Possible Worlds of Science Fiction Read online

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  Possible Worlds

  of

  Science fiction

  Ed. by Groff Conklin

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE: The Solar System

  Raymond Z. Gallun: Operation Pumice

  Robert A. Heinlein: The Black Pits of Luna

  A. E. Van Vogt: Enchanted Village

  Malcolm Jameson: Lilies of Life

  Ray Bradbury: Asleep in Armageddon

  Isaac Asimov: Not Final!

  Frank Belknap Long: Cones

  D. L. James: Moon of Delirium

  Theodore Sturgeon: Completely Automatic

  Nelson S. Bond: The Day We Celebrate

  Margaret St. Clair: The Pillows

  Hal Clement: Proof

  PART TWO: The Galaxy

  Murray Leinster: Propagandist

  H. B. Fyfe: In Value Deceived

  Jack Vance: Hard-Luck Diggings

  John Berryman: Space Rating

  Catherine MacLean: Contagion

  Clifford D. Simak: Limiting Factor

  Samuel Merwin, Jr.: Exit Line

  James H. Schmitz: Second Night of Summer

  Arthur C. Clarke: A Walk in the Dark

  Poul Anderson: The Helping Hand

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  INTRODUCTION

  UNTIL very recently, the idea of voyaging across the spaces that separate us from the Moon and the planets of our Solar System has been a sheer dream, a jumping-off place for amateur philosophers, a hide-out for fantasists. No one ever really thought it scientifically possible that man might escape from his fishlike state at the bottom of his sea of air and voyage through the star-spangled near-vacuum in which our Sun and its family of planets are suspended.

  But then, until less than half a century ago, no one really believed that man could ever get his feet off the ground at all. Yet within a quarter of a century after the first heavier-than-air flight, airplane travel was common, safe, and matter-of-fact. Similarly, though at a much less swift rate, the idea of flight into space has been marching from the realm of impossible fantasy toward that of actual achievement. Space travel is a definite probability, and in the near future, too. As Willy Ley, famed rocketry expert, has said, “It now looks as if that great old dream is not a dream after all. It looks as if it were something that can be done.”

  It has not been done yet, true enough. But the only bars to the first Moon rocket, which will herald the advent of interplanetary travel, are technical and economic, not scientific. All the basic scientific problems have been solved, and we can safely say that rockets to the Moon should be a reality within the next decade or so. We are indeed so close to solving the myriad straight engineering problems—physical, chemical, physiological, psychological—that lie between us and the new frontiers of space that the largest single bar to the first successful space rocket may be said to be financial. Space rocketry is almost fantastically expensive. Until conditions are such that a united government-private-enterprise effort can be turned to this problem from the problems of rocketry as weapons, it is unlikely that even unmanned Moon rockets will be undertaken. However, as soon as world conditions permit, such a rocket unquestionably will become a high-priority project in both military and civilian scientific circles.

  While interplanetary travel is thus an almost immediate possibility, interstellar travel remains highly unlikely for decades or even centuries to come. The project is simply too stupendous. Nevertheless, the requirements for interstellar ships are known to be at least mathematically feasible and physically conceivable. Given highly advanced atomic fuels, gigantic strides in metallurgy and other techniques, and a combined economic support which would make the financing of our first atomic-bomb research look like the purchase of a toy at the neighboring dime store, it is not wholly ridiculous to imagine the successful launching of an interstellar ship, either from the Moon or from a man-made planetoid outside the Earth’s surface, within the next century.

  The problem of what we will find when we finally set out to explore our Solar System and, later, our Galaxy, is one for which there are no satisfactory answers at all. Negative approaches are the easiest, of course, and those biologists who have turned their attention to this highly suppositive field of conjecture have in general vetoed the idea of life elsewhere in the Solar System and, by extrapolation, in the whole Galaxy of which our Sun is a minute element.

  Biologists in general seem to assume that the only possible form of life is one based on an oxygen-water ecology and on a temperature range within which water is, most of the time, a liquid. With such narrowly blindered views, the biological fraternity has an easy answer to the question of the possible existence of life on other planets. Barely possible on Mars and Venus; impossible elsewhere, they say.

  Drawing parallels from the existence on earth of certain exceptionally high- and low-temperature life forms, these biologists admit that there is no reason why such specially adapted forms could not live on our immediately neighboring planets. Scarcely developed to the point of intelligence, these specialized “animals” would probably be little more than bacteria, or mosses, or aquatic plants, and possibly some novel types of arthropods or fish or reptiles, dry-land types on Mars and probably gill-breathing on Venus. Beyond this the academic biologist will not go. Life on Mercury? Too hot! Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, the asteroids ? Too cold, by far.

  But writers of science fiction, many of them with just as sound and extensive training in biology as the professors themselves, can see no reason for staying within these narrow limitations of the known. Scientifically, they say, there is literally no reason why the possibilities of life in the Universe must be limited to those found on one planet of a dull little third-rate star on the outermost, neglected fringes of the great Galaxy. While the existence of other forms of life cannot be proved today, in the absence of interplanetary or interstellar communications, their impossibility cannot in any way be proved by known science. The stereotypes of biology which hold true under the conditions of Earth cannot disprove the possibility of utterly foreign forms of life under widely differing planetary ecologies. Why must these stereotypes be valid on planets with sulphur-gas atmospheres (about 900° Fahrenheit) or on those where the term “atmosphere,” as we understand it, may have no application to speak of—as, for example, a fantastically cold planet where gill breathers might use liquid oxygen for their metabolism (roughly — 400o Fahrenheit)?

  The one thing we can assume on the basis of scientific logic is that any form of life imaginable may exist somewhere in the Galaxy, providing we use the word life not in our commonly accepted sense, in which all that is living is composed of protoplasm requiring planetary conditions similar to those existing on Earth. In a much broader frame, perhaps we can say that anything is alive that can reproduce itself either directly (like men or amoebae) or symbiotically (like Schistosoma hematobium or various viruses), or that is by its nature immortal (as would be any life formed directly from energy).

  We can also assume the extra-solar existence of that most unlikely life form of all—our own. There is no reason why a few extra-solar planets (out of the hundreds of millions which may exist) should not provide an ecology similar to that of Earth’s, and why parallel forms of evolution on these planets should not result, now and again, in essentially human (or “humanoid,” as the science-fiction writers like to call it) forms of life. A great many science-fiction writers have chosen to envisage such humanoid societies and have very often assumed them to be far in advance of our own civilization. The most common form which these extra-solar “human” societies t
ake is, consequently, that of the Galactic Empire.

  This idea, of Earth’s backwardness, is based on the assumption that, since our Sun is actually a “fringe” star, lying far out from the center of the Galaxy in a kind of neglected backwash or eddy of cosmic matter, it is also remote from the main currents of Galactic culture, and we humans are nothing but an undiscovered tribe of savages in a poorly explored part of the Universe. Closer in to the Galactic center, these writers assume, there are many humanoid civilizations (and also many nonhuman but intelligent societies as well) that have developed not only interstellar but inter-Galactic travel, as well as all sorts of other scientific delicacies. These Galactic Empires are only now, as radiations from atomic bombs register on their supersensitive instruments, becoming aware of us. For the most part, these stories are located on Earth and fall into a different category from that covered in this book: the “earth-invasion” type of story. A collection of earth-invasion stories would make a most excellent anthology—and, indeed, may do so in the near future if the present editor has his way. But no stories assuming a non-Earthian Galactic Empire are included in this book, because they do not fit the pattern.

  On the other hand, a “Terra” (science fiction for “Earth”) of the future can be imagined which is itself the center of a Galactic Empire composed of both human and nonhuman intelligences. This type of story is obviously suitable for inclusion in this anthology. Two of them are; and the last story in the book, which is one of them, carries out the idea of a Terran-based Galactic Empire, with a certain stinging logic which is very applicable to events on Earth today.

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  As to whether or not there actually are many (or any) planetary systems among the stars of our Galaxy, astronomical evidence is almost entirely lacking. Some theories of cosmological origins make the Solar System a practically unique accident. Others make planetary systems a natural outcome of the formation of the suns themselves. Neither type of theory has any basis in experimental fact, so that we are free to assume that planets are as common in our Galaxy as are litters of pups wherever there are dogs. Such an assumption has naturally been made by the writers contributing to Part II of this collection.

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  Only one thing needs to be said about the actual stories included in this book. I have made it a point to omit any of the more typical examples of BEMs. BEMs are what science fictioneers call the more horrendous (and juvenile) forms of extra-Earthian life with which the writers of standard space operas used to delight in peopling their alien worlds. (The initials, incidentally, stand for Bug-Eyed Monsters.) I have included no gigantic squids (unless you want to call Sam Mer-win’s weird form of life a squid), no telepathic ants the size of small horses, no scaly worm-dragons of sinister intelligence, no Essences of Evil such as used to serve some of the pulpeteers as plot mechanisms in lieu of original ideas or realistic conflicts. There is no reason to assume that some sort of BEMs do not exist somewhere in the Galaxy, I admit. But I have preferred to leave their existence unreported in this book. They just do not make very good reading!

  With this, let me introduce you to the Possible Worlds of Science Fiction—or, even more tantalizingly, the Possible Worlds of Science. Not one of the stories in this book is based on fact; contrariwise, not one of them, in the opinion of the editor, is scientifically impossible. Today, however, neither of these facts is particularly important. What is important is that the stories are all, I think, fun to read. They all give your imaginations a good run for the money.

  Slip into your spacesuit, then; strap yourself down in your antigravity seat; take your anti-space sickness pills, and hold tight! You’re off for a thrilling voyage of exploration of the unknown Universe!

  Groff Conklin

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  PART ONE

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  HERE are narratives ranging from the highly probable to the rather unlikely concerning the planets, satellites, and asteroids of the little, balanced system of matter-globes that wheel around our Sun. In every instance the writers have fitted their ideas of possible life and possible environment on the various members of the Solar System into the fairly rigid pattern of known data about them—temperature, gravities, densities, atmospheres or the lack of them, and so on. That is to say that none of these stories is based on data known to be wrong—as far as the data are known. What makes them exciting are the authors’ various and sundry extrapolations into the unknown which give their stories their substance. Until we actually land on the planets and moons, and find out from firsthand experience exactly what the facts of the matter are, we will not be able to contradict even the most wild of these imaginings, no matter how unlikely we may think them.

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  Raymond Z. Gallun

  OPERATION PUMICE

  Before we can discover what it really is like on the Moon and the planets, we have to learn how to get to them. In all probability the first spaceship will not land on extraterrestrial soil, for it will not be large enough to carry the extra fuel necessary to lift it even off the Moon. It will be merely an exploring rocket, testing space and the conditions of space as they affect human beings.

  The story of the first manned rocket around the Moon is here told with realism and a down-to-earth human touch. It is in the nature of an introduction to the possible worlds of our universe—the story of the first step off the ground which must precede all other steps.

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  HE GOT all the way through the guard lines, and that must have taken some fancy figuring, or else it was just kid luck. It happened to be Mel Robbins who discovered him, early in the morning, when it was still cool and not quite broad daylight. Robbins was one of the two inside men of Operation Pumice.

  Mel had come out of the mess-trailer and was having his digestion cigarette, when he spotted the youngster sprawled on his stomach on the New Mexico desert. Mel walked toward him without hurry, the way you might do when you see something so out of place that it leaves you incredulous. Ten paces away, Mel stopped and studied his find for all of two minutes. The boy never moved nor even seemed to know that anybody was so near.

  He was spindly, fifteen or sixteen. Ten days ago he must have been very pale—maybe was the bookish kind—because now he was unbelievably sunburned. Shreds of dry skin stuck out from his blistered lips; his thin nose and high cheekbones were scabbed. The back of his neck, above his dirty T shirt, was so crusted that it was like lizard hide. All this indicated vast and unaccustomed tribulation.

  But on his face there was a look of ridiculous rapture, as if he saw the millennium coming true; as if being here was worth a hundred times what it had cost, or fifty times what flesh could endure.

  Mel Robbins had memories from his own early youth that led him to understand such feelings. His grin was sympathetic as he followed the line of the boy’s vision-haunted gaze to the thing that loomed there in the dun-colored landscape.

  It might have been taken for a vertical oil tank, a hundred feet high, capsule-shaped, silvery and seamless, and braced by slanting, winglike buttresses. But the dark vents arranged in a ring at its base suggested tumults of flaming energy. In its domed top were small, round windows. Above them, lettered in enamel that would not burn in the heat of atmospheric friction, was the melodramatic marking, MR-1.

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  Mel Robbins knew every part and mechanism in that twenty-million-dollar mass of coordinated equipment—even every brace, pared out for maximum strength with minimum weight. He knew the MR-1 by the mathematics of ballistics, physics, and chemistry, by the data from the unmanned probe-rockets that had gone far into space, by long experience flying the fastest planes in the world, by the many times he’d been whirled in a centrifuge, making tests, and by his years of dreaming that such a craft as this was possible. He lacked only the final adventure of flight, and that he would have tomorrow, before noon.

  Knowledge, building slowly, had dulled some of the glam
our and washed out the mystery.

  But now Robbins borrowed a thrill from the kid’s eyes, or called it back from memory. For a second he saw MR-1 almost freshly—enigmatic, with hints of other worlds in it. Around it was the camp, the army tents, the portable liquid hydrogen and oxygen plants on their immense trailers, the barbed-wire barriers . . .

  He chuckled, and the boy gave a start.

  “Hi, fella,” Mel said. “Didn’t you meet any guys with rifles while you were coming the last couple of miles?”

  Scared to sullenness, the kid scrambled to his feet.

  Asking the questions was a job for the security officer, but Robbins figured that Eagle Brow would make an enormity of the boy’s intrusion. What was going on here had a military importance tangled with its broader scope. It was best to break the kid in gently for trouble. Besides, Mel Robbins was curious.

  “Looks as though you had quite a journey,” he said. “And people don’t get fried by the sun, riding buses or trains. Where did you come from, and how?”

  “Long Island City,” the waif grumbled. He made a gesture with a grimy thumb. Hitchhiking.