Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (223 page)

His specimens had long since recovered from their fright, and left the cavern; he had not tried to stop them. Now, however, he emerged from the low entryway and went directly to the nearest dust dune, which was barely visible in the starlight. A few moments’ search was rewarded with one of the squirming plant-eaters, which he carried back into the shelter; then, illuminating the scene carefully with the small torch that was clipped to the waist of his suit, he made a fair-sized pile of dust, gouged a long groove in the top with his toe; with the aid of the same stone he had used before, he killed the plant-eater and poured its “blood” into the dust mold.

The fluid was metallic, all right; it cooled quickly, and in two or three minutes Cunningham had a silvery rod about as thick as a pencil and five or six inches long. He had been a little worried about the centipede at first; but the creature was either not in line to “see” into the cave, or had dug in for the night like its victims.

Cunningham took the rod, which was about as pliable as a strip of solder of the same dimensions, and, extinguishing the torch, made his way in a series of short, careful leaps to the stranded spaceship. There was no sign of the men, and they had taken their welding equipment inside with them—that is, if they had ever had it out; Cunningham had not been able to watch them for the last hour of daylight. The hull was still jacked up, however; and the naturalist eased himself under it and began to examine the damage once more using the torch. It was about as he had deduced from the conversation of the men; and with a smile, he took the little metal stick and went to work. He was busy for some time under the hull, and once he emerged, found another plant-eater, and went back underneath. After he had finished, he walked once around the ship, checking each of the air locks and finding them sealed, as he had expected.

He showed neither surprise nor disappointment at this; and without further ceremony he made his way back to the cave, which he had a little trouble finding in the starlight. He made a large pile of the dust for insulation rather than bedding, lay down on it, and tried to sleep. He had very little success, as he might have expected.

Night, in consequence, seemed unbearably long; and he almost regretted his star study of the previous darkness, for now he was able to see that sunrise was still distant, rather than bolster his morale with the hope that Deneb would be in the sky the next time he opened his eyes. The time finally came, however, when the hilltops across the valley leaped one by one into brilliance as the sunlight caught them; and Cunningham rose and stretched himself. He was stiff and cramped, for a spacesuit makes a poor sleeping costume even on a better bed than a stone floor.

As the light reached the spaceship and turned it into a blazing silvery spindle, the air lock opened.

Cunningham had been sure that the men were in a hurry to finish their task, and were probably awaiting the sun almost as eagerly as he in order to work efficiently; he had planned on this basis.

Malmeson was the first to leap to the ground, judging by their conversation, which came clearly through Cunningham’s phones. He turned back, and his companion handed down to him the bulky diode welder and a stack of filler rods. Then both men made their way forward to the dent where they were to work. Apparently they failed to notice the bits of loose metal lying on the scene—perhaps they had done some filing themselves the day before. At any rate, there was no mention of it as Malmeson lay down and slid under the hull, and the other began handing equipment in to him.

Plant-eaters were beginning to struggle out of their dust beds as the connections were completed, and the torch started to flame. Cunningham nodded in pleasure as he noted this; things could scarcely have been timed better had the men been consciously co-operating. He actually emerged from the cave, keeping in the shadow of the hillock, to increase his field of view; but for several minutes nothing but plant-eaters could be seen moving.

He was beginning to fear that his invited guests were too distant to receive their call, when his eye caught a glimpse of a long, black body slipping silently over the dunes toward the ship. He smiled in satisfaction; and then his eyebrows suddenly rose as he saw a second snaky form following the tracks of the first.

He looked quickly across his full field of view, and was rewarded by the sight of four more of the monsters—all heading at breakneck speed straight for the spaceship. The beacon he had lighted had reached more eyes than he had expected. He was sure that the men were armed, and had never intended that they actually be overcome by the creatures; he had counted on a temporary distraction that would let him reach the air lock unopposed.

He stood up, and braced himself for the dash, as Malmeson’s helper saw the first of the charging centipedes and called the welder from his work. Malmeson barely had time to gain his feet when the first pair of attackers reached them; and at the same instant Cunningham emerged into the sunlight, putting every ounce of his strength into the leaps that were carrying him toward the only shelter that now existed for him.

He could feel the ardor of Deneb’s rays the instant they struck him; and before he had covered a third of the distance the back of his suit was painfully hot. Things were hot for his ex-crew as well; fully ten of the black monsters had reacted to the burst of—to them—overpoweringly attractive odor—or gorgeous color?—that had resulted when Malmeson had turned his welder on the metal where Cunningham had applied the frozen blood of their natural prey; and more of the same substance was now vaporizing under Deneb’s influence as Malmeson, who had been lying in fragments of it, stood fighting off the attackers. He had a flame pistol, but it was slow to take effect on creatures whose very blood was molten metal; and his companion, wielding the diode unit on those who got too close, was no better off. They were practically swamped under wriggling bodies as they worked their way toward the air lock; and neither man saw Cunningham as, staggering even under the feeble gravity that was present, and fumbling with eye shield misted with sweat, he reached the same goal and disappeared within.

Being a humane person, he left the outer door open; but he closed and dogged the inner one before proceeding with a more even step to the control room. Here he unhurriedly removed his spacesuit, stopping only to open the switch of the power socket that was feeding the diode unit as he heard the outer lock door close. The flame pistol would make no impression on the alloy of the hull, and he felt no qualms about the security of the inner door. The men were safe, from every point of view.

With the welder removed from the list of active menaces, he finished removing his suit, turned to the medium transmitter, and coolly broadcast a call for help and his position in space. Then he turned on a radio transmitter, so that the rescuers could find him on the planet; and only then did he contact the prisoners on the small set that was tuned to the suit radios, and tell them what he had done.

“I didn’t mean to do you any harm,” Malmeson’s voice came back. “I just wanted the ship. I know you paid us pretty good, but when I thought of the money that could be made on some of those worlds if we looked for something besides crazy animals and plants, I couldn’t help myself. You can let us out now; I swear we won’t try anything more—the ship won’t fly, and you say a Guard flyer is on the way. How about that?”

“I’m sorry you don’t like my hobby,” said Cunningham. “I find it entertaining; and there have been times when it was even useful, though I won’t hurt your feelings by telling you about the last one. I think I shall feel happier if the two of you stay right there in the air lock; the rescue ship should be here before many hours, and you’re fools if you haven’t food and water in your suits.”

“I guess you win, in that case,” said Malmeson.

“I think so, too,” replied Cunningham, and switched off.

* * * *

Copyright © 1945 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

Some science fiction writers work like scientists. They are curious about how worlds are built. I remember listening to John Barth lecture on how often he used
Scientific American
to get ideas; and our sciences of astronomy, cosmography, solar physics, and the chemistry of heavy metals help since we know that planets come from the stars. The most recent issue of
National Geographic
(December 2010) includes a graphic report about our own substantial galaxy of stars “The Milky Way” where a massive black hole at the center churns out heavy metal elements that serve as the building blocks of planet systems around stars throughout the galaxy. Due to the physics of the balance in inertia, we image black holes now as both sucking in and spewing out matter. This is an explanation of the mechanism for the building of worlds that our science teaches.

The
Gateway
series of novels by Frederik Pohl, beginning in 1977, personifies this world building mechanism at our galactic core and names it “the Heechee.” Robert L. Forward, who was a working physicist, also nicely personifies the operating principles of black holes in
Dragon’s Egg
(1980) and later books. Most science fiction, however, is not so scientifically accurate but chooses rather to push personification further to the edges and toward heroic myth. Such stories suggest ways in which human or near-human actors work to build their own worlds. Terraforming and, even, galaxy creation grip the imagination of storytellers and readers more firmly than scientific or cosmographic explanations for world building. Most of these stories or myths ultimately are, also, political. Many are more narrow even and prefer to get down to the specifics of world geography. But all involve sentient creatures as the engineers or makers of the variety of worlds.

Hal Clement is the exception among writers of hard science fiction on world building, however; since he seems perfectly content to chart worlds or planets that are rich in difference from Earth.
Mission of Gravity
(1954) is his most memorable example of precise planet building with no attempt to assign any explanation of what forces made the thing. We can only assume that high-gravity and strangely-shaped Mesklin is just one possibility among many that has spun off from its galactic core. Other novels by Hal Clement chart the morphology of other varieties of planet. Most notable, I think, is
Star Light
(1971) in which Mesklinites under the direction of their human friends explore the gigantic object Dhrawn to determine if it should be classed as a planet or a star.

During the same time that Hal Clement was writing about Mesklin and at about the time when the market for science fiction expanded to the “empire” of book publication, Isaac Asimov was expanding his “Foundation” stories (first book publication in 1951) by depicting the creation of the Galactic Empire. In place of what our science finds as the seminal black hole at the core of the Milky Way, Asimov places the over-populated and over-engineered planet Trantor at the center of the Galactic Empire. Similarly, Ursula Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines future humans as the creators of the Ekumen of planets, an Empire, with the strange winter planet Gethen at the edges of the Empire as a sociologic experiment in gender politics. A year later, Larry Niven engineers the most ambitious world building in Ringworld (1970). In this creation, sentient builders do it all and engineer a world three million times the area of Earth with its habitable surfaces always facing the sun; and Niven imagines enough energy captured from this future sun to allow floating cities along his massive rim. It hardly seems that the mechanisms of the Milky Way are needed with such engineering capabilities.

Our budding and explicit “political” science of ecology captured the imagination of Frank Herbert when he wrote
Dune
(1965) and all of its sequels, which are still carried on after his death by his family. The desert planet Arrakis populated with the near-magical and huge sandworms is continually being managed and transformed in this story by heroic Fremen and other human agents. In fact, the transforming or “terraforming” of worlds is a major topic for science fiction. The favorite target planet has been our own nearby neighbor Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs did some of this work in his books beginning with
A Princess of Mars
(1917). The most recent inventive terraforming of Mars has been written by Kim Stanley Robinson in a wonderful series of books beginning with Red Mars (1993).

Finally, several favorites of mine among worlds built entirely by their storytelling creators, with hardly any effort to conform to what our science tells us, are the planet Lithia in
A Case of Conscience
(1958) by James Blish, the planet Pandora in the recent movie
Avatar
, and the city world Dhalgren, huge enough nearly to be a planet, in the novel
Dhalgren
(1975) by Samuel R. Delany. The first two of these each includes a huge, near-Biblical Tree that dominates the world. But all three worlds demonstrate the moral, human-centered focus and intensity whereby created worlds become not only environment and scientific phenomena but also meaningful symbols in story. So even the hard-minded scientific thinker and quantifier with a slide rule Hal Clement might agree reluctantly that some of the world building is done by us humans in science fiction stories—once we have been spit out by the Milky Way.

* * * *

Donald M. Hassler
has published two single-author studies in the Starmont series, one on Hal Clement (1982) and one on Isaac Asimov (1991). The latter won the Eaton Award for best SF criticism of the year. He published the monograph
Comic Tones in Science Fiction
(1982), and edited with his wife a set of letters by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen in 1993. In 1997 and again in 2008, he edited with Clyde Wilcox book-length collections of essays on politics and SF that were published by the University of South Carolina Press. From 1989 until 2007, he served as the prime editor of the journal Extrapolation. And he has held several offices over many years in the Science Fiction Research Association. In his early career, he wrote two books on the now nearly forgotten eighteenth-century poet and science writer Erasmus Darwin, who was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Hassler himself has published many poems in journals and magazines. He teaches at Kent State University and is currently Chairman of the Faculty Senate there.