Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  “I can’t travel, but my mind can. This machine will select some sentient being or animal in the future, that is ready to receive my intellect. For a period I can set beforehand, I will live in that being’s body and be—me.

  “I can go where he can go, and when I leave, I bring back with me whatever I can remember from any experiences I have during my term of occupation. The only thing, I don’t want to rush off and leave the thing running unattended. Therefore I want you to sit by and see that nothing goes haywire. Okay?”

  Knight nodded. “Just show me what to do.”

  “That won’t take long,” said Jim. He handed Knight a few pages of typescript and started to explain certain factors. In an hour, he was ready. He lay down on a small couch and fixed an electrode-studded helmet on his skull. Then with one hand he reached out and snapped a switch.

  Thirty seconds later a series of relays clicked home, and the figure stiffened; the eyeballs rolled high into their sockets, and Jim Forrest’s body seemed to sleep . . . .

  He opened his eyes and found himself sprawled on a thick, comfortable carpet. His front paws were forward and his chin was resting on them. He looked up at a male figure seated in a heavy chair with a book and he felt an uncontrollable, ridiculous impulse to wag his tail. He did, and it felt good.

  He looked idly around the room until he saw a woman reclining on a broad couch with a small newspaper. He liked her looks, but the whistle was stifled by the happy fact that his lips would not purse properly. He just put his tongue out and panted.

  He stood up and stretched, and wondering what was in the paper, he leaped up on the couch beside the woman. She put out a hand and stroked his head, which he found most pleasing, and he nuzzled her hand before he tinned his face toward the newspaper.

  Aside from the date, which was some two hundred years to the future, it held little interest to Jim Forrest. A theft; a notable’s opinion on the state of politics; a publicity squib; a lightly-touched humor-spot. An advertisement—mostly of the female wardrobe and according to Jim Forrest’s memory, quite similar to the wardrobes of periodic style-cycles. They were back to low necklines, high waists, and short skirts again, he observed and he wondered how many vacillations the styles had gone through during the intervening two hundred years.

  The woman scratched his ear idly, and then ordered him to get down.

  Down! Then it struck him. Jim Forrest was inhabiting the body of a dog! He tried to speak, but all that came out was a plaintive bark.

  “Topsy wants out,” said the woman in a musical voice.

  “Well, Topsy knows how to get out,” replied the man lazily. “Let her go!”

  Topsy! Jim Forrest was stunned. He was—he was a—well, he’d never admit it, period!

  The woman stood up, stretched, and went out into the back of the house. Jim followed, filled with curiosity about the house. It was quite the House of Tomorrow, a combination of comfort and utility.

  The woman reached into a cupboard and took out a square box, from which she took a bone-shaped biscuit.

  “Here, Topsy. Dog Biscuit.”

  Jim eyed the biscuit with disfavor.

  “Now, don’t refuse your biscuit. It is filled with the vitamin requirements of any city dog. You don’t get them in here, you know.”

  Jim wondered. Either the woman was inclined to talk to anything that looked as though it had ears, or— Anyway, she was talking to him as though she expected him to understand.

  “Must I insist?” she asked him.

  Jim reached up and accepted the biscuit.

  Very reluctantly he bit into it. He’d bitten into dog biscuit before, and it had all the flavor and texture of well-dried, hard-pressed, shredded cardboard. But this was different. It tasted good, and he polished it off with relish.

  “There,” she said. She returned to the living room, sat on the arm of her husband’s chair. “Topsy was reluctant about accepting her biscuit, Edward.”

  He put down the book and eyed Jim, who was standing on the floor in front of him.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Those things are good for you.”

  Jim wondered if he were supposed to say something. He tried, but all that came out was that plaintive bark.

  “Look, Topsy, don’t sit there and bark at me,” said the man sternly.

  Jim thought: What the devil am I supposed to do—sing?

  “I think Topsy is ill,” said the woman.

  “We’ll take her to the veterinarian’s, then,” replied the man. “Come on, Martha. Now’s as good as any time.”

  Jim trotted out to the automobile with them, and hopped into the rear seat. The machine was a revised version of the Car of Tomorrow excepting that it had no wheels. The shape was that of a slightly flattened ovoid with quite a bit shaved off of one side—for the bottom.

  The larger hemisphere was the front, and the entire upper half was a clear, unobstructed glasslike substance, either glass or plastic. Jim scratched it—and it scratched with some hardness, so it was not glass. He tasted it, but it was tasteless. It was air-warm.

  And he got a stern reprimand from his master for, one: making scratches on the surface, and two: for putting nose-prints and lick-marks on the ultra-clean surface.

  Then the car lifted by an inch, firmly and without tremor. It moved sidewise first, and then floated straight up for five hundred feet, turned a quarter way around, and darted forward swiftly. Below, they could see the rooftops of the community, and once they passed a car on their own level, going in the same direction.

  Cross traffic went either above or below by a couple of hundred feet.

  They did not cross toward any city, but went across open country until they came to a huge enclosure, into which the man dropped his car and parked it beside several others.

  “Come, Topsy,” ordered the man, and they went into the building nearby.

  They waited in the waiting room, and Jim Forrest knew fear, for as they entered his first view was that of a huge Dalmatian that eyed him with disfavor. The Dalmatian got up and growled, and Jim felt his hackles rise.

  “Butch!” snapped the Dalmatian’s master. “Lie down!”

  Butch registered canine disappointment and reclined, but Jim would have preferred that the bigger dog were leashed.

  But eventually the doctor came, and they went in.

  “Trouble?” asked the doctor.

  “We’re not certain,” said Jim’s master. “Topsy refused the nightly dog biscuit, and then barked when I asked what was the matter.”

  The doctor looked down at Jim. “Here, Topsy. Up on this table.”

  Jim might have grinned. He’d show ’em. If they expected him to understand them, they’d be surprised! He obeyed the command.

  “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue,” said the doctor. Jim did, after deliberately looking around to be sure that they were all watching.

  “His response seems slow,” said the doctor, with some concern. “Raise your right front paw!”

  This Jim did, after some thought. He was not used to having his right hand called a paw, and he had to think before he lifted the member.

  “Definitely slow.” The doctor turned and picked up a thermometer. Jim looked askance at this; he’d seen a dog’s temperature taken and he felt like objecting to the indignity. But the doctor shook it down, and presented it to Jim’s face. He inserted the thermometer below Jim’s tongue, picked up a paw and felt the pulse.

  “Any pain?” asked the doctor. Jim puzzled, and then shook his head. His long black ears flapped against his chin and cheeks. “Discomfort? Food agreeing with you?” The doctor ran through a list of possible symptoms, to which Jim shook his head to indicate “no.”

  The doctor read the temperature and then sat down at his desk, thinking.

  It was at that point that Jim Forrest really began to wonder. They all were treating him as though he were expected to know their tongue and to act accordingly. Instead of being surprised when he follow
ed the rules, they were a little hurt that his response was slow. And when he shook his head in response to a question of some complication, they accepted it as normal.

  Perhaps he should really show them some intelligence. On the wall behind him was a large wax-slate, and Jim stood up on the table and faced the slate. He sat close to it and extended his right paw.

  “Why, Topsy’s using her other foot,” exclaimed the woman. “Her toenails aren’t cut for writing!”

  Jim blinked, and looked at the foot, and then sat full up and compared the two feet. The nails of the right foot were clipped short; the left foot had one long nail. Jim wondered if he could manage the left-handed paw while writing, but he tried.

  “That’s better—use the left one like a good dog,” said Martha.

  The doctor smiled. “Perhaps the dog has been trying to switch,” he said. “That often causes trouble, you know.”

  Jim wrote:

  2 x 2 = 4

  4 x 4 = 16

  Then because he couldn’t recall offhand what the square of sixteen was, he put it down in longhand:

  16

  x 16

  ——

  96

  160

  ——

  256

  After which he turned to them and waited. “Has he some fixation with numbers?” asked the doctor.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “It’s strange that a dog should just turn and write that elementary stuff,” said the veterinarian. “Has he had the normal canine education?”

  “Of course.”

  “But simple multiplication—we include mathematics only as mental training and never expect a dog to take to the stuff. Wait.”

  The doctor lifted the cover-sheet and cleaned the slate. Then he wrote:

  “Now, Topsy, if you like numbers, do that one!”

  Jim looked at the thing. So that’s how it stood! Well, he was as smart as any dog, and so he did it. When he finished, he turned to see the doctor calculating mentally from the face of a stopwatch.

  “Timing’s not too bad,” said the doctor. “Yet there’s something off-key here. Too bad dogs can’t talk; I’d like to give Topsy a word-association test. But if the dog has to write the association-word, it gives time to frame an answer. We can try him on the blot-test.”

  He took a chart from his desk. It contained a number of printed blots which were similar to those made when you drop ink on a folded paper and then crease the paper while the ink is wet.

  “Now, Topsy, take a look at this first blot and write down what your impression of it is.”

  Jim looked at the blot. It was jagged and lacelike, and to Jim Forrest it resembled the filigree work on a wrought-iron fence. He wrote that down. The next blot made him think of a scientist peering into a microscope, the third was an octopus, the fourth a cumulus cloud. And so on through the batch he went.

  “Have you been treating him in any strange manner?” asked the doctor.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Well, from the results, I’d say that your dog is suffering from a delusion. Topsy seems to think that she is smarter than any dog in the Solar System.”

  That brought forth a general laugh, which Jim resented deeply. He sat up and wrote:

  “Am I not?”

  The doctor smiled tolerantly.

  “Topsy,” he said. “No doubt you are quite intelligent, but you mustn’t get grandiose ideas.” To the man, he said: “Mr. Harding, what is your business?”

  “I’m a neutrinics engineer.”

  “Topsy, do you know what that is?”

  Jim wrote: “The neutron is an atomic particle having no charge and an atomic mass of 1.0089.”

  “Now, where did he get that?” asked the doctor.

  “Topsy, have you been reading any of my collection-volumes?”

  Jim realized that he had made an error of some sort. Doubtless two hundred years had added to man’s store of nuclear physics. So he nodded.

  “Thought so. We’ve been basing all atomic masses on the neutron being unity. But Topsy misunderstood, Doctor. Perhaps you’d better check the dog’s word-recognition. Not only is Topsy slow in response, but she misconceives the word,” He turned back to Jim. “I said neutrinicist.”

  “The neutrino,” wrote Jim, “is an atomic particle having no charge and a mass approximately equivalent to the mass of the electron.”

  Mr. Harding shook his head. “Those old books,” he grumbled. “Why, they were so crude that they could hardly detect the difference in properties between the isotopes of hydrogen! About all they knew was that deuteron-water boiled at a different temperature than normal water, let alone the many other differences in physical and chemical properties.”

  “They were rather vague,” the doctor said with a smile. “They say that the old boys knew nothing of inonotronics or even azycentric geometry.”

  “No. Kiefer made his initial discoveries in inonotronics less than a hundred years ago. That must have been a dull time, indeed. Imagine living in a world without science! Never to know the relation between the Skarmer principle of light and the polypolar fields. Why, men couldn’t live without the practical application of the polypolar fields.”

  “Supposing that DeGallman had never realized that bipolar gravitic fields existed, though. Then what?” asked the doctor.

  Harding shook his head negligently. “When they isolated the neutron, the theory of gravities is naturally the next step. If DeGallman hadn’t researched, others would have found it in a matter of months. It doesn’t take a single genius to put an azy-centric crystal in a polypolar field and observe the results. After the results are known and analyzed, the use of the geotonic is almost mandatory. Then comes the tetrapositional gravitostriction and its analysis. This leads to the whole useful field of inonotronics.”

  “An interesting viewpoint,” observed the veterinarian. “I’d like to continue, but we have a patient here. Psychoanalytically, I’d say that Topsy has been reading some of your old volumes and has a distorted viewpoint. Many of the statements made as fact are at such a variance to the known fact that reading them might well be dangerous to a mind not trained to receive them.

  “For some unknown reason, Topsy is certain that her intelligence is higher than any other dog’s, and I believe that she may even consider her intellect as high as a man’s. Frankly, she is—quite normally, too—a good deal lower than the moron.

  “I say this in front of her because we are going to eliminate it all anyway, and re-educate her. No man wants an insane dog in his house. You may, of course, consult some other dog analyst before proceeding?”

  “I trust your judgment, doctor,” said Mr. Harding. “You may proceed.”

  “Thank you. Yes, we’d be lost without inonotronics. My mental therapy machine is based on the qualtorecintive fornance circuits. No pain, no strain. Come, Topsy!”

  Jim viewed this with distrust. He hung back, and when the doctor went over, Jim bared his canine teeth and growled.

  “Recalcitrant, too?” muttered the doctor. “A slight paranoid tendency, easily dispelled. Topsy, listen. You will either come with me or you’ll come under the influence of tetradiphenylene-sarcophomate, olfactorily introduced. Which?”

  Jim hung his head, and with his stubby tail down, he leaped from the table and followed the doctor.

  The machine was not terrifying nor complex. He was laid on a table between two plates, and then the doctor pressed a button on the machine, and Jim Forrest’s mind blacked-out . . . .

  Ed Knight’s vigil was tiresome. Twenty-four hours is a long time to sit and watch a machine do nothing apparently but maintain certain fields and potentials as indicated by a batch of simple meters. He dozed and he ate reams of sandwiches and drank gallons of strong black coffee. Finally the time came, and he waited for Jim Forrest’s return.

  The clock ticked, and the relays clicked, and the machine ran down to a stop. The man on the table opened his eyes and looked around. “Well, w
hat did you learn?” asked Ed Knight.

  Forrest jumped off of the table onto all fours. “Arf! Arf! Aowouuuuuu!” he said.

  It was Ed Knight who wrecked the machine.

  And it was six weeks before he could get Jim Forrest to walk on his hind feet and hold things in his hands. Forrest came out of it gradually, but to the day he died, he had an uncontrollable urge to wag his non-existent tail.

  A year after his fateful trip a scientist by the name of DeGallman observed some strange radiation effect emanating from a strange crystalline mass when it was immersed in a multipolar motor field winding. He put it down as a possible discovery and figured that it might take five years of analysis to unravel the scientific reason for such an occurrence.

  The man who might have known didn’t remember a thing.

  The End

  *********************************

  The Mobius Trail,

  by George O. Smith

  Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec. 1948

  Novelette - 16892 words

  The way of the inventor is hard,

  as Joseph Kingsley finds out

  when a gadget backfires!

  Chapter I

  Fantastic Fact

  THE first model of any invention is never the refined version. More than likely it is a rather sorry mess, containing converted parts and hand-whittled members, strewn profusely with regard only to their function, and without a single thought for the esthetic quality of placement or shining panel or meter.

  Grown from a single ides, passed through the adolescent growing pains of many failures and few true advances, the finished product is an inefficient, ill-appearing semi-mediocre forerunner of the final thing. The first working model may also make its first success at some odd hour in the morning after a job of work that culminates forty or fifty solid hours—after a few years of preliminary planning and building.