The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  VI

  Four Rantan days later, principles shelved for the moment in his anxiety for his wife, Creak accompanied the repair party toward the dam.

  It had taken a long time to set up: the logistics of a fifteen-kilometer cross-country trip were formidable, and finding workers willing to go was worse. Glue, food, spare breathing suits and their supporting gear, arrangement for reserves and reliefs—all took time. It was a little like combing a city full of twentieth-century white-collar workers to find people who were willing to take on a job of undersea or space construction.

  It might have taken even longer, but the water in the city was beginning to taste obnoxious.

  A kilometer north of the wall they met something that startled Creak more than his first sight of Cunningham and the Nimepotea six months before. He could not even think of words to describe it, though he had managed all right with man and spaceship.

  The thing consisted of a cylindrical framework, axis horizontal, made of strips of wood. Creak did not recognize the pieces of his own furniture. The cylinder contained something like an oversized worksack, made of the usual transparent fabric, which in turn contained his wife, obviously well and happy.

  At the rear of the framework, on the underside, was a heavy transverse wooden rod, and at the ends of this were—Creak had no word for “wheels.” Under the front was a single, similar disk-shaped thing, connected to the frame by an even more indescribable object which seemed to have been shaped somehow from a single large piece of wood.

  The human being was pulling the whole arrangement without apparent effort, steering it among the rocks by altering the axial orientation of the forward disk.

  The Rantans were speechless—but not one of them had the slightest difficulty in seeing how the thing worked.

  “Principles are an awful nuisance, Creak,” the man remarked. “I swore I wasn’t going to use a drop of your glue in making the wagon. Every bit of frame is tied together—I should think that people with your evolutionary background would at least have invented knots; or did they go out of style when glue came in? Anyway, the frame wasn’t so bad, but the wheels were hell. If I’d given up and used the glue, they’d have been simple enough, and I’d have made four of them, and had less trouble with that front fork mount—though I suppose steering would have been harder then. Making bundles for the rims was easy enough, but attaching spokes and making them stay was more than I’d bargained for.”

  “Why didn’t you use the glue?” Creak asked. He was slowly regaining his emotional equilibrium.

  “Same reason I left the ship down by the city, and lived on emergency food. Principle. Your principle. I wanted you and your people to be really sure that what I did was nice and simple and didn’t call for any arcane knowledge or fancy tools. Did you ever go through the stone-knife stage?” He displayed the blade. “Well, there’s a time for everything, even if the times are sometimes a little out of order. You just have to learn how to shape material instead of just sticking it together. Get it?”

  “Well … I think so.”

  “Good. And I saved my own self-respect as well as yours, I think, so everyone should be happy. Now you get to work and make some more of these wagons—only for Heaven’s sake do use glue to speed things up. And let three-quarters of this crowd go back to painting pictures or whatever they were doing, and then cart some stuff up to that dam and get it fixed. It might rain sometime, you know.”

  Creak looked at his wife—she was riding with one end out of the wagon, so she could hear him. “I’m afraid we’re further than ever from Nature,” he remarked.

  She made a gesture which Cunningham knew to mean reluctant agreement.

  “I’m afraid that’s right,” the man admitted. “Once you tip the balance, you never get quite back on dead center. You started a scientific culture, just as my people did. You got overdependent on your glue, just as we did on heat engines—I’ll explain what those are, if you like, later. I don’t see how that information can corrupt this planet.

  “You still want to get back to your tidal jungles, I suppose. Maybe you will. We got back to our forests, but they are strictly for recreation now. We don’t have to find our food in them, and we don’t have much risk of getting eaten in them. So someday you may decide that’s best. In any case, it will take you a long, long time to get around that circle; and you’ll learn a lot of things on the way; and believe it or not, the trip will be fun.

  “Forgive the philosophy, please. As I remarked to you a few days ago, when your ancestors started scientific thinking they turned you onto a one-way road. And speaking of roads, which is a word you don’t know yet—you’d better make one up to the dam. These rocks I’ve been steering the wagon around are even worse than principles.”

  Author’s Afterword

  I like to think that the science-fiction fan’s curiosity about authors is fundamentally different from the movie fan’s curiosity about acting personnel; I hope, in other words, that the first types are not just gossips. I can justify the hope to some extent. A science-fiction story tends to have a more extensive and complex background than that found in a more mundane tale. Much of this background is implicit, leaving room for speculation, and even for thought, about its nature. I know from experience that science-fiction enthusiasts spend time and argument on this aspect of the field, to the near exclusion of debate over Joe Author’s third divorce.

  I’m glad to furnish basis for such debates, if only because they occasionally provide me with new ideas. I am not really sure that my own conscious memory will furnish all the data which the more careful analysts will need. I do concede the claim that every story has its origin in things which I have experienced, directly or otherwise; but I am just about certain that the connection between the original events and the final tale is far more tenuous and tangled and much, much less open to analysis and reconstruction than the followers of von Däniken and Velikovsky like to believe.

  I am not, therefore, certain that the following bits of biography and self-analysis will be really helpful to anyone, but here they come anyway. Amateur psychoanalysts, switch on your computers.

  First, elementary characteristics. I like the old scientific gimmick story, and I like space opera. If Verne had been able to combine the events of his trip to the Moon with the ending of Phileas Fogg’s tour of the world, he would have written the ideal science-fiction story—one packed with adventure in unfamiliar environments, with an ending which any educated adult could kick himself for not foreseeing.

  My Fantasy Press copies of the old novels by E. E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and John Campbell are visibly decrepit from rereading. My most valuable collector’s items from the early magazines are getting steadily worse from the same cause. I wish I knew some way of preserving them short of sealing them in tanks of helium, which would prevent my reading them. So much for what I like in science fiction.

  I suppose there are other facets of personality needed by the psychoanalyst, but I’m not sure which will be most helpful. I suspect, though, that my stories have been influenced quite heavily by my innate conservatism, though this is not a matter of age, I am quite certain. “Impediment,” which expresses the doubts I have always felt about telepathy, was written and sold when I was nineteen, still a junior in college. The same conservatism has, I fear, controlled a lot of what I haven’t written: I am equally dubious about antigravity, the little-green-man branch of UFOlogy, the Bermuda Triangle, and the various branches of what is now called psionics. I have greatly enjoyed James Schmitz’ Telzey Amberdon stories, but I doubt very much that I could write one. I was completely unimpressed by the original article on Dianetics back in 1950, and have remained so as the concept evolved into Scientology. I am, in other words, what the crasser mystics call a crass materialist and have great trouble visualizing an event on my own—even when it is intentionally fictional—unless I have some sort of belief that it could really happen. I can enjoy reading or hearing fantasy stories, but doubt very much th
at I could ever write one.

  For example, a number of years ago I received a request from a gentleman who was planning an anthology of vampire stories. He wanted me to contribute to it. I had the ordinary literate adult’s familiarity with Dracula and a few other tales of the same general sort; there seemed nothing particularly difficult about the assignment. I took it on.

  The story which resulted was essentially science fiction. The vampire anthology never appeared, but “A Question of Guilt” was finally published in a collection of horror stories, and is now being published here as science fiction. I was much more concerned about the problems of an intelligent believer in cause and effect as he tried to solve the blood transfusion problem at a time in history when it was essentially insoluble, than I was about the hypothetical protective powers of garlic, silver, and other symbolic devices.

  Of course, I pay lip service to the concept of the open mind. I don’t happen to believe in vampires. I don’t believe in magic of the sort which claims that symbols have a feedback on reality. I do, however, admit that my own visualization of what the Arisians called the Cosmic All is certainly very incomplete and may be grossly wrong in spots. This is an admission on the strictly intellectual level. Emotionally I have as much trouble believing in the wrongness of my picture as a John Bircher would have in doubting The Conspiracy, or a Bible-belt fundamentalist in facing the fact that evolution is regularly and commonly observed in process.

  There may be an afterlife. Telepathy and other psionic manifestations may be real and may some day come under orderly human control. There may be flaws in the laws of thermodynamics, even the first one. It is fun to read stories about such possibilities, but I seem to lack what it takes to write them—with one exception. The relativity theories have survived theoretical and experimental attack for about two-thirds of a century, and if I were really consistent I would be unable to write an interstellar story claiming or implying faster-than-light travel. I am not that consistent; psychologists are welcome to their fun as they figure out why (or maybe the reason is blatantly obvious).

  Even though I tend to be conservative, and to heed unthinkingly such things as traffic signs and the moral rules I learned from my mother, some of my stories have originated from a streak of contrariness somewhere back of the eyes. This has never gotten me into serious trouble—except for World War Two I have led an incredibly uneventful life, which is the principal reason I am not doing this Afterword biographically. However, it has provided ideas. The principal trigger to the contrary urge is provided by the words “of course,” and several stories—“Uncommon Sense,” “Technical Error,” “Assumption Unjustified,” and perhaps “Answer”—have definitely resulted from my reaction to this phrase.

  In the early 1940s I was an astronomy major; my tutor—he would have been called a faculty advisor anywhere else, but this was Harvard—was the solar expert Donald H. Menzel. He was a science-fiction fan, knew that I wrote it, and would occasionally discuss it with me. He did not talk down to me. There may be stuffy, unimaginative, self-righteous types in scholarly fields and in uniform, but the only ones I have met were in the branch of scholarship called “humanities” (by them), and in hippie garb. Dr. Menzel was imaginative, and he wrote as well as read science fiction. He was even involved with the production of a short-lived magazine, Science Fiction Plus, a decade or so later. At one time we disagreed on a rather trivial point; he felt that Martians would have long, trunklike noses to permit an effective sense of smell in such thin air, while it seemed to me that low atmospheric density would actually favor molecular diffusion and make smell a more effective sense than on Earth. I don’t recall that either of us ever used the “of course” phrase, but its spirit hovered in the near background. Neither of us was silly enough to carry the argument to great lengths, since doing so obviously involved too much pure speculation about undemonstrable points. But a few years later while I was returning from Europe on a troop ship with my typewriter and a good deal of time, I settled the question to my own satisfaction with “Uncommon Sense.” I never discovered his reaction to the story, or even whether he ever read it. If he did, he was probably more bothered by my giving planets to a supergiant star like Deneb.

  As for the other examples—“Of course” there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, or at least a best way and a lot of worse ones. “Of course” if you follow the handbook carefully in dealing with alien organisms which are in the book, everything will go properly. “Of course” it’s possible to understand in principle the workings of your own mind.

  However, there may be justified differences of opinion as to which way is really best. John Campbell, for so many years the major editor and brightest guiding light of science fiction, pointed this out to me in our first face-to-face conversation. This was in early 1943, just after my graduation, when I stopped in New York on my way to Atlantic City and Army basic training. Why, he asked, should so many of our tools be forcing devices? Shouldn’t skill, generally speaking, be better than force? He supplied a few specific suggestions, I was able to come up with a few more, and I was given my first magazine cover for “Technical Error,” written at odd moments during various stages of classification and flight training. The story was published shortly before I got my gold bars and pilot wings.

  I suppose, in a way, “Assumption Unjustified” is really another vampire story turned into science fiction, but the “of course” is still behind it. Like most people, I was familiar with the notion that legends may well have roots a bit outside the undiluted human imagination. I have never carried the “may well” to the “must” level of a Velikovsky or a von Däniken, and am perfectly willing to admit that the story is fiction—though I still like to believe it could have happened. There seemed nothing unreasonable to me then about Earth’s being on a list of planets containing animal life suitable for beings who needed an occasional blood fix. Most of my chemistry was learned long after I finished my undergraduate work. I now have more realistic notions about protein chemistry, and if I had written the story about my honeymooning vampires a couple of decades later I could have created a much more tense situation. “Assumption Unjustified” might still have been the title; or perhaps “Assumptions …”

  On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d have written “Answer” at all if I’d known as much then as I do now. The general idea of how a self-duplicating machine would work had not yet appeared in Scientific American; neither had solid-state devices, something which hadn’t occurred to me either. In my mathematical ignorance—there is good reason why I’m a high school teacher instead of a professional astronomer—I had concluded that analog computers held more promise than the digital types. I doubt that I could ever have made a workable farce out of the idea, as Arthur Clarke did a few years later in “The Ultimate Melody.” I seem to be one of these dead-serious types; I think I have a sense of humor, but my funniest remarks seem to be unintentional. I don’t yet understand why I got such a laugh at a convention a few years ago when I pointed out that humor was essentially the relay-chatter displayed by the human nervous system upon conscious perception of an incongruity. I hadn’t thought of that, either, when “Answer” was gestating.

  I do have to admit that not all stories come from my contrariness. Sometimes they arise from an actual urge to get my ideas out in the open, sometimes from other people’s suggestions, and sometimes from something very much like panic. “Mistaken for Granted” is an example of the last. For many years I had a reputation as a good storyteller around Boy Scout campfires. The stories were usually other people’s—John Campbell’s “Who Goes There” has been responsible for a lot of nightmares in tents over the last forty years—but on one occasion I was caught short and had to make up a story on no notice at all. Since the audience did consist of Scouts, some with astronomy merit badges which I had issued, a version of “Mistaken” developed almost at once under the pressure.

  A few years later, while teaching at a primary-grade summer school, I wa
s informed by the director that my group would be putting on the following Wednesday’s assembly. It was then Friday, and “Mistaken” appeared in the form of a play in due course, thanks mostly to a very capable teen-aged girl to whom responsibility could be delegated. Writing the thing in story form was almost an afterthought.

  I have already admitted that some stories were suggested, in one form or another, by editors. Judy-Lynn del Rey does not greatly resemble John Campbell in very many ways, but like him she can light fires under authors. “Stuck With It” was her idea; she specifically told me she wanted a story about a civilization which had become overdependent on a superadhesive. My own contrary nature did emerge, obviously. I had been getting more and more irritated with “environmentalists” who belittle physical-science engineering and technology and claim that everything should be done biologically. They are especially annoying when conversation reveals that they don’t happen to know a chromosome from a microtome, but are still sure that the “natural” way is best. Personally I’d rather spend thirty years dying of nitrite poisoning than thirty hours dying of natural botulism. Since biological engineering can be just as good a pollutant as the chemical kind, I made it so, and this was before the flap about recombinant DNA research.

  Requests come in various forms. Fred Pohl, while editing Galaxy and If magazines, used to buy paintings which he thought would make good covers and then have stories written to fit them. I was asked to do one for what looked like a trite situation—a giant meteor fitted with rocket motors being driven Earthward. My contrariness made me interpret the picture as differently as I could, and “Bulge” resulted. Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star” appeared after I had sent “Bulge” off to Fred, and for a little while I worried about accidental plagiarism; I think I even went so far as to call Larry up and apologize. Then reason reasserted itself, and I decided that Larry had no prior rights to tidal forces, and I don’t think the yarns are similar enough to call for the convention of an Ethics Committee.