The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “Two factors control the individual in society,” said Heym, and the detached calm of his voice was vaguely surprising to him. “They are only arbitrarily separable, being aspects of the same thing, but it’s convenient to take them up in turn.

  “There is first the simple weight of social pressure. We all want to be approved by our fellows, within reasonable limits at least. The mores of the society, whatever they may be, are those of the individual. Only a psychopath would disregard them completely. Not only does society apply force on the nonconformist, but mere disapproval can be devastating. It takes a really brave—and somewhat neurotic—individual to be different in any important respect. Many have paid with their lives for innovating. So a genius will be hampered in making original contributions, and they are adopted only slowly. It usually takes a new idea many generations to become accepted. The astonishing rate of growth of science, back in the days when free research was permitted and even encouraged, indicates how rapid progress can be when there are no barriers.

  “And, of course, this social pressure usually forces conformity even on reluctant individuals. A scientist may be naturally peaceful, for instance, but he will hardly ever refuse to engage in war research when so directed.

  “The second hold of the mass on the individual is subtler and more effective. It is the mental conditioning induced by growing up in a society where certain conditions of living and rules of thought are accepted. A ‘born’ pacifist, growing up in a Warlike culture, will generally accept war as part of the natural order of things. A man who might have been a complete skeptic in a science-based society will nearly always accept the gods of a theocracy if he has been brought up to believe in them. He may even become a priest and direct his logical talents toward elaborating the accepted theology —and help in the persecution of unbelievers. And so on. I needn’t go into detail. The power of social conditioning is unbelievable—combined with social pressure, it is almost insuperable.

  “And—this is the important point—the rules and assumptions of a society are accepted and enforced by the mass—the overwhelming majority, shortsighted, conservative, hating and fearing all that is new and strange, wishing only to remain in whatever basic condition it has known from birth. The genius is forced into the strait-jacket of the mediocre man’s and the moron’s mentality. That he can expand any distance at all beyond his prison is a tribute to the supreme power of the high intellect.”

  Heym looked out at the empty street. Rain blew wildly across its darkened surface. “The Solarian Empire is nothing but the triumph of stupidity over intelligence. If every man could think for himself, we wouldn’t need an empire.”

  “Watch yourself,” muttered Goram. “The ruling class has a certain latitude of speech, but don’t overstep it.” And more loudly: “What does this mean in the case of Station Seventeen?”

  “Why, it’s a triumphant confirmation of the historical theory I was just explaining,” said Heym. “We’ve isolated pure genius from mediocrity and left it free to work out its own destiny. The result has even exceeded our predictions.

  “No doubt there are aggressive and conservative and selfish people born. But on this world the weight of social conditioning and social pressure is away from those tendencies, they don’t get a chance to develop themselves.

  “It seems”—Heym’s voice rose over the whistle of wind—“that genius shows a qualitative distinction, due to quantitative differences, from mere human intelligence. The genius is basically a distinct type, just as the moron is on the other end of the scale. And here—on Seventeen—the new type has been set free.”

  He turned around from the window. Goram sat motionless, staring at the floor, and the slow seconds ticked away before he spoke.

  “I don’t know—” he murmured. “I don’t know—”

  Defeat and despair and a binding hatred rose into Heym’s throat, tasting of vomit. You don’t know! His mind screamed the thought, it seemed incredible that Goram should sprawl there, not moving, not hearing. No, you don’t know. Your sort never does, never has known anything but its own witless bestial desires, its own self-righteous rationalization of impulses that should have died with Smilodon. You’ll destroy Seventeen, in spite of all reason, in sheer perversity—and you’ll say you did it for the good of the Empire!

  The knife seemed to spring of its own accord into his hand. He was lunging forward before he realized it. He saw the blade gleam down as if another man were wielding it. The blow shocked back into his muscles and for an instant his mind wavered, it wasn’t real—what am I doing?

  No time to lose. Goram twisted around in his seat, yelling, grabbing for Heym. The knife was deep in his neck. Heym yanked at it—pull it loose, stick it in the throat, kill—

  Something struck him from behind. The world shattered in a burst of stars, he crashed to the floor and rolled over. Through a haze of dizzy pain he saw men bending over Goram—men of the planet, rescuers for the monster who would annihilate them.

  Words tumbled from the hotel clerk, anxious, shaken: “Are you hurt? Did you—Still, lie still, here comes a doctor—”

  Pain Burled Goram’s lips back from his teeth, but he muttered a reply: “No … I’m all right … flesh wound—” The doctor bent over his bloody form. “Deep,” he said, “but it missed the important veins. Here, I’ll just pull it out—”

  “Go ahead,” whispered Goram. “I’ve taken worse than this, though … I never expected it here.”

  Heym lay on the floor while they worked over the soldier. His ringing, whirling head throbbed toward steadiness, and slowly, with so tremendous an impact that it overloaded his nerves and entered his consciousness without emotional shock, the realization grew.

  Goram had spoken to the natives—in their own language. A man bent over the psychologist. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry I had to hit you so hard. Here—drink this.” Heym forced the liquid down his throat. It coursed fierily through his veins, he sat up with an arm supporting him about his waist and held his head in his hands.

  Someone else spoke, the voice seemed to come from across an abyss: “Did he hear?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Goram, his neck bandaged, spoke painfully. A rueful smile crossed his ugly face. “The excitement was too much for me, or I would have kept silent. This is going to be—inconvenient.”

  The men of the planet helped Heym into a chair. He began to revive, and looked dazedly across at the man he had tried to kill. The others stood around the chairs, tall bearded men in barbaric dress, watching him with alertness and a strange pity.

  “Yes,” said Tamman Goram very quietly, “the assistant Grand Marshal of the Solarian Empire is a native of Station Seventeen.”

  “Who else?” whispered Heym. “How and why? I tried to kill you because I thought you meant to order the planet sterilized.”

  “It was an act,” said Gomm. “I meant to concede at last that the station was harmless and could be safely left to the Foundation’s observers. Coming from one who had apparently been strongly inclined to the opposite view, the statement would have been doubly convincing to Imperial officialdom. It was a powerful and suspicious minister who ordered the investigation, and I went to soothe his feelings. His successor will be one of our men, who will see that Station Seventeen drops into safe obscurity as an unimportant and generally unsuccessful experiment conducted by a few harmless cranks.”

  “But … aren’t you … weren’t you—”

  “Oh, yes. My history is perfectly genuine. I was planted as an obscure recruit in the border guards many years ago, and since then my rise has been strictly in accord with Imperial principles. All our men in the Empire will bear the most searching investigation. Sometimes they come from families which have lived several generations on Imperial planets. Our program of replacing key personnel with our men is planned centuries ahead of time, and succeeds by the simple fact that on the average, over long periods of time, they are so much more capable than anyone else.”


  “How long—?”

  “About five hundred years. You underestimated the capabilities of your experimental animals.” Goram rested for a moment, then asked, “If human intelligence is qualitatively different from animal intelligence, and genius is different from ordinary reasoning power—then tell me, what about the equivalent of geniuses in a world where the average man is a genius by the usual standards?

  “Pure genius strains kept right on evolving, more rapidly indeed than can be explained on any other basis than the existence of an orthogenetic factor in evolution. Supergenius —give it a different name, call it transcendence, since it is a different quality—has capabilities which the ordinary mind can no more comprehend than pure instinct can comprehend logic.

  “Your spectacular god-revelations were not forgotten, they were treated discreetly. Later, when a theory of evolution was developed, it seemed strange that man, though obviously an animal, should have no apparent phylogenesis. The stories of the ‘gods,’ the theories of evolution and astronomy—we began to suspect the truth. With that suspicion, it was not hard for a transcendent to spot your masquerading psychologists. Kidnapping, questioning under drugs developed by psychiatry, and release of the prisoner with memory of his experience removed told us the rest. Later, disguised as other prisoners, with their knowledge, and his own intelligence to fill the gaps, one transcendent after another made his way to the observation asteroid—thence out into the Galaxy, where a little spying was sufficient to reveal the principles of the interstellar drive and the other mechanisms of the Empire.” Heyni murmured: “The whole planet has been—acting?”

  “Yes.” Goram chuckled. “Rather fun for all concerned. You’d be surprised at the installations we have, out of spy-machine range. As soon as they are old enough to carry out the deception, our children are told the truth. It has actually made little difference to our lives except for those few million who are out in the Galaxy taking it over.”

  “Taking … it … over?” Heym’s mind seemed to be turning over slowly, infinitely slowly and wearily.

  “Of course.” A strange blend of sternness and sympathy overlay Goram’s harsh features. “One planet obviously cannot fight the Galaxy, nor do we wish to. Yet we cannot permit it to menace us. The only answer is—annexation.”

  “And … then?”

  “I’m sorry.” Goram’s voice came slowly, implacably, “but I’m afraid you overrated the good intentions of the pure genius strain. After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.

  “We’re taking over barbarians and Empire alike. After that, the Galaxy will do as we wish. Oh, we won’t be hard masters.. Man may never know that he is being ruled from outside, and he will enter a period of peace and contentment such as he has never imagined.

  “As for you—”

  Heym realized with vague shock that he had not even wondered or cared what was to become of him personally.

  “You are sympathetic to us—but your loyalty is to the Empire. You have thought of us only in relation to our usefulness to the Imperium. Perhaps we could trust you to keep our secret, perhaps not. We can’t take the risk. You might even release the truth inadvertently. Nor can we erase your memory of this—it would leave traces that an expert psychiatrist could detect, and all high officials undergo regular psychoanalytic checkups.

  “I’ll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet.” Goram smiled. “I don’t think you’ll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that.”

  He added thoughtfully: “In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor.”

  Although Mars had long been a dead planet, one “Martian” remained—among the crew of Earth’s spaceship. One was enough.

  And the Moon Be Still As Bright

  By Ray Bradbury

  IT WAS so cold that when they first came from the ship into the night, Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn’t say anything about a celebration, he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it and watched it burp.

  In the flare that illumined the thin air of this dried up sea of Mars he looked over his shoulder and saw the rocket ship that had brought them all, Wilder and Cheroke, and Gibbs and McClure and himself across a silent black space of stars to land upon a dead, dreaming world.

  Jeff Spender waited for the noise. He looked at the other men and waited for them to jump around and shout. It would happen as soon as the numbness of being the first men to Mars wore off.

  Gibbs walked over to the freshly ignited fire and said, “Why don’t we use the ship chemical fire instead of that wood?”

  “Never mind,” said Spender, not looking up.

  It wouldn’t be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There’d be time for that later; time to throw condensed milk cans in the proud Martian canals, time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea-bottoms, time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted delicate ruins of old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.

  He fed the fire by hand and it was like an offering to a dead giant. They were on an immense tomb. They had landed on a tomb planet. Here, a civilization had died. It was only simple courtesy that the first night be spent quietly, in reverence to a world that had once moved with life and was now buried and lifeless.

  “This is not my idea of a landing celebration,” said Gibbs. He looked at Captain Wilder. “Sir, I thought we might break out rashers of gin and meat and whoop it up a bit.”

  Captain Wilder looked off toward a dead city, a mile away. “We’re all of us tired,” he said, remotely, as if his whole attention was upon the city and the men were forgotten. “Tomorrow night, perhaps. Tonight we should be glad we got across all that space without getting a meteor in our bulkhead or having one man of us die.”

  The men shifted around. There were twenty of them and they stood around, some of them holding on to each other’s shoulders quietly. Spender watched them. They were not satisfied. They had risked their lives to do a big thing, and now they wanted to be shouting drunk and firing off guns to show how wonderful they were to have kicked a hole in space and ridden a rocket all the way to Mars.

  But nobody was yelling. Especially Captain Wilder and Spender himself. The captain gave a quiet order. One of the men ran into the ship and brought forth tins of food which were opened and dished out without much noise. The men were beginning to talk now. The captain sat down and recounted the trip to them. They already knew it all, but it was good to hear about it, as something over and done and safely finished. They would not talk about the return trip. Someone brought that up, but they told him to keep quiet. The spoons moved in the double moonlight; the food tasted good and the wine was even better.

  Spender did not take his eyes off them. He left his food on the plate under his hands. He felt the land getting colder. The stars drew closer, very clear.

  When anybody talked too loudly, the captain would reply in a low voice that made them talk quietly from imitation.

  The air smelled clean and new. Spender sat for a long time just enjoying the way it was made. It had a lot of things in it he couldn’t identify; flowers, Chemistries, dusts, winds.

  “Then, there was the time in New York when I got hold of that blonde, what was her name— Ginnie!” cried Biggs. “That was it!”

  Spender sat there, tightening in. His hand began to tremble. His eyes moved behind the thin, sparse lids. His mouth was shut.

  “And Ginnie said to me …” cried Biggs. The men listened and roared.

  “So I smacked her one,” shouted Biggs, with a bottle in his hand.

  Spender put down his food tray. He listened to the wind over
his ears, cool and whispering. He looked at the cool ice of the Martian buildings over there on the empty sea lands.

  “Let me tell you, what a woman, what a woman!” Biggs emptied his bottle into his open mouth. “Of all the women I ever knew!”

  The smell of Biggs’ sweating body was on the air. Spender let the fire die. “Hey, kick her up there, Spender,” said Biggs, looking at him for a moment, then back to his bottle. “Well, one night, me and Ginnie…”

  “This,” murmured Spender to his empty hands in front of him, “is the first night on Mars.”

  “What?” said Biggs, pausing.

  “Nothing,” said Spender.

  “As I was saying—” Biggs turned to the other men. They laughed.

  A man named Schoenke got out his accordion. He began to do a kicking dance. The dust sprang up under him. “Ahoo—I’m alive!” he shouted.

  “Yay!” roared the men. Their eyes brightened. They threw down their empty plates. Two or three of them lined up and kicked like chorus maidens, joking coarsely. The others, clapping hands, cried for something to happen. Cheroke pulled off his shirt and his undershirt and showed his naked chest, sweating, as he whirled around. The moonlight shone on his crew-cut hair and his young clean shaven cheeks glinted with light.

  In the sea bottom, the wind stirred along faint pieces of vapor, and from the mountains, great stone visages looked upon the moonlight and the rocket and the small fire.

  Spender closed his hands into fists.

  The noise got a little louder and a little louder. More of the men got up and the accordion was

  squeezed dry of its music. Somebody sucked on a mouth-organ. “A perverted pastime!” observed Biggs with a slap on the player’s back. Somebody blew on a

  tissue-papered comb. Twenty more bottles were brought out, opened, drunk.

  Biggs staggered about, wagging his arms to direct the dancing men.