The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

Volume III: The Star

Arthur C. Clarke

Copyright

The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

Volume III: The Star

Copyright © 2000 by Arthur C. Clarke

Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC, New York.

ISBN ePub edition: 9780795329074

Contents

Introduction

The Star

What Goes Up

Venture to the Moon

The Pacifist

The Reluctant Orchid

Moving Spirit

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

The Ultimate Melody

The Next Tenants

Cold War

Sleeping Beauty

Security Check

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

Critical Mass

The Other Side of the Sky

Let There Be Light

Out of the Sun

Cosmic Casanova

The Songs of Distant Earth

A Slight Case of Sunstroke

Who’s There?

Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting…

I Remember Babylon

Trouble With Time

Into the Comet

Summertime on Icarus

Saturn Rising

Death and the Senator

INTRODUCTION

By 1955 Clarke was in full stride artistically; ‘The Star”, a deliberately blasphemous work rejected by every major market and daringly taken by Larry Shaw at short money for a new magazine Infinity, had an incendiary impact upon the then small enclosure of science fiction and won the second Hugo Award awarded at the 1956 New York World Convention for best short story. (The Hugo had originated as a half-a-joke award in 1953 and was restricted in that first year to a single category of “Best Novel”…Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man won. Intended to be a one-shot and abandoned by the San Francisco World Convention the next year, the award was revived in a more systematic fashion by the 1955 Cleveland Convention and Eric Frank Russell’s Allagamoosa won in category.) Like “The Nine Billion Names of God”, discussed in the Introduction to Volume II, “The Star” is a landmark short story which over half a century later retains its force and it is known to most readers of science fiction.

Clarke seems in the penumbra of his late life Knighthood and acceptance by popular culture to be a very poor candidate for the wild man of his time (the British accent may have softened him a bit but J.G. Ballard had a plummy British accent which did not keep him from being regarded by many as a loathsome and dangerous figure) but Clarke was always much wilder than he seemed. If “The Star” is blasphemous, “The Nine Billion Names of God” was not less so although the temperature had been reduced several degrees. Novels like The City and the Stars and its later reworking Against The Fall Of Night were as stunningly bleak and depicted a human future no less spare and entrapped than implied by Childhood’s End but it was perhaps Clarke’s mysticism (and that British reserve) which kept him off the griddle. For whatever reason, his position as a Beloved Elder, encouraged by that Hugo and set prematurely at the age of 39, served him well and was never threatened although his Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel, Rendezvous With Rama (1973), was essentially characterless (it devolved upon the patient, detailed exploration of a mysterious alien spaceship) and the film 2001 opens with human predecessors murdering one another and closes with the destruction through re-alteration of humanity. Of course 2001 was a late 60s film and novelization. Perhaps you truly had to be there.

By the late 50s, the Big Three of science fiction were Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein. Until Heinlein’s death in 1988 they spent the ensuing decades (in Asimov’s words) “grimly circling one another and wondering who would be the first to die.” Asimov survived Heinlein by almost exactly four years, Clarke survived Asimov by a decade and a half and his reputation was as unassailable at the end as that of the other two. Present on international television as an observer of the 1969 Moon landing and frequent commentator on later expeditions and shuttle launches, he became—with Asimov and Carl Sagan—the living public symbol not only of science fiction but of science itself.

With all credit to the famous contents of this volume—”The Songs of Distant Earth” became the opening chapters of one of his last and best novels, identically titled, and “I Remember Babylon” reminds us that Clarke invented a communications satellite before his predicted material had been made industrially available—the best story is probably “Death And The Senator”, a quiet and magnificently reasoned exploration of the false confusion of science and politics and the tragic consequences for a humanity almost inevitably trapped there. It is a painful and deeply felt work, hardly emblematic of the stereotypically icy Clarke, and finds unforced tragic outcome which I can compare without embarrassment to King Lear. Not by any means his best known story, it is probably his masterpiece. It represents a world-view—the hopelessness of that societal-scientific interface which in the 40s was declared our ad astra—in direct contravention of John W. Campbell’s but Campbell took it anyway.

Maybe Campbell didn’t understand the story. That happened more often in Astounding than the acolytes would have you think.

—May 2012: New Jersey

The Star

First published in Infinity Science Fiction, November 1955

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

Written as an entry for a short story competition run by the Observer newspaper, on the subject ‘2500 AD.’, ‘The Star’ wasn’t even a runner-up. However, on magazine publication, it received a Hugo award in 1956. More recently, it was turned into a TV play for Christmas 1985. Although I thought the timing was appropriate, it could hardly be called seasonal fare. I never imagined that one day I would be lecturing in the Vatican.

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.

The crew are already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr Chandler, for instance, could never get over it (why are medical men such notorious atheists?). Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned end over end with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

‘Well, Father,’ he would say at last, ‘it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.’ Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that caused most amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.

Or what is left of a star…

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have travelled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?

We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance before they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae—the commonplace disasters of the universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.

But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.

When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in AD 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.

Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layer had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its centre burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a White Dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the centre of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many billions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion of these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapour, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.

The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantel of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.

Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radio-activity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s-eye like an arrow into its target.

The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labour at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilisation that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruit of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest solar system was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.

Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilisation that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows yet attracting no attention at all.

And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.

Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilisations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshipped, if indeed they worshipped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?

I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.

We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached our Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.

There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

What Goes Up

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1956, as ‘What Goes up…’

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

Doug Richardson was really the American astronomer and SF writer (‘Philip Latham’) Robert S Richardson. I am indebted to him for showing me around the Mt Wilson Observatory and for introducing me to the idea of the ‘gravity well.’

One of the reasons why I am never too specific about the exact location of the ‘White Hart’ is, frankly, because we want to keep it to ourselves. This is not merely a dog-in-the-manger attitude: we have to do it in pure self-protection. As soon as it gets around that scientists, editors and science fiction writers are forgathering at some locality, the weirdest collection of visitors is likely to turn up. Peculiar people with new theories of the Universe, characters who have been ‘cleared’ by Dianetics (God knows what they were like before), intense ladies who are liable to go all clairvoyant after the fourth gin—these are the less exotic specimens. Worst of all, however, are the Flying Sorcerers: no cure short of mayhem has yet been discovered for them.

It was a black day when one of the leading exponents of the Flying Saucer religion discovered our hide-out and fell upon us with shrill cries of delight. Here, he obviously told himself, was fertile ground for his missionary activities. People who were already interested in space flight, and even wrote books and stories about its imminent achievement, would be a pushover. He opened his little black bag and produced the latest pile of sauceriana.

It was quite a collection. There were some interesting photographs of flying saucers made by an amateur astronomer who lives right beside Greenwich Observatory, and whose busy camera has recorded such a remarkable variety of spaceships, in all shapes and sizes, that one wonders what the professionals next door are doing for their salaries. Then there was a long statement from a gentleman in Texas who had just had a casual chat with the occupants of a saucer making a wayside halt on route to Venus. Language, it seemed, had presented no difficulties: it had taken about ten minutes of arm-waving to get from ‘Me—Man. This—Earth’ to highly esoteric information about the use of the fourth dimension in space travel.

The masterpiece, however, was an excited letter from a character in South Dakota who had actually been offered a lift in a flying saucer, and had been taken for a spin round the moon. He explained at some length how the saucer travelled by hauling itself along magnetic lines of force, rather like a spider going up its thread.

It was at this point that Harry Purvis rebelled. He had been listening with a professional pride to tales which even he would never have dared to spin, for he was an expert at detecting the yield point of his audience’s credulity. At the mention of lines of magnetic force, however, his scientific training overcame his frank admiration of these latter-day Munchausens, and he gave a snort of disgust.

‘That’s a lot of nonsense,’ he said. ‘I can prove it to you—magnetism’s my speciality.’

‘Last week,’ said Drew sweetly, as he filled two glasses of ale at once, ‘you said that crystal structure was your speciality.’

Harry gave him a superior smile.

‘I’m a general specialist,’ he said loftily. ‘To get back to where I was before that interruption, the point I want to make is that there’s no such thing as a line of magnetic force. It’s a mathematical fiction—exactly on a par with lines of longitude or latitude. Now if anyone said they’d invented a machine that worked by pulling itself along parallels of latitude, everybody would know that they were talking drivel. But because few people know much about magnetism, and it sounds rather mysterious, crackpots like this guy in South Dakota can get away with the tripe we’ve just been hearing.’

There’s one charming characteristic about the ‘White Hart’—we may fight among each other, but we show an impressive solidarity in times of crisis. Everyone felt that something had to be done about our unwelcome visitor: for one thing, he was interfering with the serious business of drinking. Fanaticism of any kind casts a gloom over the most festive assembly, and several of the regulars had shown signs of leaving despite the fact that it was still two hours to closing time.

So when Harry Purvis followed up his attack by concocting the most outrageous story that even he had ever presented in the ‘White Hart’, no one interrupted him or tried to expose the weak points in his narrative. We knew that Harry was acting for us all—he was fighting fire with fire, as it were. And we knew that he wasn’t expecting us to believe him (if indeed he ever did) so we just sat back and enjoyed ourselves.

‘If you want to know how to propel spaceships,’ began Harry, ‘and mark you, I’m not saying anything one way or the other about the existence of flying saucers—then you must forget magnetism. You must go straight to gravity—that’s the basic force of the Universe, after all. But it’s going to be a tricky force to handle, and if you don’t believe me just listen to what happened only last year to a scientist down in Australia. I shouldn’t really tell you this, I suppose, because I’m not sure of its security classification, but if there’s any trouble I’ll swear that I never said a word.

‘The Aussies, as you may know, have always been pretty hot on scientific research, and they had one team working on fast reactors—those house-broken atomic bombs which are so much more compact than the old uranium piles. The head of the group was a bright but rather impetuous young nuclear physicist I’ll call Dr Cavor. That, of course, wasn’t his real name, but it’s a very appropriate one. You’ll all recollect, I’m sure, the scientist Cavor in Wells’s First Men in the Moon, and the wonderful gravity-screening material Cavorite he discovered?

‘I’m afraid dear old Wells didn’t go into the question of Cavorite very thoroughly. As he put it, it was opaque to gravity just as a sheet of metal is opaque to light. Anything placed above a horizontal sheet of Cavorite, therefore, became weightless and floated up into space.

‘Well, it isn’t as simple as that. Weight represents energy—an enormous amount of it—which can’t just be destroyed without any fuss. You’d have to put a terrific amount of work into even a small object in order to make it weightless. Antigravity screens of the Cavorite type, therefore, are quite impossible—they’re in the same class as perpetual motion.’

‘Three of my friends have made perpetual-motion machines,’ began our unwanted visitor rather stuffily. Harry didn’t let him get any further: he just steamed on and ignored the interruption.

‘Now, our Australian Dr Cavor wasn’t searching for antigravity, or anything like it. In pure science, you can be pretty sure that nothing fundamental is ever discovered by anyone who’s actually looking for it—that’s half the fun of the game. Dr Cavor was interested in producing atomic power: what he found was antigravity. And it was quite some time before he realised that was what he’d discovered.

‘What happened, I gather, was this: the reactor was of a novel and rather daring design, and there was quite a possibility that it might blow up when the last pieces of fissile material were inserted. So it was assembled by remote control in one of Australia’s numerous convenient deserts, all the final operations being observed through TV sets.

‘Well, there was no explosion—which would have caused a nasty radioactive mess and wasted a lot of money, but wouldn’t have damaged anything except a lot of reputations. What actually happened was much more unexpected, and much more difficult to explain.

‘When the last piece of enriched uranium was inserted, the control rods pulled out, and the reactor brought up to criticality—everything went dead. The meters in the remote-control room, two miles from the reactor, all dropped back to zero. The TV screen went blank. Cavor and his colleagues waited for the bang, but there wasn’t one. They looked at each other for a moment with many wild surmises: then, without a word, they climbed up out of the buried control chamber.

‘The reactor building was completely unchanged: it sat out there in the desert, a commonplace cube of brick holding a million pounds’ worth of fissile material and several years of careful design and development. Cavor wasted no time: he grabbed the jeep, switched on a portable Geiger counter, and hurried off to see what had happened.

‘He recovered consciousness in hospital a couple of hours later. There was little wrong with him apart from a bad headache, which was nothing to the one his experiment was going to give him during the next few days. It seemed that when he got to within twenty feet of the reactor, his jeep had hit something with a terrific crash. Cavor had got tangled in the steering wheel and had a nice collection of bruises; the Geiger counter, oddly enough, was quite undamaged and was still clucking away quietly to itself, detecting no more than the normal cosmic-ray background.

‘Seen from a distance, it had looked a perfectly normal sort of accident that might have been caused by the jeep going into a rut. But Cavor hadn’t been driving all that fast, luckily for him, and anyway there was no rut at the scene of the crash. What the jeep had run into was something quite impossible. It was an invisible wall, apparently the lower rim of a hemispherical dome, which entirely surrounded the reactor. Stones thrown up in the air slid back to the ground along the surface of this dome, and it also extended underground as far as digging could be carried out. It seemed as if the reactor was at the exact centre of an impenetrable, spherical shell.

‘Of course, this was marvellous news and Cavor was out of bed in no time, scattering nurses in all directions. He had no idea what had happened, but it was a lot more exciting than the humdrum piece of nuclear engineering that had started the whole business.

‘By now you’re probably all wondering what the devil a sphere of force—as you science fiction writers would call it—has to do with antigravity. So I’ll jump several days and give you the answers that Cavor and his team discovered only after much hard work and the consumption of many gallons of that potent Australian beer.

The reactor when it had been energised, had somehow produced an antigravity field. All the matter inside a twenty-foot-radius sphere had been made weightless, and the enormous amount of energy needed to do this had been extracted, in some utterly mysterious manner, from the uranium in the pile. Calculations showed that the amount of energy in the reactor was just sufficient to do the job. Presumably the sphere of force would have been larger still if there had been more ergs available in the power source.

‘I can hear someone just waiting to ask a question, so I’ll anticipate them. Why didn’t this weightless sphere of earth and air float up into space? Well, the earth was held together by its cohesion, anyway, so there was no reason why it should go wandering off. As for the air, that was forced to stay inside the zone of zero gravity for a most surprising and subtle reason which leads me to the crux of this whole peculiar business.

‘Better fasten your seat belts for the next bit: we’ve got a bumpy passage ahead. Those of you who know something about potential theory won’t have any trouble, and I’ll do my best to make it as easy as I can for the rest.

‘People who talk glibly about antigravity seldom stop to consider its implication, so let’s look at a few fundamentals. As I’ve already said, weight implies energy—lots of it. That energy is entirely due to Earth’s gravity field. If you remove an object’s weight, that’s precisely equivalent to taking it clear outside Earth’s gravity. And any rocket engineer will tell you how much energy that requires.’

Harry turned to me and said: ‘There’s an analogy I’d like to borrow from one of your books, Arthur, that puts across the point I’m trying to make. You know—comparing the fight against Earth’s gravity to climbing out of a deep pit.’

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘I pinched it from Doc Richardson, anyway.’

‘Oh,’ replied Harry. ‘I thought it was too good to be original. Well, here we go. If you hang on to this really very simple idea, you’ll be OK. To take an object clear away from the Earth requires as much work as lifting it four thousand miles against the steady drag of normal gravity. Now the matter inside Cavor’s zone of force was still on the Earth’s surface, but it was weightless. From the energy point of view, therefore, it was outside the Earth’s gravity field. It was inaccessible as if it was on top of a four-thousand-mile-high mountain.

‘Cavor could stand outside the antigravity zone and look into it from a point a few inches away. To cross those few inches, he would have to do as much work as if he climbed Everest seven hundred times. It wasn’t surprising that the jeep stopped in a hurry. No material object had stopped it, but from the point of view of dynamics it had run smack into a cliff four thousand miles high….

‘I can see some blank looks that are not entirely due to the lateness of the hour. Never mind: if you don’t get all this, just take my word for it. It won’t spoil your appreciation of what follows—at least, I hope not.

‘Cavor had realised at once that he had made one of the most important discoveries of the age, though it was some time before he worked out just what was going on. The final clue to the antigravitational nature of the field came when they shot a rifle bullet into it and observed the trajectory with a high-speed camera. Ingenious, don’t you think?

‘The next problem was to experiment with the field’s generator and to find just what had happened inside the reactor when it had been switched on. This was a problem indeed. The reactor was there in plain sight, twenty feet away. But to reach it would require slightly more energy than going to the moon….

‘Cavor was not disheartened by this, nor by the inexplicable failure of the reactor to respond to any of its remote controls. He theorised that it had been completely drained of energy, if one can use a rather misleading term, and that little if any power was needed to maintain the antigravity field once it had been set up. This was one of the many things that could only be determined by examination on the spot. So by hook or by crook, Dr Cavor would have to go there.

‘His first idea was to use an electrically driven trolley, supplied with power through cables which it dragged behind it as it advanced into the field. A hundred horsepower generator, running continuously for seventeen hours, would supply enough energy to take a man of average weight on the perilous twenty-foot journey. A velocity of slightly over a foot an hour did not seem much to boast about, until you remembered that advancing one foot into the antigravity field was equivalent to a two-hundred-mile vertical climb.

‘The theory was sound, but in practice the electric trolley wouldn’t work. It started to push its way into the field, but began to skid after it had traversed half an inch. The reason was obvious when one started to think about it. Though the power was there, the traction wasn’t. No wheeled vehicle could climb a gradient of two hundred miles per foot.

‘This minor setback did not discourage Dr Cavor. The answer, he realised at once, was to produce the traction at a point outside the field. When you wanted to lift a load vertically, you didn’t use a cart: you used a jack or a hydraulic ram.

‘The result of this argument was one of the oddest vehicles ever built. A small but comfortable cage, containing sufficient provisions to last a man for several days, was mounted at the end of a twenty-foot-long horizontal girder. The whole device was supported off the ground by balloon tyres, and the theory was that the cage could be pushed right into the centre of the field by a machine which would remain outside its influence. After some thought, it was decided that the best prime mover would be the common or garden bulldozer.

‘A test was made with some rabbits in the passenger compartment—and I can’t help thinking that there was an interesting psychological point here. The experimenters were trying to get it both ways: as scientists they’d be pleased if their subjects got back alive, and as Australians they’d be just as happy if they got back dead. But perhaps I’m being a little too fanciful…. (You know, of course, how Australians feel about rabbits.)

‘The bulldozer chugged away hour after hour, forcing the weight of the girder and its insignificant pay load up the enormous gradient. It was an uncanny sight—all this energy being expended to move a couple of rabbits twenty feet across a perfectly horizontal plain. The subjects of the experiment could be observed throughout the operation: they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite unaware of their historic role.

‘The passenger compartment reached the centre of the field, was held there for an hour, and then the girder was slowly backed out again. The rabbits were alive, in good health, and to nobody’s particular surprise there were now six of them.

‘Dr Cavor, naturally, insisted on being the first human being to venture into a zero-gravity field. He loaded up the compartment with torsion balances, radiation detectors and periscopes so that he could look into the reactor when he finally got to it. Then he gave the signal, the bulldozer started chugging, and the strange journey began.

‘There was, naturally, telephone communication from the passenger compartment to the outside world. Ordinary sound waves couldn’t cross the barrier, for reasons which were still a little obscure, but radio and telephone both worked without difficulty. Cavor kept up a running commentary as he was edged forward into the field, describing his own reactions and relaying instrument readings to his colleagues.

‘The first thing that happened to him, though he had expected it, was nevertheless rather unsettling. During the first few inches of his advance, as he moved through the fringe of the field, the direction of the vertical seemed to swing around. ‘Up’ was no longer towards the sky: it was now in the direction of the reactor hut. To Cavor, it felt as if he was being pushed up the face of a vertical cliff, with the reactor twenty feet above him. For the first time, his eyes and his ordinary human senses told him the same story as his scientific training. He could see that the centre of the field was, gravity-wise, higher than the place from which he had come. However, imagination still boggled at the thought of all the energy it would need to climb that innocent-looking twenty feet, and the hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel that must be burned to get him there.

‘There was nothing else of interest to report on the journey itself, and at last, twenty hours after he had started, Cavor arrived at his destination. The wall of the reactor hut was right beside him, though to him it seemed not a wall but an unsupported floor sticking out at right angles from the cliff up which he had risen. The entrance was just above his head, like a trap door through which he would have to climb. This would present no great difficulty, for Dr Cavor was an energetic young man, extremely eager to find just how he had created this miracle.

‘Slightly too eager, in fact. For as he tried to work his way into the door, he slipped and fell off the platform that had carried him there.

‘That was the last anyone ever saw of him—but it wasn’t the last they heard of him. Oh dear no! He made a very big noise indeed….

‘You’ll see why when you consider the situation in which this unfortunate scientist now found himself. Hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy had been pushed into him—enough to lift him to the moon and beyond. All that work had been needed to take him to a point of zero gravitational potential. As soon as he lost his means of support that energy began to reappear. To get back to our earlier and very picturesque analogy—the poor Doctor had slipped off the edge of the four-thousand-mile-high mountain he had ascended.

He fell back the twenty feet that had taken almost a day to climb. “Ah, what a fall was there, my countrymen!” It was precisely equivalent, in terms of energy, to a free drop from the remotest stars down to the surface of the Earth. And you all know how much velocity an object acquires in that fall. It’s the same velocity that’s needed to get it there in the first place—the famous velocity of escape. Seven miles a second, or twenty-five-thousand miles an hour.

That’s what Dr Cavor was doing by the time he got back to his starting point. Or, to be more accurate, that’s the speed he involuntarily tried to reach. As soon as he passed Mach 1 or 2, however, air resistance began to have its little say. Dr Cavor’s funeral pyre was the finest and, indeed, the only meteor display ever to take place entirely at sea level….

‘I’m sorry that this story hasn’t got a happy ending. In fact, it hasn’t got an ending at all, because that sphere of zero gravitational potential is still sitting there in the Australian desert, apparently doing nothing at all but in fact producing ever increasing amounts of frustration in scientific and official circles. I don’t see how the authorities can hope to keep it secret much longer. Sometimes I think how odd it is that the world’s tallest mountain is in Australia—and that though it’s four thousand miles high the airliners often fly right over it without knowing it’s there.’

You will hardly be surprised to hear that H. Purvis finished his narration at this point, even he could hardly take it much further, and no one wanted him to. We were all, including his most tenacious critics, lost in admiring awe. I have since detected six fallacies of a fundamental nature in his description of Dr Cavor’s Frankensteinian fate but at the time they never even occurred to me. (And I don’t propose to reveal them now. They will be left, as the mathematics textbooks put it, as an exercise for the reader.) What had earned our undying gratitude, however, was the fact that at some slight sacrifice of truth he had managed to keep Flying Saucers from invading the ‘White Hart’. It was almost closing time, and too late for our visitor to make a counterattack.

That is why the sequel seems a little unfair. A month later, someone brought a very odd publication to one of our meetings. It was nicely printed and laid out with professional skill, the misuse of which was sad to behold. The thing was called Flying Saucer Revelations—and there on the front page was a full and detailed account of the story Purvis had told us. It was printed absolutely straight—and what was much worse than that, from poor Harry’s point of view, was that it was attributed to him by name.

Since then he has had 4,375 letters on the subject, most of them from California. Twenty-four called him a liar; 4,205 believed him absolutely. (The remaining ones he couldn’t decipher and their contents still remain a matter of speculation.)

I’m afraid he’s never quite got over it, and I sometimes think he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to stop people believing the one story he never expected to be taken seriously.

There may be a moral here. For the life of me I can’t find it.

Venture to the Moon

First published in the London Evening Standard, 1956

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

‘Venture to the Moon’ was originally written as a series of six independent but linked stories for the London Evening Standard, in 1956. When the commission was first proposed I turned it down. It appeared impossible to write stories in only 1,500 words which would be understandable to a mass readership despite being set in a totally alien environment, but on second thought this seemed such an interesting challenge that I decided to tackle it. The resulting series was successful enough to demand a second…

The Starting Line

The story of the first lunar expedition has been written so many times that some people will doubt if there is anything fresh to be said about it. Yet all the official reports and eyewitness accounts, the on-the-spot recordings and broadcasts never, in my opinion, gave the full picture. They said a great deal about the discoveries that were made—but very little about the men who made them.

As captain of the Endeavour and thus commander of the British party, I was able to observe a good many things you will not find in the history books, and some—though not all—of them can now be told. One day, I hope, my opposite numbers on the Goddard and the Ziolkovski will give their points of view. But as Commander Vandenburg is still on Mars and Commander Krasnin is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, it looks as if we will have to wait a few more years for their memoirs.

Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. I shall certainly feel much happier when I have told the true story behind the timing of the first lunar flight, about which there has always been a good deal of mystery.

As everyone knows, the American, Russian and British ships were assembled in the orbit of Space Station Three, five hundred miles above the Earth, from components flown up by relays of freight rockets. Though all the parts had been prefabricated, the assembly and testing of the ships took over two years, by which time a great many people—who did not realise the complexity of the task—were beginning to get slightly impatient. They had seen dozens of photos and telecasts of the three ships floating there in space beside Station Three, apparently quite complete and ready to pull away from Earth at a moment’s notice. What the picture didn’t show was the careful and tedious work still in progress as thousands of pipes, wires, motors, and instruments were fitted and subjected to every conceivable test.

There was no definite target date for departure; since the moon is always at approximately the same distance, you can leave for it at almost any time you like—once you are ready. It makes practically no difference, from the point of view of fuel consumption, if you blast off at full moon or new moon or at any time in between. We were very careful to make no predictions about blast-off, though everyone was always trying to get us to fix the time. So many things can go wrong in a spaceship, and we were not going to say goodbye to Earth until we were ready down to the last detail.

I shall always remember the last commanders’ conference, aboard the space station, when we all announced that we were ready. Since it was a co-operative venture, each party specialising in some particular task, it had been agreed that we should all make our landings within the same twenty-four-hour period, on the preselected site in the Mare Imbrium. The details of the journey, however, had been left to the individual commanders, presumably in the hope that we would not copy each other’s mistakes.

‘I’ll be ready,’ said Commander Vandenburg, ‘to make my first dummy take-off at 0900 tomorrow. What about you, gentlemen? Shall we ask Earth Control to stand by for all three of us?’

‘That’s OK by me,’ said Krasnin, who could never be convinced that his American slang was twenty years out of date.

I nodded my agreement. It was true that one bank of fuel gauges was still misbehaving, but that didn’t really matter; they would be fixed by the time the tanks were filled.

The dummy run consisted of an exact replica of a real blast-off, with everyone carrying out the job he would do when the time came for the genuine thing. We had practised, of course, in mock-ups down on Earth, but this was a perfect imitation of what would happen to us when we finally took off for the moon. All that was missing was the roar of the motors that would tell us that the voyage had begun.

We did six complete imitations of blast-off, took the ships to pieces to eliminate anything that hadn’t behaved perfectly, then did six more. The Endeavour, the Goddard, and the Ziolkovski were all in the same state of serviceability. There now only remained the job of fuelling up, and we would be ready to leave.

The suspense of those last few hours is not something I would care to go through again. The eyes of the world were upon us; departure time had now been set, with an uncertainty of only a few hours. All the final tests had been made, and we were convinced that our ships were as ready as humanly possible.

It was then that I had an urgent and secret personal radio call from a very high official indeed, and a suggestion was made which had so much authority behind it that there was little point in pretending that it wasn’t an order. The first flight to the moon, I was reminded, was a co-operative venture—but think of the prestige if we got there first. It need only be by a couple of hours….

I was shocked at the suggestion, and said so. By this time Vandenburg and Krasnin were good friends of mine, and we were all in this together. I made every excuse I could and said that since our flight paths had already been computed there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. Each ship was making the journey by the most economical route, to conserve fuel. If we started together, we should arrive together—within seconds.

Unfortunately, someone had thought of the answer to that. Our three ships, fuelled up and with their crews standing by, would be circling earth in a state of complete readiness for several hours before they actually pulled away from their satellite orbits and headed out to the moon. At our five-hundred-mile altitude, we took ninety-five minutes to make one circuit of the Earth, and only once every revolution would the moment be ripe to begin the voyage. If we could jump the gun by one revolution, the others would have to wait that ninety-five minutes before they could follow. And so they would land on the moon ninety-five minutes behind us.

I won’t go into the arguments, and I’m still a little ashamed that I yielded and agreed to deceive my two colleagues. We were in the shadow of Earth, in momentary eclipse, when the carefully calculated moment came. Vandenburg and Krasnin, honest fellows, thought I was going to make one more round trip with them before we all set off together. I have seldom felt a bigger heel in my life than when I pressed the firing key and felt the sudden thrust of the motors as they swept me away from my mother world.

For the next ten minutes we had no time for anything but our instruments, as we checked to see that the Endeavour was forging ahead along her precomputed orbit. Almost at the moment that we finally escaped from Earth and could cut the motors, we burst out of shadow into the full blaze of the sun. There would be no more night until we reached the moon, after five days of effortless and silent coasting through space.

Already Space Station Three and the two other ships must be a thousand miles behind. In eighty-five more minutes Vandenburg and Krasnin would be back at the correct starting point and could take off after me, as we had all planned. But they could never overcome my lead, and I hoped they wouldn’t be too mad at me when we met again on the moon.

I switched on the rear camera and looked back at the distant gleam of the space station, just emerging from the shadow of Earth. It was some moments before I realised that the Goddard and the Ziolkovski weren’t still floating beside it where I’d left them….

No; they were just half a mile away, neatly matching my velocity. I stared at them in utter disbelief for a second, before I realised that every one of us had had the same idea. ‘Why, you pair of double-crossers!’ I gasped. Then I began to laugh so much that it was several minutes before I dared call up a very worried Earth Control and tell them that everything had gone according to plan—though in no case was it the plan that had been originally announced….

We were all very sheepish when we radioed each other to exchange mutual congratulations. Yet at the same time, I think everyone was secretly pleased that it had turned out this way. For the rest of the trip, we were never more than a few miles apart, and the actual landing manoeuvres were so well synchronised that our three braking jets hit the moon simultaneously.

Well, almost simultaneously. I might make something of the fact that the recorder tape shows I touched down two-fifths of a second ahead of Krasnin. But I’d better not, for Vandenburg was precisely the same moment ahead of me.

On a quarter-of-a-million-mile trip, I think you could call that a photo finish….

Robin Hood, F.R.S.

We had landed early in the dawn of the long lunar day, and the slanting shadows lay all around us, extending for miles across the plain. They would slowly shorten as the sun rose higher in the sky, until at noon they would almost vanish—but noon was still five days away, as we measured time on Earth, and nightfall was seven days later still. We had almost two weeks of daylight ahead of us before the sun set and the bluely gleaming Earth became the mistress of the sky.

There was little time for exploration during those first hectic days. We had to unload the ships, grow accustomed to the alien conditions surrounding us, learn to handle our electrically powered tractors and scooters, and erect the igloos that would serve as homes, offices, and labs until the time came to leave. At a pinch, we could live in the spaceships, but it would be excessively uncomfortable and cramped. The igloos were not exactly commodious, but they were luxury after five days in space. Made of tough, flexible plastic, they were blown up like balloons, and their interiors were then partitioned into separate rooms. Air locks allowed access to the outer world, and a good deal of plumbing linked to the ships’ air-purification plants kept the atmosphere breathable. Needless to say, the American igloo was the biggest one, and had come complete with everything, including the kitchen sink—not to mention a washing machine, which we and the Russians were always borrowing.

It was late in the ‘afternoon’—about ten days after we had landed—before we were properly organised and could think about serious scientific work. The first parties made nervous little forays out into the wilderness around the base, familiarising themselves with the territory. Of course, we already possessed minutely detailed maps and photographs of the region in which we had landed, but it was surprising how misleading they could sometimes be. What had been marked as a small hill on a chart often looked like a mountain to a man toiling along in a space suit, and apparently smooth plains were often covered knee-deep with dust, which made progress extremely slow and tedious.

These were minor difficulties, however, and the low gravity—which gave all objects only a sixth of their terrestrial weight—compensated for much. As the scientists began to accumulate their results and specimens, the radio and TV circuits with Earth became busier and busier, until they were in continuous operation. We were taking no chances; even if we didn’t get home, the knowledge we were gathering would do so.

The first of the automatic supply rockets landed two days before sunset, precisely according to plan. We saw its braking jets flame briefly against the stars, then blast again a few seconds before touchdown. The actual landing was hidden from us, since for safety reasons the dropping ground was three miles from the base. And on the moon, three miles is well over the curve of the horizon.

When we got to the robot, it was standing slightly askew on its tripod shock absorbers, but in perfect condition. So was everything aboard it, from instruments to food. We carried the stores back to base in triumph, and had a celebration that was really rather overdue. The men had been working too hard, and could do with some relaxation.

It was quite a party; the highlight, I think, was Commander Krasnin trying to do a Cossack dance in a space suit. Then we turned our minds to competitive sports, but found that, for obvious reasons, outdoor activities were somewhat restricted. Games like croquet or bowls would have been practical had we had the equipment; but cricket and football were definitely out. In that gravity, even a football would go half a mile if it were given a good kick—and a cricket ball would never been seen again.

Professor Trevor Williams was the first person to think of a practical lunar sport. He was our astronomer, and also one of the youngest men ever to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society, being only thirty when this ultimate accolade was conferred upon him. His work on methods of interplanetary navigation had made him world famous; less well known, however, was his skill as a toxophilite. For two years in succession he had been archery champion for Wales. I was not surprised, therefore, when I discovered him shooting at a target propped up on a pile of lunar slag.

The bow was a curious one, strung with steel control wire and shaped from a laminated plastic bar. I wondered where Trevor had got hold of it, then remembered that the robot freight rocket had now been cannibalised and bits of it were appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. The arrows, however, were the really interesting feature. To give them stability on the airless moon, where, of course, feathers would be useless, Trevor had managed to rifle them. There was a little gadget on the bow that set them spinning, like bullets, when they were fired, so that they kept on course when they left the bow.

Even with this rather makeshift equipment, it was possible to shoot a mile if one wished to. However, Trevor didn’t want to waste arrows, which were not easy to make; he was more interested in seeing the sort of accuracy he could get. It was uncanny to watch the almost flat trajectory of the arrows; they seemed to be travelling parallel with the ground. If he wasn’t careful, someone warned Trevor, his arrows might become lunar satellites and would hit him in the back when they completed their orbit.

The second supply rocket arrived the next day, but this time things didn’t go according to plan. It made a perfect touchdown, but unfortunately the radar-controlled automatic pilot made one of those mistakes that such simple-minded machines delight in doing. It spotted the only really unclimbable hill in the neighbourhood, locked its beam onto the summit of it, and settled down there like an eagle descending upon its mountain aerie.

Our badly needed supplies were five hundred feet above our heads, and in a few hours night would be falling. What was to be done?

About fifteen people made the same suggestion at once, and for the next few minutes there was a great scurrying about as we rounded up all the nylon line on the base. Soon there was more than a thousand yards of it coiled in neat loops at Trevor’s feet while we all waited expectantly. He tied one end to his arrow, drew the bow, and aimed it experimentally straight toward the stars. The arrow rose a little more than half the height of the cliff; then the weight of the line pulled it back.

‘Sorry,’ said Trevor. ‘I just can’t make it. And don’t forget—we’d have to send up some kind of grapnel as well, if we want the end to stay up there.’

There was much gloom for the next few minutes, as we watched the coils of line fall slowly back from the sky. The situation was really somewhat absurd. In our ships we had enough energy to carry us a quarter of a million miles from the moon—yet we were baffled by a puny little cliff. If we had time, we could probably find a way up to the top from the other side of the hill, but that would mean travelling several miles. It would be dangerous, and might well be impossible, during the few hours of daylight that were left.

Scientists were never baffled for long, and too many ingenious (sometimes overingenious) minds were working on the problem for it to remain unresolved. But this time it was a little more difficult, and only three people got the answer simultaneously. Trevor thought it over, then said noncommittally, ‘Well, it’s worth trying.’

The preparations took a little while, and we were all watching anxiously as the rays of the sinking sun crept higher and higher up the sheer cliff looming above us. Even if Trevor could get a line and grapnel up there, I thought to myself, it would not be easy making the ascent while encumbered with a space suit. I have no head for heights, and was glad that several mountaineering enthusiasts had already volunteered for the job.

At last everything was ready. The line had been carefully arranged so that it would lift from the ground with the minimum of hindrance. A light grapnel had been attached to the line a few feet behind the arrow; we hoped that it would catch in the rocks up there and wouldn’t let us down—all too literally—when we put our trust in it.

This time, however, Trevor was not using a single arrow. He attached four to the line, at two-hundred-yard intervals. And I shall never forget that incongruous spectacle of the space-suited figure, gleaming in the last rays of the setting sun, as it drew its bow against the sky.

The arrow sped toward the stars, and before it had lifted more than fifty feet Trevor was already fitting the second one to his improvised bow. It raced after its predecessor, carrying the other end of the long loop that was now being hoisted into space. Almost at once the third followed, lifting its section of line—and I swear that the fourth arrow, with its section, was on the way before the first had noticeably slackened its momentum.

Now that there was no question of a single arrow lifting the entire length of line, it was not hard to reach the required altitude. The first two times the grapnel fell back; then it caught firmly somewhere up on the hidden plateau—and the first volunteer began to haul himself up the line. It was true that he weighed only about thirty pounds in this low gravity, but it was still a long way to fall.

He didn’t. The stores in the freight rocket started coming down the cliff within the next hour, and everything essential had been lowered before nightfall. I must confess, however, that my satisfaction was considerably abated when one of the engineers proudly showed me the mouth organ he had had sent from Earth. Even then I felt certain that we would all be very tired of that instrument before the long lunar night had ended….

But that, of course, was hardly Trevor’s fault. As we walked back to the ship together, through the great pools of shadow that were flowing swiftly over the plain, he made a proposal that, I am sure, has puzzled thousands of people ever since the detailled maps of the first lunar expedition were published.

After all, it does seem a little odd that a flat and lifeless plain, broken by a single small mountain, should now be labelled on all the charts of the moon as Sherwood Forest.

Green Fingers

I am very sorry, now that it’s too late, that I never got to know Vladimir Surov. As I remember him, he was a quiet little man who could understand English but couldn’t speak it well enough to make conversation. Even to his colleagues, I suspect he was a bit of an enigma. Whenever I went aboard the Ziolkovski, he would be sitting in a corner working on his notes or peering through a microscope, a man who clung to his privacy even in the tight and tiny world of a spaceship. The rest of the crew did not seem to mind his aloofness; when they spoke to him, it was clear that they regarded him with tolerant affection, as well as with respect. That was hardly surprising; the work he had done developing plants and trees that could flourish far inside the Arctic Circle had already made him the most famous botanist in Russia.

The fact that the Russian expedition had taken a botanist to the moon had caused a good deal of amusement, though it was really no odder than the fact that there were biologists on both the British and American ships. During the years before the first lunar landing, a good deal of evidence had accumulated hinting that some form of vegetation might exist on the moon, despite its airlessness and lack of water. The president of the USSR Academy of Science was one of the leading proponents of this theory, and being too old to make the trip himself had done the next best thing by sending Surov.

The complete absence of any such vegetation, living or fossil, in the thousand or so square miles explored by our various parties was the first big disappointment the moon had reserved for us. Even those sceptics who were quite certain that no form of life could exist on the moon would have been very glad to have been proved wrong—as of course they were, five years later, when Richards and Shannon made their astonishing discovery inside the great walled plain of Eratosthenes. But that revelation still lay in the future; at the time of the first landing, it seemed that Surov had come to the moon in vain.

He did not appear unduly depressed, but kept himself as busy as the rest of the crew studying soil samples and looking after the little hydroponic farm whose pressurised, transparent tubes formed a gleaming network around the Ziolkovski. Neither we nor the Americans had gone in for this sort of thing, having calculated that it was better to ship food from Earth than to grow it on the spot—at least until the time came to set up a permanent base. We were right in terms of economics, but wrong in terms of morale. The tiny airtight greenhouses inside which Surov grew his vegetables and dwarf fruit trees were an oasis upon which we often feasted our eyes when we had grown tied of the immense desolation surrounding us.

One of the many disadvantages of being commander was that I seldom had much chance to do any active exploring; I was too busy preparing reports for Earth, checking stores, arranging programmes and duty rosters, conferring with my opposite numbers in the American and Russian ships, and trying—not always successfully—to guess what would go wrong next. As a result, I sometimes did not go outside the base for two or three days at a time, and it was a standing joke that my space suit was a haven for moths.

Perhaps it is because of this that I can remember all my trips outside so vividly; certainly I can recall my only encounter with Surov. It was near noon, with the sun high above the southern mountains and the new Earth a barely visible thread of silver a few degrees away from it. Henderson, our geophysicist, wanted to take some magnetic readings at a series of check points a couple of miles to the east of the base. Everyone else was busy, and I was momentarily on top of my work, so we set off together on foot.

The journey was not long enough to merit taking one of the scooters, especially because the charges in the batteries were getting low. In any case, I always enjoyed walking out in the open on the moon. It was not merely the scenery, which even at its most awe-inspiring one can grow accustomed to after a while. No—what I never tired of was the effortless, slow-motion way in which every step took me bounding over the landscape, giving me the freedom that before the coming of space flight men only knew in dreams.

We had done the job and were halfway home when I noticed a figure moving across the plain about a mile to the south of us—not far, in fact, from the Russian base. I snapped my field glasses down inside my helmet and took a careful look at the other explorer. Even at close range, of course, you can’t identify a man in a space suit, but because the suits are always coded by colour and number that makes no practical difference.

‘Who is it?’ asked Henderson over the short-range radio channel to which we were both tuned.

‘Blue suit, Number 3—that would be Surov. But I don’t understand. He’s by himself.’

It is one of the most fundamental rules of lunar exploration that no one goes anywhere alone on the surface of the moon. So many accidents can happen, which would be trivial if you were with a companion—but fatal if you were by yourself. How would you manage, for example, if your space suit developed a slow leak in the small of the back and you couldn’t put on a repair patch? That may sound funny; but it’s happened.

‘Perhaps his buddy has had an accident and he’s going to fetch help,’ suggested Henderson. ‘Maybe we had better call him.’

I shook my head. Surov was obviously in no hurry. He had been out on a trip of his own, and was making his leisurely way back to the Ziolkovski. It was no concern of mine if Commander Krasnin let his people go out on solo trips, though it seemed a deplorable practice. And if Surov was breaking regulations, it was equally no concern of mine to report him.

During the next two months, the men often spotted Surov making his lone way over the landscape, but he always avoided them if they got too near. I made some discreet inquiries, and found that Commander Krasnin had been forced, owing to shortage of men, to relax some of his safety rules. But I couldn’t find out what Surov was up to, though I never dreamed that his commander was equally in the dark.

It was with an ‘I told you so’ feeling that I got Krasnin’s emergency call. We had all had men in trouble before and had had to send out help, but this was the first time anyone had been lost and had not replied when his ship had sent out the recall signal. There was a hasty radio conference, a line of action was drawn up, and search parties fanned out from each of the three ships.

Once again I was with Henderson, and it was only common sense for us to backtrack along the route that we had seen Surov following. It was in what we regarded as ‘our’ territory, quite some distance away from Surov’s own ship, and as we scrambled up the low foothills it occurred to me for the first time that the Russian might have been doing something he wanted to keep from his colleagues. What it might be, I could not imagine.

Henderson found him, and yelled for help over his suit radio. But it was much too late; Surov was lying, face down, his deflated suit crumpled around him. He had been kneeling when something had smashed the plastic globe of his helmet; you could see how he had pitched forward and died instantaneously.

When Commander Krasnin reached us, we were still staring at the unbelievable object that Surov had been examining when he died. It was about three feet high, a leathery, greenish oval rooted to the rocks with a widespread network of tendrils. Yes—rooted; for it was a plant. A few yards away were two others, much smaller and apparently dead, since they were blackened and withered.

My first reaction was: ‘So there is life on the moon, after all!’ It was not until Krasnin’s voice spoke in my ears that I realised how much more marvellous was the truth.

‘Poor Vladimir!’ he said. ‘We knew he was a genius, yet we laughed at him when he told us of his dream. So he kept his greatest work a secret. He conquered the Arctic with his hybrid wheat, but that was only a beginning. He has brought life to the moon—and death as well.’

As I stood there, in that first moment of astonished revelation, it still seemed a miracle. Today, all the world knows the history of ‘Surov’s cactus’, as it was inevitably if quite inaccurately christened, and it has lost much of its wonder. His notes have told the full story, and have described the years of experimentation that finally led him to a plant whose leathery skin would enable it to survive in vacuum, and whose far-ranging, acid-secreting roots would enable it to grow upon rocks where even lichens would be hard put to thrive. And we have seen the realisation of the second stage of Surov’s dream, for the cactus which will forever bear his name has already broken up vast areas of the lunar rock and so prepared a way for the more specialised plants that now feed every human being upon the moon.

Krasnin bent down beside the body of his colleague and lifted it effortlessly against the low gravity. He fingered the shattered fragments of the plastic helmet, and shook his head in perplexity.

‘What could have happened to him?’ he said. ‘It almost looks as if the plant did it, but that’s ridiculous.’

The green enigma stood there on the no-longer barren plain, tantalising us with its promise and its mystery. Then Henderson said slowly, as if thinking aloud:

‘I believe I’ve got the answer. I’ve just remembered some of the botany I did at school. If Surov designed this plant for lunar conditions, how would he arrange for it to propagate itself? The seeds would have to be scattered over a very wide area in the hope of finding a few suitable places to grow. There are no birds or animals here to carry them, in the way that happens on Earth. I can only think of one solution—and some of our terrestrial plants have already used it.’

He was interrupted by my yell. Something had hit with a resounding clang against the metal waistband of my suit. It did no damage, but it was so sudden and unexpected that it took me utterly by surprise.

A seed lay at my feet, about the size and shape of a plum stone. A few yards away, we found the one that had shattered Surov’s helmet as he bent down. He must have known that the plant was ripe, but in his eagerness to examine it had forgotten what that implied. I have seen a cactus throw its seed a quarter of a mile under the low lunar gravity. Surov had been shot at point-blank range by his own creation.

All that Glitters

This is really Commander Vandenburg’s story, but he is too many millions of miles away to tell it. It concerns his geophysicist, Dr Paynter, who was generally believed to have gone to the moon to get away from his wife.

At one time or other, we were all supposed (often by our wives) to have done just that. However, in Paynter’s case, there was just enough truth to make it stick.

It was not that he disliked his wife; one could almost say the contrary. He would do anything for her, but unfortunately the things that she wanted him to do cost rather too much. She was a lady of extravagant tastes, and such ladies are advised not to marry scientists—even scientists who go to the moon.

Mrs Paynter’s weakness was for jewellery, particularly diamonds. As might be expected, this was a weakness that caused her husband a good deal of worry. Being a conscientious as well as an affectionate husband, he did not merely worry about it—he did something about it. He became one of the world’s leading experts on diamonds, from the scientific rather than the commercial point of view, and probably knew more about their composition, origin, and properties than any other man alive. Unfortunately, you may know a lot about diamonds without ever possessing any, and her husband’s erudition was not something that Mrs Paynter could wear around her neck when she went to a party.

Geophysics, as I have mentioned, was Dr Paynter’s real business; diamonds were merely a side line. He had developed many remarkable surveying instruments which could probe the interior of the Earth by means of electric impulses and magnetic waves, so giving a kind of X-ray picture of the hidden strata far below. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that he was one of the men chosen to pry into the mysterious interior of the moon.

He was quite eager to go, but it seemed to Commander Vandenburg that he was reluctant to leave Earth at this particular moment. A number of men had shown such symptoms; sometimes they were due to fears that could not be eradicated, and an otherwise promising man had to be left behind. In Paynter’s case, however, the reluctance was quite impersonal. He was in the middle of a big experiment—something he had been working on all his life—and he didn’t want to leave Earth until it was finished. However, the first lunar expedition could not wait for him, so he had to leave his project in the hands of his assistants. He was continually exchanging cryptic radio messages with them, to the great annoyance of the signals section of Space Station Three.

In the wonder of a new world waiting to be explored, Paynter soon forgot his earthly preoccupations. He would dash hither and yon over the lunar landscape on one of the neat little electric scooters the Americans had brought with them, carrying seismographs, magnetometers, gravity meters, and all the other esoteric tools of the geophysicist’s trade. He was trying to learn, in a few weeks, what it had taken men hundreds of years to discover about their own planet. It was true that he had only a small sample of the moon’s fourteen million square miles of territory to explore, but he intended to make a thorough job of it.

From time to time he continued to get messages from his colleagues back on Earth, as well as brief but affectionate signals from Mrs P. Neither seemed to interest him very much; even when you are not so busy that you hardly have time to sleep, a quarter of a million miles puts most of your personal affairs in a different perspective. I think that on the moon Dr Paynter was really happy for the first time in his life; if so, he was not the only one.

Not far from our base there was a rather fine crater pit, a great blowhole in the lunar surface almost two miles from rim to rim. Though it was fairly close at hand, it was outside the normal area of our joint operations, and we had been on the moon for six weeks before Paynter led a party of three men off in one of the baby tractors to have a look at it. They disappeared from radio range over the edge of the moon, but we weren’t worried about that because if they ran into trouble they could always call Earth and get any message relayed back to us.

Paynter and his men were gone forty-eight hours, which is about the maximum for continuous working on the moon, even with booster drugs. At first their little expedition was quite uneventful and therefore quite unexciting; everything went according to plan. They reached the crater, inflated their pressurised igloo and unpacked their stores, took their instrument readings, and then set up a portable drill to get core samples. It was while he was waiting for the drill to bring him up a nice section of the moon that Paynter made his second great discovery. He had made his first about ten hours before, but he didn’t know it yet.

Around the lip of the crater, lying where they had been thrown up by the great explosions that had convulsed the lunar landscape three hundred million years before, were immense piles of rock which must have come from many miles down in the moon’s interior. Anything he could do with his little drill, thought Paynter, could hardly compare with this. Unfortunately, the mountain-sized geological specimens that lay all around him were not neatly arranged in their correct order; they had been scattered over the landscape, much farther than the eye could see, according to the arbitrary violence of the eruptions that had blasted them into space.

Paynter climbed over these immense slag heaps, taking a swing at likely samples with his little hammer. Presently his colleagues heard him yell, and saw him come running back to them carrying what appeared to be a lump of rather poor quality glass. It was some time before he was sufficiently coherent to explain what all the fuss was about—and some time later still before the expedition remembered its real job and got back to work.

Vandenburg watched the returning party as it headed back to the ship. The four men didn’t seem as tired as one would have expected, considering the fact that they had been on their feet for two days. Indeed, there was a certain jauntiness about their movements which even the space suits couldn’t wholly conceal. You could see that the expedition had been a success. In that case, Paynter would have two causes for congratulations. The priority message that had just come from Earth was very cryptic, but it was clear that Paynter’s work there—whatever it was—had finally reached a triumphant conclusion.

Commander Vandenburg almost forgot the message when he saw what Paynter was holding in his hand. He knew what a raw diamond looked like, and this was the second largest that anyone had ever seen. Only the Cullinan, tipping the scales at 3,026 carats, beat it by a slender margin. ‘We ought to have expected it,’ he heard Paynter babble happily. ‘Diamonds are always found associated with volcanic vents. But somehow I never thought the analogy would hold here.’

Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal, and handed it over to Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never in his life, Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a message of congratulation. The signal read: WE’VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH MODIFIED PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE. COSTS NEGLIGIBLE.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Vandenburg, when he saw the stricken look on Paynter’s face. ‘It doesn’t seem bad news to me, whatever it means.’

Paynter gulped two or three times like a stranded fish, then stared helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled the palm of his hand. He tossed it into the air, and it floated back in that slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.

Finally he found his voice.

‘My lab’s been working for years,’ he said, ‘trying to synthesise diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million dollars. Today it’s worth a couple of hundred. I’m not sure I’ll bother to carry it back to Earth.’

Well, he did carry it back; it seemed a pity not to. For about three months, Mrs P. had the finest diamond necklace in the world, worth every bit of a thousand dollars—mostly the cost of cutting and polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production, and a month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental cruelty; and I suppose you could say it was justified.

Watch this Space

It was quite a surprise to discover, when I looked it up, that the most famous experiment we carried out while we were on the moon had its beginnings way back in 1955. At that time, high-altitude rocket research had been going for only about ten years, mostly at White Sands, New Mexico. Nineteen fifty-five was the date of one of the most spectacular of those early experiments, one that involved the ejection of sodium onto the upper atmosphere.

On Earth, even on the clearest night, the sky between the stars isn’t completely dark. There’s a very faint background glow, and part of it is caused by the fluorescence of sodium atoms a hundred miles up. Since it would take the sodium in a good many cubic miles of the upper atmosphere to fill a single matchbox, it seemed to the early investigators that they could make quite a fireworks display if they used a rocket to dump a few pounds of the stuff into the ionosphere.

They were right. The sodium squirted out of a rocket above White Sands early in 1955 produced a great yellow glow in the sky which was visible, like a kind of artificial moonlight, for over an hour, before the atoms dispersed. This experiment wasn’t done for fun (though it was fun) but for a serious scientific purpose. Instruments trained on this glow were able to gather new knowledge about the upper air—knowledge that went into the stockpile of information without which space flight would never have been possible.

When they got to the moon, the Americans decided that it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment there, on a much larger scale. A few hundred kilograms of sodium fired up from the surface would produce a display that would be visible from Earth, with a good pair of field glasses, as it fluoresced its way up through the lunar atmosphere.

(Some people, by the way, still don’t realise that the moon has an atmosphere. It’s about a million times too thin to be breathable, but if you have the right instruments you can detect it. As a meteor shield, it’s first-rate, for though it may be tenuous it’s hundreds of miles deep.)

Everyone had been talking about the experiment for days. The sodium bomb had arrived from Earth in the last supply rocket, and a very impressive piece of equipment it looked. Its operation was extremely simple; when ignited, an incendiary charge vaporised the sodium until a high pressure was built up, then a diaphragm burst and the stuff was squirted up into the sky through a specially shaped nozzle. It would be shot off soon after nightfall, and when the cloud of sodium rose out of the moon’s shadow into direct sunlight it would start to glow with tremendous brilliance.

Nightfall, on the moon, is one of the most awe-inspiring sights in the whole of nature, made doubly so because as you watch the sun’s flaming disc creep so slowly below the mountains you know that it will be fourteen days before you see it again. But it does not bring darkness—at least, not on this side of the moon. There is always the Earth, hanging motionless in the sky, the one heavenly body that neither rises nor sets. The light pouring back from her clouds and seas floods the lunar landscape with a soft, blue-green radiance, so that it is often easier to find your way around at night than under the fierce glare of the sun.

Even those who were not supposed to be on duty had come out to watch the experiment. The sodium bomb had been placed at the middle of the big triangle formed by the three ships, and stood upright with its nozzle pointing at the stars. Dr Anderson, the astronomer of the American team, was testing the firing circuits, but everyone else was at a respectful distance. The bomb looked perfectly capable of living up to its name, though it was really about as dangerous as a soda-water siphon.

All the optical equipment of the three expeditions seemed to have been gathered together to record the performance. Telescopes, spectroscopes, motion-picture cameras, and everything else one could think of were lined up ready for action. And this, I knew, was nothing compared with the battery that must be zeroed on us from Earth. Every amateur astronomer who could see the moon tonight would be standing by in his back garden, listening to the radio commentary that told him of the progress of the experiment. I glanced up at the gleaming planet that dominated the sky above me; the land areas seemed to be fairly free from cloud, so the folks at home should have a good view. That seemed only fair; after all, they were footing the bill.

There were still fifteen minutes to go. Not for the first time, I wished there was a reliable way of smoking a cigarette inside a space suit without getting the helmet so badly fogged that you couldn’t see. Our scientists had solved so many much more difficult problems; it seemed a pity that they couldn’t do something about that one.

To pass the time—for this was an experiment where I had nothing to do—I switched on my suit radio and listened to Dave Bolton, who was making a very good job of the commentary. Dave was our chief navigator, and a brilliant mathematician. He also had a glib tongue and a picturesque turn of speech, and sometimes his recordings had to be censored by the BBC. There was nothing they could do about this one, however, for it was going out live from the relay stations on Earth.

Dave had finished a brief and lucid explanation of the purpose of the experiment, describing how the cloud of glowing sodium would enable us to analyse the lunar atmosphere as it rose through it at approximately a thousand miles an hour. ‘However,’ he went on tell the waiting millions on Earth, ‘let’s make one point clear. Even when the bomb has gone off, you won’t see a darn thing for ten minutes—and neither will we. The sodium cloud will be completely invisible while it’s rising up through the darkness of the moon’s shadows. Then, quite suddenly, it will flash into brilliance as it enters the sun’s rays, which are streaming past over our heads right now as we stare up into space. No one is quite sure how bright it will be, but it’s a pretty safe guess that you’ll be able to see it in any telescope bigger than a two-inch. So it should just be within the range of a good pair of binoculars.’

He had to keep this sort of thing up for another ten minutes, and it was a marvel to me how he managed to do it. Then the great moment came, and Anderson closed the firing circuit. The bomb started to cook, building up pressure inside as the sodium volatilised. After thirty seconds, there was a sudden puff of smoke from the long, slender nozzle pointing up at the sky. And then we had to wait for another ten minutes while the invisible cloud rose to the stars. After all this build-up, I told myself, the result had better be good.

The seconds and minutes ebbed away. Then a sudden yellow glow began to spread across the sky, like a vast and unwavering aurora that became brighter even as we watched. It was as if an artist was sprawling strokes across the stars with a flame-filled brush. And as I stared at those strokes, I suddenly realised that someone had brought off the greatest advertising coup in history. For the strokes formed letters, and the letters formed two words—the name of a certain soft drink too well known to need any further publicity from me.

How had it been done? The first answer was obvious. Someone had placed a suitably cut stencil in the nozzle of the sodium bomb, so that the stream of escaping vapour had shaped itself to the words. Since there was nothing to distort it, the pattern had kept its shape during its invisible ascent to the stars. I had been skywriting on Earth, but this was something on a far larger scale. Whatever I thought of them, I couldn’t help admiring the ingenuity of the men who had perpetrated the scheme. The O’s and A’s had given them a bit of trouble, but the C’s and L’s were perfect.

After the initial shock, I am glad to say that the scientific programme proceeded as planned. I wish I could remember how Dave Bolton rose to the occasion in his commentary; it must have been a strain even for his quick wits. By this time, of course, half the Earth could see what he was describing. The next morning, every newspaper on the planet carried that famous photo of the crescent moon with the luminous slogan painted across its darkened sector.

The letters were visible, before they finally dispersed into space, for over an hour. By that time the words were almost a thousand miles long, and were beginning to get blurred. But they were still readable until they at last faded from sight in the ultimate vacuum between the planets.

Then the real fireworks began. Commander Vandenburg was absolutely furious, and promptly started to grill all his men. However, it was soon clear that the saboteur—if you could call him that—had been back on Earth. The bomb had been prepared there and shipped ready for immediate use. It did not take long to find, and fire, the engineer who had carried out the substitution. He couldn’t have cared less, since his financial needs had been taken care of for a good many years to come.

As for the experiment itself, it was completely successful from the scientific point of view; all the recording instruments worked perfectly as they analysed the light from the unexpectedly shaped cloud. But we never let the Americans live it down, and I am afraid poor Captain Vandenburg was the one who suffered most. Before he came to the moon he was a confirmed teetotaller, and much of his refreshment came from a certain wasp-waisted bottle. But now, as a matter of principle, he can only drink beer—and he hates the stuff.

A Question of Residence

I have already described the—shall we say—jockeying for position before take-off on the first flight to the moon. As it turned out, the American, Russian, and British ships landed just about simultaneously. No one has ever explained, however, why the British ship came back nearly two weeks after the others.

Oh, I know the official story; I ought to, for I helped to concoct it. It is true as far as it goes, but it scarcely goes far enough.

On all counts, the joint expedition had been a triumphant success. There had been only one casualty, and in the manner of his death Vladimir Surov had made himself immortal. We had gathered knowledge that would keep the scientists of Earth busy for generations, and that would revolutionise almost all our ideas concerning the nature of the universe around us. Yes, our five months on the moon had been well spent, and we could go home to such welcomes as few heroes had ever had before.

However, there was still a good deal of tidying up to be done. The instruments that had been scattered all over the lunar landscape were still busily recording, and much of the information they gathered could not be automatically radioed back to Earth. There was no point in all three of the expedition staying on the moon to the last minute; the personnel of one would be sufficient to finish the job. But who would volunteer to be caretaker while the others went back to gain the glory? It was a difficult problem, but one that would have to be solved very soon.

As far as supplies were concerned, we had little to worry about. The automatic freight rockets could keep us provided with air, food, and water for as long as we wished to stay on the moon. We were all in good health, though a little tired. None of the anticipated psychological troubles had cropped up, perhaps because we had all been so busy on tasks of absorbing interest that we had had no time to worry about going crazy. But, of course, we all looked forward to getting back to Earth, and seeing our families again.

The first change of plan was forced upon us by the Ziolkovski being put out of commission when the ground beneath one of her landing legs suddenly gave way. The ship managed to stay upright, but the hull was badly twisted and the pressure cabin sprang dozens of leaks. There was much debate about on-the-spot repairs, but it was decided that it would be far too risky for her to take off in this condition. The Russians had no alternative but to thumb lifts back in the Goddard and the Endeavour; by using the Ziolkovski’s unwanted fuel, our ships would be able to manage the extra load. However, the return flight would be extremely cramped and uncomfortable for all concerned because everyone would have to eat and sleep in shifts.

Either the American or the British ship, therefore, would be the first back to Earth. During those final weeks, as the work of the expedition was brought to its close, relations between Commander Vandenburg and myself were somewhat strained. I even wondered if we ought to settle the matter by tossing for it….

Another problem was also engaging my attention—that of crew discipline. Perhaps this is too strong a phrase; I would not like it to be thought that a mutiny ever seemed probable. But all my men were now a little abstracted and liable to be found, if off duty, scribbling furiously in corners. I knew exactly what was going on, for I was involved in it myself. There wasn’t a human being on the moon who had not sold exclusive rights to some newspaper or magazine, and we were all haunted by approaching deadlines. The radio-teletype to Earth was in continuous operation, sending tens of thousands of words a day, while ever larger slabs of deathless prose were being dictated over the speech circuits.

It was Professor Williams, our very practical-minded astronomer, who came to me one day with the answer to my main problem.

‘Skipper,’ he said, balancing himself precariously on the all-too-collapsible table I used as my working desk inside the igloo, ‘there’s no technical reason, is there, why we should get back to Earth first?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘merely a matter of fame, fortune, and seeing our families again. But I admit those aren’t technical reasons. We could stay here another year if Earth kept sending supplies. If you want to suggest that, however, I shall take great pleasure in strangling you.’

‘It’s not as bad as that. Once the main body has gone back, whichever party is left can follow in two or three weeks at the latest. They’ll get a lot of credit, in fact, for self-sacrifice, modesty, and similar virtues.’

‘Which will be very poor compensation for being second home.’

‘Right—we need something else to make it worthwhile. Some more material reward.’

‘Agreed. What do you suggest?’

Williams pointed to the calendar hanging on the wall in front of me, between the two pin-ups we had stolen from the Goddard. The length of our stay was indicated by the days that had been crossed off in red ink; a big question mark in two weeks’ time showed when the first ship would be heading back to Earth.

‘There’s your answer,’ he said. ‘If we go back then, do you realise what will happen? I’ll tell you.’

He did, and I kicked myself for not having thought of it first.

The next day, I explained my decision to Vandenburg and Krasnin.

‘We’ll stay behind and do the mopping up,’ I said. ‘It’s a matter of common sense. The Goddard’s a much bigger ship than ours and can carry an extra four people, while we can only manage two more, and even then it will be a squeeze. If you go first, Van, it will save a lot of people from eating their hearts out here for longer than necessary.’

‘That’s very big of you,’ replied Vandenburg. ‘I won’t hide the fact that we’ll be happy to get home. And it’s logical, I admit, now that the Ziolkovski’s out of action. Still, it means quite a sacrifice on your part, and I don’t really like to take advantage of it.’

I gave an expansive wave.

‘Think nothing of it,’ I answered. ‘As long as you boys don’t grab all the credit, we’ll take our turn. After all, we’ll have the show here to ourselves when you’ve gone back to Earth.’

Krasnin was looking at me with a rather calculating expression, and I found it singularly difficult to return his gaze.

‘I hate to sound cynical,’ he said, ‘but I’ve learned to be a little suspicious when people start doing big favours without very good reasons. And frankly, I don’t think the reason you’ve given is good enough. You wouldn’t have anything else up your sleeve, would you?’

‘Oh, very well,’ I sighed. ‘I’d hoped to get a little credit, but I see it’s no use trying to convince anyone of the purity of my motives. I’ve got a reason, and you might as well know it. But please don’t spread it around; I’d hate the folks back on Earth to be disillusioned. They still think of us as noble and heroic seekers after knowledge; let’s keep it that way, for all our sakes.’

Then I pulled out the calendar, and explained to Vandenburg and Krasnin what Williams had already explained to me. They listened with scepticism, then with growing sympathy.

‘I had no idea it was that bad,’ said Vandenburg at last.

‘Americans never have,’ I said sadly. ‘Anyway, that’s the way it’s been for half a century, and it doesn’t seem to get any better. So you agree with my suggestion?’

‘Of course. It suits us fine, anyhow. Until the next expedition’s ready, the moon’s all yours.’

I remembered that phrase, two weeks later, as I watched the Goddard blast up into the sky toward the distant, beckoning Earth. It was lonely, then, when the Americans and all but two of the Russians had gone. We envied them the reception they got, and watched jealously on the TV screens their triumphant processions through Moscow and New York. Then we went back to work, and bided our time. Whenever we felt depressed, we would do little sums on bits of paper and would be instantly restored to cheerfulness.

The red crosses marched across the calendar as the short terrestrial days went by—days that seemed to have very little connection with the slow cycle of lunar time. At last we were ready; all the instrument readings were taken, all the specimens and samples safely packed away aboard the ship. The motors roared into life, giving us for a moment the weight we would feel again when we were back in Earth’s gravity. Below us the rugged lunar landscape, which we had grown to know so well, fell swiftly away; within seconds we could see no sign at all of the buildings and instruments we had so laboriously erected and which future explorers would one day use.

The homeward voyage had begun. We returned to Earth in uneventful discomfort, joined the already half-dismantled Goddard beside Space Station Three, and were quickly ferried down to the world we had left seven months before.

Seven months: that, as Williams had pointed out, was the all-important figure. We had been on the moon for more than half a financial year—and for all of us, it had been the most profitable year of our lives.

Sooner or later, I suppose, this interplanetary loop-hole will be plugged; the Department of Inland Revenue is still fighting a gallant rear-guard action, but we seem neatly covered under Section 57, paragraph 8 of the Capital Gains Act of 1972. We wrote our books and articles on the moon—and until there’s a lunar government to impose income tax, we’re hanging on to every penny.

And if the ruling finally goes against us—well, there’s always Mars….

The Pacifist

First published in Fantastic Universe, October 1956

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

John Christopher and John Wyndham flit briefly across the stage as Harry Purvis spins another yarn at the White Hart, this time telling the story of a very early, ingenious computer virus…

I got to the ‘White Hart’ late that evening, and when I arrived everyone was crowded into the corner under the dartboard. All except Drew, that is: he had not deserted his post, but was sitting behind the bar reading the collected T. S. Eliot. He broke off from The Confidential Clerk long enough to hand me a beer and to tell me what was going on.

‘Eric’s brought in some kind of games machine—it’s beaten everybody so far. Sam’s trying his luck with it now.’

At that moment, a roar of laughter announced that Sam had been no luckier than the rest, and I pushed my way through the crowd to see what was happening.

On the table lay a flat metal box the size of a checkerboard, and divided into squares in a similar way. At the corner of each square was a two-way switch and a little neon lamp: the whole affair was plugged into the light socket (thus plunging the dartboard into darkness) and Eric Rodgers was looking round for a new victim.

‘What does the thing do?’ I asked.

‘It’s a modification of naughts and crosses—what the Americans call ticktacktoe. Shannon showed it to me when I was over at Bell Labs. What you have to do is to complete a path from one side of the board to the other—call it north to south—by turning these switches. Imagine the thing forms a grid of streets, if you like, and these neons are the traffic lights. You and the machine take turns making moves. The machine tries to block your path by building one of its own in the east-west direction—the little neons light up to tell you which way it wants to make a move. Neither track need be a straight line: you can zigzag as much as you like. All that matters is that the path must be continuous, and the one to get across the board first wins.’

‘Meaning the machine, I suppose?’

‘Well, it’s never been beaten yet.’

‘Can’t you force a draw, by blocking the machine’s path, so that at least you don’t lose?’

‘That’s what we’re trying: like to have a go?’

Two minutes later I joined the other unsuccessful contestants. The machine had dodged all my barriers and established its own track from east to west. I wasn’t convinced that it was unbeatable, but the game was clearly a good deal more complicated than it looked.

Eric glanced round his audience when I had retired. No one else seemed in a hurry to move forward.

‘Ha!’ he said. ‘The very man. What about you, Purvis? You’ve not had a shot yet.’

Harry Purvis was standing at the back of the crowd, with a faraway look in his eye. He jolted back to earth as Eric addressed him, but didn’t answer the question directly.

‘Fascinating things, these electronic computers,’ he mused. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t tell you this, but your gadget reminds me of what happened to Project Clausewitz. A curious story, and one very expensive to the American taxpayer.’

‘Look,’ said John Wyndham anxiously. ‘Before you start, be a good sport and let us get our glasses filled. Drew!’

This important matter having been attended to, we gathered round Harry. Only Charlie Willis still remained with the machine, hopefully trying his luck.

‘As you all know,’ began Harry, ‘Science with a capital S is a big thing in the military world these days. The weapons side—rockets, atom bombs and so on—is only part of it, though that’s all the public knows about. Much more fascinating, in my opinion, is the operational-research angle. You might say that’s concerned with brains rather than brute force. I once heard it defined as how to win wars without actually fighting, and that’s not a bad description.

‘Now you all know about the big electronic computers that cropped up like mushrooms in the 1950s. Most of them were built to deal with mathematical problems, but when you think about it you’ll realise that war itself is a mathematical problem. It’s such a complicated one that human brains can’t handle it—there are far too many variables. Even the greatest strategist cannot see the picture as a whole: the Hitlers and Napoleons always make a mistake in the end.

‘But a machine—that would be a different matter. A number of bright people realised this after the end of the war. The techniques that had been worked out in the building of ENLAC and the other big computers could revolutionise strategy.

‘Hence Project Clausewitz. Don’t ask me how I got to know about it, or press me for too many details. All that matters is that a good many megabucks worth of electronic equipment, and some of the best scientific brains in the United States, went into a certain cavern in the Kentucky hills. They’re still there, but things haven’t turned out exactly as they expected.

‘Now I don’t know what experience you have of high-ranking military officers, but there’s one type you’ll all come across in fiction. That’s the pompous, conservative, stick-in-the-mud careerist who’s got to the top by sheer pressure from beneath, who does everything by rules and regulations and regards civilians as, at the best, unfriendly neutrals. I’ll let you into a secret: he actually exists. He’s not very common nowadays, but he’s still around and sometimes it’s not possible to find a safe job for him. When that happens, he’s worth his weight in plutonium to the Other Side.

‘Such a character, it seems, was General Smith. No, of course that wasn’t his real name! His father was a senator, and although lots of people in the Pentagon had tried hard enough, the old man’s influence had prevented the General from being put in charge of something harmless, like the coast defence of Wyoming. Instead, by miraculous misfortune, he had been made the officer responsible for Project Clausewitz.

‘Of course, he was only concerned with the administrative, not the scientific aspects of the work. All might yet have been well had the General been content to let the scientists get on with their work while he concentrated on saluting smartness, the coefficient of reflection of barrack floors, and similar matters of military importance. Unfortunately, he didn’t.

‘The General had led a sheltered existence. He had, if I may borrow from Wilde (everybody else does), been a man of peace, except in his domestic life. He had never met scientists before, and the shock was considerable. So perhaps it is not fair to blame him for everything that happened.

‘It was a considerable time before he realised the aims and objects of Project Clausewitz, and when he did he was quite disturbed. This may have made him feel even less friendly towards his scientific staff, for despite anything I may have said the General was not entirely a fool. He was intelligent enough to understand that, if the Project succeeded, there might be more ex-generals around than even the combined boards of management of American industry could comfortably absorb.

‘But let’s leave the General for a minute and have a look at the scientists. There were about fifty of them, as well as a couple of hundred technicians. They’d all been carefully screened by the F.B.I., so probably not more than half a dozen were active members of the Communist party. Though there was a lot of talk of sabotage later, for once in a while the comrades were completely innocent. Besides, what happened certainly wasn’t sabotage in any generally accepted meaning of the word….

‘The man who had really designed the computer was a quiet little mathematical genius who had been swept out of college into the Kentucky hills and the world of Security and Priorities before he’d really realised what had happened. He wasn’t called Dr Milquetoast, but he should have been and that’s what I’ll christen him.

‘To complete our cast of characters, I’d better say something about Karl. At this stage in the business, Karl was only half-built. Like all big computers, most of him consisted of vast banks of memory units which could receive and store information until it was needed. The creative part of Karl’s brain—the analysers and integrators—took this information and operated on it, to produce answers to the questions he was asked. Given all the relevant facts, Karl would produce the right answers. The problem, of course, was to see that Karl did have all the facts—he couldn’t be expected to get the right results from inaccurate or insufficient information.

‘It was Dr Milquetoast’s responsibility to design Karl’s brain. Yes, I know that’s a crudely anthropomorphic way of looking at it, but no one can deny that these big computers have personalities. It’s hard to put it more accurately without getting technical, so I’ll simply say that little Milquetoast had to create the extremely complex circuits that enabled Karl to think in the way he was supposed to do.

‘So here are our three protagonists—General Smith, pining for the days of Custer; Dr Milquetoast, lost in the fascinating scientific intricacies of his job; and Karl, fifty tons of electronic gear, not yet animated by the currents that would soon be coursing through him.

‘Soon—but not soon enough for General Smith. Let’s not be too hard on the General: someone had probably put the pressure on him, when it became obvious that the Project was falling behind schedule. He called Dr Milquetoast into his office.

‘The interview lasted more than thirty minutes, and the Doctor said less than thirty words. Most of the time the General was making pointed remarks about production times, deadlines and bottlenecks. He seemed to be under the impression that building Karl differed in no important particular from the assembly of the current model Ford: it was just a question of putting the bits together. Dr Milquetoast was not the sort of man to explain the error, even if the General had given him the opportunity. He left, smarting under a considerable sense of injustice.

‘A week later, it was obvious that the creation of Karl was falling still further behind schedule. Milquetoast was doing his best, and there was no one who could do better. Problems of a complexity totally beyond the General’s comprehension had to be met and mastered. They were mastered, but it took time, and time was in short supply.

‘At his first interview, the General had tried to be as nice as he could, and had succeeded in being merely rude. This time, he tried to be rude, with results that I leave to your imagination. He practically insinuated that Milquetoast and his colleagues, by falling behind their deadlines, were guilty of un-American inactivity.

‘From this moment onwards, two things started to happen. Relations between the Army and the scientists grew steadily worse; and Dr Milquetoast, for the first time, began to give serious thought to the wider implications of his work. He had always been too busy, too engaged upon the immediate problems of his task, to consider his social responsibilities. He was still too busy now, but that didn’t stop him pausing for reflection. “Here am I,” he told himself, ‘one of the best pure mathematicians in the world—and what am I doing? What’s happened to my thesis on Diophantine equations? When am I going to have another smack at the prime-number theorem? In short, when am I going to do some real work again?”

‘He could have resigned, but that didn’t occur to him. In any case, far down beneath that mild and diffident exterior was a stubborn streak. Dr Milquetoast continued to work, even more energetically than before. The construction of Karl proceeded slowly but steadily: the final connections in his myriad-celled brain was soldered; the thousands of circuits were checked and tested by the mechanics.

‘And one circuit, indistinguishably interwoven among its multitude of companions and leading to a set of memory cells apparently identical with all the others, was tested by Dr Milquetoast alone, for no one else knew that it existed.

‘The great day came. To Kentucky, by devious routes, came very important personages. A whole constellation of multi-starred generals arrived from the Pentagon. Even the Navy had been invited.

‘Proudly, General Smith led the visitors from cavern to cavern, from memory banks to selector networks to matrix analysers to input tables—and finally to the rows of electric typewriters on which Karl would print the results of his deliberations. The General knew his way around quite well: at least, he got most of the names right. He even managed to give the impression, to those who knew no better, that he was largely responsible for Karl.

‘“Now,” said the General cheerfully. “Let’s give him some work to do. Anyone like to set him a few sums?”

‘At the word “sums” the mathematicians winced, but the General was unaware of his faux pas. The assembled brass thought for a while: then someone said daringly, “What’s nine multiplied by itself twenty times?”

‘One of the technicians, with an audible sniff, punched a few keys. There was a rattle of gunfire from an electric typewriter, and before anyone could blink twice the answer had appeared—all twenty digits of it.’

(I’ve looked it up since: for anyone who wants to know, it’s:

12157665459056928801

But let’s get back to Harry and his tale.)

‘For the next fifteen minutes Karl was bombarded with similar trivialities. The visitors were impressed, though there was no reason to suppose that they’d have spotted it if all the answers had been completely wrong.

‘The General gave a modest cough. Simple arithmetic was as far as he could go, and Karl had barely begun to warm up. “I’ll now hand you over,” he said, “to Captain Winkler.”

‘Captain Winkler was an intense young Harvard graduate whom the General distrusted, rightly suspecting him to be more a scientist than a military man. But he was the only officer who really understood what Karl was supposed to do, or could explain exactly how he set about doing it. He looked, the General thought grumpily, like a damned schoolmaster as he started to lecture the visitors.

‘The tactical problem that had been set up was a complicated one, but the answer was already known to everybody except Karl. It was a battle that had been fought and finished almost a century before, and when Captain Winkler concluded his introduction, a general from Boston whispered to his aide, “I’ll bet some damn Southerner has fixed it so that Lee wins this time.” Everyone had to admit, however, that the problem was an excellent way of testing Karl’s capabilities.

‘The punched tapes disappeared into the capacious memory units: patterns of lights flickered and flashed across the registers; mysterious things happened in all directions.

‘“This problem,” said Captain Winkler primly, “will take about five minutes to evaluate.”

‘As if in deliberate contradiction, one of the typewriters promptly started to chatter. A strip of paper shot out of the feed, and Captain Winkler, looking rather puzzled at Karl’s unexpected alacrity, read the message. His lower jaw immediately dropped six inches, and he stood staring at the paper as if unable to believe his eyes.

‘“What is it, man?” barked the General.

‘Captain Winkler swallowed hard, but appeared to have lost the power of speech. With a snort of impatience, the General snatched the paper from him. Then it was his turn to stand paralysed, but unlike his subordinate he also turned a most beautiful red. For a moment he looked like some tropical fish strangling out of water: then, not without a slight scuffle, the enigmatic message was captured by the five-star general who out-ranked everybody in the room.

‘His reaction was totally different. He promptly doubled up with laughter.

‘The minor officers were left in a state of infuriating suspense for quite ten minutes. But finally the news filtered down through colonels to captains to lieutenants, until at last there wasn’t a G.I. in the establishment who did not know the wonderful news.

‘Karl had told General Smith that he was a pompous baboon. That was all.

‘Even though everybody agreed with Karl, the matter could hardly be allowed to rest there. Something, obviously, had gone wrong. Something—or someone—had diverted Karl’s attention from the Battle of Gettysburg.

‘“Where,” roared General Smith, finally recovering his voice, “is Dr Milquetoast?”

‘He was no longer present. He had slipped quietly out of the room, having witnessed his great moment. Retribution would come later, of course, but it was worth it.

‘The frantic technicians cleared the circuits and started running tests. They gave Karl an elaborate series of multiplications and divisions to perform—the computer’s equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Everything seemed to be functioning perfectly. So they put in a very simple tactical problem, which a lieutenant, j.g. could solve in his sleep.

‘Said Karl: “Go jump in a lake, General.”

‘It was then that General Smith realised that he was confronted with something outside the scope of Standard Operating Procedure. He was faced with mechanical mutiny, no less.

‘It took several hours of tests to discover exactly what had happened. Somewhere tucked away in Karl’s capacious memory units was a superb collection of insults, lovingly assembled by Dr Milquetoast. He had punched on tape, or recorded in patterns of electrical impulses, everything he would like to have said to the General himself. But that was not all he had done: that would have been too easy, not worthy of his genius. He had also installed what could only be called a censor circuit—he had given Karl the power of discrimination. Before solving it, Karl examined every problem fed to him. If it was concerned with pure mathematics, he co-operated and dealt with it properly. But if it was a military problem—out came one of the insults. After twenty minutes, he had not repeated himself once, and the WACs had already had to be sent out of the room.

‘It must be confessed that after a while the technicians were almost as interested in discovering what indignity Karl would next heap upon General Smith as they were in finding the fault in the circuits. He had begun with mere insults and surprising genealogical surmises, but had swiftly passed on to detailed instructions the mildest of which would have been highly prejudicial to the General’s dignity, while the more imaginative would have seriously imperiled his physical integrity. The fact that all these messages, as they emerged from the typewriters, were immediately classified TOP SECRET was small consolation to the recipient. He knew with a glum certainty that this would be the worse-kept secret of the Cold War, and that it was time he looked round for a civilian occupation.

‘And there, gentlemen,’ concluded Purvis, ‘the situation remains. The engineers are still trying to unravel the circuits that Dr Milquetoast installed, and no doubt it’s only a matter of time before they succeed. But meanwhile Karl remains an unyielding pacifist. He’s perfectly happy playing with the theory of numbers, computing tables of powers, and handling arithmetical problems generally. Do you remember the famous toast. “Here’s to pure mathematics—may it never be of any use to anybody”? Karl would have seconded that….

‘As soon as anyone attempts to slip a fast one across him, he goes on strike. And because he’s got such a wonderful memory, he can’t be fooled. He has half the great battles of the world stored up in his circuits, and can recognise at once any variations on them. Though attempts were made to disguise tactical exercises as problems in mathematics, he could spot the subterfuge right away. And out would come another billet-doux for the General.

‘As for Dr Milquetoast, no one could do much about him because he promptly had a nervous breakdown. It was suspiciously well timed, but he could certainly claim to have earned it. When last heard of he was teaching matrix algebra at a theological college in Denver. He swears he’s forgotten everything that had ever happened while he was working on Karl. Maybe he was even telling the truth….’

There was a sudden shout from the back of the room.

‘I’ve won!’ cried Charles Willis. ‘Come and see!’

We all crowded under the dartboard. It seemed true enough. Charlie had established a zigzag but continuous track from one side of the checkerboard to the other, despite the obstacles the machine had tried to put in his way.

‘Show us how you did it,’ said Eric Rodgers.

Charlie looked embarrassed.

‘I’ve forgotten,’ he said. ‘I didn’t make a note of all the moves.’

A sarcastic voice broke in from the background.

‘But I did,’ said John Christopher. ‘You were cheating—you made two moves at once.’

After that, I’m sorry to say, there was some disorder, and Drew had to threaten violence before peace was restored. I don’t know who really won the squabble, and I don’t think it matters. For I’m inclined to agree with what Purvis remarked as he picked up the robot checkerboard and examined its wiring.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘this little gadget is only a simple-minded cousin of Karl’s—and look what it’s done already. All these machines are beginning to make us look fools. Before long they’ll start to disobey us without any Milquetoast interfering with their circuits. And then they’ll start ordering us about—they’re logical, after all, and won’t stand any nonsense.’

He sighed. ‘When that happens, there won’t be a thing we can do about it. We’ll just have to say to the dinosaurs: “Move over a bit—here comes Homo sap!” And the transister shall inherit the earth.’

There was no time for further pessimistic philosophy, for the door opened and Police Constable Wilkins stuck his head in. ‘Where’s the owner of CGC 571?’ he asked testily. ‘Oh—it’s you, Mr Purvis. Your rear light’s out.’

Harry looked at me sadly, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it’s started already.’ And he went out into the night.

The Reluctant Orchid

First published in Satellite, December 1956

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

One might expect a story about a carnivorous orchid to have only one possible ending, but when the storyteller is Harry Purvis, and the venue is the White Hart, nothing is quite as it seems, and thus it proves with this story, which first saw the light of day in Satellite.

Though few people in the ‘White Hart’ will concede that any of Harry Purvis’s stories are actually true everyone agrees that some are much more probable than others. And on any scale of probability, the affair of the Reluctant Orchid must rate very low indeed.

I don’t remember what ingenious gambit Harry used to launch this narrative: maybe some orchid fancier brought his latest monstrosity into the bar, and that set him off. No matter. I do remember the story, and after all that’s what counts.

The adventure did not, this time, concern any of Harry’s numerous relatives, and he avoided explaining just how he managed to know so many of the sordid details. The hero—if you can call him that—of this hothouse epic was an inoffensive little clerk named Hercules Keating. And if you think that is the most unlikely part of the story, just stick round a while.

Hercules is not the sort of name you can carry off lightly at the best of times, and when you are four foot nine and look as if you’d have to take a physical-culture course before you can even become a ninety-seven-pound weakling, it is a positive embarrassment. Perhaps it helped to explain why Hercules had very little social life, and all his real friends grew in pots in a humid conservatory at the bottom of his garden. His needs were simple and he spent very little money on himself; consequently his collection of orchids and cacti was really rather remarkable. Indeed, he had a wide reputation among the fraternity of cactophiles, and often received from remote corners of the globe parcels smelling of mould and tropical jungles.

Hercules had only one living relative, and it would have been hard to find a greater contrast than Aunt Henrietta. She was a massive six-footer, usually wore a rather loud line in Harris tweeds, drove a Jaguar with reckless skill, and chain-smoked cigars. Her parents had set their hearts on a boy, and had never been able to decide whether or not their wish had been granted. Henrietta earned a living, and quite a good one, breeding dogs of various shapes and sizes. She was seldom without a couple of her latest models, and they were not the type of portable canine which ladies like to carry in their handbags. The Keating Kennels specialised in great Danes, Alsatians, and Saint Bernards….

Henrietta, rightly despising men as the weaker sex, had never married. However, for some reason she took an avuncular (yes, that is definitely the right word) interest in Hercules, and called to see him almost every weekend. It was a curious kind of relationship: probably Henrietta found that Hercules bolstered up her feelings of superiority. If he was a good example of the male sex, then they were certainly a pretty sorry lot. Yet, if this was Henrietta’s motivation, she was unconscious of it and seemed genuinely fond of her nephew. She was patronising, but never unkind.

As might be expected, her attentions did not exactly help Hercules’ own well-developed inferiority complex. At first he had tolerated his aunt; then he came to dread her regular visits, her booming voice and her bone-crushing handshake; and at last he grew to hate her. Eventually, indeed, his hate was the dominant emotion of his life, exceeding even his love for his orchids. But he was careful not to show it, realising that if Aunt Henrietta discovered how he felt about her, she would probably break him in two and throw the pieces to her wolf pack.

There was no way, then, in which Hercules could express his pent-up feelings. He had to be polite to Aunt Henrietta even when he felt like murder. And he often did feel like murder, though he knew that there was nothing he would ever do about. Until one day…

According to the dealer, the orchid came from ‘somewhere in the Amazon region’—a rather vague postal address. When Hercules first saw it, it was not a very prepossessing sight, even to anyone who loved orchids as much as he did. A shapeless root, about the size of a man’s fist—that was all. It was redolent of decay, and there was the faintest hint of a rank, carrion smell. Hercules was not even sure that it was viable, and told the dealer as much. Perhaps that enabled him to purchase it for a trifling sum, and he carried it home without much enthusiasm.

It showed no signs of life for the first month, but that did not worry Hercules. Then, one day, a tiny green shoot appeared and started to creep up to the light. After that, progress was rapid. Soon there was a thick, fleshy stem as big as a man’s forearm, and coloured a positively virulent green. Near the top of the stem a serious of curious bulges circled the plant: otherwise it was completely featureless. Hercules was now quite excited: he was sure that some entirely new species had swum into his ken.

The rate of growth was now really fantastic: soon the plant was taller than Hercules, not that that was saying a great deal. Moreover, the bulges seemed to be developing, and it looked as if at any moment the orchid would burst into bloom. Hercules waited anxiously, knowing how short-lived some flowers can be, and spent as much time as he possibly could in the hothouse. Despite all his watchfulness, the transformation occurred one night while he was asleep.

In the morning, the orchid was fringed by a series of eight dangling tendrils, almost reaching to the ground. They must have developed inside the plant and emerged with—for the vegetable world—explosive speed. Hercules stared at the phenomenon in amazement, and went very thoughtfully to work.

That evening, as he watered the plant and checked its soil, he noticed a still more peculiar fact. The tendrils were thickening, and they were not completely motionless. They had a slight but unmistakable tendency to vibrate, as if possessing a life of their own. Even Hercules, for all his interest and enthusiasm, found this more than a little disturbing.

A few days later, there was no doubt about it at all. When he approached the orchid, the tendrils swayed towards him in an unpleasantly suggestive fashion. The impression of hunger was so strong that Hercules began to feel very uncomfortable indeed, and something started to nag at the back of his mind. It was quite a while before he could recall what it was: then he said to himself, ‘Of course! How stupid of me!’ and went along to the local library. Here he spent a most interesting half hour rereading a little piece by one H. G. Wells entitled ‘The Flowing of the Strange Orchid’.

‘My goodness!’ thought Hercules, when he had finished the tale. As yet there had been no stupefying odour which might overpower the plant’s intended victim, but otherwise the characteristics were all too similar. Hercules went home in a very unsettled mood indeed.

He opened the conservatory door and stood looking along the avenue of greenery towards his prize specimen. He judged the length of the tendrils—already he found himself calling them tentacles—with great care and walked to within what appeared a safe distance. The plant certainly had an impression of alertness and menace far more appropriate to the animal than the vegetable kingdom. Hercules remembered the unfortunate history of Doctor Frankenstein, and was not amused.

But, really, this was ridiculous! Such things didn’t happen in real life. Well, there was one way to put matters to the test….

Hercules went into the house and came back a few minutes later with a broomstick, to the end of which he had attached a piece of raw meat. Feeling a considerable fool, he advanced towards the orchid as a lion tamer might approach one of his charges at mealtime.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then two of the tendrils developed an agitated twitch. They began to sway back and forth, as if the plant was making up its mind. Abruptly, they whipped out with such speed that they practically vanished from view. They wrapped themselves round the meat, and Hercules felt a powerful tug at the end of his broomstick. Then the meat was gone: the orchid was clutching it, if one may mix metaphors slightly, to its bosom.

‘Jumping Jehosophat!’ yelled Hercules. It was very seldom indeed that he used such strong language.

The orchid showed no further signs of life for twenty-four hours. It was waiting for the meat to become high, and it was also developing its digestive system. By the next day, a network of what looked like short roots had covered the still visible chunk of meat. By nightfall, the meat was gone.

The plant had tasted blood.

Hercules’ emotions as he watched over his prize were curiously mixed. There were times when it almost gave him nightmares, and he foresaw a whole range of horrid possibilities. The orchid was now extremely strong, and if he got within its clutches he would be done for. But, of course, there was not the slightest danger of that. He had arranged a system of pipes so that it could be watered from a safe distance, and its less orthodox food he simply tossed within range of its tentacles. It was now eating a pound of raw meat a day, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that it could cope with much larger quantities if given the opportunity.

Hercules’ natural qualms were, on the whole, outweighed by his feeling of triumph that such a botanical marvel had fallen into his hands. Whenever he chose, he could become the most famous orchid-grower in the world. It was typical of his somewhat restricted viewpoint that it never occurred to him that other people besides orchid fanciers might be interested in his pet.

The creature was now about six feet tall, and apparently still growing—though much more slowly than it had been. All the other plants had been moved from its end of the conservatory, not so much because Hercules feared that it might be cannibalistic as to enable him to tend them without danger. He had stretched a rope across the central aisle so that there was no risk of his accidentally walking within range of those eight dangling arms.

It was obvious that the orchid had a highly developed nervous system, and something very nearly approaching intelligence. It knew when it was going to be fed, and exhibited unmistakable signs of pleasure. Most fantastic of all—though Hercules was still not sure about this—it seemed capable of producing sounds. There were times, just before a meal, when he fancied he could hear an incredibly high-pitched whistle, skirting the edge of audibility. A newborn bat might have had such a voice: he wondered what purpose it served. Did the orchid somehow lure its prey into its clutches by sound? If so, he did not think the technique would work on him.

While Hercules was making these interesting discoveries, he continued to be fussed over by Aunt Henrietta and assaulted by her hounds, which were never as house-trained as she claimed them to be. She would usually roar up the street on a Sunday afternoon with one dog in the seat beside her and another occupying most of the baggage compartment. Then she would bound up the steps two at a time, nearly deafen Hercules with her greeting, half paralyse him with her handshake, and blow cigar smoke in his face. There had been a time when he was terrified that the would kiss him, but he had long since realised that such effeminate behaviour was foreign to her nature.

Aunt Henrietta looked upon Hercules’ orchids with some scorn. Spending one’s spare time in a hothouse was, she considered a very effete recreation. When she wanted to let off steam, she went big-game hunting in Kenya. This did nothing to endear her to Hercules, who hated blood sports. But despite his mounting dislike for his overpowering aunt, every Sunday afternoon he dutifully prepared tea for her and they had a tête-à-tête together which, on the surface at least, seemed perfectly friendly. Henrietta never guessed that as he poured the tea Hercules often wished it was poisoned: she was, far down beneath her extensive fortifications, a fundamentally goodhearted person and the knowledge would have upset her deeply.

Hercules did not mention his vegetable octopus to Aunt Henrietta. He had occasionally shown her his most interesting specimens, but this was something he was keeping to himself. Perhaps, even before he had fully formulated his diabolical plan, his subconscious was already preparing the ground….

It was late one Sunday evening, when the roar of the Jaguar had died away into the night and Hercules was restoring his shattered nerves in the conservatory, that the idea first came fully fledged into his mind. He was staring at the orchid, noting how the tendrils were now as thick around as a man’s thumb, when a most pleasing fantasy suddenly flashed before his eyes. He pictured Aunt Henrietta struggling helplessly in the grip of the monster, unable to escape from its carnivorous clutches. Why, it would be the perfect crime. The distraught nephew would arrive on the scene too late to be of assistance, and when the police answered his frantic call they would see at a glance that the whole affair was a deplorable accident. True, there would be an inquest, but the coroner’s censure would be toned down in view of Hercules’ obvious grief….

The more he thought of the idea, the more he liked it. He could see no flaws, as long as the orchid co-operated. That, clearly, would be the greatest problem. He would have to plan a course of training for the creature. It already looked sufficiently diabolical; he must give it a disposition to suit its appearance.

Considering that he had no prior experience in such matters, and that there were no authorities he could consult, Hercules proceeded along very sound and businesslike lines. He would use a fishing rod to dangle pieces of meat just outside the orchid’s range, until the creature lashed its tentacles in a frenzy. At such times its high-pitched squeak was clearly audible, and Hercules wondered how it managed to produce the sound. He also wondered what its organs of perception were, but this was yet another mystery that could not be solved without close examination. Perhaps Aunt Henrietta, if all went well, would have a brief opportunity of discovering these interesting facts—though she would probably be too busy to report them for the benefit of posterity.

There was no doubt that the beast was quite powerful enough to deal with its intended victim. It had once wrenched a broomstick out of Hercules’ grip, and although that in itself proved very little, the sickening ‘crack’ of the wood a moment later brought a smile of satisfaction to its trainer’s thin lips. He began to be much more pleasant and attentive to his aunt. In every respect, indeed, he was the model nephew.

When Hercules considered that his picador tactics had brought the orchid into the right frame of mind, he wondered if he should test it with live bait. This was a problem that worried him for some weeks, during which time he would look speculatively at every dog or cat he passed in the street, but he finally abandoned the idea, for a rather peculiar reason. He was simply too kindhearted to put it into practice. Aunt Henrietta would have to be the first victim.

He starved the orchid for two weeks before he put his plan into action. This was as long as he dared risk—he did not wish to weaken the beast—merely to whet its appetite that the outcome of the encounter might be more certain. And so, when he had carried the teacups back into the kitchen and was sitting upwind of Aunt Henrietta’s cigar, he said casually: I’ve got something I’d like to show you, Auntie. I’ve been keeping it as a surprise. It’ll tickle you to death.’

That, he thought, was not a completely accurate description, but it gave the general idea.

Auntie took the cigar out of her mouth and looked at Hercules with frank surprise.

‘Well!’ she boomed. ‘Wonders will never cease! What have you been up to, you rascal!’ She slapped him playfully on the back and shot all the air out of his lungs.

‘You’ll never believe it,’ gritted Hercules, when he had recovered his breath. ‘It’s in the conservatory.’

‘Eh?’ said Auntie, obviously puzzled.

‘Yes—come along and have a look. It’s going to create a real sensation.’

Auntie gave a snort that might have indicated disbelief, but followed Hercules without further question. The two Alsatians now busily chewing up the carpet looked at her anxiously and half rose to their feet, but she waved them away.

‘All right, boys,’ she ordered gruffly. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Hercules thought this unlikely.

It was a dark evening, and the lights in the conservatory were off. As they entered, Auntie snorted, ‘Gad, Hercules—the place smells like a slaughterhouse. Haven’t met such a stink since I shot that elephant in Bulawayo and we couldn’t find it for a week.’

‘Sorry, Auntie,’ apologised Hercules, propelling her forward through the gloom. ‘It’s a new fertiliser I’m using. It produces the most stunning results. Go on—another couple of yards. I want this to be a real surprise.’

‘I hope this isn’t a joke,’ said Auntie suspiciously, as she stomped forward.

‘I can promise you it’s no joke,’ replied Hercules, standing with his hand on the light switch. He could just see the looming bulk of the orchid: Auntie was now within ten feet of it. He waited until she was well inside the danger zone, and threw the switch.

There was a frozen moment while the scene was transfixed with light. Then Aunt Henrietta ground to a halt and stood, arms akimbo, in front of the giant orchid. For a moment Hercules was afraid she would retreat before the plant could get into action: then he saw that she was calmly scrutinising it, unable to make up her mind what the devil it was.

It was a full five seconds before the orchid moved. Then the dangling tentacles flashed into action—but not in the way that Hercules had expected. The plant clutched them tightly, protectively, around itself—and at the same time it gave a high-pitched scream of pure terror. In a moment of sickening disillusionment, Hercules realised the awful truth.

His orchid was an utter coward. It might be able to cope with the wild life of the Amazon jungle, but coming suddenly upon Aunt Henrietta had completely broken its nerve.

As for its proposed victim, she stood watching the creature with an astonishment which swiftly changed to another emotion. She spun around on her heels and pointed an accusing finger at her nephew.

‘Hercules!’ she roared. ‘The poor thing’s scared to death. Have you been bullying it?’

Hercules could only stand with his head hanging low in shame and frustration.

‘No—no, Auntie,’ he quavered. ‘I guess it’s naturally nervous.’

‘Well, I’m used to animals. You should have called me before. You must treat them firmly—but gently. Kindness always works, as long as you show them you’re the master. There, there, did-dums—don’t be frightened of Auntie—she won’t hurt you….’

It was, thought Hercules to his blank despair, a revolting sight. With surprising gentleness, Aunt Henrietta fussed over the beast, patting and stroking it until the tentacles relaxed and the shrill, whistling scream died away. After a few minutes of this pandering, it appeared to get over its fright. Hercules finally fled with a muted sob when one of the tentacles crept forward and began to stroke Henrietta’s gnarled fingers.

From that day, he was a broken man. What was worse, he could never escape from the consequences of his intended crime. Henrietta had acquired a new pet, and was liable to call not only at weekends but two or three times in between as well. It was obvious that she did not trust Hercules to treat the orchid properly, and still suspected him of bullying it. She would bring tasty tidbits that even her dogs had rejected, but which the orchid accepted with delight. The smell, which had so far been confined to the conservatory, began to creep into the house….

And there, concluded Harry Purvis, as he brought this improbable narrative to a close, the matter rests—to the satisfaction of two, at any rate, of the parties concerned. The orchid is happy, and Aunt Henrietta has something (query, someone?) else to dominate. From time to time the creature has a nervous breakdown when a mouse gets loose in the conservatory, and she rushes to console it.

As for Hercules, there is no chance that he will ever give any more trouble to either of them. He seems to have sunk into a kind of vegetable sloth: indeed, said Harry thoughtfully, every day he becomes more and more like an orchid himself.

The harmless variety, of course….

Moving Spirit

First published in Tales from the White Hart

In this tale from the White Hart, Harry Purvis introduces us to a ‘genuine mad scientist’ living in an out-of-the-way part of Cornwall, which is coincidentally where ‘Charles Willis’—or should I say Arthur C. Clarke—spent part of his wartime service.

We were discussing a sensational trial at the Old Bailey when Harry Purvis, whose talent for twisting the conversation to his own ends is really unbelievable, remarked casually: ‘I was once an expert witness in a rather interesting case.’

‘Only a witness?’ said Drew, as he deftly filled two glasses of Bass at once.

‘Yes—but it was a rather close thing. It was in the early part of the war, about the time we were expecting the invasion. That’s why you never heard about it at the time.’

‘What makes you assume,’ said Charles Willis suspiciously, ‘that we never did hear of it?’

It was one of the few times I’d ever seen Harry caught trying to cover up his tracks. ‘Qui s’excuse s’accuse,’ I thought to myself, and waited to see what evading action he’d take.

‘It was such a peculiar case,’ he replied with dignity, ‘that I’m sure you’d have reminded me of it if you ever saw the reports. My name was featured quite prominently. It all happened in an out-of-the-way part of Cornwall, and it concerned the best example of that rare species, the genuine mad scientist, that I’ve ever met.’

Perhaps that wasn’t really a fair description, Purvis amended hastily. Homer Ferguson was eccentric and had little foibles like keeping a pet boa constrictor to catch the mice, and never wearing shoes around the house. But he was so rich that no one noticed things like this.

Homer was also a competent scientist. Many years ago he had graduated from Edinburgh University, but having plenty of money he had never done a stroke of real work in his life. Instead, he pottered round the old vicarage he’d bought not far from Newquay and amused himself building gadgets. In the last forty years he’d invented television, ball-point pens, jet propulsion, and a few other trifles. However, as he had never bothered to take out any patents, other people had got the credit. This didn’t worry him in the least, as he was of a singularly generous disposition, except with money.

It seemed that, in some complicated way, Purvis was one of his few living relatives. Consequently when Harry received a telegram one day requesting his assistance at once, he knew better than to refuse. No one knew exactly how much money Homer had or what he intended to do with it. Harry thought he had as good a chance as anyone, and he didn’t intend to jeopardise it. At some inconvenience he made the journey down to Cornwall and turned up at the Vicarage.

He saw what was wrong as soon as he entered the grounds. Uncle Homer (he wasn’t really an uncle, but he’d been called that as long as Harry could remember) had a shed beside the main building which he used for his experiments. That shed was now minus roof and windows, and a sickly odour hovered around it. There had obviously been an explosion, and Harry wondered, in a disinterested sort of way, if Uncle had been badly injured and wanted advice on drawing up a new will.

He ceased daydreaming when the old man, looking the picture of health (apart from some sticking plaster on his face) opened the door for him.

‘Good of you come so quickly,’ he boomed. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Harry. Then his face clouded over. ‘Fact is, my boy, I’m in a bit of a jam and I want you to help. My case comes up before the local Bench tomorrow.’

This was a considerable shock. Homer had been as law-abiding a citizen as any motorist in petrol-rationed Britain could be expected to be. And if it was the usual black-market business, Harry didn’t see how he could be expected to help.

‘Sorry to hear about this, Uncle. What’s the trouble?’

‘It’s a long story. Come into the library and we’ll talk it over.’

Homer Ferguson’s library occupied the entire west wing of the somewhat decrepit building. Harry believed that bats nested in the rafters, but he had never been able to prove it. When Homer had cleared a table by the simple expedient of tilting all the books off onto the floor, he whistled three times, a voice-operated relay tripped somewhere, and a gloomy Cornish voice drifted out of a concealed loud-speaker.

‘Yes, Mr Ferguson?’

‘Maida, send across a bottle of the new whisky.’

There was no reply except an audible sniff. But a moment later there came a creaking and clanking, and a couple of square feet of library shelving slid aside to reveal a conveyor belt.

‘I can’t get Maida to come into the library,’ complained Homer, lifting out a loaded tray. ‘She’s afraid of Boanerges, though he’s perfectly harmless.’

Harry found it hard not to feel some sympathy for the invisible Maida. All six feet of Boanerges was draped over the case holding the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a bulge amidships indicated that he had dined recently.

‘What do you think of the whisky?’ asked Homer when Harry had sampled some and started to gasp for breath.

‘It’s—well, I don’t know what to say. It’s—phew—rather strong. I never thought—’

‘Oh, don’t take any notice of the label on the bottle. This brand never saw Scotland. And that’s what all the trouble’s about. I made it right here on the premises.’

‘Uncle!’

‘Yes, I know it’s against the law, and all that sort of nonsense. But you can’t get any good whisky these days—it all goes for export. It seemed to me that I was being patriotic making my own, so that there was more left over for the dollar drive. But the Excise people don’t see it that way.’

‘I think you’d better let me have the whole story,’ said Harry. He was gloomily sure that there was nothing he could do to get his uncle out of this scrape.

Homer had always been fond of the bottle, and wartime shortages had hit him badly. He was also, as has been hinted, disinclined to give away money, and for a long time he had resented the fact that he had to pay a tax of several hundred per cent on a bottle of whisky. When he couldn’t get his own supply any more, he had decided it was time to act.

The district he was living in probably had a good deal to do with his decision. For some centuries, the Customs and Excise had waged a never-ending battle with the Cornish fisherfolk. It was rumoured that the last incumbent of the old vicarage had possessed the finest cellar in the district next to that of the Bishop himself—and had never paid a penny in duty on it. So Uncle Homer merely felt he was carrying on an old and noble tradition.

There was little doubt, moreover, that the spirit of pure scientific enquiry also inspired him. He felt sure that this business about being aged in the wood for seven years was all rubbish, and was confident that he could do a better job with ultrasonics and ultraviolet rays.

The experiment went well for a few weeks. But late one evening there was one of those unfortunate accidents that will happen even in the best-conducted laboratories, and before Uncle knew what had happened, he was draped over a beam, while the grounds of the vicarage were littered with pieces of copper tubing.

Even then it would not have mattered much had not the local Home Guard been practising in the neighbourhood. As soon as they heard the explosion, they immediately went into action, Sten guns at the ready. Had the invasion started? If so, they’d soon fix it.

They were a little disappointed to discover that it was only Uncle, but as they were used to his experiments they weren’t in the least surprised at what had happened. Unfortunately for Uncle, the Lieutenant in charge of the squad happened to be the local exciseman, and the combined evidence of his nose and his eyes told him the story in a flash.

‘So tomorrow,’ said Uncle Homer, looking rather like a small boy who had been caught stealing candy, ‘I have to go up before the Bench, charged with possessing an illegal still.’

‘I should have thought,’ replied Harry, ‘that was a matter for the Assizes, not the local magistrates.’

‘We do things our own way here,’ answered Homer, with more than a touch of pride. Harry was soon to discover how true this was.

They got little sleep that night, as Homer outlined his defence, overcame Harry’s objections, and hastily assembled the apparatus he intended to produce in court.

‘A Bench like this,’ he explained, ‘is always impressed by experts. If we dared, I’d like to say you were someone from the War Office, but they could check up on that. So we’ll just tell them the truth—about our qualifications, that is.’

‘Thank you,’ said Harry. ‘And suppose my college finds out what I’m doing?’

‘Well, you won’t claim to be acting for anyone except yourself. The whole thing is a private venture.’

‘I’ll say it is,’ said Harry.

The next morning they loaded their gear into Homer’s ancient Austin, and drove into the village. The Bench was sitting in one of the classrooms of the local school, and Harry felt that time had rolled back a few years and he was about to have an unpleasant interview with his old headmaster.

‘We’re in luck,’ whispered Homer, as they were ushered into their cramped seats. ‘Major Fotheringham is in the Chair. He’s a good friend of mine.’

That would help a lot, Harry agreed. But there were two other justices on the bench as well, and one friend in court would hardly be sufficient. Eloquence, not influence, was the only thing that could save the day.

The courtroom was crowded, and Harry found it surprising that so many people had managed to get away from work long enough to watch the case. Then he realised the local interest that it would have aroused, in view of the fact that—in normal times, at least—smuggling was a major industry in these parts. He was not sure whether that would mean a sympathetic audience. The natives might well regard Homer’s form of private enterprise as unfair competition. On the other hand, they probably approved on general principles with anything that put the excisemen’s noses out of joint.

The charge was read by the Clerk of the Court, and the somewhat damning evidence produced. Pieces of copper tubing were solemnly inspected by the justices, each of whom in turn looked severely at Uncle Homer. Harry began to see his hypothetical inheritance becoming even more doubtful.

When the case for the prosecution was completed, Major Fotheringham turned to Homer.

‘This appears to be a serious matter, Mr Ferguson. I hope you have a satisfactory explanation.’

‘I have your Honour,’ replied the defendant in a tone that practically reeked of injured innocence. It was amusing to see his Honour’s look of relief, and the momentary frown, quickly replaced by calm confidence, that passed across the face of H.M. Customs and Excise.

‘Do you wish to have a legal representative? I notice that you have not brought one with you.’

‘It won’t be necessary. The whole case is founded on such a trivial misunderstanding that it can be cleared up without complications like that. I don’t wish to incur the prosecution in unnecessary costs.’

This frontal onslaught brought a murmur from the body of the Court, and a flush to the cheeks of the Customs man. For the first time he began to look a little unsure of himself. If Ferguson thought the Crown would be paying costs, he must have a pretty good case. Of course, he might only be bluffing.

Homer waited until the mild stir had died away before creating a considerably greater one.

‘I have called a scientific expert to explain what happened at the Vicarage,’ he said. ‘And owing to the nature of the evidence, I must ask, for security reasons, that the rest of the proceedings be in camera.’

‘You want me to clear the Court?’ said the Chairman incredulously.

‘I am afraid so, sir. My colleague, Dr Purvis, feels that the fewer people concerned in this case, the better. When you have heard the evidence, I think you will agree with him. If I might say so, it is a great pity that it has already attracted so much publicity. I am afraid it may bring certain—ah—confidential matters to the wrong ears.’

Homer glared at the Customs officer, who fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat.

‘Oh, very well,’ said Major Fotheringham. ‘This is all very irregular, but we live in irregular times. Mr Clerk, clear the Court.’

After some grumbling and confusion, and an overruled protest from the prosecution, the order was carried out. Then, under the interested gaze of the dozen people left in the room, Harry Purvis uncovered the apparatus he had unloaded from the baby Austin. After his qualifications had been presented to the court, he took the witness stand.

‘I wish to explain, your Honour,’ he began, ‘that I have been engaged on explosives research, and that is why I happen to be acquainted with the defendant’s work.’ The opening part of this statement was perfectly true. It was about the last thing said that day that was.

‘You mean—bombs and so forth?’

‘Precisely, but on a fundamental level. We are always looking for new and better types of explosives, as you can imagine. Moreover, we in government research and the academic world are continually on the lookout for good ideas from outside sources. And quite recently, Unc—er, Mr Ferguson, wrote to us with a most interesting suggestion for a completely new type of explosive. The interesting thing about it was that it employed nonexplosive materials such as sugar, starch and so on.’

‘Eh?’ said the Chairman. ‘A non-explosive explosive? That’s impossible.’

Harry smiled sweetly.

‘I know, sir—that is one’s immediate reaction. But like most great ideas, this has the simplicity of genius. I am afraid, however, that I shall have to do a little explaining to make my point.’

The Bench looked very attentive, and also a little alarmed. Harry surmised that it had probably encountered expert witnesses before. He walked over to a table that had been set up in the middle of the courtroom, and which was now covered with flasks, piping, and bottles of liquids.

‘I hope, Dr Purvis,’ said the Chairman nervously, ‘that you’re not going to do anything dangerous.’

‘Of course not, sir. I merely wish to demonstrate some basic scientific principles. Once again, I wish to stress the importance of keeping this between these four walls.’ He paused solemnly and everyone looked duly impressed.

‘Mr Ferguson,’ he began, ‘is proposing to tap one of the fundamental forces of Nature. It is a force on which every living thing depends—a force, gentlemen, which keeps you alive even though you, may never have heard of it.’

He moved over to the table and took up his position beside the flasks and bottles.

‘Have you ever stopped to consider,’ he said, ‘how the sap manages to reach the highest leaf of a tall tree? It takes a lot of force to pump water a hundred—sometimes over three hundred—feet from the ground. Where does that force come from? I’ll show you with this practical example.

‘Here I have a strong container divided into two parts by a porous membrane. On one side of the membrane is pure water—on the other, a concentrated solution of sugar and other chemicals which I do not propose to specify. Under these condition, a pressure is set up, known as osmotic pressure. The pure water tries to pass through the membrane, as if to dilute the solution on the other side. I’ve now sealed the container, and you’ll notice the pressure gauge here on the right—see how the pointer’s going up. That’s osmotic pressure for you. This same force acts through the cell walls in our bodies, causing fluid movement. It drives the sap up the trunks of trees, from the roots to the topmost branches. It’s a universal force, and a powerful one. To Mr Ferguson must go the credit of first attempting to harness it.’

Harry paused impressively and looked round the court.

‘Mr Ferguson,’ he said, ‘was attempting to develop the Osmotic Bomb.’

It took some time for this to sink in. Then Major Fotheringham leaned forward and said in a hushed voice, ‘Are we to presume that he had succeeded in manufacturing this bomb, and that it exploded in his workshop?’

‘Precisely, your Honour. It is a pleasure—an unusual pleasure, I might say—to present a case to so perspicacious a court. Mr Ferguson had succeeded, and he was preparing to report his method to us when, owing to an unfortunate oversight, a safety device attached to the bomb failed to operate. The results, you all know. I think you will need no further evidence of the power of this weapon—and you will realise its importance when I point out that the solutions it contains are all extremely common chemicals.’

Major Fotheringham, looking a little puzzled, turned to the prosecution lawyer.

‘Mr Whiting,’ he said, ‘have you any questions to ask the witness?’

‘I certainly have, your Honour. I’ve never heard such a ridiculous—’

‘You will please confine yourself to questions of fact.’

‘Very good, your Honour. May I ask the witness how he accounts for the large quantity of alcohol vapour immediately after the explosion?’

‘I rather doubt if the inspector’s nose was capable of accurate quantitative analysis. But admittedly there was some alcohol vapour released. The solution used in the bomb contained about twenty-five per cent. By employing dilute alcohol, the mobility of the inorganic ions is restricted and the osmotic pressure raised—a desirable effect, of course.’

That should hold them for a while, thought Harry. He was right. It was a good couple of minutes before the second question. Then the prosecution’s spokeman waved one of the pieces of copper tubing in the air.

‘What function did these carry out?’ he said, in as nasty a tone of voice as he could manage. Harry affected not to notice the sneer.

‘Manometer tubing for the pressure gauges,’ he replied promptly.

The Bench, it was clear, was already far out of its depth. This was just where Harry wanted it to be. But the prosecution still had one card up its sleeve. There was a furtive whispering between the excisemen and his legal eagle. Harry looked nervously at Uncle Homer, who shrugged his shoulders with a ‘Don’t ask me!’ gesture.

‘I have some additional evidence I wish to present to the Court,’ said the Customs lawyer briskly, as a bulky brown paper parcel was hoisted onto the table.

‘Is this in order, your Honour?’ protested Harry. ‘All evidence against my—ah—colleague should already have been presented.’

‘I withdraw my statement,’ the lawyer interjected swiftly. ‘Let us say that this is not evidence for this case, but material for later proceedings.’ He paused ominously to let that sink in. ‘Nevertheless, if Mr Ferguson can give a satisfactory answer to our question now, this whole business can be cleared up right away.’ It was obvious that the last thing the speaker expected—or hoped for—was such a satisfactory explanation.

He unwrapped the brown paper, and there were three bottles of a famous brand of whisky.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Uncle Homer. ‘I was wondering—’

‘Mr Ferguson,’ said the Chairman of the Bench. ‘There is no need for you to make any statement unless you wish.’

Harry Purvis shot Major Fotheringham a grateful glance. He guessed what had happened. The prosecution had, when prowling through the ruins of Uncle’s laboratory, acquired some bottles of his home-brew. Their action was probably illegal, since they would not have had a search warrant—hence the reluctance in producing the evidence. The case had seemed sufficiently clear-cut without it.

It certainly appeared pretty clear-cut now….

‘These bottles,’ said the representative of the Crown, ‘do not contain the brand advertised on the label. They have obviously been used as convenient receptacles for the defendant’s—shall we say—chemical solutions.’ He gave Harry Purvis an unsympathetic glance. ‘We have had these solutions analysed, with most interesting results. Apart from an abnormally high alcohol concentration, the contents of these bottles are virtually indistinguishable from—’

He never had time to finish his unsolicited and certainly unwanted testimonial to Uncle Homer’s skill. For at that moment, Harry Purvis became aware of an ominous whistling sound. At first he thought it was a falling bomb—but that seemed unlikely, as there had been no air-raid warning. Then he realised that the whistling came from close at hand; from the courtroom table, in fact….

‘Take cover!’ he yelled.

The Court went into recess with a speed never matched in the annals of British law. The three justices disappeared behind the dais; those in the body of the room burrowed into the floor or sheltered under desks. For a protracted, anguished moment nothing happened, and Harry wondered if he had given a false alarm. Then there was a dull, peculiarly muffled explosion, a great tinkling of glass—and a smell like a blitzed brewery. Slowly, the court emerged from shelter.

The Osmotic Bomb had proved its power. More important still, it had destroyed the evidence for the prosecution.

The Bench was none too happy about dismissing the case; it felt, with good reason, that its dignity had been assailed. Moreover, each one of the justices would have to do some fast talking when he got home: the mist of alcohol had penetrated everything. Though the Clerk of the Court rushed round opening windows (none of which, oddly enough, had been broken) the fumes seemed reluctant to disperse. Harry Purvis, as he removed pieces of bottle glass from his hair, wondered if there would be some intoxicated pupils in class tomorrow.

Major Fotheringham, however, was undoubtedly a real sport, and as they filed out of the devastated courtroom, Harry heard him say to his uncle: ‘Look here, Ferguson—it’ll be ages before we can get those Molotov cocktails we’ve been promised by the War Office. What about making some of these bombs of yours for the Home Guard? If they don’t knock out a tank, at least they’ll make the crew drunk and incapable.’

‘I’ll certainly think about it, Major,’ replied Uncle Homer, who still seemed a little dazed by the turn of events.

He recovered somewhat as they drove back to the Vicarage along the narrow, winding lanes with their high walls of unmortared stone.

‘I hope, Uncle,’ remarked Harry, when they had reached a relatively straight stretch and it seemed safe to talk to the driver, ‘That you don’t intend to rebuild that still. They’ll be watching you like hawks and you won’t get away with it again.’

‘Very well,’ said Uncle, a little sulkily. ‘Confound these brakes! I had them fixed only just before the war!’

‘Hey!’ cried Harry. ‘Watch out!’

It was too late. They had come to a crossroads at which a brand new HALT sign had been erected. Uncle braked hard, but for a moment nothing happened. Then the wheels on the left seized up, while those on the right continued gaily spinning. The car did a hairpin bend, luckily without turning over, and ended in the ditch pointing in the direction from which it had come.

Harry looked reproachfully at his uncle. He was about to frame a suitable reprimand when a motorcycle came out of the side-turning and drew up to them.

It was not going to be their lucky day, after all. The village police sergeant had been lurking in ambush, waiting to catch motorists at the new sign. He parked his machine by the roadside and leaned in through the window of the Austin.

‘You all right, Mr Ferguson?’ he said. Then his nose wrinkled up, and he looked like Jove about to deliver a thunderbolt. ‘This won’t do,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to put you on a charge. Driving under the influence is a very serious business.’

‘But I’ve not touched a drop all day!’ protested Uncle, waving an alcohol-sodden sleeve under the sergeant’s twitching nose.

‘Do you expect me to believe that?’ snorted the irate policeman, pulling out his notebook. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come to the station with me. Is your friend sober enough to drive?’

Harry Purvis didn’t answer for a moment. He was too busy beating his head against the dashboard.

‘Well,’ we asked Harry. ‘What did they do to your uncle?’

‘Oh, he got fined five pounds and had his licence endorsed for drunken driving. Major Fotheringham wasn’t in the Chair, unfortunately, when the case came up, but the other two justices were still on the Bench. I guess they felt that even if he was innocent this time, there was a limit to everything.’

‘And did you ever get any of his money?’

‘No fear! He was very grateful, of course, and he’s told me that I’m mentioned in his will. But when I saw him last, what do you think he was doing? He was searching for the Elixir of Life.’

Harry sighed at the overwhelming injustice of things.

‘Sometimes,’ he said gloomily, ‘I’m afraid he’s found it. The doctors say he’s the healthiest seventy-year-old they’ve ever seen. So all I got out of the whole affair was some interesting memories and a hang-over.’

‘A hang-over?’ asked Charlie Willis.

‘Yes,’ replied Harry, a faraway look in his eye. ‘You see, the excisemen hadn’t seized all the evidence. We had to—ah—destroy the rest. It took us the best part of a week. We invented all sorts of things during that time—but we never discovered what they were.’

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

First published in Tales from the White Hart

An unusual story from the White Hart, in which Harry Purvis seemingly meets his match when his wife discovers the location of his ‘quantum mechanics lectures’. It also chronicles the move from the ‘White Hart’ to the ‘Sphere’, matching the move from the White Horse to the Globe, following the landlord, Lew Mordecai.

And now I have a short, sad duty to perform. One of the many mysteries about Harry Purvis—who was so informative in every other direction—was the existence or otherwise of a Mrs Purvis. It was true that he wore no wedding ring, but that means little nowadays. Almost as little, as an hotel proprietor will tell you, as does the reverse.

In a number of his tales, Harry had shown distinct evidence of some hostility towards what a Polish friend of mine, whose command of English did not match his gallantry, always referred to as ladies of the female sex. And it was by a curious coincidence that the very last story he ever told us first indicated, and then proved conclusively, Harry’s marital status.

I do not know who brought up the word ‘defenestration,’ which is not, after all, one of the most commonly used abstractions in the language. It was probably one of the alarmingly erudite younger members of the ‘White Hart’ clientele; some of them are just out of college, and so make us old-timers feel very callow and ignorant. But from the word, the discussion naturally passed to the deed. Had any of us ever been defenestrated? Did we know anyone who had?

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It happened to a verbose lady I once knew. She was called Ermintrude, and was married to Osbert Inch, a sound engineer at the BBC.

‘Osbert spent all his working hours listening to other people talking, and most of his free time listening to Ermintrude. Unfortunately, he couldn’t switch her off at the turn of a knob, and so he very seldom had a chance of getting a word in edgeways.

‘There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation. Ermintrude would start as soon as she woke up, change gear so that she could hear herself speak above the eight o’clock news, and continue unabated until Osbert thankfully left for work. A couple of years of this had almost reduced him to a nervous wreck, but one morning when his wife was handicapped by a long overdue attack of laryngitis he made a spirited protest against her vocal monopoly.

‘To his incredulous disbelief, she flatly refused to accept the charge. It appeared that to Ermintrude, time ceased to exist when she was talking—but she became extremely restive when anyone else held the stage. As soon as she had recovered her voice, she told Osbert how unfair it was of him to make such an unfounded accusation, and the argument would have been very acrimonious—if it had been possible to have an argument with Ermintrude at all.

‘This made Osbert an angry and also a desperate man. But he was an ingenious one, too, and it occurred to him that he could produce irrefutable evidence that Ermintrude talked a hundred words for every syllable he was able to utter. I mentioned that he was a sound engineer, and his room was fitted up with hi-fi set, tape recorder, and the usual electronic tools of his trade, some of which the BBC had unwittingly supplied.

‘It did not take him very long to construct a piece of equipment which one might call a Selective Word Counter. If you know anything about audio engineering you’ll appreciate how it could be done with suitable filters and dividing circuits—and if you don’t, you’ll have to take it for granted. What the apparatus did was simply this: a microphone picked up every word spoken in the Inch apartment. Osbert’s deeper tones went one way and registered on a counter marked ‘His,’ and Ermintrude’s higher frequencies went the other direction and ended up on the counter marked ‘Hers’.

‘Within an hour of switching on, the score was as follows:

His

23

Hers

2,530

‘As the numbers flicked across the counter dials, Ermintrude became more and more thoughtful and at the same time more and more silent. Osbert, on the other hand, drinking the heady wine of victory (though to anyone else it would have looked like his morning cup of tea) began to make the most of his advantage and became quite talkative. By the time he had left for work, the counters had reflected the changing status in the household:

His

1,043

Hers

3,397

‘Just to show who was now the boss, Osbert left the apparatus switched on; he had always wondered if Ermintrude talked to herself as a purely automatic reflex even when there was no one around to hear what she was saying. He had, by the way, thoughtfully taken the precaution of putting a lock on the Counter so that his wife couldn’t turn it off while he was out.

‘He was a little disappointed to find that the figures were quite unaltered when he came home that evening, but thereafter the score soon started to mount again. It became a kind of game—though a deadly serious one—with each of the protagonists keeping one eye on the machine whenever either of them said a word. Ermintrude was clearly discomfited: ever and again she would suffer a verbal relapse and increase her score by a couple of hundred before she brought herself to a halt by a supreme effort of self-control. Osbert, who still had such a lead that he could afford to be garrulous, amused himself by making occasional sardonic comments which were well worth the expenditure of a few-score points.

‘Although a measure of equality had been restored in the Inch household, the Word Counter had, if anything, increased the state of dissension. Presently Ermintrude, who had a certain natural intelligence which some people might have called craftiness, made an appeal to her husband’s better nature. She pointed out that neither of them was really behaving naturally while every word was being monitored and counted; Osbert had unfairly let her get ahead and was now being taciturn in a way that he would never have been had he not got that warning score continuously before his eyes. Though Osbert gagged at the sheer effrontery of this charge, he had to admit that the objection did contain an element of truth. The test would be fairer and more conclusive if neither of them could see the accumulating score—if, indeed, they forgot all about the presence of the machine and so behaved perfectly naturally, or at least as naturally as they could in the circumstances.

‘After much argument they came to a compromise. Very sportingly, in his opinion, Osbert reset the dials to zero and sealed up the Counter windows so that no one could take a peek at the scores. They agreed to break the wax seals—on which they had both impressed their fingerprints—at the end of the week, and to abide by the decision. Concealing the microphone under a table, Osbert moved the Counter equipment itself into his little workshop, so that the living room now bore no sign of the implacable electronic watchdog that was controlling the destiny of the Inches.

‘Thereafter, things slowly returned to normal. Ermintrude became as talkative as ever, but now Osbert didn’t mind in the least because he knew that every word she uttered was being patiently noted to be used as evidence against her. At the end of the week, his triumph would be complete. He could afford to allow himself the luxury of a couple of hundred words a day, knowing that Ermintrude used up this allowance in five minutes.

‘The breaking of the seals was performed ceremonially at the end of an unusually talkative day, when Ermintrude had repeated verbatim three telephone conversations of excruciating banality which, it seemed, had occupied most of her afternoon. Osbert had merely smiled and said “Yes, dear” at ten-minute intervals, meanwhile trying to imagine what excuse his wife would put forward when confronted by the damning evidence.

‘Imagine, therefore, his feelings when the seals were removed to disclose the week’s total:

His

143,567

Hers

32,590

‘Osbert stared at the incredible figures with stunned disbelief. Something had gone wrong—but where? There must, he decided, have been a fault in the apparatus. It was annoying, very annoying, for he knew perfectly well that Ermintrude would never let him live it down, even if he proved conclusively that the Counter had gone haywire.

‘Ermintrude was still crowing victoriously when Osbert pushed her out of the room and started to dismantle his errant equipment. He was halfway through the job when he noticed something in his wastepaper basket which he was sure he hadn’t put there. It was a closed loop of tape, a couple of feet long, and he was quite unable to account for its presence as he had not used the tape recorder for several days. He picked it up, and as he did so suspicion exploded into certainty.

‘He glanced at the recorder; the switches, he was quite sure, were not as he had left them. Ermintrude was crafty, but she was also careless. Osbert had often complained that she never did a job properly, and here was the final proof.

‘His den was littered with old tapes carrying unerased test passages he had recorded; it had been no trouble at all for Ermintrude to locate one, snip off a few words, stick the ends together, switch to “Playback” and leave the machine running hour after hour in front of the microphone. Osbert was furious with himself for not having thought of so simple a ruse; if the tape had been strong enough, he would probably have strangled Ermintrude with it.

‘Whether he tried to do anything of the sort is still uncertain. All we know is that she went out of the apartment window, and of course it could have been an accident—but there was no way of asking her, as the Inches lived four storeys up.

‘I know that defenestration is usually deliberate, and the Coroner had some pointed words to say on the subject. But nobody could prove that Osbert pushed her, and the whole thing soon blew over. About a year later he married a charming little deaf-and-dumb girl, and they’re one of the happiest couples I know.’

There was a long pause when Harry had finished, whether out of disbelief or out of respect for the late Mrs Inch it would be hard to say. But before anyone could make a suitable comment, the door was thrown open and a formidable blonde advanced into the private bar of the ‘White Hart’.

It is seldom indeed that life arranges its climaxes as neatly as this. Harry Purvis turned very pale and tried, in vain, to hide himself in the crowd. He was instantly spotted and pinned down beneath a barrage of invective.

‘So this,’ we heard with interest, ‘is where you’ve been giving your Wednesday evening lectures on quantum mechanics! I should have checked up with the University years ago! Harry Purvis, you’re a liar, and I don’t mind if everybody knows it. And as for your friends’—she gave us all a scathing look—‘it’s a long time since I’ve seen such a scruffy lot of tipplers.’

‘Hey, just a minute!’ protested Drew from the other side of the counter. She quelled him with a glance, then turned upon poor Harry again.

‘Come along,’ she said, ‘you’re going home. No, you needn’t finish that drink! I’m sure you’ve already had more than enough.’

Obediently, Harry Purvis picked up his briefcase and coat.

‘Very well, Ermintrude,’ he said meekly.

I will not bore you with the long and still unsettled arguments as to whether Mrs Purvis really was called Ermintrude, or whether Harry was so dazed that he automatically applied the name to her. We all have our theories about that, as indeed we have about everything concerning Harry. All that matters now is the sad and indisputable fact that no one has ever seen him since that evening.

It is just possible that he doesn’t know where we meet nowadays, for a few months later the ‘White Hart’ was taken over by a new management and we all followed Drew lock, stock and barrel—particularly barrel—to his new establishment. Our weekly sessions now take place at the ‘Sphere’, and for a long time many of us used to look up hopefully when the door opened to see if Harry had managed to escape and find his way back to us. It is, indeed, partly in the hope that he will see this book and hence discover our new location that I have gathered these tales together.

Even those who never believed a word you spoke miss you, Harry. If you have to defenestrate Ermintrude to regain your freedom, do it on a Wednesday evening between six and eleven, and there’ll be forty people in the ‘Sphere’ who’ll provide you with an alibi. But get back somehow; things have never been quite the same since you went.

The Ultimate Melody

First published in If, February 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

Have you ever noticed that, when there are twenty or thirty people talking together in a room, there are occasional moments when everyone becomes suddenly silent, so that for a second there’s a sudden, vibrating emptiness that seems to swallow up all sound? I don’t know how it affects other people, but when it happens it makes me feel cold all over. Of course, the whole thing’s merely caused by the laws of probability, but somehow it seems more than a mere coinciding of conversational pauses. It’s almost as if everybody is listening for something—they don’t know what. At such moments I say to myself:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…

That’s how I feel about it, however cheerful the company in which it happens. Yes, even if it’s in the ‘White Hart’.

It was like that one Wednesday evening when the place wasn’t quite as crowded as usual. The silence came, as unexpectedly as it always does. Then, probably in a deliberate attempt to break that unsettling feeling of suspense, Charlie Willis started whistling the latest hit tune. I don’t even remember what it was. I only remember that it triggered off one of Harry Purvis’s most disturbing stories.

‘Charlie,’ he began, quietly enough, ‘that darn tune’s driving me mad. I’ve heard it every time I’ve switched on the radio for the last week.’

There was a sniff from John Christopher.

‘You ought to stay tuned to the Third Programme. Then you’d be safe.’

‘Some of us,’ retorted Harry, ‘don’t care for an exclusive diet of Elizabethan madrigals. But don’t let’s quarrel about that, for heaven’s sake. Has it ever occurred to you that there’s something rather—fundamental—about hit tunes?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, they come along out of nowhere, and then for weeks everybody’s humming them, just as Charlie did then. The good ones grab hold of you so thoroughly that you just can’t get them out of your head—they go round and round for days. And then, suddenly, they’ve vanished again.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Art Vincent. ‘There are some melodies that you can take or leave, but others stick like treacle, whether you want them or not.’

‘Precisely. I got saddled that way for a whole week with the big theme from the finale of Sibelius Two—even went to sleep with it running round inside my head. Then there’s that “Third Man” piece—da di da di daa dida didaa… look what that did to everybody.’

Harry had to pause for a moment until his audience had stopped zithering. When the last ‘Plonk!’ had died away he continued:

‘Precisely! You all felt the same way. Now what is there about these tunes that has this effect? Some of them are great music, other just banal—but they’ve obviously got something in common.’

‘Go on,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re waiting.’

‘I don’t know what the answer is,’ replied Harry. ‘And what’s more, I don’t want to. For I know a man who found out.’

Automatically, someone handed him a beer, so that the tenor of his tale would not be disturbed. It always annoyed a lot of people when he had to stop in mid-flight for a refill.

‘I don’t know why it is,’ said Harry Purvis, ‘that most scientists are interested in music, but it’s an undeniable fact. I’ve known several large labs that had their own amateur symphony orchestras—some of them quite good, too. As far as the mathematicians are concerned, one can think of obvious reasons for this fondness: music, particularly classical music, has a form which is almost mathematical. And then, of course, there’s the underlying theory—harmonic relations, wave analysis, frequency distribution, and so on. It’s a fascinating study in itself, and one that appeals strongly to the scientific mind. Moreover, it doesn’t—as some people might think—preclude a purely aesthetic appreciation of music for its own sake.

‘However, I must confess that Gilbert Lister’s interest in music was purely cerebral. He was, primarily, a physiologist, specialising in the study of the brain. So when I said that his interest was cerebral, I meant it quite literally. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and the Choral Symphony were all the same to him. He wasn’t concerned with the sounds themselves, but only what happened when they got past the ears and started doing things to the brain.

‘In an audience as well educated as this,’ said Harry, with an emphasis that made it sound positively insulting, ‘there will be no one who’s unaware of the fact that much of the brain’s activity is electrical. There are, in fact, steady pulsing rhythms going on all the time, and they can be detected and analysed by modern instruments. This was Gilbert Lister’s line of territory. He could stick electrodes on your scalp and his amplifiers would draw your brain waves on yards of tape. Then he could examine them and tell you all sorts of interesting things about yourself. Ultimately, he claimed, it would be possible to identify anyone from their encephalogram—to use the correct term—more positively than by fingerprints. A man might get a surgeon to change his skin, but if we ever got to the stage when surgery could change your brain—well, you’d have turned into somebody else, anyway, so the system still wouldn’t have failed.

‘It was while he was studying the alpha, beta and other rhythms in the brain that Gilbert got interested in music. He was sure that there must be some connection between musical and mental rhythms. He’d play music at various tempos to his subjects and see what effect it had on their normal brain frequencies. As you might expect, it had a lot, and the discoveries he made led Gilbert on into more philosophical fields.

‘I only had one good talk with him about his theories. It was not that he was at all secretive—I’ve never met a scientist who was, come to think of it—but he didn’t like to talk about his work until he knew where it was leading. However, what he told me was enough to prove that he’d opened up a very interesting line of territory, and thereafter I made rather a point of cultivating him. My firm supplied some of his equipment, but I wasn’t averse to picking up a little profit on the side. It occurred to me that if Gilbert’s ideas worked out, he’d need a business manager before you could whistle the opening bar of the Fifth Symphony….

‘For what Gilbert was trying to do was to lay a scientific foundation for the theory of hit tunes. Of course, he didn’t think of it that way: he regarded it as a pure research project, and didn’t look any further ahead than a paper in the Proceedings of the Physical Society. But I spotted its financial implications at once. They were quite breath-taking.

‘Gilbert was sure that a great melody, or a hit tune, made its impression on the mind because in some way it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain. One analogy he used was “It’s like a Yale key going into a lock—the two patterns have got to fit before anything happens.”

‘He tackled the problem from two angles. In the first place, he took hundreds of the really famous tunes in classical and popular music and analysed their structure—their morphology, as he put it. This was done automatically, in a big harmonic analyser that sorted out all the frequencies. Of course, there was a lot more to it than this, but I’m sure you’ve got the basic idea.

‘At the same time, he tried to see how the resulting patterns of waves agreed with the natural electrical vibrations of the brain. Because it was Gilbert’s theory—and this is where we get into rather deep philosophical waters—that all existing tunes were merely crude approximations to one fundamental melody. Musicians had been groping for it down the centuries, but they didn’t know what they were doing, because they were ignorant of the relation between music and mind. Now that this had been unravelled, it should be possible to discover the Ultimate Melody.’

‘Huh!’ said John Christopher. ‘It’s only a rehash of Plato’s theory of ideals. You know—all the objects of our material world are merely crude copies of the ideal chair or table or what-have-you. So your friend was after the ideal melody. And did he find it?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ continued Harry imperturbably. ‘It took Gilbert about a year to complete his analysis, and then he started on the synthesis. To put it crudely, he built a machine that would automatically construct patterns of sound according to the laws that he’d uncovered. He had banks of oscillators and mixers—in fact, he modified an ordinary electronic organ for this part of the apparatus—which were controlled by his composing machine. In the rather childish way that scientists like to name their offspring, Gilbert had called this device Ludwig.

‘Maybe it helps to understand how Ludwig operated if you think of him as a kind of kaleidoscope, working with sound rather than light. But he was a kaleidoscope set to obey certain laws, and those laws—so Gilbert believed—were based on the fundamental structure of the human mind. If he could get the adjustments correct, Ludwig would be bound, sooner or later, to arrive at the Ultimate Melody as he searched through all the possible patterns of music.

‘I had one opportunity of hearing Ludwig at work, and it was uncanny. The equipment was the usual nondescript mess of electronics which one meets in any lab: it might have been a mock-up of a new computer, a radar gunsight, a traffic-control system, or a ham radio. It was very hard to believe that, if it worked, it would put every composer in the world out of business. Or would it? Perhaps not: Ludwig might be able to deliver the raw material, but surely it would still have to be orchestrated.

‘Then the sound started to come from the speaker. At first it seemed to me that I was listening to the five-finger exercises of an accurate but completely uninspired pupil. Most of the themes were quite banal: the machine would play one, then ring the changes on it bar after bar until it had exhausted all the possibilities before going on to the next. Occasionally a quite striking phrase would come up, but on the whole I was not at all impressed.

‘However, Gilbert explained that this was only a trial run and that the main circuits had not yet been set up. When they were, Ludwig would be far more selective: at the moment, he was playing everything that came along—he had no sense of discrimination. When he had acquired that, then the possibilities were limitless.

‘That was the last time I ever saw Gilbert Lister. I had arranged to meet him at the lab about a week later, when he expected to have made substantial progress. As it happened, I was about an hour late for my appointment. And that was very lucky for me….

‘When I got there, they had just taken Gilbert away. His lab assistant, an old man who’d been with him for years, was sitting distraught and disconsolate among the tangled wiring of Ludwig. It took me a long time to discover what had happened, and longer still to work out the explanation.

‘There was no doubt of one thing. Ludwig had finally worked. The assistant had gone off to lunch while Gilbert was making the final adjustments, and when he came back an hour later the laboratory was pulsing with one long and very complex melodic phrase. Either the machine had stopped automatically at that point, or Gilbert had switched it over to REPEAT. At any rate, he had been listening, for several hundred times at least, to that same melody. When his assistant found him, he seemed to be in a trance. His eyes were open yet unseeing, his limbs rigid. Even when Ludwig was switched off, it made no difference. Gilbert was beyond help.

‘What had happened? Well, I suppose we should have thought of it, but it’s so easy to be wise after the event. It’s just as I said at the beginning. If a composer, working merely by rule of thumb, can produce a melody which can dominate our mind for days on end, imagine the effect of the Ultimate Melody for which Gilbert was searching! Supposing it existed—and I’m not admitting that it does—it would form an endless ring in the memory circuits of the mind. It would go round and round forever, obliterating all other thoughts. All the cloying melodies of the past would be mere ephemerae compared to it. Once it had keyed into the brain, and distorted the circling wave forms which are the physical manifestations of consciousness itself—that would be the end. And that is what happened to Gilbert.

‘They’ve tried shock therapy—everything. But it’s no good; the pattern has been set, and it can’t be broken. He’s lost all consciousness of the outer world, and has to be fed intravenously. He never moves or reacts to external stimuli, but sometimes, they tell me, he twitches in a peculiar way, as if he is beating time….

‘I’m afraid there’s no hope for him. Yet I’m not sure if his fate is a horrible one, or whether he should be envied. Perhaps, in a sense, he’s found the ultimate reality that philosophers like Plato are always talking about. I really don’t know. And sometimes I find myself wondering just what that infernal melody was like, and almost wishing that I’d been able to hear it perhaps once. There might have been some way of doing it in safety: remember how Ulysses listened to the song of the sirens and got away with it…? But there’ll never be a chance now, of course.’

‘I was waiting for this,’ said Charles Willis nastily. ‘I suppose the apparatus blew up, or something, so that as usual there’s no way of checking your story.’

Harry gave him his best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look.

‘The apparatus was quite undamaged,’ he said severely. ‘What happened next was one of those completely maddening things for which I shall never stop blaming myself. You see, I’d been too interested in Gilbert’s experiment to look after my firm’s business in the way that I should. I’m afraid he’d fallen badly behind with his payments, and when the Accounts Department discovered what had happened to him they acted quickly. I was only off for a couple of days on another job, and when I got back, do you know what had happened? They’d pushed through a court order, and had seized all their property. Of course that had meant dismantling Ludwig: when I saw him next he was just a pile of useless junk. And all because of a few pounds! It made me weep.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ said Eric Maine. ‘But you’ve forgotten Loose End Number Two. What about Gilbert’s assistant? He went into the lab while the gadget was going full blast. Why didn’t it get to him, too? You’ve slipped up there, Harry.’

H. Purvis, Esquire, paused only to drain the last drops from his glass and to hand it silently across to Drew.

‘Really!’ he said. ‘Is this a cross-examination? I didn’t mention the point because it was rather trivial. But it explains why I was never able to get the slightest inkling of the nature of that melody. You see, Gilbert’s assistant was a first-rate lab technician, but he’d never been able to help much with the adjustments to Ludwig. For he was one of those people who are completely tone-deaf. To him, the Ultimate Melody meant no more than a couple of cats on a garden wall.’

Nobody asked any more questions: we all, I think, felt the desire to commune with our thoughts. There was a long, brooding silence before the ‘White Hart’ resumed its usual activities. And even then, I noticed, it was every bit of ten minutes before Charlie started whistling ‘La Ronde’ again.

The Next Tenants

First published in Satellite, February 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

‘The number of mad scientists who wish to conquer the world,’ said Harry Purvis, looking thoughtfully at his beer, ‘has been grossly exaggerated. In fact, I can remember encountering only a single one.’

‘Then there couldn’t have been many others,’ commented Bill Temple, a little acidly. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one would be likely to forget.’

‘I suppose not,’ replied Harry, with that air of irrefragable innocence which is so disconcerting to his critics. ‘And, as a matter of fact, this scientist wasn’t really mad. There was no doubt, though, that he was out to conquer the world. Or if you want to be really precise—to let the world be conquered.’

‘And by whom?’ asked George Whitley. ‘The Martians? Or the well-known little green men from Venus?’

‘Neither of them. He was collaborating with someone a lot nearer home. You’ll realise who I mean when I tell you he was a myrmecologist.’

‘A which-what?’ asked George.

‘Let him get on with the story,’ said Drew, from the other side of the bar. ‘It’s past ten, and if I can’t get you all out by closing time this week, I’ll lose my licence.’

‘Thank you,’ said Harry with dignity, handing over his glass for a refill. ‘This all happened about two years ago, when I was on a mission in the Pacific. It was rather hush-hush, but in view of what’s happened since, there’s no harm in talking about it. Three of us scientists were landed on a certain Pacific atoll not a thousand miles from Bikini, and given a week to set up some detection equipment. It was intended, of course, to keep an eye on our good friends and allies when they started playing with thermonuclear reactions—to pick some crumbs from the AEC’s table, as it were. The Russians, naturally, were doing the same thing, and occasionally we ran into each other and then both sides would pretend that there was nobody here but us chickens.

‘This atoll was supposed to be uninhabited, but this was a considerable error. It actually had a population of several hundred millions—’

‘What!’ gasped everybody.

‘—several hundred millions,’ continued Purvis calmly, ‘of which number, one was human. I came across him when I went inland one day to have a look at the scenery.’

‘Inland?’ asked George Whitley. ‘I thought you said it was an atoll. How can a ring of coral—’

‘It was a very plump atoll,’ said Harry firmly. ‘Anyway, who’s telling this story?’ He waited defiantly for a moment until he had the right of way again.

‘Here I was, then, walking up a charming little river course underneath the coconut palms, when to my great surprise I came across a water wheel—a very modern-looking one, driving a dynamo. If I’d been sensible, I suppose I’d have gone back and told my companions, but I couldn’t resist the challenge and decided to do some reconnoitering on my own. I remembered that there were still supposed to be Japanese troops around who didn’t know that the war was over, but that explanation seemed a bit unlikely.

‘I followed the power line up a hill, and there on the other side was a low, whitewashed building set in a large clearing. All over this clearing were tall, irregular mounds of earth, linked together with a network of wires. It was one of the most baffling sights I have ever seen, and I stood and stared for a good ten minutes, trying to decide what was going on. The longer I looked, the less sense it seemed to make.

‘I was debating what to do when a tall, white-haired man came out of the building and walked over to one of the mounds. He was carrying some kind of apparatus and had a pair of earphones slung around his neck, so I guessed that he was using a Geiger counter. It was just about then that I realised what those tall mounds were. They were termitaries… the skyscrapers, in comparison to their makers, far taller than the Empire State Building in which the so-called white ants live.

‘I watched with great interest, but complete bafflement, while the elderly scientist inserted his apparatus into the base of the termitary, listened intently for a moment, and then walked back towards the building. By this time I was so curious that I decided to make my presence known. Whatever research was going on here obviously had nothing to do with international politics, so I was the only one who’d have anything to hide. You’ll appreciate later just what a miscalculation that was.

‘I yelled for attention and walked down the hill, waving my arms. The stranger halted and watched me approaching: he didn’t look particularly surprised. As I came closer I saw that he had a straggling moustache that gave him a faintly Oriental appearance. He was about sixty years old, and carried himself very erect. Though he was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, he looked so dignified that I felt rather ashamed of my noisy approach.

‘“Good morning,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t know that there was anyone else on this island. I’m with an—er—scientific-survey party over on the other side.”

‘At this the stranger’s eyes lit up. “Ah,” he said, in almost perfect English, “a fellow scientist! I’m very pleased to meet you. Come into the house.”

‘I followed gladly enough—I was pretty hot after my scramble—and I found that the building was simply one large lab. In a corner was a bed, and a couple of chairs, together with a stove and one of those folding washbasins that campers use. That seemed to sum up the living arrangements. But everything was very neat and tidy: my unknown friend seemed to be a recluse, but he believed in keeping up appearances.

‘I introduced myself first, and, as I’d hoped, he promptly responded. He was one Professor Takato, a biologist from a leading Japanese university. He didn’t look particularly Japanese, apart from the moustache I’ve mentioned. With his erect, dignified bearing he reminded me more of an old Kentucky colonel I once knew.

‘After he’d given me some unfamiliar but refreshing wine, we sat and talked for a couple of hours. Like most scientists he seemed happy to meet someone who would appreciate his work. It was true that my interests lay in physics and chemistry rather than on the biological side, but I found Professor Takato’s research quite fascinating.

‘I don’t suppose you know much about termites, so I’ll remind you of the salient facts. They’re among the most highly evolved of the social insects, and live in vast colonies throughout the tropics. They can’t stand cold weather, nor, oddly enough, can they endure direct sunlight. When they have to get from one place to another, they construct little covered roadways. They seem to have some unknown and almost instantaneous means of communication, and though the individual termites are pretty helpless and dumb, a whole colony behaves like an intelligent animal. Some writers have drawn comparisons between a termitary and a human body, which is also composed of individual living cells making up an entity much higher than the basic units. The termites are often called “white ants”, but that’s a completely incorrect name, as they aren’t ants at all but quite a different species of insect. Or should I say “genus”? I’m pretty vague about this sort of thing…

‘Excuse this little lecture, but after I’d listened to Takato for a while I began to get quite enthusiastic about termites myself. Did you know, for example, that they not only cultivate gardens but also keep cows—insect cows, of course—and milk them? Yes, they’re sophisticated little devils, even though they do it all by instinct.

‘But I’d better tell you something about the Professor. Although he was alone at the moment, and had lived on the island for several years, he had a number of assistants who brought equipment from Japan and helped him in his work. His first great achievement was to do for the termites what von Frisch had done with bees—he’d learned their language. It was much more complex than the system of communication that bees use, which as you probably know, is based on dancing. I understood that the network of wires linking the termitaries to the lab not only enabled Professor Takato to listen to the termites talking among each other, but also permitted him to speak to them. That’s not really as fantastic as it sounds, if you use the word “speak” in its widest sense. We speak to a good many animals—not always with our voices, by any means. When you throw a stick for your dog and expect him to run and fetch it, that’s a form of speech—sign language. The Professor, I gathered, had worked out some kind of code which the termites understood, though how efficient it was at communicating ideas I didn’t know.

‘I came back each day, when I could spare the time, and by the end of the week we were firm friends. It may surprise you that I was able to conceal these visits from my colleagues, but the island was quite large and we each did a lot of exploring. I felt somehow that Professor Takato was my private property, and did not wish to expose him to the curiosity of my companions. They were rather uncouth characters, graduates of some provincial university like Oxford or Cambridge.

‘I’m glad to say that I was able to give the Professor a certain amount of assistance, fixing his radio and lining up some of his electronic gear. He used radioactive tracers a good deal, to follow individual termites around. He’d been tracking one with a Geiger counter when I first met him, in fact.

‘Four or five days after we’d met, his counters started to go haywire, and the equipment we’d set up began to reel in its recordings. Takato guessed what had happened: he’d never asked me exactly what I was doing on the island, but I think he knew. When I greeted him he switched on his counters and let me listen to the roar of radiation. There had been some radioactive fall-out—not enough to be dangerous, but sufficient to bring the background way up.

‘“I think,” he said softly, “that you physicists are playing with your toys again. And very big ones, this time.”

‘“I’m afraid you’re right,” I answered. We wouldn’t be sure until the readings had been analysed, but it looked as if Teller and his team had started the hydrogen reaction. “Before long, we’ll be able to make the first A bombs look like damp squibs.”

‘“My family,” said Professor Takato, without any emotion, “was at Nagasaki.”

‘There wasn’t a great deal I could say to that, and I was glad when he went on to add: “Have you ever wondered who will take over when we are finished?”

‘“Your termites?” I said, half-facetiously. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said quietly, “Come with me; I have not shown you everything.”

‘We walked over to a corner of the lab where some equipment lay concealed beneath dust sheets, and the Professor uncovered a rather curious piece of apparatus. At first sight it looked like one of the manipulators used for the remote handling of dangerously radioactive materials. There were hand-grips that conveyed movements through rods and levers, but everything seemed to focus on a small box a few inches on a side. “What is it?” I asked.

‘“It’s a micromanipulator. The French developed them for biological work. There aren’t many around yet.”

‘Then I remembered. These were devices with which, by the use of suitable reduction gearing, one could carry out the most incredibly delicate operations. You moved your finger an inch—and the tool you were controlling moved a thousandth of an inch. The French scientist who had developed this technique had built tiny forges on which they could construct minute scalpels and tweezers from fused glass. Working entirely through microscopes, they had been able to dissect individual cells. Removing an appendix from a termite (in the highly doubtful event of the insect possessing one) would be child’s play with such an instrument.

‘“I am not very skilled at using the manipulator,” confessed Takato. “One of my assistants does all the work with it. I have shown no one else this, but you have been very helpful. Come with me, please.”

‘We went out into the open, and walked past the avenues of tall, cement-hard mounds. They were not all of the same architectural design, for there are many different kinds of termites—some, indeed, don’t build mounds at all. I felt rather like a giant walking through Manhattan, for these were sky-scrapers, each with its own teeming population.

‘There was a small metal (not wooden—the termites would soon have fixed that!) hut beside one of the mounds, and as we entered it the glare of sunlight was banished. The Professor threw a switch, and a faint red glow enabled me to see various types of optical equipment.

‘“They hate light,” he said, “so it’s a great problem observing them. We solved it by using infrared. This is an image-converter of the type that was used in the war for operations at night. You know about them?”

‘“Of course,” I said. “Snipers had them fixed on their rifles so that they could go sharpshooting in the dark. Very ingenious things—I’m glad you’ve found a civilised use for them.”

‘It was a long time before Professor Takato found what he wanted. He seemed to be steering some kind of periscope arrangement, probing through the corridors of the termite city. Then he said: “Quick—before they’ve gone!”

‘I moved over and took his position. It was a second or so before my eye focused properly, and longer still before I understood the scale of the picture I was seeing. Then I saw six termites, greatly enlarged, moving rather rapidly across the field of vision. They were travelling in a group, like the huskies forming a dog team. And that was a very good analogy, because they were towing a sledge…

‘I was so astonished that I never even noticed what kind of load they were moving. When they had vanished from sight, I turned to Professor Takato. My eyes had now grown accustomed to the faint red glow, and I could see him quite well.

‘“So that’s the sort of tool you’ve been building with your micromanipulator!” I said. “It’s amazing—I’d never have believed it.”

‘“But that is nothing,” replied the Professor. “Performing fleas will pull a cart around. I haven’t told you what is so important. We only made a few of those sledges. The one you saw they constructed themselves.”

‘He let that sink in: it took some time. Then he continued quietly, but with a kind of controlled enthusiasm in his voice: “Remember that the termites, as individuals, have virtually no intelligence. But the colony as a whole is a very high type of organism—and an immortal one, barring accidents. It froze in its present instinctive pattern millions of years before Man was born, and by itself it can never escape from its present sterile perfection. It has reached a dead end—because it has no tools, no effective way of controlling Nature. I have given it the lever, to increase its power, and now the sledge, to improve its efficiency. I have thought of the wheel, but it is best to let that wait for a later stage—it would not be very useful now. The results have exceeded my expectations. I started with this termitary alone—but now they all have the same tools. They have taught each other, and that proves they can co-operate. True, they have wars—but not when there is enough food for all, as there is here.

‘“But you cannot judge the termitary by human standards. What I hope to do is to jolt its rigid, frozen culture—to knock it out of the groove in which it has stuck for so many millions of years. I will give it more tools, more new techniques—and before I die, I hope to see it beginning to invent things for itself.”

‘“Why are you doing this?” I asked, for I knew there was more than mere scientific curiosity here.

‘“Because I do not believe that Man will survive, yet I hope to preserve some of the things he has discovered. If he is to be a dead end, I think that another race should be given a helping hand. Do you know why I chose this island? It was so that my experiment should remain isolated. My supertermite, if it ever evolves, will have to remain here until it has reached a very high level of attainment. Until it can cross the Pacific, in fact…

‘“There is another possibility. Man has no rival on this planet. I think it may do him good to have one. It may be his salvation.”

‘I could think of nothing to say: this glimpse of the Professor’s dreams was so overwhelming—and yet, in view of what I had just seen, so convincing. For I knew that Professor Takato was not mad. He was a visionary, and there was a sublime detachment about his outlook, but it was based on a secure foundation of scientific achievement.

‘And it was not that he was hostile to mankind: he was sorry for it. He simply believed that humanity had shot its bolt, and wished to save something from the wreckage. I could not feel it in my heart to blame him.

‘We must have been in that little hut for a long time, exploring possible futures. I remember suggesting that perhaps there might be some kind of mutual understanding, since two cultures so utterly dissimilar as Man and Termite need have no cause for conflict. But I couldn’t really believe this, and if a contest comes, I’m not certain who will win. For what use would man’s weapons be against an intelligent enemy who could lay waste all the wheat fields and all the rice crops in the world?

‘When we came out into the open once more, it was almost dusk. It was then that the Professor made his final revelation.

‘“In a few weeks,” he said, “I am going to take the biggest step of all.”

‘“And what is that?” I asked.

‘“Cannot you guess? I am going to give them fire.”

‘Those words did something to my spine. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the oncoming night. The glorious sunset that was taking place beyond the palms seemed symbolic—and suddenly I realised that the symbolism was even deeper than I had thought.

‘That sunset was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and it was partly of man’s making. Up there in the stratosphere, the dust of an island that had died this day was encircling the earth. My race had taken a great step forward; but did it matter now?

‘“I am going to give them fire.” Somehow, I never doubted that the Professor would succeed. And when he had done so, the forces that my own race had just unleashed would not save it…

‘The flying boat came to collect us the next day, and I did not see Takato again. He is still there, and I think he is the most important man in the world. While our politicians wrangle, he is making us obsolete.

‘Do you think that someone ought to stop him? There may still be time. I’ve often thought about it, but I’ve never been able to think of a really convincing reason why I should interfere. Once or twice I nearly made up my mind, but then I’d pick up the newspaper and see the headlines.

‘I think we should let them have the chance. I don’t see how they could make a worse job of it than we’ve done.’

Cold War

First published in Satellite, April 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

The story quoted really appeared in a Miami newspaper on the date given, and may even be accurate.

Some of the wealthier Arab states once looked into the possibility of towing icebergs from the Antarctic to irrigate their rather arid kingdoms. I’ve heard nothing of the idea for many years, and suspect that the engineering problems were insuperable.

A job for unemployed nuclear submarines?

One of the things that makes Harry Purvis’s tales so infernally convincing is their detailed verisimilitude. Consider, for instance, this example. I’ve checked the places and information as thoroughly as I can—I had to, in order to write up this account—and everything fits into place. How do you explain that unless—but judge for yourself…

‘I’ve often noticed,’ Harry began, ‘how tantalising little snippets of information appear in the Press and then, sometimes years later, one comes across their sequels. I’ve just had a beautiful example. In the spring of 1954—I’ve looked up the date—it was April 19—an iceberg was reported off the coast of Florida. I remember spotting this news item and thinking it highly peculiar. The Gulf Stream, you know, is born in the Straits of Florida, and I didn’t see how an iceberg could get that far south before it melted. But I forgot about the whole business almost immediately, thinking it was just another of those tall stories which the papers like to print when there isn’t any real news.

‘And then, about a week ago, I met a friend who’d been a commander in the US Navy, and he told me the whole astonishing tale. It’s such a remarkable story that I think it ought to be better known, though I’m sure that a lot of people simply won’t believe it.

‘Any of you who are familiar with domestic American affairs may know that Florida’s claim to be the Sunshine State is strongly disputed by some of the other forty-seven members of the Union. I don’t suppose New York or Maine or Connecticut are very serious contenders, but the State of California regards the Florida claim as an almost personal affront, and is always doing its best to refute it. The Floridians hit back by pointing to the famous Los Angeles smogs, then the Californians say, with careful anxiety, “Isn’t it about time you had another hurricane?” and the Floridians reply, “You can count on us when you want any earthquake relief.” So it goes on, and this is where my friend Commander Dawson came into the picture.

‘The Commander had been in submarines, but was now retired. He’d been working as technical adviser on a film about the exploits of the submarine service when he was approached one day with a very peculiar proposition. I won’t say that the California Chamber of Commerce was behind it, as that might be libel. You can make your own guesses…

‘Anyway, the idea was a typical Hollywood conception. So I thought at first, until I remembered that dear old Lord Dunsany had used a similar theme in one of his short stories. Maybe the Californian sponsor was a Jorkens fan, just as I am.

‘The scheme was delightful in its boldness and simplicity. Commander Dawson was offered a substantial sum of money to pilot an artificial iceberg to Florida, with a bonus if he could contrive to strand it on Miami Beach at the height of the season.

‘I need hardly say that the Commander accepted with alacrity: he came from Kansas himself, so could view the whole thing dispassionately as a purely commercial proposition. He got together some of his old crew, swore them to secrecy, and after much waiting in Washington corridors managed to obtain temporary loan of an obsolete submarine. Then he went to a big air-conditioning company, convinced them of his credit and his sanity, and got the ice-making plant installed in a big blister on the sub’s deck.

‘It would take an impossible amount of power to make a solid iceberg, even a small one, so a compromise was necessary. There would be an outer coating of ice a couple of feet thick, but Frigid Freda, as she was christened, was to be hollow. She would look quite impressive from the outside, but would be a typical Hollywood stage set when one got behind the scenes. However, nobody would see her inner secrets except the Commander and his men. She would be set adrift when the prevailing winds and currents were in the right direction, and would last long enough to cause the calculated alarm and despondency.

‘Of course, there were endless practical problems to be solved. It would take several days of steady freezing to create Freda, and she must be launched as near her objective as possible. That meant that the submarine—which we’ll call the Marlin—would have to use a base not too far from Miami.

‘The Florida Keys were considered but at once rejected. There was no privacy down there any more; the fishermen now outnumbered the mosquitoes and a submarine would be spotted almost instantly. Even if the Marlin pretended she was merely smuggling, she wouldn’t be able to get away with it. So that plan was out.

‘There was another problem that the Commander had to consider. The coastal waters round Florida are extremely shallow, and though Freda’s draft would only be a couple of feet, everybody knew that an honest-to-goodness iceberg was nearly all below the waterline. It wouldn’t be very realistic to have an impressive-looking berg sailing through two feet of water. That would give the show away at once.

‘I don’t know exactly how the Commander overcame these technical problems, but I gather that he carried out several tests in the Atlantic, far from any shipping routes. The iceberg reported in the news was one of his early productions. Incidentally, neither Freda nor her brethren would have been a danger to shipping—being hollow, they would have broken up on impact.

‘Finally, all the preparations were complete. The Marlin lay out in the Atlantic, some distance north of Miami, with her ice-manufacturing equipment going full blast. It was a beautiful clear night, with a crescent moon sinking in the west. The Marlin had no navigation lights, but Commander Dawson was keeping a very strict watch for other ships. On a night like this, he’d be able to avoid them without being spotted himself.

‘Freda was still in an embryonic stage. I gather that the technique used was to inflate a large plastic bag with supercooled air, and spray water over it until a crust of ice formed. The bag could be removed when the ice was thick enough to stand up under its own weight. Ice is not a very good structural material, but there was no need for Freda to be very big. Even a small iceberg would be as disconcerting to the Florida Chamber of Commerce as a small baby to an unmarried lady.

‘Commander Dawson was in the conning tower, watching his crew working with their sprays of ice-cold water and jets of freezing air. They were now quite skilled at this unusual occupation, and delighted in little artistic touches. However, the Commander had had to put a stop to attempts to reproduce Marilyn Monroe in ice—though he filed the idea for future reference.

‘Just after midnight he was startled by a flash of light in the northern sky, and turned in time to see a red glow die away on the horizon.

‘“There’s a plane down, Skipper!” shouted one of the lookouts. “I just saw it crash!” Without hesitation, the Commander shouted down to the engine room and set course to the north. He’d got an accurate fix on the glow, and judged that it couldn’t be more than a few miles away. The presence of Freda, covering most of the stern of his vessel, would not affect his speed appreciably, and in any case there was no way of getting rid of her quickly. He stopped the freezers to give more power to the main diesels, and shot ahead at full speed.

‘About thirty minutes later the lookout, using powerful night glasses, spotted something lying in the water. “It’s still afloat,” he said. “Some kind of airplane, all right—but I can’t see any sign of life. And I think the wings have come off.”

‘He had scarcely finished speaking when there was an urgent retort from another watcher.

‘“Look, Skipper—thirty degrees to starboard! What’s that?”

‘Commander Dawson swung around and whipped up his glasses. He saw, just visible above the water, a small oval object spinning rapidly on its axis.

‘“Uh-huh,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ve got company. That’s a radar scanner—there’s another sub here.” Then he brightened considerably. “Maybe we can keep out of this after all,” he remarked to his second-in-command. “We’ll watch to see that they start rescue operations, then sneak away.

‘“We may have to submerge and abandon Freda. Remember they’ll have spotted us by now on their radar. Better slacken speed and behave more like a real iceberg.”

‘Dawson nodded and gave the order. This was getting complicated, and anything might happen in the next few minutes. The other sub would have observed the Marlin merely as a blip on its radar screen, but as soon as it upped periscope its commander would start investigating. Then the fat would be in the fire…

‘Dawson analysed the tactical situation. The best move, he decided, was to employ his unusual camouflage to the full. He gave the order to swing the Marlin around so that her stern pointed towards the still submerged stranger. When the other sub surfaced, her commander would be most surprised to see an iceberg, but Dawson hoped he would be too busy with rescue operations to bother about Freda.

‘He pointed his glasses towards the crashed plane—and then had his second shock. It was a very peculiar type of aircraft indeed—and there was something wrong—

‘“Of course!” said Dawson to his Number One. “We should have thought of this—that thing isn’t an airplane at all. It’s a missile from the range over at Cocoa—look, you can see the flotation bags. They must have inflated on impact, and the sub was waiting out here to take it back.”

‘He’d remembered that there was a big missile launching range over on the east coast of Florida, at a place with the unlikely name of Cocoa on the still more improbable Banana River. Well, at least there was nobody in danger, and if the Marlin sat tight there was a sporting chance that they’d be none the worse for this diversion.

‘Their engines were just turning over, so that they had enough control to keep hiding behind their camouflage. Freda was quite large enough to conceal their conning tower, and from a distance, even in better light than this, the Marlin would be totally invisible. There was one horrid possibility, though. The other sub might start shelling them on general principles, as a menace to navigation. No: it would just report them by radio to the Coast Guard, which would be a nuisance but would not interfere with their plans.

‘“Here she comes!” said Number One. “What class is she?”

‘They both stared through their glasses as the submarine, water pouring from its sides, emerged from the faintly phosphorescent ocean. The moon had now almost set, and it was difficult to make out any details. The radar scanner, Dawson was glad to see, had stopped its rotation and was pointing at the crashed missile. There was something odd about the design of that conning tower, though…

‘Then Dawson swallowed hard, lifted the mike to his mouth, and whispered to his crew in the bowels of the Marlin! “Does anyone down there speak Russian…?”

‘There was a long silence, but presently the engineer officer climbed up into the conning tower.

‘“I know a bit, Skipper,” he said. “My grandparents came from the Ukraine. What’s the trouble?”

‘“Take a look at this,” said Dawson grimly. “There’s an interesting piece of poaching going on here. I think we ought to stop it…”’

Harry Purvis has a most annoying habit of breaking off just when a story reaches its climax, and ordering another beer—or, more usually, getting someone else to buy him one. I’ve watched him do this so often that now I can tell just when the climax is coming by the level in his glass. We had to wait, with what patience we could, while he refuelled.

‘When you think about it,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it was jolly hard luck on the commander of that Russian submarine. I imagine they shot him when he got back to Vladivostok, or wherever he came from. For what court of inquiry would have believed his story? If he was fool enough to tell the truth, he’d have said, “We were just off the Florida coast when an iceberg shouted at us in Russian, ‘Excuse me—I think that’s our property!’” Since there would be a couple of MVD men aboard the ship, the poor guy would have had to make up some kind of story, but whatever he said wouldn’t be very convincing…

‘As Dawson had calculated, the Russian sub simply ran for it as soon as it knew it had been spotted. And remembering that he was an officer in the Reserve, and that his duty to his country was more important than his contractual obligations to any single state, the Commander of the Marlin really had no choice in his subsequent actions. He picked up the missile, defrosted Freda, and set course for Cocoa—first sending a radio message that caused a great flurry in the Navy Department and started destroyers racing out into the Atlantic. Perhaps Inquisitive Ivan never got back to Vladivostok after all…

‘The subsequent explanations were a little embarrassing, but I gather that the rescued missile was so important that no one asked too many questions about the Marlin’s private war. The attack on Miami Beach had to be called off, however, at least until the next season. It’s satisfactory to relate that even the sponsors of the project, though they had sunk a lot of money into it, weren’t too disappointed. They each have a certificate signed by the Chief of Naval Operations, thanking them for valuable but unspecified services to their country. These cause such envy and mystification to all their Los Angeles friends that they wouldn’t part with them for anything…

‘Yet I don’t want you to think that nothing more will ever come of the whole project; you ought to know American publicity men better than that. Freda may be in suspended animation, but one day she’ll be revived. All the plans are ready, down to such little details as the accidental presence of a Hollywood film unit on Miami Beach when Freda comes sailing in from the Atlantic.

‘So this is one of those stories I can’t round off to a nice, neat ending. The preliminary skirmishes have taken place, but the main engagement is still to come. And this is the thing I often wonder about—what will Florida do to the Californians when it discovers what’s going on? Any suggestions, anybody?’

Sleeping Beauty

First published in Infinity Science Fiction, April 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

It was one of those halfhearted discussions that is liable to get going in the ‘White Hart’ when no one can think of anything better to argue about. We were trying to recall the most extraordinary names we’d ever encountered, and I had just contributed ‘Obediah Polkinghorn’ when—inevitably—Harry Purvis got into the act.

‘It’s easy enough to dig up odd names,’ he said, reprimanding us for our levity, ‘but have you ever stopped to consider a much more fundamental point—the effects of those names on their owners? Sometimes, you know, such a thing can warp a man’s entire life. That is what happened to young Sigmund Snoring.’

‘Oh, no!’ groaned Charles Willis, one of Harry’s most implacable critics. ‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Do you imagine,’ said Harry indignantly, ‘that I’d invent a name like that? As a matter of fact, Sigmund’s family name was something Jewish from Central Europe: it began with SCH and went on for quite a while in that vein. “Snoring” was just an anglicised précis of it. However, all this is by the way: I wish people wouldn’t make me waste time on such details.’

Charlie, who is the most promising author I know (he has been promising for more than twenty-five years) started to make vaguely protesting noises, but someone public spiritedly diverted him with a glass of beer.

‘Sigmund,’ continued Harry, ‘bore his burden bravely enough until he reached manhood. There is little doubt, however, that his name preyed upon his mind, and finally produced what you might call a psychosomatic result. If Sigmund had been born of any other parents, I am sure that he would not have become a stertorous and incessant snorer in fact as well as—almost—in name.

‘Well, there are worse tragedies in life. Sigmund’s family had a fair amount of money, and a soundproofed bedroom protected the remainder of the household from sleepless nights. As is usually the case, Sigmund was quite unaware of his own nocturnal symphonies, and could never really understand what all the fuss was about.

‘It was not until he got married that he was compelled to take his affliction—if you can call it that, for it only inflicted itself on other people—as seriously as it deserved. There is nothing unusual in a young bride returning from her honeymoon in a somewhat distracted condition, but poor Rachel Snoring had been through a uniquely shattering experience. She was red-eyed with lack of sleep, and any attempt to get sympathy from her friends only made them dissolve into peals of laughter. So it was not surprising that she gave Sigmund an ultimatum; unless he did something about his snoring, the marriage was off.

‘Now this was a very serious matter for both Sigmund and his family. They were fairly well-to-do, but by no means rich—unlike Granduncle Reuben, who had died last year leaving a rather complicated will. He had taken quite a fancy to Sigmund, and had left a considerable sum of money in trust for him, which he would receive when he was thirty. Unfortunately, Granduncle Reuben was very old-fashioned and straitlaced, and did not altogether trust the modern generation. One of the conditions of the bequest was that Sigmund should not be divorced or separated before the designated date. If he was, the money would go to found an orphanage in Tel Aviv.

‘It was a difficult situation, and there is no way of guessing how it would have resolved itself had not someone suggested that Sigmund ought to go and see Uncle Hymie. Sigmund was not at all keen on this, but desperate predicaments demanded desperate remedies; so he went.

‘Uncle Hymie, I should explain, was a very distinguished professor of physiology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society with a whole string of papers to his credit. He was also, at the moment, somewhat short of money, owing to a quarrel with the trustees of his college, and had been compelled to stop work on some of his pet research projects. To add to his annoyance, the Physics Department had just been given half a million pounds for a new synchrotron, so he was in no pleasant mood when his unhappy nephew called upon him.

‘Trying to ignore the all-pervading smell of disinfectant and livestock, Sigmund followed the lab steward along rows of incomprehensible equipment, and past cages of mice and guinea pigs, frequently averting his eyes from the revolting coloured diagrams which occupied so much wall space. He found his uncle sitting at a bench, drinking tea from a beaker and absentmindedly nibbling sandwiches.

‘“Help yourself,” he said ungraciously. “Roast hamster—delicious. One of the litter we used for some cancer tests. What’s the trouble?”

‘Pleading lack of appetite, Sigmund told his distinguished uncle his tale of woe. The professor listened without much sympathy.

‘“Don’t know what you got married for,” he said at last. “Complete waste of time.” Uncle Hymie was known to possess strong views on this subject, having had five children but no wives. “Still, we might be able to do something. How much money have you got?”

‘“Why?” asked Sigmund, somewhat taken aback. The professor waved his arms around the lab.

‘“Costs a lot to run all this,” he said.

‘“But I thought the university—”

‘“Oh yes—but any special work will have to be under the counter, as it were. I can’t use college funds for it.”

‘“Well, how much will you need to get started?”

‘Uncle Hymie mentioned a sum which was rather smaller than Sigmund had feared, but his satisfaction did not last for long. The scientist, it soon transpired, was fully acquainted with Granduncle Reuben’s will; Sigmund would have to draw up a contract promising him a share of the loot when, in five years’ time, the money became his. The present payment was merely an advance.

‘“Even so, I don’t promise anything, but I’ll see what can be done,” said Uncle Hymie, examining the cheque carefully. “Come and see me in a month.”

‘That was all that Sigmund could get out of him, for the professor was then distracted by a highly decorative research student in a sweater which appeared to have been sprayed on her. They started discussing the domestic affairs of the lab’s rats in such terms that Sigmund, who was easily embarrassed, had to beat a hasty retreat.

‘Now, I don’t really think that Uncle Hymie would have taken Sigmund’s money unless he was fairly sure he could deliver the goods. He must, therefore, have been quite near the completion of his work when the university had slashed his funds; certainly he could never have produced, in a mere four weeks, whatever complex mixture of chemicals it was that he injected into his hopeful nephew’s arm a month after receiving the cash. The experiment was carried out at the professor’s own home, late one evening; Sigmund was not too surprised to find the lady research student in attendance.

‘“What will this stuff do?” he asked.

‘“It will stop you snoring—I hope,” answered Uncle Hymie. “Now, here’s a nice comfortable seat, and a pile of magazines to read. Irma and I will take turns keeping an eye on you in case there are any side reactions.”

‘“Side reactions?” said Sigmund anxiously, rubbing his arm.

‘“Don’t worry—just take it easy. In a couple of hours we’ll know if it works.”

‘So Sigmund waited for sleep to come, while the two scientists fussed about him (not to mention around each other) taking readings of blood pressure, pulse, temperature and generally making Sigmund feel like a chronic invalid. When midnight arrived, he was not at all sleepy, but the professor and his assistant were almost dead on their feet. Sigmund realised that they had been working long hours on his behalf, and felt a gratitude which was quite touching during the short period while it lasted.

‘Midnight came and passed. Irma folded up and the professor laid her, none too gently, on the couch. “You’re quite sure you don’t feel tired yet?” he yawned at Sigmund.

‘“Not a bit. It’s very odd; I’m usually fast asleep by this time.”

‘“You feel perfectly all right?”

‘“Never felt better.”

‘There was another vast yawn from the professor. He muttered something like, “Should have taken some of it myself,” then subsided into an armchair.

‘“Give us a shout,” he said sleepily, “if you feel anything unusual. No point in us staying up any longer.” A moment later Sigmund, still somewhat mystified, was the only conscious person in the room.

‘He read a dozen copies of Punch stamped “Not to Be Removed from the Common Room” until it was 2 a.m. He polished off all the Saturday Evening Posts by 4. A small bundle of New Yorkers kept him busy until 5, when he had a stroke of luck. An exclusive diet of caviar soon grows monotonous, and Sigmund was delighted to discover a limp and much-thumbed volume entitled The Blonde Was Willing. This engaged his full attention until dawn, when Uncle Hymie gave a convulsive start, shot out of his chair, woke Irma with a well-directed slap, and then turned his full attention towards Sigmund.

‘“Well, my boy,” he said, with a hearty cheerfulness that at once alerted Sigmund’s suspicions. “I’ve done what you wanted. You passed the night without snoring, didn’t you?”

‘Sigmund put down the Willing Blonde, who was now in a situation where her co-operation or lack of it would make no difference at all.

‘“I didn’t snore,” he admitted. “But I didn’t sleep either.”

‘“You still feel perfectly wide awake?”

‘“Yes—I don’t understand it at all.”

‘Uncle Hymie and Irma exchanged triumphant glances. “You’ve made history, Sigmund,” said the professor. ‘You’re the first man to be able to do without sleep.” And so the news was broken to the astonished and not yet indignant guinea pig.

‘I know,’ continued Harry Purvis, not altogether accurately, ‘that many of you would like the scientific details of Uncle Hymie’s discovery. But I don’t know them, and if I did they would be too technical to give here. I’ll merely point out, since I see some expressions which a less trusting man might describe as sceptical, that there is nothing really startling about such a development. Sleep, after all, is a highly variable factor. Look at Edison, who managed on two or three hours a day right up to the end of his life. It’s true that men can’t go without sleep indefinitely—but some animals can, so it clearly isn’t a fundamental part of metabolism.’

‘What animals can go without sleep?’ asked somebody, not so much in disbelief as out of pure curiosity.

‘Well—er—of course!—the fish that live out in deep water beyond the continental shelf. If they ever fall asleep, they’d be snapped up by other fish, or they’d lose their trim and sink to the bottom. So they’ve got to keep awake all of their lives.’

(I am still, by the way, trying to find if this statement of Harry’s is true. I’ve never caught him out yet on a scientific fact, though once or twice I’ve had to give him the benefit of the doubt. But back to Uncle Hymie.)

‘It took some time,’ continued Harry, ‘for Sigmund to realise what an astonishing thing had been done to him. And enthusiastic commentary from his uncle, enlarging upon all the glorious possibilities that had been opened up for him now that he had been freed from the tyranny of sleep, made it difficult to concentrate on the problem. But presently he was able to raise the question that had been worrying him. “How long will this last?” he enquired.

‘The professor and Irma looked at each other. Then Uncle Hymie coughed a little nervously and replied: “We’re not quite sure yet. That’s one thing we’ve got to find out. It’s perfectly possible that the effect will be permanent.”

‘“You mean that I’ll never be able to sleep again?”

‘“Not ‘Never be able to.’ ‘Never want to.’ However, I could probably work out some way of reversing the process if you’re really anxious. Cost a lot of money, though.”

‘Sigmund left hastily, promising to keep in touch and to report his progress every day. His brain was still in a turmoil, but first he had to find his wife and to convince her that he would never snore again.

‘She was quite willing to believe him, and they had a touching reunion. But in the small hours of next morning it got very dull lying there with no one to talk to, and presently Sigmund tiptoed away from his sleeping wife. For the first time, the full reality of his position was beginning to dawn upon him; what on earth was he going to do with the extra eight hours a day that had descended upon him as an unwanted gift?

‘You might think that Sigmund had a wonderful—indeed an unprecedented—opportunity for leading a fuller life by acquiring that culture and knowledge which we all felt we’d like—if only we had the time to do something about it. He could read every one of the great classics that are just names to most people; he could study art, music or philosophy, and fill his mind with all the finest treasures of the human intellect. In fact, a good many of you are probably envying him right now.

‘Well, it didn’t work out that way. The fact of the matter is that even the highest-grade mind needs some relaxation, and cannot devote itself to serious pursuits indefinitely. It was true that Sigmund had no further need of sleep, but he needed entertainment to occupy him during the long, empty hours of darkness.’

‘Civilisation, he soon discovered, was not designed to fit the requirements of a man who couldn’t sleep. He might have been better off in Paris or New York, but in London practically everything closed down at 11 p.m., only a few coffee bars were still open at midnight, and by 1 a.m.—well, the less said about any establishments still operating, the better.

‘At first, when the weather was good, he occupied his time going for long walks, but after several encounters with inquisitive and sceptical policemen he gave this up. So he took to the car and drove all over London during the small hours, discovering all sorts of odd places he never knew existed. He soon had a nodding acquaintance with many night watchmen, Covent Garden porters and milkmen, as well as Fleet Street journalists and printers who had to work while the rest of the world slept. But as Sigmund was not the sort of person who took a great interest in his fellow human beings, this amusement soon palled and he was thrown back upon his own limited resources.

‘His wife, as might be expected, was not at all happy about his nocturnal wanderings. He had told her the whole story, and though she had found it hard to believe she was forced to accept the evidence of her own eyes. But having done so, it seemed that she would prefer a husband who snored and stayed at home to one who tiptoed away around midnight and was not always back by breakfast.

‘This upset Sigmund greatly. He had spent or promised a good deal of money (as he kept reminding Rachel) and taken a considerable personal risk to cure himself of his malaise. And was she grateful? No; she just wanted an itemised account of the time he spent when he should have been sleeping but wasn’t. It was most unfair and showed a lack of trust which he found very disheartening.

‘Slowly the secret spread through a wider circle, though the Snorings (who were a very close-knit clan) managed to keep it inside the family. Uncle Lorenz, who was in the diamond business, suggested that Sigmund take up a second job as it seemed a pity to waste all that additional working time. He produced a list of one-man occupations, which could be carried on equally easily by day or night, but Sigmund thanked him kindly and said he saw no reason why he should pay two lots of income tax.

‘By the end of six weeks of twenty-four-hour days, Sigmund had had enough. He felt he couldn’t read another book, go to another night club or listen to another gramophone record. His great gift, which many foolish men would have paid a fortune to possess, had become an intolerable burden. There was nothing to do but to go and see Uncle Hymie again.

‘The professor had been expecting him, and there was no need to threaten legal proceedings, to appeal to the solidarity of the Snorings, or to make pointed remarks about breach of contract.

‘“All right, all right,” grumbled the scientist. “I don’t believe in casting pearls before swine. I knew you’d want the antidote sooner or later, and because I’m a generous man it’ll only cost you fifty guineas. But don’t blame me if you snore worse than ever.”

‘“I’ll take that risk,” said Sigmund. As far as he and Rachel were concerned, it had come to separate rooms anyway by this time.

‘He averted his gaze as the professor’s assistant (not Irma this time, but an angular brunette) filled a terrifyingly large hypodermic with Uncle Hymie’s latest brew. Before he had absorbed half of it, he had fallen asleep.

‘For once, Uncle Hymie looked quite disconcerted. “I didn’t expect it to act that fast,” he said. “Well, let’s get him to bed—we can’t have him lying around the lab.”

‘By the next morning, Sigmund was still fast asleep and showed no reactions to any stimuli. His breathing was imperceptible; he seemed to be in a trance rather than a slumber, and the professor was getting a little alarmed.

‘His worry did not last for long, however. A few hours later an angry guinea pig bit him on the finger, blood poisoning set in, and the editor of Nature was just able to get the obituary notice into the current issue before it went to press.

‘Sigmund slept through all this excitement and was still blissfully unconscious when the family got back from the Golders Green Crematorium and assembled for a council of war. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but it was obvious that the late Professor Hymie had made another unfortunate mistake, and no one knew how to set about unravelling it.

‘Cousin Meyer, who ran a furniture store in the Mile End Road, offered to take charge of Sigmund if he could use him on display in his shop window to demonstrate the luxury of the beds he stocked. However, it was felt that this would be too undignified, and the family vetoed the scheme.

‘But it gave them ideas. By now they were getting a little fed up with Sigmund; this flying from one extreme to another was really too much. So why not take the easy way out and, as one wit expressed it, let sleeping Sigmunds lie?

‘There was no point in calling in another expensive expert who might only make matters worse (though how, no one could quite imagine). It cost nothing to feed Sigmund, he required only a modicum of medical attention, and while he was sleeping there was certainly no danger of him breaking the terms of Granduncle Reuben’s will. When this argument was rather tactfully put to Rachel, she quite saw the strength of it. The policy demanded required a certain amount of patience, but the ultimate reward would be considerable.

‘The more Rachel examined it, the more she liked the idea. The thought of being a wealthy near-widow appealed to her; it had such interesting and novel possibilities. And, to tell the truth, she had had quite enough of Sigmund to last her for the five years until he came into his inheritance.

‘In due course that time arrived and Sigmund became a semi-demi-millionaire. However, he still slept soundly—and in all those five years he had never snored once. He looked so peaceful lying there that it seemed a pity to wake him up, even if anyone knew exactly how to set about it. Rachel felt strongly that ill-advised tampering might have unfortunate consequences, and the family, after assuring itself that she could only get at the interest on Sigmund’s fortune and not at the capital, was inclined to agree with her.

‘And that was several years ago. When I last heard of him, Sigmund was still peacefully sleeping, while Rachel was having a perfectly wonderful time on the Riviera. She is quite a shrewd woman, as you may have guessed, and I think she realises how convenient it might be to have a youthful husband in cold storage for her old age.

‘There are times, I must admit, when I think it’s rather a pity that Uncle Hymie never had a chance of revealing his remarkable discoveries to the world. But Sigmund proved that our civilisation isn’t yet ripe for such changes, and I hope I’m not around when some other physiologist starts the whole thing over again.’

Harry looked at the clock. ‘Good lord!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d no idea it was so late—I feel half asleep.’ He picked up his briefcase, stifled a yawn, and smiled benignly at us.

‘Happy dreams, everybody,’ he said.

Security Check

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

It is often said that in our age of assembly lines and mass production there’s no room for the individual craftsman, the artist in wood or metal who made so many of the treasures of the past. Like most generalisations, this simply isn’t true. He’s rarer now, of course, but he’s certainly not extinct. He has often had to change his vocation, but in his modest way he still flourishes. Even on the island of Manhattan he may be found, if you know where to look for him. Where rents are low and fire regulations unheard of, his minute, cluttered workshops may be discovered in the basements of apartment houses or in the upper storeys of derelict shops. He may no longer make violins or cuckoo clocks or music boxes, but the skills he uses are the same as they always were, and no two objects he creates are ever identical. He is not contemptuous of mechanisation: you will find several electric hand tools under the debris on his bench. He has moved with the times: he will always be around, the universal odd-job man who is never aware of it when he makes an immortal work of art.

Hans Muller’s workshop consisted of a large room at the back of a deserted warehouse, no more than a vigorous stone’s throw from the Queensborough Bridge. Most of the building had been boarded up awaiting demolition, and sooner or later Hans would have to move. The only entrance was across a weed-covered yard used as a parking place during the day, and much frequented by the local juvenile delinquents at night. They had never given Hans any trouble, for he knew better than to cooperate with the police when they made their periodic inquiries. The police fully appreciated his delicate position and did not press matters, so Hans was on good terms with everybody. Being a peaceable citizen, that suited him very well.

The work on which Hans was now engaged would have deeply puzzled his Bavarian ancestors. Indeed, ten years ago it would have puzzled Hans himself. And it had all started because a bankrupt client had given him a TV set in payment for services rendered…

Hans had accepted the offer reluctantly, not because he was old-fashioned and disapproved of TV, but simply because he couldn’t imagine where he would find time to look at the darned thing. Still, he thought, at least I can always sell it for fifty dollars. But before I do that, let’s see what the programmes are like…

His hand had gone out to the switch: the screen had filled with moving shapes—and, like millions of men before him, Hans was lost. He entered a world he had not known existed—a world of battling spaceships, of exotic planets and strange races—the world, in fact, of Captain Zipp, Commander of the Space Legion.

Only when the tedious recital of the virtues of Crunche, the Wonder Cereal, had given way to an almost equally tedious boxing match between two muscle-bound characters who seemed to have signed a nonaggression pact, did the magic fade. Hans was a simple man. He had always been fond of fairy tales—and this was the modern fairy tale, with trimmings of which the Grimm Brothers had never dreamed. So Hans did not sell his TV set.

It was some weeks before the initial naïve, uncritical enjoyment wore off. The first thing that began to annoy Hans was the furniture and general décor in the world of the future. He was, as has been indicated, an artist—and he refused to believe that in a hundred years taste would have deteriorated as badly as the Crunche sponsors seemed to imagine.

He also thought very little of the weapons that Captain Zipp and his opponents used. It was true that Hans did not pretend to understand the principles upon which the portable proton disintegrator was based, but however it worked, there was certainly no reason why it should be that clumsy. The clothes, the spaceship interiors—they just weren’t convincing. How did he know? He had always possessed a highly developed sense of the fitness of things, and it could still operate even in this novel field.

We have said that Hans was a simple man. He was also a shrewd one, and he had heard that there was money in TV. So he sat down and began to draw.

Even if the producer of Captain Zipp had not lost patience with his set designer, Hans Muller’s ideas would certainly have made him sit up and take notice. There was an authenticity and realism about them that made them quite outstanding. They were completely free from the element of phoniness that had begun to upset even Captain Zipp’s most juvenile followers. Hans was hired on the spot.

He made his own conditions, however. What he was doing he did largely for love, notwithstanding the fact that it was earning him more money than anything he had ever done before in his life. He would take no assistants, and would remain in his little workshop. All that he wanted to do was to produce the prototypes, the basic designs. The mass production could be done somewhere else—he was a craftsman, not a factory.

The arrangement had worked well. Over the last six months Captain Zipp had been transformed and was now the despair of all the rival space operas. This, his viewers thought, was not just a serial about the future. It was the future—there was no argument about it. Even the actors seemed to have been inspired by their new surroundings: off the set, they sometimes behaved like twentieth-century time travellers stranded in the Victorian Age, indignant because they no longer had access to the gadgets that had always been part of their lives.

But Hans knew nothing about this. He toiled happily away, refusing to see anyone except the producer, doing all his business over the telephone—and watching the final result to ensure that his ideas had not been mutilated. The only sign of his connection with the slightly fantastic world of commercial TV was a crate of Crunche in one corner of the workshop. He had sampled one mouthful of this present from the grateful sponsor and had then remembered thankfully that, after all, he was not paid to eat the stuff.

He was working late one Sunday evening, putting the final touches to a new design for a space helmet, when he suddenly realised that he was no longer alone. Slowly he turned from the workbench and faced the door. It had been locked—how could it have been opened so silently? There were two men standing beside it, motionless, watching him. Hans felt his heart trying to climb into his gullet, and summoned up what courage he could to challenge them. At least, he felt thankfully, he had little money here. Then he wondered if, after all, this was a good thing. They might be annoyed…

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

One of the men moved toward him while the other remained watching alertly from the door. They were both wearing very new overcoats, with hats low down on their heads so that Hans could not see their faces. They were too well dressed, he decided, to be ordinary holdup men.

‘There’s no need to be alarmed, Mr Muller,’ replied the nearer man, reading his thoughts without difficulty. ‘This isn’t a holdup. It’s official. We’re from—Security.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The other reached into a portfolio he had been carrying beneath his coat, and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. He riffled through them until he had found the one he wanted.

‘You’ve given us quite a headache, Mr Muller. It’s taken us two weeks to find you—your employers were so secretive. No doubt they were anxious to hide you from their rivals. However, here we are and I’d like you to answer some questions.’

‘I’m not a spy!’ answered Hans indignantly as the meaning of the words penetrated. ‘You can’t do this! I’m a loyal American citizen!’

The other ignored the outburst. He handed over the photograph.

‘Do you recognise this?’ he said.

‘Yes. It’s the inside of Captain Zipp’s spaceship.’

‘And you designed it?’

‘Yes.’

Another photograph came out of the file.

‘And what about this?’

‘That’s the Martian city of Paldar, as seen from the air.’

‘Your own idea?’

‘Certainly,’ Hans replied, now too indignant to be cautious.

‘And this?’

‘Oh, the proton gun. I was quite proud of that.’

‘Tell me, Mr Muller—are these all your own ideas?’

‘Yes, I don’t steal from other people.’

His questioner turned to his companion and spoke for a few minutes in a voice too low for Hans to hear. They seemed to reach agreement on some point, and the conference was over before Hans could make his intended grab at the telephone.

‘I’m sorry,’ continued the intruder. ‘But there has been a serious leak. It may be—uh—accidental, even unconscious, but that does not affect the issue. We will have to investigate you. Please come with us.’

There was such power and authority in the stranger’s voice that Hans began to climb into his overcoat without a murmur. Somehow, he no longer doubted his visitors’ credentials and never thought of asking for any proof. He was worried, but not yet seriously alarmed. Of course, it was obvious what had happened. He remembered hearing about a science fiction writer during the war who had described the atom bomb with disconcerting accuracy. When so much secret research was going on, such accidents were bound to occur. He wondered just what it was he had given away.

At the doorway, he looked back into his workshop and at the men who were following him.

‘It’s all a ridiculous mistake,’ he said. ‘If I did show anything secret in the programme, it was just a coincidence. I’ve never done anything to annoy the FBI.’

It was then that the second man spoke at last, in very bad English and with a most peculiar accent.

‘What is the FBI?’ he asked.

But Hans didn’t hear him. He had just seen the spaceship.

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

First published in Satellite, June 1957

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

This story was written in Miami, in 1954. Despite the lapse of time, many of the themes of this story are surprisingly up-to-date, and a few years ago I was amazed to read a description in a scientific journal of a ship-borne device to extract uranium from sea water! I sent a copy of the story to the inventors, and apologised for invalidating their patent.

The adventures of Harry Purvis have a kind of mad logic that makes them convincing by their very improbability. As his complicated but neatly dovetailed stories emerge, one becomes lost in a sort of baffled wonder. Surely, you say to yourself, no one would have the nerve to make that up—such absurdities only occur in real life, not in fiction. And so criticism is disarmed, or at any rate discomfited, until Drew shouts, ‘Time gentlemen, pleeze!’ and throws us all out into the cold hard world.

Consider, for example, the unlikely chain of events which involved Harry in the following adventure. If he’d wanted to invent the whole thing, surely he could have managed it a lot more simply. There was not the slightest need, from the artistic point of view, to have started at Boston to make an appointment off the coast of Florida…

Harry seems to have spent a good deal of time in the United States, and to have quite as many friends there as he has in England. Sometimes he brings them to the ‘White Hart’, and sometimes they leave again under their own power. Often, however, they succumb to the illusion that beer which is tepid is also innocuous. (I am being unjust to Drew: his beer is not tepid. And if you insist, he will give you, for no extra charge, a piece of ice every bit as large as a postage stamp.)

This particular saga of Harry’s began, as I have indicated, at Boston, Mass. He was staying as a house guest of a successful New England lawyer when one morning his host said, in the casual way Americans have: ‘Let’s go down to my place in Florida. I want to get some sun.’

‘Fine,’ said Harry, who’d never been to Florida. Thirty minutes later, to his considerable surprise, he found himself moving south in a red Jaguar saloon at a formidable speed.

The drive in itself was an epic worthy of a complete story. From Boston to Miami is a little matter of 1,568 miles—a figure which, according to Harry, is now engraved on his heart. They covered the distance in thirty hours, frequently to the sound of ever-receding police sirens as frustrated squad cars dwindled astern. From time to time considerations of tactics involved them in evasive manoeuvres and they had to shoot off into secondary roads. The Jaguar’s radio tuned in to all the police frequencies, so they always had plenty of warning if an interception was being arranged. Once or twice they just managed to reach a state line in time, and Harry couldn’t help wondering what his host’s clients would have thought had they known the strength of the psychological urge which was obviously getting him away from them. He also wondered if he was going to see anything of Florida at all, or whether they would continue at this velocity down US I until they shot into the ocean at Key West.

They finally came to a halt sixty miles south of Miami, down on the Keys—that long, thin line of islands hooked on to the lower end of Florida. The Jaguar angled suddenly off the road and weaved a way through a rough track cut in the mangroves. The road ended in a wide clearing at the edge of the sea, complete with dock, thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser, swimming pool, and modern ranch-type house. It was quite a nice little hideaway, and Harry estimated that it must have cost the best part of a hundred thousand dollars.

He didn’t see much of the place until the next day, as he collapsed straight into bed. After what seemed far too short a time, he was awakened by a sound like a boiler factory in action. He showered and dressed in slow motion, and was reasonably back to normal by the time he had left his room. There seemed to be no one in the house, so he went outside to explore.

By this time he had learned not to be surprised at anything so he barely raised his eyebrows when he found his host working down at the dock, straightening out the rudder on a tiny and obviously homemade submarine. The little craft was about twenty feet long, had a conning tower with large observation windows, and bore the name Pompano stencilled on her prow.

After some reflection, Harry decided that there was nothing really very unusual about all this. About five million visitors come to Florida every year, most of them determined to get on or into the sea. His host happened to be one of those fortunate enough to indulge in his hobby in a big way.

Harry looked at the Pompano for some time, and then a disturbing thought struck him. ‘George,’ he said, ‘do you expect me to go down in that thing?’

‘Why, sure,’ answered George, giving a final bash at the rudder. ‘What are you worried about? I’ve taken her out lots of times—she’s safe as houses. We won’t be going deeper than twenty feet.’

‘There are circumstances,’ retorted Harry, ‘when I should find a mere six feet of water more than adequate. And didn’t I mention my claustrophobia? It always comes on badly at this time of year.’

‘Nonsense!’ said George. ‘You’ll forget all about that when we’re out on the reef.’ He stood back and surveyed his handiwork, then said with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Looks OK now. Let’s have some breakfast.’

During the next thirty minutes, Harry learned a good deal about the Pompano. George had designed and built her himself, and her powerful little diesel could drive her at five knots when she was fully submerged. Both crew and engine breathed through a snorkel tube, so there was no need to bother about electric motors and an independent air supply. The length of the snorkel limited dives to twenty-five feet, but in these shallow waters this was no great handicap.

‘I’ve put a lot of novel ideas into her,’ said George enthusiastically. ‘Those windows, for instance—look at their size. They’ll give you a perfect view, yet they’re quite safe. I use the old aqualung principle to keep the air pressure in the Pompano exactly the same as the water pressure outside, so there’s no strain on the hull or the ports.’

‘And what happens,’ asked Harry, ‘if you get stuck on the bottom?’

‘I open the door and get out, of course. There are a couple of spare aqualungs in the cabin, as well as a life raft with a waterproof radio, so that we can always yell for help if we get in trouble. Don’t worry—I’ve thought of everything.’

‘Famous last words,’ muttered Harry. But he decided that after the ride down from Boston he undoubtedly had charmed life: the sea was probably a safer place than US I with George at the wheel.

He made himself thoroughly familiar with the escape arrangements before they set out, and was fairly happy when he saw how well designed and constructed the little craft appeared to be. The fact that a lawyer had produced such a neat piece of marine engineering in his spare time was not in the least unusual. Harry had long ago discovered that a considerable number of Americans put quite as much effort into their hobbies as into their professions.

They chugged out of the little harbour, keeping to the marked channel until they were well clear of the coast. The sea was calm and as the shore receded the water became steadily more and more transparent. They were leaving behind the fog of pulverised coral which clouded the coastal waters, where the waves were incessantly tearing at the land. After thirty minutes they had come to the reef, visible below them as a kind of patchwork quilt above which multicoloured fish pirouetted to and fro. George closed the hatches, opened the valve of the buoyancy tanks, and said gaily, ‘Here we go!’

The wrinkled silk veil lifted, crept past the window, distorting all vision for a moment—and then they were through, no longer aliens looking into the world of waters, but denizens of that world themselves. They were floating above a valley carpeted with white sand, and surrounded by low hills of coral. The valley itself was barren but the hills around it were alive with things that grew, things that crawled and things that swam. Fish as dazzling as neon signs wandered lazily among the animals that looked like trees. It seemed not only a breathtakingly lovely but also a peaceful world. There was no haste, no sign of the struggle for existence. Harry knew very well that this was an illusion, but during all the time they were submerged he never saw one fish attack another. He mentioned this to George, who commented: ‘Yes, that’s a funny thing about fish. They seem to have definite feeding times. You can see barracuda swimming around and if the dinner gong hasn’t gone the other fish won’t take any notice of them.’

A ray, looking like some fantastic black butterfly, flapped its way across the sand, balancing itself with its long, whiplike tail. The sensitive feelers of a crayfish waved cautiously from a crack in the coral; the exploring gestures reminded Harry of a soldier testing for snipers with his hat on a stick. There was so much life, of so many kinds, crammed in this single spot that it would take years of study to recognise it all.

The Pompano cruised very slowly along the valley, while George gave a running commentary.

‘I used to do this sort of thing with the aqualung,’ he said, ‘but then I decided how nice it would be to sit in comfort and have an engine to push me around. Then I could stay out all day, take a meal along, use my cameras and not give a damn if a shark was sneaking up on me. There goes a tang—did you ever see such a brilliant blue in your life? Besides, I could show my friends around down here while still being able to talk to them. That’s one big handicap with ordinary diving gear—you’re deaf and dumb and have to talk in signs. Look at those angelfish—one day I’m going to fix up a net to catch some of them. See the way they vanish when they’re edge on! Another reason why I built the Pompano was so that I could look for wrecks. There are hundreds in this area—it’s an absolute graveyard. The Santa Margarita is only about fifty miles from here, in Biscayne Bay. She went down in 1595 with seven million dollars of bullion aboard. And there’s a little matter of sixty-five million off Long Cay, where fourteen galleons sank in 1715. The trouble is, of course, that most of these wrecks have been smashed up and overgrown with coral so it wouldn’t do you a lot of good even if you did locate them. But it’s fun to try.’

By this time Harry had begun to appreciate his friend’s psychology. He could think of few better ways of escaping from a New England law practice. George was a repressed romantic—and not such a repressed one, either, now that he came to think of it.

They cruised along happily for a couple of hours, keeping in water that was never more than forty feet deep. Once they grounded on a dazzling stretch of broken coral, and took time off for liverwurst sandwiches and glasses of beer. ‘I drank some ginger beer down here once,’ said George. ‘When I came up the gas inside me expanded and it was a very odd sort of feeling. Must try it with champagne some day.’

Harry was just wondering what to do with the empties when the Pompano seemed to go into eclipse as a dark shadow drifted overhead. Looking up through the observation window, he saw that a ship was moving slowly past twenty feet above their heads. There was no danger of a collision, as they had pulled down their snort for just this reason and were subsisting for the moment on their capital as far as air was concerned. Harry had never seen a ship from underneath and began to add another novel experience to the many he had acquired today.

He was quite proud of the fact that, despite his ignorance of matters nautical, he was just as quick as George at spotting what was wrong with the vessel sailing overhead. Instead of the normal shaft and screw, this ship had a long tunnel running the length of its keel. As it passed above them, the Pompano was rocked by the sudden rush of water.

‘I’ll be damned!’ said George, grabbing the controls. ‘That looks like some kind of jet-propulsion system. It’s about time somebody tried one out. Let’s have a look.’

He pushed up the periscope, and discovered that the ship slowly cruising past them was the Valency, of New Orleans. ‘That’s a funny name,’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I would say,’ answered Harry, ‘that it means the owner is a chemist—except for the fact that no chemist would ever make enough money to buy a ship like that.’

‘I’m going to follow her,’ decided George. ‘She’s only making five knots, and I’d like to see how that dingus works.’

He elevated the snort, got the diesel running, and started in pursuit. After a brief chase, the Pompano drew within fifty feet of the Valency, and Harry felt rather like a submarine commander about to launch a torpedo. They couldn’t miss from this distance.

In fact, they nearly made a direct hit. For the Valency suddenly slowed to a halt, and before George realised what had happened, he was alongside her. ‘No signals!’ he complained, without much logic. A minute later, it was clear that the manoeuvre was no accident. A lasso dropped neatly over the Pompano’s snorkel and they were efficiently gaffed. There was nothing to do but emerge, rather sheepishly, and make the best of it.

Fortunately, their captors were reasonable men and could recognise the truth when they heard it. Fifteen minutes after coming aboard the Valency, George and Harry were sitting on the bridge while a uniformed steward brought them highballs and they listened attentively to the theories of Dr Gilbert Romano.

They were still both a little overawed at being in Dr Romano’s presence: it was rather like meeting a live Rockefeller or a reigning du Pont. The Doctor was a phenomenon virtually unknown in Europe and unusual even in the United States—the big scientist who had become a bigger businessman. He was now in his late seventies and had just been retired—after a considerable tussle—from the chairmanship of the vast chemical-engineering firm he had founded.

It is rather amusing, Harry told us, to notice the subtle social distinctions which differences in wealth can produce even in the most democratic country. By Harry’s standards, George was a very rich man: his income was around a hundred thousand dollars a year. But Dr Romano was in another price range altogether, and had to be treated accordingly with a kind of friendly respect which had nothing to do with obsequiousness. On his side, the Doctor was perfectly free and easy; there was nothing about him that gave any impression of wealth, if one ignored such trivia as hundred-and-fifty-foot ocean-going yachts.

The fact that George was on first-name terms with most of the Doctor’s business acquaintances helped to break the ice and to establish the purity of their motives. Harry spent a boring half hour while business deals ranging over half the United States were discussed in terms of what Bill So-and-So did in Pittsburgh, who Joe Somebody Else ran into at the Bankers’ Club in Houston, how Clyde Thingummy happened to be playing golf at Augusta while Ike was there. It was a glimpse of a mysterious world where immense power was wielded by men who all seemed to have gone to the same colleges, or who at any rate belonged to the same clubs. Harry soon became aware of the fact that George was not merely paying court to Dr Romano because that was the polite thing to do. George was too shrewd a lawyer to miss the chance of building up some good will, and appeared to have forgotten all about the original purpose of their expedition.

Harry had to wait for a suitable gap in the conversation before he could raise the subject which really interested him. When it dawned on Dr Romano that he was talking to another scientist, he promptly abandoned finance and George was the one who was left out in the cold.

The thing that puzzled Harry was why a distinguished chemist should be interested in marine propulsion. Being a man of direct action, he challenged the Doctor on this point. For a moment the scientist appeared a little embarrassed and Harry was about to apologise for his inquisitiveness—a feat that would have required real effort on his part. But before he could do this, Dr Romano had excused himself and disappeared into the bridge.

He came back five minutes later with a rather satisfied expression, and continued as if nothing had happened.

‘A very natural question, Mr Purvis,’ he chuckled. ‘I’d have asked it myself. But do you really expect me to tell you?’

‘Er—it was just a vague sort of hope,’ confessed Harry.

‘Then I’m going to surprise you—surprise you twice, in fact. I’m going to answer you, and I’m going to show you that I’m not passionately interested in marine propulsion. Those bulges on the bottom of my ship which you were inspecting with such great interest do contain the screws, but they also contain a good deal else as well.

‘Let me give you,’ continued Dr Romano, now obviously warming up to his subject, ‘a few elementary statistics about the ocean. We can see a lot of it from here—quite a few square miles. Did you know that every cubic mile of sea water contains a hundred and fifty million tons of minerals?’

‘Frankly, no,’ said George. ‘It’s an impressive thought.’

‘It’s impressed me for a long time,’ said the Doctor. ‘Here we go grubbing about in the earth for our metals and chemicals, while every element that exists can be found in sea water. The ocean, in fact, is a kind of universal mine which can never be exhausted. We may plunder the land, but we’ll never empty the sea.

‘Men have already started to mine the sea, you know. Dow Chemical has been taking out bromine for years: every cubic mile contains about three hundred thousand tons. More recently, we’ve started to do something about the five million tons of magnesium per cubic mile. But that sort of thing is merely a beginning.

‘The great practical problem is that most of the elements present in sea water are in such low concentrations. The first seven elements make up about ninety-nine per cent of the total, and it’s the remaining one per cent that contains all the useful metals except magnesium.

‘All my life I’ve wondered how we could do something about this, and the answer came during the war. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the techniques used in the atomic-energy field to remove minute quantities of isotopes from solutions: some of those methods are still pretty much under wraps.’

‘Are you talking about ion-exchange resins?’ hazarded Harry.

‘Well—something similar. My firm developed several of these techniques on AEC contracts, and I realised at once that they would have wider applications. I put some of my bright young men to work and they have made what we call a “molecular sieve”. That’s a mighty descriptive expression: in its way, the thing is a sieve, and we can set it to select anything we like. It depends on very advanced wave-mechanical theories for its operation, but what it actually does is absurdly simple. We can choose any component of sea water we like, and get the sieve to take it out. With several units, working in series, we can take out one element after another. The efficiency’s quite high, and the power consumption negligible.’

‘I know!’ yelped George. ‘You’re extracting gold from sea water!’

‘Huh!’ snorted Dr Romano in tolerant disgust. ‘I’ve got better things to do with my time. Too much damn gold around, anyhow. I’m after the commercially useful metals—the ones our civilisation is going to be desperately short of in another couple of generations. And as a matter of fact, even with my sieve it wouldn’t be worth going after gold. There are only about fifty pounds of the stuff in every cubic mile.’

‘What about uranium?’ asked Harry. ‘Or is that scarcer still?’

‘I rather wish you hadn’t asked that question,’ replied Dr Romano with a cheerfulness that belied the remark. ‘But since you can look it up in any library, there’s no harm in telling you that uranium’s two hundred times more common than gold. About seven tons in every cubic mile—a figure which is, shall we say, distinctly interesting. So why bother about gold?’

‘Why indeed?’ echoed George.

‘To continue,’ said Dr Romano, duly continuing, ‘even with the molecular sieve, we’ve still got the problem of processing enormous volumes of sea water. There are a number of ways one could tackle this: you could build giant pumping stations, for example. But I’ve always been keen on killing two birds with one stone, and the other day I did a little calculation that gave the most surprising result. I found that every time the Queen Mary crosses the Atlantic, her screws chew up about a tenth of a cubic mile of water. Fifteen million tons of minerals, in other words. Or to take the case you indiscreetly mentioned—almost a ton of uranium on every Atlantic crossing. Quite a thought, isn’t it?

‘So it seemed to me that all we need do to create a very useful mobile extraction plant was to put the screws of any vessel inside a tube which would compel the slip stream to pass through one of my sieves. Of course, there’s a certain loss of propulsive power, but our experimental unit works very well. We can’t go quite as fast as we did, but the farther we cruise the more money we make from our mining operations. Don’t you think the shipping companies will find that very attractive? But of course that’s merely incidental. I look forward to the building of floating extraction plants that will cruise round and round in the ocean until they’ve filled their hoppers with anything you care to name. When that day comes, we’ll be able to stop tearing up the land and all our material shortages will be over. Everything goes back to the sea in the long run anyway, and once we’ve unlocked that treasure chest, we’ll be all set for eternity.’

For a moment there was silence on deck, save for the faint clink of ice in the tumblers, while Dr Romano’s guests contemplated this dazzling prospect. Then Harry was struck by a sudden thought.

‘This is quite one of the most important inventions I’ve ever heard of,’ he said. ‘That’s why I find it rather odd that you should have confided in us so fully. After all, we’re perfect strangers, and for all you know might be spying on you.’

The old scientist chortled gaily.

‘Don’t worry about that, my boy,’ he reassured Harry. ‘I’ve already been on to Washington and had my friends check up on you.’

Harry blinked for a minute, then realised how it had been done. He remembered Dr Romano’s brief disappearance, and could picture what had happened. There would have been a radio call to Washington, some senator would have got on to the Embassy, the Ministry of Supply representative would have done his bit—and in five minutes the Doctor would have got the answer he wanted. Yes, Americans were very efficient—those who could afford to be.

It was about this time that Harry became aware of the fact that they were no longer alone. A much larger and more impressive yacht than the Valency was heading towards them, and in a few minutes he was able to read the name Sea Spray. Such a name, he thought, was more appropriate to billowing sails than throbbing diesels, but there was no doubt that the Spray was a very pretty creature indeed. He could understand the looks of undisguised covetousness that both George and Dr Romano now plainly bore.

The sea was so calm that the two yachts were able to come alongside each other, and as soon as they had made contact a sunburned, energetic man in the late forties vaulted over onto the deck of the Valency. He strode up to Dr Romano, shook his hand vigorously, said, ‘Well, you old rascal, what are you up to?’ and then looked enquiringly at the rest of the company. The Doctor carried out the introductions: it seemed that they had been boarded by Professor Scott McKenzie, who’d been sailing his yacht down from Key Largo.

‘Oh no!’ cried Harry to himself. ‘This is too much! One millionaire scientist per day is all I can stand.’

But there was no getting away from it. True, McKenzie was very seldom seen in the academic cloisters, but he was a genuine professor none the less, holding the chair of geophysics at some Texas college. Ninety per cent of his time, however, he spent working for the big oil companies and running a consulting firm of his own. It rather looked as if he had made his torsion balances and seismographs pay quite well for themselves. In fact, though he was a much younger man than Dr Romano, he had even more money owing to being in a more rapidly expanding industry. Harry gathered that the peculiar tax laws of the sovereign State of Texas also had something to do with it…

It seemed an unlikely coincidence that these two scientific tycoons should have met by chance, and Harry waited to see what skulduggery was afoot. For a while the conversation was confined to generalities, but it was obvious that Professor McKenzie was extremely inquisitive about the Doctor’s other two guests. Not long after they had been introduced, he made some excuse to hop back to his own ship and Harry moaned inwardly. If the Embassy got two separate enquiries about him in the space of half an hour, they’d wonder what he’d been up to. It might even make the FBI suspicious, and then how would he get those promised twenty-four pairs of nylons out of the country?

He found it quite fascinating to study the relation between the two scientists. They were like a couple of fighting cocks circling for position. Romano treated the younger man with a downright rudeness which, Harry suspected, concealed a grudging admiration. It was clear that Dr Romano was an almost fanatical conservationist, and regarded the activities of McKenzie and his employers with the greatest disapproval. ‘You’re a gang of robbers,’ he said once. ‘You’re seeing how quickly you can loot this planet of its resources, and you don’t give a damn about the next generation.’

‘And what,’ answered McKenzie, not very originally, ‘has the next generation ever done for us?’

The sparring continued for the best part of an hour, and much of what went on was completely over Harry’s head. He wondered why he and George were being allowed to sit in on all this, and after a while he began to appreciate Dr Romano’s technique. He was an opportunist of genius: he was glad to keep them around, now that they had turned up, just to worry Professor McKenzie and to make him wonder what other deals were afoot.

He let the molecular sieve leak out bit by bit, as if it wasn’t really important and he was only mentioning it in passing. Professor McKenzie, however, latched on to it at once, and the more evasive Romano became, the more insistent was his adversary. It was obvious that he was being deliberately coy, and that though Professor McKenzie knew this perfectly well, he couldn’t help playing the older scientist’s game.

Dr Romano had been discussing the device in a peculiarly oblique fashion, as if it were a future project rather than an existing fact. He outlined its staggering possibilities, and explained how it would make all existing forms of mining obsolete, besides removing forever the danger of world metal shortages.

‘If it’s so good,’ exclaimed McKenzie presently, ‘why haven’t you made the thing?’

‘What do you think I’m doing out here in the Gulf Stream?’ retorted the Doctor. ‘Take a look at this.’

He opened a locker beneath the sonar set, and pulled out a small metal bar which he tossed to McKenzie. It looked like lead, and was obviously extremely heavy. The Professor hefted it in his hand and said at once: ‘Uranium. Do you mean to say…’

‘Yes—every gram. And there’s plenty more where that came from.’ He turned to Harry’s friend and said: ‘George—what about taking the Professor down in your submarine to have a look at the works? He won’t see much, but it’ll show him we’re in business.’

McKenzie was still so thoughtful that he took a little thing like a private submarine in his stride. He returned to the surface fifteen minutes later, having seen just enough to whet his appetite.

‘The first thing I want to know,’ he said to Romano, ‘is why you’re showing this to me! It’s about the biggest thing that ever happened—why isn’t your own firm handling it?’

Romano gave a little snort of disgust.

‘You know I’ve had a row with the board,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that lot of old dead beats couldn’t handle anything as big as this. I hate to admit it, but you Texas pirates are the boys for the job.’

‘This is a private venture of yours?’

‘Yes: the company knows nothing about it, and I’ve sunk half a million of my own money into it. It’s been a kind of hobby of mine. I felt someone had to undo the damage that was going on, the rape of the continents by people like—’

‘All right—we’ve heard that before. Yet you propose giving it to us?’

‘Who said anything about giving?’

There was a pregnant silence. Then McKenzie said cautiously: ‘Of course, there’s no need to tell you that we’ll be interested—very interested. If you’ll let us have the figures on efficiency, extraction rates, and all the other relevant statistics—no need to tell us the actual technical details if you don’t want to—then we’ll be able to talk business. I can’t really speak for my associates but I’m sure that they can raise enough cover to make any deal—’

‘Scott,’ said Romano—and his voice now held a note of tiredness that for the first time reflected his age—‘I’m not interested in doing a deal with your partners. I haven’t time to haggle with the boys in the front room and their lawyers and their lawyer’s lawyers. Fifty years I’ve been doing that sort of thing, and believe me, I’m tired. This is my development. It was done with my money, and all the equipment is in my ship. I want to do a personal deal, direct with you. You can handle it from then on.’

McKenzie blinked.

‘I couldn’t swing anything as big as this,’ he protested. ‘Sure, I appreciate the offer, but if this does what you say, it’s worth billions. And I’m just a poor but honest millionaire.’

‘Money I’m no longer interested in. What would I do with it at my time of life? No, Scott, there’s just one thing I want now—and I want it right away, this minute. Give me the Sea Spray, and you can have my process.’

‘You’re crazy! Why, even with inflation, you could build the Spray for inside a million. And your process must be worth—’

‘I’m not arguing, Scott. What you say is true, but I’m an old man in a hurry, and it would take me a year to get a ship like yours built. I’ve wanted her ever since you showed her to me back at Miami. My proposal is that you take over the Valency, with all her lab equipment and records. It will only take an hour to swap our personal effects—we’ve a lawyer here who can make it all legal. And then I’m heading out into the Caribbean, down through the islands, and across the Pacific.’

‘You’ve got it all worked out?’ said McKenzie in awed wonder.

‘Yes. You can take it or leave it.’

‘I never heard such a crazy deal in my life,’ said McKenzie, somewhat petulantly. ‘Of course I’ll take it. I know a stubborn old mule when I see one.’

The next hour was one of frantic activity. Sweating crew members rushed back and forth with suitcases and bundles, while Dr Romano sat happily in the midst of the turmoil he had created, a blissful smile upon his wrinkled old face. George and Professor McKenzie went into a legal huddle, and emerged with a document which Dr Romano signed with hardly a glance.

Unexpected things began to emerge from the Sea Spray, such as a beautiful mutation mink and a beautiful nonmutation blonde.

‘Hello, Sylvia,’ said Dr Romano politely. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find the quarters here a little more cramped. The Professor never mentioned you were aboard. Never mind—we won’t mention it either. Not actually in the contract, but a gentleman’s agreement, shall we say? It would be such a pity to upset Mrs McKenzie.’

‘I don’t know what you mean!’ pouted Sylvia. ‘Someone has to do all the Professor’s typing.’

‘And you do it damn badly, my dear,’ said McKenzie, assisting her over the rail with true Sothern gallantry. Harry couldn’t help admiring his composure in such an embarrassing situation—he was by no means sure that he would have managed as well. But he wished he had the opportunity to find out.

At last the chaos subsided, the stream of boxes and bundles subsided to a trickle. Dr Romano shook hands with everybody, thanked George and Harry for their assistance, strode to the bridge of the Sea Spray, and ten minutes later, was halfway to the horizon.

Harry was wondering if it wasn’t about time for them to take their departure as well—they had never got round to explaining to Professor McKenzie what they were doing here in the first place—when the radiotelephone started calling. Dr Romano was on the line.

‘Forgotten his toothbrush, I suppose,’ said George. It was not quite as trivial as that. Fortunately, the loud-speaker was switched on. Eavesdropping was practically forced upon them and required none of the effort that makes it so embarrassing to a gentleman.

‘Look here, Scott,’ said Dr Romano, ‘I think I owe you some sort of explanation.’

‘If you’ve gypped me, I’ll have you for every cent—’

‘Oh, it’s not like that. But I did rather pressurise you, though everything I said was perfectly true. Don’t get too annoyed with me—you’ve got a bargain. It’ll be a long time, though, before it makes you any money, and you’ll have to sink a few millions of your own into it first. You see, the efficiency has to be increased by about three orders of magnitude before it will be a commercial proposition: that bar of uranium cost me a couple of thousand dollars. Now don’t blow your top—it can be done—I’m certain of that. Dr Kendall is the man to get: he did all the basic work—hire him away from my people however much it costs you. You’re a stubborn cuss and I know you’ll finish the job now it’s on your hands. That’s why I wanted you to have it. Poetic justice, too—you’ll be able to repay some of the damage you’ve done to the land. Too bad it’ll make you a billionaire, but that can’t be helped.

‘Wait a minute—don’t cut in on me. I’d have finished the job myself if I had the time, but it’ll take at least three more years. And the doctors say I’ve only got six months: I wasn’t kidding when I said I was in a hurry. I’m glad I clinched the deal without having to tell you that, but believe me I’d have used it as a weapon if I had to. Just one thing more—when you do get the process working, name it after me, will you? That’s all—it’s no use calling me back. I won’t answer—and I know you can’t catch me.’

Professor McKenzie didn’t turn a hair.

‘I thought it was something like that,’ he said to no one in particular. Then he sat down, produced an elaborate pocket slide rule, and became oblivious to the world. He scarcely looked up when George and Harry, feeling very much outclassed, made their polite departure and silently snorkelled away.

‘Like so many things that happen these days,’ concluded Harry Purvis, ‘I still don’t know the final outcome of this meeting. I rather imagine that Professor McKenzie has run into some snags, or we’d have heard rumours about the process by now. But I’ve not the slightest doubt that sooner or later it’ll be perfected, so get ready to sell your mining shares…

‘As for Dr Romano, he wasn’t kidding, though his doctors were a little out in their estimates. He lasted a full year, and I guess the Sea Spray helped a lot. They buried him in mid-Pacific, and it’s just occurred to me that the old boy would have appreciated that. I told you what a fanatical conservationist he was, and it’s a piquant thought that even now some of his atoms may be going through his own molecular sieve…

‘I notice some incredulous looks, but it’s a fact. If you took a tumbler of water, poured it into the ocean, mixed well, then filled the glass from the sea, there’d still be some scores of molecules of water from the original sample in the tumbler. So—’ he gave a gruesome little chuckle—‘it’s only a matter of time before not only Dr Romano, but all of us, make some contribution to the sieve. And with that thought, gentlemen, I bid you all a very pleasant good night.’

Critical Mass

First published in Space Science Fiction Magazine, August 1957, revised from Lilliput, March 1949

Collected in Tales from the White Hart

‘Did I ever tell you,’ said Harry Purvis modestly, ‘about the time I prevented the evacuation of southern England?’

‘You did not,’ said Charles Willis, ‘or if you did, I slept through it.’

‘Well, then,’ continued Harry, when enough people had gathered round him to make a respectable audience. ‘It happened two years ago at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment near Clobham. You all know the place, of course. But I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I worked there for a while, on a special job I can’t talk about.’

‘That makes a nice change,’ said John Wyndham, without the slightest effect.

‘It was on a Saturday afternoon,’ Harry began. ‘A beautiful day in late spring. There were about six of us scientists in the bar of the “Black Swan”, and the windows were open so that we could see down the slopes of Clobham Hill and out across the country to Upchester, about thirty miles away. It was so clear, in fact, that we could pick out the twin spires of Upchester Cathedral on the horizon. You couldn’t have asked for a more peaceful day.

‘The staff from the Establishment got on pretty well with the locals, though at first they weren’t at all happy about having us on their doorsteps. Apart from the nature of our work, they’d believed that scientists were a race apart, with no human interests. When we’d beaten them up at darts a couple of times, and bought a few drinks, they changed their minds. But there was still a certain amount of half-serious leg-pulling, and we were always being asked what we were going to blow up next.

‘On this afternoon there should have been several more of us present, but there’d been a rush job in the Radioisotopes Division and so we were below strength. Stanley Chambers, the landlord, commented on the absence of some familiar faces.

‘“What’s happened to all your pals today?” he asked my boss, Dr French.

‘“They’re busy at the works,” French replied—we always called the Establishment “the works”, as that made it seem more homely and less terrifying. “We had to get some stuff out in a hurry. They’ll be along later.”

‘“One day,” said Stan severely, “you and your friends are going to let out something you won’t be able to bottle up again. And then where will we all be?”

‘“Halfway to the moon,” said Dr French. I’m afraid it was rather an irresponsible sort of remark, but silly questions like this always made him lose patience.

‘Stan Chambers looked over his shoulder as if he was judging how much of the hill stood between him and Clobham. I guessed he was calculating if he’d have time to reach the cellar—or whether it was worth trying anyway.

‘“About these—isotopes—you keep sending to the hospitals,” said a thoughtful voice. “I was at St Thomas’s last week, and saw them moving some around in a lead safe that must have weighed a ton. It gave me the creeps, wondering what would happen if someone forgot to handle it properly.”

‘“We calculated the other day,” said Dr French, obviously still annoyed at the interruption to his darts, “that there was enough uranium in Clobham to boil the North Sea.”

‘Now that was a silly thing to say: and it wasn’t true, either. But I couldn’t very well reprimand my own boss, could I?

‘The man who’d been asking these questions was sitting in the alcove by the window, and I noticed that he was looking down the road with an anxious expression.

‘“The stuff leaves your place on trucks, doesn’t it?” he asked, rather urgently.

‘“Yes: a lot of isotopes are short-lived, and so they’ve got to be delivered immediately.”

‘“Well, there’s a truck in trouble down the hill. Would it be one of yours?”

‘The dartboard was forgotten in the general rush to the window. When I managed to get a good look, I could see a large truck, loaded with packing cases, careering down the hill about a quarter of a mile away. From time to time it bounced off one of the hedges: it was obvious that the brakes had failed and the driver had lost control. Luckily there was no oncoming traffic, or a nasty accident would have been inevitable. As it was, one looked probable.

‘Then the truck came to a bend in the road, left the pavement, and tore through the hedge. It rocked along with diminishing speed for fifty yards, jolting violently over the rough ground. It had almost come to rest when it encountered a ditch and, very sedately, canted over onto one side. A few seconds later the sound of splintering wood reached us as the packing cases slid off to the ground.

‘“That’s that,” said someone with a sigh of relief. “He did the right thing, aiming for the hedge. I guess he’ll be shaken up, but he won’t be hurt.”

‘And then we saw a most perplexing sight. The door of the cab opened, and the driver scrambled out. Even from this distance, it was clear that he was highly agitated—though, in the circumstances, that was natural enough. But he did not, as one would have expected, sit down to recover his wits. On the contrary: he promptly took to his heels and ran across the field as if all the demons of hell were after him.

‘We watched open-mouthed, and with rising apprehension, as he dwindled down the hill. There was an ominous silence in the bar, except for the ticking of the clock that Stan always kept exactly ten minutes fast. Then someone said, “D’you think we’d better stay? I mean—t’s only half a mile…”

‘There was an uncertain movement away from the window. Then Dr French gave a nervous little laugh.

‘“We don’t know if it is one of our trucks,” he said. “And anyway, I was pulling your legs just now. It’s completely impossible for any of this stuff to explode. He’s just afraid his tank’s going to catch fire.”

‘“Oh yes?” said Stan. “Then why’s he still running? He’s halfway down the hill now.”

‘“I know!” suggested Charlie Evan, from the Instruments Section. “He’s carrying explosives, and is afraid they’re going to go up.”

‘I had to scotch that one. “There’s no sign of a fire, so what’s he worried about now? And if he was carrying explosives, he’d have a red flag or something.”

‘“Hang on a minute,” said Stan. “I’ll go and get my glasses.”

‘No one moved until he came back: no one, that is, except the tiny figure far down the hillside, which had now vanished into the woods without slackening its speed.

‘Stan stared through the binoculars for an eternity. At last he lowered them with a grunt of disappointment.

‘“Can’t see much,” he said. “The truck’s tipped over in the wrong direction. Those crates are all over the place—some of them have busted open. See if you can make anything of it.”

‘French had a long stare, then handed the glasses to me. They were a very old-fashioned model, and didn’t help much. For a moment it seemed to me that there was a curious haziness about some of the boxes—but that didn’t make sense. I put it down to the poor condition of the lenses.

‘And there, I think, the whole business would have fizzled out if those cyclists hadn’t appeared. They were puffing up the hill on a tandem, and when they came to the fresh gap in the hedge they promptly dismounted to see what was going on. The truck was visible from the road and they approached it hand in hand, the girl obviously hanging back, the man telling her not to be nervous. We could imagine their conversation: it was a most touching spectacle.

‘It didn’t last long. They got to within a few yards of the truck—and then departed at high speed in opposite directions. Neither looked back to observe the other’s progress; and they were running, I noticed, in a most peculiar fashion.

‘Stan, who’d retrieved his glasses, put them down with a shaky hand.

‘“Get out the cars!” he said.

‘“But—” began Dr French.

‘Stan silenced him with a glare. “You damned scientists!” he said, as he slammed and locked the till (even at a moment like his, he remembered his duty). “I knew you’d do it sooner or later.”

‘Then he was gone, and most of his cronies with him. They didn’t stop to offer us a lift.

‘“This is perfectly ridiculous!” said French. “Before we know where we are, those fools will have started a panic and there’ll be hell to pay.”

‘I knew what he meant. Someone would tell the police: cars would be diverted away from Clobham; the telephone lines would be blocked with calls—it would be like the Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” scare back in 1938. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating, but you can never underestimate the power of panic. And people were scared, remember, of our place, and were half expecting something like this to happen.

‘What’s more, I don’t mind telling you that by this time we weren’t any too happy ourselves. We were simply unable to imagine what was going on down there by the wrecked truck, and there’s nothing a scientist hates more than being completely baffled.

‘Meanwhile I’d grabbed Stan’s discarded binoculars and had been studying the wreck very carefully. As I looked, a theory began to evolve in my mind. There was some—aura—about those boxes. I stared until my eyes began to smart, and then said to Dr French: “I think I know what it is. Suppose you ring up Clobham Post Office and try to intercept Stan, or at least to stop him spreading rumours if he’s already got there. Say that everything’s under control—there’s nothing to worry about. While you’re doing that, I’m going to walk down to the truck and test my theory.”

‘I’m sorry to say that no one offered to follow me. Though I started down the road confidently enough, after a while I began to be a little less sure of myself. I remembered an incident that’s always struck me as one of history’s most ironic jokes, and began to wonder if something of the same sort might not be happening now. There was once a volcanic island in the Far East, with a population of about fifty thousand. No one worried about the volcano, which had been quiet for a hundred years. Then one day, eruptions started. At first they were minor, but they grew more intense hour by hour. The people started to panic, and tried to crowd aboard the few boats in harbour so that they could reach the mainland.

‘But the island was ruled by a military commandant who was determined to keep order at all costs. He sent out proclamations saying that there was no danger, and he got his troops to occupy the ships so that there would be no loss of life as people attempted to leave in overloaded boats. Such was the force of his personality, and the example of his courage, that he calmed the multitude, and those who had been trying to get away crept shamefaced back to their homes, where they sat waiting for conditions to return to normal.

‘So when the volcano blew up a couple of hours later, taking the whole island with it, there weren’t any survivors at all…

‘As I got near the truck, I began to see myself in the role of that misguided commandant. After all, there are some times when it is brave to stay and face danger, and others when the most sensible thing to do is to take to the hills. But it was too late to turn back now, and I was fairly sure of my theory.’

‘I know,’ said George Whitley, who always liked to spoil Harry’s stories if he could. ‘It was gas.’

Harry didn’t seem at all perturbed at losing his climax.

‘Ingenious of you to suggest it. That’s just what I did think, which shows that we can all be stupid at times.

‘I’d got to within fifty feet of the truck when I stopped dead, and though it was a warm day a most unpleasant chill began to spread out from the small of my back. For I could see something that blew my gas theory to blazes and left nothing at all in its place.

‘A black, crawling mass was writhing over the surface of one of the packing cases. For a moment I tried to pretend to myself that it was some dark liquid oozing from a broken container. But one rather well-known characteristic of liquids is that they can’t defy gravity. This thing was doing just that: and it was also quite obviously alive. From where I was standing, it looked like the pseudopod of some giant amoeba as it changed its shape and thickness, and wavered to and fro over the side of the broken crate.

‘Quite a few fantasies that would have done credit to Edgar Allan Poe flitted through my mind in those few seconds. Then I remembered my duty as a citizen and my pride as a scientist: I started to walk forward again, though in no great haste.

‘I remember sniffing cautiously, as if I still had gas on the mind. Yet it was my ears, not my nose, that gave me the answer, as the sound from that sinister, seething mass built up around me. It was a sound I’d heard a million times before, but never as loud as this. And I sat down—not too close—and laughed and laughed and laughed. Then I got up and walked back to the pub.

‘“Well,” said Dr French eagerly, “what was it? We’ve got Stan on the line—caught him at the crossroads. But he won’t come back until we can tell him what’s happening.”

‘“Tell Stan,” I said, “to rustle up the local apiarist, and bring him along at the same time. There’s a big job for him here.”

‘“The local what?” said French. Then his jaw dropped. “My God! You don’t mean…”

‘“Precisely,” I answered, walking behind the bar to see if Stan had any interesting bottles hidden away. “They’re settling down now, but I guess they’re still pretty annoyed. I didn’t stop to count, but there must be half a million bees down there trying to get back into their busted hives.”’

The Other Side of the Sky

First published in Infinity Science Fiction Magazine, September/October 1957

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

The success of the earlier set of linked short stories, ‘Venture to the Moon’, led to the writing of this series which by good luck appeared on the London newsstands just when Sputnik I appeared in the sky.

Special Delivery

I can still remember the excitement, back in 1957, when Russia launched the first artificial satellites and managed to hang a few pounds of instruments up here above the atmosphere. Of course, I was only a kid at the time, but I went out in the evening like everyone else, trying to spot those little magnesium spheres as they zipped through the twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It’s strange to think that some of them are still there—but that now they’re below me, and I’d have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see them…

Yes, a lot has happened in the last forty years, and sometimes I’m afraid that you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted, forgetting the skill and science and courage that went to make them. How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls, and most of your TV programmes, are routed through one or the other of the satellites? And how often do you give any credit to the meteorologists up here for the fact that weather forecasts are no longer the joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate ninety-nine per cent of the time?

It was a rugged life, back in the seventies, when I went up to work on the outer stations. They were being rushed into operation to open up the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would be available as soon as we had transmitters out in space that could beam programmes to anywhere on the globe.

The first artificial satellites had been very close to Earth, but the three stations forming the great triangle of the Relay Chain had to be twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around the equator. At this altitude—and at no other—they would take exactly a day to go around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot on the turning Earth.

In my time I’ve worked on all three of the stations, but my first tour of duty was aboard Relay Two. That’s almost exactly over Entebbe, Uganda, and provides service for Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. Today it’s a huge structure hundreds of yards across, beaming thousands of simultaneous programmes down to the hemisphere beneath it as it carries the radio traffic of half the world. But when I saw it for the first time from the port of the ferry rocket that carried me up to orbit, it looked like a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible that any order could ever emerge from this chaos.

Accommodation for the technical staff and assembling crews was primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable ferry rockets that had been stripped of everything except air purifiers. ‘The Hulks’, we christened them; each man had just enough room for himself and a couple of cubic feet of personal belongings. There was a fine irony in the fact that we were living in the midst of infinite space—and hadn’t room to swing a cat.

It was a great day when we heard that the first pressurised living quarters were on their way up to us—complete with needle-jet shower baths that would operate even here, where water—like everything else—had no weight. Unless you’ve lived aboard an overcrowded spaceship, you won’t appreciate what that meant. We could throw away our damp sponges and feel really clean at last…

Nor were the showers the only luxury promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge spacious enough to hold no fewer than eight people, a microfilm library, a magnetic billiard table, lightweight chess sets, and similar novelties for bored spacemen. The very thought of all these comforts made our cramped life in the Hulks seem quite unendurable, even though we were being paid about a thousand dollars a week to endure it.

Starting from the Second Refuelling Zone, two thousand miles above Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would take about six hours to climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty at the time, and stationed myself at the telescope where I’d spent most of my scanty leisure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world hanging there in space beside us; with the highest power of the telescope, one seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When there were no clouds and the seeing was good, objects the size of a small house were easily visible. I had never been to Africa, but I grew to know it well while I was off duty in Station Two. You may not believe this, but I’ve often spotted elephants moving across the plains, and the immense herds of zebras and antelopes were easy to see as they flowed back and forth like living tides on the great reservations.

But my favourite spectacle was the dawn coming up over the mountains in the heart of the continent. The line of sunlight would come sweeping across the Indian Ocean, and the new day would extinguish the tiny twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me. Long before the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day would march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with light. Earth would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.

Twelve hours later, I would see the reverse process as the same mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun. They would blaze for a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth would spin into darkness, and night would fall upon Africa.

It was not the beauty of the terrestrial globe I was concerned with now. Indeed, I was not even looking at Earth, but at the fierce blue-white star high above the western edge of the planet’s disc. The automatic freighter was eclipsed in Earth’s shadow; what I was seeing was the incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its twenty-thousand-mile climb.

I had watched ships ascending to us so often that I knew every stage of their manoeuvre by heart. So when the rockets didn’t wink out, but continued to burn steadily, I knew within seconds that something was wrong. In sick, helpless fury I watched all our longed-for comforts—and, worse still, our mail!—moving faster and faster along the unintended orbit. The freighter’s auto-pilot had jammed; had there been a human pilot aboard, he could have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now all the fuel that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being burned in one continuous blast of power.

By the time the fuel tanks had emptied, and that distant star had flickered and died in the field of my telescope, the tracking stations had confirmed what I already knew. The freighter was moving far too fast for Earth’s gravity to recapture it—indeed, it was heading into the cosmic wilderness beyond Pluto…

It took a long time for morale to recover, and it only made matters worse when someone in the computing section worked out the future history of our errant freighter. You see, nothing is ever really lost in space. Once you’ve calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of eternity. As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail receding to the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would all come back one day, in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing by it will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the sun—quite early in the spring of the year AD 15,862.

Feathered Friend

To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a regulation that forbids one to keep pets in a space station. No one ever thought it was necessary—and even had such a rule existed, I am quite certain that Sven Olsen would have ignored it.

With a name like that, you will picture Sven at once as a six-foot-six Nordic giant, built like a built and with a voice to match. Had this been so, his chances of getting a job in space would have been very slim; actually he was a wiry little fellow, like most of the early spacers, and managed to qualify easily for the 150-pound bonus that kept so many of us on a reducing diet.

Sven was one of our best construction men, and excelled at the tricky and specialised work of collecting assorted girders as they floated around in free fall, making them do the slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet that would get them into their right positions, and fusing the pieces together when they were precisely dovetailed into the intended pattern. I never tired of watching him and his gang as the station grew under their hands like a giant jigsaw puzzle; it was a skilled and difficult job, for a space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to work. However, Sven’s team had one great advantage over the construction gangs you see putting up skyscrapers down on Earth. They could step back and admire their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity…

Don’t ask me why Sven wanted a pet, or why he chose the one he did. I’m not a psychologist, but I must admit that his selection was very sensible. Claribel weighed practically nothing, her food requirements were infinitesimal—and she was not worried, as most animals would have been, by the absence of gravity.

I first became aware that Claribel was aboard when I was sitting in the little cubbyhole laughingly called my office, checking through my lists of technical stores to decide what items we’d be running out of next. When I heard the musical whistle beside my ear, I assumed that it had come over the station intercom, and waited for an announcement to follow. It didn’t; instead, there was a long and involved pattern of melody that made me look up with such a start that I forgot all about the angle beam just behind my head. When the stars had ceased to explode before my eyes, I had my first view of Claribel.

She was a small yellow canary, hanging in the air as motionless as a hummingbird—and with much less effort, for her wings were quietly folded along her sides. We stared at each other for a minute; then, before I had quite recovered my wits, she did a curious kind of backward loop I’m sure no earthbound canary had ever managed, and departed with a few leisurely flicks. It was quite obvious that she’d already learned how to operate in the absence of gravity, and did not believe in doing unnecessary work.

Sven didn’t confess to her ownership for several days, and by that time it no longer mattered, because Claribel was a general pet. He had smuggled her up on the last ferry from Earth, when he came back from leave—partly, he claimed, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He wanted to see just how a bird would operate when it had no weight but could still use its wings.

Claribel thrived and grew fat. On the whole, we had little trouble concealing our unauthorised guest when VIPs from Earth came visiting. A space station has more hiding places than you can count; the only problem was that Claribel got rather noisy when she was upset, and we sometimes had to think fast to explain the curious peeps and whistles that came from ventilating shafts and storage bulkheads. There were a couple of narrow escapes—but then who would dream of looking for a canary in a space station?

We were now on twelve-hour watches, which was not as bad as it sounds, since you need little sleep in space. Though of course there is no ‘day’ and ‘night’ when you are floating in permanent sunlight, it was still convenient to stick to the terms. Certainly when I woke up that ‘morning’ it felt like 6.00 a.m. on Earth. I had a nagging headache, and vague memories of fitful, disturbed dreams. It took me ages to undo my bunk straps, and I was still only half awake when I joined the remainder of the duty crew in the mess. Breakfast was unusually quiet, and there was one seat vacant.

‘Where’s Sven?’ I asked, not very much caring.

‘He’s looking for Claribel,’ someone answered. ‘Says he can’t find her anywhere. She usually wakes him up.’

Before I could retort that she usually woke me up, too, Sven came in through the doorway, and we could see at once that something was wrong. He slowly opened his hand, and there lay a tiny bundle of yellow feathers, with two clenched claws sticking pathetically up into the air.

‘What happened?’ we asked, all equally distressed.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sven mournfully. ‘I just found her like this.’

‘Let’s have a look at her,’ said Jock Duncan, our cook-doctor-dietitian. We all waited in hushed silence while he held Claribel against his ear in an attempt to detect any heartbeat.

Presently he shook his head. ‘I can’t hear anything, but that doesn’t prove she’s dead. I’ve never listened to a canary’s heart,’ he added rather apologetically.

‘Give her a shot of oxygen,’ suggested somebody, pointing to the green-banded emergency cylinder in its recess beside the door. Everyone agreed that this was an excellent idea, and Claribel was tucked snugly into a face mask that was large enough to serve as a complete oxygen tent for her.

To our delighted surprise, she revived at once. Beaming broadly, Sven removed the mask, and she hopped onto his finger. She gave her series of ‘Come to the cookhouse, boys’ trills—then promptly keeled over again.

‘I don’t get it,’ lamented Sven. ‘What’s wrong with her? She’s never done this before.’

For the last few minutes, something had been tugging at my memory. My mind seemed to be very sluggish that morning, as if I was still unable to cast off the burden of sleep. I felt that I could do with some of that oxygen—but before I could reach the mask, understanding exploded in my brain. I whirled on the duty engineer and said urgently:

‘Jim! There’s something wrong with the air! That’s why Claribel’s passed out. I’ve just remembered that miners used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Jim. ‘The alarms would have gone off. We’ve got duplicate circuits, operating independently.’

‘Er—the second alarm circuit isn’t connected up yet,’ his assistant reminded him. That shook Jim; he left without a word, while we stood arguing and passing the oxygen bottle around like a pipe of peace.

He came back ten minutes later with a sheepish expression. It was one of those accidents that couldn’t possibly happen; we’d had one of our rare eclipses by Earth’s shadow that night; part of the air purifier had frozen up, and the single alarm in the circuit had failed to go off. Half a million dollars’ worth of chemical and electronic engineering had let us down completely. Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.

So now, if you visit any space station, don’t be surprised if you hear an inexplicable snatch of bird song. There’s no need to be alarmed: on the contrary, in fact. It will mean that you’re being doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense.

Take a Deep Breath

A long time ago I discovered that people who’ve never left Earth have certain fixed ideas about conditions in space. Everyone ‘knows’, for example, that a man dies instantly and horribly when exposed to the vacuum that exists beyond the atmosphere. You’ll find numerous gory descriptions of exploded space travellers in the popular literature, and I won’t spoil your appetite by repeating them here. Many of those tales, indeed, are basically true. I’ve pulled men back through the air lock who were very poor advertisements for space flight.

Yet, at the same time, there are exceptions to every rule—even this one. I should know, for I learned the hard way.

We were on the last stages of building Communications Satellite Two; all the main units had been joined together, the living quarters had been pressurised, and the station had been given the slow spin around its axis that had restored the unfamiliar sensation of weight. I say ‘slow’, but at its rim our two-hundred-foot-diameter wheel was turning at thirty miles an hour. We had, of course, no sense of motion, but the centrifugal force caused by this spin gave us about half the weight we would have possessed on Earth. That was enough to stop things from drifting around, yet not enough to make us feel uncomfortably sluggish after our weeks with no weight at all.

Four of us were sleeping in the small cylindrical cabin known as Bunk-house Number 6 on the night that it happened. The bunkhouse was at the very rim of the station; if you imagine a bicycle wheel, with a string of sausages replacing the tyre, you have a good idea of the layout. Bunkhouse Number 6 was one of these sausages, and we were slumbering peacefully inside it.

I was awakened by a sudden jolt that was not violent enough to cause me alarm, but which did make me sit up and wonder what had happened. Anything unusual in a space station demands instant attention, so I reached for the intercom switch by my bed. ‘Hello, Central,’ I called. ‘What was that?’

There was no reply; the line was dead.

Now thoroughly alarmed, I jumped out of bed—and had an even bigger shock. There was no gravity. I shot up to the ceiling before I was able to grab a stanchion and bring myself to a halt, at the cost of a sprained wrist.

It was impossible for the entire station to have suddenly stopped rotating. There was only one answer; the failure of the intercom and, as I quickly discovered, of the lighting circuit as well forced us to face the appalling truth. We were no longer part of the station; our little cabin had somehow come adrift, and had been slung off into space like a raindrop falling on a spinning flywheel.

There were no windows through which we could look out, but we were not in complete darkness for the battery-powered emergency lights had come on. All the main air vents had closed automatically when the pressure dropped. For the time being, we could live in our own private atmosphere, even though it was not being renewed. Unfortunately, a steady whistling told us that the air we did have was escaping through a leak somewhere in the cabin.

There was no way of telling what had happened to the rest of the station. For all we knew, the whole structure might have come to pieces, and all our colleagues might be dead or in the same predicament as we—drifting through space in leaking cans of air. Our one slim hope was the possibility that we were the only castaways, that the rest of the station was intact and had been able to send a rescue team to find us. After all, we were receding at no more than thirty miles an hour, and one of the rocket scooters could catch up to us in minutes.

It actually took an hour, though without the evidence of my watch I should never have believed that it was so short a time. We were now gasping for breath, and the gauge on our single emergency oxygen tank had dropped to one division above zero.

The banging on the wall seemed like a signal from another world. We banged back vigorously, and a moment later a muffled voice called to us through the wall. Someone outside was lying with his space-suit helmet pressed against the metal, and his shouted words were reaching us by direct conduction. Not as clear as radio—but it worked.

The oxygen gauge crept slowly down to zero while we had our council of war. We would be dead before we could be towed back to the station; yet the rescue ship was only a few feet away from us, with its air lock already open. Our little problem was to cross that few feet—without space suits.

We made our plans carefully, rehearsing our actions in the full knowledge that there could be no repeat performance. Then we each took a deep, final swig of oxygen, flushing out our lungs. When we were all ready, I banged on the wall to give the signal to our friends waiting outside.

There was a series of short, staccato raps as the power tools got to work on the thin hull. We clung tightly to the stanchions, as far away as possible from the point of entry, knowing just what would happen. When it came, it was so sudden that the mind couldn’t record the sequence of events. The cabin seemed to explode, and a great wind tugged at me. The last trace of air gushed from my lungs, through my already-opened mouth. And then—utter silence, and the stars shining through the gaping hole that led to life.

Believe me, I didn’t stop to analyse my sensations. I think—though I can never be sure that it wasn’t imagination—that my eyes were smarting and there was a tingling feeling all over my body. And I felt very cold, perhaps because evaporation was already starting from my skin.

The only thing I can be certain of is that uncanny silence. It is never completely quiet in a space station, for there is always the sound of machinery or air pumps. But this was the absolute silence of the empty void, where there is no trace of air to carry sound.

Almost at once we launched ourselves out through the shattered wall, into the full blast of the sun. I was instantly blinded—but that didn’t matter, because the men waiting in space suits grabbed me as soon as I emerged and hustled me into the air lock. And there, sound slowly returned as the air rushed in, and we remembered we could breathe again. The entire rescue, they told us later, had lasted just twenty seconds…

Well, we were the founding members of the Vacuum-Breathers’ Club. Since then, at least a dozen other men have done the same thing, in similar emergencies. The record time in space is now two minutes; after that, the blood begins to form bubbles as it boils at body temperature, and those bubbles soon get to the heart.

In my case, there was only one aftereffect. For maybe a quarter of a minute I had been exposed to real sunlight, not the feeble stuff that filters down through the atmosphere of Earth. Breathing space didn’t hurt me at all—but I got the worst dose of sunburn I’ve ever had in my life.

Freedom of Space

Not many of you, I suppose, can imagine the time before the satellite relays gave us our present world communications system. When I was a boy, it was impossible to send TV programmes across the oceans, or even to establish reliable radio contact around the curve of the Earth without picking up a fine assortment of crackles and bangs on the way. Yet now we take interference-free circuits for granted, and think nothing of seeing our friends on the other side of the globe as clearly as if we were standing face to face. Indeed, it’s a simple fact that without the satellite relays, the whole structure of world commerce and industry would collapse. Unless we were up here on the space stations to bounce their messages around the globe, how do you think any of the world’s big business organisations could keep their widely scattered electronic brains in touch with each other?

But all this was still in the future, back in the late seventies, when we were finishing work on the Relay Chain. I’ve already told you about some of our problems and near disasters; they were serious enough at the time, but in the end we overcame them all. The three stations spaced around Earth were no longer piles of girders, air cylinders, and plastic pressure chambers. Their assembly had been completed, we had moved aboard, and could now work in comfort, unhampered by space suits. And we had gravity again, now that the stations had been set slowly spinning. Not real gravity, of course; but centrifugal force feels exactly the same when you’re out in space. It was pleasant being able to pour drinks and to sit down without drifting away on the first air current.

Once the three stations had been built, there was still a year’s solid work to be done installing all the radio and TV equipment that would lift the world’s communications networks into space. It was a great day when we established the first TV link between England and Australia. The signal was beamed up to us in Relay Two, as we sat above the centre of Africa, we flashed it across to Three—poised over New Guinea—and they shot it down to Earth again, clear and clean after its ninety-thousand-mile journey.

These, however, were the engineers’ private tests. The official opening of the system would be the biggest event in the history of world communication—an elaborate global telecast, in which every nation would take part. It would be a three-hour show, as for the first time the live TV camera roamed around the world, proclaiming to mankind that the last barrier of distance was down.

The programme planning, it was cynically believed, had taken as much effort as the building of the space stations in the first place, and of all the problems the planners had to solve, the most difficult was that of choosing a compère or master of ceremonies to introduce the items in the elaborate global show that would be watched by half the human race.

Heaven knows how much conniving, blackmail, and downright character assassination went on behind the scenes. All we knew was that a week before the great day, a nonscheduled rocket came up to orbit with Gregory Wendell aboard. This was quite a surprise, since Gregory wasn’t as big a TV personality as, say, Jeffers Jackson in the US or Vince Clifford in Britain. However, it seemed that the big boys had cancelled each other out, and Gregg had got the coveted job through one of those compromises so well known to politicians.

Gregg had started his career as a disc jockey on a university radio station in the American Midwest, and had worked his way up through the Hollywood and Manhattan night-club circuits until he had a daily, nation-wide programme of his own. Apart from his cynical yet relaxed personality, his biggest asset was his deep velvet voice, for which he could probably thank his Negro blood. Even when you flatly disagreed with what he was saying—even, indeed, when he was tearing you to pieces in an interview—it was still a pleasure to listen to him.

We gave him the grand tour of the space station, and even (strictly against regulations) took him out through the air lock in a space suit. He loved it all, but there were two things he liked in particular. This air you make,’ he said, ‘it beats the stuff we have to breathe down in New York. This is the first time my sinus trouble has gone since I went into TV.’ He also relished the low gravity; at the station’s rim, a man had half his normal, Earth weight—and at the axis he had no weight at all.

However, the novelty of his surroundings didn’t distract Gregg from his job. He spent hours at Communications Central, polishing his script and getting his cues right, and studying the dozens of monitor screens that would be his windows on the world. I came across him once while he was running through his introduction of Queen Elizabeth, who would be speaking from Buckingham Palace at the very end of the programme. He was so intent on his rehearsal that he never even noticed I was standing beside him.

Well, that telecast is now part of history. For the first time a billion human beings watched a single programme that came ‘live’ from every corner of the Earth, and was a roll call of the world’s greatest citizens. Hundreds of cameras on land and sea and air looked inquiringly at the turning globe; and at the end there was that wonderful shot of the Earth through a zoom lens on the space station, making the whole planet recede until it was lost among the stars…

There were a few hitches, of course. One camera on the bed of the Atlantic wasn’t ready on cue, and we had to spend some extra time looking at the Taj Mahal. And owing to a switching error Russian subtitles were superimposed on the South American transmission, while half the USSR found itself trying to read Spanish. But this was nothing to what might have happened.

Through the entire three hours, introducing the famous and the unknown with equal ease, came the mellow yet never orotund flow of Gregg’s voice. He did a magnificent job; the congratulations came pouring up the beam the moment the broadcast finished. But he didn’t hear them; he made one short, private call to his agent, and then went to bed.

Next morning, the Earth-bound ferry was waiting to take him back to any job he cared to accept. But it left without Gregg Wendell, now junior station announcer of Relay Two.

‘They’ll think I’m crazy,’ he said, beaming happily, ‘but why should I go back to that rat race down there? I’ve all the universe to look at, I can breathe smog-free air, the low gravity makes me feel a Hercules, and my three darling ex-wives can’t get at me.’ He kissed his hand to the departing rocket. ‘So long, Earth,’ he called. ‘I’ll be back when I start pining for Broadway traffic jams and bleary penthouse dawns. And if I get homesick, I can look at anywhere on the planet just by turning a switch. Why, I’m more in the middle of things here than I could ever be on Earth, yet I can cut myself off from the human race whenever I want to.’

He was still smiling as he watched the ferry begin the long fall back to Earth, toward the fame and fortune that could have been his. And then, whistling cheerfully, he left the observation lounge in eight-foot strides to read the weather forecast for Lower Patagonia.

Passer-by

It’s only fair to warn you, right at the start, that this is a story with no ending. But it has a definite beginning, for it was while we were both students at Astrotech that I met Julie. She was in her final year of solar physics when I was graduating, and during our last year at college we saw a good deal of each other. I’ve still got the woollen tam-o’shanter she knitted so that I wouldn’t bump my head against my space helmet. (No, I never had the nerve to wear it.)

Unfortunately, when I was assigned to Satellite Two, Julie went to the Solar Observatory—at the same distance from Earth, but a couple of degrees eastward along the orbit. So there we were, sitting twenty-two thousand miles above the middle of Africa—but with nine hundred miles of empty, hostile space between us.

At first we were both so busy that the pang of separation was somewhat lessened. But when the novelty of life in space had worn off, our thoughts began to bridge the gulf that divided us. And not only our thoughts, for I’d made friends with the communications people, and we used to have little chats over the interstation TV circuit. In some ways it made matters worse seeing each other face to face and never knowing just how many other people were looking in at the same time. There’s not much privacy in a space station…

Sometimes I’d focus one of our telescopes onto the distant, brilliant star of the observatory. In the crystal clarity of space, I could use enormous magnifications, and could see every detail of our neighbours’ equipment—the solar telescopes, the pressurised spheres of the living quarters that housed the staff, the slim pencils of visiting ferry rockets that had climbed up from Earth. Very often there would be space-suited figures moving among the maze of apparatus, and I would strain my eyes in a hopeless attempt at identification. It’s hard enough to recognise anyone in a space suit when you’re only a few feet apart—but that didn’t stop me from trying.

We’d resigned ourselves to waiting, with what patience we could muster, until our Earth leave was due in six months’ time, when we had an unexpected stroke of luck. Less than half our tour of duty had passed when the head of the transport section suddenly announced that he was going outside with a butterfly net to catch meteors. He didn’t become violent, but had to be shipped hastily back to Earth. I took over his job on a temporary basis and now had—in theory at least—the freedom of space.

There were ten of the little low-powered rocket scooters under my proud command, as well as four of the larger interstation shuttles used to ferry stores and personnel from orbit to orbit. I couldn’t hope to borrow one of those, but after several weeks of careful organising I was able to carry out the plan I’d conceived some two micro-seconds after being told I was now head of transport.

There’s no need to tell how I juggled duty lists, cooked logs and fuel registers, and persuaded my colleagues to cover up for me. All that matters is that, about once a week, I would climb into my personal space suit, strap myself to the spidery framework of a Mark III Scooter, and drift away from the station at minimum power. When I was well clear, I’d go over to full throttle, and the tiny rocket motor would hustle me across the nine-hundred-mile gap to the observatory.

The trip took about thirty minutes, and the navigational requirements were elementary. I could see where I was going and where I’d come from, yet I don’t mind admitting that I often felt—well, a trifle lonely—around the mid-point of the journey. There was no other solid matter within almost five hundred miles—and it looked an awfully long way down to Earth. It was a great help, at such moments, to tune the suit radio to the general service band, and to listen to all the back-chat between ships and stations.

At midflight I’d have to spin the scooter around and start braking, and ten minutes later the observatory would be close enough for its details to be visible to the unaided eye. Very shortly after that I’d drift up to a small, plastic pressure bubble that was in the process of being fitted out as a spectroscopic laboratory—and there would be Julie, waiting on the other side of the air lock…

I won’t pretend that we confined our discussions to the latest results in astrophysics, or the progress of the satellite construction schedule. Few things, indeed, were further from our thoughts; and the journey home always seemed to flash by at a quite astonishing speed.

It was around mid-orbit on one of those homeward trips that the radar started to flash on my little control panel. There was something large at extreme range, and it was coming in fast. A meteor, I told myself—maybe-even a small asteroid. Anything giving such a signal should be visible to the eye: I read off the bearings and searched the star fields in the indicated direction. The thought of a collision never even crossed my mind; space is so inconceivably vast that I was thousands of times safer than a man crossing a busy street on Earth.

There it was—a bright and steadily growing star near the foot of Orion. It already outshone Rigel, and seconds later it was not merely a star, but had begun to show a visible disc. Now it was moving as fast as I could turn my head; it grew to a tiny misshaped moon, then dwindled and shrank with that same silent, inexorable speed.

I suppose I had a clear view of it for perhaps half a second, and that half-second has haunted me all my life. The—object—had already vanished by the time I thought of checking the radar again, so I had no way of gauging how close it came, and hence how large it really was. It could have been a small object a hundred feet away—or a very large one, ten miles off. There is no sense of perspective in space, and unless you know what you are looking at, you cannot judge its distance.

Of course, it could have been a very large and oddly shaped meteor; I can never be sure that my eyes, straining to grasp the details of so swiftly moving an object, were not hopelessly deceived. I may have imagined that I saw that broken, crumpled prow, and the cluster of dark ports like the sightless sockets of a skull. Of one thing only was I certain, even in that brief and fragmentary vision. If it was a ship, it was not one of ours. Its shape was utterly alien, and it was very, very old.

It may be that the greatest discovery of all time slipped from my grasp as I struggled with my thoughts midway between the two space stations. But I had no measurements of speed or direction; whatever it was that I had glimpsed was now lost beyond recapture in the wastes of the solar system.

What should I have done? No one would ever have believed me, for I would have had no proof. Had I made a report, there would have been endless trouble. I should have become the laughingstock of the Space Service, would have been reprimanded for misuse of equipment—and would certainly not have been able to see Julie again. And to me, at that age, nothing else was as important. If you’ve been in love yourself, you’ll understand; if not, then no explanation is any use.

So I said nothing. To some other man (how many centuries hence?) will go the fame for proving that we were not the first-born of the children of the sun. Whatever it may be that is circling out there on its eternal orbit can wait, as it has waited ages already.

Yet I sometimes wonder. Would I have made a report, after all—had I known that Julie was going to marry someone else?

The Call of the Stars

Down there on Earth the twentieth century is dying. As I look across at the shadowed globe blocking the stars, I can see the lights of a hundred sleepless cities, and there are moments when I wish that I could be among the crowds now surging and singing in the streets of London, Capetown, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Madrid… Yes, I can see them all at a single glance, burning like fireflies against the darkened planet. The line of midnight is now bisecting Europe: in the eastern Mediterranean a tiny, brilliant star is pulsing as some exuberant pleasure ship waves her searchlights to the sky. I think she is deliberately aiming at us; for the past few minutes the flashes have been quite regular and startlingly bright. Presently I’ll call the communications centre and find out who she is, so that I can radio back our own greetings.

Passing into history now, receding forever down the stream of time, is the most incredible hundred years the world has ever seen. It opened with the conquest of the air, saw at its mid-point the unlocking of the atom—and now ends with the bridging of space.

(For the past five minutes I’ve been wondering what’s happening to Nairobi; now I realise that they are putting on a mammoth fireworks display. Chemically fuelled rockets may be obsolete out here—but they’re still using lots of them down on Earth tonight.)

The end of a century—and the end of a millennium. What will the hundred years that begin with two and zero bring? The planets, of course; floating there in space, only a mile away, are the ships of the first Martian expedition. For two years I have watched them grow, assembled piece by piece, as the space station itself was built by the men I worked with a generation ago.

Those ten ships are ready now, with all their crews aboard, waiting for the final instrument check and the signal for departure. Before the first day of the new century has passed its noon, they will be tearing free from the reins of Earth, to head out toward the strange world that may one day be man’s second home.

As I look at the brave little fleet that is now preparing to challenge infinity, my mind goes back forty years, to the days when the first satellites were launched and the moon still seemed very far away. And I remember—indeed, I have never forgotten—my father’s fight to keep me down on Earth.

There were not many weapons he had failed to use. Ridicule had been the first: ‘Of course they can do it,’ he had sneered, ‘but what’s the point? Who wants to go out into space while there’s so much to be done here on Earth? There’s not a single planet in the solar system where men can live. The moon’s a burnt-out slag heap, and everywhere else is even worse. This is where we were meant to live.’

Even then (I must have been eighteen or so at the time) I could tangle him up in points of logic. I can remember answering, ‘How do you know where we were meant to live, Dad? After all, we were in the sea for about a billion years before we decided to tackle the land. Now we’re making the next big jump: I don’t know where it will lead—nor did that first fish when it crawled up on the beach, and started to sniff the air.’

So when he couldn’t outargue me, he had tried subtler pressures. He was always talking about the dangers of space travel, and the short working life of anyone foolish enough to get involved in rocketry. At that time, people were still scared of meteors and cosmic rays; like the ‘Here Be Dragons’ of the old map makers, they were the mythical monsters on the still-blank celestial charts. But they didn’t worry me; if anything, they added the spice of danger to my dreams.

While I was going through college, Father was comparatively quiet. My training would be valuable whatever profession I took up in later life, so he could not complain—though he occasionally grumbled about the money I wasted buying all the books and magazines on astronautics that I could find. My college record was good, which naturally pleased him; perhaps he did not realise that it would also help me to get my way.

All through my final year I had avoided talking of my plans. I had even given the impression (though I am sorry for that now) that I had abandoned my dream of going into space. Without saying anything to him, I put in my application to Astrotech, and was accepted as soon as I had graduated.

The storm broke when that long blue envelope with the embossed heading ‘Institute of Astronautical Technology’ dropped into the mailbox. I was accused of deceit and ingratitude, and I do not think I ever forgave my father for destroying the pleasure I should have felt at being chosen for the most exclusive—and most glamorous—apprenticeship the world has ever known.

The vacations were an ordeal; had it not been for Mother’s sake, I do not think I would have gone home more than once a year, and I always left again as quickly as I could. I had hoped that Father would mellow as my training progressed and as he accepted the inevitable, but he never did.

Then had come that stiff and awkward parting at the spaceport, with the rain streaming down from leaden skies and beating against the smooth walls of the ship that seemed so eagerly waiting to climb into the eternal sunlight beyond the reach of storms. I know now what it cost my father to watch the machine he hated swallow up his only son: for I understand many things today that were hidden from me then.

He knew, even as we parted at the ship, that he would never see me again. Yet his old, stubborn pride kept him from saying the only words that might have held me back. I knew that he was ill, but how ill, he had told no one. That was the only weapon he had not used against me, and I respect him for it.

Would I have stayed had I known? It is even more futile to speculate about the unchangeable past than the unforeseeable future; all I can say now is that I am glad I never had to make the choice. At the end he let me go; he gave up his fight against my ambition, and a little while later his fight with Death.

So I said goodbye to Earth, and to the father who loved me but knew no way to say it. He lies down there on the planet I can cover with my hand; how strange it is to think that of the countless billion human beings whose blood runs in my veins, I was the very first to leave his native world…

The new day is breaking over Asia; a hairline of fire is rimming the eastern edge of Earth. Soon it will grow into a burning crescent as the sun comes up out of the Pacific—yet Europe is preparing for sleep, except for those revellers who will stay up to greet the dawn.

And now, over there by the flagship, the ferry rocket is coming back for the last visitors from the station. Here comes the message I have been waiting for: CAPTAIN STEVENS PRESENTS HIS COMPLIMENTS TO THE STATION COMMANDER. BLAST-OFF WILL BE IN NINETY MINUTES; HE WILL BE GLAD TO SEE YOU ABOARD NOW.

Well, Father, now I know how you felt: time has gone full circle. Yet I hope that I have learned from the mistakes we both made, long ago. I shall remember you when I go over there to the flagship Starfire and say goodbye to the grandson you never knew.

Let There Be Light

First published in the Dundee Sunday Telegraph, 5th September 1957

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

The conversation had come around to death rays again, and some carping critic was poking fun at the old science fiction magazines whose covers so often displayed multicoloured beams creating havoc in all directions. ‘Such an elementary scientific blunder,’ he snorted. ‘All the visible radiations are harmless—we wouldn’t be alive if they weren’t. So anybody should have known that the green rays and purple rays and scots-tartan rays were a lot of nonsense. You might even make a rule—if you could see a ray, it couldn’t hurt you.’

‘An interesting theory,’ said Harry Purvis, ‘but not in accordance with the facts. The only death ray that I, personally, have ever come across was perfectly visible.’

‘Indeed? What colour was it?’

‘I’ll come round to that in a minute—if you want me to. But talking of rounds…’

We caught Charlie Willis before he could sneak out of the bar, and practised a little jujitsu on him until all the glasses were filled again. Then that curious, suspenseful silence descended over the White Hart that all the regulars recognise as the prelude to one of Harry Purvis’s improbable stories.

‘Edgar and Mary Burton were a somewhat ill-assorted pair, and none of their friends could explain why they had married. Perhaps the cynical explanation was the correct one; Edgar was almost twenty years older than his wife, and had made a quarter of a million on the stock exchange before retiring at an unusually early age. He had set himself this financial target, had worked hard to attain it—and when his bank balance had reached the desired figure had instantly lost all ambition. From now on he intended to live the life of a country gentleman, and to devote his declining years to his one absorbing hobby—astronomy.

‘For some reason, it seems to surprise many people that an interest in astronomy is compatible with business acumen or even with common sense. This is a complete delusion,’ said Harry with much feeling; ‘I was once practically skinned alive at a poker game by a professor of astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. But in Edgar’s case, shrewdness seemed to have been combined with a vague impracticality in one and the same person; once he had made his money, he took no further interest in it, or indeed in anything else except the construction of progressively larger reflecting telescopes.

‘On his retirement, Edgar had purchased a fine old house high up on the Yorkshire moors. It was not as bleak and Wuthering-Heightsish as it may sound; there was a splendid view, and the Bentley would get you into town in fifteen minutes. Even so, the change did not altogether suit Mary, and it is hard not to feel rather sorry for her. There was no work for her to do, since the servants ran the house, and she had few intellectual resources to fall back on. She took up riding, joined all the book clubs, read the Tatler and Country Life from cover to cover, but still felt that there was something missing.

‘It took her about four months to find what she wanted; and then she met it at an otherwise dismal village fete. It was six foot three, ex-Coldstream Guards, with a family that looked on the Norman Conquest as a recent and regrettable piece of impertinence. It was called Rupert de Vere Courtenay (we’ll forget about the other six Christian names) and it was generally regarded as the most eligible bachelor in the district.

‘Two full weeks passed before Rupert, who was a high-principled English gentleman, brought up in the best traditions of the aristocracy, succumbed to Mary’s blandishments. His downfall was accelerated by the fact that his family was trying to arrange a match for him with the Honourable Felicity Fauntleroy, who was generally admitted to be no great beauty. Indeed, she looked so much like a horse that it was risky for her to go near her father’s famous stables when the stallions were exercising.

‘Mary’s boredom, and Rupert’s determination to have a last desperate fling, had the inevitable result. Edgar saw less and less of his wife, who found an amazing number of reasons for driving into town during the week. At first he was quite glad that the circle of her acquaintances was widening so rapidly, and it was several months before he realised that it was doing nothing of the sort.

‘It is quite impossible to keep any liaison secret for long in a small country town like Stocksborough, though this is a fact that every generation has to learn afresh, usually the hard way. Edgar discovered the truth by accident, but some kind friend would have told him sooner or later. He had driven into town for a meeting of the local astronomical society—taking the Rolls, since his wife had already gone with the Bentley—and was momentarily held up on the way home by the crowds emerging from the last performance at the local cinema. In the heart of the crowd was Mary, accompanied by a handsome young man whom Edgar had seen before but couldn’t identify at the moment. He would have thought no more of the matter had not Mary gone out of her way the next morning to mention that she’d been unable to get a seat in the cinema and had spent a quiet evening with one of her women friends.

‘Even Edgar, engrossed though he now was in the study of variable stars, began to put two and two together when he realised that his wife was gratuitously lying. He gave no hint of his vague suspicions, which ceased to be vague after the local Hunt Ball. Though he hated such functions (and this one, by bad luck, occurred just when U Orionis was going through its minimum and he had to miss some vital observations), he realised that this would give him a chance of identifying his wife’s companion, since everyone in the district would be there.

‘It proved absurdly easy to locate Rupert and to get into conversation with him. Although the young man seemed a little ill at ease, he was pleasant company, and Edgar was surprised to find himself taking quite a fancy to him. If his wife had to have a lover, on the whole he approved her choice.

‘And there matters rested for some months, largely because Edgar was too busy grinding and figuring a fifteen-inch mirror to do anything about it. Twice a week Mary drove into town, ostensibly to meet her friends or to go to the cinema, and arrived back at the lodge just before midnight. Edgar could see the lights of the car for miles away across the moor, the beams twisting and turning as his wife drove homeward with what always seemed to him excessive speed. That had been one of the reasons why they seldom went out together; Edgar was a sound but cautious driver, and his comfortable cruising speed was ten miles an hour below Mary’s.

‘About three miles from the house the lights of the car would disappear for several minutes as the road was hidden by a hill. There was a dangerous hairpin bend here; in a piece of highway construction more reminiscent of the Alps than of rural England, the road hugged the edge of a cliff and skirted an unpleasant hundred-foot drop before it straightened out on the homeward stretch. As the car rounded this bend, its headlights would shine full on the house, and there were many evenings when Edgar was dazzled by the sudden glare as he sat at the eyepiece of his telescope. Luckily, this stretch of road was very little used at night; if it had been, observations would have been well-nigh impossible, since it took Edgar’s eyes ten or twenty minutes to recover fully from the direct blast of the headlights. This was no more than a minor annoyance, but when Mary started to stay out four or five evenings a week it became a confounded nuisance. Something, Edgar decided, Would Have To Be Done.

‘It will not have escaped your notice,’ continued Harry Purvis, ‘that throughout all this affair Edgar Burton’s behaviour was hardly that of a normal person. Indeed, anyone who could have switched his mode of life so completely from that of a busy London stockbroker to that of a near-recluse on the Yorkshire moors must have been a little odd in the first place. I would hesitate, however, to say that he was more than eccentric until the time when Mary’s midnight arrivals started to interfere with the serious business of observation. And even thereafter, one must admit that there was a certain crazy logic in his actions.

‘He had ceased to love his wife some years earlier, but he did object to her making a fool of him. And Rupert de Vere Courtenay seemed a pleasant young chap; it would be an act of kindness to rescue him. Well, there was a beautifully simple solution, which had come to Edgar in a literally blinding flash. And I literally mean literally, for it was while he was blinking in the glare of Mary’s headlights that Edgar conceived the only really perfect murder I’ve ever encountered. It is strange how apparently irrelevant factors can determine a man’s life; though I hate to say anything against the oldest and noblest of the sciences, it cannot be denied that if Edgar had never become an astronomer, he would never have become a murderer. For his hobby provided part of the motive, and a good deal of the means…

‘He could have made the mirror he needed—he was quite an expert by this time—but astronomical accuracy was unnecessary in this case, and it was simpler to pick up a secondhand searchlight reflector at one of those war-surplus shops off Leicester Square. The mirror was about three feet across, and it was only a few hours’ work to fix up a mounting for it and to arrange a crude but effective arc light at its focus. Getting the beam lined up was equally straightforward, and no one took the slightest notice of his activities, since his experimenting was now taken for granted by wife and servants alike.

‘He made the final brief test on a clear, dark night and settled down to await Mary’s return. He did not waste the time, of course, but continued his routine observations of a group of selected stars. By midnight, there was still no sign of Mary, but Edgar did not mind, because he was getting a nicely consistent series of stellar magnitudes which were lying smoothly on his curves. Everything was going well, though he did stop to wonder just why Mary was so unusually late.

‘At last he saw the headlights of the car flickering on the horizon, and rather reluctantly broke off his observations. When the car had disappeared behind the hill, he was waiting with his hand on the switch. His timing was perfect; the instant the car came round the curve and the headlights shone on him he closed the arc.

‘Meeting another car at night can be unpleasant enough even when you are prepared for it and are driving on a straight road. But if you are rounding a hairpin bend, and know that there is no other car coming, yet suddenly find yourself staring directly into a beam fifty times as powerful as any headlight—well, the results are more than unpleasant.

‘They were exactly what Edgar had calculated. He switched off his beam almost at once, but the car’s own lights showed him all that he wanted to see. He watched them swing out over the valley and then curve down, ever more and more swiftly, until they disappeared below the crest of the hill. A red glow flared for a few seconds, but the explosion was barely audible, which was just as well, since Edgar did not want to disturb the servants.

‘He dismantled his little searchlight and returned to the telescope; he had not quite completed his observations. Then, satisfied that he had done a good night’s work, he went to bed.

‘His sleep was sound but short, for about an hour later the telephone started to ring. No doubt someone had found the wreckage, but Edgar wished they could have left it until morning, for an astronomer needed all the sleep he could get. With some irritation he picked up the phone, and it was several seconds before he realised that his wife was at the other end of the line. She was calling from Courtenay Place, and wanted to know what had happened to Rupert.

‘It seemed that they had decided to make a clean breast of the whole affair, and Rupert (not unfortified by strong liquor) had agreed to be a man and break the news to Edgar. He was going to call back as soon as he had done this, and tell Mary how her husband had received it. She had waited with mounting impatience and alarm as long as she could, until at last anxiety had got the better of discretion.

‘I need hardly say that the shock to Edgar’s already somewhat unbalanced nervous system was considerable. After Mary had been talking to her husband for several minutes, she realised that he had gone completely round the bend. It was not until the next morning that she discovered that this was precisely what Rupert had failed to do, unfortunately for him.

‘In the long run, I think Mary came out of it rather well. Rupert wasn’t really very bright, and it would never have been a satisfactory match. As it was, when Edgar was duly certified, Mary received power of attorney for the estate and promptly moved to Dartmouth, where she took a charming flat near the Royal Naval College and seldom had to drive the new Bentley for herself.

‘But all that is by the way,’ concluded Harry, ‘and before some of you sceptics ask me how I know all this, I got it from the dealer who purchased Edgar’s telescopes when they locked him up. It’s a sad fact that no one would believe his confession; the general opinion was that Rupert had had too much to drink and had been driving too fast on a dangerous road. That may be true, but I prefer to think it isn’t. After all, that is such a humdrum way to die. To be killed by a death ray would be a fate much more fitting for a de Vere Courtenay—and in the circumstances I don’t see how anyone can deny that it was a death ray that Edgar had used. It was a ray, and it killed someone. What more do you want?’

Out of the Sun

First published in If, February 1958

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

If you have only lived on Earth, you have never seen the sun. Of course, we could not look at it directly, but only through dense filters that cut its rays down to endurable brilliance. It hung there forever above the low, jagged hills to the west of the Observatory, neither rising nor setting, yet moving around a small circle in the sky during the eighty-eight-day year of our little world. For it is not quite true to say that Mercury keeps the same face always turned toward the sun; it wobbles slightly on its axis, and there is a narrow twilight belt which knows such terrestrial commonplaces as dawn and sunset.

We were on the edge of the twilight zone, so that we could take advantage of the cool shadows yet could keep the sun under continuous surveillance as it hovered there above the hills. It was a full-time job for fifty astronomers and other assorted scientists; when we’ve kept it up for a hundred years or so, we may know something about the small star that brought life to Earth.

There wasn’t a single band of solar radiation that someone at the Observatory had not made a life’s study and was watching like a hawk. From the far X rays to the longest of radio waves, we had set our traps and snares; as soon as the sun thought of something new, we were ready for it. So we imagined…

The sun’s flaming heart beats in a slow, eleven-year rhythm, and we were near the peak of the cycle. Two of the greatest spots ever recorded—each of them large enough to swallow a hundred Earths—had drifted across the disc like great black funnels piercing deeply into the turbulent outer layers of the sun. They were black, of course, only by contrast with the brilliance all around them; even their dark, cool cores were hotter and brighter than an electric arc. We had just watched the second of them disappear around the edge of the disc, wondering if it would survive to reappear two weeks later, when something blew up on the equator.

It was not too spectacular at first, partly because it was almost exactly beneath us—at the precise centre of the sun’s disc—and so was merged into all the activity around it. If it had been near the edge of the sun, and thus projected against the background of space, it would have been truly awe-inspiring.

Imagine the simultaneous explosion of a million H-bombs. You can’t? Nor can anyone else—but that was the sort of thing we were watching climb up toward us at hundreds of miles a second, straight out of the sun’s spinning equator. At first it formed a narrow jet, but it was quickly frayed around the edges by the magnetic and gravitational forces that were fighting against it. The central core kept right on, and it was soon obvious that it had escaped from the sun completely and was headed out into space—with us as its first target.

Though this had happened half a dozen times before, it was always exciting. It meant that we could capture some of the very substance of the sun as it went hurtling past in a great cloud of electrified gas. There was no danger; by the time it reached us it would be far too tenuous to do any damage, and, indeed, it would take sensitive instruments to detect it at all.

One of those instruments was the Observatory’s radar, which was in continual use to map the invisible ionised layers that surround the sun for millions of miles. This was my department; as soon as there was any hope of picking up the oncoming cloud against the solar background, I aimed my giant radio mirror toward it.

It came in sharp and clear on the long-range screen—a vast, luminous island still moving outward from the sun at hundreds of miles a second. At this distance it was impossible to see its finer details, for my radar waves were taking minutes to make the round trip and to bring me back the information they were presenting on the screen. Even at its speed of not far short of a million miles an hour, it would be almost two days before the escaping prominence reached the orbit of Mercury and swept past us toward the outer planets. But neither Venus nor Earth would record its passing, for they were nowhere near its line of flight.

The hours drifted by; the sun had settled down after the immense convulsion that had shot so many millions of tons of its substance into space, never to return. The aftermath of that eruption was now a slowly twisting and turning cloud a hundred times the size of Earth, and soon it would be close enough for the short-range radar to reveal its finer structure.

Despite all the years I have been in the business, it still gives me a thrill to watch that line of light paint its picture on the screen as it spins in synchronism with the narrow beam of radio waves from the transmitter. I sometimes think of myself as a blind man exploring the space around him with a stick that may be a hundred million miles in length. For man is truly blind to the things I study; these great clouds of ionised gas moving far out from the sun are completely invisible to the eye and even to the most sensitive of photographic plates. They are ghosts that briefly haunt the solar system during the few hours of their existence; if they did not reflect our radar waves or disturb our magnetometers, we should never know that they were there.

The picture on the screen looked not unlike a photograph of a spiral nebula, for as the cloud slowly rotated it trailed ragged arms of gas for ten thousand miles around it. Or it might have been a terrestrial hurricane that I was watching from above as it spun through the atmosphere of Earth. The internal structure was extremely complicated, and was changing minute by minute beneath the action of forces which we have never fully understood. Rivers of fire were flowing in curious paths under what could only be the influence of electric fields; but why were they appearing from nowhere and disappearing again as if matter was being created and destroyed? And what were those gleaming nodules, larger than the moon, that were being swept along like boulders before a flood?

Now it was less than a million miles away; it would be upon us in little more than an hour. The automatic cameras were recording every complete sweep of the radar scan, storing up evidence which was to keep us arguing for years. The magnetic disturbance riding ahead of the cloud had already reached us; indeed, there was hardly an instrument in the Observatory that was not reacting in some way to the onrushing apparition.

I switched to the short-range scanner, and the image of the cloud expanded so enormously that only its central portion was on the screen. At the same time I began to change frequency, tuning across the spectrum to differentiate among the various levels. The shorter the wave length, the farther you can penetrate into a layer of ionised gas; by this technique I hoped to get a kind of X-ray picture of the cloud’s interior.

It seemed to change before my eyes as I sliced down through the tenuous outer envelope with its trailing arms, and approached the denser core. ‘Denser’, of course, was a purely relative word; by terrestrial standards even its most closely packed regions were still a fairly good vacuum. I had almost reached the limit of my frequency band, and could shorten the wave length no farther, when I noticed the curious, tight little echo not far from the centre of the screen.

It was oval, and much more sharp-edged than the knots of gas we had watched adrift in the cloud’s fiery streams. Even in that first glimpse, I knew that here was something very strange and outside all previous records of solar phenomena. I watched it for a dozen scans of the radar beam, then called my assistant away from the radio-spectrograph, with which he was analysing the velocities of the swirling gas as it spun toward us.

‘Look, Don,’ I asked him, ‘have you ever seen anything like that?’

‘No,’ he answered after a careful examination. ‘What holds it together? It hasn’t changed its shape for the last two minutes.’

‘That’s what puzzles me. Whatever it is, it should have started to break up by now, with all that disturbance going on around it. But it seems as stable as ever.’

‘How big would you say it is?’

I switched on the calibration grid and took a quick reading.

‘It’s about five hundred miles long, and half that in width.’

‘Is this the largest picture you can get?’

‘I’m afraid so. We’ll have to wait until it’s closer before we can see what makes it tick.’

Don gave a nervous little laugh.

‘This is crazy,’ he said, ‘but do you know something? I feel as if I’m looking at an amoeba under a microscope.’

I did not answer; for, with what I can only describe as a sensation of intellectual vertigo, exactly the same thought had entered my mind.

We forgot about the rest of the cloud, but luckily the automatic cameras kept up their work and no important observations were lost. From now on we had eyes only for that sharp-edged lens of gas that was growing minute by minute as it raced towards us. When it was no farther away than is the moon from Earth, it began to show the first signs of its internal structure, revealing a curious mottled appearance that was never quite the same on two successive sweeps of the scanner.

By now, half the Observatory staff had joined us in the radar room, yet there was complete silence as the oncoming enigma grew swiftly across the screen. It was coming straight toward us; in a few minutes it would hit Mercury somewhere in the centre of the daylight side, and that would be the end of it—whatever it was. From the moment we obtained our first really detailed view until the screen became blank again could not have been more than five minutes; for every one of us, that five minutes will haunt us all our lives.

We were looking at what seemed to be a translucent oval, its interior laced with a network of almost invisible lines. Where the lines crossed there appeared to be tiny, pulsing nodes of light; we could never be quite sure of their existence because the radar took almost a minute to paint the complete picture on the screen—and between each sweep the object moved several thousand miles. There was no doubt, however, that the network itself existed; the cameras settled any arguments about that.

So strong was the impression that we were looking at a solid object that I took a few moments off from the radar screen and hastily focused one of the optical telescopes on the sky. Of course, there was nothing to be seen—no sign of anything silhouetted against the sun’s pock-marked disc. This was a case where vision failed completely and only the electrical senses of the radar were of any use. The thing that was coming toward us out of the sun was as transparent as air—and far more tenuous.

As those last moments ebbed away, I am quite sure that every one of us had reached the same conclusion—and was waiting for someone to say it first. What we were seeing was impossible, yet the evidence was there before our eyes. We were looking at life, where no life could exist…

The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed.

Today, now that I have run through those films a hundred times, the idea no longer seems so strange to me. For what is life but organised energy? Does it matter what form that energy takes—whether it is chemical, as we know it on Earth, or purely electrical, as it seemed to be here? Only the pattern is important; the substance itself is of no significance. But at the time I did not think of this; I was conscious only of a vast and overwhelming wonder as I watched this creature of the sun live out the final moments of its existence.

Was it intelligent? Could it understand the strange doom that had befallen it? There are a thousand such questions that may never be answered. It is hard to see how a creature born in the fires of the sun itself could know anything of the external universe, or could even sense the existence of something as unutterably cold as rigid nongaseous matter. The living island that was falling upon us from space could never have conceived, however intelligent it might be, of the world it was so swiftly approaching.

Now it filled our sky—and perhaps, in those last few seconds, it knew that something strange was ahead of it. It may have sensed the far-flung magnetic field of Mercury, or felt the tug of our little world’s gravitational pull. For it had begun to change; the luminous lines that must have been what passed for its nervous system were clumping together in new patterns, and I would have given much to know their meaning. It may be that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion of fear—or of a godlike being making its peace with the universe.

Then the radar screen was empty, wiped clean during a single scan of the beam. The creature had fallen below our horizon, and was hidden from us now by the curve of the planet. Far out in the burning dayside of Mercury, in the inferno where only a dozen men have ever ventured and fewer still come back alive, it smashed silently and invisibly against the seas of molten metal, the hills of slowly moving lava. The mere impact could have meant nothing to such an entity; what it could not endure was its first contact with the inconceivable cold of solid matter.

Yes, cold. It had descended upon the hottest spot in the solar system, where the temperature never falls below seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was far, far colder to it than the Antarctic winter would be to a naked man.

We did not see it die, out there in the freezing fire; it was beyond the reach of our instruments now, and none of them recorded its end. Yet every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is why we are not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes tell us that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon.

How can one explain what we felt, in that last moment when half our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils of that huge but immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry of anguish, a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since, that he had witnessed the passing of a giant.

We may have been both the first and the last of all men to see so mighty a fall. Whatever they may be, in their unimaginable world within the sun, our paths and theirs may never cross again. It is hard to see how we can ever make contact with them, even if their intelligence matches ours.

And does it? It may be well for us if we never know the answer. Perhaps they have been living there inside the sun since the universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom that we shall never scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across the light-years to their cousins in other stars.

One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they possess, as we circle around their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon the skins of worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of organic life.

And then, if they have the power, they will do what they consider necessary. The sun will put forth its strength and lick the faces of its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once more as they were in the beginning—clean and bright… and sterile.

Cosmic Casanova

First published in Venture, May 1958

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

This time I was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a month; I was not certain whether the difference was due to advancing age or to something the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could merely have been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting was heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so I had little time to brood over the girls I’d left behind me. As soon as one star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as happened in about one case out of ten, planets did turn up, I’d be furiously busy for several days seeing that Max, the ship’s electronic computer, got all the information down on his tapes.

Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space, and it sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That was time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty indeed.

Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was being reprovisioned and I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a survey scout spends eighty per cent of his time alone in space, and human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost time. I had not merely done that; I’d built up considerable credit for the future—though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this trip.

First, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde, cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time together until her husband came back from his mission; he was extremely decent about it but pointed out, reasonable enough, that Helene would now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had already made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.

Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think of her. When that affair broke up—for the simple reason that a man has to get a little sleep sometime—I swore off women for a whole week. Then I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John Donne—he’s worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English—which reminded me that time lost could never be regained.

How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman’s uniform and wandered down to the beach of Diadne V’s only sea. There was need to walk no more than a few hundred metres before I’d spotted a dozen possibilities, brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.

That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting to Ruth (or was it Kay?). I can’t stand girls who think they own a man, so I blasted off after a rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crockery. This left me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to the rescue and—but by now you’ll have gotten the general idea, so I won’t bore you with details.

These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On this trip I’d deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that they only made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good artist in a rather specialised way, I started to draw my own, and it wasn’t long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any respectable planet.

I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my efficiency as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long, dull runs between the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the computer, that I found my glands getting the better of me. Max, my electronic colleague, was good enough company in the ordinary course of events, but there are some things that a machine can’t be expected to understand. I often hurt his feelings when I was in one of my irritable moods and lost my temper for no apparent reason. ‘What’s the matter, Joe?’ Max would say plaintively. ‘Surely you’re not mad at me because I beat you at chess again? Remember, I warned you I would.’

‘Oh, go to hell!’ I’d snarl back—and then I’d have an anxious five minutes while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded Navigation Robot.

Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from my mind. The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was coming from somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate bearing that I could; the transmission was an unmodulated, very narrow band—clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to the best of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the universe; I was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.

This, I told myself, is IT—my big moment, the payoff for all the lonely years I’d spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me was another civilisation—a race sufficiently advanced to possess hyper-radio.

I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to Base. If anything happened to me; the Survey would know where and could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn’t come home on schedule, my friends would be out here in force to pick up the pieces.

Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed course for the small yellow star that was dead on line with the beacon. No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they had space travel themselves; I might be running into a culture as advanced as my own—with all that that implied.

I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully, with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction. The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses, repeated over and over again. Even Max couldn’t make anything of the message; it probably meant ‘Who the heck are you?’—which was not a big enough sample for even the most intelligent of translating machines to get its teeth into.

Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot the same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my second big surprise.

I had expected them—whoever or whatever they might be—to switch to speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception. This was precisely what they did; what I had not expected was that their voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one word in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so badly that I could not recognise them.

When the first words came over the loud-speaker, I guessed the truth. This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I had established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First Empire—the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of interstellar exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire collapsed, most of these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back to barbarism. Here, it seemed, was one that had survived.

I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any language and no real communication was possible. They were clearly excited at the contact—pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is not always the case; some of the isolated cultures left over from the First Empire have become violently xenophobic and react almost with hysteria to the knowledge that they are not alone in space.

Our attempts to communicate were not making much progress, when a new factor appeared—one that changed my outlook abruptly. A woman’s voice started to come from the speaker.

It was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard, and even without the lonely weeks in space that lay behind me I think I would have fallen in love with it at once. Very deep, yet still completely feminine, it had a warm, caressing quality that seemed to ravish all my senses. I was so stunned, in fact, that it was several minutes before I realised that I could understand what my invisible enchantress was saying. She was speaking English that was almost fifty per cent comprehensible.

To cut a short story shorter, it did not take me very long to learn that her name was Liala, and that she was the only philologist on her planet to specialise in Primitive English. As soon as contact had been made with my ship, she had been called in to do the translating. Luck, it seemed, was very much on my side; the interpreter could so easily have been some ancient, white-bearded fossil.

As the hours ticked away and her sun grew ever larger in the sky ahead of me, Liala and I became the best of friends. Because time was short, I had to operate faster than I’d ever done before. The fact that no one else could understand exactly what we were saying to each other insured our privacy. Indeed, Liala’s own knowledge of English was sufficiently imperfect for me to get away with some outrageous remarks; there’s no danger of going too far with a girl who’ll give you the benefit of the doubt by deciding you couldn’t possibly have meant what she thought you said…

Need I say that I felt very, very happy? It looked as if my official and personal interests were neatly coinciding. There was, however, just one slight worry. So far, I had not seen Liala. What if she turned out to be absolutely hideous?

My first chance of settling that important question came six hours from planet-fall. Now I was near enough to pick up video transmissions, and it took Max only a few seconds to analyse the incoming signals and adjust the ship’s receiver accordingly. At last I could have my first close-ups of the approaching planet—and of Liala.

She was almost as beautiful as her voice. I stared at the screen, unable to speak, for timeless seconds. Presently she broke the silence. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?’

I had to admit that I’d seen two or even three, but never one like her. It was a great relief to find that her reaction to me was quite favourable, so it seemed that nothing stood in the way of our future happiness—if we could evade the army of scientists and politicians who would surround me as soon as I landed. Our hopes of privacy were very slender; so much so, in fact, that I felt tempted to break one of my most ironclad rules. I’d even consider marrying Liala if that was the only way we could arrange matters. (Yes, that two months in space had really put a strain on my system…)

Five thousand years of history—ten thousand, if you count mine as well—can’t be condensed easily into a few hours. But with such a delightful tutor, I absorbed knowledge fast, and everything I missed, Max got down in his infallible memory circuits.

Arcady, as their planet was charmingly called, had been at the very frontier of interstellar colonisation; when the tide of empire had retreated, it had been left high and dry. In the struggle to survive, the Arcadians had lost much of their original scientific knowledge, including the secret of the Star Drive. They could not escape from their own solar system, but they had little incentive to do so. Arcady was a fertile world and the low gravity—only a quarter of Earth’s—had given the colonists the physical strength they needed to make it live up to its name. Even allowing for any natural bias on Liala’s part, it sounded a very attractive place.

Arcady’s little yellow sun was already showing a visible disc when I had my brilliant idea. That reception committee had been worrying me, and I suddenly realised how I could keep it at bay. The plan would need Liala’s co-operation, but by this time that was assured. If I may say so without sounding too immodest, I have always had a way with women, and this was not my first courtship by TV.

So the Arcadians learned, about two hours before I was due to land, that survey scouts were very shy and suspicious creatures. Owing to previous sad experiences with unfriendly cultures, I politely refused to walk like a fly into their parlour. As there was only one of me, I preferred to meet only one of them, in some isolated spot to be mutually selected. If that meeting went well, I would then fly to the capital city; if not—I’d head back the way I came. I hoped that they would not think this behaviour discourteous, but I was a lonely traveller a long way from home, and as reasonable people, I was sure they’d see my point of view…

They did. The choice of the emissary was obvious, and Liala promptly became a world heroine by bravely volunteering to meet the monster from space. She’d radio back, she told her anxious friends, within an hour of coming aboard my ship. I tried to make it two hours, but she said that might be overdoing it, and nasty-minded people might start to talk.

The ship was coming down through the Arcadian atmosphere when I suddenly remembered my compromising pin-ups, and had to make a rapid spring-cleaning. (Even so, one rather explicit masterpiece slipped down behind a chart rack and caused me acute embarrassment when it was discovered by the maintenance crew months later.) When I got back to the control room, the vision screen showed the empty, open plain at the very centre of which Liala was waiting for me; in two minutes, I would hold her in my arms, be able to drink the fragrance of her hair, feel her body yield in all the right places—

I didn’t bother to watch the landing, for I could rely on Max to do his usual flawless job. Instead, I hurried down to the air lock and waited with what patience I could muster for the opening of the doors that barred me from Liala.

It seemed an age before Max completed the routine air check and gave the ‘Outer Door Opening’ signal. I was through the exit before the metal disc had finished moving, and stood at last on the rich soil of Arcady.

I remembered that I weighed only forty pounds here, so I moved with caution despite my eagerness. Yet I’d forgotten, living in my fool’s paradise, what a fractional gravity could do to the human body in the course of two hundred generations. On a small planet, evolution can do a lot in five thousand years.

Liala was waiting for me, and she was as lovely as her picture. There was, however, one trifling matter that the TV screen hadn’t told me.

I’ve never liked big girls, and I like them even less now. If I’d still wanted to, I suppose I could have embraced Liala. But I’d have looked like such a fool, standing there on tiptoe with my arms wrapped around her knees.

The Songs of Distant Earth

First published in If, June 1958

Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

Many years later, this became the basis for my own favourite novel, and a beautiful suite by Mike ‘Tubular Bells’ Oldfield.

Beneath the palm trees Lora waited, watching the sea. Clyde’s boat was already visible as a tiny notch on the far horizon—the only flaw in the perfect mating of sea and sky. Minute by minute it grew in size, until it had detached itself from the featureless blue globe that encompassed the world. Now she could see Clyde standing at the prow, one hand twined around the rigging, statue-still as his eyes sought her among the shadows.

‘Where are you, Lora?’ his voice asked plaintively from the radio bracelet he had given her when they became engaged. ‘Come and help me—we’ve got a big catch to bring home.’

So! Lora told herself; that’s why you asked me to hurry down to the beach. Just to punish Clyde and to reduce him to the right state of anxiety, she ignored his call until he had repeated it half a dozen times. Even then she did not press the beautiful golden pearl set in the ‘Transmit’ button, but slowly emerged from the shade of the great trees and walked down the sloping beach.

Clyde looked at her reproachfully, but gave her a satisfactory kiss as soon as he had bounded ashore and secured the boat. Then they started unloading the catch together, scooping fish large and small from both hulls of the catamaran. Lora screwed up her nose but assisted gamely, until the waiting sand sled was piled high with the victims of Clyde’s skill.

It was a good catch; when she married Clyde, Lora told herself proudly, she’d never starve. The clumsy armoured creatures of this young planet’s sea were not true fish; it would be a hundred million years before nature invented scales here. But they were good enough eating, and the first colonists had labelled them with names they had brought, with so many other traditions, from unforgotten Earth.

‘That’s the lot!’ grunted Clyde, tossing a fair imitation of a salmon onto the glistening heap. ‘I’ll fix the nets later—let’s go!’

Finding a foothold with some difficulty, Lora jumped onto the sled behind him. The flexible rollers spun for a moment against the sand, then got a grip. Clyde, Lora, and a hundred pounds of assorted fish started racing up the wave-scalloped beach. They had made half the brief journey when the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came suddenly to its end.

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue vault of heaven. Even as Clyde and Lora watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at its edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud.

And now they could hear, falling down through the miles above their heads, a sound their world had not known for generations. Instinctively they grasped each other’s hands, as they stared at that snow-white furrow across the sky and listened to the thin scream from the borders of space. The descending ship had already vanished beyond the horizon before they turned to each other and breathed, almost with reverence, the same magic word: ‘Earth!’

After three hundred years of silence, the mother world had reached out once more to touch Thalassa…

Why? Lora asked herself, when the long moment of revelation had passed and the scream of torn air ceased to echo from the sky. What had happened, after all these years, to bring a ship from mighty Earth to this quiet and contented world? There was no room for more colonists here on this one island in a watery planet, and Earth knew that well enough. Its robot survey ships had mapped and probed Thalassa from space five centuries ago, in the early days of interstellar exploration. Long before man himself had ventured out into the gulfs between the stars, his electronic servants had gone ahead of him, circling the worlds of alien suns and heading homeward with their store of knowledge, as bees bring honey back to the parent hive.

Such a scout had found Thalassa, a freak among worlds with its single large island in a shoreless sea. One day continents would be born here, but this was a new planet, its history still waiting to be written.

The robot had taken a hundred years to make its homeward journey, and for a hundred more its garnered knowledge had slept in the electronic memories of the great computers which stored the wisdom of Earth. The first waves of colonisation had not touched Thalassa; there were more profitable worlds to be developed—worlds that were not nine-tenths water. Yet at last the pioneers had come; only a dozen miles from where she was standing now, Lora’s ancestors had first set foot upon this planet and claimed it for mankind.

They had levelled hills, planted crops, moved rivers, built towns and factories, and multiplied until they reached the natural limits of their land. With its fertile soil, abundant seas, and mild, wholly predictable weather, Thalassa was not a world that demanded much of its adopted children. The pioneering spirit had lasted perhaps two generations; thereafter the colonists were content to work as much as necessary (but no more), to dream nostalgically of Earth, and to let the future look after itself.

The village was seething with speculation when Clyde and Lora arrived. News had already come from the northern end of the island that the ship had spent its furious speed and was heading back at a low altitude, obviously looking for a place to land. ‘They’ll still have the old maps,’ someone said. ‘Ten to one they’ll ground where the first expedition landed, up in the hills.’

It was a shrewd guess, and within minutes all available transport was moving out of the village, along the seldom used road to the west. As befitted the mayor of so important a cultural centre as Palm Bay (population: 572; occupations: fishing, hydroponics; industries: none), Lora’s father led the way in his official car. The fact that its annual coat of paint was just about due was perhaps a little unfortunate; one could only hope that the visitors would overlook the occasional patches of bare metal. After all, the car itself was quite new; Lora could distinctly remember the excitement its arrival had caused, only thirteen years ago.

The little caravan of assorted cars, trucks, and even a couple of straining sand sleds rolled over the crest of the hill and ground to a halt beside the weathered sign with its simple but impressive words:

LANDING SITE OF THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO THALASSA

1 JANUARY, YEAR ZERO

(28 May AD 2626)

The first expedition, Lora repeated silently. There had never been a second one—but here it was…

The ship came in so low, and so silently, that it was almost upon them before they were aware of it. There was no sound of engines—only a brief rustling of leaves as the displaced air stirred among the trees. Then all was still once more, but it seemed to Lora that the shining ovoid resting on the turf was a great silver egg, waiting to hatch and to bring something new and strange into the peaceful world of Thalassa.

‘It’s so small,’ someone whispered behind her. ‘They couldn’t have come from Earth in that thing!’

‘Of course not,’ the inevitable self-appointed expert replied at once. ‘That’s only a lifeboat—the real ship’s up there in space. Don’t you remember that the first expedition—’

‘Sshh!’ someone else remonstrated. ‘They’re coming out!’

It happened in the space of a single heartbeat. One second the seamless hull was so smooth and unbroken that the eye looked in vain for any sign of an opening. And then, an instant later, there was an oval doorway with a short ramp leading to the ground. Nothing had moved, but something had happened. How it had been done, Lora could not imagine, but she accepted the miracle without surprise. Such things were only to be expected of a ship that came from Earth.

There were figures moving inside the shadowed entrance; not a sound came from the waiting crowd as the visitors slowly emerged and stood blinking in the fierce light of an unfamiliar sun. There were seven of them—all men—and they did not look in the least like the super-beings she had expected. It was true that they were all somewhat above the average in height and had thin, clear-cut features, but they were so pale that their skins were almost white. They seemed, moreover, worried and uncertain, which was something that puzzled Lora very much. For the first time it occurred to her that this landing on Thalassa might be unintentional, and that the visitors were as surprised to be here as the islanders were to greet them.

The mayor of Palm Bay, confronted with the supreme moment of his career, stepped forward to deliver the speech on which he had been frantically working ever since the car left the village. A second before he opened his mouth, a sudden doubt struck him and sponged his memory clean. Everyone had automatically assumed that this ship came from Earth—but that was pure guesswork. It might just as easily have been sent here from one of the other colonies, of which there were at least a dozen much closer than the parent world. In his panic over protocol, all that Lora’s father could manage was: ‘We welcome you to Thalassa. You’re from Earth—I presume?’ That ‘I presume?’ was to make Mayor Fordyce immortal; it would be a century before anyone discovered that the phrase was not quite original.

In all that waiting crowd, Lora was the only one who never heard the confirming answer, spoken in English that seemed to have speeded up a trifle during the centuries of separation. For in that moment, she saw Leon for the first time.

He came out of the ship, moving as unobtrusively as possible to join his companions at the foot of the ramp. Perhaps he had remained behind to make some adjustment to the controls; perhaps—and this seemed more likely—he had been reporting the progress of the meeting to the great mother ship, which must be hanging up there in space, far beyond the uttermost fringes of the atmosphere. Whatever the reason, from then onward Lora had eyes for no one else.

Even in that first instant, she knew that her life could never again be the same. This was something new and beyond all her experience, filling her at the same moment with wonder and fear. Her fear was for the love she felt for Clyde; her wonder for the new and unknown thing that had come into her life.

Leon was not as tall as his companions, but was much more stockily built, giving an impression of power and competence. His eyes, very dark and full of animation, were deep-set in rough-hewn features which no one could have called handsome, yet which Lora found disturbingly attractive. Here was a man who had looked upon sights she could not imagine—a man who, perhaps, had walked the streets of Earth and seen its fabled cities. What was he doing here on lonely Thalassa, and why were those lines of strain and worry about his ceaselessly searching eyes?

He had looked at her once already, but his gaze had swept on without faltering. Now it came back, as if prompted by memory, and for the first time he became conscious of Lora, as all along she had been aware of him. Their eyes locked, bridging gulfs of time and space and experience. The anxious furrows faded from Leon’s brow, the tense lines slowly relaxed; and presently he smiled.

It was dusk when the speeches, the banquets, the receptions, the interviews were over. Leon was very tired, but his mind was far too active to allow him to sleep. After the strain of the last few weeks, when he had awakened to the shrill clamour of alarms and fought with his colleagues to save the wounded ship, it was hard to realise that they had reached safety at last. What incredible good fortune that this inhabited planet had been so close. Even if they could not repair the ship and complete the two centuries of flight that still lay before them, here at least they could remain among friends. No ship-wrecked mariners, of sea or space, could hope for more than that.

The night was cool and calm and ablaze with unfamiliar stars. Yet there were still some old friends, even though the ancient patterns of the constellations were hopelessly lost. There was mighty Rigel, no fainter for all the added light-years that its rays must now cross before they reached his eyes. And that must be giant Canopus, almost in line with their destination, but so much more remote that even when they reached their new home, it would seem no brighter than in the skies of Earth.

Leon shook his head, as if to clear the stupefying, hypnotic image of immensity from his mind. Forget the stars, he told himself; you will face them again soon enough. Cling to this little world while you are upon it, even though it may be a grain of dust on the road between the Earth you will never see again and the goal that waits for you at journey’s end, two hundred years from now.

His friends were already sleeping, tired and content, as they had a right to be. Soon he would join them—when his restless spirit would allow him to. But first he would see something of this world to which chance had brought him, this oasis peopled by his own kinsmen in the deserts of space.

He left the long, single-storeyed guesthouse that had been prepared for them in such obvious haste, and walked out into the single street of Palm Bay. There was no one about, though sleepy music came from a few houses. It seemed that the villagers believed in going to bed early—or perhaps they, too, were exhausted by the excitement and hospitality of the day. That suited Leon, who wanted only to be left alone until his racing thoughts had slowed to rest.

Out of the quiet night around him he became aware of the murmuring sea, and the sound drew his footsteps away from the empty street. It was dark among the palms, when the lights of the village had faded behind him, but the smaller of Thalassa’s two moons was high in the south and its curious yellow glow gave him all the guidance he required. Presently he was through the narrow belt of trees, and there at the end of the steeply shelving beach lay the ocean that covered almost all of this world.

A line of fishing boats was drawn up at the water’s edge, and Leon walked slowly toward them, curious to see how the craftsmen of Thalassa had solved one of man’s oldest problems. He looked approvingly at the trim plastic hulls, the narrow outrigger float, the power-operated winch for raising the nets, the compact little motor, the radio with its direction-finding loop. This almost primitive, yet completely adequate, simplicity had a profound appeal to him; it was hard to think of a greater contrast with the labyrinthine complexities of the mighty ship hanging up there above his head. For a moment he amused himself with fantasy; how pleasant to jettison all his years of training and study, and to exchange the life of a starship propulsion engineer for the peaceful, undemanding existence of a fisherman! They must need someone to keep their boats in order, and perhaps he could think of a few improvements…

He shrugged away the rosy dream, without bothering to marshal all its obvious fallacies, and began to walk along the shifting line of foam where the waves had spent their last strength against the land. Underfoot was the debris of this young ocean’s newborn life—empty shells and carapaces that might have littered the coasts of Earth a billion years ago. Here, for instance, was a tightly wound spiral of limestone which he had surely seen before in some museum. It might well be; any design that had once served her purpose, Nature repeated endlessly on world after world.

A faint yellow glow was spreading swiftly across the eastern sky; even as Leon watched, Selene, the inner moon, edged itself above the horizon. With astonishing speed, the entire gibbous disc climbed out of the sea, flooding the beach with sudden light.

And in that burst of brilliance, Leon saw that he was not alone.

The girl was sitting on one of the boats, about fifty yards farther along the beach. Her back was turned toward him and she was staring out to sea, apparently unaware of his presence. Leon hesitated, not wishing to invade her solitude, and also being uncertain of the local mores in these matters. It seemed highly likely, at such a time and place, that she was waiting for someone; it might be safest, and most tactful, to turn quietly back to the village.

He had decided too late. As if startled by the flood of new light along the beach, the girl looked up and at once caught sight of him. She rose to her feet with an unhurried grace, showing no signs of alarm or annoyance. Indeed, if Leon could have seen her face clearly in the moonlight, he would have been surprised at the quiet satisfaction it expressed.

Only twelve hours ago, Lora would have been indignant had anyone suggested that she would meet a complete stranger here on this lonely beach when the rest of her world was slumbering. Even now, she might have tried to rationalise her behaviour, to argue that she felt restless and could not sleep, and had therefore decided to go for a walk. But she knew in her heart that this was not the truth; all day long she had been haunted by the image of that young engineer, whose name and position she had managed to discover without, she hoped, arousing too much curiosity among her friends.

It was not even luck that she had seen him leave the guesthouse; she had been watching most of the evening from the porch of her father’s residence, on the other side of the street. And it was certainly not luck, but deliberate and careful planning, that had taken her to this point on the beach as soon as she was sure of the direction Leon was heading.

He came to a halt a dozen feet away. (Did he recognise her? Did he guess that this was no accident? For a moment her courage almost failed her, but it was too late now to retreat.) Then he gave a curious, twisted smile that seemed to light up his whole face and made him look even younger than he was.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I never expected to meet anyone at this time of night. I hope I haven’t disturbed you.’

‘Of course not,’ Lora answered, trying to keep her voice as steady and emotionless as she could.

‘I’m from the ship, you know. I thought I’d have a look at Thalassa while I’m here.’

At those last words, a sudden change of expression crossed Lora’s face; the sadness he saw there puzzled Leon, for it could have no cause. And then, with an instantaneous shock of recognition, he knew that he had seen this girl before, and understood what she was doing here. This was the girl who had smiled at him when he came out of the ship—no, that was not right; he had been the one who smiled…

There seemed nothing to say. They stared at each other across the wrinkled sand, each wondering at the miracle that had brought them together out of the immensity of time and space. Then, as if in unconscious agreement, they sat facing each other on the gunwale of the boat, still without a word.

This is folly, Leon told himself. What am I doing here? What right have I, a wanderer passing through this world, to touch the lives of its people? I should make my apologies and leave this girl to the beach and the sea that are her birthright, not mine.

Yet he did not leave. The bright disc of Selene had risen a full hand’s breadth above the sea when he said at last: ‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Lora,’ she answered, in the soft, lilting accent of the islanders, which was so attractive, but not always easy to understand.

‘And I’m Leon Carrell, Assistant Propulsion Engineer, Starship Magellan.’

She gave a little smile as he introduced himself, and at that moment Leon was certain that she already knew his name. At the same time a completely irrelevant and whimsical thought struck him; until a few minutes ago he had been dead-tired, just about to turn back for his overdue sleep. Yet now he was fully awake and alert—poised, as it were, on the brink of a new and unpredictable adventure.

But Lora’s next remark was predictable enough: ‘How do you like Thalassa?’

‘Give me time,’ Leon countered. ‘I’ve only seen Palm Bay, and not much of that.’

‘Will you be here—very long?’

The pause was barely perceptible, but his ear detected it. This was the question that really mattered.

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, truthfully enough. ‘It depends on how long the repairs take.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, we ran into something too big for our meteor screen to absorb. And—bang!—that was the end of the screen. So we’ve got to make a new one.’

‘And you think you can do that here?’

‘We hope so. The main problem will be lifting about a million tons of water up to the Magellan. Luckily, I think Thalassa can spare it.’

‘Water? I don’t understand.’

‘Well, you know that a starship travels at almost the speed of light; even then it takes years to get anywhere, so that we have to go into suspended animation and let the automatic controls run the ship.’

Lora nodded. ‘Of course—that’s how our ancestors got here.’

‘Well, the speed would be no problem if space was really empty—but it isn’t. A starship sweeps up thousands of atoms of hydrogen, particles of dust, and sometimes larger fragments, every second of its flight. At nearly the speed of light, these bits of cosmic junk have enormous energy, and could soon burn up the ship. So we carry a shield about a mile ahead of us, and let that get burned up instead. Do you have umbrellas on this world?’

‘Why—yes,’ Lora replied, obviously baffled by the incongruous question.

‘Then you can compare a starship to a man moving head down through a rainstorm behind the cover of an umbrella. The rain is the cosmic dust between the stars, and our ship was unlucky enough to lose its umbrella.’

‘And you can make a new one of water?’

‘Yes; it’s the cheapest building material in the universe. We freeze it into an iceberg which travels ahead of us. What could be simpler than that?’

Lora did not answer; her thoughts seemed to have veered onto a new track. Presently she said, her voice so low and wistful that Leon had to bend forward to hear it against the rolling of the surf: ‘And you left Earth a hundred years ago.’

‘A hundred and four. Of course, it seems only a few weeks, since we were deep-sleeping until the autopilot revived us. All the colonists are still in suspended animation; they don’t know that anything’s happened.’

‘And presently you’ll join them again, and sleep your way on to the stars.’

Leon nodded, avoiding her eye. ‘That’s right. Planet-fall will be a few months late, but what does that matter on a trip that takes three hundred years?’

Lora pointed to the island behind them, and then to the shoreless sea at whose edge they stood.

‘It’s strange to think that your sleeping friends up there will never know anything of all this. I feel sorry for them.’

‘Yes, only we fifty or so engineers will have any memories of Thalassa. To everyone else in the ship, our stop here will be nothing more than a hundred-year-old entry in the logbook.’

He glanced at Lora’s face, and saw again that sadness in her eyes.

‘Why does that make you unhappy?’

She shook her head, unable to answer. How could one express the sense of loneliness that Leon’s words had brought to her? The lives of men, and all their hopes and fears, were so little against the inconceivable immensities that they had dared to challenge. The thought of that three-hundred-year journey, not yet half completed, was something from which her mind recoiled in horror. And yet—in her own veins was the blood of those earlier pioneers who had followed the same path to Thalassa, centuries ago.

The night was no longer friendly; she felt a sudden longing for her home and family, for the little room that held everything she owned and that was all the world she knew or wanted. The cold of space was freezing her heart; she wished now that she had never come on this mad adventure. It was time—more than time—to leave.

As she rose to her feet, she noticed that they had been sitting on Clyde’s boat, and wondered what unconscious prompting of her mind had brought her here to this vessel out of all the little fleet lined up along the beach. At the thought of Clyde, a spasm of uncertainty, even of guilt, swept over her. Never in her life, except for the most fleeting of moments, had she thought of any other man but him. Now she could no longer pretend that this was true.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Leon. ‘Are you cold?’ He held out his hand to her, and for the first time their fingers touched as she automatically responded. But at the instant of contact, she shied like a startled animal and jerked away.

‘I’m all right,’ she answered, almost angrily. ‘It’s late—I must go home. Goodbye.’

Her reaction was so abrupt that it took Leon by surprise. Had he said anything to offend her? he wondered. She was already walking quickly away when he called after her: ‘Will I see you again?’

If she answered, the sound of the waves carried away her voice. He watched her go, puzzled and a little hurt, while not for the first time in his life he reflected how hard it was to understand the mind of a woman.

For a moment he thought of following her and repeating the question, but in his heart he knew there was no need. As surely as the sun would rise tomorrow, they would meet again.

And now the life of the island was dominated by the crippled giant a thousand miles out in space. Before dawn and after sunset, when the world was in darkness but the light of the sun still streamed overhead, the Magellan was visible as a brilliant star, the brightest object in all the sky except the two moons themselves. But even when it could not be seen—when it was lost in the glare of day or eclipsed by the shadow of Thalassa—it was never far from men’s thoughts.

It was hard to believe that only fifty of the starship’s crew had been awakened, and that not even half of those were on Thalassa at any one time. They seemed to be everywhere, usually in little groups of two or three, walking swiftly on mysterious errands or riding small anti-gravity scooters which floated a few feet from the ground and moved so silently that they made life in the village rather hazardous. Despite the most pressing invitations, the visitors had still taken no part in the cultural and social activities of the island. They had explained, politely but firmly, that until the safety of their ship was secured, they would have no time for any other interests. Later, certainly, but not now…

So Thalassa had to wait with what patience it could muster while the Earthmen set up their instruments, made their surveys, drilled deep into the rocks of the island, and carried out scores of experiments which seemed to have no possible connection with their problem. Sometimes they consulted briefly with Thalassa’s own scientists, but on the whole they kept to themselves. It was not that they were unfriendly or aloof; they were working with such a fierce and dedicated intensity that they were scarcely aware of anyone around them.

After their first meeting, it was two days before Lora spoke to Leon again. She saw him from time to time as he hurried about the village, usually with a bulging brief case and an abstracted expression, but they were able to exchange only the briefest of smiles. Yet even this was enough to keep her emotions in turmoil, to banish her peace of mind, and to poison her relationship with Clyde.

As long as she could remember, he had been part of her life; they had had their quarrels and disagreements, but no one else had ever challenged his place in her heart. In a few months they would be married—yet now she was not even sure of that, or indeed of anything.

‘Infatuation’ was an ugly word, which one applied only to other people. But how else could she explain this yearning to be with a man who had come suddenly into her life from nowhere, and who must leave again in a few days or weeks? No doubt the glamour and romance of his origin was partly responsible, but that alone was not enough to account for it. There were other Earthmen better looking than Leon, yet she had eyes for him alone, and her life now was empty unless she was in his presence.

By the end of the first day, only her family knew about her feelings; by the end of the second, everyone she passed gave her a knowing smile. It was impossible to keep a secret in such a tight and talkative community as Palm Bay, and she knew better than to attempt it.

Her second meeting with Leon was accidental—as far as such things can ever be accidents. She was helping her father deal with some of the correspondence and inquiries that had flooded upon the village since the Earthmen’s arrival, and was trying to make some sense out of her notes when the door of the office opened. It had opened so often in the last few days that she had ceased to look up; her younger sister was acting as receptionist and dealt with all the visitors. Then she heard Leon’s voice; and the paper blurred before her eyes, the notes might have been in an unknown language.

‘Can I see the mayor, please?’

‘Of course, Mr—?’

‘Assistant Engineer Carrell.’

‘I’ll go and fetch him. Won’t you sit down?’

Leon slumped wearily on the ancient armchair that was the best the reception room could offer its infrequent visitors, and not until then did he notice that Lora was watching him silently from the other side of the room. At once he sloughed off his tiredness and shot to his feet.

‘Hello—I didn’t know you worked here.’

‘I live here; my father’s the mayor.’

This portentous news did not seem to impress Leon unduly. He walked over to the desk and picked up the fat volume through which Lora had been browsing between her secretarial duties.

‘A Concise History of Earth,’ he read, ‘from the Dawn of Civilisation to the Beginning of Interstellar Flight. And all in a thousand pages! It’s a pity it ends three hundred years ago.’

‘We hope that you’ll soon bring us up to date. Has much happened since that was written?’

‘Enough to fill about fifty libraries, I suppose. But before we go we’ll leave you copies of all our records, so that your history books will only be a hundred years out of date.’

They were circling around each other, avoiding the only thing that was important. When can we meet again? Lora’s thoughts kept hammering silently, unable to break through the barrier of speech. And does he really like me or is he merely making polite conversation?

The inner door opened, and the mayor emerged apologetically from his office.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Carrell, but the president was on the line—he’s coming over this afternoon. And what can I do for you?’

Lora pretended to work, but she typed the same sentence eight times while Leon delivered his message from the captain of the Magellan. She was not a great deal wiser when he had finished; it seemed that the starship’s engineers wished to build some equipment on a headland a mile from the village, and wanted to make sure there would be no objection.

‘Of course!’ said Mayor Fordyce expansively, in his nothing’s-too-good-for-our-guests tone of voice. ‘Go right ahead—the land doesn’t belong to anybody, and no one lives there. What do you want to do with it?’

‘We’re building a gravity inverter, and the generator has to be anchored in solid bedrock. It may be a little noisy when it starts to run, but I don’t think it will disturb you here in the village. And of course we’ll dismantle the equipment when we’ve finished.’

Lora had to admire her father. She knew perfectly well that Leon’s request was as meaningless to him as it was to her, but one would never have guessed it.

‘That’s perfectly all right—glad to be of any help we can. And will you tell Captain Gold that the president’s coming at five this afternoon? I’ll send my car to collect him; the reception’s at five thirty in the village hall.’

When Leon had given his thanks and departed, Mayor Fordyce walked over to his daughter and picked up the slim pile of correspondence she had none-too-accurately typed.

‘He seems a pleasant young man,’ he said, ‘but is it a good idea to get too fond of him?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Now, Lora! After all, I am your father, and I’m not completely unobservant.’

‘He’s not’—sniff—‘a bit interested in me.’

‘Are you interested in him?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, Daddy, I’m so unhappy!’

Mayor Fordyce was not a brave man, so there was only one thing he could do. He donated his handkerchief, and fled back into his office.

It was the most difficult problem that Clyde had ever faced in his life, and there were no precedents that gave any help at all. Lora belonged to him—everyone knew that. If his rival had been another villager, or someone from any other pan of Thalassa, he knew exactly what he would have done. But the laws of hospitality, and, above all, his natural awe for anything of Earth, prevented him from politely asking Leon to take his attentions elsewhere. It would not be the first time that had happened, and there had never been the slightest trouble on those earlier occasions. That could have been because Clyde was over six feet tall, proportionally broad, and had no excess fat on his one hundred and ninety-pound frame.

During the long hours at sea, when he had nothing else to do but to brood, Clyde toyed with the idea of a short, sharp bout with Leon. It would be very short; though Leon was not as skinny as most of the Earthmen, he shared their pale, washed-out look and was obviously no match for anyone who led a life of physical activity. That was the trouble—it wouldn’t be fair. Clyde knew that public opinion would be outraged if he had a fight with Leon, however justified he might be.

And how justified was he? That was the big problem that worried Clyde, as it had worried a good many billion men before him. It seemed that Leon was now practically one of the family; every time he called at the mayor’s house, the Earthman seemed to be there on some pretext or other. Jealousy was an emotion that had never afflicted Clyde before, and he did not enjoy the symptoms.

He was still furious about the dance. It had been the biggest social event for years; indeed, it was not likely that Palm Bay would ever match it again in the whole of its history. To have the president of Thalassa, half the council, and fifty visitors from Earth in the village at the same moment was not something that could happen again this side of eternity.

For all his size and strength, Clyde was a good dancer—especially with Lora. But that night he had had little chance of proving it; Leon had been too busy demonstrating the latest steps from Earth (latest, that is, if you overlooked the fact that they must have passed out of fashion a hundred years ago—unless they had come back and were now the latest thing). In Clyde’s opinion Leon’s technique was very poor and the dances were ugly; the interest that Lora showed in them was perfectly ridiculous.

He had been foolish enough to tell her so when his opportunity came; and that had been the last dance he had had with Lora that evening. From then onward, he might not have been there, as far as she was concerned. Clyde had endured the boycott as long as he could, then had left for the bar with one objective in mind. He had quickly attained it, and not until he had come reluctantly to his senses the next morning did he discover what he had missed.

The dancing had ended early; there had been a short speech from the president—his third that evening—introducing the commander of the starship and promising a little surprise. Captain Gold had been equally brief; he was obviously a man more accustomed to orders than orations.

‘Friends: he began, ‘you know why we’re here, and I’ve no need to say how much we appreciate your hospitality and kindness. We shall never forget you, and we’re only sorry that we have had so little time to see more of your beautiful island and its people. I hope you will forgive us for any seeming discourtesy, but the repair of our ship, and the safety of our companions, has had to take priority in our minds.

‘In the long run, the accident that brought us here may be fortunate for us both. It has given us happy memories, and also inspiration. What we have seen here is a lesson to us. May we make the world that is waiting at the end of our journey as fair a home for mankind as you have made Thalassa.

‘And before we resume our voyage, it is both a duty and a pleasure to leave with you all the records we can that will bridge the gap since you last had contact with Earth. Tomorrow we shall invite your scientists and historians up to our ship so that they can copy any of our information tapes they desire. Thus we hope to leave you a legacy which will enrich your world for generations to come. That is the very least we can do.

‘But tonight, science and history can wait, for we have other treasures aboard. Earth has not been idle in the centuries since your forefathers left. Listen, now, to some of the heritage we share together, and which we will leave upon Thalassa before we go our way.’

The lights had dimmed; the music had begun. No one who was present would ever forget that moment; in a trance of wonder, Lora had listened to what men had wrought in sound during the centuries of separation. Time had meant nothing, she had not even been conscious of Leon standing by her side, holding her hand, as the music ebbed and flowed around them.

These were the things that she had never known, the things that belonged to Earth, and to Earth alone. The slow beat of mighty bells, climbing like invisible smoke from old cathedral spires; the chant of patient boatmen, in a thousand tongues now lost forever, rowing home against the tide in the last light of day; the songs of armies marching into battles that time had robbed of all their pain and evil; the merged murmur of ten million voices as man’s greatest cities woke to meet the dawn; the cold dance of the Aurora over endless seas of ice; the roar of mighty engines climbing upward on the highway to the stars. All these she had heard in the music and the songs that had come out of the night—songs of distant Earth, carried to her across the light-years…

A clear soprano voice, swooping and soaring like a bird at the very edge of hearing, sang a wordless lament that tore at the heart. It was a dirge for all loves lost in the loneliness of space, for friends and homes that could never again be seen and must fade at last from memory. It was a song for all exiles, and it spoke as clearly to those who were sundered from Earth by a dozen generations as to the voyagers to whom its fields and cities still seemed only weeks away.

The music had died into the darkness; misty-eyed, avoiding words, the people of Thalassa had gone slowly to their homes. But Lora had not gone to hers; against the loneliness that had pierced her very soul, there was only one defence. And presently she had found it, in the warm night of the forest, as Leon’s arms tightened around her and their souls and bodies merged. Like wayfarers lost in a hostile wilderness, they had sought warmth and comfort beside the fire of love. While that fire burned, they were safe from the shadows that prowled in the night; and all the universe of stars and planets shrank to a toy that they could hold within their hands.

To Leon, it was never wholly real. Despite all the urgency and peril that had brought them here, he sometimes fancied that at journey’s end it would be hard to convince himself that Thalassa was not a dream that had come in his long sleep. This fierce and foredoomed love, for example; he had not asked for it—it had been thrust upon him. Yet there were few men, he told himself, who would not have taken it, had they, too, landed, after weeks of grinding anxiety, on this peaceful, pleasant world.

When he could escape from work, he took long walks with Lora in the fields far from the village, where men seldom came and only the robot cultivators disturbed the solitude. For hours Lora would question him about Earth—but she would never speak of the planet that was the Magellan’s goal. He understood her reasons well enough, and did his best to satisfy her endless curiousity about the world that was already ‘home’ to more men than had ever seen it with their own eyes.

She was bitterly disappointed to hear that the age of cities had passed. Despite all that Leon could tell her about the completely decentralised culture that now covered the planet from pole to pole, she still thought of Earth in terms of such vanished giants as Chandrigar, London, Astrograd. New York, and it was hard for her to realise that they had gone forever, and with them the way of life they represented.

‘When we left Earth,’ Leon explained, ‘the largest centres of population were university towns like Oxford or Ann Arbor or Canberra; some of them had fifty thousand students and professors. There are no other cities left of even half that size.’

‘But what happened to them?’

‘Oh, there was no single cause, but the development of communications started it. As soon as anyone on Earth could see and talk to anyone else by pressing a button, most of the need for cities vanished. Then anti-gravity was invented, and you could move goods or houses or anything else through the sky without bothering about geography. That completed the job of wiping out distance, which the airplane had begun a couple of centuries earlier. After that, men started to live where they liked, and the cities dwindled away.’

For a moment Lora did not answer; she was lying on a bank of grass, watching the behaviour of a bee whose ancestors, like hers, had been citizens of Earth. It was trying vainly to extract nectar from one of Thalassa’s native flowers; insect life had not yet arisen on this world, and the few indigenous flowers had not yet invented lures for air-borne visitors.

The frustrated bee gave up the hopeless task and buzzed angrily away; Lora hoped that it would have enough sense to head back to the orchards, where it would find more co-operative flowers. When she spoke again, it was to voice a dream that had now haunted mankind for almost a thousand years.

‘Do you suppose,’ she said wistfully, ‘that we’ll ever break through the speed of light?’

Leon smiled, knowing where her thoughts were leading. To travel faster than light—to go home to Earth, yet to return to your native world while your friends were still alive—every colonist must, at some time or other, have dreamed of this. There was no problem, in the whole history of the human race, that had called forth so much effort and that still remained so utterly intractable.

‘I don’t believe so,’ he said. ‘If it could be done, someone would have discovered how by this time. No—we have to do it the slow way, because there isn’t any other. That’s how the universe is built, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘But surely we could still keep in touch!’

Leon nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘and we try to. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but you should have heard from Earth long before now. We’ve been sending our robot message carriers to all the colonies, carrying a full history of everything that’s happened up to the time of departure, and asking for a report back. As the news returns to Earth, it’s all transcribed and sent out again by the next messenger. So we have a kind of interstellar news service, with the Earth as the central clearinghouse. It’s slow, of course, but there’s no other way of doing it. If the last messenger to Thalassa has been lost, there must be another on the way—maybe several, twenty or thirty years apart.’

Lora tried to envisage the vast, star-spanning network of message carriers, shuttling back and forth between Earth and its scattered children, and wondered why Thalassa had been overlooked. But with Leon beside her, it did not seem important. He was here; Earth and the stars were very far away. And so also, with whatever unhappiness it might bring, was tomorrow…

By the end of the week, the visitors had built a squat and heavily braced pyramid of metal girders, housing some obscure mechanism, on a rocky headland overlooking the sea. Lora, in common with the 571 other inhabitants of Palm Bay and the several thousand sight-seers who had descended upon the village, was watching when the first test was made. No one was allowed to go within a quarter of a mile of the machine—a precaution that aroused a good deal of alarm among the more nervous islanders. Did the Earthmen know what they were doing? Suppose that something went wrong. And what were they doing, anyway?

Leon was there with his friends inside that metal pyramid, making the final adjustments—the ‘coarse focusing’, he had told Lora, leaving her none the wiser. She watched with the same anxious incomprehension as all her fellow islanders until the distant figures emerged from the machine and walked to the edge of the flat-topped rock on which it was built. There they stood, a tiny group of figures silhouetted against the ocean, staring out to sea.

A mile from the shore, something strange was happening to the water. It seemed that a storm was brewing—but a storm that kept within an area only a few hundred yards across. Mountainous waves were building up, smashing against each other and then swiftly subsiding again. Within a few minutes the ripples of the disturbance had reached the shore, but the centre of the tiny storm showed no sign of movement. It was as if, Lora told herself, an invisible finger had reached down from the sky and was stirring the sea.

Quite abruptly, the entire pattern changed. Now the waves were no longer battering against each other; they were marching in step, moving more and more swiftly in a tight circle. A cone of water was rising from the sea, becoming taller and thinner with every second. Already it was a hundred feet high, and the sound of its birth was an angry roaring that filled the air and struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it. All, that is, except the little band of men who had summoned this monster from the deep, and who still stood watching it with calm assurance, ignoring the waves that were breaking almost against their feet.

Now the spinning tower of water was climbing swiftly up the sky, piercing the clouds like an arrow as it headed toward space. Its foam-capped summit was already lost beyond sight, and from the sky there began to fall a steady shower of rain, the drops abnormally large, like those which prelude a thunderstorm. Not all the water that was being lifted from Thalassa’s single ocean was reaching its distant goal; some was escaping from the power that controlled it and was falling back from the edge of space.

Slowly the watching crowd drifted away, astonishment and fright already yielding to a calm acceptance. Man had been able to control gravity for half a thousand years, and this trick—spectacular though it was—could not be compared with the miracle of hurling a great starship from sun to sun at little short of the speed of light.

The Earthmen were now walking back toward their machine, clearly satisfied with what they had done. Even at this distance, one could see that they were happy and relaxed—perhaps for the first time since they had reached Thalassa. The water to rebuild the Magellan’s shield was on its way out into space, to be shaped and frozen by the other strange forces that these men had made their servants. In a few days, they would be ready to leave, their great interstellar ark as good as new.

Even until this minute, Lora had hoped that they might fail. There was nothing left of that hope now, as she watched the man-made waterspout lift its burden from the sea. Sometimes it wavered slightly, its base shifting back and forth as if at the balance point between immense and invisible forces. But it was fully under control, and it would do the task that had been set for it. That meant only one thing to her; soon she must say goodbye to Leon.

She walked slowly toward the distant group of Earthmen, marshalling her thoughts and trying to subdue her emotions. Presently Leon broke away from his friends and came to meet her; relief and happiness were written across his face, but they faded swiftly when he saw Lora’s expression.

‘Well,’ he said lamely, almost like a schoolboy caught in some crime, ‘we’ve done it.’

‘And now—how long will you be here?’

He scuffed nervously at the sand, unable to meet her eye.

‘Oh, about three days—perhaps four.’

She tried to assimilate the words calmly; after all, she had expected them—this was nothing new. But she failed completely, and it was as well that there was no one near them.

‘You can’t leave!’ she cried desperately. ‘Stay here on Thalassa!’

Leon took her hands gently, then murmured: ‘No Lora—this isn’t my world; I would never fit into it. Half my life’s been spent training for the work I’m doing now; I could never be happy here, where there aren’t any more frontiers. In a month, I should die of boredom.’

‘Then take me with you!’

‘You don’t really mean that.’

‘But I do!’

‘You only think so; you’d be more out of place in my world than I would be in yours.’

‘I could learn—there would be plenty of things I could do. As long as we could stay together!’

He held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes. They mirrored sorrow, and also sincerity. She really believed what she was saying, Leon told himself. For the first time, his conscience smote him. He had forgotten—or chosen not to remember—how much more serious these things could be to a woman than to a man.

He had never intended to hurt Lora; he was very fond of her, and would remember her with affection all his life. Now he was discovering, as so many men before him had done, that it was not always easy to say goodbye.

There was only one thing to do. Better a short, sharp pain than a long bitterness.

‘Come with me, Lora,’ he said. ‘I have something to show you.’

They did not speak as Leon led the way to the clearing that the Earthmen used as a landing ground. It was littered with pieces of enigmatic equipment, some of them being repacked while others were being left behind for the islanders to use as they pleased. Several of the anti-gravity scooters were parked in the shade beneath the palms; even when not in use they spurned contact with the ground, and hovered a couple of feet above the grass.

But it was not these that Leon was interested in; he walked purposefully toward the gleaming oval that dominated the clearing, and spoke a few words to the engineer who was standing beside it. There was a short argument; then the other capitulated with fairly good grace.

‘It’s not fully loaded,’ Leon explained as he helped Lora up the ramp. ‘But we’re going just the same. The other shuttle will be down in half an hour, anyway.’

Already Lora was in a world she had never known before—a world of technology in which the most brilliant engineer or scientist of Thalassa would be lost. The island possessed all the machines it needed for its life and happiness; this was something utterly beyond its ken. Lora had once seen the great computer that was the virtual ruler of her people and with whose decisions they disagreed not once in a generation. That giant brain was huge and complex, but there was an awesome simplicity about this machine that impressed even her nontechnical mind. When Leon sat down at the absurdly small control board, his hands seemed to do nothing except rest lightly upon it.

Yet the walls were suddenly transparent—and there was Thalassa, already shrinking below them. There had been no sense of movement, no whisper of sound, yet the island was dwindling even as she watched. The misty edge of the world, a great bow dividing the blue of the sea from the velvet blackness of space, was becoming more curved with every passing second.

‘Look,’ said Leon, pointing to the stars.

The ship was already visible, and Lora felt a sudden sense of disappointment that it was so small. She could see a cluster of portholes around the centre section, but there appeared to be no other breaks anywhere on the vessel’s squat and angular hull.

The illusion lasted only for a second. Then, with a shock of incredulity that made her senses reel and brought her to the edge of vertigo, she saw how hopelessly her eyes had been deceived. Those were not portholes; the ship was still miles away. What she was seeing were the gaping hatches through which the ferries could shuttle on their journeys between the starship and Thalassa.

There is no sense of perspective in space, where all objects are still clear and sharp whatever their distance. Even when the hull of the ship was looming up beside them, an endless curving wall of metal eclipsing the stars, there was still no real way of judging its size. She could only guess that it must be at least two miles in length.

The ferry berthed itself, as far as Lora could judge, without any intervention from Leon. She followed him out of the little control room, and when the air lock opened she was surprised to discover that they could step directly into one of the starship’s passageways.

They were standing in a long tubular corridor that stretched in each direction as far as the eye could see. The floor was moving beneath their feet, carrying them along swiftly and effortlessly—yet strangely enough Lora had felt no sudden jerk as she stepped onto the conveyer that was now sweeping her through the ship. One more mystery she would never explain; there would be many others before Leon had finished showing her the Magellan.

It was an hour before they met another human being. In that time they must have travelled miles, sometimes being carried along by the moving corridors, sometimes being lifted up long tubes within which gravity had been abolished. It was obvious what Leon was trying to do; he was attempting to give her some faint impression of the size and complexity of this artificial world that had been built to carry the seeds of a new civilisation to the stars.

The engine room alone, with its sleeping, shrouded monsters of metal and crystal, must have been half a mile in length. As they stood on the balcony high above that vast arena of latent power, Leon said proudly, and perhaps not altogether accurately: ‘These are mine.’ Lora looked down on the huge and meaningless shapes that had carried Leon to her across the light-years, and did not know whether to bless them for what they had brought or to curse them for what they might soon take away.

They sped swiftly through cavernous holds, packed with all the machines and instruments and stores needed to mould a virgin planet and to make it a fit home for humanity. There were miles upon miles of storage racks, holding on tape or microfilm or still more compact form the cultural heritage of mankind. Here they met a group of experts from Thalassa, looking rather dazed, trying to decide how much of all this wealth they could loot in the few hours left to them.

Had her own ancestors, Lora wondered, been so well equipped when they crossed space? She doubted it; their ship had been far smaller, and Earth must have learned much about the techniques of interstellar colonisation in the centuries since Thalassa was opened up. When the Magellan’s sleeping travellers reached their new home, their success was assured if their spirit matched their material resources.

Now they had come to a great white door which slid silently open as they approached, to reveal—of all incongruous things to find inside a spaceship—a cloakroom in which lines of heavy furs hung from pegs. Leon helped Lora to climb into one of these, then selected another for himself. She followed him uncomprehendingly as he walked toward a circle of frosted glass set in the floor; then he turned to her and said: ‘There’s no gravity where we’re going now, so keep close to me and do exactly as I say.’

The crystal trap door swung upward like an opening watch glass, and out of the depths swirled a blast of cold such as Lora had never imagined, still less experienced. Thin wisps of moisture condensed in the freezing air, dancing around her like ghosts. She looked at Leon as if to say, ‘Surely you don’t expect me to go down there!’

He took her arm reassuringly and said, ‘Don’t worry—you won’t notice the cold after a few minutes. I’ll go first.’

The trap door swallowed him; Lora hesitated for a moment, then lowered herself after him. Lowered? No; that was the wrong word; up and down no longer existed here. Gravity had been abolished—she was floating without weight in this frigid, snow-white universe. All around her were glittering honeycombs of glass, forming thousands and tens of thousands of hexagonal cells. They were laced together with clusters of pipes and bundles of wiring, and each cell was large enough to hold a human being.

And each cell did. There they were, sleeping all around her, the thousands of colonists to whom Earth was still, in literal truth, a memory of yesterday. What were they dreaming, less than halfway through their three-hundred-year sleep? Did the brain dream at all in this dim no man’s land between life and death?

Narrow, endless belts, fitted with handholds every few feet were strung across the face of the honeycomb. Leon grabbed one of these, and let it tow them swiftly past the great mosaic of hexagons. Twice they changed direction, switching from one belt to another, until at last they must have been a full quarter of a mile from the point where they had started.

Leon released his grip, and they drifted to rest beside one cell no different from all the myriads of others. But as Lora saw the expression on Leon’s face, she knew why he had brought her here, and knew that her battle was already lost.

The girl floating in her crystal coffin had a face that was not beautiful, but was full of character and intelligence. Even in this centuries-long repose, it showed determination and resourcefulness. It was the face of a pioneer, of a frontierswoman who could stand beside her mate and help him wield whatever fabulous tools of science might be needed to build a new Earth beyond the stars.

For a long time, unconscious of the cold, Lora stared down at the sleeping rival who would never know of her existence. Had any love, she wondered, in the whole history of the world, ever ended in so strange a place?

At last she spoke, her voice hushed as if she feared to wake these slumbering legions.

‘Is she your wife?’

Leon nodded.

‘I’m sorry, Lora. I never intended to hurt you…’

‘It doesn’t matter now. It was my fault, too,’ She paused, and looked more closely at the sleeping woman. ‘And your child as well?’

‘Yes; it will be born three months after we land.’

How strange to think of a gestation that would last nine months and three hundred years! Yet it was all part of the same pattern; and that, she knew now, was a pattern that had no place for her.

These patient multitudes would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life; as the crystal trap door closed behind her, and warmth crept back into her body, she wished that the cold that had entered her heart could be so easily dispelled. One day, perhaps, it would be; but many days and many lonely nights must pass ere that time came.

She remembered nothing of the journey back through the labyrinth of corridors and echoing chambers; it took her by surprise when she found herself once more in the cabin of the little ferry ship that had brought them up from Thalassa. Leon walked over to the controls, made a few adjustments, but did not sit down.

‘Goodbye, Lora,’ he said. ‘My work is done. It would be better if I stayed here.’ He took her hands in his; and now, in the last moment they would ever have together, there were no words that she could say. She could not even see his face for the tears that blurred her vision.

His hands tightened once, then relaxed. He gave a strangled sob, and when she could see clearly again, the cabin was empty.

A long time later a smooth, synthetic voice announced from the control board, ‘We have landed; please leave by the forward air lock.’ The pattern of opening doors guided her steps, and presently she was looking out into the busy clearing she had left a lifetime ago.

A small crowd was watching the ship with attentive interest, as if it had not landed a hundred times before. For a moment she did not understand the reason; then Clyde’s voice roared, ‘Where is he? I’ve had enough of this!’

In a couple of bounds he was up the ramp and had gripped her roughly by the arm. ‘Tell him to come out like a man!’

Lora shook her head listlessly.

‘He’s not here,’ she answered. ‘I’ve said goodbye to him. I’ll never see him again.’

Clyde stared at her disbelievingly, then saw that she spoke the truth. In the same moment she crumpled into his arms, sobbing as if her heart would break. As she collapsed, his anger, too, collapsed within him, and all that he had intended to say to her vanished from his mind. She belonged to him again; there was nothing else that mattered now.

For almost fifty hours the geyser roared off the coast of Thalassa, until its work was done. All the island watched, through the lenses of the television cameras, the shaping of the iceberg that would ride ahead of the Magellan on her way to the stars. May the new shield serve her better, prayed all who watched, than the one she had brought from Earth. The great cone of ice was itself protected, during these few hours while it was close to Thalassa’s sun, by a paper-thin screen of polished metal that kept it always in shadow. The sunshade would be left behind as soon as the journey began; it would not be needed in the interstellar wastes.

The last day came and went; Lora’s heart was not the only one to feel sadness now as the sun went down and the men from Earth made their final farewells to the world they would never forget—and which their sleeping friends would never remember. In the same swift silence with which it had first landed, the gleaming egg lifted from the clearing, dipped for a moment in salutation above the village, and climbed back into its natural element. Then Thalassa waited.

The night was shattered by a soundless detonation of light. A point of pulsing brilliance no larger than a single star had banished all the hosts of heaven and now dominated the sky, far outshining the pale disc of Selene and casting sharp-edged shadows on the ground—shadows that moved even as one watched. Up there on the borders of space the fires that powered the suns themselves were burning now, preparing to drive the starship out into immensity on the last leg of her interrupted journey.

Dry-eyed, Lora watched the silent glory on which half her heart was riding out toward the stars. She was drained of emotion now; if she had tears, they would come later.

Was Leon already sleeping or was he looking back upon Thalassa, thinking of what might have been? Asleep or waking, what did it matter now…?

She felt Clyde’s arms close around her, and welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she belonged; her heart would not stray again. Goodbye, Leon—may you be happy on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But think of me sometimes, two hundred years behind you on the road to Earth.

She turned her back upon the blazing sky and buried her face in the shelter of Clyde’s arms. He stroked her hair with clumsy gentleness, wishing that he had words to comfort her yet knowing that silence was best. He felt no sense of victory; though Lora was his once more, their old and innocent companionship was gone beyond recall. Leon’s memory would fade, but it would never wholly die. All the days of his life, Clyde knew, the ghost of Leon would come between him and Lora—the ghost of a man who would be not one day older when they lay in their graves.

The light was fading from the sky as the fury of the star drive dwindled along its lonely and unreturning road. Only once did Lora turn away from Clyde to look again at the departing ship. Its journey had scarcely begun, yet already it was moving across the heavens more swiftly than any meteor; in a few moments it would have fallen below the edge of the horizon as it plunged past the orbit of Thalassa, beyond the barren outer planets, and on into the abyss.

She clung fiercely to the strong arms that enfolded her, and felt against her cheek the beating of Clyde’s heart—the heart that belonged to her and which she would never spurn again. Out of the silence of the night there came a sudden, long-drawn sigh from the watching thousands, and she knew that the Magellan had sunk out of sight below the edge of the world. It was all over.

She looked up at the empty sky to which the stars were now returning—the stars which she could never see again without remembering Leon. But he had been right; that way was not for her. She knew now, with a wisdom beyond her years, that the starship Magellan was outward bound into history; and that was something of which Thalassa had no further part. Her world’s story had begun and ended with the pioneers three hundred years ago, but the colonists of the Magellan would go on to victories and achievements as great as any yet written in the sagas of mankind. Leon and his companions would be moving seas, levelling mountains, and conquering unknown perils when her descendants eight generations hence would still be dreaming beneath the sun-soaked palms.

And which was better, who could say?

A Slight Case of Sunstroke

First published in Galaxy, September 1958, as ‘The Stroke of the Sun’

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

Someone else should be telling this story—someone who understands the funny kind of football they play down in South America. Back in Moscow, Idaho, we grab the ball and run with it. In the small but prosperous republic which I’ll call Perivia, they kick it around with their feet. And that is nothing to what they do to the referee.

Hasta la Vista, the capital of Perivia, is a fine, modern town up in the Andes, almost two miles above sea level. It is very proud of its magnificent football stadium, which can hold a hundred thousand people. Even so, it’s hardly big enough to pack in all the fans who turn up when there’s a really important game—such as the annual one with the neighbouring republic of Panagura.

One of the first things I learned when I got to Perivia, after various distressing adventures in the less democratic parts of South America, was that last year’s game had been lost because of the knavish dishonesty of the ref. He had, it seemed, penalised most of the players on the team, disallowed a goal, and generally made sure that the best side wouldn’t win. This diatribe made me quite homesick, but remembering where I was, I merely commented, ‘You should have paid him more money.’ ‘We did,’ was the bitter reply, ‘but the Panagurans got at him later.’ ‘Too bad,’ I answered. ‘It’s hard nowadays to find an honest man who stays bought.’ The Customs Inspector who’d just taken my last hundred-dollar bill had the grace to blush beneath his stubble as he waved me across the border.

The next few weeks were tough, which isn’t the only reason why I’d rather not talk about them. But presently I was back in the agricultural-machinery business—though none of the machines I imported ever went near a farm, and it now cost a good deal more than a hundred dollars a time to get them over the frontier without some busybody looking into the packing cases. The last thing I had time to bother about was football; I knew that my expensive imports were going to be used at any moment, and wanted to make sure that this time my profits went with me when I left the country.

Even so, I could hardly ignore the excitement as the day for the return game drew nearer. For one thing, it interfered with business. I’d go to a conference, arranged with great difficulty and expense at a safe hotel or in the house of some reliable sympathiser, and half the time everyone would be talking about football. It was maddening, and I began to wonder if the Perivians took their politics as seriously as their sports. ‘Gentlemen!’ I’d protest. ‘Our next consignment of rotary drills is being unloaded tomorrow, and unless we get that permit from the Minister of Agriculture, someone may open the cases and then…’

‘Don’t worry, my boy,’ General Sierra or Colonel Pedro would answer airily, ‘that’s already taken care of. Leave it to the Army.’

I knew better than to retort ‘Which army?’, and for the next ten minutes I’d have to listen while an argument raged about football tactics and the best way of dealing with recalcitrant referees. I never dreamed—and I’m sure that no one else did—that this topic was intimately bound up with our particular problem.

Since then, I’ve had the leisure to work out what really happened, though it was very confusing at the time. The central figure in the whole improbable drama was undoubtedly Don Hernando Dias—millionaire playboy, football fan, scientific dilettante, and, I am sure, future president of Perivia. Owing to his fondness for racing cars and Hollywood beauties, which has made him one of his country’s best-known exports, most people assume that the ‘playboy’ label describes Don Hernando completely. Nothing, but nothing, could be farther from the truth.

I knew that Don Hernando was one of us, but at the same time he was a considerable favourite of President Ruiz, which placed him in a powerful yet delicate position. Naturally, I’d never met him; he had to be very particular about his friends, and there were few people who cared to meet me, unless they had to. His interest in science I didn’t discover until much later; it seems that he has a private observatory which is in frequent use on clear nights, though rumour has it that its functions are not entirely astronomical.

It must have taken all Don Hernando’s charm and powers of persuasion to talk the President into it; if the old boy hadn’t been a football fan too, and smarting under last year’s defeat like every other patriotic Perivian, he would never have agreed. But the sheer originality of the scheme must have appealed to him even though he may not have been too happy about having half his troops out of action for the best part of an afternoon. Still, as Don Hernando undoubtedly reminded him, what better way of ensuring the loyalty of the Army than by giving it fifty thousand seats for the game of the year?

I knew nothing about all this when I took my place in the stadium on that memorable day. If you think I had no wish to be there, you are quite correct. But Colonel Pedro had given me a ticket, and it was unhealthy to hurt his feelings by not using it. So there I was, under the sweltering sun, fanning myself with the programme and listening to the commentary over my portable radio while we waited for the game to begin.

The stadium was packed, its great oval bowl a solid sea of faces. There had been a slight delay in admitting the spectators; the police had done their best, but it takes time to search a hundred thousand people for concealed firearms. The visiting team had insisted on this, to the great indignation of the locals. The protests faded swiftly enough, however, as the artillery accumulated at the check points.

It was easy to tell the exact moment the referee drove up in his armour-plated Cadillac; you could follow his progress by the booing of the crowd. ‘Surely,’ I said to my neighbour—a young lieutenant so junior that it was safe for him to be seen out with me—‘you could change the ref if you feel that way about him?’

He shrugged resignedly. ‘The visitors have the right to choose. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘Then at least you ought to win the games you play in Panagura.’

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But last time we were overconfident. We played so badly that even our ref couldn’t save us.’

I found it hard to feel much sympathy for either side, and settled down to a couple of hours of noisy boredom. Seldom have I been more mistaken.

Admittedly, the game took some time to get started. First a sweating band played the two national anthems, then the teams were presented to El Presidente and his lady, then the Cardinal blessed everybody, then there was a pause while the two captains had some obscure argument over the size or shape of the ball. I spent the waiting period reading my programme, an expensive and beautifully produced affair that had been given to me by the lieutenant. It was tabloid size, printed on art paper, lavishly illustrated, and looked as if it had been bound in silver. It seemed unlikely that the publishers would get their money back, but this was obviously a matter of prestige rather than economics. In any event there was an impressive list of subscribers, headed by the President, to this ‘Special Victory Souvenir Issue’. Most of my friends were on it, and I noted with amusement that the bill for presenting fifty thousand free copies to our gallant fighting men had been met by Don Hernando. It seemed a somewhat naïve bid for popularity, and I doubted if the good will was worth the considerable cost. The ‘Victory’ also struck me as a trifle premature, not to say tactless.

These reflections were interrupted by the roar of the enormous crowd as play started. The ball slammed into action, but had barely zigzagged halfway down the field when a blue-jerseyed Perivian tripped a black-striped Panaguran. They don’t waste much time, I told myself; what’s the ref going to do? To my surprise, he did nothing, and I wondered if this match we’d got him to accept COD terms.

‘Wasn’t that a foul, or whatever you call it?’ I said to my companion.

‘Pfui!’ he answered, not taking his eyes off the game. ‘Nobody bothers about that sort of thing. Besides, the coyote never saw it.’

That was true. The referee was a long way down the field, and seemed to be finding it hard to keep up with the game. His movements were distinctly laboured, and that puzzled me until I guessed the reason. Have you ever seen a man trying to run in a bulletproof vest? Poor devil. I thought, with the detached sympathy of one crook for another; you’re earning your bribe. I was finding it hot enough merely sitting still.

For the first ten minutes, it was a pretty open game, and I don’t think there were more than three fights. The Perivians just missed one goal; the ball was headed out so neatly that the frantic applause from the Panaguran supporters (who had a special police guard and a fortified section of the stadium all to themselves) went quite unbooed. I began to feel disappointed. Why, if you changed the shape of the ball this might be a good-natured game back home.

Indeed, there was no real work for the Red Cross until nearly half time, when three Perivians and two Panagurans (or it may have been the other way around) fused together in a magnificent melee from which only one survivor emerged under his own power. The casualties were carted off the field of battle amid much pandemonium, and there was a short break while replacements were brought up. This started the first major incident: the Perivians complained that the other side’s wounded were shamming so that fresh reserves could be poured in. But the ref was adamant, the new men came on, and the background noise dropped to just below the threshold of pain as the game resumed.

The Panagurans promptly scored, and though none of my neighbours actually committed suicide, several seemed close to it. The transfusion of new blood had apparently pepped up the visitors, and things looked bad for the home team. Their opponents were passing the ball with such skill that the Perivian defences were as porous as a sieve. At this rate, I told myself, the ref can afford to be honest; his side will win anyway. And to give him his due, I’d seen no sign of any obvious bias so far.

I didn’t have long to wait. A last-minute rally by the home team blocked a threatened attack on their goal, and a mighty kick by one of the defenders sent the ball rocketing toward the other end of the field. Before it had reached the apex of its flight, the piercing shriek of the referee’s whistle brought the game to a halt. There was a brief consultation between ref and captains, which almost at once broke up in disorder. Down there on the field everyone was gesticulating violently, and the crowd was roaring its disapproval. ‘What’s happening now?’ I asked plaintively.

‘The ref says our man was off side.’

‘But how can he be? He’s on top of his own goal!’

‘Shush!’ said the lieutenant, unwilling to waste time enlightening my ignorance. I don’t shush easily, but this time I let it go, and tried to work things out for myself. It seemed that the ref had awarded the Panagurans a free kick at our goal, and I could understand the way everybody felt about it.

The ball soared through the air in a beautiful parabola, nicked the post—and cannoned in despite a flying leap by the goalie. A mighty roar of anguish rose from the crowd, then died abruptly to a silence that was even more impressive. It was as if a great animal had been wounded—and was biding the time for its revenge. Despite the heat pouring down from the not-far-from-vertical sun, I felt a sudden chill, as if a cold wind had swept past me. Not for all the wealth of the Incas would I have changed places with the man sweating out there on the field in his bulletproof vest.

We were two down, but there was still hope—it was not yet half time and a lot could happen before the end of the game. The Perivians were on their mettle now, playing with almost demonic intensity, like men who had accepted a challenge and were going to show that they could meet it.

The new spirit paid off promptly. The home team scored one impeccable goal within a couple of minutes, and the crowd went wild with joy. By this time I was shouting like everyone else, and telling that referee things I didn’t know I could say in Spanish. One to two now, and a hundred thousand people praying and cursing for the goal that would bring us level again.

It came just before half time. In a matter that had such grave consequences, I want to be perfectly fair. The ball had been passed to one of our forwards, he ran about fifty feet with it, evaded a couple of the defenders with some neat footwork, and kicked it cleanly into the goal. It had scarcely dropped down from the net when that whistle went again.

Now what? I wondered. He can’t disallow that.

But he did. The ball, it seemed, had been handled. I’ve got pretty good eyes, and I never saw it. So I cannot honestly say that I blame the Perivians for what happened next.

The police managed to keep the crowd off the field, though it was touch and go for a minute. The two teams drew apart, leaving the centre of the field bare except for the stubbornly defiant figure of the referee. He was probably wondering how he could make his escape from the stadium, and was consoling himself with the thought that when this game was over he could retire for good.

The thin, high bugle call took everyone completely by surprise—everyone, that is, except the fifty thousand well-trained men who had been waiting for it with mounting impatience. The whole arena became instantly silent, so silent that I could hear the noise of the traffic outside the stadium. A second time that bugle sounded—and all the vast acreage of faces opposite me vanished in a blinding sea of fire.

I cried out and covered my eyes; for one horrified moment I thought of atomic bombs and braced myself uselessly for the blast. But there was no concussion—only that flickering veil of flame that beat even through my closed eyelids for long seconds, then vanished as swiftly as it had come when the bugle blared out for the third and last time.

Everything was just as it had been before, except for one minor item. Where the referee had been standing there was a small, smouldering heap, from which a thin column of smoke curled up into the still air.

What in heaven’s name had happened? I turned to my companion, who was as shaken as I was. ‘Madre de Dios,’ I heard him mutter. ‘I never knew it would do that.’ He was staring, not at the small funeral pyre down there on the field, but at the handsome souvenir programme spread across his knees. And then, in a flash of incredulous comprehension, I understood.

Yet even now, when it’s all been explained to me, I still find it hard to credit what I saw with my own eyes. It was so simple, so logical—so unbelievable.

Have you ever annoyed anyone by flicking a pocket mirror across his eyes? I guess every kid has: I remember doing it to a teacher once, and getting duly paddled. But I’d never imagined what would happen if fifty thousand well-trained men did the same trick, each using a tin-foil reflector a couple of feet square.

A mathematically minded friend of mine has worked it out—not that I needed any further proof, but I always like to get to the bottom of things. I never knew, until then, just how much energy there is in sunlight; it’s well over a horsepower on every square yard facing the sun. Most of the heat falling on one side of that enormous stadium had been diverted into the single small area occupied by the late ref. Even allowing for all the programmes that weren’t aimed in the right direction, he must have intercepted at least a thousand horsepower of raw heat. He couldn’t have felt much; it was as if he had been dropped into a blast furnace.

I’m sure that no one except Don Hernando realised what was likely to happen; his well-drilled fans had been told that the ref would merely be blinded and put out of action for the rest of the game. But I’m also equally sure that no one had any regrets. They play football for keeps in Perivia.

Likewise politics. While the game was continuing to its now predictable end, beneath the benign gaze of a new and understandably docile referee, my friends were hard at work. When our victorious team had marched off the field (the final score was fourteen to two), everything had been settled. There had been practically no shooting, and as the President emerged from the stadium he was politely informed that a seat had been reserved for him on the morning flight to Mexico City.

As General Sierra remarked to me when I boarded the same plane as his late chief, ‘We let the Army win the football match, and while it was busy we won the country. So everybody’s happy.’

Though I was too polite to voice any doubts, I could not help thinking that this was a rather shortsighted attitude. Several million Panagurans were very unhappy indeed, and sooner or later there would be a day of reckoning.

I suspect that it’s not far away. Last week a friend of mine, who is one of the world’s top experts in his specialised field but prefers to work on a freelance basis under an assumed name, indiscreetly blurted out one of his problems to me.

‘Joe,’ he said, ‘why the devil should anyone want me to build a guided rocket that can fit inside a football?’

Who’s There?

First published in New Worlds, November 1958

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

When Satellite Control called me, I was writing up the day’s progress report in the Observation Bubble—the glass-domed office that juts out from the axis of the Space Station like the hubcap of a wheel. It was not really a good place to work, for the view was too overwhelming. Only a few yards away I could see the construction teams performing their slow-motion ballet as they put the station together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And beyond them, twenty thousand miles below, was the blue-green glory of the full Earth, floating against the ravelled star clouds of the Milky Way.

‘Station Supervisor here,’ I answered. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Our radar’s showing a small echo two miles away, almost stationary, about five degrees west of Sirius. Can you give us a visual report on it?’

Anything matching our orbit so precisely could hardly be a meteor; it would have to be something we’d dropped—perhaps an inadequately secured piece of equipment that had drifted away from the station. So I assumed: but when I pulled out my binoculars and searched the sky around Orion, I soon found my mistake. Though this space traveller was manmade, it had nothing to do with us.

‘I’ve found it,’ I told Control. ‘It’s someone’s test satellite—cone-shaped, four antennas, and what looks like a lens system in its base. Probably US Air Force, early nineteen-sixties, judging by the design. I know they lost track of several when their transmitters failed. There were quite a few attempts to hit this orbit before they finally made it.’

After a brief search through the files, Control was able to confirm my guess. It took a little longer to find out that Washington wasn’t in the least bit interested in our discovery of a twenty-year-old stray satellite, and would be just as happy if we lost it again.

‘Well, we can’t do that,’ said Control. ‘Even if nobody wants it, the thing’s a menace to navigation. Someone had better go out and haul it aboard.’

That someone, I realised, would have to be me. I dared not detach a man from the closely knit construction teams, for we were already behind schedule—and a single day’s delay on this job cost a million dollars. All the radio and TV networks on Earth were waiting impatiently for the moment when they could route their programmes through us, and thus provide the first truly global service, spanning the world from Pole to Pole.

‘I’ll go out and get it,’ I answered, snapping an elastic band over my papers so that the air currents from the ventilators wouldn’t set them wandering around the room. Though I tried to sound as if I was doing everyone a great favour, I was secretly not at all displeased. It had been at least two weeks since I’d been outside; I was getting a little tired of stores schedules, maintenance reports, and all the glamorous ingredients of a Space Station Supervisor’s life.

The only member of the staff I passed on my way to the air lock was Tommy, our recently acquired cat. Pets mean a great deal to men thousands of miles from Earth, but there are not many animals that can adapt themselves to a weightless environment. Tommy mewed plaintively at me as I clambered into my spacesuit, but I was in too much of a hurry to play with him.

At this point, perhaps I should remind you that the suits we use on the station are completely different from the flexible affairs men wear when they want to walk around on the moon. Ours are really baby spaceships, just big enough to hold one man. They are stubby cylinders, about seven feet long, fitted with low-powered propulsion jets, and have a pair of accordion-like sleeves at the upper end for the operator’s arms. Normally, however, you keep your hands drawn inside the suit, working the manual controls in front of your chest.

As soon as I’d settled down inside my very exclusive space-craft, I switched on power and checked the gauges on the tiny instrument panel. There’s a magic word, ‘FORB’, that you’ll often hear spacemen mutter as they climb into their suits; it reminds them to test fuel, oxygen, radio, batteries. All my needles were well in the safety zone, so I lowered the transparent hemisphere over my head and sealed myself in. For a short trip like this, I did not bother to check the suit’s internal lockers, which were used to carry food and special equipment for extended missions.

As the conveyor belt decanted me into the air lock, I felt like an Indian papoose being carried along on its mother’s back. Then the pumps brought the pressure down to zero, the outer door opened, and the last traces of air swept me out into the stars, turning very slowly head over heels.

The station was only a dozen feet away, yet I was now an independent planet—a little world of my own. I was sealed up in a tiny, mobile cylinder, with a superb view of the entire universe, but I had practically no freedom of movement inside the suit. The padded seat and safety belts prevented me from turning around, though I could reach all the controls and lockers with my hands or feet.

In space, the great enemy is the sun, which can blast you to blindness in seconds. Very cautiously, I opened up the dark filters on the ‘night’ side of my suit, and I turned my head to look out at the stars. At the same time I switched the helmet’s external sunshade to automatic, so that whichever way the suit gyrated my eyes would be shielded from that intolerable glare.

Presently, I found my target—a bright fleck of silver whose metallic glint distinguished it clearly from the surrounding stars. I stamped on the jet-control pedal, and felt the mild surge of acceleration as the low-powered rockets set me moving away from the station. After ten seconds of steady thrust, I estimated that my speed was great enough, and cut off the drive. It would take me five minutes to coast the rest of the way, and not much longer to return with my salvage.

And it was at that moment, as I launched myself out into the abyss, that I knew that something was horribly wrong.

It is never completely silent inside a spacesuit; you can always hear the gentle hiss of oxygen, the faint whirr of fans and motors, the susurration of your own breathing—even, if you listen carefully enough, the rhythmic thump that is the pounding of your heart. These sounds reverberate through the suit, unable to escape into the surrounding void; they are the unnoticed background of life in space, for you are aware of them only when they change.

They had changed now; to them had been added a sound which I could not identify. It was an intermittent, muffled thudding, sometimes accompanied by a scraping noise, as of metal upon metal.

I froze instantly, holding my breath and trying to locate the alien sound with my ears. The meters on the control board gave me no clues; all the needles were rock-steady on their scales, and there were none of the flickering red lights that would warn of impending disaster. That was some comfort, but not much. I had long ago learned to trust my instincts in such matters; their alarm signals were flashing now, telling me to return to the station before it was too late…

Even now, I do not like to recall those next few minutes, as panic slowly flooded into my mind like a rising tide, overwhelming the dams of reason and logic which every man must erect against the mystery of the universe. I knew then what it was like to face insanity; no other explanation fitted the facts.

For it was no longer possible to pretend that the noise disturbing me was that of some faulty mechanism. Though I was in utter isolation, far from any other human being or indeed any material object, I was not alone. The soundless void was bringing to my ears the faint but unmistakable stirrings of life.

In that first, heart-freezing moment it seemed that something was trying to get into my suit—something invisible, seeking shelter from the cruel and pitiless vacuum of space. I whirled madly in my harness, scanning the entire sphere of vision around me except for the blazing, forbidden cone toward the sun. There was nothing there, of course. There could not be—yet that purposeful scrabbling was clearer than ever.

Despite the nonsense that has been written about us, it is not true that spacemen are superstitious. But can you blame me if, as I came to the end of logic’s resources, I suddenly remembered how Bernie Summers had died, no farther from the station than I was at this very moment?

It was one of those ‘impossible’ accidents; it always is. Three things had gone wrong at once. Bernie’s oxygen regulator had run wild and sent the pressure soaring, the safety valve had failed to blow—and a faulty joint had given way instead. In a fraction of a second, his suit was open to space.

I had never known Bernie, but suddenly his fate became of overwhelming importance to me—for a horrible idea had come into my mind. One does not talk about these things, but a damaged spacesuit is too valuable to be thrown away, even if it has killed its wearer. It is repaired, renumbered—and issued to someone else…

What happens to the soul of a man who dies between the stars, far from his native world? Are you still here, Bernie, clinging to the last object that linked you to your lost and distant home?

As I fought the nightmares that were swirling around me—for now it seemed that the scratchings and soft fumblings were coming from all directions—there was one last hope to which I clung. For the sake of my sanity, I had to prove that this wasn’t Bernie’s suit—that the metal walls so closely wrapped around me had never been another man’s coffin.

It took me several tries before I could press the right button and switch my transmitter to the emergency wave length. ‘Station!’ I gasped. ‘I’m in trouble! Get records to check my suit history and—’

I never finished; they say my yell wrecked the microphone. But what man alone in the absolute isolation of a spacesuit would not have yelled when something patted him softly on the back of the neck?

I must have lunged forward, despite the safety harness, and smashed against the upper edge of the control panel. When the rescue squad reached me a few minutes later, I was still unconscious, with an angry bruise across my forehead.

And so I was the last person in the whole satellite relay system to know what had happened. When I came to my senses an hour later, all our medical staff was gathered around my bed, but it was quite a while before the doctors bothered to look at me. They were much too busy playing with the three cute little kittens our badly misnamed Tommy had been rearing in the seclusion of my spacesuit’s Number Five Storage Locker.

Out Of The Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting…

First published in Dude, March 1959

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

Before we start, I’d like to point out something that a good many people seem to have overlooked. The twenty-first century does not begin tomorrow; it begins a year later, on January 1, 2001. Even though the calendar reads 2000 from midnight, the old century still has twelve months to run. Every hundred years we astronomers have to explain this all over again, but it makes no difference. The celebrations start just as soon as the two zeros go up…

So you want to know my most memorable moment in fifty years of space exploration… I suppose you’ve already interviewed von Braun? How is he? Good; I’ve not seen him since that symposium we arranged in Astrograd on his eightieth birthday, the last time he came down from the Moon.

Yes—I’ve been present at some of the biggest moments in the history of space flight, right back to the launching of the first satellite. I was only twenty-five then, and a very junior mathematician at Kapustin Yar—not important enough to be in the control centre during the countdown. But I heard the take-off: it was the second most awe-inspiring sound I’ve heard in my entire life. (The first? I’ll come to that later.) When we knew we’d hit orbit, one of the senior scientists called for his Zis, and we drove into Stalingrad for a real party. Only the very top people had cars in the Workers’ Paradise, you know, we made the hundred-kilometre drive in just about the same time the Sputnik took for one circuit of Earth, and that was pretty good going. Someone calculated that the amount of vodka consumed the next day could have launched the satellite the Americans were building, but I don’t think that was quite true.

Most of the history books say that the Space Age began then, on October 4, 1957; I’m not going to argue with them, but I think the really exciting times came later. For sheer drama you can’t beat the US Navy’s race to fish Dimitri Kalinin out of the South Atlantic before his capsule sank. Then there was Jerry Wingate’s radio commentary, with all the adjectives which no network dared to censor, as he rounded the Moon and became the first man to see its hidden face. And, of course, only five years later, that TV broadcast from the cabin of the Hermann Oberth as she touched down on the plateau in the Bay of Rainbows, where she still stands, an eternal monument to the men buried beside her.

Those were the great landmarks on the road to space, but you’re wrong if you think I’m going to talk about them; for what made the greatest impact on me was something very, very different. I’m not even sure if I can share the experience, and if I succeed you won’t be able to make a story out of it. Not a new one, anyway, for the papers were full of it at the time. But most of them missed the point completely; to them it was just good human-interest material, nothing more.

The time was twenty years after the launching of Sputnik I, and by then, with a good many other people, I was on the Moon… and too important, alas, to be a real scientist any more. It had been a dozen years since I’d programmed an electronic computer; now I had the slightly more difficult task of programming human beings, since I was Chief Co-ordinator of Project Ares, the first manned expedition to Mars.

We were starting from the Moon, of course, because of the low gravity; it’s about fifty times easier, in terms of fuel, to take off from there than from the Earth. We’d thought of constructing the ships in a satellite orbit, which would have cut fuel requirements even further, but when we looked into it, the idea wasn’t as good as it seemed. It’s not easy to set up factories and machine shops in space; the absence of gravity is a nuisance rather than an advantage when you want things to stay put. By that time, at the end of the seventies, the First Lunar Base was getting well organised, with chemical processing plants and all kinds of small-scale industrial operations to turn out the things the colony needed. So we decided to use the existing facilities rather than set up new ones, at great difficulty and expense, out in space.

Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, the three ships of the expedition, were being built inside the ramparts of Plato, perhaps the most perfect of all the walled plains on this side of the Moon. It’s so large that if you stand in the middle you could never guess that you were inside a crater; the ring of mountains around you is hidden far below the horizon. The pressure domes of the base were about ten kilometres from the launching site, connected to it by one of those overhead cable systems that the tourists love to ride on, but which have ruined so much of the lunar scenery.

It was a rugged sort of life, in those pioneering days, for we had none of the luxuries everyone now takes for granted. Central Dome, with its parks and lakes, was still a dream on the architects’ drawing boards; even if it had existed, we would have been too busy to enjoy it, for Project Ares devoured all our waking moments. It would be Man’s first great leap into space; by that time we already looked on the Moon as no more than a suburb of Earth, a steppingstone on the way to places that really mattered. Our beliefs were neatly expressed by that famous remark of Tsiolkovsky’s, which I’d hung up for everyone to see as they entered my office:

EARTH IS THE CRADLE OF THE MIND—BUT

YOU CANNOT LIVE IN THE CRADLE FOREVER

(What was that? No—of course I never knew Tsiolkovsky! I was only four years old when he died in 1936!)

After half a lifetime of secrecy, it was good to be able to work freely with men of all nations, on a project that was backed by the entire world. Of my four chief assistants, one was American, one Indian, one Chinese, and one Russian. We often congratulated ourselves on escaping from Security and the worst excesses of nationalism, and though there was plenty of good-natured rivalry between scientists from different countries, it gave a stimulus to our work. I sometimes boasted to visitors who remembered the bad old days, ‘There are no secrets on the Moon.’

Well, I was wrong; there was a secret, and it was under my very nose—in my own office. Perhaps I might have suspected something if I hadn’t been so immersed in the multitudinous details of Project Ares that I’d no opportunity of taking the wider view. Looking back on it afterward, of course, I knew there were all sorts of hints and warnings, but I never noticed any of them at the time.

True, I was vaguely aware that Jim Hutchins, my young American assistant, was becoming increasingly abstracted, as if he had something on his mind. Once or twice I had to pull him up for some minor inefficiency; each time he looked hurt and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He was one of those typical, clean-cut college boys the United States produces in such quantities—usually very reliable, but not exceptionally brilliant. He’d been on the Moon for three years, and was one of the first to bring his wife up from Earth when the ban on nonessential personnel was lifted. I’d never quite understood how he’d managed that; he must have been able to pull some strings, but certainly he was the last person you’d expect to find at the centre of a world-wide conspiracy. World-wide, did I say? No—it was bigger than that, for it extended all the way back to Earth. Dozens of people were involved, right up to the top brass of the Astronautics Authority. It still seems a miracle that they were able to keep the plot from leaking out.

The slow sunrise had been under way for two days, Earth time, and though the needle-sharp shadows were shortening, it was still five days to noon. We were ready to make the first static tests of Alpha’s motors, for the power plant had been installed and the framework of the ship was complete. It stood out there on the plain looking more like a half-built oil refinery than a space ship, but to us it was beautiful, with its promise of the future. It was a tense moment; never before had a thermonuclear engine of such size been operated, and despite all the safety precautions that had been taken, one could never be sure… If anything went wrong now, it could delay Project Ares by years.

The countdown had already begun when Hutchins, looking rather pale, came hurrying up to me. ‘I have to report to Base at once,’ he said. ‘It’s very important,’ ‘More important than this?’ I retorted sarcastically, for I was mighty annoyed. He hesitated for a moment, as if wanting to tell me something; then he replied, ‘I think so,’ ‘OK,’ I said, and he was gone in a flash. I could have questioned him, but one has to trust one’s subordinates. As I went back to the central control panel, in rather a bad temper, I decided that I’d had enough of my temperamental young American and would ask for him to be transferred. It was odd, though—he’d been as keen as anybody on this test, and now he was racing back to Base on the cable car. The blunt cylinder of the shuttle was already halfway to the nearest suspension tower, sliding along its almost invisible wires like some strange bird skimming across the lunar surface.

Five minutes later, my temper was even worse. A group of vital recording instruments had suddenly packed up, and the whole test would have to be postponed for at least three hours. I stormed around the blockhouse telling everyone who would listen (and of course everyone had to) that we used to manage things much better at Kapustin Yar. I’d quietened down a bit and we were on our second round of coffee when the General Attention signal sounded from the speakers. There’s only one call with a higher priority than that—the wail of the emergency alarms, which I’ve heard just twice in all my years in the Lunar Colony, and hope never to hear again.

The voice that echoed through every enclosed space on the Moon, and over the radios of every worker out on the soundless plains, was that of General Moshe Stein, Chairman of the Astronautics Authority. (There were still lots of courtesy titles around in those days, though they didn’t mean anything any more.)

‘I’m speaking from Geneva,’ he said, ‘and I have an important announcement to make. For the last nine months, a great experiment has been in progress. We have kept it secret for the sake of those directly involved, and because we did not wish to raise false hopes or fears. Not long ago, you will remember, many experts refused to believe that men could survive in space; this time, also, there were pessimists who doubted if we could take the next step in the conquest of the universe. We have proved that they were wrong; for now I would like to introduce you to George Jonathan Hutchins—first Citizen of Space.’

There was a click as the circuit was rerouted, followed by a pause full of indeterminate shufflings and whisperings. And then, over all the Moon and half the Earth, came the noise I promised to tell you about—the most awe-inspiring sound I’ve ever heard in my life.

It was the thin cry of a newborn baby—the first child in all the history of mankind to be brought forth on another world than Earth. We looked at each other, in the suddenly silenced blockhouse, and then at the ships we were building out there on the blazing lunar plain. They had seemed so important, a few minutes ago. They still were—but not as important as what had happened over in Medical Centre, and would happen again billions of times on countless worlds down all the ages to come.

For that was the moment, gentlemen, when I knew that Man had really conquered space.

I Remember Babylon

First published in Playboy, March 1960

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn’s excellent rule: ‘If you gotta message, use Western Union.’ This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.

My name is Arthur C. Clark, and I wish I had no connection with this whole sordid business. But as the moral—repeat, moral—integrity of the United States is involved, I must first establish my credentials. Only thus will you understand how, with the aid of the late Dr Alfred Kinsey, I have unwittingly triggered an avalanche that may sweep away much of Western civilisation.

Back in 1945, while a radar officer in the Royal Air Force, I had the only original idea of my life. Twelve years before the first Sputnik started beeping, it occurred to me that an artificial satellite would be a wonderful place for a television transmitter, since a station several thousand miles high could broadcast to half the globe. I wrote up the idea the week after Hiroshima, proposing a network of relay satellites twenty-two thousand miles above the Equator; at this height, they’d take exactly one day to complete a revolution, and so would remain fixed over the same spot on the Earth.

The piece appeared in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World; not expecting that celestial mechanics would be commercialised in my lifetime, I made no attempt to patent the idea, and doubt if I could have done so anyway. (If I’m wrong, I’d prefer not to know.) But I kept plugging it in my books, and today the idea of communications satellites is so commonplace that no one knows its origin.

I did make a plaintive attempt to put the record straight when approached by the House of Representatives Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; you’ll find my evidence on page thirty-two of its report, The Next Ten Years in Space. And as you’ll see in a moment, my concluding words had an irony I never appreciated at the time: ‘Living as I do in the Far East, I am constantly reminded of the struggle between the Western World and the USSR for the uncommitted millions of Asia… When line-of-sight TV transmissions become possible from satellites directly overhead, the propaganda effect may be decisive…’

I still stand by those words, but there were angles I hadn’t thought of—and which, unfortunately, other people have.

It all began during one of those official receptions which are such a feature of social life in Eastern capitals. They’re even more common in the West, of course, but in Colombo there’s little competing entertainment. At least once a week, if you are anybody, you get an invitation to cocktails at an embassy or legation, the British Council, the US Operations Mission, L’Alliance Française, or one of the countless alphabetical agencies the United Nations has begotten.

At first, being more at home beneath the Indian Ocean than in diplomatic circles, my partner and I were nobodies and were left alone. But after Mike compèred Dave Brubeck’s tour of Ceylon, people started to take notice of us—still more so when he married one of the island’s best-known beauties. So now our consumption of cocktails and canapés is limited chiefly by reluctance to abandon our comfortable sarongs for such Western absurdities as trousers, dinner jackets, and ties.

It was the first time we’d been to the Soviet Embassy, which was throwing a party for a group of Russian oceanographers who’d just come into port. Beneath the inevitable paintings of Lenin and Marx, a couple of hundred guests of all colours, religions, and languages were milling around, chatting with friends, or single-mindedly demolishing the vodka and caviar. I’d been separated from Mike and Elizabeth, but could see them at the other side of the room. Mike was doing his ‘There was I at fifty fathoms’ act to a fascinated audience, while Elizabeth watched him quizzically—and rather more people watched Elizabeth.

Ever since I lost an eardrum while pearl-diving on the Great Barrier Reef, I’ve been at a considerable disadvantage at functions of this kind; the surface noise is about twelve decibels too much for me to cope with. And this is no small handicap when being introduced to people with names like Dharmasiriwardene, Tissaveerasinghe, Goonetilleke, and Jayawickrema. When I’m not raiding the buffet, therefore, I usually look for a pool of relative quiet where there’s a chance of following more than fifty per cent of any conversation in which I may get involved. I was standing in the acoustic shadow of a large ornamental pillar, surveying the scene in my detached or Somerset Maugham manner, when I noticed that someone was looking at me with that ‘Haven’t we met before?’ expression.

I’ll describe him with some care, because there must be many people who can identify him. He was in the mid-thirties, and I guessed he was American; he had that well-scrubbed, crew-cut, man-about-Rockefeller-Center look that used to be a hallmark until the younger Russian diplomats and technical advisers started imitating it so successfully. He was about six feet in height, with shrewd brown eyes and black hair, prematurely grey at the sides. Though I was fairly certain we’d never met before, his face reminded me of someone. It took me a couple of days to work it out: remember the late John Garfield? That’s who it was, as near as makes no difference.

When a stranger catches my eye at a party, my standard operating procedure goes into action automatically. If he seems a pleasant-enough person but I don’t feel like introductions at the moment, I give him the Neutral Scan, letting my eyes sweep past him without a flicker of recognition, yet without positive unfriendliness. If he looks like a creep, he receives the Coup d’oeil, which consists of a long, disbelieving stare followed by an unhurried view of the back of my neck. In extreme cases, an expression of revulsion may be switched on for a few milliseconds. The message usually gets across.

But this character seemed interesting, and I was getting bored, so I gave him the Affable Nod. A few minutes later he drifted through the crowd, and I aimed my good ear toward him.

‘Hello,’ he said (yes, he was American), ‘my name’s Gene Hartford. I’m sure we’ve met somewhere.’

‘Quite likely,’ I answered, ‘I’ve spent a good deal of time in the States. I’m Arthur Clarke.’

Usually that produces a blank stare, but sometimes it doesn’t. I could almost see the IBM cards flickering behind those hard brown eyes, and was flattered by the brevity of his access time.

‘The science writer?’

‘Correct.’

‘Well, this is fantastic.’ He seemed genuinely astonished. ‘Now I know where I’ve seen you. I was in the studio once when you were on the Dave Garroway show.’

(This lead may be worth following up, though I doubt it; and I’m sure that ‘Genea Hartford’ was phony—it was too smoothly synthetic.)

‘So you’re in TV?’ I said. ‘What are you doing here—collecting material, or just on vacation?’

He gave me the frank, friendly smile of a man who has plenty to hide.

‘Oh, I’m keeping my eyes open. But this is really amazing, I read your Exploration of Space when it came out back in, Ah—’

‘Nineteen fifty-two; the Book-of-the-Month Club’s never been quite the same since.’

All this time I had been sizing him up, and though there was something about him I didn’t like, I was unable to pin it down. In any case, I was prepared to make substantial allowances for someone who had read my books and was also in TV; Mike and I are always on the lookout for markets for our under-water movies. But that, to put it mildly, was not Hartford’s line of business.

‘Look,’ he said eagerly, ‘I’ve a big network deal cooking that will interest you—in fact, you helped to give me the idea.’

This sounded promising, and my coefficient of cupidity jumped several points.

‘I’m glad to hear it. What’s the general theme?’

‘I can’t talk about it here, but could we meet at my hotel, around three tomorrow?’

‘Let me check my diary; yes, that’s OK.’

There are only two hotels in Colombo patronised by Americans, and I guessed right the first time. He was at the Mount Lavinia, and though you may not know it, you’ve seen the place where we had our private chat. Around the middle of Bridge on the River Kwai, there’s a brief scene at a military hospital, where Jack Hawkins meets a nurse and asks her where he can find Bill Holden. We have a soft spot for this episode, because Mike was one of the convalescent naval officers in the background. If you look smartly you’ll see him on the extreme right, beard in full profile, signing Sam Spiegel’s name to his sixth round of bar chits. As the picture turned out, Sam could afford it.

It was here, on this diminutive plateau high above the miles of palm-fringed beach, that Gene Hartford started to unload—and my simple hopes of financial advantage started to evaporate. What his exact motives were, if indeed he knew them himself, I’m still uncertain. Surprise at meeting me, and a twisted feeling of gratitude (which I would gladly have done without) undoubtedly played a part, and for all his air of confidence he must have been a bitter, lonely man who desperately needed approval and friendship.

He got neither from me. I have always had a sneaking sympathy for Benedict Arnold, as must anyone who knows the full facts of the case. But Arnold merely betrayed his country; no one before Hartford ever tried to seduce it.

What dissolved my dream of dollars was the news that Hartford’s connection with American TV had been severed, somewhat violently, in the early fifties. It was clear that he’d been bounced out of Madison Avenue for Party-lining, and it was equally clear that his was one case where no grave injustice had been done. Though he talked with a certain controlled fury of his fight against asinine censorship, and wept for a brilliant—but unnamed—cultural series he’d started before being kicked off the air, by this time I was beginning to smell so many rats that my replies were distinctly guarded. Yet as my pecuniary interest in Mr Hartford diminished, so my personal curiosity increased. Who was behind him? Surely not the BBC…

He got round to it at last, when he’d worked the self-pity out of his system.

‘I’ve some news that will make you sit up,’ he said smugly. ‘The American networks are soon going to have some real competition. And it will be done just the way you predicted; the people who sent a TV transmitter to the Moon can put a much bigger one in orbit round the Earth.’

‘Good for them,’ I said cautiously. ‘I’m all in favour of healthy competition. When’s the launching date?’

‘Any moment now. The first transmitter will be parked due south of New Orleans—on the equator, of course. That puts it way out in the open Pacific; it won’t be over anyone’s territory, so there’ll be no political complications on that score. Yet it will be sitting up there in the sky in full view of everybody from Seattle to Key West. Think of it—the only TV station the whole United States can tune in to! Yes, even Hawaii! There won’t be any way of jamming it; for the first time, there’ll be a clear channel into every American home. And J. Edgar’s Boy Scouts can’t do a thing to block it.’

So that’s your little racket, I thought; at least you’re being frank. Long ago I learned not to argue with Marxists and Flat-Earthers, but if Hartford was telling the truth, I wanted to pump him for all he was worth.

‘Before you get too enthusiastic,’ I said, ‘there are a few points you may have overlooked.’

‘Such as?’

‘This will work both ways. Everyone knows that the Air Force, NASA, Bell Labs, IT&T, Hughes, and a few dozen other agencies are working on the same project. Whatever Russia does to the States in the propaganda line, she’ll get back with compound interest.’

Hartford grinned mirthlessly.

‘Really, Clarke!’ he said. (I was glad he hadn’t first-named me.) ‘I’m a little disappointed. Surely you know that the United States is years behind in pay-load capacity! And do you imagine that the old T_3 is Russia’s last word?’

It was at this moment that I began to take him very seriously. He was perfectly right. The T_3 could inject at least five times the pay load of any American missile into that critical twenty-two-thousand-mile orbit—the only one that would allow a satellite to remain fixed above the Earth. And by the time the US could match that performance, heaven knows where the Russians would be. Yes, heaven certainly would know…

‘All right,’ I conceded. ‘But why should fifty million American homes start switching channels just as soon as they can tune in to Moscow? I admire the Russians, but their entertainment is worse than their politics. After the Bolshoi, what have you? And for me, a little ballet goes a long, long way.’

Once again I was treated to that peculiarly humourless smile. Hartford had been saving up his Sunday punch, and now he let me have it.

‘You were the one who brought in the Russians,’ he said. ‘They’re involved, sure—but only as contractors. The independent agency I’m working for is hiring their services.’

‘That,’ I remarked dryly, ‘must be some agency.’

‘It is; just about the biggest. Even though the United States tries to pretend it doesn’t exist.’

‘Oh,’ I said, rather stupidly. ‘So that’s your sponsor.’

I’d heard those rumours that the USSR was going to launch satellites for the Chinese; now it began to look as if the rumours fell far short of the truth. But how far short, I’d still no conception.

‘You are so right,’ continued Hartford, obviously enjoying himself, ‘about Russian entertainment. After the initial novelty, the Nielson rating would drop to zero. But not with the programme I’m planning. My job is to find material that will put everyone else out of business when it goes on the air. You think it can’t be done? Finish that drink and come up to my room. I’ve a highbrow movie about ecclesiastical art that I’d like to show you.’

Well, he wasn’t crazy, though for a few minutes I wondered. I could think of few titles more carefully calculated to make the viewer reach for the channel switch than the one that flashed on the screen: ASPECTS OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY TANTRIC SCULPTURE.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Hartford chuckled, above the whirr of the projector. ‘That title saves me having trouble with inquisitive Customs inspectors. It’s perfectly accurate, but we’ll change it to something with a bigger box-office appeal when the time comes.’

A couple of hundred feet later, after some innocuous architectural long shots, I saw what he meant.

You may know that there are certain temples in India covered with superbly executed carvings of a kind that we in the West scarcely associate with religion. To say that they are frank is a laughable understatement; they leave nothing to the imagination—any imagination. Yet at the same time they are genuine works of art. And so was Hartford’s movie.

It had been shot, in case you’re interested, at the Temple of the Sun, Konarak. I’ve since looked it up; it’s on the Orissa coast, about twenty-five miles northeast of Puri. The reference books are pretty mealymouthed; some apologise for the ‘obvious’ impossibility of providing illustrations, but Percy Brown’s Indian Architecture minces no words. The carvings, it says primly, are of ‘a shamelessly erotic character that have no parallel in any known building’. A sweeping claim, but I can believe it after seeing that movie.

Camera work and editing were brilliant, the ancient stones coming to life beneath the roving lens. There were breath-taking time-lapse shots as the rising sun chased the shadows from bodies intertwined in ecstasy; sudden startling close-ups of scenes which at first the mind refused to recognise; soft-focus studies of stone shaped by a master’s hand in all the fantasies and aberrations of love; restless zooms and pans whose meaning eluded the eye until they froze into patterns of timeless desire, eternal fulfilment. The music—mostly percussion, with a thin, high thread of sound from some stringed instrument that I could not identify—perfectly fitted the tempo of the cutting. At one moment it would be languorously slow, like the opening bars of Debussy’s ‘L’Après-midi’; then the drums would swiftly work themselves up to a frenzied, almost unendurable climax. The art of the ancient sculptors and the skill of the modern cameraman had combined across the centuries to create a poem of rapture, an orgasm on celluloid which I would defy any man to watch unmoved.

There was a long silence when the screen flooded with light and the lascivious music ebbed into exhaustion.

‘My God!’ I said, when I had recovered some of my composure. ‘Are you going to telecast that?’

Hartford laughed.

‘Believe me,’ he answered, ‘that’s nothing; it just happens to be the only reel I can carry around safely. We’re prepared to defend it any day on grounds of genuine art, historic interest, religious tolerance—oh, we’ve thought of all the angles. But it doesn’t really matter; no one can stop us. For the first time in history, any form of censorship’s become utterly impossible. There’s simply no way of enforcing it; the customer can get what he wants, right in his own home. Lock the door, switch on the TV set—friends and family will never know.’

‘Very clever,’ I said, ‘but don’t you think such a diet will soon pall?’

‘Of course; variety is the spice of life. We’ll have plenty of conventional entertainment; let me worry about that. And every so often we’ll have information programmes—I hate that word “propaganda”—to tell the cloistered American public what’s really happening in the world. Our special features will just be the bait.’

‘Mind if I have some fresh air?’ I said. ‘It’s getting stuffy in here.’

Hartford drew the curtains and let daylight back into the room. Below us lay that long curve of beach, with the outrigger fishing boats drawn up beneath the palms, and the little waves falling in foam at the end of their weary march from Africa. One of the loveliest sights in the world, but I couldn’t focus on it now. I was still seeing those writhing stone limbs, those faces frozen with passions which the centuries could not slake.

That lickerish voice continued behind my back.

‘You’d be astonished if you knew just how much material there is. Remember, we’ve absolutely no taboos. If you can film it, we can telecast it.’

He walked over to his bureau and picked up a heavy, dog-eared volume.

‘This has been my Bible,’ he said, ‘or my Sears, Roebuck, if you prefer. Without it, I’d never have sold the series to my sponsors. They’re great believers in science, and they swallowed the whole thing, down to the last decimal point. Recognise it?’

I nodded; whenever I enter a room, I always monitor my host’s literary tastes.

‘Dr Kinsey, I presume.’

‘I guess I’m the only man who’s read it from cover to cover, and not just looked up his own vital statistics. You see, it’s the only piece of market research in its field. Until something better comes along, we’re making the most of it. It tells us what the customer wants, and we’re going to supply it.’

‘All of it?’

‘If the audience is big enough, yes. We won’t bother about feeble-minded farm boys who get too attached to the stock. But the four main sexes will get the full treatment. That’s the beauty of the movie you just saw—it appeals to them all.’

‘You can say that again,’ I muttered.

‘We’ve had a lot of fun planning the feature I’ve christened “Queer Corner”. Don’t laugh—no go-ahead agency can afford to ignore that audience. At least ten million, if you count the ladies—bless their clogs and tweeds. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at all the male art mags on the newsstands. It was no trick, blackmailing some of the daintier musclemen to perform for us.’

He saw that I was beginning to get bored; there are some kinds of single-mindedness that I find depressing. But I had done Hartford an injustice, as he hastened to prove.

‘Please don’t think,’ he said anxiously, ‘that sex is our only weapon. Sensation is almost as good. Ever see the job Ed Murrow did on the late sainted Joe McCarthy? That was milk and water compared with the profiles we’re planning in “Washington Confidential”.

‘And there’s our “Can You Take It?” series, designed to separate the men from the milksops. We’ll issue so many advance warnings that every red-blooded American will feel he has to watch the show. It will start innocently enough, on ground nicely prepared by Hemingway. You’ll see some bullfighting sequences that will really lift you out of your seat—or send you running to the bathroom—because they show all the little details you never get in those cleaned-up Hollywood movies.

‘We’ll follow that with some really unique material that cost us exactly nothing. Do you remember the photographic evidence the Nuremburg war trials turned up? You’ve never seen it, because it wasn’t publishable. There were quite a few amateur photographers in the concentration camps, who made the most of opportunities they’d never get again. Some of them were hanged on the testimony of their own cameras, but their work wasn’t wasted. It will lead nicely into our series “Torture Through the Ages”—very scholarly and thorough, yet with a remarkably wide appeal…

‘And there are dozens of other angles, but by now you’ll have the general picture. The Avenue thinks it knows all about Hidden Persuasion—believe me, it doesn’t. The world’s best practical psychologists are in the East these days. Remember Korea, and brainwashing? We’ve learned a lot since then. There’s no need for violence any more; people enjoy being brainwashed, if you set about it the right way.’

‘And you,’ I said, ‘are going to brainwash the United States. Quite an order.’

‘Exactly—and the country will love it, despite all the screams from Congress and the churches. Not to mention the networks, of course. They’ll make the biggest fuss of all, when they find they can’t compete with us.’

Hertford glanced at his watch, and gave a whistle of alarm.

‘Time to start packing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to be at that unpronounceable airport of yours by six. There’s no chance, I suppose, that you can fly over to Macao and see us sometime?’

‘Not a hope; but I’ve got a pretty good idea of the picture now. And incidentally, aren’t you afraid that I’ll spill the beans?’

‘Why should I be? The more publicity you can give us, the better. Although our advertising campaign doesn’t go into top gear for a few months yet, I feel you’ve earned this advance notice. As I said, your books helped to give me the idea.’

His gratitude was quite genuine, by God; it left me completely speechless.

‘Nothing can stop us,’ he declared—and for the first time the fanaticism that lurked behind that smooth, cynical, façade was not altogether under control. ‘History is on our side. We’ll be using America’s own decadence as a weapon against her, and it’s a weapon for which there’s no defence. The Air Force won’t attempt space piracy by shooting down a satellite nowhere near American territory. The FCC can’t even protest to a country that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the State Department. If you’ve any other suggestions, I’d be most interested to hear them.’

I had none then, and I have none now. Perhaps these words may give some brief warning before the first teasing advertisements appear in the trade papers, and may start stirrings of elephantine alarm among the networks. But will it make any difference? Hartford did not think so, and he may be right.

‘History is on our side.’ I cannot get those words out of my head. Land of Lincoln and Franklin and Melville, I love you and I wish you well. But into my heart blows a cold wind from the past; for I remember Babylon.

Trouble With Time

First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1960, as ‘Crime on Mars’

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

It does seem a little eerie that, more than two decades before the notorious ‘Face on Mars’ was discovered, I described an identical one—though on a slightly smaller scale.

‘We don’t have much crime on Mars,’ said Detective Inspector Rawlings, a little sadly. ‘In fact, that’s the chief reason I’m going back to the Yard. If I stayed here much longer, I’d get completely out of practice.’

We were sitting in the main observation lounge of the Phobos Spaceport, looking out across the jagged, sun-drenched crags of the tiny moon. The ferry rocket that had brought us up from Mars had left ten minutes ago, and was now beginning the long fall back to the ochre-tinted globe hanging there against the stars. In half an hour we would be boarding the liner for Earth—a world upon which most of the passengers had never set foot, but which they still called ‘home’.

‘At the same time,’ continued the Inspector, ‘now and then there’s a case that makes life interesting. You’re an art dealer, Mr Maccar; I’m sure you heard about that spot of bother at Meridian City a couple of months ago.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replied the plump, olive-skinned little man I’d taken for just another returning tourist. Presumably the Inspector had already checked through the passenger list; I wondered how much he knew about me, and tried to reassure myself that my conscience was—well—reasonably clear. After all, everybody took something out through Martian Customs—

‘It’s been rather well hushed up,’ said the Inspector, ‘but you can’t keep these things quiet for long. Anyway, a jewel thief from Earth tried to steal Meridian Museum’s greatest treasure—the Siren Goddess.’

‘But that’s absurd!’ I objected. ‘It’s priceless, of course—but it’s only a lump of sandstone. You couldn’t sell it to anyone—you might just as well steal the Mona Lisa.’

The Inspector grinned, rather mirthlessly. ‘That’s happened once,’ he said. ‘Maybe the motive was the same. There are collectors who would give a fortune for such an object, even if they could only look at it themselves. Don’t you agree, Mr Maccar?’

‘That’s perfectly true. In my business, you meet all sorts of crazy people.’

‘Well, this chappie—name’s Danny Weaver—had been well paid by one of them. And if it hadn’t been for a piece of fantastically bad luck, he might have brought it off.’

The Spaceport PA system apologised for a further slight delay owing to final fuel checks, and asked a number of passengers to report to Information. While we were waiting for the announcement to finish, I recalled what little I knew about the Siren Goddess. Though I’d never seen the original, like most other departing tourists I had a replica in my baggage. It bore the certificate of the Mars Bureau of Antiquities, guaranteeing that ‘this full-scale reproduction is an exact copy of the so-called Siren Goddess, discovered in the Mare Sirenium by the Third Expedition, AD 2012 (A.M. 23).’

It’s quite a tiny thing to have caused so much controversy. Only eight or nine inches high—you wouldn’t look at it twice if you saw it in a museum on Earth. The head of a young woman, with slightly oriental features, elongated earlobes, hair curled in tight ringlets close to the scalp, lips half parted in an expression of pleasure or surprise—that’s all. But it’s an enigma so baffling that it’s inspired a hundred religious sects, and driven quite a few archaeologists round the bend. For a perfectly human head has no right whatsoever to be found on Mars, whose only intelligent inhabitants were crustaceans—‘educated lobsters’, as the newspapers are fond of calling them. The aboriginal Martians never came near to achieving space flight, and in any event their civilisation died before men existed on Earth. No wonder the Goddess is the solar system’s number-one mystery; I don’t suppose we’ll find the answer in my lifetime—if we ever do.

‘Danny’s plan was beautifully simple,’ continued the Inspector. ‘You know how absolutely dead a Martian city gets on Sunday, when everything closes down and the colonists stay home to watch the TV from Earth. Danny was counting on this, when he checked into the hotel in Meridian West, late Friday afternoon. He’d have Saturday for reconnoitering the Museum, an undisturbed Sunday for the job itself, and on Monday morning he’d be just another tourist leaving town…

‘Early Saturday he strolled through the little park and crossed over into Meridian East, where the Museum stands. In case you don’t know, the city gets its name because it’s exactly on longitude one hundred and eighty degrees; there’s a big stone slab in the park with the prime meridian engraved on it, so that visitors can get themselves photographed standing in two hemispheres at once. Amazing what simple things amuse some people.

‘Danny spent the day going over the Museum exactly like any other tourist determined to get his money’s worth. But at closing time he didn’t leave; he’d holed up in one of the galleries not open to the public, where the Museum had been arranging a Late Canal Period reconstruction but had run out of money before the job could be finished. He stayed there until about midnight, just in case there were any enthusiastic researchers still in the building. Then he emerged and got to work.’

‘Just a minute,’ I interrupted. ‘What about the night watchman?’

The Inspector laughed.

‘My dear chap! They don’t have such luxuries on Mars. There weren’t even any alarms, for who would bother to steal lumps of stone? True, the Goddess was sealed up neatly in a strong glass-and-metal cabinet, just in case some souvenir hunter took a fancy to her. But even if she were stolen, there was nowhere the thief could hide, and of course all outgoing traffic would be searched as soon as the statue was missed.’

That was true enough. I’d been thinking in terms of Earth, forgetting that every city on Mars is a closed little world of its own beneath the force-field that protects it from the freezing near-vacuum. Beyond those electronic shields is the utterly hostile emptiness of the Martian Outback, where a man will die in seconds without protection. That makes law enforcement very easy; no wonder there’s so little crime on Mars…

‘Danny had a beautiful set of tools, as specialised as a watchmaker’s. The main item was a microsaw no bigger than a soldering iron; it had a wafer-thin blade, driven at a million cycles a second by an ultrasonic power pack. It would go through glass or metal like butter—and left a cut only about as thick as a hair. Which was very important for Danny, since he had to leave no traces of his handiwork.

‘I suppose you’ve guessed how he intended to operate. He was going to cut through the base of the cabinet, and substitute one of those souvenir replicas for the real Goddess. It might be a couple of years before some inquisitive expert discovered the awful truth; long before then the original would have travelled back to Earth, perfectly disguised as a copy of itself, with a genuine certificate of authenticity. Pretty neat, eh?

‘It must have been a weird business, working in that darkened gallery with all those million-year-old carvings and unexplainable artifacts around him. A museum on Earth is bad enough at night, but at least it’s—well—human. And Gallery Three, which houses the Goddess, is particularly unsettling. It’s full of bas-reliefs showing quite incredible animals fighting each other; they look rather like giant beetles, and most paleontologists flatly deny that they could ever have existed. But imaginary or not, they belonged to this world, and they didn’t disturb Danny as much as the Goddess, staring at him across the ages and defying him to explain her presence here. She gave him the creeps. How do I know? He told me.

‘Danny set to work on that cabinet as carefully as any diamond cutter preparing to cleave a gem. It took most of the night to slice out the trap door, and it was nearly dawn when he relaxed and put down the saw. There was still a lot of work to do, but the hardest part was over. Putting the replica into the case, checking its appearance against the photos he’d thoughtfully brought with him, and covering up his traces might take most of Sunday, but that didn’t worry him in the least. He had another twenty-four hours, and would positively welcome Monday’s first visitors so that he could mingle with them and make his inconspicuous exit.

It was a perfectly horrible shock to his nervous system, therefore, when the main doors were noisily unbarred at eight thirty and the Museum staff—all six of them—started to open up for the day. Danny bolted for the emergency exit, leaving everything behind—tools, Goddesses, the lot. He had another big surprise when he found himself in the street; it should have been completely deserted at this time of day, with everyone at home reading the Sunday papers. But here were the citizens of Meridian East, as large as life, heading for plant or office on what was obviously a normal working day.

‘By the time poor Danny got back to his hotel, we were waiting for him. We couldn’t claim much credit for deducing that only a visitor from Earth—and a very recent one at that—could have overlooked Meridian City’s chief claim to fame. And I presume you know what that is.’

‘Frankly, I don’t,’ I answered. ‘You can’t see much of Mars in six weeks, and I never went east of the Syrtis Major.’

‘Well, it’s absurdly simple, but we shouldn’t be too hard on Danny; even the locals occasionally fall into the same trap. It’s something that doesn’t bother us on Earth, where we’ve been able to dump the problem in the Pacific Ocean. But Mars, of course, is all dry land; and that means that somebody has to live with the International Date Line…

‘Danny, you see, had worked from Meridian West. It was Sunday over there all right—and it was still Sunday when we picked him up back at the hotel. But over in Meridian East, half a mile away, it was only Saturday. That little trip across the park had made all the difference; I told you it was rotten luck.’

There was a long moment of silent sympathy; then I asked, ‘What did he get?’

‘Three years,’ said Inspector Rawlings.

‘That doesn’t seem very much.’

‘Mars years; that makes it almost six of ours. And a whacking fine which, by an odd coincidence, came to just the refund value of his return ticket to Earth. He isn’t in jail, of course; Mars can’t afford that kind of nonproductive luxury. Danny has to work for a living, under discreet surveillance. I told you that the Meridian Museum couldn’t afford a night watchman. Well, it has one now. Guess who.’

‘All passengers prepare to board in ten minutes! Please collect your hand baggage!’ ordered the loud-speakers.

As we started to move toward the air lock, I couldn’t help asking one more question.

‘What about the people who put Danny up to it? There must have been a lot of money behind him. Did you get them?’

‘Not yet; they’d covered their tracks pretty thoroughly, and I believe Danny was telling the truth when he said he couldn’t give us any leads. Still, it’s not my case; as I told you, I’m going back to my old job at the Yard. But a policeman always keeps his eyes open—like an art dealer, eh, Mr Maccar? Why, you look a bit green about the gills. Have one of my space-sickness tablets.’

‘No, thank you,’ answered Mr Maccar, ‘I’m quite all right.’

His tone was distinctly unfriendly; the social temperature seemed to have dropped below zero in the last few minutes. I looked at Mr Maccar, and I looked at the Inspector. And suddenly I realised that we were going to have a very interesting trip.

Into the Comet

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1960, as ‘Inside the Comet’

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

‘I don’t know why I’m recording this,’ said George Takeo Pickett slowly into the hovering microphone. ‘There’s no chance that anyone will ever hear it. They say the comet will bring us back to the neighbourhood of Earth in about two million years, when it makes its next turn around the sun. I wonder if mankind will still be in existence then, and whether the comet will put on as good a display for our descendants as it did for us? Maybe they’ll launch an expedition, just as we have done, to see what they can find. And they’ll find us…

‘For the ship will still be in perfect condition, even after all those ages. There’ll be fuel in the tanks, maybe even plenty of air, for our food will give out first, and we’ll starve before we suffocate. But I guess we won’t wait for that; it will be quicker to open the air lock and get it all over.

‘When I was a kid, I read a book on polar exploration called Winter Amid the Ice. Well, that’s what we’re facing now. There’s ice all around us, floating in great porous bergs. Challenger’s in the middle of a cluster, orbiting round one another so slowly that you have to wait several minutes before you’re certain they’ve moved. But no expedition to Earth’s poles ever faced our winter. During most of that two million years, the temperature will be four hundred and fifty below zero. We’ll be so far away from the sun that it’ll give about as much heat as the stars. And who ever tried to warm his hands by Sirius on a cold winter night?’

That absurd image, coming suddenly into his mind, broke him up completely. He could not speak because of memories of moonlight upon snowfields, of Christmas chimes ringing across a land already fifty million miles away. Suddenly he was weeping like a child, his self-control dissolved by the remembrance of all the familiar, disregarded beauties of the Earth he had forever lost.

And everything had begun so well, in such a blaze of excitement and adventure. He could recall (was it only six months ago?) the very first time he had gone out to look for the comet, soon after eighteen-year-old Jimmy Randall had found it in his homemade telescope and sent his famous telegram to Mount Stromlo Observatory. In those early days, it had been only a faint polliwog of mist, moving slowly through the constellation of Eridanus, just south of the Equator. It was still far beyond Mars, sweeping sunward along its immensely elongated orbit. When it had last shone in the skies of Earth, there were no men to see it, and there might be none when it appeared again. The human race was seeing Randall’s comet for the first and perhaps the only time.

As it approached the sun, it grew, blasting out plumes and jets, the smallest of which was larger than a hundred Earths. Like a great pennant streaming down some cosmic breeze, the comet’s tail was already forty million miles long when it raced past the orbit of Mars. It was then that the astronomers realised that this might be the most spectacular sight ever to appear in the heavens; the display put on by Halley’s comet, back in 1986, would be nothing in comparison. And it was then that the administrators of the International Astrophysical Decade decided to send the research ship Challenger chasing after it, if she could be fitted out in time; for here was a chance that might not come again in a thousand years.

For weeks on end, in the hours before dawn, the comet sprawled across the sky like a second but far brighter Milky Way. As it approached the sun, and felt again the fires it had not known since the mammoths shook the Earth, it became steadily more active. Gouts of luminous gas erupted from its core, forming great fans which turned like slowly swinging searchlights across the stars. The tail, now a hundred million miles long, divided into intricate bands and streamers which changed their patterns completely in the course of a single night. Always they pointed away from the sun, as if driven starward by a great wind blowing forever outward from the heart of the solar system.

When the Challenger assignment had been give to him, George Pickett could hardly believe his luck. Nothing like this had happened to any reporter since William Laurence and the atom bomb. The facts that he had a science degree, was unmarried, in good health, weighed less than one hundred and twenty pounds, and had no appendix undoubtedly helped. But there must have been many others equally qualified; well, their envy would soon turn to relief.

Because the skimpy pay load of Challenger could not accommodate a mere reporter, Pickett had had to double up in his spare time as executive officer. This meant, in practice, that he had to write up the log, act as captain’s secretary, keep track of stores, and balance the accounts. It was very fortunate, he often thought, that one needed only three hours’ sleep in every twenty-four, in the weightless world of space.

Keeping his two duties separate had required a great deal of tact. When he was not writing in his closet-sized office, or checking the thousands of items stacked away in stores, he would go on the prowl with his recorder. He had been careful, at one time or another, to interview every one of the twenty scientists and engineers who manned Challenger. Not all the recordings had been radioed back to Earth; some had been too technical, some too inarticulate, and others too much the reverse. But at least he had played no favourites and, as far as he knew, had trodden on no toes. Not that it mattered now.

He wondered how Dr Martens was taking it; the astronomer had been one of his most difficult subjects, yet the one who could give most information. On a sudden impulse, Pickett located the earliest of the Martens tapes, and inserted it in the recorder. He knew that he was trying to escape from the present by retreating into the past, but the only effect of that self-knowledge was to make him hope the experiment would succeed.

He still had vivid memories of that first interview, for the weightless microphone, wavering only slightly in the draft of air from the ventilators, had almost hypnotised him into incoherence. Yet no one would have guessed: his voice had its normal, professional smoothness.

They had been twenty million miles behind the comet, but swiftly overtaking it, when he had trapped Martens in the observatory and thrown the opening question at him.

‘Dr Martens,’ he began, ‘just what is Randall’s comet made of?’

‘Quite a mixture,’ the astronomer had answered, ‘and it’s changing all the time as we move away from the sun. But the tail’s mostly ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, water vapour, cyanogen—’

‘Cyanogen? Isn’t that a poison gas? What would happen if the Earth ran into it?’

‘Not a thing. Though it looks so spectacular, by our normal standards a comet’s tail is a pretty good vacuum. A volume as big as Earth contains about as much gas as a matchbox full of air.’

‘And yet this thin stuff puts on such a wonderful display!’

‘So does the equally thin gas in an electric sign, and for the same reason. A comet’s tail glows because the sun bombards it with electrically charged particles. It’s a cosmic skysign; one day, I’m afraid, the advertising people will wake up to this, and find a way of writing slogans across the solar system.’

‘That’s a depressing thought—though I suppose someone will claim it’s a triumph of applied science. But let’s leave the tail; how soon will we get into the heart of the comet—the nucleus, I believe you call it?’

‘Since a stern chase always takes a long time, it will be another two weeks before we enter the nucleus. We’ll be ploughing deeper and deeper into the tail, taking a cross section through the comet as we catch up with it. But though the nucleus is still twenty million miles ahead, we’ve already learned a good deal about it. For one thing, it’s extremely small—less than fifty miles across. And even that’s not solid, but probably consists of thousands of smaller bodies, all milling round in a cloud.’

‘Will we be able to go into the nucleus?’

‘We’ll know when we get there. Maybe we’ll play safe and study it through our telescopes from a few thousand miles away. But personally, I’ll be disappointed unless we go right inside. Won’t you?’

Picket switched off the recorder. Yes, Martens had been right. He would have been disappointed, especially since there had seemed no possible source of danger. Nor was there, as far as the comet was concerned. The danger had come from within.

They had sailed through one after another of the huge but unimaginably tenuous curtains of gas that Randall’s comet was still ejecting as it raced away from the sun. Yet even now, though they were approaching the densest regions of the nucleus, they were for all practical purposes in a perfect vacuum. The luminous fog that stretched around Challenger for so many millions of miles scarcely dimmed the stars; but directly ahead, where lay the comet’s core, was a brilliant patch of hazy light, luring them onward like a will-o’-the-wisp.

The electrical disturbances now taking place around them with ever-increasing violence had almost completely cut their link with Earth. The ship’s main radio transmitter could just get a signal through, but for the last few days they had been reduced to sending ‘OK’ messages in Morse. When they broke away from the comet and headed for home, normal communication would be resumed; but now they were almost as isolated as explorers had been in the days before radio. It was inconvenient, but that was all. Indeed, Pickett rather welcomed this state of affairs; it gave him more time to get on with his clerical duties. Though Challenger was sailing into the heart of a comet, on a course that no captain could have dreamed of before the twentieth century, someone still had to check the provisions and count the stores.

Very slowly and cautiously, her radar probing the whole sphere of space around her, Challenger crept into the nucleus of the comet. And there she came to rest—amid the ice.

Back in the nineteen-forties, Fred Whipple, of Harvard, had guessed the truth, but it was hard to believe it even when the evidence was before one’s eyes. The comet’s relatively tiny core was a loose cluster of icebergs, drifting and turning round one another as they moved along their orbit. But unlike the bergs that floated in polar seas, they were not a dazzling white, nor were they made of water. They were a dirty grey, and very porous, like partly thawed snow. And they were riddled with pockets of methane and frozen ammonia, which erupted from time to time in gigantic gas jets as they absorbed the heat of the sun. It was a wonderful display, but Pickett had little time to admire it. Now he had far too much.

He had been doing his routine check of the ship’s stores when he came face to face with disaster—though it was some time before he realised it. For the supply situation had been perfectly satisfactory; they had ample stocks for the return to Earth. He had checked that with his own eyes, and now had merely to confirm the balances recorded in the pinhead-sized section of the ship’s electronic memory which stored all the accounts.

When the first crazy figures flashed on the screen, Pickett assumed that he had pressed the wrong key. He cleared the totals, and fed the information into the computer once more.

Sixty cases of pressed meat to start with; 17 consumed so far; quantity left: 99999943.

He tried again, and again, with no better result. Then, feeling annoyed but not particularly alarmed, he went in search of Dr Martens.

He found the astronomer in the Torture Chamber—the tiny gym, squeezed between the technical stores and the bulkhead of the main propellant tank. Each member of the crew had to exercise here for an hour a day, lest his muscles waste away in this gravityless environment. Martens was wrestling with a set of powerful springs, an expression of grim determination on his face. It became much grimmer when Pickett gave his report.

A few tests on the main input board quickly told them the worst. ‘The computer’s insane,’ said Martens. ‘It can’t even add or subtract.’

‘But surely we can fix it!’

Martens shook his head. He had lost all his usual cocky self-confidence; he looked, Pickett told himself, like an inflated rubber doll that had started to leak.

‘Not even the builders could do that. It’s a solid mass of microcircuits, packed as tightly as the human brain. The memory units are still operating, but the computing section’s utterly useless. It just scrambles the figures you feed into it.’

‘And where does that leave us?’ Pickett asked.

‘It means that we’re all dead,’ Martens answered flatly. ‘Without the computer, we’re done for. It’s impossible to calculate an orbit back to Earth. It would take an army of mathematicians weeks to work it out on paper.’

‘That’s ridiculous! The ship’s in perfect condition, we’ve plenty of food and fuel—and you tell me we’re all going to die just because we can’t do a few sums.’

‘A few sums!’ retorted Martens, with a trace of his old spirit. ‘A major navigational change, like the one needed to break away from the comet and put us on an orbit to Earth, involves about a hundred thousand separate calculations. Even the computer needs several minutes for the job.’

Pickett was no mathematician, but he knew enough of astronautics to understand the situation. A ship coasting through space was under the influence of many bodies. The main force controlling it was the gravity of the sun, which kept all the planets firmly chained in their orbits. But the planets themselves also tugged it this way and that, though with much feebler strength. To allow for all these conflicting tugs and pulls—above all, to take advantage of them to reach a desired goal scores of millions of miles away—was a problem of fantastic complexity. He could appreciate Martens’ despair; no man could work without the tools of his trade, and no trade needed more elaborate tools than this one.

Even after the Captain’s announcement, and that first emergency conference when the entire crew had gathered to discuss the situation, it had taken hours for the facts to sink home. The end was still so many months away that the mind could not grasp it; they were under sentence of death, but there was no hurry about the execution. And the view was still superb…

Beyond the glowing mists that enveloped them—and which would be their celestial monument to the end of time—they could see the great beacon of Jupiter, brighter than all the stars. Some of them might still be alive, if the others were willing to sacrifice themselves, when the ship went past the mightiest of the sun’s children. Would the extra weeks of life be worth it, Pickett asked himself, to see with your own eyes the sight that Galileo had first glimpsed through his crude telescope four centuries ago—the satellites of Jupiter, shuttling back and forth like beads upon an invisible wire?

Beads upon a wire. With that thought, an all-but-forgotten childhood memory exploded out of his subconscious. It must have been there for days, struggling upward into the light. Now at last it had forced itself upon his waiting mind.

‘No!’ he cried aloud. ‘It’s ridiculous! They’ll laugh at me!’

So what? said the other half of his mind. You’ve nothing to lose; if it does no more, it will keep everyone busy while the food and the oxygen dwindle away. Even the faintest hope is better than none at all…

He stopped fidgeting with the recorder; the mood of maudlin self-pity was over. Releasing the elastic webbing that held him to his seat, he set off for the technical stores in search of the material he needed.

‘This,’ said Dr Martens three days later, ‘isn’t my idea of a joke.’ He gave a contemptuous glance at the flimsy structure of wire and wood that Pickett was holding in his hand.

‘I guessed you’d say that,’ Pickett replied, keeping his temper under control. ‘But please listen to me for a minute. My grandmother was Japanese, and when I was a kid she told me a story that I’d completely forgotten until this week. I think it may save our lives.

‘Sometime after the Second World War, there was a contest between an American with an electric desk calculator and a Japanese using an abacus like this. The abacus won.’

‘Then it must have been a poor desk machine, or an incompetent operator.’

‘They used the best in the US Army. But let’s stop arguing. Give me a test—say a couple of three-figure numbers to multiply.’

‘Oh—856 times 437.’

Pickett’s fingers danced over the beads, sliding them up and down the wires with lightning speed. There were twelve wires in all, so that the abacus could handle numbers up to 999,999,999,999—or could be divided into separate sections where several independent calculations could be carried out simultaneously.

‘374072,’ said Pickett, after an incredibly brief interval of time. ‘Now see how long you take to do it, with pencil and paper.’

There was a much longer delay before Martens, who like most mathematicians was poor at arithmetic, called out ‘375072.’ A hasty check soon confirmed that Martens had taken at least three times as long as Pickett to arrive at the wrong answer.

The astronomer’s face was a study in mingled chagrin, astonishment, and curiosity.

‘Where did you learn that trick?’ he asked. ‘I thought those things could only add and subtract.’

‘Well—multiplication’s only repeated addition, isn’t it? All I did was to add 856 seven times in the unit column, three times in the tens column, and four times in the hundreds column. You do the same thing when you use pencil and paper. Of course, there are some short cuts, but if you think I’m fast, you should have seen my granduncle. He used to work in a Yokohama bank, and you couldn’t see his fingers when he was going at speed. He taught me some of the tricks, but I’ve forgotten most of them in the last twenty years. I’ve only been practising for a couple of days, so I’m still pretty slow. All the same, I hope I’ve convinced you that there’s something in my argument.’

‘You certainly have: I’m quite impressed. Can you divide just as quickly?’

‘Very nearly, when you’ve had enough experience.’

Martens picked up the abacus, and started flicking the beads back and forth. Then he sighed.

‘Ingenious—but it doesn’t really help us. Even if it’s ten times as fast as a man with pencil and paper—which it isn’t—the computer was a million times faster.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ answered Pickett, a little impatiently.

(Martens had no guts—he gave up too easily. How did he think astronomers managed a hundred years ago, before there were any computers?)

‘This is what I propose—tell me if you can see any flaws in it…’

Carefully and earnestly he detailed his plan. As he did so, Martens slowly relaxed, and presently he gave the first laugh that Pickett had heard aboard Challenger for days.

‘I want to see the skipper’s face,’ said the astronomer, ‘when you tell him that we’re all going back to the nursery to start playing with beads.’

There was scepticism at first, but it vanished swiftly when Pickett gave a few demonstrations. To men who had grown up in a world of electronics, the fact that a simple structure of wire and beads could perform such apparent miracles was a revelation. It was also a challenge, and because their lives depended upon it, they responded eagerly.

As soon as the engineering staff had built enough smoothly operating copies of Pickett’s crude prototype, the classes began. It took only a few minutes to explain the basic principles; what required time was practice—hour after hour of it, until the fingers flew automatically across the wires and flicked the beads into the right positions without any need for conscious thought. There were some members of the crew who never acquired both accuracy and speed, even after a week of constant practice: but there were others who quickly outdistanced Pickett himself.

They dreamed counters and columns, and flicked beads in their sleep. As soon as they had passed beyond the elementary stage they were divided into teams, which then competed fiercely against each other, until they had reached still higher standards of proficiency. In the end, there were men aboard Challenger who could multiply four-figure numbers on the abacus in fifteen seconds, and keep it up hour after hour.

Such work was purely mechanical; it required skill, but no intelligence. The really difficult job was Martens’, and there was little that anyone could do to help him. He had to forget all the machine-based techniques he had taken for granted, and rearrange his calculations so that they could be carried out automatically by men who had no idea of the meaning of the figures they were manipulating. He would feed them the basic data, and then they would follow the programme he had laid down. After a few hours of patient routine work, the answer would emerge from the end of the mathematical production line—provided that no mistakes had been made. And the way to guard against that was to have two independent teams working, cross-checking results at regular intervals.

‘What we’ve done,’ said Pickett into his recorder, when at last he had time to think of the audience he had never expected to speak to again, ‘is to build a computer out of human beings instead of electronic circuits. It’s a few thousand times slower, can’t handle many digits, and gets tired easily—but it’s doing the job. Not the whole job of navigating to Earth—that’s far too complicated—but the simpler one of giving us an orbit that will bring us back into radio range. Once we’ve escaped from the electrical interference around us, we can radio our position and the big computers on Earth can tell us what to do next.

‘We’ve already broken away from the comet and are no longer heading out of the solar system. Our new orbit checks with the calculations, to the accuracy that can be expected. We’re still inside the comet’s tail, but the nucleus is a million miles away and we won’t see those ammonia icebergs again. They’re racing on toward the stars into the freezing night between the suns, while we are coming home…

‘Hello, Earth… hello, Earth! This is Challenger calling. Challenger calling. Signal back as soon as you receive us—we’d like you to check our arithmetic—before we work our fingers to the bone!’

Summertime on Icarus

First published in Vogue, June 1960, as ‘The Hottest Piece of Real Estate in the Solar System’

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

When I wrote this story, I certainly never dreamed that one day I would have an asteroid named after me: in 1996 the International Astronomical Union rescued 4923 from anonymity. As a result, I am now the proud absentee landlord of about 100 square kilometres of real estate out around Mars. It doesn’t come anywhere near the Earth, so I’m not worried about Deep Impact type lawsuits.

When Colin Sherrard opened his eyes after the crash, he could not imagine where he was. He seemed to be lying, trapped in some kind of vehicle, on the summit of a rounded hill, which sloped steeply away in all directions. Its surface was seared and blackened, as if a great fire had swept over it. Above him was a jet-black sky, crowded with stars; one of them hung like a tiny, brilliant sun low down on the horizon.

Could it be the sun? Was he so far from Earth? No—that was impossible. Some nagging memory told him that the sun was very close—hideously close—not so distant that it had shrunk to a star. And with that thought, full consciousness returned. Sherrard knew exactly where he was, and the knowledge was so terrible that he almost fainted again.

He was nearer to the sun than any man had ever been. His damaged space-pod was lying on no hill, but on the steeply curving surface of a world only two miles in diameter. That brilliant star sinking swiftly in the west was the light of Prometheus, the ship that had brought him here across so many millions of miles of space. She was hanging up there among the stars, wondering why his pod had not returned like a homing pigeon to its roost. In a few minutes she would have passed from sight, dropping below the horizon in her perpetual game of hide-and-seek with the sun.

That was a game that he had lost. He was still on the night side of the asteroid, in the cool safety of its shadow, but the short night would be ending soon. The four-hour day of Icarus was spinning him swiftly toward that dreadful dawn, when a sun thirty times larger than ever shone upon Earth would blast these rocks with fire. Sherrard knew all too well why everything around him was burned and blackened. Icarus was still a week from perihelion but the temperature at noon had already reached a thousand degrees Farenheit.

Though this was no time for humour, he suddenly remembered Captain McClellan’s description of Icarus: ‘The hottest piece of real estate in the solar system.’ The truth of that jest had been proved, only a few days before, by one of those simple and unscientific experiments that are so much more impressive than any number of graphs and instrument readings.

Just before daybreak, someone had propped a piece of wood on the summit of one of the tiny hills. Sherrard had been watching, from the safety of the night side, when the first rays of the rising sun had touched the hilltop. When his eyes had adjusted to the sudden detonation of light, he saw that the wood was already beginning to blacken and char. Had there been an atmosphere here, the stick would have burst into flames; such was dawn, upon Icarus…

Yet it had not been impossibly hot at the time of their first landing, when they were passing the orbit of Venus five weeks ago. Prometheus had overtaken the asteroid as it was beginning its plunge toward the sun, had matched speed with the little world and had touched down upon its surface as lightly as a snowflake. (A snowflake on Icarus—that was quite a thought…) then the scientists had fanned out across the fifteen square miles of jagged nickel-iron that covered most of the asteroid’s surface, setting up their instruments and check-points, collecting samples and making endless observations.

Everything had been carefully planned, years in advance, as part of the International Astrophysical Decade. Here was a unique opportunity for a research ship to get within a mere seventeen million miles of the sun, protected from its fury by a two-mile-thick shield of rock and iron. In the shadow of Icarus, the ship could ride safely round the central fire which warmed all the planets, and upon which the existence of all life depended. As the Prometheus of legend had brought the gift of fire to mankind, so the ship that bore his name would return to Earth with other unimagined secrets from the heavens.

There had been plenty of time to set up the instruments and make the surveys before Prometheus had to take off and seek the permanent shade of night. Even then, it was still possible for men in the tiny self-propelled space-pods—miniature spaceships, only ten feet long—to work on the night side for an hour or so, as long as they were not overtaken by the advancing line of sunrise. That had seemed a simple-enough condition to meet, on a world where dawn marched forward at only a mile an hour; but Sherrard had failed to meet it, and the penalty was death.

He was still not quite sure what had happened. He had been replacing a seismograph transmitter at Station 145, unofficially known as Mount Everest because it was a full ninety feet above the surrounding territory. The job had been a perfectly straightforward one, even though he had to do it by remote control through the mechanical arms of his pod. Sherrard was an expert at manipulating these; he could tie knots with his metal fingers almost as quickly as with his flesh-and-bone ones. The task had taken little more than twenty minutes, and then the radioseismograph was on the air again, monitoring the tiny quakes and shudders that racked Icarus in ever-increasing numbers as the asteroid approached the sun. It was small satisfaction to know that he had now made a king-sized addition to the record.

After he had checked the signals, he had carefully replaced the sun screens around the instrument. It was hard to believe that two flimsy sheets of polished metal foil, no thicker than paper, could turn aside a flood of radiation that would melt lead or tin within seconds. But the first screen reflected more than ninety per cent of the sunlight falling upon its mirror surface and the second turned back most of the rest, so that only a harmless fraction of the heat passed through.

He had reported completion of the job, received an acknowledgment from the ship, and prepared to head for home. The brilliant floodlights hanging from Prometheus—without which the night side of the asteroid would have been in utter darkness—had been an unmistakable target in the sky. The ship was only two miles up, and in this feeble gravity he could have jumped that distance had he been wearing a planetary-type space suit with flexible legs. As it was, the low-powered micro-rockets of his pod would get him there in a leisurely five minutes.

He had aimed the pod with its gyros, set the rear jets at Strength Two, and pressed the firing button. There had been a violent explosion somewhere in the vicinity of his feet and he had soared away from Icarus—but not toward the ship. Something was horribly wrong; he was tossed to one side of the vehicle, unable to reach the controls. Only one of the jets was firing, and he was pinwheeling across the sky, spinning faster and faster under the off-balanced drive. He tried to find the cutoff, but the spin had completely disorientated him. When he was able to locate the controls, his first reaction made matters worse—he pushed the throttle over to full, like a nervous driver stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake. It took only a second to correct the mistake and kill the jet, but by then he was spinning so rapidly that the stars were wheeling round in circles.

Everything had happened so quickly that there was no time for fear, no time even to call the ship and report what was happening. He took his hands away from the controls; to touch them now would only make matters worse. It would take two or three minutes of cautious jockeying to unravel his spin, and from the flickering glimpses of the approaching rocks it was obvious that he did not have as many seconds. Sherrard remembered a piece of advice at the front of the Spaceman’s Manual ‘When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.’ He was still doing it when Icarus fell upon him, and the stars went out.

It had been a miracle that the pod was unbroken, and that he was not breathing space. (Thirty minutes from now he might be glad to do so, when the capsule’s heat insulation began to fail…) There had been some damage, of course. The rear-view mirrors, just outside the dome of transparent plastic that enclosed his head, were both snapped off, so that he could no longer see what lay behind him without twisting his neck. This was a trivial mishap; far more serious was the fact that his radio antennas had been torn away by the impact. He could not call the ship, and the ship could not call him. All that came over the radio was a faint crackling, probably produced inside the set itself. He was absolutely alone, cut off from the rest of the human race.

It was a desperate situation, but there was one faint ray of hope. He was not, after all, completely helpless. Even if he could not use the pod’s rockets—he guessed that the starboard motor had blown back and ruptured a fuel line, something the designers said was impossible—he was still able to move. He had his arms.

But which way should he crawl? He had lost all sense of location, for though he had taken off from Mount Everest, he might now be thousands of feet away from it. There were no recognisable landmarks in his tiny world; the rapidly sinking star of Prometheus was his best guide, and if he could keep the ship in view he would be safe. It would only be a matter of minutes before his absence was noted, if indeed it had not been discovered already. Yet without radio, it might take his colleagues a long time to find him; small though Icarus was, its fifteen square miles of fantastically rugged no man’s land could provide an effective hiding place for a ten-foot cylinder. It might take an hour to locate him—which meant that he would have to keep ahead of the murderous sunrise.

He slipped his fingers into the controls that worked his mechanical limbs. Outside the pod, in the hostile vacuum that surrounded him, his substitute arms came to life. They reached down, thrust against the iron surface of the asteroid, and levered the pod from the ground. Sherrard flexed them, and the capsule jerked forward, like some weird, two-legged insect… first the right arm, then the left, then the right…

It was less difficult than he had feared, and for the first time he felt his confidence return. Though his mechanical arms had been designed for light precision work, it needed very little pull to set the capsule moving in this weightless environment. The gravity of Icarus was ten thousand times weaker than Earth’s: Sherrard and his space-pod weighed less than an ounce here, and once he had set himself in motion he floated forward with an effortless, dreamlike ease.

Yet that very effortlessness had its dangers. He had travelled several hundred yards, and was rapidly overhauling the sinking star of the Prometheus, when overconfidence betrayed him. (Strange how quickly the mind could switch from one extreme to the other; a few minutes ago he had been steeling himself to face death—now he was wondering if he would be late for dinner.) Perhaps the novelty of the movement, so unlike anything he had ever attempted before, was responsible for the catastrophe; or perhaps he was still suffering from the after-effects of the crash.

Like all astronauts, Sherrard had learned to orientate himself in space, and had grown accustomed to living and working when the Earthly conceptions of up and down were meaningless. On a world such as Icarus, it was necessary to pretend that there was a real, honest-to-goodness planet ‘beneath’ your feet, and that when you moved you were travelling over a horizontal plain. If this innocent self-deception failed, you were heading for space vertigo.

The attack came without warning, as it usually did. Quite suddenly, Icarus no longer seemed to be beneath him, the stars no longer above. The universe tilted through a right angle; he was moving straight up a vertical cliff, like a mountaineer scaling a rock face, and though Sherrard’s reason told him that this was pure illusion, all his senses screamed that it was true. In a moment gravity must drag him off this sheer wall, and he would drop down mile upon endless mile until he smashed into oblivion.

Worse was to come; the false vertical was still swinging like a compass needle that had lost the pole. Now he was on the underside of an immense rocky roof, like a fly clinging to a ceiling; in another moment it would have become a wall again—but this time he would be moving straight down it, instead of up…

He had lost all control over the pod, and the clammy sweat that had begun to dew his brow warned him that he would soon lose control over his body. There was only one thing to do; he clenched his eyes tightly shut, squeezed as far back as possible into the tiny closed world of the capsule, and pretended with all his might that the universe outside did not exist. He did not even allow the slow, gentle crunch of his second crash to interfere with his self-hypnosis.

When he again dared to look outside, he found that the pod had come to rest against a large boulder. Its mechanical arms had broken the force of the impact, but at a cost that was more than he could afford to pay. Though the capsule was virtually weightless here, it still possessed its normal five hundred pounds of inertia, and it had been moving at perhaps four miles an hour. The momentum had been too much for the metal arms to absorb; one had snapped, and the other was hopelessly bent.

When he saw what had happened, Sherrard’s first reaction was not despair, but anger. He had been so certain of success when the pod had started its glide across the barren face of Icarus. And now this, all through a moment of physical weakness! But space made no allowance for human frailties or emotions, and a man who did not accept that fact had no right to be here.

At least he had gained precious time in his pursuit of the ship; he had put an extra ten minutes, if not more, between himself and dawn. Whether that ten minutes would merely prolong the agony or whether it would give his shipmates the extra time they needed to find him, he would soon know.

Where were they? Surely they had started the search by now! He strained his eyes toward the brilliant star of the ship, hoping to pick out the fainter lights of space-pods moving toward him—but nothing else was visible against the slowly turning vault of heaven.

He had better look to his own resources, slender though they were. Only a few minutes were left before the Prometheus and her trailing lights would sink below the edge of the asteroid and leave him in darkness. It was true that the darkness would be all too brief, but before it fell upon him he might find some shelter against the coming day. This rock into which he had crashed, for example…

Yes, it would give some shade, until the sun was halfway up the sky. Nothing could protect him if it passed right overhead, but it was just possible that he might be in a latitude where the sun never rose far above the horizon at this season of Icarus’s four-hundred-and-nine-day year. Then he might survive the brief period of daylight; that was his only hope, if the rescuers did not find him before dawn.

There went Prometheus and her lights, below the edge of the world. With her going, the now-unchallenged stars blazed forth with redoubled brilliance. More glorious than any of them—so lovely that even to look upon it almost brought tears to his eyes—was the blazing beacon of Earth, with its companion moon beside it. He had been born on one, and had walked on the other; would he see either again?

Strange that until now he had given no thought to his wife and children, and to all that he loved in the life that now seemed so far away. He felt a spasm of guilt, but it passed swiftly. The ties of affection were not weakened, even across the hundred million miles of space that now sundered him from his family. At this moment, they were simply irrelevant. He was now a primitive, self-centred animal fighting for his life, and his only weapon was his brain. In this conflict, there was no place for the heart; it would merely be a hindrance, spoiling his judgment and weakening his resolution.

And then he saw something that banished all thoughts of his distant home. Reaching up above the horizon behind him, spreading across the stars like a milky mist, was a faint and ghostly cone of phosphorescence. It was the herald of the sun—the beautiful, pearly phantom of the corona, visible on Earth only during the rare moments of a total eclipse. When the corona was rising, the sun would not be far behind, to smite this little land with fury.

Sherrard made good use of the warning. Now he could judge, with some accuracy, the exact point where the sun would rise. Crawling slowly and clumsily on the broken stumps of his metal arms, he dragged the capsule round to the side of the boulder that should give the greatest shade. He had barely reached it when the sun was upon him like a beast of prey, and his tiny world exploded into light.

He raised the dark filters inside his helmet, one thickness after another, until he could endure the glare. Except where the broad shadow of the boulder lay across the asteroid, it was like looking into a furnace. Every detail of the desolate land around him was revealed by that merciless light; there were no greys only blinding whites and impenetrable blacks. All the shadowed cracks and hollows were pools of ink, while the higher ground already seemed to be on fire, as it caught the sun. Yet it was only a minute after dawn.

Now Sherrard could understand how the scorching heat of a billion summers had turned Icarus into a cosmic cinder, baking the rocks until the last traces of gas had bubbled out of them. Why should men travel, he asked himself bitterly, across the gulf of stars at such expense and risk—merely to land on a spinning slag heap? For the same reason, he knew, that they had once struggled to reach Everest and the Poles and the far places of the Earth—for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery. It was an answer that gave him little consolation, now that he was about to be grilled like a joint on the turning spit of Icarus.

Already he could feel the first breath of heat upon his face. The boulder against which he was lying gave him protection from direct sunlight, but the glare reflected back at him from those blazing rocks only a few yards away was striking through the transparent plastic of the dome. It would grow swiftly more intense as the sun rose higher; he had even less time than he had thought, and with the knowledge came a kind of numb resignation that was beyond fear. He would wait—if he could—until the sunrise engulfed him and the capsule’s cooling unit gave up the unequal struggle, then he would crack the pod and let the air gush out into the vacuum of space.

Nothing to do but to sit and think in the minutes that were left to him before his pool of shadow contracted. He did not try to direct his thoughts, but let them wander where they willed. How strange that he should be dying now, because back in the nineteen-forties—years before he was born—a man at Palomar had spotted a streak of light on a photographic plate, and had named it so appropriately after the boy who flew too near the sun.

One day, he supposed, they would build a monument here for him on this blistered plain. What would they inscribe upon it? ‘Here died Colin Sherrard, astronics engineer, in the cause of Science.’ That would be funny, for he had never understood half the things that the scientists were trying to do.

Yet some of the excitement of their discoveries had communicated itself to him. He remembered how the geologists had scraped away the charred skin of the asteroid, and had polished the metallic surface that lay beneath. It had been covered with a curious pattern of lines and scratches, like one of the abstract paintings of the Post-Picasso Decadents. But these lines had some meaning; they wrote the history of Icarus, though only a geologist could read it. They revealed, so Sherrard had been told, that this lump of iron and rock had not always floated alone in space. At some remote time in the past, it had been under enormous pressure—and that could mean only one thing. Billions of years ago it had been part of a much larger body, perhaps a planet like Earth. For some reason that planet had blown up, and Icarus and all the thousands of other asteroids were the fragments of that cosmic explosion.

Even at this moment, as the incandescent line of sunlight came closer, this was a thought that stirred his mind. What Sherrard was lying upon was the core of a world—perhaps a world that had once known life. In a strange, irrational way it comforted him to know that his might not be the only ghost to haunt Icarus until the end of time.

The helmet was misting up; that could only mean that the cooling unit was about to fail. It had done its work well; even now, though the rocks only a few yards away must be glowing a sullen red, the heat inside the capsule was not unendurable. When failure came, it would be sudden and catastrophic.

He reached for the red lever that would rob the sun of its prey—but before he pulled it, he would look for the last time upon Earth. Cautiously, he lowered the dark filters, adjusting them so that they still cut out the glare from the rocks, but no longer blocked his view of space.

The stars were faint now, dimmed by the advancing glow of the corona. And just visible over the boulder whose shield would soon fail him was a stub of crimson flame, a crooked finger of fire jutting from the edge of the sun itself. He had only seconds left.

There was the Earth, there was the moon. Goodbye to them both, and to his friends and loved ones on each of them. While he was looking at the sky, the sunlight had begun to lick the base of the capsule, and he felt the first touch of fire. In a reflex as automatic as it was useless, he drew up his legs, trying to escape the advancing wave of heat.

What was that? A brilliant flash of light, infinitely brighter than any of the stars, had suddenly exploded overhead. Miles above him, a huge mirror was sailing across the sky, reflecting the sunlight as it slowly turned through space. Such a thing was utterly impossible; he was beginning to suffer from hallucinations, and it was time he took his leave. Already the sweat was pouring from his body, and in a few seconds the capsule would be a furnace.

He waited no longer, but pulled on the Emergency Release with all his waning strength, bracing himself at the same moment to face the end.

Nothing happened; the lever would not move. He tugged it again and again before he realised that it was hopelessly jammed. There was no easy way out for him, no merciful death as the air gushed from his lungs. It was then, as the true terror of his situation struck home to him, that his nerve finally broke and he began to scream like a trapped animal.

When he heard Captain McClellan’s voice speaking to him, thin but clear, he knew that it must be another hallucination. Yet some last remnant of discipline and self-control checked his screaming; he clenched his teeth and listened to that familiar, commanding voice.

‘Sherrard! Hold on, man! We’ve got a fix on you—but keep shouting!’

‘Here I am!’ he cried. ‘But hurry, for God’s sake! I’m burning!’

Deep down in what was left of his rational mind he realised what had happened. Some feeble ghost of a signal was leaking through the broken stubs of his antennas, and the searchers had heard his screams—as he was hearing their voices. That meant they must be very close indeed, and the knowledge gave him sudden strength.

He stared through the steaming plastic of the dome, looking once more for that impossible mirror in the sky. There it was again—and now he realised that the baffling perspectives of space had tricked his senses. The mirror was not miles away, nor was it huge. It was almost on top of him, and it was moving fast.

He was still shouting when it slid across the face of the rising sun, and its blessed shadow fell upon him like a cool wind that had blown out of the heart of winter, over leagues of snow and ice. Now that it was so close, he recognised it at once; it was merely a large metal-foil radiation screen, no doubt hastily snatched from one of the instrument sites. In the safety of its shadow, his friends had been searching for him.

A heavy-duty, two-man capsule was hovering overhead, holding the glittering shield in one set of arms and reaching for him with the other. Even through the misty dome and the haze of heat that still sapped his senses, he recognised Captain McClellan’s anxious face, looking down at him from the other pod.

So this was what birth was like, for truly he had been reborn. He was too exhausted for gratitude—that would come later—but as he rose from the burning rocks his eyes sought and found the bright star of Earth. ‘Here I am,’ he said silently. ‘I’m coming back.’

Back to enjoy and cherish all the beauties of the world he had thought were lost forever. No—not all of them.

He would never enjoy summer again.

Saturn Rising

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1961

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

Little did I imagine, when I wrote this story in 1960, that within less than two decades the fantastically successful Voyager Missions to the outer Solar System would reveal that the rings of Saturn were far more complex and beautiful than anyone had ever dreamed.

The story has, of course, been dated by the scientific discoveries of the last [four] decades—in particular, we now know that Titan does not have a predominantly methane atmosphere, but one which is mostly nitrogen.

There is another error which I might have corrected at the time. Even if you could observe Saturn from the surface of Titan (which atmospheric haze will probably prevent), you’d never see it ‘rising’. Almost certainly, Titan, like our own Moon, has had its rotation tidally braked, so that it always keeps the same face turned towards its primary. So Saturn remains fixed in Titan’s sky, just as the Earth does in the Moon’s.

Yes, that’s perfectly true. I met Morris Perlman when I was about twenty-eight. I met thousands of people in those days, from presidents downward.

When we got back from Saturn, everybody wanted to see us, and about half the crew took off on lecture tours. I’ve always enjoyed talking (don’t say you haven’t noticed it), but some of my colleagues said they’d rather go to Pluto than face another audience. Some of them did.

My beat was the Midwest, and the first time I ran into Mr Perlman—no one ever called him anything else, certainly never ‘Morris’—was in Chicago. The agency always booked me into good, but not too luxurious, hotels. That suited me; I liked to stay in places where I could come and go as I pleased without running a gauntlet of liveried flunkies, and where I could wear anything within reason without being made to feel a tramp. I see you’re grinning; well, I was only a kid then, and a lot of things have changed…

It’s all a long time ago now, but I must have been lecturing at the University. At any rate, I remember being disappointed because they couldn’t show me the place where Fermi started the first atomic pile—they said that the building had been pulled down forty years before, and there was only a plaque to mark the spot. I stood looking at it for a while, thinking of all that had happened since that far-off day in 1942. I’d been born, for one thing; and atomic power had taken me out to Saturn and back. That was probably something that Fermi and Co. never thought of, when they built their primitive latticework of uranium and graphite.

I was having breakfast in the coffee shop when a slightly built, middle-aged man dropped into the seat on the other side of the table. He nodded a polite ‘Good morning’, then gave a start of surprise as he recognised me. (Of course, he’d planned the encounter, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

‘This is a pleasure’ he said. ‘I was at your lecture last night. How I envied you!’

I gave a rather forced smile; I’m never very sociable at breakfast, and I’d learned to be on my guard against the cranks, bores, and enthusiasts who seemed to regard me as their legitimate prey. Mr Perlman, however, was not a bore—though he was certainly an enthusiast, and I suppose you could call him a crank.

He looked like any average, fairly prosperous businessman, and I assumed that he was a guest like myself. The fact that he had attended my lecture was not surprising; it had been a popular one, open to the public, and of course well advertised over press and radio.

‘Ever since I was a kid,’ said my uninvited companion, ‘Saturn has fascinated me. I know exactly when and how it all started. I must have been about ten years old when I came across those wonderful paintings of Chesley Bonestell’s, showing the planet as it would look from its nine moons. I suppose you’ve seen them?’

‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Though they’re half a century old, no one’s beaten them yet. We had a couple aboard the Endeavour, pinned on the plotting table. I often used to look at the pictures and then compare them with the real thing.’

‘Then you know how I felt, back in the nineteen-fifties. I used to sit for hours trying to grasp the fact that this incredible object, with its silver rings spinning around it, wasn’t just some artist’s dream, but actually existed—that it was a world, in fact, ten times the size of Earth.

‘At that time I never imagined that I could see this wonderful thing for myself; I took it for granted that only the astronomers, with their giant telescopes, could ever look at such sights. But then, when I was about fifteen, I made another discovery—so exciting that I could hardly believe it.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked. By now I’d become reconciled to sharing breakfast; my companion seemed a harmless-enough character, and there was something quite endearing about his obvious enthusiasm.

‘I found that any fool could make a high-powered astronomical telescope in his own kitchen, for a few dollars and a couple of weeks’ work. It was a revelation; like thousands of other kids, I borrowed a copy of Ingalls’ Amateur Telescope Making from the public library, and went ahead. Tell me—have you ever built a telescope of your own?’

‘No: I’m an engineer, not an astronomer. I wouldn’t know how to begin the job.’

‘It’s incredibly simple, if you follow the rules. You start with two discs of glass, about an inch thick. I got mine for fifty cents from a ship chandler’s; they were porthole glasses that were no use because they’d been chipped around the edges. Then you cement one disc to some flat, firm surface—I used an old barrel, standing on end.

‘Next you have to buy several grades of emery powder, starting from coarse, gritty stuff and working down to the finest that’s made. You lay a pinch of the coarsest powder between the two discs, and start rubbing the upper one back and forth with regular strokes. As you do so, you slowly circle around the job.

‘You see what happens? The upper disc gets hollowed out by the cutting action of the emery powder, and as you walk around, it shapes itself into a concave, spherical surface. From time to time you have to change to a finer grade of powder, and make some simple optical tests to check that your curve’s right.

‘Later still, you drop the emery and switch to rouge, until at last you have a smooth, polished surface that you can hardly credit you’ve made yourself. There’s only one more step, though that’s a little tricky. You still have to silver the mirror, and turn it into a good reflector. This means getting some chemicals made up at the drugstore, and doing exactly what the book says.

‘I can still remember the kick I got when the silver film began to spread like magic across the face of my little mirror. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything on Mount Palomar.

‘I fixed it at one end of a wooden plank: there was no need to bother about a telescope tube, though I put a couple of feet of cardboard round the mirror to cut out stray light. For an eyepiece I used a small magnifying lens I’d picked up in a junk store for a few cents. Altogether, I don’t suppose the telescope cost more than five dollars—though that was a lot of money to me when I was a kid.

‘We were living then in a run-down hotel my family owned on Third Avenue. When I’d assembled the telescope I went up on the roof and tried it out, among the jungle of TV antennas that covered every building in those days. It took me a while to get the mirror and eyepiece lined up, but I hadn’t made any mistakes and the thing worked. As an optical instrument it was probably lousy—after all, it was my first attempt—but it magnified at least fifty times and I could hardly wait until nightfall to try it on the stars.

‘I’d checked with the almanac, and knew that Saturn was high in the east after sunset. As soon as it was dark I was up on the roof again, with my crazy contraption of wood and glass propped between two chimneys. It was late fall, but I never noticed the cold, for the sky was full of stars—and they were all mine.

‘I took my time setting the focus as accurately as possible, using the first star that came in to the field. Then I started hunting for Saturn, and soon discovered how hard it was to locate anything in a reflecting telescope that wasn’t properly mounted. But presently the planet shot across the field of view. I nudged the instrument a few inches this way and that—and there it was.

‘It was tiny, but it was perfect. I don’t think I breathed for a minute; I could hardly believe my eyes. After all the pictures, here was the reality. It looked like a toy hanging there in space, with the rings slightly open and tilted toward me. Even now, forty years later, I can remember thinking “It looks so artificial—like something from a Christmas tree!” There was a single bright star to the left of it, and I knew that was Titan.’

He paused, and for a moment we must have shared the same thoughts. For to both of us Titan was no longer merely the largest moon of Saturn—a point of light known only to astronomers. It was the fiercely hostile world upon which Endeavour had landed, and where three of my crew-mates lay in lonely graves, farther from their homes than any of Mankind’s dead had ever rested before.

‘I don’t know how long I stared, straining my eyes and moving the telescope across the sky in jerky steps as Saturn rose above the city. I was a billion miles from New York; but presently New York caught up with me.

‘I told you about our hotel; it belonged to my mother, but my father ran it—not very well. It had been losing money for years, and all through my boyhood there had been continuous financial crises. So I don’t want to blame my father for drinking; he must have been half crazy with worry most of the time. And I had quite forgotten that I was supposed to be helping the clerk at the reception desk…

‘So Dad came looking for me, full of his own cares and knowing nothing about my dreams. He found me stargazing on the roof.

‘He wasn’t a cruel man—he couldn’t have understood the study and patience and care that had gone into my little telescope, or the wonders it had shown me during the short time I had used it. I don’t hate him any more, but I’ll remember all my life the splintering crack of my first and last mirror as it smashed against the brickwork.’

There was nothing I could say. My initial resentment at this interruption had long since changed to curiosity. Already I sensed that there was much more to this story than I’d heard so far, and I’d noticed something else. The waitress was treating us with an exaggerated deference—only a little of which was directed at me.

My companion toyed with the sugar bowl while I waited in silent sympathy. By this time I felt there was some bond between us, though I did not know exactly what it was.

‘I never built another telescope,’ he said. ‘Something else broke, besides that mirror—something in my heart. Anyway, I was much too busy. Two things happened that turned my life upside down. Dad walked out on us, leaving me the head of the family. And then they pulled down the Third Avenue El.’

He must have seen my puzzled look, for he grinned across the table at me.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know about that. But when I was a kid, there was an elevated railroad down the middle of Third. It made the whole area dirty and noisy; the Avenue was a slum district of bars, pawnshops and cheap hotels—like ours. All that changed when the El went; land values shot up, and we were suddenly prosperous. Dad came back quickly enough, but it was too late; I was running the business. Before long I started moving across town—then across country. I wasn’t an absent-minded stargazer any more, and I gave Dad one of my smaller hotels, where he couldn’t do much harm.

‘It’s forty years since I looked at Saturn, but I’ve never forgotten that one glimpse, and last night your photographs brought it all back. I just wanted to say how grateful I am.’

He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out a card.

‘I hope you’ll look me up when you’re in town again; you can be sure I’ll be there if you give any more lectures. Good luck—and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time.’

Then he was gone, almost before I could say a word. I glanced at the card, put it away in my pocket, and finished my breakfast, rather thoughtfully.

When I signed my check on the way out of the coffee shop I asked: ‘Who was that gentleman at my table? The boss?’

The cashier looked at me as if I were mentally retarded.

‘I suppose you could call him that, sir,’ she answered. ‘Of course he owns this hotel, but we’ve never seen him here before. He always stays at the Ambassador, when he’s in Chicago.’

‘And does he own that?’ I said, without too much irony, for I’d already suspected the answer.

‘Why, yes. As well as—’ and she rattled off a whole string of others, including the two biggest hotels in New York.

I was impressed, and also rather amused, for it was now obvious that Mr Perlman had come here with the deliberate intention of meeting me. It seemed a roundabout way of doing it; I knew nothing, then, of his notorious shyness and secretiveness. From the first, he was never shy with me.

Then I forgot about him for five years. (Oh, I should mention that when I asked for my bill, I was told I didn’t have one.) During that five years, I made my second trip.

We knew what to expect this time, and weren’t going completely into the unknown. There were no more worries about fuel, because all we could ever use was waiting for us on Titan; we just had to pump its methane atmosphere into our tanks, and we’d made our plans accordingly. One after another, we visited all the nine moons; and then we went into the rings…

There was little danger, yet it was a nerve-racking experience. The ring system is very thin, you know—only about twenty miles in thickness. We descended into it slowly and cautiously, after having matched its spin so that we were moving at exactly the same speed. It was like stepping onto a carousel a hundred and seventy thousand miles across…

But a ghostly kind of carousel, because the rings aren’t solid and you can look right through them. Close up, in fact, they’re almost invisible; the billions of separate particles that make them up are so widely spaced that all you see in your immediate neighbourhood are occasional small chunks, drifting very slowly past. It’s only when you look into the distance that the countless fragments merge into a continuous sheet, like a hailstorm that sweeps around Saturn forever.

That’s not my phrase, but it’s a good one. For when we brought our first piece of genuine Saturnian ring into the air lock, it melted down in a few minutes into a pool of muddy water. Some people think it spoils the magic to know that the rings—or ninety per cent of them—are made of ordinary ice. But that’s a stupid attitude; they would be just as wonderful, and just as beautiful, if they were made of diamond.

When I got back to Earth, in the first year of the new century, I started off on another lecture tour—only a short one, for now I had a family and wanted to see as much of it as possible. This time I ran into Mr Perlman in New York, when I was speaking at Columbia and showing our movie, ‘Exploring Saturn.’ (A misleading title, that, since the nearest we’d been to the planet itself was about twenty thousand miles. No one dreamed, in those days, that men would ever go down into the turbulent slush which is the closest thing Saturn has to a surface.)

Mr Perlman was waiting for me after the lecture. I didn’t recognise him, for I’d met about a million people since our last encounter. But when he gave his name, it all came back, so clearly that I realised he must have made a deep impression on my mind.

Somehow he got me away from the crowd; though he disliked meeting people in the mass, he had an extraordinary knack of dominating any group when he found it necessary—and then clearing out before his victims knew what had happened. Though I saw him in action scores of times, I never knew exactly how he did it.

At any rate, half an hour later we were having a superb dinner in an exclusive restaurant (his, of course). It was a wonderful meal, especially after the chicken and ice cream of the lecture circuit, but he made me pay for it. Metaphorically, I mean.

Now all the facts and photos gathered by the two expeditions to Saturn were available to everyone, in hundreds of reports and books and popular articles. Mr Perlman seemed to have read all the material that wasn’t too technical; what he wanted from me was something different. Even then, I put his interest down to that of a lonely, aging man, trying to recapture a dream that had been lost in youth. I was right; but that was only a fraction of the whole picture.

He was after something that all the reports and articles failed to give. What did it feel like, he wanted to know, to wake up in the morning and see that great, golden globe with its scudding cloud belts dominating the sky? And the rings themselves—what did they do to your mind when they were so close that they filled the heavens from end to end?

You want a poet, I said—not an engineer. But I’ll tell you this; however long you look at Saturn, and fly in and out among its moons, you can never quite believe it. Every so often you find yourself thinking: ‘It’s all a dream—a thing like that can’t be real.’ And you go to the nearest view-port—and there it is, taking your breath away.

You must remember that, altogether apart from our nearness, we were able to look at the rings from angles and vantage points that are quite impossible from Earth, where you always see them turned toward the sun. We could fly into their shadow, and then they would no longer gleam like silver—they would be a faint haze, a bridge of smoke across the stars.

And most of the time we could see the shadow of Saturn lying across the full width of the rings, eclipsing them so completely that it seemed as if a great bite had been taken out of them. It worked the other way, too; on the day side of the planet, there would always be the shadow of the rings running like a dusky band parallel to the Equator and not far from it.

Above all—though we did this only a few times—we could rise high above either pole of the planet and look down upon the whole stupendous system, so that it was spread out in plan beneath us. Then we could see that instead of the four visible from Earth, there were at least a dozen separate rings, merging one into the other. When we saw this, our skipper made a remark that I’ve never forgotten. ‘This,’ he said—and there wasn’t a trace of flippancy in the words—‘is where the angels have parked their halos.’

All this, and a lot more, I told Mr Perlman in that little but oh-so-expensive restaurant just south of Central Park. When I’d finished, he seemed very pleased, though he was silent for several minutes. Then he said, about as causally as you might ask the time of the next train at your local station: ‘Which would be the best satellite for a tourist resort?’

When the words got through to me, I nearly choked on my hundred-year-old brandy. Then I said, very patiently and politely (for after all, I’d had a wonderful dinner): ‘Listen, Mr Perlman. You know as well as I do that Saturn is nearly a billion miles from Earth—more than that, in fact, when we’re on opposite sides of the sun. Someone worked out that our round-trip tickets averaged seven and a half million dollars apiece—and, believe me, there was no first-class accommodation on Endeavour I or II. Anyway, no matter how much money he had, no one could book a passage to Saturn. Only scientists and space crews will be going there, for as far ahead as anyone can imagine.’

I could see that my words had absolutely no effect; he merely smiled, as if he knew some secret hidden from me.

‘What you say is true enough now,’ he answered, ‘but I’ve studied history. And I understand people—that’s my business. Let me remind you of a few facts.

‘Two or three centuries ago, almost all the world’s great tourist centres and beauty spots were as far away from civilisation as Saturn is today. What did—oh, Napoleon, let’s say—know about the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Hawaii, Mount Everest? And look at the South Pole; it was reached for the first time when my father was a boy—but there’s been a hotel there for the whole of your lifetime.

‘Now it’s starting all over again. You can appreciate only the problems and difficulties, because you’re too close to them. Whatever they are, men will overcome them, as they’ve always done in the past.

‘For wherever there’s something strange or beautiful or novel, people will want to see it. The rings of Saturn are the greatest spectacle in the known universe: I’ve always guessed so, and now you’ve convinced me. Today it takes a fortune to reach them, and the men who go there must risk their lives. So did the first men who flew—but now there are a million passengers in the air every second of the day and night.

‘The same thing is going to happen in space. It won’t happen in ten years, maybe not in twenty. But twenty-five is all it took, remember, before the first commercial flights started to the moon. I don’t think it will be as long for Saturn…

‘I won’t be around to see it—but when it happens, I want people to remember me. So—where should we build?’

I still thought he was crazy, but at last I was beginning to understand what made him tick. And there was no harm in humouring him, so I gave the matter careful thought.

‘Mimas is too close,’ I said, ‘and so are Enceladus and Tethys.’ (I don’t mind telling you, those names were tough after all that brandy.) ‘Saturn just fills the sky, and you think it’s falling on top of you. Besides, they aren’t solid enough—they’re nothing but overgrown snowballs. Dione and Rhea are better—you get a magnificent view from both of them. But all these inner moons are so tiny; even Rhea is only eight hundred miles across, and the others are much smaller.

‘I don’t think there’s any real argument; it will have to be Titan. That’s a man-sized satellite—it’s a lot bigger than our moon, and very nearly as large as Mars. There’s a reasonable gravity too—about a fifth of Earth’s—so your guests won’t be floating all over the place. And it will always be a major refuelling point because of its methane atmosphere, which should be an important factor in your calculations. Every ship that goes out to Saturn will touch down there.’

‘And the outer moons?’

‘Oh, Hyperion, Japetus, and Phoebe are much too far away. You have to look hard to see the rings at all from Phoebe! Forget about them. Stick to good old Titan. Even if the temperature is two hundred below zero, and ammonia snow isn’t the sort of stuff you’d want to ski on.’

He listened to me very carefully, and if he thought I was making fun of his impractical, unscientific notions he gave no sign of it. We parted soon afterward—I don’t remember anything more of that dinner—and then it must have been fifteen years before we met again. He had no further use for me in all that time; but when he wanted me, he called.

I see now what he had been waiting for; his vision had been clearer than mine. He couldn’t have guessed, of course, that the rocket would go the way of the steam engine within less than a century—but he knew something better would come along, and I think he financed Saunderson’s early work on the Paragravity Drive. But it was not until they started building fusion plants that could warm up a hundred square miles of a world as cold as Pluto that he got in contact with me again.

He was a very old man, and dying. They told me how rich he was, and I could hardly believe it. Not until he showed me the elaborate plans and the beautiful models his experts had prepared with such remarkable lack of publicity.

He sat in his wheel chair like a wrinkled mummy, watching my face as I studied the models and blueprints. Then he said: ‘Captain, I have a job for you…’

So here I am. It’s just like running a spaceship, of course—many of the technical problems are identical. And by this time I’d be too old to command a ship, so I’m very grateful to Mr Perlman.

There goes the gong. If the ladies are ready, I suggest we walk down to dinner through the Observation Lounge.

Even after all these years, I still like to watch Saturn rising—and tonight it’s almost full.

Death and the Senator

First published in Analog, May 1961

Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

Washington had never looked lovelier in the spring; and this was the last spring, thought Senator Steelman bleakly, that he would ever see. Even now, despite all that Dr Jordan had told him, he could not fully accept the truth. In the past there had always been a way of escape; no defeat had been final. When men had betrayed him, he had discarded them—even ruined them, as a warning to others. But now the betrayal was within himself; already, it seemed, he could feel the laboured beating of the heart that would soon be stilled. No point in planning now for the Presidential election of 1976; he might not even live to see the nominations…

It was an end of dreams and ambition, and he could not console himself with the knowledge that for all men these must end someday. For him it was too soon; he thought of Cecil Rhodes, who had always been one of his heroes, crying ‘So much to do—so little time to do it in!’ as he died before his fiftieth birthday. He was already older than Rhodes, and had done far less.

The car was taking him away from the Capitol; there was symbolism in that, and he tried not to dwell upon it. Now he was abreast of the New Smithsonian—that vast complex of museums he had never had time to visit, though he had watched it spread along the Mall throughout the years he had been in Washington. How much he had missed, he told himself bitterly, in his relentless pursuit of power. The whole universe of art and culture had remained almost closed to him, and that was only part of the price that he had paid. He had become a stranger to his family and to those who were once his friends. Love had been sacrificed on the altar of ambition, and the sacrifice had been in vain. Was there anyone in all the world who would weep at his departure?

Yes, there was. The feeling of utter desolation relaxed its grip upon his soul. As he reached for the phone, he felt ashamed that he had to call the office to get this number, when his mind was cluttered with memories of so many less important things.

(There was the White House, almost dazzling in the spring sunshine. For the first time in his life he did not give it a second glance. Already it belonged to another world—a world that would never concern him again.)

The car circuit had no vision, but he did not need it to sense Irene’s mild surprise—and her still milder pleasure.

‘Hello, Renee—how are you all?’

‘Fine, Dad. When are we going to see you?’

It was the polite formula his daughter always used on the rare occasions when he called. And invariably, except at Christmas or birthdays, his answer was a vague promise to drop around at some indefinite future date.

‘I was wondering,’ he said slowly, almost apologetically, ‘if I could borrow the children for an afternoon. It’s a long time since I’ve taken them out, and I felt like getting away from the office.’

‘But of course,’ Irene answered, her voice warming with pleasure. ‘They’ll love it. When would you like them?’

‘Tomorrow would be fine. I could call around twelve, and take them to the Zoo or the Smithsonian, or anywhere else they felt like visiting.’

Now she was really startled, for she knew well enough that he was one of the busiest men in Washington, with a schedule planned weeks in advance. She would be wondering what had happened; he hoped she would not guess the truth. No reason why she should, for not even his secretary knew of the stabbing pains that had driven him to seek this long-overdue medical checkup.

‘That would be wonderful. They were talking about you only yesterday, asking when they’d see you again.’

His eyes misted, and he was glad that Renee could not see him.

‘I’ll be there at noon,’ he said hastily, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. ‘My love to you all.’ He switched off before she could answer, and relaxed against the upholstery with a sigh of relief. Almost upon impulse, without conscious planning, he had taken the first step in the reshaping of his life. Though his own children were lost to him, a bridge across the generations remained intact. If he did nothing else, he must guard and strengthen it in the months that were left.

Taking two lively and inquisitive children through the natural-history building was not what the doctor would have ordered, but it was what he wanted to do. Joey and Susan had grown so much since their last meeting, and it required both physical and mental alertness to keep up with them. No sooner had they entered the rotunda than they broke away from him, and scampered toward the enormous elephant dominating the marble hall.

‘What’s that?’ cried Joey.

‘It’s an elephant, stupid,’ answered Susan with all the crushing superiority of her seven years.

‘I know it’s an effelant,’ retorted Joey. ‘But what’s its name?’

Senator Steelman scanned the label, but found no assistance there. This was one occasion when the risky adage ‘Sometimes wrong, never uncertain’ was a safe guide to conduct.

‘He was called—er—Jumbo,’ he said hastily. ‘Just look at those tusks!’

‘Did he ever get toothache?’

‘Oh no.’

‘Then how did he clean his teeth? Ma says that if I don’t clean mine…’

Steelman saw where the logic of this was leading, and thought it best to change the subject.

‘There’s a lot more to see inside. Where do you want to start—birds, snakes, fish, mammals?’

‘Snakes!’ clamoured Susan. ‘I wanted to keep one in a box, but Daddy said no. Do you think he’d change his mind if you asked him?’

‘What’s a mammal?’ asked Joey, before Steelman could work out an answer to that.

‘Come along,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll show you.’

As they moved through the halls and galleries, the children darting from one exhibit to another, he felt at peace with the world. There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world. As he stood before the monstrous bones of Diplodocus (the children for once awed and silent), he felt the winds of Eternity blowing through his soul. He could no longer take so seriously the gnawing of ambition, the belief that he was the man the nation needed. What nation, if it came to that? A mere two centuries ago this summer, the Declaration of Independence had been signed; but this old American had lain in the Utah rocks for a hundred million years…

He was tired when they reached the Hall of Oceanic Life, with its dramatic reminder that Earth still possessed animals greater than any that the past could show. The ninety-foot blue whale plunging into the ocean, and all the other swift hunters of the sea, brought back memories of hours he had once spent on a tiny, glistening deck with a white sail billowing above him. That was another time when he had known contentment, listening to the swish of water past the prow, and the sighing of the wind through the rigging. He had not sailed for thirty years; this was another of the world’s pleasures he had put aside.

‘I don’t like fish,’ complained Susan. ‘When do we get to the snakes?’

‘Presently,’ he said. ‘But what’s the hurry? There’s plenty of time.’

The words slipped out before he realised it. He checked his step, while the children ran on ahead. Then he smiled, without bitterness. For in a sense, it was true enough. There was plenty of time. Each day, each hour could be a universe of experience, if one used it properly. In the last weeks of his life, he would begin to live.

As yet, no one at the office suspected anything. Even his outing with the children had not caused much surprise; he had done such things before, suddenly cancelling his appointments and leaving his staff to pick up the pieces. The pattern of his behaviour had not yet changed, but in a few days it would be obvious to all his associates that something had happened. He owed it to them—and to the party—to break the news as soon as possible; there were, however, many personal decisions he had to make first, which he wished to settle in his own mind before he began the vast unwinding of his affairs.

There was another reason for his hesitancy. During his career, he had seldom lost a fight, and in the cut and thrust of political life he had given quarter to none. Now, facing his ultimate defeat, he dreaded the sympathy and the condolences that his many enemies would hasten to shower upon him. The attitude, he knew, was a foolish one—a remnant of his stubborn pride which was too much a part of his personality to vanish even under the shadow of death.

He carried his secret from committee room to White House to Capitol, and through all the labyrinths of Washington society, for more than two weeks. It was the finest performance of his career, but there was no one to appreciate it. At the end of that time he had completed his plan of action; it remained only to dispatch a few letters he had written in his own hand, and to call his wife.

The office located her, not without difficulty, in Rome. She was still beautiful, he thought, as her features swam on to the screen; she would have made a fine First Lady, and that would have been some compensation for the lost years. As far as he knew, she had looked forward to the prospect; but had he ever really understood what she wanted?

‘Hello, Martin,’ she said, ‘I was expecting to hear from you. I suppose you want me to come back.’

‘Are you willing to?’ he asked quietly. The gentleness of his voice obviously surprised her.

‘I’d be a fool to say no, wouldn’t I? But if they don’t elect you, I want to go my own way again. You must agree to that.’

‘They won’t elect me. They won’t even nominate me. You’re the first to know this, Diana. In six months, I shall be dead.’

The directness was brutal, but it had a purpose. That fraction-of-a-second delay while the radio waves flashed up to the communication satellites and back again to Earth had never seemed so long. For once, he had broken through the beautiful mask. Her eyes widened with disbelief, her hand flew to her lips.

‘You’re joking!’

‘About this? It’s true enough. My heart’s worn out. Dr Jordan told me, a couple of weeks ago. It’s my own fault, of course, but let’s not go into that.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been taking out the children: I wondered what had happened.’

He might have guessed that Irene would have talked with her mother. It was a sad reflection on Martin Steelman, if so commonplace a fact as showing an interest in his own grandchildren could cause curiosity.

‘Yes,’ he admitted frankly. ‘I’m afraid I left it a little late. Now I’m trying to make up for lost time. Nothing else seems very important.’

In silence, they looked into each other’s eyes across the curve of the Earth, and across the empty desert of the dividing years. Then Diana answered, a little unsteadily, ‘I’ll start packing right away.’

Now that the news was out, he felt a great sense of relief. Even the sympathy of his enemies was not as hard to accept as he had feared. For overnight, indeed, he had no enemies. Men who had not spoken to him in years, except with invective, sent messages whose sincerity could not be doubted. Ancient quarrels evaporated, or turned out to be founded on misunderstandings. It was a pity that one had to die to learn these things…

He also learned that, for a man of affairs, dying was a full-time job. There were successors to appoint, legal and financial mazes to untangle, committee and state business to wind up. The work of an energetic lifetime, could not be terminated suddenly, as one switches off an electric light. It was astonishing how many responsibilities he had acquired, and how difficult it was to divest himself of them. He had never found it easy to delegate power (a fatal flaw, many critics had said, in a man who hoped to be Chief Executive), but now he must do so, before it slipped forever from his hands.

It was as if a great clock was running down, and there was no one to rewind it. As he gave away his books, read and destroyed old letters, closed useless accounts and files, dictated final instructions, and wrote farewell notes, he sometimes felt a sense of complete unreality. There was no pain; he could never have guessed that he did not have years of active life ahead of him. Only a few lines on a cardiogram lay like a roadblock across his future—or like a curse, written in some strange language the doctors alone could read.

Almost every day now Diana, Irene, or her husband brought the children to see him. In the past he had never felt at ease with Bill, but that, he knew, had been his own fault. You could not expect a son-in-law to replace a son, and it was unfair to blame Bill because he had not been cast in the image of Martin Steelman, Jr. Bill was a person in his own right; he had looked after Irene, made her happy, and fathered her children. That he lacked ambition was a flaw—if flaw indeed it was—that the Senator could at last forgive.

He could even think, without pain or bitterness, of his own son, who had travelled this road before him and now lay, one cross among many, in the United Nations cemetery at Capetown. He had never visited Martin’s grave; in the days when he had the time, white men were not popular in what was left of South Africa. Now he could go if he wished, but he was uncertain if it would be fair to harrow Diana with such a mission. His own memories would not trouble him much longer, but she would be left with hers.

Yet he would like to go, and felt it was his duty. Moreover, it would be a last treat for the children. To them it would be only a holiday in a strange land, without any tinge of sorrow for an uncle they had never known. He had started to make the arrangements when, for the second time within a month, his whole world was turned upside down.

Even now, a dozen or more visitors would be waiting for him each morning when he arrived at his office. Not as many as in the old days, but still a sizable crowd. He had never imagined, however, that Dr Harkness would be among them.

The sight of that thin, gangling figure made him momentarily break his stride. He felt his cheeks flush, his pulse quicken at the memory of ancient battles across committee-room tables, of angry exchanges that had reverberated along the myriad channels of the ether. Then he relaxed; as far as he was concerned, all that was over.

Harkness rose to his feet, a little awkwardly, as he approached. Senator Steelman knew that initial embarrassment—he had seen it so often in the last few weeks. Everyone he now met was automatically at a disadvantage, always on the alert to avoid the one subject that was taboo.

‘Well, Doctor,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise—I never expected to see you here.’

He could not resist that little jab, and derived some satisfaction at watching it go home. But it was free from bitterness, as the other’s smile acknowledged.

‘Senator,’ replied Harkness, in a voice that was pitched so low that he had to lean forward to hear it, ‘I’ve some extremely important information for you. Can we speak alone for a few minutes? It won’t take long.’

Steelman nodded; he had his own ideas of what was important now, and felt only a mild curiosity as to why the scientist had come to see him. The man seemed to have changed a good deal since their last encounter, seven years ago. He was much more assured and self-confident, and had lost the nervous mannerisms that had helped to make him such an unconvincing witness.

‘Senator,’ he began, when they were alone in the private office, ‘I’ve some news that may be quite a shock to you. I believe that you can be cured.’

Steelman slumped heavily in his chair. This was the one thing he had never expected; from the first, he had not encumbered himself with the burden of vain hopes. Only a fool fought against the inevitable, and he had accepted his fate.

For a moment he could not speak; then he looked up at his old adversary and gasped: ‘Who told you that? All my doctors—’

‘Never mind them; it’s not their fault they’re ten years behind the times. Look at this.’

‘What does it mean? I can’t read Russian.’

‘It’s the latest issue of the USSR Journal of Space Medicine. It arrived a few days ago, and we did the usual routine translation. This note here—the one. I’ve marked—refers to some recent work at the Mechnikov Station.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t know? Why, that’s their Satellite Hospital, the one they’ve built just below the Great Radiation Belt.’

‘Go on,’ said Steelman, in a voice that was suddenly dry and constricted. ‘I’d forgotten they’d called it that.’ He had hoped to end his life in peace, but now the past had come back to haunt him.

‘Well, the note itself doesn’t say much, but you can read a lot between the lines. It’s one of those advance hints that scientists put out before they have time to write a full-fledged paper, so they can claim priority later. The title is: “Therapeutic Effects of Zero Gravity on Circulatory Diseases”. What they’ve done is to induce heart disease artificially in rabbits and hamsters, and then take them up to the space station. In orbit, of course, nothing has any weight; the heart and muscles have practically no work to do. And the result is exactly what I tried to tell you, years ago. Even extreme cases can be arrested, and many can be cured.’

The tiny, panelled office that had been the centre of his world, the scene of so many conferences, the birthplace of so many plans, became suddenly unreal. Memory was much more vivid: he was back again at those hearings, in the fall of 1969, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s first decade of activity had been under review—and, frequently, under fire.

He had never been chairman of the Senate Committee on Astronautics, but he had been its most vocal and effective member. It was here that he had made his reputation as a guardian of the public purse, as a hardheaded man who could not be bamboozled by utopian scientific dreamers. He had done a good job; from that moment, he had never been far from the headlines. It was not that he had any particular feeling for space and science, but he knew a live issue when he saw one. Like a tape-recorder unrolling in his mind, it all came back…

‘Dr Harkness, you are Technical Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?’

‘That is correct.’

‘I have here the figures for NASA’s expenditure over the period 1959–69; they are quite impressive. At the moment the total is $82,547,450,000, and the estimate for fiscal 69–70 is well over ten billions. Perhaps you could give us some indication of the return we can expect from all this.’

‘I’ll be glad to do so, Senator.’

That was how it had started, on a firm but not unfriendly note. The hostility had crept in later. That it was unjustified, he had known at the time; any big organisation had weaknesses and failures, and one which literally aimed at the stars could never hope for more than partial success. From the beginning, it had been realised that the conquest of space would be at least as costly in lives and treasure as the conquest of the air. In ten years, almost a hundred men had died—on Earth, in space, and upon the barren surface of the Moon. Now that the urgency of the early sixties was over, the public was asking ‘Why?’ Steelman was shrewd enough to see himself as mouthpiece for those questioning voices. His performance had been cold and calculated; it was convenient to have a scapegoat, and Dr Harkness was unlucky enough to be cast for the role.

‘Yes, Doctor, I understand all the benefits we’ve received from space research in the way of improved communications and weather forecasting, and I’m sure everyone appreciates them. But almost all this work has been done with automatic, unmanned vehicles. What I’m worried about—what many people are worried about—is the mounting expense of the Man-in-Space programme, and its very marginal utility. Since the original Dyna-Soar and Apollo projects, almost a decade ago, we’ve shot billions of dollars into space. And with what result? So that a mere handful of men can spend a few uncomfortable hours outside the atmosphere, achieving nothing that television cameras and automatic equipment couldn’t do—much better and cheaper. And the lives that have been lost! None of us will forget those screams we heard coming over the radio when the X-21 burned up on reentry. What right have we to send men to such deaths?’

He could still remember the hushed silence in the committee chamber when he had finished. His questions were very reasonable ones, and deserved to be answered. What was unfair was the rhetorical manner in which he had framed them and, above all, the fact that they were aimed at a man who could not answer them effectively. Steelman would not have tried such tactics on a von Braun or a Rickover; they would have given him at least as good as they received. But Harkness was no orator; if he had deep personal feelings, he kept them to himself. He was a good scientist, an able administrator—and a poor witness. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel. The reporters had loved it; he never knew which of them coined the nickname ‘Hapless Harkness’.

‘Now this plan of yours, Doctor, for a fifty-man space laboratory—how much did you say it would cost?’

‘I’ve already told you—just under one and a half billions.’

‘And the annual maintenance?’

‘Not more than $250,000,000.’

‘When we consider what’s happened to previous estimates, you will forgive us if we look upon these figures with some scepticism. But even assuming that they are right, what will we get for the money?’

‘We will be able to establish our first large-scale research station in space. So far, we have had to do our experimenting in cramped quarters aboard unsuitable vehicles, usually when they were engaged on some other mission. A permanent, manned satellite laboratory is essential. Without it, further progress is out of the question. Astrobiology can hardly get started—’

‘Astro what?’

‘Astrobiology—the study of living organisms in space. The Russians really started it when they sent up the dog Laika in Sputnik II and they’re still ahead of us in this field. But no one’s done any serious work on insects or invertebrates—in fact, on any animals except dogs, mice, and monkeys.’

‘I see. Would I be correct in saying that you would like funds for building a zoo in space?’

The laughter in the committee room had helped to kill the project. And it had helped, Senator Steelman now realised, to kill him.

He had only himself to blame, for Dr Harkness had tried, in his ineffectual way, to outline the benefits that a space laboratory might bring. He had particularly stressed the medical aspects, promising nothing but pointing out the possibilities. Surgeons, he had suggested, would be able to develop new techniques in an environment where the organs had no weight; men might live longer, freed from the wear and tear of gravity, for the strain on heart and muscles would be enormously reduced. Yes, he had mentioned the heart; but that had been of no interest to Senator Steelman—healthy, and ambitious, and anxious to make good copy…

‘Why have you come to tell me this?’ he said dully. ‘Couldn’t you let me die in peace?’

‘That’s the point,’ said Harkness impatiently. ‘There’s no need to give up hope.’

‘Because the Russians have cured some hamsters and rabbits?’

‘They’ve done much more than that. The paper I showed you only quoted the preliminary results; it’s already a year out of date. They don’t want to raise false hopes, so they are keeping as quiet as possible.’

‘How do you know this?’

Harkness looked surprised.

‘Why, I called Professor Stanyukovitch, my opposite number. It turned out that he was up on the Mechnikov Station, which proves how important they consider this work. He’s an old friend of mine, and I took the liberty of mentioning your case.’

The dawn of hope, after its long absence, can be as painful as its departure. Steelman found it hard to breathe and for a dreadful moment he wondered if the final attack had come. But it was only excitement; the constriction in his chest relaxed, the ringing in his ears faded away, and he heard Dr Harkness’s voice saying: ‘He wanted to know if you could come to Astrograd right away, so I said I’d ask you. If you can make it, there’s a flight from New York at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.’

Tomorrow he had promised to take the children to the Zoo; it would be the first time he had let them down. The thought gave him a sharp stab of guilt, and it required almost an effort of will to answer: ‘I can make it.’

He saw nothing of Moscow during the few minutes that the big intercontinental ramjet fell down from the stratosphere. The view-screens were switched off during the descent, for the sight of the ground coming straight up as a ship fell vertically on its sustaining jets was highly disconcerting to passengers.

At Moscow he changed to a comfortable but old-fashioned turboprop, and as he flew eastward into the night he had his first real opportunity for reflection. It was a very strange question to ask himself, but was he altogether glad that the future was no longer wholly certain? His life, which a few hours ago had seemed so simple, had suddenly become complex again, as it opened out once more into possibilities he had learned to put aside. Dr Johnson had been right when he said that nothing settles a man’s mind more wonderfully than the knowledge that he will be hanged in the morning. For the converse was certainly true—nothing unsettled it so much as the thought of a reprieve.

He was asleep when they touched down at Astrograd, the space capital of the USSR. When the gentle impact of the landing shook him awake, for a moment he could not imagine where he was. Had he dreamed that he was flying halfway around the world in search of life? No; it was not a dream, but it might well be a wild-goose chase.

Twelve hours later, he was still waiting for the answer. The last instrument reading had been taken; the spots of light on the cardiograph display had ceased their fateful dance. The familiar routine of the medical examination and the gentle, competent voices of the doctors and nurses had done much to relax his mind. And it was very restful in the softly lit reception room, where the specialists had asked him to wait while they conferred together. Only the Russian magazines, and a few portraits of somewhat hirsute pioneers of Soviet medicine, reminded him that he was no longer in his own country.

He was not the only patient. About a dozen men and women, of all ages, were sitting around the wall, reading magazines and trying to appear at ease. There was no conversation, no attempt to catch anyone’s eye. Every soul in this room was in his private limbo, suspended between life and death. Though they were linked together by a common misfortune, the link did not extend to communication. Each seemed as cut off from the rest of the human race as if he was already speeding through the cosmic gulfs where lay his only hope.

But in the far corner of the room, there was an exception. A young couple—neither could have been more than twenty-five—were huddling together in such desperate misery that at first Steelman found the spectacle annoying. No matter how bad their own problems, he told himself severely, people should be more considerate. They should hide their emotions—especially in a place like this, where they might upset others.

His annoyance quickly turned to pity, for no heart can remain untouched for long at the sight of simple, unselfish love in deep distress. As the minutes dripped away in a silence broken only by the rustling of papers and the scraping of chairs, his pity grew almost to an obsession.

What was their story, he wondered? The boy had sensitive, intelligent features; he might have been an artist, a scientist, a musician—there was no way of telling. The girl was pregnant; she had one of those homely peasant faces so common among Russian women. She was far from beautiful, but sorrow and love had given her features a luminous sweetness. Steelman found it hard to take his eyes from her—for somehow, though there was not the slightest physical resemblance, she reminded him of Diana. Thirty years ago, as they had walked from the church together, he had seen that same glow in the eyes of his wife. He had almost forgotten it; was the fault his, or hers, that it had faded so soon?

Without any warning, his chair vibrated beneath him. A swift, sudden tremor had swept through the building, as if a giant hammer had smashed against the ground, many miles away. An earthquake? Steelman wondered; then he remembered where he was, and started counting seconds.

He gave up when he reached sixty; presumably the soundproofing was so good that the slower, air-borne noise had not reached him, and only the shock wave through the ground recorded the fact that a thousand tons had just leapt into the sky. Another minute passed before he heard, distant but clear, a sound as of a thunderstorm raging below the edge of the world. It was even more miles away than he had dreamed; what the noise must be like at the launching site was beyond imagination.

Yet that thunder would not trouble him, he knew, when he also rose into the sky; the speeding rocket would leave it far behind. Nor would the thrust of acceleration be able to touch his body, as it rested in its bath of warm water—more comfortable even than this deeply padded chair.

That distant rumble was still rolling back from the edge of space when the door of the waiting room opened and the nurse beckoned to him. Though he felt many eyes following him, he did not look back as he walked out to receive his sentence.

The news services tried to get in contact with him all the way back from Moscow, but he refused to accept the calls. ‘Say I’m sleeping and mustn’t be disturbed,’ he told the stewardess. He wondered who had tipped them off, and felt annoyed at this invasion of his privacy. Yet privacy was something he had avoided for years, and had learned to appreciate only in the last few weeks. He could not blame the reporters and commentators if they assumed that he had reverted to type.

They were waiting for him when the ramjet touched down at Washington. He knew most of them by name, and some were old friends, genuinely glad to hear the news that had raced ahead of him.

‘What does it feel like, Senator,’ said Macauley, of the Times, ‘to know you’re back in harness? I take it that it’s true—the Russians can cure you?’

‘They think they can,’ he answered cautiously. ‘This is a new field of medicine, and no one can promise anything.’

‘When do you leave for space?’

‘Within the week, as soon as I’ve settled some affairs here.’

‘And when will you be back—if it works?’

‘That’s hard to say. Even if everything goes smoothly, I’ll be up there at least six months.’

Involuntarily, he glanced at the sky. At dawn or sunset—even during the daytime, if one knew where to look—the Mechnikov Station was a spectacular sight, more brilliant than any of the stars. But there were now so many satellites of which this was true that only an expert could tell one from another.

‘Six months,’ said a newsman thoughtfully. ‘That means you’ll be out of the picture for seventy-six.’

‘But nicely in it for 1980,’ said another.

‘And 1984,’ added a third. There was a general laugh; people were already making jokes about 1984, which had once seemed so far in the future, but would soon be a date no different from any other… it was hoped.

The ears and the microphones were waiting for his reply. As he stood at the foot of the ramp, once more the focus of attention and curiosity, he felt the old excitement stirring in his veins. What a comeback it would be, to return from space a new man! It would give him a glamour that no other candidate could match; there was something Olympian, almost godlike, about the prospect. Already he found himself trying to work it into his election slogans…

‘Give me time to make my plans,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take me a while to get used to this. But I promise you a statement before I leave Earth.’

Before I leave Earth. Now, there was a fine, dramatic phrase. He was still savouring its rhythm with his mind when he saw Diana coming toward him from the airport buildings.

Already she had changed, as he himself was changing; in her eyes was a wariness and reserve that had not been there two days ago. It said, as clearly as any words: ‘Is it going to happen, all over again?’ Though the day was warm, he felt suddenly cold, as if he had caught a chill on those far Siberian plains.

But Joey and Susan were unchanged, as they ran to greet him. He caught them up in his arms, and buried his face in their hair, so that the cameras would not see the tears that had started from his eyes. As they clung to him in the innocent, unselfconscious love of childhood, he knew what his choice would have to be.

They alone had known him when he was free from the itch for power; that was the way they must remember him, if they remembered him at all.

‘Your conference call, Mr Steelman,’ said his secretary. ‘I’m routing it on to your private screen.’

He swivelled round in his chair and faced the grey panel on the wall. As he did so, it split into two vertical sections. On the right half was a view of an office much like his own, and only a few miles away. But on the left—

Professor Stanyukovitch, lightly dressed in shorts and singlet, was floating in mid-air a good foot above his seat. He grabbed it when he saw that he had company, pulled himself down, and fastened a webbed belt around his waist. Behind him were ranged banks of communications equipment; and behind those, Steelman knew, was space.

Dr Harkness spoke first, from the right-hand screen.

‘We were expecting to hear from you, Senator. Professor Stanyukovitch tells me that everything is ready.’

‘The next supply ship,’ said the Russian, ‘comes up in two days. It will be taking me back to Earth, but I hope to see you before I leave the station.’

His voice was curiously high-pitched, owing to the thin oxyhelium atmosphere he was breathing. Apart from that, there was no sense of distance, no background of interference. Though Stanyukovitch was thousands of miles away, and racing through space at four miles a second, he might have been in the same office. Steelman could even hear the faint whirring of electric motors from the equipment racks behind him.

‘Professor,’ answered Steelman, ‘there are a few things I’d like to ask before I go.’

‘Certainly.’

Now he could tell that Stanyukovitch was a long way off. There was an appreciable time lag before his reply arrived; the station must be above the far side of the Earth.

‘When I was at Astrograd, I noticed many other patients at the clinic. I was wondering—on what basis do you select those for treatment?’

This time the pause was much greater than the delay due to the sluggish speed of radio waves. Then Stanyukovitch answered: ‘Why, those with the best chance of responding.’

‘But your accommodation must be very limited. You must have many other candidates besides myself.’

‘I don’t quite see the point—’ interrupted Dr Harkness, a little too anxiously.

Steelman swung his eyes to the right-hand screen. It was quite difficult to recognise, in the man staring back at him, the witness who had squirmed beneath his needling only a few years ago. That experience had tempered Harkness, had given him his baptism in the art of Politics. Steelman had taught him much, and he had applied his hard-won knowledge.

His motives had been obvious from the first. Harkness would have been less than human if he did not relish this sweetest of revenges, this triumphant vindication of his faith. And as Space Administration Director, he was well aware that half his budget battles would be over when all the world knew that a potential President of the United States was in a Russian space hospital… because his own country did not possess one.

‘Dr Harkness,’ said Steelman gently, ‘this is my affair. I’m still waiting for your answer, Professor.’

Despite the issues involved, he was quite enjoying this. The two scientists, of course, were playing for identical stakes. Stanyukovitch had his problems too; Steelman could guess the discussions that had taken place at Astrograd and Moscow, and the eagerness with which the Soviet astronauts had grasped this opportunity—which, it must be admitted, they had richly earned.

It was an ironic situation, unimaginable only a dozen years before. Here were NASA and the USSR Commission of Astronautics working hand in hand, using him as a pawn for their mutual advantage. He did not resent this, for in their place he would have done the same. But he had no wish to be a pawn; he was an individual who still had some control of his own destiny.

‘It’s quite true,’ said Stanyukovitch, very reluctantly, ‘that we can only take a limited number of patients here in Mechnikov. In any case, the station’s a research laboratory, not a hospital.’

‘How many?’ asked Steelman relentlessly.

‘Well—fewer than ten,’ admitted Stanyukovitch, still more unwillingly.

It was an old problem, of course, though he had never imagined that it would apply to him. From the depths of memory there flashed a newspaper item he had come across long ago. When penicillin had been first discovered, it was so rare that if both Churchill and Roosevelt had been dying for lack of it, only one could have been treated…

Fewer than ten. He had seen a dozen waiting at Astrograd, and how many were there in the whole world? Once again, as it had done so often in the last few days, the memory of those desolate lovers in the reception room came back to haunt him. Perhaps they were beyond his aid; he would never know.

But one thing he did know. He bore a responsibility that he could not escape. It was true that no man could foresee the future, and the endless consequences of his actions. Yet if it had not been for him, by this time his own country might have had a space hospital circling beyond the atmosphere. How many American lives were upon his conscience? Could he accept the help he had denied to others? Once he might have done so—but not now.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I can speak frankly with you both, for I know your interests are identical.’ (His mild irony, he saw, did not escape them.) ‘I appreciate your help and the trouble you have taken; I am sorry it has been wasted. No—don’t protest; this isn’t a sudden, quixotic decision on my part. If I was ten years younger, it might be different. Now I feel that this opportunity should be given to someone else—especially in view of my record.’ He glanced at Dr Harkness, who gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I also have other, personal reasons, and there’s no chance that I will change my mind. Please don’t think me rude or ungrateful, but I don’t wish to discuss the matter any further. Thank you again, and goodbye.’

He broke the circuit; and as the image of the two astonished scientists faded, peace came flooding back into his soul.

Imperceptibly, spring merged into summer. The eagerly awaited Bicentenary celebrations came and went; for the first time in years, he was able to enjoy Independence Day as a private citizen. Now he could sit back and watch the others perform—or he could ignore them if he wished.

Because the ties of a lifetime were too strong to break, and it would be his last opportunity to see many old friends, he spent hours looking in on both conventions and listening to the commentators. Now that he saw the whole world beneath the light of Eternity, his emotions were no longer involved; he understood the issues, and appreciated the arguments, but already he was as detached as an observer from another planet. The tiny, shouting figures on the screen were amusing marionettes, acting out roles in a play that was entertaining, but no longer important—at least, to him.

But it was important to his grandchildren, who would one day move out onto this same stage. He had not forgotten that; they were his share of the future, whatever strange form it might take. And to understand the future, it was necessary to know the past.

He was taking them into that past, as the car swept along Memorial Drive. Diana was at the wheel, with Irene beside her, while he sat with the children, pointing out the familiar sights along the highway. Familiar to him, but not to them; even if they were not old enough to understand all that they were seeing, he hoped they would remember.

Past the marble stillness of Arlington (he thought again of Martin, sleeping on the other side of the world) and up into the hills the car wound its effortless way. Behind them, like a city seen through a mirage, Washington danced and trembled in the summer haze, until the curve of the road hid it from view.

It was quiet at Mount Vernon; there were few visitors so early in the week. As they left the car and walked toward the house, Steelman wondered what the first President of the United States would have thought could he have seen his home as it was today. He could never have dreamed that it would enter its second century still perfectly preserved, a changeless island in the hurrying river of time.

They walked slowly through the beautifully proportioned rooms, doing their best to answer the children’s endless questions, trying to assimilate the flavour of an infinitely simpler, infinitely more leisurely mode of life. (But had it seemed simple or leisurely to those who lived it?) It was so hard to imagine a world without electricity, without radio, without any power save that of muscle, wind, and water. A world where nothing moved faster than a running horse, and most men died within a few miles of the place where they were born.

The heat, the walking and the incessant questions proved more tiring than Steelman had expected. When they had reached the Music Room, he decided to rest. There were some attractive benches out on the porch, where he could sit in the fresh air and feast his eyes upon the green grass of the lawn.

‘Meet me outside,’ he explained to Diana, ‘when you’ve done the kitchen and the stables. I’d like to sit down for a while.’

‘You’re sure you’re quite all right?’ she said anxiously.

‘I never felt better, but I don’t want to overdo it. Besides, the kids have drained me dry—I can’t think of any more answers. You’ll have to invent some; the kitchen’s your department, anyway.’

Diana smiled.

‘I was never much good in it, was I? But I’ll do my best—I don’t suppose we’ll be more than thirty minutes.’

When they had left him, he walked slowly out onto the lawn. Here Washington must have stood, two centuries ago, watching the Potomac wind its way to the sea, thinking of past wars and future problems. And here Martin Steelman, thirty-eighth President of the United States, might have stood a few months hence, had the fates ruled otherwise.

He could not pretend that he had no regrets, but they were very few. Some men could achieve both power and happiness, but that gift was not for him. Sooner or later, his ambition would have consumed him. In the last few weeks he had known contentment, and for that no price was too great.

He was still marvelling at the narrowness of his escape when his time ran out and Death fell softly from the summer sky.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Star

What Goes Up

Venture to the Moon

The Pacifist

The Reluctant Orchid

Moving Spirit

The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

The Ultimate Melody

The Next Tenants

Cold War

Sleeping Beauty

Security Check

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea

Critical Mass

The Other Side of the Sky

Let There Be Light

Out of the Sun

Cosmic Casanova

The Songs of Distant Earth

A Slight Case of Sunstroke

Who’s There?

Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting…

I Remember Babylon

Trouble With Time

Into the Comet

Summertime on Icarus

Saturn Rising

Death and the Senator