Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (191 page)

“Gourlay next!” barked Morton.

Gourlay climbed lazily to his feet. He looked sleepy, as if he was somewhat bored by the whole proceedings, yet Morton knew he loved people to think him lazy, a good-for-nothing slouch, who spent his days in slumber and his nights catching forty winks. His title was chief communication engineer, but his knowledge extended to every vibration field; and he was probably, with the possible exception of Kent, the fastest thinker on the ship. His voice drawled out, and—Morton noted—the very deliberate assurance of it had a soothing effect on the men—anxious faces relaxed, bodies leaned back more restfully:

“Once inside,” Gourlay said, “we’ve rigged up vibration screens of pure force that should stop nearly everything he’s got on the ball. They work on the principle of reflection, so that everything he sends will be reflected back to him. In addition, we’ve got plenty of spare electric energy that we’ll just feed him from mobile copper cups. There must be a limit to his capacity for handling power with those insulated nerves of his.”

“Selenski!” called Morton.

The chief pilot was already standing, as if he had anticipated Morton’s call. And that, Morton reflected, was the man. His nerves had that rocklike steadiness which is the first requirement of the master controller of a great ship’s movements; yet that very steadiness seemed to rest on dynamite ready to explode at its owner’s volition. He was not a man of great learning, but he “reacted” to stimuli so fast that he always seemed to be anticipating.

“The impression I’ve received of the plan is that it must be cumulative. Just when the creature thinks that he can’t stand any more, another thing happens to add to his trouble and confusion. When the uproar’s at its height, I’m supposed to cut in the anti-accelerators. The commander thinks with Gunlie Lester that these creatures will know nothing about anti-acceleration. It’s a development, pure and simple, of the science of interstellar flight, and couldn’t have been developed in any other way. We think when the creature feels the first effects of the anti-acceleration—you all remember the caved-in feeling you had the first month—it won’t know what to think or do.”

* * * *

“Korita next.”

“I can only offer you encouragement,” said the archeologist, “on the basis of my theory that the monster has all the characteristics of a criminal of the early ages of any civilization, complicated by an apparent reversion to primitiveness. The suggestion has been made by Smith that his knowledge of science is puzzling, and could only mean that we are dealing with an actual inhabitant, not a descendant of the inhabitants of the dead city we visited. This would ascribe virtual immortality to our enemy, a possibility which is borne out by his ability to breathe both oxygen and chlorine—or neither—but even that makes no difference. He comes from a certain age in his civilization; and he has sunk so low that his ideas are mostly memories of that age.

“In spite of all the powers of his body, he lost his head in the elevator the first morning, until he remembered. He placed himself in such a position that he was forced to reveal his special powers against vibrations. He bungled the mass murders a few hours ago. In fact, his whole record is one of the low cunning of the primitive, egotistical mind which has little or no conception of the vast organization with which it is confronted.

“He is like the ancient German soldier who felt superior to the elderly Roman scholar, yet the latter was part of a mighty civilization of which the Germans of that day stood in awe.

“You may suggest that the sack of Rome by the Germans in later years defeats my argument; however, modern historians agree that the ‘sack’ was an historical accident, and not history in the true sense of the word. The movement of the ‘Sea-peoples’ which set in against the Egyptian civilization from 1400 B.C. succeeded only as regards the Cretan island-realm—their mighty expeditions against the Libyan and Phoenician coasts, with the accompaniment of Viking fleets, failed as those of the Huns failed against the Chinese Empire. Rome would have been abandoned in any event. Ancient, glorious Samarra was desolate by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s great capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveler Hsinan-tang visited it about A.D. 635.

“We have, then, a primitive, and that primitive is now far out in space, completely outside of his natural habitat. I say, let’s go in and win.”

One of the men grumbled, as Korita finished: “You can talk about the sack of Rome being an accident, and about this fellow being a primitive, but the facts are facts. It looks to me as if Rome is about to fall again; and it won’t be no primitive that did it, either. This guy’s got plenty of what it takes.”

Morton smiled grimly at the man, a member of the crew. “We’ll see about that—right now!”

* * * *

In the blazing brilliance of the gigantic machine shop, Coeurl slaved. The forty-foot, cigar-shaped spaceship was nearly finished. With a grunt of effort, he completed the laborious installation of the drive engines, and paused to survey his craft.

Its interior, visible through the one aperture in the outer wall, was pitifully small. There was literally room for nothing but the engines—and a narrow space for himself.

He plunged frantically back to work as he heard the approach of the men, and the sudden change in the tempest-like thunder of the engines—a rhythmical off-and-on hum, shriller in tone, sharper, more nerve-racking than the deep-throated, steady throb that had preceded it. Suddenly, there were the atomic disintegrators again at the massive outer doors.

He fought them off, but never wavered from his task. Every mighty muscle of his powerful body strained as he carried great loads of tools, machines and instruments, and dumped them into the bottom of his makeshift ship. There was no time to fit anything into place, no time for anything—no time—no time.

The thought pounded at his reason. He felt strangely weary for the first time in his long and vigorous existence. With a last, tortured heave, he jerked the gigantic sheet of metal into the gaping aperture of the ship—and stood there for a terrible minute, balancing it precariously.

He knew the doors were going down. Half a dozen disintegrators concentrating on one point were irresistibly, though slowly, eating away the remaining inches. With a gasp, he released his mind from the doors and concentrated every ounce of his mind on the yard-thick outer wall, toward which the blunt nose of his ship was pointing.

His body cringed from the surging power that flowed from the electric dynamo through his ear tendrils into that resisting wall. The whole inside of him felt on fire, and he knew that he was dangerously close to carrying his ultimate load.

And still he stood there, shuddering with the awful pain, holding the unfastened metal plate with hard-clenched tentacles. His massive head pointed as in dread fascination at that bitterly hard wall.

He heard one of the engine-room doors crash inward. Men shouted; disintegrators rolled forward, their raging power unchecked. Coeurl heard the floor of the engine room hiss in protest, as those beams of atomic energy tore everything in their path to bits. The machines rolled closer; cautious footsteps sounded behind them. In a minute they would be at the flimsy doors separating the engine room from the machine shop.

Suddenly, Coeurl was satisfied. With a snarl of hate, a vindictive glow of feral eyes, he ducked into his little craft, and pulled the metal plate down into place as if it was a hatchway.

His ear tendrils hummed, as he softened the edges of the surrounding metal. In an instant, the plate was more than welded—it was part of his ship, a seamless, rivetless part of a whole that was solid opaque metal except for two transparent areas, one in the front, one in the rear.

His tentacle embraced the power drive with almost sensuous tenderness. There was a forward surge of his fragile machine, straight at the great outer wall of the machine shops. The nose of the forty-foot craft touched—and the wall dissolved in a glittering shower of dust.

Coeurl felt the barest retarding movement; and then he kicked the nose of the machine out into the cold of space, twisted it about, and headed back in the direction from which the big ship had been coming all these hours.

Men in space armor stood in the jagged hole that yawned in the lower reaches of the gigantic globe. The men and the great ship grew smaller. Then the men were gone; and there was only the ship with its blaze of a thousand blurring portholes. The ball shrank incredibly, too small now for individual portholes to be visible.

Almost straight ahead, Coeurl saw a tiny, dim, reddish ball—his own sun, he realized. He headed toward it at full speed. There were caves where he could hide and with other coeurls build secretly a spaceship in which they could reach other planets safety—now that he knew how.

His body ached from the agony of acceleration, yet he dared not let up for a single instant. He glanced back, half in terror. The globe was still there, a tiny dot of light in the immense blackness of space. Suddenly it twinkled and was gone.

For a brief moment, he had the empty, frightened impression that just before it disappeared, it moved. But he could see nothing. He could not escape the belief that they had shut off all their lights, and were sneaking up on him in the darkness. Worried and uncertain, he looked through the forward transparent plate.

* * * *

A tremor of dismay shot through him. The dim red sun toward which he was heading was not growing larger.
It was becoming smaller
by the instant, and it grew visibly tinier during the next five minutes, became a pale-red dot in the sky—and vanished like the ship.

Fear came then, a blinding surge of it, that swept through his being and left him chilled with the sense of the unknown. For minutes, he stared frantically into the space ahead, searching for some landmark. But only the remote stars glimmered there, unwinking points against a velvet background of unfathomable distance.

Wait! One of the points was growing larger. With every muscle and nerve tensed, Coeurl watched the point becoming a dot, a round ball of light—red light. Bigger, bigger, it grew. Suddenly, the red light shimmered and turned white—and there, before him, was the great globe of the spaceship, lights glaring from every porthole, the very ship which a few minutes before he had watched vanish behind him.

Something happened to Coeurl in that moment. His brain was spinning like a flywheel, faster, faster, more incoherently. Suddenly, the wheel flew apart into a million aching fragments. His eyes almost started from their sockets as, like a maddened animal, he raged in his small quarters.

His tentacles clutched at precious instruments and flung them insensately; his paws smashed in fury at the very walls of his ship. Finally, in a brief flash of sanity, he knew that he couldn’t face the inevitable fire of atomic disintegrators.

It was a simple thing to create the violent disorganization that freed every drop of id from his vital organs.

* * * *

They found him lying dead in a little pool of phosphorus.

“Poor pussy,” said Morton. “I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Knowing nothing of anti-accelerators, he couldn’t know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours to decelerate; and in the meantime he’d be drawing farther and farther away from where he wanted to go. He couldn’t know that by stopping, we flashed past him at millions of miles a second. Of course, he didn’t have a chance once he left our ship. The whole world must have seemed topsy-turvy.”

“Never mind the sympathy,” he heard Kent say behind him. “We’ve got a job—to kill every cat in that miserable world.”

Korita murmured softly: “That should be simple. They are but primitives; and we have merely to sit down, and they will come to us, cunningly expecting to delude us.”

Smith snapped: “You fellows make me sick! Pussy was the toughest nut we ever had to crack. He had everything he needed to defeat us—”

Morton smiled as Korita interrupted blandly: “Exactly, my dear Smith, except that he reacted according to the biological impulses of his type. His defeat was already foreshadowed when we unerringly analyzed him as a criminal from a certain era of his civilization.

“It was history, honorable Mr. Smith, our knowledge of history that defeated him,” said the Japanese archeologist, reverting to the ancient politeness of his race.

* * * *

Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith Publication, Inc.

For the somewhat narrow-minded, “science fiction” means “spaceships.” According to some, the presence of space travel means that something is science fiction, the absence of it means that it is definitely not. This viewpoint can especially be seen in the fact that when modern critics designate pre-1800 works as “science fiction,” they are almost always about journeys into space. Lucian of Samosata’s
True History
(c. 150 C.E.) and Johannes Kepler’s
Somnium
(1634) are both often cited as early works of science fiction, as they involve trips to the Moon and other planets (Asimov 10). But whatever tropes of modern science fiction these stories anticipate, their space travel is not scientific. In
True History
a sailing ship is propelled upwards by waterspout, and in
Somnium
the protagonist is transported by demons.

Spaceships make their first real appearances in science fiction in the nineteenth century, constructed by both humans and aliens. Jules Verne’s
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865) has a group of American men, belonging to a “Gun Club,” build a spaceship that is essentially a giant bullet designed to house the three of them when launched out of a giant cannon called the Columbiad into space. Verne calculated the factors necessary to carry a spaceship to the Moon as best he could given his scientific knowledge, and his attention to detail means that there are many similarities between his space program and the real-life Apollo one, the least of which is that the Columbiad is very near Cape Canaveral, Florida. (On the other hand, the amount of acceleration needed to achieve escape velocity with one massive explosion would kill anyone aboard such a capsule.)

In Verne’s story, the space capsule has small rockets allowing it to slow its descent for landing, but otherwise travels purely on inertia once launched. In the sequel,
Around the Moon
(1870), the astronauts are only able to return to Earth because an asteroid knocks them off course, causing them to miss landing on the moon entirely. Had they landed there, they would have had to construct a second Columbiad. A similar technique is used in H. G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
(1897), where Martians launch several “cylinders” to Earth to carry their invasion forces. These ships are very similar to Verne’s, being launched from the surface of Mars by enormous explosions and having no motive power of their own; they crash upon Earth some months later. If the Martians intended to return to Mars after their invasion, the details of how they would have done so are not clear.

When Wells depicted human spaceflight in
The First Men in the Moon
(1901), he used a much more fanciful system; the scientist Dr. Cavor builds a spaceship from a material called cavorite that shields matter from gravity. The air above the cavorite is no longer subjected to Earth’s gravity and flies off into space; the resulting pressure from all the other air around the sphere launches it upwards. Once in space, precision control is obtained via shutters that allow the effects of the cavorite to be focused in certain directions. While the idea of “cavorite” is much more fanciful than Verne’s Columbiad, some future depictions of space travel in science fiction would be even more so.

Many other authors in the period were developing similar ideas. George Griffith’s
Honeymoon in Space
(1900) features an airshiplike space cruiser that visits several planets for the protagonists’ honeymoon, whereas in Garrett P. Serviss’s
Edison’s Conquest of Mars
(1898), an unauthorized sequel to
The War of the Worlds
, Thomas Edison builds a fleet of spaceships that move themselves along electric current.
Edison’s Conquest
is especially noteworthy as it is one of the first stories to feature combat in outer space, when Edison’s fleet is attacked by a Martian defensive cannon positioned on an asteroid between Earth and Mars.

Space travel became a cornerstone of science fiction in the twentieth century. Following
The War of the Worlds
and
Edison’s Conquest of Mars
, there are many stories that posit travel within the solar system—frequently to Earth’s neighbor Mars. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) shows an early expedition to an inhabited (and human-habitable) Mars, while Isaac Asimov’s “The Martian Way” (1952) features human colonists on Mars who are trying to terraform the planet even as they adapt to life in space.

Travel within the solar system was also a staple of the planetary romance genre that flourished in pulp magazines such as Planet Stories (1939–55), with tales of high adventure that emphasized exotic destinations such as the jungles of Venus and the canals of Mars much more than the journeys to get there. Leigh Brackett, with tales such as “The Last Days of Shandakor” (1952), was a prominent writer in this subgenre, alongside Ray Bradbury. The sense of adventure in these stories also appeared in “juvenile” tales such as Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet (1948) that depicted young adults being trained for the rigors of outer space.

More fantastic destinations awaited, but the advancement of scientific knowledge in the early twentieth century made the depiction of scientifically accurate space travel progressively more difficult. Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905 showed that exceeding the speed of light was impossible, for the more a body accelerates, the more mass it has—yet astronomy had demonstrated that there were not scores of habitable planets within Earth’s solar system. If authors wanted to write interstellar tales of derring-do, solutions needed to be found. E. E. “Doc” Smith depicted one of the earliest forms of a faster-than-light (FTL) drive in
The Skylark of Space
(1928), using some largely nonsensical science about the metal “X” and electromagnetism liberating the intra-atomic energy of copper, enabling enormous speed. The explanation for why this technology allows them to exceed the speed of light is shrugged off by a character saying that Einsten’s relativity is yet another incorrect theory that will have to be adjusted to fit the facts. In his later Lensman novels (1934–50), Smith provided more of a rationale with his “inertialess drive,” which allows matter to instantaneously transition between being at rest and moving at a desired speed without any intermediate acceleration, “circumventing” Einsteinian relativity rather than ignoring it entirely (Ellik and Evans 95).

Most science fiction tries to pay at least lip service to Einstein, however, and several different standard depictions of FTL travel have emerged. One of the most common is that of “hyperspace,” originally a mathematical term used to indicate a space of more than three dimensions. In SF it is another dimension or continuum alongside the “normal” universe, which can be traveled through more quickly than light can travel through our own universe (Prucher 94). An engine than can do this is called a “hyperdrive.” This is also commonly called “warp drive,” a term primarily associated with the television series
Star Trek
(1966–69), though it dates back to Fredric Brown’s
Gateway to Darkness
from 1949 at least (Prucher 268). There are many variations on how hyperdrives and warp drives achieve their immense velocities (Landis).

A primary example of hyperdrive is the fiction of Isaac Asimov. His short story “Escape!” (1945), collected in
I, Robot
(1950), depicts the invention of the “hyper-atomic motor” used in most of his fiction. When this is activated, the spaceship and its occupants cease to exist for a short period of time, effectively dying, as they transit between two points, though they are returned to life upon rematerializing. In Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1942–51), set fifty thousand years later, however, the transit time of the hyperdrive is instantaneous. The limiting factors prove to be that the range is short on a galactic scale (it takes dozens of “jumps” to cross the galaxy) and that the calculations are time-consuming and must be done manually. It is not until Foundation’s Edge (1982) that Asimov introduces computers capable of quickly performing the calculations themselves, allowing a ship to execute a series of jumps taking it across the galaxy in a few minutes.

Wormholes—holes in space connecting two disparate points—are probably the other most common method of FTL travel in SF. When Gregory Benford wrote a prequel to Asimov’s Foundation stories,
Foundation’s Fear
(1997), he updated the setting by replacing hyperdrive with wormholes. Wormhole endpoints are located at billions of fixed points, allowing any ship to enter them and transit to another endpoint, elsewhere in the galaxy. Another prominent example of wormhole travel is Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001: a space odyssey
(1968), which climaxes with astronaut David Bowman entering a mysterious black monolith that turns out to be a “star gate”—the entrance to a wormhole crossing the galaxy until it reaches a central location where numerous wormhole endpoints are clustered together. Bowman sees alien spaceships exiting one and entering another, realizing that it is “some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy” (Clarke 211). Because all of the space-warping is done by the star gate, Bowman is able to make the trip in nothing more than a pod from an American non-FTL spaceship.

Not all wormholes are permanent structures, nor do they always require spaceships. The
Fourth World
comic books (1970–73) of Jack Kirby feature miniature wormholes called “boom tubes” that can be spontaneously generated to allow travel between points on different planets, large enough to carry a few people at a time. Wormholes are closely related to the idea of “folding space” so that two points touch one another temporarily. This is the method of FTL travel used in
Dune
(1965) by Frank Herbert, where it is so complicated it requires psychic prediction to find a safe path.

The tendency of science fiction to create strange and ultimately nonsensical forms of FTL travel was parodied by Douglas Adams in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(1979). The series includes travel through hyperspace, which is described as being “rather unpleasantly like being drunk.” When another character asks what is unpleasant about being drunk, he is told, “You ask a glass of water” (53). However, the novel is primarily known for the Infinite Improbability Drive, a device which causes highly improbable things to happen. Since instantaneous travel between galaxies is the most improbable, the Drive is naturally a highly effective means of transport—even if it does have unfortunate side effects like the spontaneous generation of a baby whale miles above a planetary surface.

Not all science fiction uses faster-than-light travel, however. Beyond the traditional “rocket engine,” there’s also the solar sail, which uses the radiation pressure of the sun to move a starship along. Seemingly fanciful and certainly romantic, the solar sail has a solid basis in physics, and has appeared in stories such as “Sail 25” by Jack Vance (1962) and “The Wind from the Sun” by Arthur Clarke (1964), both showcasing travel within the solar system. But slower-than-light travel does not need to restrict stories to a single system, for SF depicts several ways of crossing interstellar space without the use of an FTL drive. Robert Heinlein’s “Universe” (1941) features the
Vanguard
,
a “generation ship” that will take so long to cross interstellar distances that it will be the descendents of the original crew that finally reach their destination. In “Universe,” a mutiny long ago killed all the officers, leaving the ship flying on automatic. Those left aboard the ship have descended into primitive superstition, not even aware that they are actually aboard a spaceship, using the term “the Ship” the way we would use “the Universe.”

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Ekumen novels present another common method of interstellar travel without FTL technology; her novels use near-as-fast-as-light (NAFAL) spaceships that take years to cross interstellar distances. Thanks to relativistic time dilation, however, those years seem like months or even days to those aboard the ships; the consequences of such a journey are depicted in “Semley’s Necklace” (1964). Humanity is still able to maintain an interstellar civilization, the Ekumen, through the use of the ansible, which allows for instantaneous communication. (It is worth pointing out that FTL communication breaks all the same laws of physics as FTL travel, making its use a bit of a cheat.) Some of her novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), focus on characters called Mobiles, who travel to other planets as representatives of the Ekumen. The Mobiles know that in doing so, they will never see any of their loved ones ever again—they will have been dead for years by the time their wanderings are over.

The ability of time dilation to “stretch out” the life-span of a traveler compared to a stationary person was exploited by characters in Orson Scott Card’s
Ender’s Game
(1985). After the conclusion of a war with a dangerous alien species, humanity places the strategic genius who won the war on a spaceship traveling near lightspeed so that when the war begins again in fifty years, he will be available to personally train a new commander to fight the aliens. The sequel,
Speaker for the Dead
(1986), features the same protagonist as the first novel, three thousand years later but only a decade older, thanks to constant use of near-lightspeed travel. Joe Haldeman’s
The Forever War
(1974) puts a more negative spin on such an occurrence, as it features a group of soldiers returning from the battlefield decades after they left for war, resulting in profound culture shock.