Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “We’ll go outside,” Max said. “You and I. Maybe the shock won’t be so bad to the women after they see me.” He paused. “You didn’t tell them, did you?”

  “I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure. I—was hoping I was wrong.”

  She opened the door and closed it quickly. There was a small crowd on the other side.

  “Hello, Pat,” Elsie said uncertainly, trying to look past them into the tank room before the door shut.

  “I’m not Pat, I’m Max,” said the tall man with the blue eyes and the fuzz-reddened skull. “Listen—”

  “Good heavens, Pat, what happened to your hair?” Shelia asked.

  “I’m Max,” insisted the man with the handsome face and the sharp blue eyes. “Don’t you get it? I’m Max Stark. The melting sickness is Mead cells. We caught them from Pat. They adapted us to Minos. They also changed us all into Pat Mead.”

  The women stared at him, at one another. They shook their heads.

  “They don’t understand,” June said. “I couldn’t have if I hadn’t seen it happening, Max.”

  “It’s Pat,” said Shelia, dazedly stubborn. “He shaved off his hair. It’s some kind of joke.”

  Max shook her shoulders, glaring down at her face. “I’m Max. Max Stark. They all look like me. Do you hear? It’s funny, but it’s not a joke. Laugh for us, for God’s sake!”

  “It’s too much,” said June. “They’ll have to see.”

  She opened the door and let them in. They hurried past her to the tanks, looking at forty-six identical blond faces, beginning to call in frightened voices:

  “Jerry!”

  “Harry!”

  “Lee, where are you sweetheart—”

  June shut the door on the voices that were growing hysterical, the women terrified and helpless, the men shouting to let the women know who they were.

  “It isn’t easy,” said Max, looking down at his own thick muscles. “But you aren’t changed and the other girls aren’t. That helps.”

  Through the muffled noise and hysteria, a bell was ringing.

  “It’s the airlock,” June said.

  Peering in the viewplate were nine Meads from Alexandria. To all appearances, eight of them were Pat Mead at various ages from fifteen to fifty, and the other was a handsome, leggy, redheaded girl who could have been his sister.

  Regretfully, they explained through the voice tube that they had walked over from Alexandria to bring news that the plane pilot had contracted melting sickness there and had died.

  They wanted to come in.

  June and Max told them to wait and returned to the tank room. The men were enjoying their new height and strength, and the women were bewilderedly learning that they could tell one Pat Mead from another by voice, by gesture of face or hand. The panic was gone. In its place was a dull acceptance of the fantastic situation.

  Max called for attention. “There are nine Meads outside who want to come in. They have different names, but they’re all Pat Mead.”

  They frowned or looked blank, and George Barton asked, “Why didn’t you let them in? I don’t see any problem.”

  “One of them,” said Max soberly, “is a girl. Patricia Mead. The girl wants to come in.”

  There was a long silence while the implication settled to the fear center of the women’s minds. Shelia the beautiful felt it first. She cried, “No! Please don’t let her in!” There was real fright in her tone, and the women caught it quickly.

  Elsie clung to Jerry, begging, “You don’t want me to change, do you, Jerry? You like me the way I am! Tell me you do!”

  The other girls backed away. It was illogical, but it was human. June felt terror rising in herself. She held up her hand for quiet and presented the necessity to the group.

  “Only half of us can leave Minos,” she said. “The men cannot eat ship food; they’ve been conditioned to this planet. We women can go, but we would have to go without our men. We can’t go outside without contagion, and we can’t spend the rest of our lives in quarantine inside the ship. George Barton is right—there is no problem.”

  “But we’d be changed!” Shelia shrilled. ‘I don’t want to become a Mead! I don’t want to be somebody else!”

  She ran to the inner wall of the corridor. There was a brief hesitation, and then one by one the women fled to that side, until there were only Bess, June, and four others left.

  “See!” cried Shelia. “A vote! We can’t let the girl in!”

  No one spoke. To change, to be someone else—the idea was strange and horrifying. The men stood uneasily glancing at one another, as if looking into mirrors, and against the wall of the corridor the women watched in fear and huddled together, staring at the men. One man in forty-seven poses. One of them made a beseeching move toward Elsie, and she shrank away.

  “No, Jerry! I won’t let you change me!”

  Max stirred restlessly, the ironic smile that made his new face his own unconsciously twisting into a grimace of pity. “We men can’t leave, and you women can’t stay,” he said bluntly. “Why not let Patricia Mead in? Get it over with!”

  June took a small mirror from her belt pouch and studied her own face, aware of Max talking forcefully, the men standing silent, the women pleading. Her face . . . her own face with its dark-blue eyes, small nose, long mobile lips . . . the mind and the body are inseparable; the shape of a face is part of the mind. She put the mirror back.

  “I’d kill myself!” Shelia was sobbing. “I’d rather die!”

  “You won’t die,” Max was saying. “Can’t you see there’s only one solution—”

  They were looking at Max. June stepped silently out of the tank room and then turned and went to the airlock. She opened the valves that would let in Pat Mead’s sister.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Clifford D. Simak

  LIMITING FACTOR

  One of the strangest of all worlds—yet perhaps, as we look around at our own fantastically increasing technological complexities, one of the more inevitable in a highly advanced civilization. In this story a gigantic super-advanced society is completely characterized by an artifact which it has abandoned.

  ~ * ~

  FIRST, there were two planets looted of their ores, mined and gutted and left there naked for the crows of space to pick.

  Then there was a planet with a faery city, a place that made one think of cobwebs with the dew still on them, a place of glass and plastic so full of wondrous beauty that it hurt one’s throat to look.

  But there was just this one city. There was no other sign of habitation on the entire planet. And the city was deserted. Perfect in its beauty but hollow as a laugh.

  Finally, there was a metal planet, third outward from the Sun. Not a lump of metallic ore, but a planet with a surface—or a roof—of fabricated metal burnished to the polish of a bright steel mirror. And it shone, by reflected light, like another Sun.

  ~ * ~

  “I can’t get over the conviction,” said Duncan Griffith, “that this place is no more than a camp.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” Paul Lawrence told him sharply. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  “It may not look like a camp,” said Griffith doggedly, “but it meets the definition.”

  It looks like a city to me, Lawrence told himself. It always has, from the first moment that I saw it, and it always will. Big and vital, despite its faery touch—a place to live and dream and find the strength and courage to put the dreams to work. Great dreams, he told himself. Dreams to match the city—such a city as would take man a thousand years to build.

  “What I can’t understand,” he said aloud, “is why it is deserted. There is no sign of violence. No sign of death at all.”

  “They voluntarily left it,” Griffith told him. “They up and went away. And they did it because it wasn’t really home to them. It was just a camp, and it held no traditions and no legends. As a camp, it had no emotional value for the ones who built it.”

&nb
sp; “A camp,” said Lawrence stubbornly, “is just a stopping place. A temporary habitation that you sling together and make as comfortable as you can with the things at hand.”

  “So?” asked Griffith.

  “These folks did more than stop here,” Lawrence said. “That city wasn’t slapped together. It was planned with foresight and built with loving care.”

  “On a human basis, yes,” said Griffith. “You’re dealing here with non-human values and an alien viewpoint.”

  Lawrence squatted and plucked at a grass stem, stuck it between his teeth, and chewed on it thoughtfully. He squinted across the brilliant blaze of noonday sun at the silent, empty city.

  Griffith hunkered down beside him.

  “Don’t you see, Paul,” he said, “that it has to be a temporary habitation. There is no sign of any previous culture on the planet. No artifact. King and his gang went over it, and there wasn’t anything. Nothing but the city. Think of it—an absolutely virgin planet with a city that would take a race a million year’s of living just to dream. First there’d be a tree to huddle under when it rained. Then a cave to huddle in when night came down. After that there’d be a tent or a wigwam or a hut. Then three huts, and you had a village.”

  “I know,” Lawrence said. “I know.”

  “A million years of living,” Griffith said relentlessly. “Ten thousand centuries before a race could build a fairyland of glass and plastics. And that million years of living wasn’t done on this planet. A million years of living leaves scars upon a planet. And there aren’t any scars. This planet is brand-new.”

  “You’re convinced they came from somewhere else, Dune?”

  Griffith nodded. “They must have.”

  “From Planet Three, perhaps.”

  “We can’t know that. Not yet.”

  “Maybe never,” Lawrence said.

  He spat out the blade of grass.

  “This system,” he said, “is like a pulp whodunit. Everywhere you turn you stumble on a clue, and every clue is haywire. Too many mysteries, Dune. This city here, the metal planet, the looted planets— it’s just too much to swallow. It would be our luck to stumble on a place like this.”

  “I have a feeling there’s a tie between it all,” said Griffith.

  Lawrence grunted.

  “It’s a sense of history” Griffith said. “A feeling for the fitness of things. Given time, all historians acquire it.”

  A footstep crunched behind them and they came to their feet, turning toward the sound.

  It was Doyle, the radioman, hurrying toward them from the lifeboat camp.

  “Sir,” he said to Lawrence, “I just had Taylor out on Planet Three. He asks if you won’t come. It seems they’ve found a door.”

  “A door!” said Lawrence. “A door into the planet. What did they find inside?”

  “He didn’t say, sir.”

  “He didn’t say!”

  “No. You see, sir, they can’t budge the door. There’s no way to open it.”

  ~ * ~

  The door wasn’t much to look at.

  There were twelve holes in the planet’s surface, grouped in four groups of three each, as if they might be handholds for a thing that had three fingers.

  And that was all. You could not tell where the door began or where it ended.

  “There is a crack,” said Taylor, “but you can just barely see it with a glass. Even under magnification it’s no more than a hairline. The door’s machined so perfectly that it’s practically one piece with the surface. For a long time we didn’t even know it was a door. We sat around and wondered what the holes were for.

  “Scott found it. Just skating around and saw those holes. You could have looked until your eyes fell out and you’d never have found it except by accident.”

  “And there’s no way to open it?” asked Lawrence.

  “None that we have found. We tried lifting it sticking our fingers in the holes and heaving. You might as well have tried to lift the planet. And anyhow, you can’t get much purchase here. Can’t keep your feet under you. This stuff’s so slick you can scarcely walk on it. You don’t walk, in fact; you skate. I’d hate to think what would happen if some of the boys got to horsing around and someone gave someone else a shove. It would take us a week to run them down.”

  “I know,” said Lawrence. “I put the lifeboat down as easy as I could, and we skidded forty miles or more.”

  Taylor chuckled. “I’ve got the big job stuck on with all the magnetics that we have and even then she wabbles if you lean on her. Ice is positively rough alongside this stuff.”

  “About this door,” said Lawrence. “It occurred to you it might be a combination?”

  Taylor nodded. “Sure, we thought of that. And if it is, we haven’t got a ghost. Take the element of chance, multiply it by the unpredictability of an alien mind.”

  “You checked?”

  “We did,” said Taylor. “We stuck a camera tentacle down into those holes and we took all kinds of shots. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Eight inches deep or so. Wider at the bottom than the top. But smooth. No bumps. No ridges. No keyholes.

  “We managed to saw out a hunk of metal so that we could test it. Used up three blades getting it out. Basically it’s steel, but it’s alloyed with something Mueller can’t tie a tag onto, and the molecular structure has him going nuts.”

  “Stumped,” said Lawrence.

  “Yeah. I skated the ship over to the door and we hooked up a derrick and heaved with everything we had. The ship swung like a pendulum and the door stayed put.”

  “We might look for other doors,” said Lawrence, whistling past the graveyard. “They might not be all alike.”

  “We looked,” said Taylor. “Crazy as it sounds, we did. Each man jack of us, creeping on our shinbones. We mapped the area off in sectors and crawled on our hands and knees for miles, squinting and peering. We almost put our eyes out, what with the sun glaring from the metal and our images staring back at us as if we were crawling on a mirror.”

  “Come to think of it,” said Lawrence, “they probably wouldn’t have built doors very close together. Every hundred miles, say—or maybe every thousand.”

  “You’re right,” said Taylor. “It might be a thousand.”

  “There’s just one thing to do,” Lawrence told him.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Taylor, “but I hate to do it. We got a problem here. Something we should work out. And if we blast, we’ve failed at the first equation.”

  Lawrence stirred uneasily. “I know how you feel,” he said. “If they beat us on the first move, we haven’t got a chance at the second or the third.”

  “We can’t just sit around,” said Taylor.

  “No,” said Lawrence. “No, I guess we can’t.”

  “I hope it works,” said Taylor. It did.

  The blast ripped the door free and hurled it into space. It came down a mile away and rolled like a crazy, jagged wheel across the ice-slick surface.

  Half an acre or so of the surface itself peeled up and back and hung twisted like a question mark that sparkled in the sun.

  The unmanned lifeboat, clamped to the metal by its weak magnetics, like a half-licked stamp, came unstuck when the blast let loose. It danced a heavy-footed skater’s waltz for a good twelve miles before it came to rest.

  The metal of the surface was a mere fourteen inches thick, a paper-thin covering when one considered that the sphere was the size of Earth.

  A metal ramp, its upper ten feet twisted and smashed by the explosive force, wound down into the interior like a circular staircase.

  Nothing came out of the hole. No sound or light or smell.

  Seven men went down the ramp to see what they could find. The others waited topside, sweating them out.

  ~ * ~

  Take a trillion sets of tinker toys.

  Turn loose a billion kids.

  Give them all the time they need and don’t tell them what to do.