The World Turned Upside Down (50 page)

"What of it?"
demanded the skipper, rumbling.

"They believe," said Baird, "that they can handle the
Niccola
with their beefed-up tractor beams." He wetted his lips. "They're going to tow us to the oxygen planet ahead, sir. They're going to set us down on it. They'll help us find the metals we need to build the tools to repair the
Niccola
, sir. You see the reasoning, sir. We turned them loose to improve the chance of friendly contact when another human ship runs into them. They want us to carry back—to be proof that Plumies and men can be friends. It seems that—they like us, sir."

He stopped for a moment. Then he went on reasonably:

"And besides that, it'll be one hell of a fine business proposition. We never bother with hydrogen-methane planets. They've minerals and chemicals we haven't got, but even the stones of a methane-hydrogen planet are ready to combine with the oxygen we need to breathe! We can't carry or keep enough oxygen for real work. The same thing's true with them on an oxygen planet. We can't work on each other's planets, but we can do fine business in each other's minerals and chemicals from those planets. I've got a feeling, sir, that the Plumie cairns are location-notices; markers set up over ore deposits they can find but can't hope to work, yet they claim against the day when their scientists find a way to make them worth owning. I'd be willing to bet, sir, that if we explored hydrogen planets as thoroughly as oxygen ones, we'd find cairns on their-type planets that they haven't colonized yet."

The skipper stared. His mouth dropped open.

"And I think, sir," said Baird, "that until they detected us they thought they were the only intelligent race in the galaxy. They were upset to discover suddenly that they were not, and at first they'd no idea what we'd be like. But I'm guessing now, sir, that they're figuring on what chemicals and ores to start swapping with us." Then he added, "When you think of it, sir, probably the first metal they ever used was aluminum—where our ancestors used copper—and they had a beryllium age next, instead of iron. And right now, sir, it's probably as expensive for them to refine iron as it is for us to handle titanium and beryllium and osmium—which are duck soup for them! Our two cultures ought to thrive as long as we're friends, sir. They know it already—and we'll find it out in a hurry!"

The skipper's mouth moved. It closed, and then dropped open again. The search for the Plumies had been made because it looked like they had to be fought. But Baird had just pointed out some extremely commonsense items which changed the situation entirely. And there was evidence that the Plumies saw the situation the new way. The skipper felt such enormous relief that his manner changed. He displayed what was almost effusive cordiality—for the skipper. He cleared his throat.

"Hm-m-m. Hah! Very good, Mr. Baird," he said formidably. "And of course with time and air and metals we can rebuild our drive. For that matter, we could rebuild the Niccola! I'll notify the ship's company, Mr. Baird. Very good!" He moved to use another microphone. Then he checked himself. "Your expression is odd, Mr. Baird. Did you wish to say something more?" 

"Y-yes, sir," said Baird. He held Diane's hand fast. "It'll be months before we get back to port, sir. And it's normally against regulations, but under the circumstances . . . would you mind . . . as skipper . . . marrying Lieutenant Holt and me?"

The skipper snorted. Then he said almost—almost—amiably?

"Hm-m-m. You've both done very well, Mr. Baird. Yes. Come to the navigation room and we'll get it over with. Say—ten minutes from now." 

Baird grinned at Diane. Her eyes shone a little.

This was at 04 hours 10 minutes ship time. It was exactly twelve hours since the alarm-bell rang.

Afterword by Eric Flint

Murray Leinster died almost thirty years ago, in 1976, and his writing career had essentially ended by the beginning of the 1970s. During the decades that followed, this once-major figure in science fiction more or less faded away from the public eye. Until I started editing the multivolume reissue of his writings which Baen Books is now publishing, the only important reissue of his writing that had taken place in many years was NESFA Press' 1998 one-volume omnibus
First Contacts.
 
This . . . for a man who held the title "the dean of science fiction" before Robert Heinlein inherited it. (And it wasn't bestowed on him by an obscure fan club, either—Leinster was given the sobriquet by
Time
magazine.) When I first started reading science fiction in the early '60s, Leinster seemed well-nigh ubiquitous to me. I couldn't have imagined back then that the day would come when he had completely vanished from the shelves.

What happened? Leinster was no minor writer like several in this anthology, after all: Rick Raphael, Robert Ernest Gilbert, Wyman Guin, some others. All of them wrote well, to be sure—but Leinster published more novels than they did short stories. He might have published more novels than all of their short stories put together. And his total output, even leaving aside the many westerns and mystery stories he wrote under his real name of Will Jenkins, would have buried them. Would have buried most authors, in fact, major or minor.
Part of it, I think, was that the loose human conglomeration you might call "the science fiction community" was always fairly lukewarm about him. His career in science fiction spanned half a century, in the course of which he was published by many book publishers and appeared in almost all the principal magazines. Yet, during his lifetime, he only won a major science fiction award once—the Hugo award for best novelette in 1956, for "Exploration Team." In fact, he only received one other nomination for the Hugo: his novel
The Pirates of Zan
made the final list in 1960 (losing, not surprisingly, to Heinlein's
Starship Troopers
). He was never nominated once for the Nebula award.

To be sure, the major SF awards like all such awards are notoriously subject to the popularity of the recipient with the relatively small numbers of people who cast the votes. And since Leinster paid no attention to them—he rarely if ever attended a science fiction convention, and had very little contact with other science fiction writers—it's not surprising that they tended to ignore him in return.
But there's more to it, I think, than just personal distance. The key is that famous old saw: "Familiarity breeds contempt." Leinster was there at the creation of science fiction—and he created much of it himself. Name any of the now-recognized subgenres or themes of science fiction and trace them back in time . . . and, as often as not, you will discover that Murray Leinster laid the foundations.
First contact? The name itself comes from a Murray Leinster story.

Alternate history? He published the time-travel story "The Runaway Skyscraper" in
Argosy
magazine in the year 1919—a year before my
father
was born. Ironically enough, for a man who was almost never recognized by the awards, the Sidewise Award which is today given out at the annual Hugo ceremony for the best alternate histories of the year . . . was named after Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time," first published seventy years ago.
I could go and on, but I won't bother. Granted, Leinster was never a dazzling writer. His prose is journeyman at best, he was repetitive in his longer works, he recycled plots shamelessly—no fewer than six of his novels are essentially
Die Hard in Space
with the serial numbers filed off—and he wrote a lot of stuff that can only be described as dreck. I know. I've read almost everything he wrote. I edited a reissue of the complete works of James H. Schmitz and never had to hold my nose once. I wouldn't even think of doing the same with Leinster. Still, I could fill twice as many volumes with
good
Leinster than I could with Schmitz, simply because he wrote so much more.

And that's what Leinster was, in the end. An indefatigable storyteller, often a superb one, and the writer who, more than anyone, created science fiction as a viable and separate genre in the first place. So have some respect. If we still worshipped our ancestors and kept their shrunken heads over the hearth, Murray Leinster's would be the one in the center.

Preface by David Drake

Before writing
The Killer Angels
, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, Michael Shaara practiced his skill by writing SF. Those of you who've read "Soldier Boy," "Death of a Hunter" (my particular favorite), and this story will agree that he didn't need much practice.

Great were the Antha, so reads the One Book of history, greater perhaps than any of the Galactic Peoples, and they were brilliant and fair, and their reign was long, and in all things they were great and proud, even in the manner of their dying—

Preface to
Loab: History of The Master Race
 

The huge red ball of a sun hung glowing upon the screen.

Jansen adjusted the traversing knob, his face tensed and weary. The sun swung off the screen to the right, was replaced by the live black of space and the million speckled lights of the farther stars. A moment later the sun glided silently back across the screen and went off at the left. Again there was nothing but space and the stars.

"Try it again?" Cohn asked.

Jansen mumbled: "No. No use," and he swore heavily. "Nothing. Always nothing. Never a blessed thing."

Cohn repressed a sigh, began to adjust the controls.

In both of their minds was the single, bitter thought that there would be only one more time, and then they would go home. And it was a long way to come to go home with nothing.

When the controls were set there was nothing left to do. The two men walked slowly aft to the freeze room. Climbing up painfully on to the flat steel of the beds, they lay back and waited for the mechanism to function, for the freeze to begin.

Turned in her course, the spaceship bore off into the open emptiness. Her ports were thrown open, she was gathering speed as she moved away from the huge red star.

* * *

The object was sighted upon the last leg of the patrol, as the huge ship of the Galactic Scouts came across the edge of the Great Desert of the Rim, swinging wide in a long slow curve. It was there on the massometer as a faint
blip
, and, of course, the word went directly to Roymer.

"Report," he said briefly, and Lieutenant Goladan—a young and somewhat pompous Higiandrian—gave the Higiandrian equivalent of a cough and then reported.

"Observe," said Lieutenant Goladan, "that it is not a meteor, for the speed of it is much too great."

Roymer nodded patiently.

"And again, the speed is decreasing"—Goladan consulted his figures—"at a rate of twenty-four dines per segment. Since the orbit appears to bear directly upon the star Mina, and the decrease in speed is of a certain arbitrary origin, we must conclude that the object is a spaceship."

Roymer smiled.

"Very good, lieutenant." Like a tiny nova, Goladan began to glow and expand.

A good man, thought Roymer tolerantly, his is a race of good men. They have been two million years in achieving space flight; a certain adolescence is to be expected.

"Would you call Mind-Search, please?" Roymer asked.

Goladan sped away, to return almost immediately with the heavy-headed non-human Trian, chief of the Mind-Search Section.

Trian cocked an eyelike thing at Roymer, with grave inquiry.

"Yes, commander?"

The abrupt change in course was noticeable only on the viewplate, as the stars slid silently by. The patrol vessel veered off, swinging around and into the desert, settled into a parallel course with the strange new craft, keeping a discreet distance of—approximately—a light-year.

The scanners brought the object into immediate focus, and Goladan grinned with pleasure. A spaceship, yes, Alien, too. Undoubtedly a primitive race. He voiced these thoughts to Roymer.

"Yes," the commander said, staring at the strange, small, projectilelike craft. "Primitive type. It is to be wondered what they are doing in the desert."

Goladan assumed an expression of intense curiosity.

"Trian," said Roymer pleasantly, "would you contact?"

The huge head bobbed up and down once and then stared into the screen. There was a moment of profound silence. Then Trian turned back to stare at Roymer, and there was a distinctly human expression of surprise in his eyelike things.

"Nothing," came the thought. "I can detect no presence at all."

Roymer raised an eyebrow.

"Is there a barrier?"

"No"—Trian had turned to gaze back into the screen—"a barrier I could detect. But there is nothing at all. There is no sentient activity on board that vessel."

Trian's word had to be taken, of course, and Roymer was disappointed. A spaceship empty of life—Roymer shrugged. A derelict, then. But why the decreasing speed? Pre-set controls would account for that, of course, but why? Certainly, if one abandoned a ship, one would not arrange for it to—

He was interrupted by Trian's thought:

"Excuse me, but there is nothing. May I return to my quarters?"

Roymer nodded and thanked him, and Trian went ponderously away. Goladan said:

"Shall we prepare to board it, sir?"

"Yes."

And then Goladan was gone to give his proud orders.

Roymer continued to stare at the primitive vessel which hung on the plate. Curious. It was very interesting, always, to come upon derelict ships. The stories that were old, the silent tombs that had been drifting perhaps, for millions of years in the deep sea of space. In the beginning Roymer had hoped that the ship would be manned, and alien, but—nowadays, contact with an isolated race was rare, extremely rare. It was not to be hoped for, and he would be content with this, this undoubtedly empty, ancient ship.

And then, to Roymer's complete surprise, the ship at which he was staring shifted abruptly, turned on its axis, and flashed off like a live thing upon a new course.