors, for goodness sake.”
“Oh.”
“Sunbathing. Always sunbathing. I wonder where her boy is. He's usually out on a nice day like this, standing in that tremendous yard of theirs and throwing the ball against the house. Did you ever see him, George?”
“I've heard him. It's a version of the Chinese water torture. Bang on the wall, bill on the ground, smack in the hand. Bang, bill, smack, bang, bill-”
“He's a nice boy, quiet and well-behaved. I wish Tommie would make friends with him. He's the right age, too, just about ten, I should say.”
“I didn't know Tommie was backward about making friends.”
“Well, it's hard with the Sakkaros, They keep so to themselves. I don't even know what Mr. Sakkaro does.”
“Why should you? It's not really anyone's business what he does.”
“It's odd that I never see him go to work.”
“No one ever sees me go to work.”
“You stay home and write. What does he do.”
“I dare say Mrs. Sakkaro knows what Mr. Sakkaro does and is all upset because she doesn't know' what I do,”
“Oh, George.” Lillian retreated from the window and glanced with distaste at the television. (Schoendienst was at bat.) “I think we should make an effort; the neighborhood should.”
“What kind of an effort?” George was comfortable on the couch now, with a king-size Coke in his hand, freshly opened and frosted with moisture.
“To get to know them.”
“Well, didn't you, when she first moved in? You said you called.”
“I said hello but, well, she'd just moved in and the house was still upset, so that's all it could be, just hello. It's been two months now and it's still nothing more than hello, sometimes. --She's so odd.”
“Is she?”
“She's always looking at the sky; I've seen her do it a hundred times and she's never been out when it's the least bit cloudy. Once, when the boy was out playing, she called to him to come in, shouting that it was going to rain. I happened to hear her and I thought, Good Lord, wouldn't you know and me with a wash on the line, so I hurried out and, you know, it was broad sunlight. Oh, there were some clouds, but nothing, really.”
“Did it rain, eventually?”
“Of course not. I just had to run out in the yard for nothing.”
George was lost amid a couple of base hits and a most embarrassing bobble that meant a run. When the excitement was over and the pitcher was trying to regain his composure, George called out after Lillian, who was vanishing into the kitchen, “Well, since they're from Arizona, I dare say they don't know rainclouds from any other kind.”
Lillian came back into the living room with a patter of high heels. “From where?”
“From Arizona, according to Tommie.”
“How did Tommie know?”
“He talked to their boy, in between ball chucks, I guess, and he told Tommie they came from Arizona and then the boy was called in. At least, Tommie says it might have been Arizona, or maybe Alabama or some place like that. You know Tommie and his nontotal recall. But if they're that nervous about the weather, I guess it's Arizona and they don't know what to make of a good rainy climate like ours.”
“But why didn't you ever tell me?”
“Because Tommie only told me this morning and because I thought he must have told you already and, to tell the absolute truth, because I thought you could just manage to drag out a normal existence even if you never found out. Wow-”
The ball went sailing into the right field stands and that was that for the pitcher.
Lillian went back to the venetian blinds and said, “I'll simply just have to make her acquaintance. She looks very nice. -Oh, Lord, look at that, George.”
George was looking at nothing but the TV.
Lillian said, “I know she's staring at that cloud. And now she'll be going in. Honestly.”
George was out two days later on a reference search in the library and came home with a load of books. Lillian greeted him jubilantly.
She said, “Now, you're not doing anything tomorrow.”
“That sounds like a statement, not a question.”
“It is a statement. We're going out With the Sakkaros to Murphy's Park.
“With-”
“With the next-door neighbors, George. Haw can you never remember the name?”
“I'm gifted. How did it happen?”
“I just went up to their house this morning and rang the bell.”
“That easy?”
“It wasn't easy. It was hard. I stood there, jittering, with my finger on the doorbell, till I thought that ringing the bell would be easier than having the door open and being caught standing there like a fool.”
“And she didn't kick you out?”
“No. She was sweet as she could be. Invited me in, knew who I was, said she was so glad I had come to visit. Yau know.”
“And you suggested we go to Murphy's Park.”
“Yes. I thought if I suggested something that would let the children have fun, it would be easier for her to go along with it. She wouldn't want to spoil a chance for her boy.”
“A mother's psychology.”
“But you should see her home.”
“Ah. You had a reason for all this. It comes out. You wanted the Cook's tour. But, please, spare me the color scheme details. I'm not interested in the bedspreads, and the size of the closets is a topic with which I can dispense.”
It was the secret of their happy marriage that Lillian paid no attention to George. She went into the color scheme details, was most meticulous about the bedspreads, and gave him an inch-by-inch description of closet-size.
“And clean? I have never seen any place so spotless.”
“If you get to know her, then, she'll be setting you impossible standards and you'll have to drop her in self-defense.”
“Her kitchen,” said Lillian, ignoring him, “was so spanking clean you just couldn't believe she ever used it. I asked for a drink of water and she held the glass underneath the tap and poured slowly so that not one drop fell in the sink itself. It wasn't affectation. She did it so casually that I just knew she always did it that way. And when she gave me the glass she held it with a clean napkin. Just hospital-sanitary.”
“She must be a lot of trouble to herself. Did she agree to come with us right off?”
“Well-not right off. She called to her husband about what the weather forecast was, and he said that the newspapers all said it would be fair tomorrow but that he was waiting for the latest report on the radio.”
“All the newspapers said so, eh?”
“Of course, they all just print the official weather forecast, so they would all agree. But I think they do subscribe to all the newspapers. At least I’ve watched the bundle the newsboy leaves-”
“There isn't much you miss, is there?”
“Anyway,” said Lillian severely, “she called up the weather bureau and had them tell her the latest and she called it out to her husband and they said they'd go, except they said they'd phone us if there were any unexpected changes in the weather.”
“All right. Then we'll go.”
The Sakkaros were young and pleasant, dark and handsome. In fact, as they came down the long walk from their home to where the Wright automobile was parked, George leaned toward his wife and breathed into her ear, “So he's the reason.”
“I wish he were,” said Lillian. “Is that a handbag he's carrying?”
“Pocket-radio. To listen to weather forecasts, I bet.” The Sakkaro boy came running after them, waving, something which turned out to be an aneroid barometer, and all three got into the back seat. Conversation was turned on and lasted, with neat give-and-take on impersonal subjects, to Murphy's Park.
The Sakkaro boy was so polite and reasonable that even Tommie Wright, wedged between his parents in the front seat, was subdued by example into a semblance of civilization. Lillian couldn't recall when she had spent so serenely pleasant a drive.
She was not the least disturbed by the fact that, barely to be heard under the flow of the conversation, Mr. Sakkaro's small radio was on, and she never actually saw him put it occasionally to his ear.
It was a beautiful day at Murphy's Park; hot and dry without being too hot; and with a cheerfully bright sun in a blue, blue sky. Even Mr. Sakkaro, though he inspected every quarter of the heavens with a careful eye and then stared piercingly at the barometer, seemed to have no fault to find. I
Lillian ushered the two boys to the amusement section and bought enough tickets to allow one ride for each on every variety of centrifugal thrill that the park offered.
“Please,” she had said to a protesting Mrs. Sakkaro, “let this be my treat. I'll let you have your turn next I time.”
When she returned, George was alone. “Where-” she began.
“Just down there at the refreshment stand. I told them I'd wait here for you and we would join them.” He sounded gloomy.
“Anything wrong?”
“No, not really, except that I think he must be independently wealthy.”
“What?”
“I don't know what he does for a living. I hinted-”
“Now who's curious?”
“I was doing it for you. He said he's just a student of human nature.”
“How philosophical. That would explain all those newspapers.”
“Yes, but with a handsome, wealthy man next door, it looks as though I'll have impossible standards set for me, too.”
“Don't be silly.”
“And he doesn't come from Arizona.”
“He doesn't?”
“I said I heard he was from Arizona. He looked so surprised, it was obvious he didn't. Then he laughed and asked if he had an Arizona accent.”
Lillian said thoughtfully, “He has some kind of accent, you know. There are lots of Spanish-ancestry people in the Southwest, so he could still be from Arizona. Sakkaro could be a Spanish name.”
“Sounds Japanese to me. -Come on, they're waving. Oh, good Lord, look what they've bought.”
The Sakkaros were each holding three sticks of cotton candy, huge swirls of pink foam consisting of threads of sugar dried out of frothy syrup that had been whipped about in a warm vessel. It melted sweetly in the mouth and left one feeling sticky.
The Sakkaros held one out to each Wright, and out of politeness the Wrights accepted.
They went down the midway, tried their hand at darts, at the kind of poker game where balls were rolled into holes, at knocking wooden cylinders off pedestals. They took pictures of themselves and recorded their voices and tested the strength of their handgrips.
Eventually they collected the youngsters, who had been reduced to a satisfactorily breathless state of roiled-up insides, and the Sakkaros ushered theirs off instantly to the refreshment stand. Tommie hinted the extent of his pleasure at the possible purchase of a hot-dog and George tossed him a quarter. He ran off, too.
“Frankly,” said George, “I prefer to stay here. If I see them biting away at another cotton candy stick I'll turn green and sicken on the spot. If they haven't had a dozen apiece, I'll eat a dozen myself.”
“I know, and they're buying a handful for the child now.”
“I offered to stand Sakkaro a hamburger and he just looked grim and shook his head. Not that a hamburger's much, but after enough cotton candy, it ought to be a feast.”
“I know. I offered her an orange drink and the way she jumped when she said no, you'd think I'd thrown it in her face. -Still, I suppose they've never been to a place like this before and they'll need time to adjust to the novelty. They'll fill up on cotton candy and then never eat it again for ten years.”
“Well, maybe.” They strolled toward the Sakkaros. “You know, Lil, it's clouding up.”
Mr. Sakkaro had the radio to his ear and was looking anxiously toward the west.
“Uh-oh,” said George, “he's seen it. One gets you fifty, he'll want to go home.”
All three Sakkaros were upon him, polite but insistent. They were sorry, they had had a wonderful time, a marvelous time, the Wrights would have to be their guests as soon as it could be managed, but now, really, they had to go home. It looked stormy. Mrs. Sakkaro wailed that all the forecasts had been for fair weather.
George tried to console them. “It's hard to predict a local thunderstorm, but even if it were to come, and it mightn't, it wouldn't last more than half an hour on the outside.”
At which comment, the Sakkaro youngster seemed on the verge of tears, and Mrs. Sakkaro's hand, holding a handkerchief, trembled visibly.
“Let's go home,” said George in resignation.
The drive back seemed to stretch interminably. There was no conversation to speak of. Mr. Sakkaro's radio was quite loud now as he switched from station to station, catching a weather report every time. They were mentioning “local thundershowers” now.
The Sakkaro youngster piped up that the barometer was falling, and Mrs. Sakkaro, chin in the palm of her hand, stared dolefully at the sky and asked if George could not drive faster, please.
“It does look rather threatening, doesn't it?” said Lillian in a polite attempt to share their guests' attitude. But then George heard her mutter, “Honestly!” under her breath.
A wind had sprung up, driving the dust of the weeks-dry road before it, when they entered the street on which they lived, and the leaves rustled ominously. Lightning flickered.
George said, “You'll be indoors in two minutes, friends. We'll make it.”
He pulled up at the gate that opened onto the Sakkaro's spacious front yard and got out of the car to open the back door. He thought he felt a drop. They were just in time.
The Sakkaros tumbled out, faces drawn with tension, muttering thanks, and started off toward their long front walk at a dead run.
“Honestly,” began Lillian, “you would think they were-”
The heavens opened and the rain came down in giant drops as though some celestial dam had suddenly burst. The top of their car was pounded with a hundred drum sticks, and halfway to their front door the Sakkaros stopped and looked despairingly upward.
Their faces blurred as the rain hit; blurred and shrank and ran together. All three shriveled, collapsing within their clothes, which sank down into three sticky-wet heaps.
And while the Wrights sat there, transfixed with horror, Lillian found herself unable to stop the completion of her remark: “--made of sugar and afraid they would melt. “
=====
My book THE EARLY ASIMOV did sufficiently well for Doubleday to decide to do other, similar books by other writers who have been writing long enough to have had an early period of some worth. The next book in the series is THE EARLY DEL REY (Doubleday, 1975) by my good old friend Lester del Rey.
Lester doesn't have his book filled with autobiographical minutiae, as I do, but has meant his book to be a more sober device for describing his views on how to write science fiction.
I would cheerfully do the same except that I don't know how to write science fiction, or anything else. What I do, I do by blind instinct.
However, something does occasionally occur to me, and one little tiny rule comes up in connection with RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY. If you're going to write a story, avoid contemporary references. They date a story and they have no staying power. The story mentions Schoendienst as having been at bat during a baseball game. Well, who the heck was Schoendienst? Do you remember? Does the name have meaning to you a decade and a half later?
And if it does, is there any point in reminding the reader that the story is a decade and a half old? --Of course, I spend pages telling you how old my stories are and everything else about them, but that's different. You 're all friends of mine.
The drift to nonfiction continued. In the spring of 1959 Leon Svirsky of Basic Books, Inc., persuaded me to do a large book to be called THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE, which was published in 1960. It was my first real success in the nonfiction field. It got numerous favorable reviews, and my annual income suddenly doubled.
I wasn't doing it all primarily for money, you understand, but my family was growing and I wasn't going to throw money away, either. So there was again that much less urge to return to fiction.
Frederik Pohl, who had succeeded Horace Gold as editor of Galaxy, tried to lure a story out of me in March 1965 by sending me a cover painting he intended to run, and asked me to write a story about it. “You have the cover!” he said, “so it will be easy.”
No, it wasn't. I looked at the cover, which featured a large, sad, space-helmeted face, with several crude crosses in the background, and with a space helmet balanced on each cross. I could make nothing of it. I would have told Fred this, but he was an old friend, and I didn't want to break his heart with the knowledge that there was something I couldn't do. So I made a supreme effort and wrote the following, which appeared in the August 1965 Galaxy.
The original combination of catastrophes had taken place five years ago--five revolutions of this planet, HC12549d by the charts, and nameless otherwise. Six-plus revolutions of Earth, but who was counting-anymore?
If the men back home knew, they might say it was a heroic fight, an epic of the Galactic Corps; five men against a hostile world, holding their bitter own for five (or six-plus) years. And now they were dying, the battle lost after all. Three were in final coma, a fourth had his yellow-tinged eyeballs still open, and a fifth was yet on his feet.
But it was no question of heroism at all. It had been five men fighting off boredom and despair and maintaining their metallic bubble of livability only for the most unheroic reason that there was nothing else to do while life remained.
If any of them felt stimulated by the battle, he never mentioned it. After the first year they stopped talking of rescue, and after the second a moratorium descended on the word “Earth.”
But one word remained always present. If unspoken it had to be found in their thoughts: “ammonia.”
It had come first while the landing was being scratched out, against all odds, on limping motors and in a battered space can.
You allow for bad breaks, of course; you expect a certain number--but one at a time. A stellar flare fries out the hypercircuits--that can be repaired, given time. A meteorite disaligns the feeder valves-they can be straightened, given time. A trajectory is miscalculated under tension and a momentarily unbearable acceleration tears out the Jump-antennae and dulls the senses of every man on board-but antennae can be replaced and senses will recover, given time.
The chances are one in countless many that all three will happen at once; and still less that they will all happen during a particularly tricky landing when the one necessary currency for the correction of all errors, time, is the one thing that is most lacking.
The Cruiser John hit that one chance in countless many, and it made a final landing, for it would never lift off a planetary surface again.
That it had landed essentially intact was itself a near miracle. The five were given life for some years at least. Beyond that, only the blundering arrival of another ship could help, but no one expected that. They had had their life's share of coincidences, they knew, and all had been bad.
That was that. And the key word was “ammonia.” With the surface spiraling upward, and death (mercifully quick) facing them at considerably better than even odds, Chou somehow had time to note the absorption spectrograph, which was registering raggedly.
“Ammonia,” he cried out. The others heard but there was no time to pay attention. There was only the wrenching fight against a quick death for the sake of a slow one.
When they landed finally, on sandy ground with sparse bluish (bluish?) vegetation; reedy grass; stunted treelike objects with blue bark and no leaves; no sign of animal life; and with a greenish (greenish?) cloud-streaked sky above-the word came back to haunt them.
“Ammonia?” said Petersen heavily. Chou said, “Four per cent.”
“Impossible,” said Petersen. But it wasn't. The books didn't say impossible. What the Galactic Corps had discovered was that a planet of a certain mass and volume and a certain temperature was an ocean planet and had one of two atmospheres: nitrogen/ oxygen or nitrogen/ carbon dioxide. In the former case, life was advanced; in the latter, it was primitive.
No one checked beyond mass, volume, and temperature any longer. One took the atmosphere (one or the other of them) for granted. But the books didn't say it had to be so; just that it always was so. Other atmospheres were thermodynamically possible, but extremely unlikely, so they weren't found in actual practice.
Until now. The men of the Cruiser John had found one and were bathed for the rest of such life as they could eke out by a nitrogen/carbon dioxide/ammonia atmosphere.
The men converted their ship into an underground bubble of Earth-type surroundings. They could not lift off the surface, nor could they drive a communicating beam through hyperspace, but all else was salvageable. To make up for inefficiencies in the cycling system, they could even tap the planet's own water and air supply, within limits; provided, of course, they subtracted the ammonia.
They organized exploring parties since their suits were in excellent condition and it passed the time. The planet was harmless; no animal life; sparse plant life everywhere. Blue, always blue; ammoniated chlorophyll; ammoniated protein.
They set up laboratories, analyzed the plant components, studied microscopic sections, compiled vast volumes of findings. They tried growing native plants in ammonia-free atmosphere and failed. They made themselves into geologists and studied the planet's crust; astronomers, and studied the spectrum of the planet's sun.
Barrère would say sometimes, “Eventually, the Corps will reach this planet again and we'll leave a legacy of knowledge for them. It's a unique planet after all. There might not be another Earth-type with ammonia in all the Milky Way.”
“Great,” said Sandropoulos bitterly. “What luck for us.”
Sandropoulos worked out the thermodynamics of the situation. “ A metastable system,” he said. “The ammonia disappears steadily through geochemical oxidation that forms nitrogen; the plants utilize nitrogen and re-form ammonia, adapting themselves to the presence of ammonia. If the rate of plant formation of ammonia dropped two per cent, a declining spiral would set in. Plant life would wither, reducing the ammonia still further, and so on.”
“You mean if we killed enough plant life,” said Vlassov, “we could wipe out the ammonia.”
“If we had air sleds and wide-angle blasters, and a year to work in, we might,” said Sandropoulos, “but we haven't and there's a better way. If we could get our own plants going, the formation of oxygen through photosynthesis would increase the rate of ammonia oxidation. Even a small localized rise would lower the ammonia in the region, stimulate Earth-plant growth further and inhibit the native growth, drop the ammonia further, and so on.”
They became gardeners through all the growing season. That was, after all, routine for the Galactic Corps. Life on Earth-type planets was usually of the water/protein type, but variation was infinite and other-world food was rarely nourishing and even more rarely palatable. One had to try Earth plants of different sorts. It often happened (not always, but often) that some types of Earth plants would overrun and drown out the native flora. With the native flora held down, other Earth plants could take root.
Dozens of planets had been converted into new Earths in this fashion. In the process Earthly plants developed hundreds of hardy varieties that flourished under extreme conditions. --All the better with which to seed the next planet.
The ammonia would kill any Earth plant, but the seeds at the disposal of the Cruiser John were not true Earth plants but otherworld mutations of these plants. They fought hard but not well enough. Some varieties grew in a feeble, sickly manner and then died.
At that they did better than did microscopic life. The planet's bacterioids were far more flourishing than was the planet's straggly blue plant life. The native micro-organisms drowned out any attempt at competition from Earth samples. The attempt to seed the alien soil with Earthtype bacterial flora in order to aid the Earth plants failed.
Vlassov shook his head. “It wouldn't do anyway. If our bacteria survived, it would only be by adapting to the presence of ammonia.”
Sandropoulos said, “Bacteria won't help us. We need the plants; they carry the oxygen-manufacturing systems.”
“We could make some ourselves,” said Petersen. “We could electrolyze water.”
“How long will our equipment last? If we could only get our plants going, it would be like electrolyzing water forever, little by little, but year after year, till the planet gave up.”
Barrère said, “Let's treat the soil then. It's rotten with ammonium salts. We'll bake the salts out and replace the ammonia-free soil.”
“And what about the atmosphere?” asked Chou. “In ammonia-free soil, they may catch hold despite the atmosphere. They almost make it as is.”
They worked like longshoremen, but with no real end in view. None really thought it would work, and there was no future for themselves, personally, even if it did work. But working passed the days.
The next growing season, they had their ammonia-free soil, but Earth plants still grew only feebly. They even placed domes over several shoots and pumped ammonia-free air within. It helped slightly but not enough. They adjusted the chemical composition of the soil in every possible fashion. There was no reward.
The feeble shoots produced their tiny whiffs of oxygen, but not enough to topple the ammonia atmosphere off its narrow base.
“One more push,” said Sandropoulos, “one more. We're rocking it; we're rocking it; but we can't knock it over.”
Their tools and equipment blunted and wore out with time and the future closed in steadily. Each month there was less room for maneuver.
When the end came at last it was with almost gratifying suddenness. There was no name to place on the weakness and vertigo. No one actually suspected direct ammonia poisoning. Still, they were living off the algal growths of what had once been ship-hydroponics for years, and the growths were themselves aberrant with possible ammonia contamination.
It could have been the workings of some native microorganism which might finally have learned to feed off them. It might even have been an Earthly microorganism, mutated under the conditions of a strange world.
So three died at last, and did so, circumstances be praised, painlessly. They were glad to go, and leave the useless fight.
Chou said in a voiceless whisper, “It's foolish to lose so badly.”
Petersen, alone of the five to be on his feet (was he immune, whatever it was?) turned a grieving face toward his only living companion. “Don't die,” he said, “don't leave me alone.”
Chou tried to smile. “I have no choice. --But you can follow us old-friend. Why fight? The tools are gone and there is no way of winning now, if there ever was.”
Even now, Petersen fought off final despair by concentrating on the fight against the atmosphere. But his mind was weary, his heart worn-out, and when Chou died the next hour he was left with four corpses to work with.
He stared at the bodies, counting over the memories, stretching them back (now that he was alone and dared wail) to Earth itself, which he had last seen on a visit nearly eleven years before.
He would have to bury the bodies. He would break off the bluish branches of the native leafless trees and build crosses of them. He would hang the space helmet of each man on top and prop the oxygen cylinders below. Empty cylinders to symbolize the lost fight.
A foolish sentiment for men who could no longer care, and for future eyes that might never see.
But he was doing it for himself, to show respect for his friends, and respect for himself, too, for he was not the kind of man to leave his friends untended in death while he himself could stand.
Besides--
Besides? He sat in weary thought for some moments. While he was still alive he would fight with such tools as were left. He would bury his friends.
He buried each in a spot of ammonia-free soil they had so laboriously built up: buried them without shroud and without clothing; leaving them naked in the hostile ground for the slow decomposition that would come with their own micro-organisms before those, too, died with the inevitable invasion of the native bacterioids.
Petersen placed each cross, with its helmet and oxygen cylinders, propped each with rocks, then turned away, grim and sad-eyed, to return to the buried ship that he now inhabited alone.
He worked each day and eventually the symptoms came for him, too. He struggled into his spacesuit and came to the surface for what he knew would be one last time.
He fell to his knees on the garden plots. The Earth plants were green. They had lived longer than ever before. They looked healthy, even vigorous.
They had patched the soil, babied the atmosphere, and now Petersen had used the last tool, the only one remaining at his disposal, and he had given them fertilizer as well
Out of the slowly corrupting flesh of the Earthmen came the nutrients that supplied the final push. Out of the Earth plants came the oxygen that would beat back the ammonia and push the planet out of the unaccountable niche into which it had stuck.
If Earthmen ever came again (when? a million years hence?) they would find a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere and a limited flora strangely reminiscent of Earth's.
The crosses would rot and decay; the metal, rust and decompose. The bones might fossilize and remain to give a hint as to what happened. Their own records, sealed away, might be found.
But none of that mattered. If nothing at all was ever found, the planet itself, the whole planet, would be their monument.
And Petersen lay down to die amid their victory.
=====
Fred Pohl changes titles more frequently than most editors do, and in some cases drove me to distraction by doing so. In this case, though, my own title was The Last Tool, and once again the editorial change was for the better, so I kept FOUNDING FATHER. (I hate when Fred changes me for the better, but he won't stop.)
By 1967 it had been ten years since I had switched to nonfiction, and ten years since I had sold anything to John Campbell.
John was just rounding out his third decade as editor of Astounding. As the 19608 opened, however, he changed its name to Analog, and I had never had any fiction in the magazine in its new incarnation.
So I wrote EXILE TO HELL and sent it in to John. He took it, thank goodness, and it was a great pleasure to appear in the pages of the magazine again, in the May 1968 issue, even if it was just a short-short.
“The Russians,” said Dowling, in his precise voice, “used to send prisoners to Siberia in the days before space travel had become common. The French used Devil's Island for the purpose. The British sailed them off to Australia.”
He considered the chessboard carefully and his hand hesitated briefly over the bishop.
Parkinson, at the other side of the chess board, watched the pattern of the pieces absently. Chess was, of course, the professional game of computer programmers, but, under the circumstances, he lacked enthusiasm. By rights, he felt with some annoyance, Dowling should have been even worse off; he was programming the prosecution's case.
There was, of course, a tendency for the programmer to take over some of the imagined characteristics of the computer-the unemotionality, the imperviousness to anything but logic. Dowling reflected that in his precise hair-part and in the restrained elegance of his clothing.
Parkinson, who preferred to program the defense in the law cases in which he was involved, also preferred to be deliberately careless in the minor aspects of his costume.
He said, “You mean exile is a well-established punishment and therefore not particularly cruel.”
“No, it is particularly cruel, but also it is well-established, and nowadays it has become the perfect deterrent.”
Dowling moved the bishop and did not look upward. Parkinson, quite involuntarily, did.
Of course, he couldn't see anything. They were indoors, in the comfortable modem world tailored to human needs, carefully protected against the raw environment. Out there, the night would be bright with its illumination.
When had he last seen it? Not for a long time. It occurred to him to wonder what phase it was in right now.
Full? Gleaming? Or was it in its crescent phase? Was it a bright fingernail of light low in the sky?
By rights it should be a lovely sight. Once it had been. But that had been centuries ago, before space travel had become common and cheap, and before the surroundings all about them had grown sophisticated and controlled. Now the lovely light in the sky had become a new and more horrible Devil's Island hung in space.
--No one even used its name any longer, out of sheer distaste. It was “It.” Or it was less than that, just a silent, upward movement-of the head.
Parkinson said, “You might have allowed me to program the case against exile generally.”
“Why? It couldn't have affected the result.”
“Not this one, Dowling. But it might have affected future cases. Future punishments might be commuted to the death sentence.”
“For someone guilty of equipment damage? You're dreaming.”
“It was an act of blind anger. There was intent to harm a human being, granted; but there was no intent to harm equipment. “
“Nothing; it means nothing. Lack of intent is no excuse in such cases. You know that.”
“It should be an excuse. That's my point; the one I
wanted to make.” Parkinson advanced a pawn now, to cover his knight. Dowling considered. “You're trying to hang onto the queen's attack, Parkinson, and I'm not going to let you. -Let's see, now.” And while he pondered he said, “These are not primitive times, Parkinson. We live in a crowded world with no margin for error. As small a thing as a blown-out consistor could endanger a sizable fraction of our population. When anger endangers and subverts a power line, it's a serious thing.”
“I don't question that--”
“You seemed to be doing so, when you were constructing the defense program.”
“I was not. Look, when Jenkins' laser beam cut through the Field-warp, I myself was as close to death as anyone. A quarter hour's additional delay would have meant my end, too, and I'm completely aware of that. My point is only that exile is not the proper punishment!”
He tapped his finger on the chessboard for emphasis, and Dowling caught the queen before it went over. “Adjusting, not moving,” he mumbled.
Dowling's eyes went from piece to piece and he continued to hesitate. “You're wrong, Parkinson. It is the proper punishment, because there's nothing worse and that matches a crime than which there is nothing worse. Look, we all feel our absolute dependence on a complicated and rather fragile technology. A breakdown might kill us all, and it doesn't matter whether the breakdown is 1 deliberate, accidental, or caused by incompetence. Human beings demand the maximum punishment for any such I deed as the only way they can feel secure. Mere death is I not sufficient deterrent.”
“Yes, it is. No one wants to die.”
“They want to live in exile up there even less. That's why we've only had one such case in the last ten years, and only one exile. -There, do something about that!” I And Dowling nudged his queen's rook one space to the right.
A light flashed. Parkinson was on his feet at once. “The programming is finished. The computer will have its verdict now.”
Dowling looked up phlegmatically, “You've no doubt about what the verdict will be, have you? --Keep the board standing. We'll finish afterward.”
Parkinson was quite certain he would lack the heart to continue the game. He hurried down the corridor to the courtroom, light and quick on his feet, as always.
Shortly after he and Dowling had entered, the judge took his seat, and then in came Jenkins, flanked by two guards.
Jenkins looked haggard, but stoical. Ever since the blind rage had overcome him and he had accidentally I thrown a sector into unpowered darkness while striking out at a fellow worker, he must have known the inevitable consequence of this worst of all crimes. It helps to have no illusions.
Parkinson was not stoical. He dared not look squarely at Jenkins. He could not have done so without wondering, painfully, as to what might be going through Jenkins' mind at that moment. Was he absorbing, through every sense, all the perfections of familiar comfort before being thrust forever into the luminous Hell that rode the night sky?
Was he savoring the clean and pleasant air in his nostrils, the soft lights, the equable temperature, the pure water on call, the secure surroundings designed to cradle humanity in tame comfort?
While up there--
The judge pressed a contact and the computer's decision was converted into the warm, unmannered sound of a standardized human voice.
“A weighing of all pertinent information in the light of the law of the land and of all relevant precedents leads to the conclusion that Anthony Jenkins is guilty on all counts of the crime of equipment damage and is subject to the maximum penalty.”
There were only six people in the courtroom itself, but the entire population was listening by television, of course.
The judge spoke in prescribed phraseology. “The defendant will be taken from here to the nearest spaceport and, on the first available transportation, be removed from this world and sent into exile for the term of his natural life.”
Jenkins seemed to shrink within himself, but he said no word.
Parkinson shivered. How many, he wondered, would now feel the enormity of such a punishment for any crime? How long before there would be enough humanity among men to wipe out forever the punishment of exile?
Could anyone really think of Jenkins up there in space, without flinching? Could they think, and endure the thought, of a fellow man thrown for all his life among the strange, unfriendly, vicious population of a world of unbearable heat by day and frigid cold by night; of a world where the sky was a harsh blue and the ground a harsher, clashing green; where the dusty air moved raucously and the viscous sea heaved eternally?
And the gravity, that heavy--heavy--heavy--eternal--pull!
Who could bear the horror of condemning someone, for whatever reason, to leave the friendly home of the I Moon for that Hell in the sky--the Earth?
=====
Considering what John Campbell means to me, I hate to point out any editorial bad points he had-but he was a terrible blurb writer. In those little editorial comments at the beginning of a story, comments that are supposed to lure you into reading it, he all too often gave away the point of the story, when the writer was doing his best to conceal the point till the proper moment.
Here is John's blurb for EXILE TO HELL: “Hell is, of course, the worst imaginable place you least want to be forced to experience. It's an attitude about a place-Fiji for an Eskimo, Baffin Island for a Polynesian....” If you read the blurb first and then read my story, EXILE TO HELL will have the impact of a strand of wet spaghetti.
As the drought of science fiction intensified, it became important to me not to allow any item to go to waste.
A friend of mine, Ed Berkeley, ran a little periodical devoted to computers and automation. (It was even called COMPUTERS AND AUTOMATION, as I recall.) In 1959 he asked me to do a little story for him, for friendship's sake, and since I always have trouble fighting off anything put to me in that fashion, I wrote KEY ITEM for him and he paid me a dollar for it. --But then he never printed it.
Eight years passed and I finally said to him, “Hey, Ed, I what happened to my story KEY ITEM?” and he told me he had decided not to publish science fiction.
“Give it back, then,” I said, and he said, “Oh, can you Use it?”
Yes, I could use it. I sent it in to F & SF and they took it and ran it in the July 1968 issue of that magazine.
Jack Weaver came out of the vitals of Multivac looking utterly worn and disgusted.
From the stool, where the other maintained his own stolid watch, Todd Nemerson said, “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Weaver. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. No one can find anything wrong with it.”
“Except that it won't work, you mean.”
“You're no help sitting there!”
“I'm thinking.”
“Thinking!” Weaver showed a canine at one side of his mouth.
Nemerson stirred impatiently on his stool. “Why not? There are six teams of computer technologists roaming around in the corridors of Multivac. They haven't come up with anything in three days. Can't you spare one person to think?”
“It's not a matter of thinking. We've got to look. Somewhere a relay is stuck.”
“It's not that simple, Jack!”
“Who says it's simple. You know how many million relays we have there?”
“That doesn't matter. If it were just a relay, Multivac would have alternate circuits, devices for locating the flaw, and facilities to repair or replace the ailing part. The trouble is, Multivac won't only not answer the original question, it won't tell us what's wrong with it. --And meanwhile, there'll be panic in every city if we don't do something. The world's economy depends on Multivac, and everyone knows that.”
“I know it, too. But what's there to do?”
“I told you, think. There must be something we're missing completely. Look, Jack, there isn't a computer bigwig in a hundred years who hasn't devoted himself to making Multivac more complicated. It can do so much now--hell, it can even talk and listen. It's practically as complex as the human brain. We can't understand the human brain, so why should we understand Multivac?”
“Aw, come on. Next you'll be saying Multivac is human.”
“Why not?” Nemerson grew absorbed and seemed to sink into himself. “Now that you mention it, why not? Could we tell if Multivac passed the thin dividing line where it stopped being a machine and started being human? Is there a dividing line, for that matter? If the brain is just more complex than Multivac, and we keep making Multivac more complex, isn't there a point where...” He mumbled down into silence.
Weaver said impatiently, “What are you driving at? Suppose Multivac were human. How would that help us find out why it isn't working?”
“For a human reason, maybe. Suppose you were asked the most probable price of wheat next summer and didn't answer. Why wouldn't you answer?”
“Because I wouldn't know. But Multivac would know! We've given it an the factors. It can analyze futures in weather, politics, and economics. We know it can. It's done it before.”
“ All right. Suppose I asked the question and you knew the answer but didn't tell me. Why not?”
Weaver snarled, “Because I had a brain tumor. Because I had been knocked out. Because I was drunk. Damn it, because my machinery was out of order. That's just what we're trying to find out about Multivac. We're looking for the place where its machinery is out of order, for the key item.”
“Only you haven't found it.” Nemerson got off his stool. “Listen, ask me the question Multivac stalled on.”
“How? Shall I run the tape through you?”
“Come on, Jack. Give me the talk that goes along with it. You do talk to Multivac, don't you?”
“I've got to. Therapy.”
Nemerson nodded. “Yes, that's the story. Therapy. That's the official story. We talk to it in order to pretend it's a human being so that we don't get neurotic over having a machine know so much more than we do. We turn a frightening metal monster into a protective father image.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“Well, it's wrong and you know it. A computer as complex as Multivac must talk and listen to be efficient. Just putting in and taking out coded dots isn't sufficient. At a certain level of complexity, Multivac must be made to seem human because, by God, it is human. Come on, Jack, ask me the question. I want to see my reaction to it.”
Jack Weaver flushed. “This is silly.”
“Come on, will you?”
It was a measure of Weaver's depression and desperation that he acceded. Half sullenly, he pretended to be feeding the program into Multivac, speaking as he did so in his usual manner. He commented on the latest information concerning farm unrest, talked about the new equations describing jet-stream contortions, lectured on the solar constant.
He began stiffly enough, but warmed to this task out of long habit, and when the last of the program was slammed home, he almost closed contact with a physical snap at Todd Nemerson's waist.
He ended briskly, “All right, now. Work that out and give us the answer pronto.”
For a moment, having done, Jack Weaver stood there, nostrils flaring, as though he was feeling once more the excitement of throwing into action the most gigantic and glorious machine ever put together by the mind and hands of man.
Then he remembered and muttered, “ All right. That's it.”
Nemerson said, “ At least I know now why I wouldn't answer, so let's try that on Multivac. Look, clear Multivac; make sure the investigators have their paws off it. Then run the program into it and let me do the talking. Just once.”
Weaver shrugged and turned to Multivac's control wall, filled with its somber, unwinking dials and lights. Slowly he cleared it. One by one he ordered the teams away.
Then, with a deep breath, he began once more feeding the program into Multivac. It was the twelfth time all told, the dozenth time. Somewhere a distant news commentator would spread the word that they were trying again. All over the world a Multivac-dependent people would be holding its collective breath.
Nemerson talked as Weaver fed the data silently. He talked diffidently, trying to remember what it was that Weaver had said, but waiting for the moment when the key item might be added.
Weaver was done and now a note of tension was in Nemerson's voice. He said, “All right, now, Multivac. Work that out and give us the answer.” He paused and added the key item. He said “Please!”
And all over Multivac, the valves and relays went joyously to work. After all, a machine has feelings--when it isn't a machine anymore.
=====
The story didn't stop at F & SF, by the way.
The Saturday Evening Post had died in 1966, shortly after serializing my novel FANTASTIC VOYAGE (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), though I don't think there was any connection. It came back to life, however, and its editors were interested in some of my stories. They reprinted A STATUE FOR FATHER, and they also did KEY ITEM, under the title The Computer That Went On Strike, in their spring 1972 issue.
The slick magazines were interested in science fiction now. It was not only The Saturday Evening Post that was after me for stories. Boys' Life was, too. They sent me a painting hoping it would inspire a story, and I tried. I turned out THE PROPER STUDY, which appeared in the September 1968 issue of Boys' Life.
“The demonstration is ready,” said Oscar Harding softly, half to himself, when the phone rang to say that the general was on his way upstairs.
Ben Fife, Harding's young associate, pushed his fists deep into the pockets of his laboratory jacket. “We won't get anywhere,” he said. “The general doesn't change his mind.” He looked sideways at the older man's sharp profile, his pinched cheeks, his thinning gray hair. Harding might be a wizard with electronic equipment, but he couldn't seem to grasp the kind of man the general was.
And Harding said mildly, “Oh, you can never tell.”
The general knocked once on the door, but it was for I show only. He walked in quickly, without waiting for a response. Two soldiers took up their position in the corridor, one on each side of the door. They faced outward, rifles ready.
General Gruenwald said crisply, “Professor Harding!” He nodded briefly in Fife's direction and then, for a moment, studied the remaining individual in the room. That was a blank-faced man who sat apart in a straight-backed chair, half-obscured by surrounding equipment.
Everything about the general was crisp; his walk, the way he held his spine, the way he spoke. He was an straight lines and angles, adhering rigidly at all points to the etiquette of the born soldier. .
“Won't you sit down, General,” murmured Harding. “Thank you. It's good of you to come; I've been trying to see you for some time. I appreciate the fact you're a busy man.”
“Since I am busy,” said the general, “let us get to the point.”
“ As near the point as I can, sir. I assume you know about our project here. You know about the Neurophotoscope.”
“Your top-secret project? Of course. My scientific aides keep me abreast of it as best they can. I won't object to some further clarification. What is it you want?”
The suddenness of the question made Harding blink. Then he said, “To be brief--declassification. I want the world to know that--”
“Why do you want them to know anything?”
“Neurophotoscopy is an important problem, sir, and enormously complex. I would like all scientists of all nationalities working on it.”
“No, no. That's been gone over many times. The discovery is ours and we keep it.”
“It will remain a very small discovery if it remains ours. Let me explain once more.”
The general looked at his watch. “It will be quite useless.”
“I have a new subject. A new demonstration. As long as you've come here at all, General, won't you listen for just a little while? I'll omit scientific detail as much as possible and say only that the varying electric potentials of brain cells can be recorded as tiny, irregular waves.”
“Electroencephalograms. Yes, I know. We've had them for a century. And I know what you do with it.”
“Uh-yes.” Harding grew more earnest. “The brain waves by themselves carry their information too compactly. They give us the whole complex of changes from a hundred billion brain cells at once. My discovery was of a practical method for converting them to colored patterns.”
“With your Neurophotoscope,” said the general, pointing. “You see, I recognize the machine.” Every campaign ribbon and medal on his chest lay in its proper place to within the millimeter.
“Yes. The 'scope produces color effects, real images that seem to fill the air and change very rapidly. They can be photographed and they're beautiful.”
“I have seen photographs,” the general said coldly. “Have you seen the real thing, in action?”
“Once or twice. You were there at the time.”
“Oh, yes.” The professor was disconcerted. He said, “But you haven't seen this man; our new subject.” He pointed briefly to the man in the chair, a man with a sharp chin, a long nose, no sign of hair on his skull, and still that vacant look in his eye.
“Who is he?” asked the general.
“The only name we use for him is Steve. He is mentally retarded but produces the most intense patterns we have yet found. Why this should be we don't know. Whether it has something to do with his mental--”
“Do you intend to show me what he does?” broke in the general.
“If you will watch, General.” Harding nodded at Fife, who went into action at once.
The subject, as always, watched Fife with mild interest, doing as he was told and making no resistance. The light plastic helmet fitted snugly over his shaved cranium and each of the complicated electrodes was adjusted properly. Fife tried to work smoothly under the unusual tension of the occasion. He was in agony lest the general look at his watch again, and leave.
He stepped away, panting. “Shall I activate it now, Professor Harding?”
“Yes. Now.” Fife closed a contact gently and at once the air above Steve's head seemed filled with brightening color. Circles appeared and circles within circles, turning, whirling, and splitting apart.
Fife felt a clear sensation of uneasiness but pushed it away impatiently. That was the subject's emotion--Steve's--not his own. The general must have felt it too, for he shifted in his chair and cleared his throat loudly.
Harding said casually, “The patterns contain no more information than the brain waves, really, but are much more easily studied and analyzed. It is like putting germs under a strong microscope. Nothing new is added, but what is there can be seen more easily.”
Steve was growing steadily more uneasy. Fife could sense it was the harsh and unsympathetic presence of the general that was the cause. Although Steve did not change his position or give any outward sign of fear, the colors in the patterns his mind created grew harsher, and within the outer circles there were clashing interlocks.
The general raised his hand as though to push the flickering lights away. He said, “What about all this, Professor?”
“With Steve, we can jump ahead even faster than we have been. Already we have learned more in the two years since I devised the first 'scope than in the fifty years before that. With Steve, and with others like him, perhaps, and with the help of the scientists of the world-”
“I have been told you can use this to reach minds,” said the general sharply.
“Reach minds?” Harding thought a moment. “You mean telepathy? That's quite exaggerated. Minds are too different for that. The fine details of your way of thinking are not like mine or like anyone else's, and raw brain patterns won't match. We have to translate thoughts into words, a much cruder form of communication, and even then it is hard enough for human beings to make contact.”
“I don't mean telepathy! I mean emotion! If the subject feels anger, the receiver can be made to experience anger. Right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The general was clearly agitated. “Those things-right there--” His finger jabbed toward the patterns, which were whirling most unpleasantly now. “They can be used for emotion control. With these, broadcast on television, whole populations can be emotionally manipulated. Can we allow such power to fall into the wrong hands?”
“If it were such power,” said Harding mildly, “there would be no right hands.”
Fife frowned. That was a dangerous remark. Every once in a while Harding seemed to forget that the old days of democracy were gone.
But the general let it go. He said, “I didn't know you had this thing so far advanced. I didn't know you had this-Steve. You get others like that. Meanwhile, the army is taking this over. Completely!”
“Wait, General, just ten seconds.” Harding turned to Fife. “Give Steve his book, will you, Ben?”
Fife did so with alacrity. The book was one of the new Kaleido-volumes that told their stories by means of colored photographs that slowly twisted and changed once the book was opened. It was a kind of animated cartoon in hard-covers and Steve smiled as he reached out eagerly for it.
Almost at once the colored patterns that clustered above his plastic helmet changed in nature. They slowed their turning and the colors softened. The patterns within the circle grew less discordant.
Fife sighed his relief and let warmth and relaxation sweep over him.
Harding said, “General, don't let the possibility of emotion control alarm you. The 'scope offers less possibility for that than you think. Surely there are men whose emotions can be manipulated, but the 'scope isn't necessary for them. They react mindlessly to catch words, music, uniforms, almost anything. Hitler once controlled Germany without even television, and Napoleon controlled France without even radio or mass-circulation newspapers. The 'scope offers nothing new.”
“I don't believe that,” muttered the general, but he had grown thoughtful again.
Steve stared earnestly at the Kaleido-volume, and the patterns over his head had almost stilled into warmly colored and intricately detailed circles that pulsed their pleasure.
Harding's voice was almost coaxing. “There are always the people who resist conformity; who don't go along; and they are the important ones of society. They won't go along with colored patterns any more than with any other form of persuasion. So why worry about the useless bogey of emotion control? Let us instead see the Neurophotoscope as the first instrument through which mental function can be truly analyzed. That's what should concern us above an. The proper study of mankind is man, as Alexander Pope once said, and what is man but his brain?”
The general remained silent.
“If we can solve the manner of the brain's workings,” went on Harding, “and learn at last what makes a man a man, we are on our way to understanding ourselves, and nothing more difficult--or more worthwhile-faces us. And how can this be done by just one man, by one laboratory? How can it be done in secrecy and fear? The whole world of science must cooperate. --General, declassify the project! Throw it open to all men!”
Slowly the general nodded. “I think you're right after all.”
“I have the proper document. If you'll sign it and key it with your fingerprint; if you use your two guards outside as witnesses; if you alert the Executive Board by closed video; if you-”
It was all done. Before Fife's astonished eyes it was all done.
When the general was gone, the Neurophotoscope dismantled, and Steve taken back to his quarters, Fife finally overcame his amazement long enough to speak.
“How could he have been persuaded so easily, Professor Harding? You've explained your point of view at length in a dozen reports and it never helped a bit.”
“I've never presented it in this room, with the Neurophotoscope working,” said Harding. “I've never had anyone as intensely projective as Steve before. Many people can withstand emotion control, as I said, but some people cannot withstand it. Those who have a tendency to conform are easily led to agree with others. I took the gamble that any man who feels comfortable in uniform and who lives by the military book is liable to be swayed, no matter how powerful he imagines himself to be.”
“You mean--Steve--”
“Of course, I let the general feel the uneasiness first, then you handed Steve the Kaleido-volume and the air filled with happiness. You felt it, didn't you?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“It was my guess the general couldn't resist that happiness so suddenly following the unease, and he didn't. Anything would have sounded good at that moment. “
“But he'll get over it, won't he?”
“Eventually, I suppose, but so what? The key progress reports concerning Neurophotoscopy are being sent out right now to news media all over the world. The general might suppress it here in this country, but surely not elsewhere. --No, he will have to make the best of it. Mankind can begin its proper study in earnest, at last.”
The painting was simply a crudely done head surrounded by a series of aimless psychedelic designs. It meant nothing to ine and I had a terrible time thinking up THE PROPER STUDY. Foul Anderson also wrote a story based on the same painting and probably had no trouble at all.
The two stories appeared in the same issue and I suppose it might be interesting to compare the stories and try to get an idea of the different workings of Poul's brain--and mine--but, as in the case of BLANK!, I didn't save the other story. Besides, I don't want you to compare brains. Poul is awfully bright and you might come to me with some hard truths I'd rather not face.
In early 1970 IBM Magazine came to me with a quote from J. B. Priestley which went as follows: “Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.”
The editor of the magazine asked me to write a story based on the quote, and I did the job in late April and mailed it in. The story was 2430 A.D., and in it I took I Priestley's quotation seriously and tried to describe the world of his nightmares.
And IBM Magazine sent it back. They said they didn't want a story that backed the quotation; they wanted one I that refuted the quotation. Well, they had never said so.
Under ordinary circumstances I might have been very indignant and might have written a rather scathing letter. However, these were hard times for me and there was another turning point, and a very sad one, coming up in my life.
My marriage had been limping for some years and it finally broke down. On July 3, 1970, with our twenty-eighth anniversary nearly upon US, I moved out and went to New York. I took a two-room hotel suite that I was to use as an office for nearly five years.
You can't make a change like that without all kinds of worries, miseries, and guilts. And among them all, I being what I am, one of my worries, as I sat in the two rooms in a strange environment, with my reference library still undelivered,* [* As long as I was a fiction writer I needed very little in the way of a library and could write anywhere. One of the less pleasant aspects of my switch to nonfiction was that I gradually built up an enormous reference library which nails me to the ground.] was whether I would still be able to write.
I remembered my story 2430 A.D., which ordinarily I might have abandoned in indignation. Now, just to see if I could do it, I began another story, on July 8, 1970, five days after my move, one which would refute Priestley's quotation. I called it THE GREATEST ASSET.
I sent it to IBM Magazine, and you'll never believe me but after reading my second story they decided to take my first one after all. It was utterly confusing. Was my second story so bad that it made the first look good? Or had they changed their mind before I had written the second story and had they not gotten round to telling me? I suspect the latter. Anyway, 2430 A.D. was published in the October 1970 issue of IBM Magazine.
Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.
--J.B. Priestly.
“He'll talk to us,” said Alvarez when the other stepped out the door.
“Good,” said Bunting. “Social pressure is bound to get to him eventually. An odd character. How he escaped genetic adjustment I'll never know. --But you do the talking. He irritates me past tact.”
Together they swung down the corridor along the Executive Trail, which was, as always, sparsely occupied. They might have taken the Moving Strips, but there were only two miles to go and Alvarez enjoyed walking, so I Bunting didn't insist. I
Alvarez was tall and rather thin, with the kind of athletic figure one would expect of a person who cherished the muscular activities; who routinely used the stairs and rampways, for instance, almost to the edge of being considered an unsettling character himself. Bunting, softer and rounder, avoided even the sunlamps, and was quite pale.
Bunting said dolefully, “I hope the two of us will be enough.”
“I should think so. We want to keep it in our sector, if we can.”
“Yes! You know, I keep thinking-why does it have to be our sector? Fifty million square miles of seven-hundred-level living space, and it has to be in our apartment bloc.”
“Rather a distinction, in a grisly kind of way,” said Alvarez.
Bunting snorted.
“And a little to our credit,” Alvarez added softly, “if we settle the matter. We reach peak. We reach end. We reach goal. All mankind. And we do it.”
Bunting brightened. He said, “You think they'll look at it that way?”
“Let's see to it that they do.”
Their footsteps were muted against the plastic-knit crushed rock underfoot. They passed crosscorridors and saw the endless crowds on the Moving Strips in the middle distance. There was a fugitive whiff of plankton in its varieties. Once, almost by instinct, they could tell that up above, far above, was one of the giant conduits leading in from the sea. And by symmetry they knew there would be another conduit, just as large, far below, leading out to sea.
Their destination was a dwelling room set well back from the corridor, but one that seemed different from the thousands they had passed. There was about it an intangible and disconcerting note of space, for on either side, for hundreds of feet, the wall was blank. And there was something in the air.
“Smell it?” muttered Bunting.
“I've smelled it before,” said Alvarez. “Inhuman.”
“Literally!” said Bunting. “He won't expect us to look at them, will he?”
“If he does, it's easy enough to refuse.” They signaled, then waited in silence while the hum of infinite life sounded all around them in utterly disregarded manner, for it was always there.
The door opened. Cranwitz was waiting. He looked sullen. He wore the same clothes they all did; light, simple, gray. On him, though, they seemed rumpled. He seemed rumpled, his hair too long, his eyes bloodshot and shifting uneasily.
“May we enter?” asked Alvarez with cold courtesy.
Cranwitz stood to one side.
The odor was stronger inside. Cranwitz closed the door behind them and they sat down. Cranwitz remained standing and said nothing.
Alvarez said, “I must ask you, in my capacity as Sector Representative, with Bunting here as Vice-Representative, whether you are now ready to comply with social necessity.”
Cranwitz seemed to be thinking. When he finally spoke his deep voice was choked and he had to clear his throat. “I don't want to,” he said. “I don't have to. There is a contract with the government of long-standing. My family has always had the right--”
“We know all this and there's no question of force involved,” said Bunting irritably. “We're asking you to accede voluntarily.”
Alvarez touched the other's knee lightly. “You understand the situation is not what it was in your father's time; or even, really, what it was last year?”
Cranwitz's long jaw quivered slightly. “I don't see that. The birth rate has dropped this year by the amount computerized, and everything else has changed correspondingly. That goes on from year to year. Why should this I year be different?”
His voice somehow did not carry conviction. Alvarez was sure he did know why this year was different, and he said softly, “This year we've reached the goal. The birth rate now exactly matches the death rate; the population level is now exactly steady; construction is now confined to replacement entirely; and the sea farms are in a steady state. Only you stand between all mankind and perfection...
“Because of a few mice?”
“Because of a few mice. And other creatures. Guinea pigs. Rabbits. Some kinds of birds and lizards. I haven't taken a census--”
“But they're the only ones left in all the world. What harm do they do?”
“What good?” demanded Bunting.
Cranwitz said, “The good of being there to look at. There was once a time when--”
Alvarez had heard that before. He said, with as much sympathy as he could pump into his voice (and, to his surprise, with a certain amount of real sympathy, too), “I know. There was once a time! Centuries ago! There were vast numbers of life forms like those you care for. And millions of years before that there were dinosaurs. But we have microfilms of everything. No man need go ignorant of them.”
“How can you compare microfilms with the real thing?” asked Cranwitz.
Bunting's lips quirked. “The microfilms don't smell.”
“The zoo was much larger once,” said Cranwitz. “Year by year we've had to get rid of so many. All the large animals. All the carnivores. The trees. There's nothing left but small plants, tiny creatures. Let them be.”
Alvarez said, “What is there to do with them? No one wants to see them. Mankind is against you.”
“Social pressure--”
“We couldn't persuade people against real resistance. People don't want to see these life distortions. They're sickening; they really are. What's there to do with them?” Alvarez's voice was insinuating.
Cranwitz sat down now. A certain feverishness heightened the color in his cheeks. “I've been thinking. Someday we'll reach out. Mankind will colonize other worlds. He'll want animals. He'll want other species in these new, empty worlds. He'll start a new ecology of variety. He'll...”
His words faded under the hostile stare of the other two.
Bunting said, “What other worlds are we going to colonize?”
“We reached the moon in 1969,” said Cranwitz.
“Sure, and we established a colony, and we abandoned it. There's no world in all the solar system capable of supporting human life without prohibitive engineering.”
Cranwitz said, “There are worlds circling other stars. Earthlike worlds by the hundred of millions. There must be.”
Alvarez shook his head. “Out of reach. We have finally exploited Earth and filled it with the human species. We have made our choice, and it is Earth. There is no margin for the kind of effort needed to build a starship capable of crossing light-years of space. -Have you been immersing yourself in twentieth-century history?”
“It wasn’t the last century of the open world,” said Cranwitz.
“So it was,” said Alvarez dryly. “I hope you haven't over-romanticized it. I've studied its madness, too. The world was empty then, only a few billions, and they thought it was crowded-and with 'good reason. They spent more than half their substance on war and preparations of war, ran their economy without forethought, wasted and poisoned at will, let pure chance govern the genetic pool, and tolerated the deviants-from-norm of all descriptions. Of course, they dreaded what they called the population explosion, and dreamed of reaching other worlds as a kind of escape. So would we under those conditions.
“I needn't tell you the combination of events and of scientific advances that changed everything, but just let me remind you briefly in case you are trying to forget. There was the establishment of a world government, the development of fusion power, and the growth of the art of genetic engineering; With planetary peace, plentiful energy, and a placid humanity men could multiply peacefully, and science kept up with the multiplication.
“It was known in advance exactly how many men the Earth could support. So many calories of sunlight reached the Earth, and, using that, only so many tons of carbon dioxide could be fixed by green plants each year, and only so many tons of animal life could be supported by those plants. The Earth could support two trillion tons of animal life-”
Cranwitz finally broke in, “And why shouldn't all two trillion tons be human?”
“Exactly.”
“Even if it meant killing off all other animal life?”
“That's the way of evolution.” said Bunting angrily. “The fit survive.”
Alvarez touched the other's knee again. “Bunting is right, Cranwitz,” he said gently. “The toleosts replaced the placoderms, who had replaced the trilobites. The reptiles replaced the amphibians and were in turn replaced by the mammals. Now, at last, evolution has reached its peak. Earth bears its mighty population of fifteen trillion human beings--”
“But how?” demanded Cranwitz. “They live in one vast building over all the face of the dry land, with no plants and no animals beside, except what I have right here. And all the uninhabited ocean has become a plankton soup; no life but plankton. We harvest it endlessly to feed our people; and as endlessly we restore organic matter to feed the plankton.”
“We live very well,” said Alvarez. “There is no war; there is no crime. Our births are regulated; our deaths are peaceful. Our infants are genetically adjusted and on Earth there are now twenty billion tons of normal brain; the largest conceivable quantity of the most complex conceivable matter in the universe.”
“And all that weight of brain doing what?”
Bunting heaved an audible sigh of exasperation but Alvarez, still calm, said, “My good friend, you confuse the journey with the destination. Perhaps it comes from living with your animals. When the Earth was in process of development, it was necessary for life to experiment and take chances. It was even worthwhile to be wasteful. The Earth was empty then. It had infinite room and evolution had to experiment with ten million species or more--till it found the species.
“Even after mankind came, it had to learn the way. While it was learning, it had to take chances, attempt the impossible, be foolish or mad. --But mankind has come home, now. Men have filled the planet and need only to enjoy perfection.”
Alvarez paused to let that sink in, then said, “We want it, Cranwitz. The whole world wants perfection. It is in our generation that perfection has been reached, and we want the distinction of having reached it. Your animals are in the way .”
Cranwitz shook his head stubbornly. “They take up so little room; consume so little energy. If all were wiped out, you might have room for what? For twenty-five more human beings? Twenty-five in fifteen trillion?”
Bunting said, “Twenty-five human beings represent another seventy-five pounds of human brain. With what measure can you evaluate seventy-five pounds of human brain?”
“But you already have billions of tons of it.”
“I know,” said Alvarez, “but the difference between perfection and not-quite-perfection is that between life and not-quite-life. We are so close now. All Earth is prepared to celebrate this year of 2430 AD. This is the year when the computer tens us that the planet is fun at last; the goal is achieved; all the striving of evolution crowned. Shall we fan short by twenty-five--even out of fifteen trillion. It is such a tiny, tiny flaw, but it is a flaw.
“Think, Cranwitz! Earth has been waiting for five billion years to be fulfilled. Must we wait longer? We cannot and will not force you, but if you yield voluntarily you will be a hero to everyone.”
Bunting said, “Yes. In all future time men win say that Cranwitz acted and with that one single act perfection was reached.”
And Cranwitz said, imitating the other's tone of voice, “And men will say that Alvarez and Bunting persuaded him to do so.”
“If we succeed!” said Alvarez with no audible annoyance. “But tell me, Cranwitz, can you hold out against the enlightened will of fifteen trillion people forever? Whatever your motives--and I recognize that in your own way I you are an idealist--can you withhold that last bit of perfection from so many?”
Cranwitz looked down in silence and Alvarez's hand waved gently in Bunting's direction and Bunting said not a word. The silence remained unbroken while slow minutes crept by.
Then Cranwitz whispered, “Can I have one more day with my animals?”
“And then?”
“And then--I won't stand between mankind and perfection.”
And Alvarez said, “I’ll let the world know. You will be honored.” And he and Bunting left.
Over the vast continental buildings some five trillion human beings placidly slept; some two trillion human beings placidly ate; half a trillion carefully made love. Other trillions talked without heat, or tended the computers quietly, or ran the vehicles, or studied the machinery, or organized the microfilm libraries, or amused their fellows. Trillions went to sleep; trillions woke up; and the routine never varied.
The machinery worked, tested itself, repaired itself. The plankton soup of the planetary ocean basked under the sun and the cells divided, and divided, and divided, while dredges endlessly scooped them up and dried them and by the millions of tons transferred them to conveyors and conduits that brought them to every corner of the endless buildings.
And in every corner of the buildings human wastes were gathered and irradiated and dried, and human corpses were ground and treated and dried and endlessly the residue was brought back to the ocean. And for hours, while all this was going on, as it had gone on for decades, and might be doomed to go on for millennia, Cranwitz fed his little creatures a last time, stroked his guinea pig, lifted a tortoise to gaze into its uncomprehending eye, felt a blade of living grass between his fingers.
He counted them over, all of them--the last living things on Earth that were neither humans nor food for humans--and then he seared the soil in which the plants grew and killed them. He flooded the cages and rooms in which the animals moved with appropriate vapors, and they moved no more and soon they lived no more.
The last of them was gone and now between mankind and perfection there was only Cranwitz, whose thoughts still rebelliously departed from the norm. But for Cranwitz there were also the vapors, and he didn’t want to live.
And, after that, there was really perfection, for over all the Earth, through all its fifteen trillion inhabitants and over all its twenty billion tons of human brain, there was (with Cranwitz gone) not one unsettling thought, not one unusual idea, to disturb the universal placidity that meant that the exquisite nothingness of uniformity had at last been achieved.
=====
Even though 2430 A.D. was published, and had been paid for very generously indeed, it left my neurotic fears unallayed. That story, which had been accepted, was written I while I still lived in Newton. The one which had not been taken was written in New York.
So I took THE GREATEST ASSET to John Campbell (we were now in the same city again for the first time in twenty-one years) and told him the story of IBM Magazine. I said I was handing him the one that they had rejected, but I wouldn't if he would scorn to look at a story under those conditions.
Good old John shrugged and said, “One editor doesn't necessarily agree with another.”
He read the story and bought it. I hadn't told him about my crazy worry about being unable to write in New York, because I was ashamed of it and John was still the great man before whom I feared to show myself in my role as jackass. Still, by taking that story he had added one more favor to the many, many, he had done for me.
(And in case you're worried, I might as well tell you that my years in New York have so far been even more prolific than the Newton years were. I stayed 57 months in my two-room office and in that period of time published 57 books.)
NOTE: The population of Earth In 1970 Is estimated to be 3.68 billion. The present rate of increase doubles that population every 35 years. If this present rate of Increase can be maintained for 460 years then in the year 2430 A.D. the weight of human flesh and blood will be equal to the total weight of animal life now present on Earth. To that extent, the story above is not fiction.
The Earth was one large park. It had been tamed utterly. Lou Tansonia saw it expand under his eyes as he watched somberly from the Lunar Shuttle. His prominent nose split his lean face into inconsiderable halves and each looked sad always-but this time in accurate reflection of his mood.
He had never been away so long-almost a month--and he anticipated a none-too-pleasant acclimation period once Earth's large gravity made its grip fiercely evident.
But that was for later. That was not the sadness of now as he watched Earth grow larger.
As long as the planet was far enough to be a circle of white spirals, glistening in the sun that shone over the ship's shoulders, it had its primeval beauty. When the occasional patches of pastel browns and greens peeped through the clouds, it might still have been the planet it was at any time since three hundred million years before, when life had first stretched out of the sea arid moved over the dry land to fill the valleys with green.
It was lower, lower--when the ship sank down--that the tameness began to show.
There was no wilderness anywhere. Lou had never seen Earthly wilderness; he had only read of it, or seen it in old films.
The forests stood in rank and file, with each tree carefully ticketed by species and position. The crops grew in their fields in orderly rotation, with intermittent and automated fertilization and weeding. The few domestic animals that still existed were numbered and Lou wryly suspected that the blades of grass were as well.
Animals were so rarely seen as to be a sensation when glimpsed. Even the insects had faded, and none of the large animals existed anywhere outside the slowly dwindling number of zoos.
The very cats had become few in number, for it was much more patriotic to keep a hamster, if one had to have a pet at all.
Correction! Only Earth's nonhuman animal population had diminished. Its mass of animal life was as great as ever, but most of it, about three fourths of its total, was one species only--Homo sapiens. And, despite everything the Terrestrial Bureau of Ecology could do (or said it could do), that fraction very slowly increased from year to year.
Lou thought of that, as he always did, with a towering sense of loss. The human presence was unobtrusive, to be sure. There was no sign of it from where the shuttle made its final orbits about the planet; and, Lou knew, there would be no sign of it even when they sank much lower.
The sprawling cities of the chaotic pre-Planetary days were gone. The old highways could be traced from the air by the imprint they still left on the vegetation, but they were invisible from close quarters. Individual men themselves rarely troubled the surface, but they were there, underground. All mankind was, in all its billions, with the factories, the food-processing plants, the energies, the vacu-tunnels.
The tame world lived on solar energy and was free of strife, and to Lou it was hateful in consequence.
Yet at the moment he could almost forget, for, after months of failure, he was going to see Adrastus, himself. It had meant the pulling of every available string.
Ino Adrastus was the Secretary General of Ecology. It was not an elective office; it was little-known. It was simply the most important post on Earth, for it controlled everything.
Jan Marley said exactly that, as he sat there, with a sleepy look of absent-minded dishevelment that made one I think he would have been fat if the human diet were so I uncontrolled as to allow of fatness.
He said, “For my-money this is the most important post on Earth, and no one seems to know it. I want to write it up.”
Adrastus shrugged. His stocky figure, with its shock of hair, once a light brown and now a brown-flecked gray, his faded blue eyes nested in darkened surrounding tissues, finely wrinkled, had been an unobtrusive part of the administrative scene for a generation. He had been Secretary-General of Ecology ever since the regional ecological councils had been combined into the Terrestrial Bureau. Those who knew of him at all found it impossible to think of ecology without him.
He said, “The truth is I hardly ever make a decision truly my own. The directives I sign aren't mine, really. I sign them because it would be psychologically uncomfortable to have computers sign them. But, you know, it's only the computers that can do the work.
“The Bureau ingests an incredible quantity of data each day; data forwarded to it from every part of the globe and dealing not only with human births, deaths, population shifts, production, and consumption, but with all the tangible changes in the plant and animal population as well, to say nothing of the measured state of the major segments of the environment--air, sea, and soil. The information is taken apart, absorbed, and assimilated into crossfiled memory indices of staggering complexity, and from that memory comes answers to the questions we ask.”
Marley said, with a shrewd, sidelong glance, “Answers to all questions?”
Adrastus smiled. “We learn not to bother to ask questions that have no answer.”
“And the result,” said Marley, “is ecological balance.”
“Right, but a special ecological balance. All through the planet's history, the balance has been maintained, but always at the cost of catastrophe. After temporary imbalance, the balance is restored by famine, epidemic, drastic climatic change. We maintain it now without catastrophe by daily shifts and changes, by never allowing imbalance to accumulate dangerously.”
Marley said, “There's what you once said--'Man's greatest asset is a balanced ecology.'“
“So they tell me I said.”
“It's there on the wall behind you.”
“Only the first three words,” said Adrastus dryly.
There it was on a long Shimmer-plast, the words winking and alive: MAN'S GREATEST ASSET...
“You don't have to complete the statement.”
“What else can I tell you?”
“Can I spend some time with you and watch you at your work?”
“You'll watch a glorified clerk.”
“I don't think so. Do you have appointments at which I may be present?”
“One appointment today; a young fellow named Tansonia; one of our Moon-men. You can sit in.”
“Moon-men? You mean--”
“Yes, from the lunar laboratories. Thank heaven for the moon. Otherwise all their experimentation would take place on Earth, and we have enough trouble containing the ecology as it is.”
“You mean like nuclear experiments and radiational pollution?”
“I mean many things.”
Lou Tansonia's expression was a mixture of barely suppressed excitement and barely suppressed apprehension. “I'm glad to have this chance to see you, Mr. Secretary,” he said breathlessly, puffing against Earth's gravity.
“I'm sorry we couldn't make it sooner,” said Adrastus smoothly. “I have excellent reports concerning your work. The other gentleman present is Jan Marley, a science writer, and he need not concern us.”
Lou glanced at the writer briefly and nodded, then turned eagerly to Adrastus. “Mr. Secretary-”
“Sit down,” said Adrastus.
Lou did so, with the trace of clumsiness to be expected of one acclimating himself to Earth, and with an air, somehow, that to pause long enough to sit was a waste of time. He said, “Mr. Secretary, I am appealing to you personally concerning my Project Application Num-”
“I know it.”
“You've read it, sir?”
“No, I haven't, but the computers have. It's been rejected.”
“Yes! But I appeal from the computers to you.”
Adrastus smiled and shook his head. “That's a difficult appeal for me. I don't know from where I could gather the courage to override the computer.”
“But you must,” said the young man earnestly. “My field is genetic engineering.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And genetic engineering,” said Lou, running over the interruption, “is the handmaiden of medicine and it shouldn't be so. Not entirely, anyway.”
“Odd that you think so. You have your medical degree, and you have done impressive work in medical genetics. I have been told that in two years time your work may lead to the full suppression of diabetes mellitus for good.”
“Yes, but I don't care. I don't want to carry that through. Let someone else do it. Curing diabetes is just a detail and it will merely mean that the death rate will go down slightly and produce just a bit more pressure in the direction of population increase. I'm not interested in achieving that.”
“You don't value human life?”
“Not infinitely. There are too many people on Earth.”
“I know that some think so.”
“You're one of them, Mr. Secretary. You have written articles saying so. And it's obvious to any thinking man--to you more than anyone--what it's doing. Over-population means discomfort, and to reduce the discomfort private choice must disappear. Crowd enough people into a field and the only way they can all sit down is for all to sit down at the same time. Make a mob dense enough and they can move from one point to another quickly only by marching in formation. That is what men are becoming; a blindly marching mob knowing nothing about where it is going or why.”
“How long have you rehearsed this speech, Mr. Tansonia?”
Lou flushed slightly. “ And the other life forms are decreasing in numbers of species and individuals, except for the plants we eat. The ecology gets simpler every year.”
“It stays balanced.”
“But it loses color and variety and we don't even know how good the balance is. We accept the balance only because it's all we have.”
“What would you do?”
“ Ask the computer that rejected my proposal. I want to initiate a program for genetic engineering on a wide variety of species from worms to mammals. I want to create new variety out of the dwindling material at hand before it dwindles out altogether.”
“For what purpose?”
“To set up artificial ecologies. To set up ecologies based on plants and animals not like anything on Earth.”
“What would you gain?”
“I don't know. If I knew exactly what I would gain there would be no need to do research. But I know what we ought to gain. We ought to learn more about what makes an ecology tick. So far, we've only taken what nature has handed us and then ruined it and broken it down and made do with the gutted remains. Why not build something up and study that?”
“You mean build it blindly? At random?”
“We don't know enough to do it any other way. Genetic engineering has the random mutation as its basic driving force. Applied to medicine, this randomness must be minimized at all costs, since a specific effect is sought. I want to take the random component of genetic engineering and make use of it.”
Adrastus frowned for a moment. “ And how are you going to set up an ecology that's meaningful? Won't it interact with the ecology that already exists, and possibly unbalance it? That is something we can't afford.”
“I don't mean to carry out the experiments on Earth,” said Lou. “Of course not.”
“On the moon?”
“Not on the moon, either. -On the asteroids. I've thought of that since my proposal was fed to the computer which spit it out. Maybe this will make a difference. How about small asteroids, hollowed-out; one per ecology? Assign a certain number of asteroids for the purpose. Have them properly engineered; outfit them with energy sources and transducers; seed them with collections of life forms which might form a closed ecology. See what happens. If it doesn't work, try to figure out why and subtract an item, or, more likely, add an item, or change the proportions. We'll develop a science of applied ecology, or, if you prefer, a science of ecological engineering; a science one step up in complexity and significance beyond genetic engineering.”
“But the good of it, you can't say.”
“The specific good, of course not. But how can it avoid some good? It will increase knowledge in the very field we need it most.” He pointed to the shimmering lettering behind Adrastus. “You said it yourself, 'Man's greatest asset is a balanced ecology.' I'm offering you a way of doing basic research in experimental ecology; something that has never been done before.”
“How many asteroids will you want?” Lou hesitated. “Ten?” he said with rising inflection. “As a beginning.”
“Take five,” said Adrastus, drawing the report toward himself and scribbling quickly on its face, canceling out the computer's decision.
Afterward, Marley said, “Can you sit there and tell me that you're a glorified clerk now? You cancel the computer and hand out five asteroids. Like that.”
“The Congress will have to give its approval. I'm sure it will.”
“Then you think this young man's suggestion is really a good one.”
“No, I don't. It won't work. Despite his enthusiasm, the matter is so complicated that it will surely take far more men than can possibly be made available for far more years than that young man will live to carry it through to any worthwhile point.”
“Are you sure?”
“The computer says so. It's why his project was rejected.”
“Then why did you cancel the computer's decision?”
“Because I, and the government in general, are here in order to preserve something far more important than the ecology.”
Marley leaned forward. “I don't get it.”
“Because you misquoted what I said so long ago. Because everyone misquotes it. Because I spoke two sentences and they were telescoped into one and I have never been able to force them apart again. Presumably, the human race is unwilling to accept my remarks as I made them.”
“You mean you didn't say 'Man's greatest asset is a I balanced ecology'?”
“Of course not. I said, 'Man's greatest need is a balanced ecology.'“
“But on your Shimmer-plast you say, 'Man's greatest asset--'“
“That begins the second sentence, which men refuse to quote, but which I never forget--'Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.' I haven't overruled the computer for the sake of our ecology. We only need that to live. I overruled it to save a valuable mind and keep it at work, an unsettled mind. We need that for man to be man--which is more important than merely to live.”
Marley rose. “I suspect, Mr. Secretary, you wanted me here for this interview. It's this thesis you want me to publicize, isn't it?”
“Let's say,” said Adrastus, “that I'm seizing the chance to get my remarks correctly quoted.”
=====
Alas, that was my last sale to John. The check arrived on August 18, 1970, and less than a year later he was dead.
When the story appeared in the January 1972 issue of Analog my good and gentle friend, Ben Bova, was editor of the magazine. It isn't possible to fill John Campbell's shoes, but Ben is filling his own very successfully.
The next story was written as the result of a comedy of errors. In January 1971, as a result of a complicated set of circumstances, I promised Bob Silverberg that I would write a short story for an anthology of originals he was preparing.* [* You may be surprised that I don't explain the complicated set of circumstances, since I am such a blabbermouth, but Bob finds my version a little on the offensive side, so we’ll let it go.]
I wrote the short story but it turned out not to be a short story. To my enormous surprise, I wrote a novel, THE GODS THEMSELVES (Doubleday, 1972), my first science fiction novel in fifteen years (if you don't count FANTASTIC VOYAGE, which wasn't entirely mine).
It wasn't a bad novel at all, since it won the Hugo and the Nebula, and showed the science fiction world that the old man still had it. Nevertheless, it put me in a hole since there was the short story I had promised Bob. I wrote another, therefore, TAKE A MATCH, and it appeared in Bob's anthology New Dimensions II (Doubleday, 1972).
Space was black; black an around in every direction. There was nothing to be seen; not a star.
It was not because there were no stars--
Actually the thought that there might be no stars, literally no stars, had chilled Per Hanson's vitals. It was the old nightmare that rested just barely subliminally beneath the skin of every deep-spacer's brain.
When you took the Jump through the tachyon-universe, how sure were you where you would emerge? The timing and quantity of the energy input might be as tightly controlled as you liked, and your Fusionist might be the best in space, but the uncertainty principle reigned supreme and there was always the chance, even the inevitability of a random miss.
And by way of tachyons, a paper-thin miss might be a thousand light-years.
What, then, if you landed nowhere; or at least so distant from anywhere that nothing could possibly ever, guide you to knowledge of your own position and nothing, therefore, could guide you back to anywhere?
Impossible, said the pundits. There was no place in the universe from which the quasars could not be seen, and from those alone you could position yourself. Besides, the chance that in the course of ordinary Jumps mere chance would take you outside the galaxy was only one in about ten million, and to the distance of, say, the Andromeda galaxy or Maffei 1, perhaps one in a quadrillion.
Forget it, said the pundits.
So when a ship comes out of its Jump, and returns from the weird paradoxes of the faster-than-light tachyons to the healthy we-know-it-all of an the tardyons from protons down to protons up, there must be stars to be seen. If they are not seen nevertheless, you are in a dust cloud; it is the only explanation. There are smoggy areas in the galaxy, or in any spiral galaxy, as once there were on Earth, when it was the sole home of humanity, rather than the carefully preserved, weather-controlled, life-preserve museum-piece it now was.
Hanson was tall and gloomy; his skin was leathery; and what he didn't know about the hyperships that ploughed the length and breadth of the galaxy and immediately neighboring regions-always barring the Fusionists' mysteries-was yet to be worked out. He was alone, now, in the Captain's Corner, as he liked to be. He had at hand all that was needed to be connected with any man or woman on board, and with the results of any device and instrument, and it pleased him to be the unseen presence.
--Though now nothing pleased him. He closed contact and said, “What else, Strauss?”
“We're in an open cluster,” said Strauss's voice. (Hanson did not turn on the visual attachment; it would have meant revealing his own face and he preferred his look of sick worry to be held private.)
“At least,” Strauss continued, “it seems to be an open cluster, from the level of radiation we can get in the far infrared and microwave regions. The trouble is we just can't pinpoint the positions well enough to locate ourselves. Not a hope.”
“Nothing in visible light?”
“Nothing at all; or in the near-infrared, either. The dust cloud is as thick as soup.”
“How big is it?”
“No way of telling.”
“Can you estimate the distance to the nearest edge?”
“Not even to an order of magnitude. It might be a light-week. It might be ten light-years. Absolutely no way of telling.”
“Have you talked to Viluekis?”
Strauss said briefly, “Yes!”
“What does he say?”
“Not much. He's sulking. He's taking it as a personal insult, of course.”
“Of course.” Hanson sighed noiselessly. Fusionists were as childish as children and because theirs was the romantic role in deep space, they were indulged. He said, “I suppose you told him that this sort of thing is unpredictable and could happen at any time.”
“I did. And he said, as you can guess--'Not to Viluekis.' “
“Except that it did, of course. Well, I can't speak to him. Nothing I say will mean anything at all except that I'm trying to pull rank and then we'll get nothing further out of him. --He won't start the scoop?”
“He says he can't. He says it will be damaged.”
“How can you damage a magnetic field!”
Strauss grunted. “Don't say that to him. He'll tell you there's more to a fusion tube than a magnetic field and then say you're trying to downgrade him.”
“Yes, I know. --Well, look, put everyone and everything on the cloud. There must be some way to make some sort of guess as to the direction and distance of the nearest edge.” He broke connection.
Hanson frowned into the middle distance, then.
Nearest edge! It was doubtful if at the ship's speed (relative to the surrounding matter) they dared expend the energy required for radical alteration of course.
They had moved into the Jump at half-light speed relative to the galactic nucleus in the tardyon-universe, and they emerged from the Jump at (of course) the same speed. There always seemed an element of risk in that. After all, suppose you found yourself, on the return, in the near neighborhood of a star and heading toward it at half-light speed.
The theoreticians denied the possibility. To get dangerously close to a massive body by way of a Jump was not reasonably to be expected. So said the pundits. Gravitational forces were involved in the Jump and for the transition from tardyon to tachyon and back to tardyon those forces were repulsive in nature. In fact, it was the random effect of a net gravitational force that could never be worked out in complete detail that accounted for a good deal of the uncertainty in the Jump.
Besides, they would say, trust to the Fusionist's instinct. A good Fusionist never goes wrong.
Except that this Fusionist had Jumped them into a cloud.
--Oh, that! It happens all the time. It doesn't matter. Do you know how thin most clouds are. You won't even know you're in one.
(Not this cloud, O Pundit.)
--In fact, clouds are good for you. The scoops don't have to work so long or so hard to keep fusion going and energy storing.
(Not this cloud, O Pundit.)
--Well, then, rely on the Fusionist to think of a way out.
(But if there was no way out?)
Hanson shied away from that last thought. He tried hard not to think it. --But how do you not think a thought that is the loudest thing in your head?
Henry Strauss, ship's astronomer, was himself in a mood of deep depression. If what had taken place were undiluted catastrophe, it might be accepted. No one on the hyperships could entirely close his eyes to the possibility of catastrophe. You were prepared for that, or you tried to be. --Though it was worse for the passengers, of course.
But when the catastrophe involved something that you would give your eye-teeth to observe and study, and when you find that the professional find of a lifetime was precisely what was killing you--
He sighed heavily.
He was a stout man, with tinted contact lenses that gave a spurious brightness and color to eyes that would otherwise have precisely matched a colorless personality.
There was nothing the captain could do. He knew that. The captain might be autocrat of all the rest of the ship, but a Fusionist was a Jaw to himself, and always had been. Even to the passengers (he thought with some disgust) the Fusionist is the emperor of the spaceways and everyone beside dwindles to impotence.
It was a matter of supply and demand. The computers might calculate the exact quantity and timing of the energy input and the exact place and direction (if “direction “ had any meaning in the transition from tardyon to tachyon), but the margin of error was huge and only a talented Fusionist could lower it. What it was that gave a Fusionist his talent, no one knew-they were born, not made. But Fusionists knew they had the talent and there was never one that didn't trade on that.
Viluekis wasn't bad as Fusionists went-though they never went far. He and Strauss were at least on speaking terms, even though Viluekis had effortlessly collected the prettiest passenger on board after Strauss had seen her first. (That was somehow part of the Imperial rights of the Fusionists en route.)
Strauss contacted Anton Viluekis. It took time for it to go through and when it did, Viluekis looked irritated in a rumpled, sad-eyed way.
“How's the tube?” asked Strauss gently. “I think I shut it down in time. I've gone over it and I don't see any damage. Now,” he looked down at himself, “I've got to clean up.”
“At least it isn't harmed.”
“But we can't use it “
“We might use it, Vil,” said Strauss in an insinuating voice. “We can't say what will happen out there. If the tube were damaged, it wouldn't matter what happened out there, but, as it is, if the cloud cleans up--”
“If--if--if--I'll tell you an 'if.' If you stupid astronomers had known this cloud was here, I might have avoided it.”
That was flatly irrelevant, and Strauss did not rise to the bait. He said, “It might clear up.”
“What's the analysis?”
“Not good, Vil. It's the thickest hydroxyl cloud that's ever been observed. There is nowhere in the galaxy, as far as I know, a place where hydroxyl has been concentrated so densely.”
“ And no hydrogen?”
“Some hydrogen, of course. About five per cent”
“Not enough,” said Viluekis curtly. “There's something else there besides hydroxyl. There's something that gave me more trouble than hydroxyl could. Did you locate it?”
“Oh, yes. Formaldehyde. There's more formaldehyde than hydrogen. Do you realize what it means, Vil? Some process has concentrated oxygen and carbon in space in unheard-of amounts; enough to use up the hydrogen over a volume of cubic light-years, perhaps. There isn't anything I know or can imagine which would account for such a thing.”
“What are you trying to say, Strauss? Are you telling me that this is the only cloud of this type in space and I am stupid enough to land in it?”
“I'm not saying that, Vil. I only say what you hear me say and you haven't heard me say that. But, Vil, to get out we're depending on you. I can't call for help because I can't aim a hyperbeam without knowing where we are: I can't find out where we are because I can't pinpoint any stars--”
“And I can't use the fusion tube, so why am I the villain? You can't do your job, either, so why is the Fusionist always the villain.” Viluekis was simmering. “It's up to you, Strauss, up to you. Tell me where to cruise the ship to find hydrogen. Tell me where the edge of the cloud is. --Or to hell with the edge of the cloud; find me the edge of the hydroxyl-formaldehyde business.”
“I wish I could,” said Strauss, “but so far I can't detect anything but hydroxyl and formaldehyde as far as I can probe.”
“We can't fuse that stuff.”
“I know.”
“Well,” said Viluekis violently, “this is an example of why it's wrong for the government to try to legislate supersafety instead of leaving it to the judgment of the Fusionist on the spot. If we had the capacity for the Double-Jump, there'd be no trouble.”
Strauss knew perfectly well what Viluekis meant. There was always the tendency to save time by making two Jumps in rapid succession, but if one Jump involved certain unavoidable uncertainties, two in succession greatly multiplied those uncertainties, and even the best Fusionist couldn't do much. The multiplied error almost invariably greatly lengthened the total time of the trip.
It was a strict rule of hypernavigation that one full day of cruising between Jumps was necessary--three full days was preferable. That gave time enough to prepare the next Jump with all due caution. To avoid breaking that rule, each Jump was made under conditions that left insufficient energy supply for a second. For at least some time, the scoops had to gather and compress hydrogen, fuse it, and store the energy, building up to Jump-ignition. And it usually took at least a day to store enough to allow a Jump.
Strauss said, “How far short in energy are you, Vil?”
“Not much. This much.” Viluekis held his thumb and forefinger apart by a quarter of an inch. “It's enough, though.”
“Too bad,” said Strauss flatly. The energy supply was recorded and could be inspected, but even so, Fusionists had been known to organize the records in such a way as to leave themselves some leeway for that second Jump.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Suppose you throw in the emergency generators, turn off all the lights--”
“And the air circulation and the appliances and the hydroponics apparatus. I know. I know. I figured that all in and we don't quite make it. --There's your stupid Double-Jump safety regulation.”
Strauss still managed to keep his temper. He knew--everyone knew--that it had been the Fusionist Brotherhood that had been the driving force behind that regulation. A Double-Jump, sometimes insisted on by the captain, much more often than not made the Fusionist look bad. -But then, there was at least one advantage. With an obligatory cruise between every Jump, there ought to be at least a week before the passengers grew restless and suspicious, and in that week something might happen. So far, it was not quite a day.
He said, “Are you sure you can't do something with your system; filter out some of the impurities?”
“Filter them out! They're not impurities; they're the whole thing. Hydrogen is the impurity here. Listen, I'll need half a billion degrees to fuse carbon and oxygen atoms; probably a full billion. It can't be done and I'm not going to try. If I try something and it doesn't work, it's my fault, and I won't stand for that. It's up to you to get me to the hydrogen and you do it. You just cruise this ship to the hydrogen. I don't care how long it takes.”
Strauss said, “We can't go faster than we're going now, considering the density of the medium, Vil. And at halflight speed we might have to cruise for two years-maybe twenty years”
“Well, you think of a way out. Or the captain.”
Strauss broke contact in despair. There was just no way of carrying on a rational conversation with a Fusionist. He'd heard the theory advanced (and perfectly seriously) that repeated Jumps affected the brain. In the Jump, every tardyon in ordinary matter had to be turned into an equivalent tachyon and then back again to the original tardyon. If the double conversion was imperfect in even the tiniest way, surely the effect would show up first in the brain, which was by far the most complex piece of matter ever to make the transition. Of course, no ill effects had ever been demonstrated experimentally, and no class of hypership officers seemed to deteriorate with time past what could be attributed to simple aging. But perhaps whatever it was in the Fusionists' brains that made them Fusionists and allowed them to go, by sheer intuition, beyond the best of computers might be particularly complex and therefore particularly vulnerable.
Nuts! There was nothing to it! Fusionists were merely spoiled!
He hesitated. Ought he to try to reach Cheryl? She could smooth matters if anyone could, and once old Vil-baby was properly dandled, he might think of a way to put the fusion tubes into operation--hydroxyl or not.
Did he really believe Viluekis could, under any circumstances? Or was he trying to avoid the thought of cruising for years? To be sure, hyperships were prepared for such an eventuality, in principle, but the eventuality had never come to pass and the crews--and still less the passengers--were surely not prepared for it.
But if he did talk to Cheryl, what could he say that wouldn't sound like an order for seduction? It was only one day so far and he was not yet ready to pimp for a Fusionist.
Wait! Awhile, anyway!
Viluekis frowned. He felt a little better having bathed and he was pleased that he had been firm with Strauss. Not a bad fellow, Strauss, but like all of them (“them,” the captain, the crew, the passengers, all the stupid non-Fusionists in the universe) he wanted to shed responsibility. Put it all on the Fusionist. It was an old, old song, and he was one Fusionist who wouldn't take it.
That talk about cruising for years was just a way of trying to frighten him. If they really put their minds to it, they could work out the limits of the cloud and somewhere there had to be a nearer edge. It was too much to ask that they had landed in the precise center. Of course, if they had landed near one edge and were heading for the other--
Viluekis rose and stretched. He was tall and his eyebrows hung over his eyes like canopies.
Suppose it did take years. No hypership had ever cruised for years. The longest cruise had been eighty-eight days and thirteen hours, when one of them had managed to find itself in an unfavorable position with respect to a diffuse star and had to recede at speeds that built up to over 0.9 light before it was reasonably able to Jump.
They had survived and that was a quarter-year cruise. Of course, twenty years
But that was impossible.
The signal light flashed three times before he was fully aware of it. If that was the captain coming to see him personally, he would leave at a rather more rapid rate than he had come.
“Anton!”
The voice was soft, urgent, and part of his annoyance seeped away. He allowed the door to recede into its socket and Cheryl came in. The door closed again behind her.
She was about twenty-five, with green eyes, a firm chin, dull red hair, and a magnificent figure that did not hide its light under a bushel.
She said, “ Anton. Is there something wrong?”
Viluekis was not caught so entirely by surprise as to admit any such thing. Even a Fusionist knew better than to reveal anything prematurely to a passenger. “Not at all. What makes you think so?”
“One of the other passengers says so. A man named Martand.”
“Martand? What does he know about it?” Then, suspiciously, “ And what are you doing listening to some fool passenger? What does he look like?”
Cheryl smiled wanly. “Just someone who struck up a conversation in the lounge. He must be nearly sixty years old, and quite harmless, though I imagine he would like not to be. But that's not the point. There are no stars in view. Anyone can see that, and Martand said it was significant.”
“Did he? We're just passing through a cloud. There are lots of clouds in the galaxy and hyperships pass through them all the time.”
“Yes, but Martand says you can usually see some stars even in a cloud.”
“What does he know about it?” Viluekis repeated. “Is he an old hand at deep space?”
“No-o,” admitted Cheryl. “Actually, it's his first trip, I think. But he seems to know a lot.”
“I'll bet. Listen, you go to him and tell him to shut up. He can be put in solitary for this. And don't you repeat stories like that, either.”
Cheryl put her head to one side. “Frankly, Anton, you sound as though there were trouble. This Martand--Louis Martand is his name--is an interesting fellow. He's a schoolteacher--eighth grade general science.”
“A grade-school teacher! Good Lord, Cheryl--”
“But you ought to listen to him. He says that teaching children is one of the few professions where you have to know a little bit about everything because kids ask questions and can spot phonies.”
“Well, then, maybe your specialty should be spotting phonies, too. Now, Cheryl, you go and tell him to shut up, or I will.”
“All right. But first--is it true that we're going through a hydroxyl cloud and the fusion tube is shut down?”
Viluekis's mouth opened, then shut again. It was quite a while before he said, “Who told you that?”
“Martand. I'll go now.”
“No,” said Viluekis sharply. “Wait awhile. How many others has Martand been telling all this?”
“Nobody. He said he doesn't want to spread panic. I was there when he was thinking about it, I suppose, and I guess he couldn't resist saying something.”
“Does he know you know me?”
Cheryl's forehead furrowed slightly. “I think I mentioned something about it.”
Viluekis snorted, “Don't you suppose that this crazy old man you've picked up is bound to try to show you how great he is. It's me he's trying to impress through you.”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Cheryl. “In fact, he specifically said I wasn't to tell you anything.”
“Knowing, of course, that you'd come to me at once.”
“Why should he want me to do that?”
“To show me up. Do you know what it's like being a Fusionist? To have everyone resenting you, against you, because you're so needed, because you--”
Cheryl said, “But what's any of that got to do with it? If Martand's all wrong, how would that show you up? And if he's right--Is he right, Anton?”
“Well, exactly what did he say?”
“I'm not sure I can remember it all, of course,” Cheryl said thoughtfully. “It was after we came out of the Jump, actually quite a few hours after. By that time all anyone was talking about was that there were no stars in view. In the lounge everyone was saying there ought to be another Jump soon because what was the good of deep-space travel without a view. Of course, we knew we had to cruise at least a day. Then Martand came in, saw me, and came over to speak to me. --I think he rather likes me.”
“I think I rather don't like him,” said Viluekis grimly. “Go on.”
“I said to him that it was pretty dreary without a view and he said it would stay that way for a while, and he sounded worried. Naturally I asked why he said such a thing and he said it was because the fusion tube had been turned off.”
“Who told him that?” demanded Viluekis.
He said there was a low hum that you could hear in one of the men's rooms that you couldn't hear anymore. And he said there was a place in the closet of the game room where the chess sets were kept where the wall felt warm because of the fusion tube and that place was not warm now.”
“Is that all the evidence he has?”
--Cheryl ignored that and went on, “He said there were no stars visible because we were in a dust cloud and the fusion tubes must have stopped because there was no hydrogen to speak of in it. He said there probably wouldn't be enough energy to spark another Jump and that if we looked for hydrogen we might have to cruise years to get out of the cloud.”
Viluekis's frown became ferocious. “He's panic-mongering. Do you know what that--”
“He's not. He told me not to tell anyone because he said it would create panic and that besides it wouldn't happen. He only told me because he had just figured it out and was all excited about it and had to talk to someone, but he said there was an easy way out and that the Fusionist would know what to do so that there was no need to worry at all. --But you're the Fusionist, so it seemed to me I had to ask whether he was really right about the cloud and whether you had really taken care of it.”
Viluekis said, “This grade-school teacher of yours knows nothing about anything. Just stay away from him. --Uh, did he say what his so-called easy way out was?”
“No. Should I have asked him?”
“No! Why should you have asked him? What would he know about it? But then again-- All right, ask him. I'm curious what the idiot has in mind. Ask him.”
Cheryl nodded. “I can do that. But are we in trouble?” Viluekis said shortly. “Suppose you leave that to me.
We're not in trouble till I say we're in trouble.”
He looked for a long time at the closed door after she had left, both angry and uneasy. What was this Louis Martand--this grade-school teacher--doing with his lucky guesses?
If it finally came about that an extended cruise was necessary, the passengers would have to have it broken to them carefully, or none of them would survive. With Martand shouting it to all who would listen--
Almost savagely Viluekis clicked shut the combination that would bring him the captain.
Martand was slim and of neat appearance. His lips seemed forever on the verge of a smile, though his face and bearing were marked by a polite gravity; an almost expectant gravity, as though he was forever waiting for the person with him to say something truly important.
Cheryl said to him, “I spoke to Mr. Viluekis. --He's the Fusionist, you know. I told him what you said.”
Martand looked shocked and shook his head. “I'm afraid you shouldn't have done that!”
“He did seem displeased.”
“Of course. Fusionists are very special people and they don't like to have outsiders--”
“I could see that. But he insisted there was nothing to worry about.”
“Of course not,” said Martand, taking her hand and patting it in a consoling gesture, but then continuing to hold it. “I told you there was an easy way out. He's probably setting it up now. Still, I suppose it could be awhile before he thinks of it.”
“Thinks of what?” Then, warmly, “Why shouldn't he think of it, if you have?”
“But he's a specialist, you see, my dear young lady. Specialists think in their speciality and have a hard time getting out of it. As for myself, I don't dare fall into rots. When I set up a class demonstration I've got to improvise most of the time. I have never yet been at a school where proton micropiles have been available, and I’ve had to work up a kerosene thermoelectric generator when we're off on field trips.”
“What's kerosene?” asked Cheryl.
Martand laughed. He seemed delighted. “You see? People forget. Kerosene is a kind of flammable liquid. A still-more-primitive source of energy that I have many times had to use was a wood fire which you start by friction. Did you ever come across one of those? You take a match--”
Cheryl was looking blank and Martand went on indulgently, “Well, it doesn't matter. I'm just trying to get across the notion that your Fusionist will have to think of something more primitive than fusion and that will take him a while. As for me, I'm used to working with primitive methods. -For instance, do you know what's out there?”
He gestured at the viewing port, which was utterly featureless; so featureless that the lounge was virtually depopulated for lack of a view.
“A cloud; a dust cloud.”
“Ah, but what kind? The one thing that's always to be found everywhere is hydrogen. It's the original stuff of the universe and hyperships depend on it. No ship can carry enough fuel to make repeated Jumps or to accelerate to near-light-speed and back repeatedly. We have to scoop the fuel out of space.”
“You know, I've always wondered about that. I thought outer space was empty!”
“Nearly empty, my dear, and 'nearly' is as good as a feast. When you travel at a hundred thousand miles a second, you can scoop up and compress quite a bit of hydrogen, even when there's only a few atoms per cubic centimeter. And small amounts of hydrogen, fusing steadily, provide all the energy we need. In clouds the hydrogen is usually even thicker, but impurities may cause trouble, as in this one.”
“How can you tell this one has impurities?”
“Why else would Mr. Viluekis have shut down the fusion tube. Next to hydrogen, the most common elements in the universe are helium, oxygen, and carbon. If the fusion pumps have stopped, that means there's a shortage of fuel, which is hydrogen, and a presence of something that will damage the complex fusion system. This can't be helium, which is harmless. It is possibly hydroxyl groups, an oxygen-hydrogen combination. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Cheryl. “I had general science in college, and some of it is coming back. The dust is really hydroxyl groups attached to solid dust grains.”
“Or actually free in the gaseous state, too. Even hydroxyl is not too dangerous to the fusion system, in moderation, but carbon compounds are. Formaldehyde is most --likely and I should imagine with a ratio of about one of those to four hydroxyls. Do you see now?”
“No, I don't,” said Cheryl flatly.
“Such compounds won't fuse. If you heat them to a few hundred million degrees, they break down into single atoms and the concentration of oxygen and carbon will simply damage the system. But why not take them in at ordinary temperatures. Hydroxyl will combine with formaldehyde, after compression, in a chemical reaction that will cause no harm to the system. At least, I'm sure a good Fusionist could modify the system to handle a chemical reaction at room temperature. The energy of the reaction can be stored and, after a while, there will be enough to make a Jump possible.”
Cheryl said, “I don't see that at all. Chemical reactions produce hardly any energy, compared to fusion.”
“You're quite right, dear. But we don't need much. The previous Jump has left us with insufficient energy for an immediate second Jump--that's regulations. But I'll bet your friend, the Fusionist, saw to it that as little energy as possible was lacking. Fusionists usually do that. The little extra required to reach ignition can be collected from ordinary chemical reactions. Then, once a Jump takes us out of the cloud, cruising for a week or so will refill our energy tanks and we can continue without harm. Of course--” Martand raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
“Yes?”
“Of course,” said Martand, “if for any reason Mr. Viluekis should delay, there may be trouble. Every day we spend before Jumping uses up energy in the ordinary life of the ship, and after a while chemical reactions won't supply the energy required to reach Jump-ignition. I hope he doesn't wait long.”
“Well, why don't you tell him? Now.”
Martand shook his head. “Tell a Fusionist? I couldn't do that, dear.”
“Then I will.”
“Oh, no. He's sure to think of it himself. In fact, I'll make a bet with you, my dear. You tell him exactly what I said and say that I told you he had already thought of it himself and that the fusion tube was in operation. And, of course, if I win--”
Martand smiled.
Cheryl smiled, too. “I'll see,” she said.
Martand looked after her thoughtfully as she hastened away, his thoughts not entirely on Viluekis's possible reaction.
He was not surprised when a ship's guard appeared from almost nowhere and said, “Please come with me, Mr. Martand.”
Martand said quietly. “Thank you for letting me finish. I was afraid you wouldn't.”
Something more than six hours passed before Martand was allowed to see the captain. His imprisonment (which was what he considered it) was one of isolation, but was not onerous; and the captain, when he did see him, looked tired and not particularly hostile.
Hanson said, “It was reported to me that you were spreading rumors designed to create panic among the passengers. That is a serious charge.”
“I spoke to one passenger only, sir; and for a purpose.”
“So we realize. We put you under surveillance at once
and I have a report, a rather full one, of the conversation you had with Miss Cheryl Winter. It was the second conversation on the subject.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Apparently you intended the meat of the conversation to be passed on to Mr. Viluekis.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You did not consider going to Mr. Viluekis personally?”
“I doubt that he would have listened, sir.”
“Or to me.”
“You might have listened, but how would you pass on the information to Mr. Viluekis? You might then have had to use Miss Winter yourself. Fusionists have their peculiarities.”
The captain nodded abstractedly. “What was it you expected to happen when Miss Winter passed on the information to Mr. Viluekis?”
“My hope, sir,” said Martand, “was that he would be less defensive with Miss Winter than with anyone else; that he would feel less threatened. I was hoping that he would laugh and say the idea was a simple one that had occurred to him long before, and that, indeed, the scoops were already working, with the intent of promoting the chemical reaction. Then, when he got rid of Miss Winter, and I imagine he would do that quickly, he would start the scoops and report his action to you, sir, omitting any reference to myself or Miss Winter.”
“You did not think he might dismiss the whole notion as unworkable?”
“There was that chance, but it didn't happen.”
“How do you know?”
“Because half an hour after I was placed in detention, sir, the lights in the room in which I was kept dimmed perceptibly and did not brighten again. I assumed that energy expenditure in the ship was being cut to the bone, and assumed further that Viluekis was throwing everything into the pot so that the chemical reaction would supply enough for ignition.”
The captain frowned. “What made you so sure you could manipulate Mr. Viluekis? Surely you have never dealt with Fusionists, have you?”
“Ah, but I teach the eighth-grade, captain. I have dealt with other children.”
For a moment the captain's expression remained wooden. And then slowly it relaxed into a smile. “I like you, Mr. Martand,” he said, “but it won't help you. Your expectations did come to pass; as nearly as I can tell, exactly as you had hoped. But do you understand what followed?”
“I will, if you tell me.”
“Mr. Viluekis had to evaluate your suggestion and decide, at once, whether it was practical. He had to make a number of careful adjustments to the system to allow chemical reactions without knocking out the possibility of future fusion. He had to determine the maximum safe rate of reaction; the amount of stored energy to save; the point at which ignition might safely be attempted; the kind and nature of the Jump. It all had to be done quickly and no one else but a Fusionist could have done it. In fact, not every Fusionist could have done it; Mr. Viluekis is exceptional even for a Fusionist. Do you see?”
“Quite well.” The captain looked at the timepiece on the wall and activated his viewport. It was black, as it had been now for the better part of two days. “Mr. Viluekis has informed me of the time at which he will attempt Jump-ignition. He thinks it will work and I am confident in his judgment.”
“If he misses,” said Martand somberly, “we may find ourselves in the same position as before, but stripped of energy.”
“I realize that,” said Hanson, “and since you might feel a certain responsibility over having placed the idea in the Fusionist's mind, I thought you might want to wait through the few moments of suspense ahead of us.”
Both men were silent now, watching the screen, while first seconds, then minutes, moved past. Hanson had not mentioned the exact deadline and Martand had no way of telling how imminent it was or whether it had passed. He could only shift his glance, occasionally and momentarily, to the captain's face, which maintained a studied expressionlessness.
And then came that queer internal wrench that disappeared almost at once, like a tic in the abdominal wall. They had Jumped.
“Stars!” said Hanson in a whisper of deep satisfaction. The viewport had burst into a riot of them, and at that moment Martand could recall no sweeter sight in all his life.
“And on the second,” said Hanson. “ A beautiful job. We're energy-stripped now, but we'll be full again in anywhere from one to three weeks, and during that time the passengers will have their view.”
Martand felt too weak with relief to speak.
The captain turned to him. “Now, Mr. Martand. Your idea had merit. One could argue that it saved the ship and everyone on it. One could also argue that Mr. Viluekis was sure to think of it himself soon enough. But there will be no argument about it at all, for under no conditions can your part in this be known. Mr. Viluekis did the job and it was a great one of pure virtuosity even after we take into account the fact that you may have sparked it. He will be commended for it and receive great honors. You will receive nothing.”
Martand was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I understand. A Fusionist is indispensable and I am of no account. If Mr. Viluekis's pride is hurt in the slightest, he may become useless to you, and you can't afford to lose him. For myself-well, be it as you wish. Good day, Captain.”
“Not quite,” said the captain. “We can't trust you.”
“I won't say anything.”
“You may not intend to, but things happen. We can't take the chance. For the remainder of the flight you will be under house arrest.”
Martand frowned. “For what? I saved you and your damned ship--and your Fusionist.”
“For exactly that. For saving it. That's the way it works out.”
“Where's the justice?”
Slowly the captain shook his head. “It's a rare commodity, I admit, and sometimes too expensive to afford. You can't even go back to your room. You will be seeing no one in what remains of the trip.”
Martand rubbed the side of his chin with one finger. “Surely you don't mean that literally, Captain.”
“I'm afraid I do.”
“But there is another who might talk--accidentally and without meaning to. You had better place Miss Winter under house arrest, too.”
“And double the injustice?”
“Misery loves company,” said Martand.
And the captain smiled. “Perhaps you're right,” he said.
=====
Writer-friends come and go, too, alas. After I moved to New York, I frequently saw a number of writers whom, while I was in Boston, I had seen only occasionally. Lester del Rey and Robert Silverberg are examples. But then in 1972 Bob moved to California and I lost him again.
I had a chance to do one last thing for John Campbell, by the way. It occurred to Harry Harrison to do an anthology of stories of the kind that John Campbell had made famous by the authors he had made famous. Naturally, I was one of the authors, and in March 1972 I offered to do another “thiotimoline” article.
I had done three in my time and they had made a considerable stir. The first was The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline and it had appeared in the March 1948, Astounding under circumstances described in THE EARLY ASIMOV (where the article was reprinted) .
The second was The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline, which appeared in the December 1953 Astounding. It, along with the first, was included in my collection ONLY A TRILLION (Abelard-Schuman, 1957).
The third was Thiotimoline and the Space Age, which appeared in the September 1960 Analog and was included in my book OPUS 100 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
Now I wrote a fourth, a quarter century after the first, and it was THIOTIMOLINE TO THE STARS.
“Same speech, I suppose,” said Ensign Feet wearily.
“Why not?” said Lieutenant Frohorov, closing his eyes and carefully sitting down on the small of his back. “He's given it for fifteen years, once to each graduating class of the Astronautic Academy.”
“Word for word, I'll bet,” said Feet, who had heard it the year before for the first time.
“As far as I can tell. --What a pompous bore! Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension.”
But the class was filing in now, uniformed and expectant, marching forward, breaking into rows with precision, each man and woman moving to his or her assigned seat to the rhythm of a subdued drumbeat, and then all sitting down to one loud boom.
At that moment Admiral Vernon entered and walked stiffly to the podium.
“Graduating class of '22, welcome! Your school days are over. Your education will now begin.
“You have learned all there is to know about the classic theory of space flight. You have been filled to overflowing with astrophysics and celestial relativistic mechanics. But you have not been told about thiotimoline.
“That's for a very good reason. Telling you about it in class will do you no good. You will have to learn to fly with thiotimoline. It is thiotimoline and that alone that will take you to the stars. With all your book learning, you may still never learn to handle thiotimoline. If so, there will yet be many posts you can fill in the astronautic way of life. Being a pilot will not, however, be one of them.
“I will start you off on this, your graduation day, with the only lecture you will get on the subject. After this, your dealings will thiotimoline will be in flight and we will find out quickly whether you have any talent for it at all.”
The admiral paused, and seemed to be looking from face to face as though he was trying to assay each man's talent to begin with. Then he barked:
“Thiotimoline! First mentioned in 1948, according to legend, by Azimuth or, possibly, Asymptote, who may, very likely, never have existed. There is no record of the original article supposed to have been written by him; merely vague references to it, none earlier than the twenty-first century.
“Serious study began with Almirante, who either discovered thiotimoline, or rediscovered it, if the Azimuth/Asymptote tale is accepted. Almirante worked out the theory of hypersteric hindrance and showed that the molecule of thiotimoline is so distorted that one bond is forced into extension through the temporal dimension into the past; and another into the future.
“Because of the future-extension, thiotimoline can interact with an event that has not yet taken place. It can, for instance, to use the classic example, dissolve in water approximately one second before the water is added.
“Thiotimoline is, of course, a very simple compound, comparatively. It has, indeed, the simplest molecule capable of displaying endochronic properties--that is, the past-future extension. While this makes possible certain unique devices, the true applications of endochronicity had to await the development of more complicated molecules; polymers that combined endochronicity with firm structure.
“Pellagrini was the first to form endochronic resins and plastics, and, twenty years later, Cudahy demonstrated the technique for binding endochronic plastics to metal. It became possible to make large objects endochronic--entire spaceships, for instance.
“Now let us consider what happens when a large structure is endochronic. I will describe it qualitatively only; it is all that is necessary. The theoreticians have it all worked out mathematically, but I have never known a physics-johnny yet who could pilot a starship. Let them handle the theory, then, and you handle the ship.
“The small thiotimoline molecule is extraordinarily sensitive to the probabilistic states of the future. If you are certain you are going to add the water, it will dissolve before the water is added. If there is even the slightest doubt in your mind as to whether you will add the water, the thiotimoline will not dissolve until you actually add it.
“The larger the molecule possessing endochronicity, the less sensitive it is to the presence of doubt. It will dissolve, swell, change its electrical properties, or in some way interact with water, even if you are almost certain you may not add the water. But then what if you don't, in actual fact, add the water? The answer is simple. The endochronic structure will move into the future in search of water; not finding it, it will continue to move into the future.
“The effect is very much that of the donkey following the carrot fixed to a stick and held two feet in front of the donkey's nose; except that the endochronic structure is not as smart as the donkey, and never gets tired.
“If an entire ship is endochronic--that is, if endochronic groupings are fixed to the hull at frequent intervals--it is easy to set up a device that will deliver water to key spots in the structure, and yet so arrange that device that although it is always apparently on the point of delivering the water, it never actually does.
“In that case, the endochronic groupings move forward in time, carrying all the ship with it and all the objects on board the ship, including its personnel.
“Of course, there are no absolutes. The ship is moving forward in time relative to the universe; and this is precisely the same as saying that the universe is moving backward in time relative to the ship. The rate at which the ship is moving forward, or the universe is moving backward, in time, can be adjusted with great delicacy by the necessary modification of the device for adding water. The proper way of doing this can be taught, after a fashion; but it can be applied perfectly only by inborn talent. That is what we will find out about you all; whether you have that talent.”
Again he paused and appraised them. Then he went on, amid perfect silence:
“But what good is it all? Let's consider starflights and review some of the things you have learned in school.
“Stars are incredibly far apart and to travel from one to another, considering the light-speed limit on velocity, takes years; centuries; millennia. One way of doing it is to set up a huge ship with a closed ecology; a tiny, self-contained universe. A group of people will set out and the tenth generation thereafter reaches a distant star. No one man makes the journey, and even if the ship eventually returns home, many centuries may have passed.
“To take the original crew to the stars in their own lifetime, freezing techniques may keep them in suspended animation for virtually all the trip. But freezing is a very uncertain procedure, and even if the crew survives and returns home, they will find that many centuries have passed on Earth.
“To take the original crew to the stars in their own lifetime, without freezing them, it is only necessary to accelerate to near-light velocities. Subjective time slows, and it will seem to the crew that it will have taken them only months to make the trip. But time travels at the normal rate for the rest of the universe, and when the crew returns they will find that although they, themselves, have aged and experienced no more than two months of time, perhaps, the Earth itself will have experienced many centuries.
“In every case, star travel involves enormous duration of time on Earth, even if not to the crew. One must return to Earth, if one returns at all, far into the Earth's future, and this means interstellar travel is not psychologically practical.
“But-- But, graduates--”
He peered piercingly at them and said in a low, tense voice, “If we use an endochronic ship, we can match the time-dilatation effect exactly with the endochronic effect. While the ship travels through space at enormous velocity, and experiences a large slowdown in rate of experienced time, the endochronic effect is moving the universe back in time with respect to the ship. Properly handled, when the ship returns to Earth, with the crew having experienced, say, only two months of duration, the entire universe will have likewise experienced only two months' duration. At last, interstellar travel became practical.
“But only if very delicately handled.
“If the endochronic effect lags a little behind the time dilatation effect, the ship will return after two months to find an Earth four months older. This is not much, perhaps; it can be lived with, you might think; but not so. The crew members are out of phase. They feel everything about them to have aged two months with respect to themselves. Worse yet, the general population feels that the crew members are two months younger than they ought to be. It creates hard feelings and discomforts.
“Similarly, if the endochronic effect races a little ahead of the time-dilatation effect, the ship may return after two months to find an Earth that has not experienced any time duration at all. The ship returns, just as it is rising into the sky. The hard feelings and discomforts will still exist.
“No, graduates, no interstellar flight will be considered successful in this star fleet unless the duration to the crew and the duration to Earth match minute for minute. A sixty-second deviation is a sloppy job that will gain you no merit. A hundred-twenty-second deviation will not be tolerated.
“I know, graduates, very well what questions are going through your minds. They went through mine when I graduated. Do we not in the endochronic ship have the equivalent of a time machine? Can we not, by proper adjustment of our endochronic device, deliberately travel a century into the future, make our observations, then travel a century into the past to return to our starting point? Or vice versa, can we not travel a century into the past and then back into the future to the starting point? Or a thousand years, or a billion? Could we not witness the Earth being born, life evolving, the sun dying?
“Graduates, the mathematical-johnnies tell us that this sort of thing creates paradoxes and requires too much energy to be practical. But 1 tell you the hen with paradoxes. We can't do it for a very simple reason. The endochronic properties are unstable. Molecules that are puckered into the time dimension are sensitive indeed. Relatively small effects will cause them to undergo chemical changes that will allow unpuckering. Even if there are no effects at all, random vibrations will produce the changes that will unpucker them.
“In short, an endochronic ship will slowly go isochronic and become ordinary matter without temporal extension. Modem technology has reduced the rate of unpuckering enormously and may reduce it further still, but nothing we do, theory tells us, will ever create a truly stable endochronic molecule.
“This means that your starship has only a limited life as a starship. It must get back to Earth while its endochronicity still holds, and that endochronicity must be restored before the next trip.
“Now, then, what happens if you return out-of-time? If you are not very nearly in your own time, you will have no assurance that the state of the technology will be such as to enable you to re-endochronicize your ship. You may be lucky if you are in the future; you will certainly be unlucky in the past. If, through carelessness on your part, or simply through lack of talent, you come back a substantial distance into the past, you will be certain to be stuck there because there will be no way of treating your ship in such a fashion as to bring it back into what will then be your future.
“And I want you to understand, graduates,” here he slapped one hand against the other, as though to emphasize his words, “there is no time in the past where a civilized astronautic officer would care to spend his life. You might, for instance, be stranded in sixth-century France or, worse still, twentieth-century America.
“Refrain, then, from any temptation to experiment with time.
“Let us now pass on to one more point which may not have been more than hinted at in your formal school days, but which is something you will be experiencing.
“You may wonder how it is that a relatively few endochronic atomic bonds placed here and there among matter which is overwhelmingly isochronic can drag an with it. Why should one endochronic bond, racing toward water, drag with it a quadrillion atoms with isochronic , bonds? We feel this should not happen, because of our lifelong experience with inertia.
“There is, however, no inertia in the movement toward past or future. If one part of an object moves toward the past or future, the rest of the object does so as well, and at precisely the same speed. There is no mass-factor at all. That is why it is as easy for the entire universe to move backward in time as for this single ship to move forward--and at the same rate.
“But there is even more to it than that. The time-dilatation effect is the result of your acceleration with respect to the universe generally. You learned that in grade school, when you took up elementary relativistic physics. It is part of the inertial effect of acceleration.
“But by using the endochronic effect, we wipe out the time-dilatation effect. If we wipe out the time-dilatation effect, then we are, so to speak, wiping out that which produces it. In short, when the endochronic effect exactly balances the time-dilatation effect, the inertial effect of acceleration is canceled out.
“You cannot cancel out one inertial effect without canceling them all. Inertia is therefore wiped out altogether and you can accelerate at any rate without feeling it. Once the endochronic effect is well-adjusted, you can accelerate from rest relative to Earth, to 186,000 miles per second relative to Earth in anywhere from a few hours to a few minutes. The more talented and skillful you are at handling the endochronic effect, the more rapidly you can accelerate.
“You are experiencing that now, gentlemen. It seems to you that you are sitting in an auditorium on the surface of the planet Earth, and I'm sure that none of you has had any reason or occasion to doubt the truth of that impression. But it's wrong just the same.
“You are in an auditorium, I admit, but it is not on the surface of the planet, Earth; not anymore. You--I--all of us--are in a large starship, which took off the moment I began this speech and which accelerated at an enormous rate. We reached the outskirts of the solar system while I've been talking, and we are now returning.
“ At no time have any of you felt any acceleration, either through change in speed, change in direction of travel, or both, and therefore you have all assumed that you have remained at rest with respect to the surface of the Earth.
“Not at all, graduates. You have been out in space all the time I was talking, and have passed, according to calculations, within two million miles of the planet Saturn.”
He seemed grimly pleased at the distinct stir in the audience.
“You needn't worry, graduates. Since we experience no inertial effects, we experience no gravitational effects either (the two are essentially the same), so that our course has not been affected by Saturn. We will be back on Earth's surface any moment now. As a special treat we will be coming down in the United Nations Port in Lincoln, Nebraska, and you will all be free to enjoy the pleasures of the metropolis for the weekend.
“Incidentally, the mere fact that we have experienced no inertial effects at all shows how well the endochronic effect matched the time-dilatation. Had there been any mismatch, even a small one, you would have felt the effects of acceleration-another reason for making no effort to experiment with time.
“Remember, graduates, a sixty-second mismatch is sloppy and a hundred-twenty-second mismatch is intolerable. We are about to land now; Lieutenant Prohorov, will you take over in the conning tower and oversee the actual landing?”
Prohorov said briskly, “Yes, sir,” and went up the ladder in the rear of the assembly hall, where he had been sitting.
Admiral Vernon smiled. “You will all keep your seats. We are exactly on course. My ships are always exactly on course.”
But then Prohorov descended again and came running up the aisle to the admiral. He reached him and spoke in a whisper. “Admiral, if this is Lincoln, Nebraska, something is wrong. All I can see are Indians; hordes of Indians. Indians in Nebraska, now, Admiral?”
Admiral Vernon turned pale and made a rattling sound in his throat. He crumpled and collapsed, while the graduating class rose to its feet uncertainly. Ensign Peet had followed Prohorov onto the platform and had caught his words and now stood there thunderstruck.
Prohorov raised his arms. “All's well, ladies and gentlemen. Take it easy. The admiral has just had a momentary attack of vertigo. It happens on landing, sometimes, to older men.”
Peet whispered harshly, “But we're stuck in the past, Prohorov.”
Prohorov raised his eyebrows. “Of course not. You didn't feel any inertial effects, did you? We can't even be an hour off. If the admiral had any brains to go with his uniform, he would have realized it, too. He had just said it, for God's sake.”
“Then why did you say there was something wrong? Why did you say there are Indians out there?”
“Because there was and there are. When Admiral Sap comes to, he won't be able to do a thing to me. We didn't land in Lincoln, Nebraska, so there was something wrong all right. And as for the Indians-well, if I read the traffic signs correctly, we've come down on the outskirts of Calcutta.”
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Harry Harrison's anthology, in which THIOTIMOLINE TO THE STARS appeared, was called simply Astounding. It had been Harry's aim to make it one last issue of that magazine. Not Analog now, but Astounding.
There is nothing wrong with Analog, but to us old-timers no name change can possibly replace Astounding in our hearts.
In the spring of 1973 The Saturday Evening Post, having reprinted a couple of my short pieces, asked me to write an original piece for them. On May 3, 1973, caught in the grip of inspiration, I wrote LIGHT VERSE in one quick session at the typewriter and scarcely had to change a word in preparing final copy. It appeared in the September-October 1973 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
The very last person anyone would expect to be a murderer was Mrs. Avis Lardner. Widow of the great astronaut-martyr, she was a philanthropist, an art collector, a hostess extraordinary, and, everyone agreed, an artistic genius. But above all, she was the gentlest and kindest human being one could imagine.
Her husband, William J. Lardner, died, as we all know, of the effects of radiation from a solar flare, after he had deliberately remained in space so that a passenger vessel might make it safely to Space Station 5.
Mrs. Lardner had received a generous pension for that, and she had then invested wisely and well. By late middle age she was very wealthy.
Her house was a showplace, a veritable museum, containing a small but extremely select collection of extraordinarily beautiful jeweled objects. From a dozen different cultures she had obtained relics of almost every conceivable artifact that could be embedded with jewels and made to serve the aristocracy of that culture. She had one of the first jeweled wristwatches manufactured in America, a jeweled dagger from Cambodia, a jeweled pair of spectacles from Italy, and so on almost endlessly.
All was open for inspection. The artifacts were not insured, and there were no ordinary security provisions. There was no need for anything conventional, for Mrs. Lardner maintained a large staff of robot servants, all of whom could be relied on to guard every item with imperturbable concentration, irreproachable honesty, and irrevocable efficiency.
Everyone knew the existence of those robots and there is no record of any attempt at theft, ever.
And then, of course, there was her light-sculpture. How Mrs. Lardner discovered her own genius at the art, no guest at her many lavish entertainments could guess. On each occasion, however, when her house was thrown open to guests, a new symphony of light shone throughout the rooms; three-dimensional curves and solids in melting color, some pure and some fusing in startling, crystalline effects that bathed every guest in wonder and somehow always adjusted itself so as to make Mrs. Lardner's blue-white hair and soft, unlined face gently beautiful.
It was for the light-sculpture more than anything else that the guests came. It was never the same twice, and never failed to explore new experimental avenues of art. Many people who could afford light-consoles prepared light-sculptures for amusement, but no one could approach Mrs. Lardner's expertise. Not even those who considered themselves professional artists.
She herself was charmingly modest about it. “No, no,” she would protest when someone waxed lyrical. “I wouldn't call it 'poetry in light.' That's far too kind. At most, I would say it was mere 'light verse.'“ And everyone smiled at her gentle wit.
Though she was often asked, she would never create light-sculpture for any occasion but her own parties. “That would be commercialization,” she said.
She had no objection, however, to the preparation of elaborate holograms of her sculptures so that they might be made permanent and reproduced in museums of art an over the world. Nor was there ever a charge for any use that might be made of her light-sculptures.
“I couldn't ask a penny,” she said, spreading her arms wide. “It's free to all. After all, I have no further use for it myself.” It was truer She never used the same light-sculpture twice.
When the holograms were taken, she was cooperation itself. Watching benignly at every step, she was always ready to order her robot servants to help. “Please, Courtney,” she would say, “would you be so kind as to adjust the step ladder?”
It was her fashion. She always addressed her robots with the most formal courtesy.
Once, years before, she had been almost scolded by a government functionary from the Bureau of Robots and Mechanical Men. “You can't do that,” he said severely. “It interferes with their efficiency. They are constructed to follow orders, and the more clearly you give those orders, the more efficiently they follow them. When you ask with elaborate politeness, it is difficult for them to understand that an order is being given. They react more slowly.”
Mrs. Lardner lifted her aristocratic head. “I do not ask for speed and efficiency,” she said. “I ask goodwill. My robots love me.”
The government functionary might have explained that robots cannot love, but he withered under her hurt but gentle glance.
It was notorious that Mrs. Lardner never even returned a robot to the factory for adjustment. Their positronic brains are enormously complex, and once in ten times or so the adjustment is not perfect as it leaves the factory. Sometimes the error does not show up for a period of time, but whenever it does, u. S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., always makes the adjustment free of charge.
Mrs. Lardner shook her head. “Once a robot is in my house,” she said, “and has performed his duties, any minor eccentricities must be borne with. I will not have him manhandled.”
It was the worse thing possible to try to explain that a robot was but a machine. She would say very stiffly, “Nothing that is as intelligent as a robot can ever be but a machine. I treat them as people.”
And that was that!
She kept even Max, although he was almost helpless. He could scarcely understand what was expected of him. Mrs. Lardner denied that strenuously, however. “Not at all,” she would say firmly. “He can take hats and coats and store them very well, indeed. He can hold objects for me. He can do many things.”
“But why not have him adjusted?” asked a friend, once.
“Oh, I couldn't. He's himself. He's very lovable, you know. After all, a positronic brain is so complex that no one can ever tell in just what way it's off. If he were made perfectly normal there would be no way to adjust him back to the lovability he now has. I won't give that up.”
“But if he's maladjusted,” said the friend, looking at Max nervously, “might he not be dangerous?”
“Never,” laughed Mrs. Lardner. “I've had him for years. He's completely harmless and quite a dear.”
Actually he looked like all the other robots, smooth, metallic, vaguely human but expressionless.
To the gentle Mrs. Lardner, however, they were all individual, all sweet, all lovable. It was the kind of woman she was.
How could she commit murder?
The very last person anyone would expect to be murdered would be John Semper Travis. Introverted and gentle, he was in the world but not of it. He had that peculiar mathematical turn of mind that made it possible for him to work out in his mind the complicated tapestry of the myriad positronic brain-paths in a robot's mind.
He was chief engineer of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.
But he was also an enthusiastic amateur in light-sculpture. He had written a book on the subject, trying to show that the type of mathematics he used in working out positronic brain-paths might be modified into a guide to the production of aesthetic light-sculpture.
His attempt at putting theory into practice was a dismal failure, however. The sculptures he himself produced, following his mathematical principles, were stodgy, mechanical, and uninteresting.
It was the only reason for unhappiness in his quiet, introverted, and secure life, and yet it was reason enough for him to be very unhappy indeed. He knew his theories were right, yet he could not make them work. If he could but produce one great piece of light-sculpture--
Naturally, he knew of Mrs. Lardner's light-sculpture. She was universally hailed as a genius, yet Travis knew she could not understand even the simplest aspect of robotic mathematics. He had corresponded with her but she consistently refused to explain her methods, and he wondered if she had any at all. Might it not be mere intuition? --but even intuition might be reduced to mathematics. Finally he managed to receive an invitation to one of her parties. He simply had to see her.
Mr. Travis arrived rather late. He had made one last attempt at a piece of light-sculpture and had failed dismally.
He greeted Mrs. Lardner with a kind of puzzled respect and said, “That was a peculiar robot who took my hat and coat.”
“That is Max,” said Mrs. Lardner.
“He is quite maladjusted, and he's a fairly old model. How is it you did not return it to the factory?”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Lardner. “It would be too much trouble.”
“None at all, Mrs. Lardner,” said Travis. “You would be surprised how simple a task it was. Since I am with U. S. Robots, I took the liberty of adjusting him myself. It took no time and you'll find he is now in perfect working order.”
A queer change came over Mrs. Lardner's face. Fury found a place on it for the first time in her gentle life, and it was as though the lines did not know how to form.
“You adjusted him?” she shrieked. “But it was he who created my light-sculptures. It was the maladjustment, the maladjustment, which you can never restore, that--that--”
It was really unfortunate that she had been showing her collection at the time and that the jeweled dagger from Cambodia was on the marble tabletop before her.
Travis's face was also distorted. “You mean if I had studied his uniquely maladjusted positronic brain-paths I might have learned--”
She lunged with the knife too quickly for anyone to stop her and he did not try to dodge. Some said he came to meet it--as though he wanted to die.
=====
In sending the story to The Saturday Evening Post I was anxious to make it clear that I had not sent them an old story. I explained rather emphatically that “I have written it today.”
In doing this I had forgotten the prejudice many people have against any story that is written quickly. There is the legend that a good story must be written and rewritten and must take days and days of agony for each pain-wracked paragraph. I think writers spread that piece of embroidery to collect public sympathy for themselves.
Anyway, I don't write slowly, but editors who don't have much experience with me don't realize it. I got a letter from the Post people raving about the story and expressing the utmost astonishment that I had managed to write it in one day. I kept quiet and said nothing.
However, I can tell you because you're my friends. From the moment of sitting down at the typewriter to the moment of placing the envelope in the mailbox, it did not take me one day. It took me two and a half hours. But don't tell the Post.
What, then, is left to tell you to bring you up to date?
Well, on November 30, 1973, I married a second time. My wife is Janet Jeppson. She is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a wonderful woman, in order of increasing importance. She has published a science fiction novel of her own, THE SECOND EXPERIMENT (Houghton Mufflin, 1974) and received final word of the acceptance of that novel on November 30, 1973, half an hour after we had been married. It was a big day.
I, for one, wish that her professional career left her a little more time for writing. Then we could perhaps work up a man-and-wife collection someday.