Poul Anderson's Planet Stories
Page 57
He was a moon now, a satellite skimming low above the airless surface of his own midget world. The fracture plain where Lundgard had shot at him went by, and he braced himself. Up around the tiny planet, and there was the hill he had left, stark against Sagittarius. He saw Lundgard, standing on its heights and looking the way he had gone. Carefully, he aimed the tank and gave himself another small blast to correct his path. There was no noise to betray him, the asteroid was a grave where all sound was long buried and frozen.
He flattened, holding his body parallel to the tank in his arms. One hand still gripped the wrench, the other reached to open the blow valve wide.
The surge almost tore him loose. He had a careening lunatic moment of flight in which the roar of escaping gas boiled through his armor and he clung like a troll to a runaway witch's broom. The sun was blinding on one side of him.
He struck Lundgard with an impact of velocity and inertia which sent him spinning down the hill. Bo hit the ground, recoiled, and sprang after his enemy. Lundgard was still rolling. As Bo approached, he came to a halt, lifted his rifle dazedly, and had it knocked loose with a single blow of the wrench.
Lundgard crawled to his feet while Bo picked up the rifle and threw it off the asteroid. "Why did you do that?"
"I don't know," said Bo. "I should just shoot you down, but I want you to surrender."
Lundgard drew his wrench. "No," he said.
"All right," said Bo. "It won't take long."
When he got up to the Sirius, using a tank Lundgard would never need, Valeria had armed herself with a kitchen knife. "It wouldn't have done much good," he said when he came through the airlock. She fell into his arms, sobbing, and he tried to comfort her. "It's all over. All taken care of. We can go home now."
He himself was badly in need of consolation. The inquiry on Earth would clear him, of course, but he would always have to live with the memory of a man stretched dead under a wintery sky. He went aft and replaced the links. When he came back, Valeria had recovered herself, but as she watched his methodical preparations and listened to what he had to tell, there was that in her eyes which he hardly dared believe.
Not him. Not a big dumb slob like him.
ADDENDA
PS's FEATURE FLASH: Poul Anderson
Before we met Poul Anderson, we had pictured a formidable gent, some nine feet tall, hawk-eyed, sober and prematurely grey. Then he showed up in New York one day, and proved to be amicable, not quite nine feet tall, eagle-eyed, grinning and a blond. Moreover, on a spirited jaunt about town, he revealed a repertoire of brightly colored tales that matched, if not exceeded, your editor's. We respect a man like that.
Meet the author of DUEL ON SYRTIS:
An autobiography implies something worth autobiographing, which is lamentably lacking in this case. I really can't imagine readers working up much enthusiasm over my favorite brand of beer or the time our cow mistook a tractor for a bull. (Yes, it really happened.) However—
I was born in Pennsylvania late in 1926 of Scandinavian parents. Hence that first name, which, incidentally, has a pronunciation midway between "pole" and "powl." We soon moved to Port Arthur, Texas, where I did some of my growing among the oil refineries and Gulf coast shipping and acquired a younger brother. After my father's death we lived in Washington, D. C, for about a year—where my mother had a job with the Danish foreign office and I pottered happily around the Smithsonian. But it really isn't a town fit to live in, so we took another jump and spent some years farming in Minnesota. It took that long for us to discover that you can't make a living off fifty acres, and quit. But at least it disabused me of any notions about the happy, simple outdoor life.
While studying physics at the University of Minnesota, I wrote a story and—it—sold. To anyone with my pathological hatred of regular hours that was a bugle call. But it took some time and several odd jobs—very odd, some of 'em—before I got to the point of making a living off writing alone. And no sooner had I reached that, than the good old academic life started calling me back. At present I'm working toward a master's degree and financing the project by writing. Combine long vacation trips, beer and books, Wein, Weib, und Gesang, and occasional pilgrimages back to the home town for some of my mother's roast goose and red cabbage, and it begins to look like an ideal existence. But by the time you read this, I'll probably be doing something else.
Special likes include bull sessions till all hours, camping in Western scenery, travel of all kinds (here and abroad), blondes, Greek literature and Shakespeare, brunettes, Mozart, redheads, and so on down the line. Favorite contemporary writer is Johannes V. Jensen, but I'm not going intellectual on you—I like the Saint and Li'l Abner just as well as you do.
Ambitions are to do a lot more traveling, write several novels and essays, learn classical Greek and Old Norse, own a seagoing sailboat, become a connoisseur of wine, get a doctor's degree in astrophysics, and spend the pipe-and-slippers stage of life on a peaceful mountaintop photographing remote galaxies. That's program enough to keep me busy for a while. Too bad one has to sleep.
Planet Stories - March 1951
The Vizgrath
DEAR MR. BIXBY:
.........."About WOTDS—please, no more straight adventure yarns, especially not when Celtic, Greek, Persian and Cretan word-derivations abound in them. A good story, if your adrenal glands are beginning to lose the old zing, but not Stf. Not even SA. Thalassocracy indeed! Craig must be an erudite man. (This does not mean I am, by the way. By the wildest coincidence, someone had mentioned that Thalassa is Greek for sea just four hours before I bought the magazine.)"........
A. J. Budrys Planet Stories - May 1951
A. A. CRAIG REPLIES
Dear Ed,
Mr. A. J. Budrys' comment in the current PLANET as to "Witch of the Demon Seas" deserves an answer. He objects, you remember, to the use of a more or less Grecian nomenclature in a vaguely Minoan background, the implication being that it's a mere steal from history. I'd like to defend myself and, by extension, every other writer who has ever done the same thing. It's common practice, you know. De Camp's Krishnan language—one of them, at least—is based on Persian. Anderson's "Helping Hand" used Samoan and Old Norse as a basis for two languages, and "Tiger By the Tail" has a definitely Gothic ring. Asimov, especially in his Foundation yarns, draws names and situations directly from history and geography wherever they are needed, and one might multiply examples indefinitely.
My point is that it's a perfectly legitimate practice and does much to give certain stories a well-developed, convincing background. History does seem to follow general patterns—empires grow up and decay, civilizations evolve through cycles at least vaguely analogous to each other, situations of a given kind evoke corresponding responses in art, philosophy, technology, and overt action ; and so it goes. It seems at least plausible to suggest that similar cycles will recur in the future, or on other planets, whenever conditions are similar. If Mr. Budrys doesn't like the notion, he'd better take it up with Spengler, Toynbee, and company, not with me.
As to languages, well, a language is not a collection of random elements, it has a character of its own and the looks and sounds of its words usually obey general laws of similarity. The typical Greek, German, or French word can hardly be mistaken for one in any of the other languages, to say nothing of such unrelated tongues as Finnish or Chinese. So your science-fiction writer trying to construct a plausible, self-consistent system of words and names does well to take some past or present language of Earth, mix up and distort its elements, and produce his own result. I admit, the ideal solution would be to make up your own language from scratch, roots and syntax and everything else—but my God, we only have twenty-four hours in a day !
I make no apologies for using the word "thalassocracy," since that is what I meant and there is no equilvalent word in English. I could have said "ubglub" or something on that order, but it would have necessitated tedious explanation of its meaning. I could not have called the ruler of
Achaera a "sea king," because that phrase in English has come to be the standard translation of the Old Norse saekoningr, meaning a viking chief of royal blood and not the king of any land area. Will it make Mr. Budrys happier to pretend I called it an ubglub? All right, assume I did.
In conclusion, I would like to thank Mr. Budrys for bringing up an issue of some small importance to science-fiction. Thanks too for his saying he liked the yarn, and for calling me "erudite." `Tain't so, but undeserved flattery is all the sweeter.
Sincerely,
A. A. CRAIG Planet Stories - September 1951
Poul Anderson's
PLANET STORIES
~~oOo~~
Star Ship
Planet Stories - v4n09 Autumn 1950
(artwork: unsigned)
Witch of the Demon Seas by A. A. Craig
Planet Stories - v4n10 January 1951
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Vestal)
Tiger by the Tail
Planet Stories - v4n10 January 1951
(artwork: Herman Vestal)
Duel on Syrtis
Planet Stories - v4n11 March 1951
(artwork: Herman Vestal)
The Virgin of Valkarion
Planet Stories - v5n01 July 1951
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Mayan)
Lord of a Thousand Suns
Planet Stories - v5n02 September 1951
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Vestal)
Swordsman of Lost Terra
Planet Stories - v5n03 November 1951
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Vestal)
Sargasso of Lost Starships
Planet Stories - v5n04 January 1952
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Vestal)
Captive of the Centaurianess
Planet Stories - v5n05 March 1952
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Ed Emshwiller)
Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine Fall 1978
(artwork: Alex Schomburg)
War-Maid of Mars
Planet Stories - v5n06 May 1952
(cover: Anderson - artwork: Vestal)
The Star Plunderer
Planet Stories - v5n08 September 1952
(cover: Vestal - artwork: unsigned)
The Ambassadors of Flesh
Planet Stories - v6n07 Summer 1954
(cover: Freas - artwork: Vestal)
Out of the Iron Womb!
Planet Stories - v6n11 Summer 1955
(artwork: Joseph Eberle)
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
STAR SHIP
WITCH OF THE DEMON SEAS
TIGER BY THE TAIL
THE AMBASSADORS OF FLESH
DUEL ON SYRTIS
WAR-MAID OF MARS
THE VIRGIN OF VALKARION
LORD OF A THOUSAND SUNS
SWORDSMAN OF LOST TERRA
SARGASSO OF LOST STARSHIPS
CAPTIVE OF THE CENTAURIANESS
THE STAR PLUNDERER
OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!
ADDENDA
PS's FEATURE FLASH: Poul Anderson
The Vizgrath
Poul Anderson's PLANET STORIES