The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “Ready?” he asked. The hull-to-hull contact phone carried his words.

  “Set.”

  He cut in the master intercontrol, and after a momentary pause to run through his mental check-list, he thumbed the Big Red Button. Relays clacked, and the tape hooked in the timers. They were on the roller coaster now—unless they canceled immediately.

  He heard a faint click as the external feed lines that had been replacing the fuel burned during warm-up disconnected and retracted.

  “Last chance,” Merrill announced quickly.

  “Clear to lift,” the answer came back.

  Slidell pulled the cobalt glass screen down across the slanting blast-proof window of his office. Conversation was impossible through the uproar of the sirens, so he glanced at the chronometer, he tapped the nurse’s shoulder and held up five fingers.

  Involuntarily she winced. Then even through the heavy purple shield the glare filled the room with blistering radiance. Around the pit a flattened sphere of flame more deadly than the heat of any blast furnace ballooned and burst. A shrieking cyclone of superheated gas bombarded the low, solid building with dust and gravel.

  A few seconds later a second sun was rapidly fading overhead. The din of the sirens lowered and died.

  “Was it—” she asked.

  “It was very, very smooth—so far.”

  “But was it—”

  Slidell shrugged. He raised the shield and stared unseeingly at the thermal dust-devils still dancing over the field. “But which one?” she insisted.

  Slidell turned impatiently. “Don’t you think I want to know too?”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “Mr. Slidell? Radar Plot,” the intercom rasped suddenly.

  Jerry gripped the speaker box as though to squeeze information from it. Haskell-Jenkins interference made direct radio contact impossible even on microwave, but three radar eyes were following the Doughnut-Fireball combination while a mechanical brain compared their findings with

  the theoretical flight path.

  “How bad?” he demanded.

  “Not too much deflection, sir, but a nasty gyration on the longitudinal axis.”

  “Power output?”

  “Full.”

  Slidell exhaled gently. At least, the flight wasn’t aborting —yet.

  “Keep me posted,” he ordered unnecessarily.

  He slumped behind his desk, and from the workings of his face muscles the nurse knew that in spirit he was riding a control chair again, his body heavy under the acceleration stresses, watching the spots of light on the meter faces swing, and punching studs to steady them.

  After a few minutes he snapped out of it and used his dictating machine to record a pungent memorandum on changes in medical procedure to prevent other virus carriers from getting aboard any spaceship.

  Radar reports during the next hours were poor but maddeningly inconclusive. It was impossible to tell from them whether Doughnut was running well and being erratically piloted, or whether someone was really hand-riding a set of surging, unsteady jets. The data grew steadily less intelligible as the Earth turned, and the probing beams pierced the atmosphere at an increasingly oblique angle.

  Finally the intercom spoke again. “Below horizon. Contact broken.”

  Honolulu would take over the tracking, and then Guam.

  The nurse returned to the spaceport after a night of dream-haunted naps and headed directly for Slidell’s office. He was already there, and the drawn, gray look on his face made it obvious he had slept no better than she. The current flight graphs were strewn across his desk.

  He shoved the power output chart toward her. It was full of irregular sawtoothed peaks and valleys, and although she was not an engineer, she knew they signified jet malfunction. But Slidell was smiling faintly.

  “They’re still pretty close to plotted trajectory,” he told her. “We’ll know soon now.”

  The radiophone buzzed, and as Slidell snatched the handset, Bubsy leaned over to eavesdrop shamelessly.

  “Guam? Reduced power on which unit?”

  He listened a moment. “Damn your foul driver emission meters! Why don’t you get something sensitive?”

  The radio sputtered indignantly.

  “Okay, okay. Yes. I’ll see the directors about an appropriation to develop one,” he promised, and broke contact. “They’ve split, but whether it’s line-out or back-out we can’t be certain until Doughnut and Fireball are far enough apart to read their power impulses separately,” he explained.

  They waited what seemed like ages before Guam called again, and then Slidell picked up the phone as though it might bite.

  “Continuing steady full? Good! Other on intermittent low bursts? Thanks!”

  That was Merrill’s trademark, the signature of a smooth pilot, rocking Doughnut into turnover with minimum throttle settings to save his body and ship from the jarring shocks of suddenly applied power.

  Bubsy knew it as well as Slidell did, for more than once Walter had diagrammed it for her on restaurant tablecloths. She grinned, and the operations manager grinned back. Then, suddenly and irrationally, she wanted to cry. She knew the intensity of Merrill’s desires, but with a mutant virus loose in Mars Colony, the surest way had been the only decent way. Bob Ord might have flown a successful full-power boost, but then Slidell looked years younger as he switched his interphone into the public address system.

  “All hands! Fireball is lined out!” he announced. “Hot, straight and normal!”

  For a minute he leaned back and relaxed, then spoke. “Sit down, Miss Thomas.”

  She jerked around, startled by the unaccustomed formality, then saw the twinkle in his eyes.

  “Are you a sufficiently loyal employee to enter into a private conspiracy for the good of the company?” he asked seriously.

  “Just what are you talking about?” she demanded.

  “This is off the record yet, but I’m slated to get myself heavily doped and ride deadhead to Marsport for some special development work. The new operations manager here—I just picked him—has guts enough so once he’s stuck with this job, he’ll hang tight and ride it.

  “But he’s going to beef and yank and kick at the traces—unless someone helps keep him contented.”

  Bubsy understood, and smiled as she nodded.

  “But it’s just for dear, old Interplanet, you understand.” Slidell raised one eyebrow quizzically but said nothing. “Oh, you go to the devil!” she blurted, and blushed for the first time since her high-school days.

  The yellow car actually paused at the gate.

  “Checking out.”

  “Okay, Mr. Merrill, Miss Thomas.”

  It was one of those crystal nights that come occasionally to foggy Puget Sound, moonless and with

  a sky full of stars. South of the zenith, the faint pink dot of Mars twinkled invitingly.

  Merrill sighed. “That scheming fox! Eighteen months before I get another chance, but I’ll get there yet—if Van Zwaluvenberg’s new emission meters and Doughnut III plans don’t land me in the nuthatch

  first.”

  The girl let one hand slide along his arm. This was no night for talking shop.

  “But they should have some decent transient facilities ready by then, as well as the fuel plant,” he

  continued. “Might even be a good spot for a honeymoon.” “Eighteen months? Second honeymoon,” she corrected firmly.

  Relativity applies—even among gods!

  Thang

  By Martin Gardner

  THE EARTH had completed another turn about the sun, whirling slowly and silently as it always whirled. The East had experienced a record breaking crop of yellow rice and yellow children, larger stockpiles of atomic weapons were accumulating in certain strategic centers, and the sages of the University of Chicago were uttering words of profound wisdom, when Thang reached down and picked up the Earth between his thumb and finger.

  Thang had been sleeping. When he finally awoke and
blinked his six opulent eyes at the blinding light (for the light of our stars when viewed in their totality is no thing of dimness) he had become uncomfortably aware of an empty feeling near the pit of his stomach. How long he had been sleeping even he did not know exactly, for in the mind of Thang time is a term of no significance. Although the ways of Thang are beyond the ways of men, and the thoughts of Thang scarcely conceivable by our thoughts; still—stating the matter roughly and in the language we know—the ways of Thang are this: When Thang is not asleep, he hungers.

  After blinking his opulent eyes (in a specific consecutive order which had long been his habit) and stretching forth a long arm to sweep aside the closer suns, Thang squinted into the deep. The riper planets were near the center and usually could be recognized by surface texture; but frequently Thanghad had to thump them with his middle finger. It was some time until he found a piece that suited him. He picked it up with his right hand and shook off most of the adhering salty moisture. Other fingers scaled away thin flakes of bluish ice that had caked on opposite sides. Finally, he dried the ball completely by rubbing it on his chest.

  He bit into it. It was soft and juicy, neither unpleasantly hot nor freezing to the tongue; and Thang, who always ate the entire planet, core and all, lay back contentedly, chewing slowly and permitting his thoughts to dwell idly on trivial matters, when he felt himself picked up suddenly by the back of the neck.

  He was jerked upward and backward by an arm of tremendous bulk (an arm covered with greyish hair and exuding a foul smell). Then he was lowered even more rapidly. He looked down in time to see an enormous mouth—red and gaping and watering around the edges—then the blackness closed over him with a slurp like a clap of thunder.

  For there are other gods than Thang.

  Do only “men” have human feelings?

  Period Piece

  By J. J. Coupling

  IT WAS at that particular party of Cordoban’s that he began actually to have doubts—real doubts. Before, there had been puzzlement and some confusion. But now, among these splendid people, in this finely appointed apartment, he wondered who he was, and where he was.

  After his friend—or, his keeper?—Gavin had introduced him to his host, there had been a brief conversation about the twentieth century. Cordoban, a graying man with both dignity and alertness, asked the usual questions, always addressing Smith with the antique title, Mister, which he seemed to relish as an oddity. To Smith it seemed that Cordoban received the answers with the sort of rapt attention a child might give to a clever mechanical toy.

  “Tell me, Mr. Smith,” Cordoban said, “some of the scientists of your day must have been philosophers as well, were they not?”

  Smith could not remember having been asked just this question before. For a moment he could think of nothing. Then, suddenly, as always, the knowledge flooded into his mind. He found himself making a neat little three-minute speech almost automatically. The material seemed to arrange itself as he spoke, telling how Einstein forced an abandonment of the idea of simultaneity, of Eddington’s idea that the known universe is merely what man is able to perceive and measure, of Milne’s two time scales, and of the strange ideas of Rhine and Dunne concerning precognition. He had always been a clever speaker, ever since high school, he thought.

  “Of course,” he found himself concluding, “it was not until later in the century that Chandra Bhopal demonstrated the absurdity of time travel.”

  Cordoban stared at him queerly. For a moment Smith was scarcely conscious of what he had said. Then he formulated his thoughts.

  “But time travel must be possible,” he said, “for I’m a twentieth century man, and I’m here in the thirty-first century.”

  He looked about the pleasant room, softly lighted, with deep recesses of color, for assurance, and at the handsome people, grouped standing or sitting in glowing pools of pearly illumination.

  “Of course you’re here, fellow,” Cordoban said, reassuringly.

  The remark was so true and so banal that Smith scarcely heard it. His thoughts were groping. Slowly, he was piecing together an argument.

  “But time travel is absurd,” he said.

  Cordoban looked a little annoyed and made a nod with his head which Smith did not quite follow.

  “It was shown in the twentieth century to be absurd,” Smith said.

  But, had it been shown in his part of the twentieth century, he wondered?

  Cordoban glanced to his left.

  “We know very little about the twentieth century,” he said.

  Gavin knows about the twentieth century, Smith thought. Then, following Cordoban’s glance, he saw that a young woman had detached herself from a group and was moving toward them. A segment of the pearly illumination followed her, making her a radiant creature indeed.

  “Myria,” Cordoban said, smiling, “you particularly wanted to meet Mr. Smith.”

  Myria smiled at Smith.

  “Indeed, yes,” she said. “I’ve always been curious about the twentieth century. And you must tell me about your music.”

  Cordoban bowed slightly and withdrew, the light which had been playing on him, seemingly from nowhere, detaching itself from the pool about Myria and Smith. And Smith’s doubts fled to the back of his mind, crowded out, almost, by a flood of thoughts about music. And Myria was an enchanting creature.

  Smith felt very chipper the next morning as he rose and bathed. The twentieth century had nothing like this to offer, he reflected. He knit his brows for a moment, trying to remember just what his room had been like, but at that moment the cupboard softly buzzed and he withdrew the glass of bland liquid which was his breakfast. His mind wandered while he sipped it. It wasn’t until he walked down the corridor and sat in the office opposite Gavin that his doubts at Cordoban’s returned to his mind.

  Gavin was droning out the schedule. “We have a pretty full day, Smith,” he said. “First, a couple of hours at the Lollards’ country estate. We can stop by the Primus’s on the way back. Then, a full afternoon at a party given by the decorators’ council. In the evening—”

  “Gavin,” Smith said, “why do we see all these people?”

  “Why,” Gavin answered, a little taken aback, “everyone wants to see a man from the twentieth century.”

  “But why these people?” Smith persisted. “They all ask the same questions. And I never see them again. I just go on repeating myself.”

  “Are we too frivolous by twentieth century standards?” Gavin asked, smiling and leaning back in his chair.

  Smith smiled back. Then his thoughts troubled him again. Cordoban hadn’t been frivolous.

  “How much do you know about the twentieth century, Gavin?” he asked, keeping his tone light.

  “Pretty much what you do,” Gavin replied.

  But this couldn’t be! Gavin appeared to be a kind of social tutor and arranger of things. As far as Smith could remember, mostly, information had passed from Gavin to him, not from him to Gavin. He decided to pursue the matter further, and as Gavin learned forward to glance at the schedule again, Smith spoke once more.

  “By the way, Gavin,” he asked, “who is Cordoban?” “Director of the Historical Institute, of course. I told you before we went there,” Gavin replied.

  “Who is Myria?” Smith asked.

  “One of his secretaries,” Gavin said. “A man of his position always has one on call.”

  “Cordoban said that not much was known about the twentieth century,” Smith remarked mildly.

  Gavin started up as if he had been stung. Then he sank back and opened his mouth. It was a moment before he found the words.

  “Directors—” he said, and waved his hand as if brushing the matter aside. Smith was really puzzled now. “Gavin,” he said, “is time travel possible?”

  If Gavin had been startled, he was at his ease now. “You’re here,” he said, “not in the twentieth century.” Gavin spoke in so charming and persuasive a manner that Smith felt like a fool for a momen
t. His thoughts were slipping back toward the schedule when he realized, that wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even couched as one. But this was silly, too. If it wasn’t an answer, it was just what one would say. Still, he’d try again.

  “Gavin,” he said, “Cordoban—”

  “Look,” Gavin said with a smile, “you’ll get used to us in time. We’ll keep the Lollards and their guests waiting if we don’t start now. It isn’t asking too much of you to see them now, is it? And you’ll like it. They have a lovely fifteenth-century Chinese garden, with a dragon in a cave.”

  After all, Smith thought, he did owe his collective hosts of the thirty-first century something. And it was amusing.

  The Lollards’ garden was amusing, and so was the dragon, which breathed out smoke and roared. Primus’s was dull, but the decorators’ council had a most unusual display of fabrics which tinkled when they were touched, and of individual lighting in color. The evening was equally diverting, and delightful but strange people asked the same frivolous questions. Smith was diverted enough so that his doubts did not return until late that night.

  But when Gavin left him at the door, Smith did not go to his bed and his usual dreamless sleep. Instead, he sat down in a chair, closed his eyes, and thought.

  What did these people know about the twentieth century? Gavin had said, what he, Smith, knew. But that must be a great deal. An adult man, he, for instance, had a huge store of memories, accumulated over all his years. The human brain, he found himself thinking, has around ten billion nerve cells. If these were used to store words on a binary basis, they would hold some four hundred million words—a prodigious amount of learning. Tokayuki had, in 2117—