Other voices were calling in the space around him, as he came once more within range of Launch Control. They waxed and waned as he flashed through the radio shadow of the mountains; they were talking about him, but the fact scarcely registered on his emotions. He listened with an impersonal interest, as if to messages from some remote point of space or time, of no concern to him. Once he heard Van Kessel’s voice say, quite distinctly: “Tell Callisto’s skipper we’ll give him an intercept orbit, as soon as we know that Leyland’s past perigee. Rendezvous time should be one hour, five minutes from now.” I hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that’s one appointment I’ll never keep.
For now the wall of rock was only fifty miles away, and each time he spun helplessly in space it came ten miles closer. There was no room for optimism now, as he sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier. This was the end, and suddenly it became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned, like a coward.
No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. Now he was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled, the path that should have led to Earth. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him.
And then the moonscape exploded into silent flame. A light as fierce as that of the Sun banished the long shadows struck fire from the peaks and craters spread below. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, and had faded completely before he had turned toward its source.
Directly ahead of him, only twenty miles away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted in the Soviet Range—but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought—that by some fantastic feat of organization and logistics the Farside Engineering Division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.
For it was gone. A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five seconds ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.
He had made another complete revolution and was almost upon the mountains when he remembered that all this while there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule—a thousand tons, traveling at over a mile a second— was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he was now racing. The impact of the man-made meteor must have jolted the whole of Farside.
His luck held to the very end. There was a brief pitter-patter of dust particles against his suit, and he caught a blurred glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke clouds flashing beneath him. (How strange to see a cloud upon the Moon!) Then he was through the mountains, with nothing ahead but blessed, empty sky.
Somewhere up there, an hour in the future along his second orbit, Callisto would be moving to meet him. But there was no hurry now; he had escaped from the maelstrom. For better or for worse, he had been granted the gift of life.
There was the launching track, a few miles to the right of his path; it looked like a hairline scribed across the face of the Moon. In a few moments he would be within radio range; now, with thankfulness and joy, he could make that second call to Earth, to the woman who was still waiting in the African night.
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* * * *
Anyone who does not know by now that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick are collaborating on a novel and movie to be called 2001: A Space Odyssey (and completed well before that date, one assumes) has not been reading his London Sunday Times Magazine— or his New York Sunday Times Magazine, or Life, or these Annuals— or probably much of anything else. The news has grown from a trickle to a flood over the past year; it is even barely possible that the novel, at least, will be published before this book.
Well, we assume it is worth waiting for: Kubrick-and-Clarke can’t be all bad. In fact, things seem to be picking up in s-f movies, I have not seen The 10th Victim, but if the film compares to Sheckley’s “novelization” (of the movie made from his own story), it is good nervous fun. I have seen a preview of Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity, which has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with Einstein, and everything to do with S (for society, sex, sanity, science, speculation, surrealism, symbolism) F (for fantasy, fact, feelings, fluidity, and first-rate fotografy).
The situation in television is, perhaps, faintly promising. As I write, the offerings are primarily fantasy: I Dream of Jeannie, Stuart Little. Batman is not exactly fantasy—maybe the good old invidious term, “pseudoscience”? But ABC has announced a show called Time Tunnel, and is considering another. The Invaders, both of which are supposed to be bona-fide science fiction. Meantime from England comes word of a BBC-2 series initiated last fall under Producer Irene Shubik, which has done some acceptable, if not exciting, dramatizations of stories by such people as Asimov, Brunner, Pohl, Tenn, and Wyndham. And the late news is that Rattray Taylor, who has been responsible for some first-rate features and documentaries, will produce The World of J. G. Ballard.
On stage, of course, symbolism is the thing. Albee and Pinter and the New York production of Marat/Sade all veer continually into fantasy—but not often over the (shifting and frequently invisible) line into s-f. Closer to home were Durrenmatt’s The Physicists (now in print here, from Grove Press) and Loring Mandel’s Project Immortality, which saw only a two-week experimental production at Washington’s Arena Theatre in 1965, but will, hopefully, be more widely known by the time this is published.
And then of course there is Ubu Roi, by that spectacular scatologist, surrealist, speculative philosopher, and pataphysical scientist Alfred Jarry. Ubu is in.
Less well known is the “neo-scientific novel” Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician, written a full seventy years ago and first published posthumously (in France) in 1911, now in print in English for the first time.
To call Faustroll a novel is rather like referring to a Mariner space probe as a flying machine. The term is applicable, but a great deal less than adequate. Faustroll is a novel, and a rather old-fashioned one, as far as plot is concerned: The learned doctor, dunned for debts, escapes prison by luring the drink-loving bailiff, Panmuphle, into a Marvelous Invention (a copper-mesh skiff—perhaps the first amphibious vessel), in which, with the added company of the doctor’s friend (or familiar), the talking baboon Bosse-de-Nage, a Wonderful Voyage is conducted. After many strange adventures and exotic sights, including a holocaust in which Bosse-de-Nage dies (“provisionally”), the sieve-boat founders, and Panmuphle, the narrator up to this point, disappears (presumably, unprovisionally, dead). Faustroll takes up the (prophetically posthumous?) narrative in the last section (Book VIII, subtitled, Ethernity), from which the first two chapters are reprinted below.
(In the Selected Works, editors Ralph Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, supply footnotes and introductory explanations which I shall not include here, beyond commenting that the cosmological, physical, and metaphysical arguments advanced are in specific reply/parody to/of several essays and addresses of Lord Kelvin, then recently published; that the names mentioned are those of scientists of the time, mentioned in Kelvin’s works; and that “the measuring rod, the watch, the tuning fork, the luminiferous ether, the rotating flywheels and linked gyrostats,” as well as the Scottish shoemaker’s wax, the squares, pyramids, screws, and paddles, plus the reference to the sun as a “cool solid,” and the final reference to an optics phenomenon known as “Haidinger’s Brushes” are all lifted straight from Kelvin.)
* * * *
TWO TELEPATHIC LETTERS TO LORD KELVIN
ALFRED JARRY
I: Concerning the Measuring Rod, the Watch and the Tuning Fork
It is a long time since I have sent you news of myself; but I do not think you will have imagined that I was dead. Death is only for common people. It is a fact, nevertheless, that I am no longer on earth. Where I am I have only discovered a very short time ago. For we are both of the opinion that, if one can measure what one is talking about and express it in numbers, which constitute the sole reality, then one has some knowledge of one’s subject. Now, up to the present moment I knew myself to be elsewhere than on earth, in the same way that I know that quartz is situated elsewhere, in the realm of hardness, and less honorably so, than the ruby; the ruby elsewhere than the diamond; the diamond than the posterior callosities of Bosse-de-Nage; and their thirty-two skin-folds—more numerous than his teeth, if one includes the wisdom teeth—than the prose of Latent Obscure.
But was I elsewhere in terms of date or of position, before or to the side, after or nearer? I was in that place where one finds oneself after having left time and space: the infinite eternal, Sir.
It was natural that, having lost my books, my skiff of metallic cloth, the society of Bosse-de-Nage and Monsieur Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff, my senses, the earth, and those two old Kantian aspects of thought, I should suffer the same anguish of isolation as a residual molecule several centimeters distant from the others in a good modern vacuum of Messrs. Tait and Dewar. And, even then, perhaps the molecule knows that it is several centimeters away! For one single centimeter, the only valid sign for me of space, being measurable and a means of measuring, and for the mean solar second, in terms of which the heart of my terrestrial body beat—for these things I would have given my soul, Sir, despite the usefulness to me of this commodity in informing you of these curiosities.
The body is a more necessary vehicle because it supports one’s clothes, and through clothes one’s pockets. I had left in one of my pockets by mistake my centimeter, an authentic copy in brass of the traditional standard, more portable than the earth or even the terrestrial quadrant, which permits the wandering and posthumous souls of interplanetary savants to concern themselves no further with this old globe, nor even with CGS [centimeter gramme second], as far as measurements of size are concerned, thanks to MM. Mechain and Delambre.
As for my mean solar second, were I to have remained on the earth I still could not have been certain of retaining it safely and of being able to measure time validly through its medium.
If in the course of a few million years I have not terminated my pataphysical studies, it is certain that the period of the earth’s rotation around its axis and of its revolution around the sun will both be very different from what they are now. A good watch, which I would have had running all this time, would have cost me an exorbitant price, and, in any case, I do not perform secular experiments, have nothing but contempt for continuity, and consider it more esthetic to keep Time itself in my pocket, or the unity of time, which is its snapshot.
For these reasons, I possessed a vibrator better arranged for permanence and for absolute accuracy than the hairspring of a chronometer, one whose period of vibration would have retained the same value over a certain number of million years with an error of less than 1:1,000. A tuning fork. Its period had been carefully determined, before I embarked in the skiff, according to your instructions, by our colleague Professor Macleod, in terms of mean solar seconds, with the prongs of the tuning fork being pointed successively upward, downward and toward the horizon, in order to eliminate the least effect of terrestrial gravity.
I no longer had even my tuning fork. Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his measuring rod, and his tuning fork. I believe, Sir, that it is indeed this state which constitutes death.
But I suddenly remembered your teachings and my own previous experiments. Since I was simply nowhere, or somewhere, which is the same thing, I found a substance with which to make a piece of glass, having met various demons, including the Sorting Demon of Maxwell, who succeeded in grouping particular types of movement in one continuous widespread liquid (what you call small elastic solids or molecules): a substance as plentiful as one could desire, in the shape of silicate of aluminum. I have engraved the lines and lit the two candles, albeit with a little time and perseverance, having had to work without even the aid of flint implements. I have seen the two rows of spectrums, and the yellow spectrum has returned my centimeter to me by virtue of the figure 5.892 x 105 [wavelength of yellow light].
Now that we are happy and comfortable, and on dry land, as is my atavistic habit, since I carry on me the one-thousand-millionth part of a quarter of the earth’s circumference [one centimeter], which is more honorable than being attached to the surface of the globe by attraction, permit me, I pray, to note a few impressions for you.
Eternity appears to me in the image of an immobile ether, which consequently is not luminiferous. I would describe luminiferous ether as circularly mobile and perishable. And I deduce from Aristotle (Treatise on the Heavens) that it is appropriate to write ethernity.
Luminiferous ether, together with all material particles, which I can easily distinguish—my astral body having good pataphysical eyes—possesses the form, at first sight, of a system of rigid links joined together, and having rapidly rotating fly-wheels pivoted on some of the links. Thus it fulfills exactly the mathematical ideal worked out by Navier, Poisson, and Cauchy. Furthermore, it constitutes an elastic solid capable of determining the magnetic rotation of the plane of polarization of light discovered by Faraday. At my posthumous leisure I shall arrange it to have zero moment of momentum as a whole and to reduce it to the state of a mere spring balance.
Moreover, I am of the opinion that one could reduce considerably the complexity of this spring balance of this luminiferous ether by substituting for the linked gyrostats various systems of circulation of liquids of infinite volume through perforations in infinitely small solids.
It will lose none of its qualities as a result of these modifications. Ether has always appeared to me, to the touch, to be as elastic as jelly and yielding under pressure like Scottish shoemakers’ wax.
* * * *
II: Concerning the Sun as a Cool Solid
The sun is a cool, solid, and homogeneous globe. Its surface is divided into squares of one meter, which are the bases of long, inverted pyramids, thread-cut, 696,999 kilometers long, their points one kilometer from the center. Each is mounted on a screw and its movement toward the center would cause, if I had the time, the rotation of a paddle at the top end of each screw shaft, in a few meters of viscous fluid, with which the whole surface is thinly covered . . .
I was quite disinterested in this mechanical spectacle, not having found again my mean solar second and being distraught at the loss of my tuning fork. But I took a piece of brass and fashioned a wheel in which I cut two thousand teeth, copying everything which M. Fizeau, Lord Rayleigh, and Mrs. Sidgwick had achieved in similar circumstances.
Suddenly, the second was rediscovered in the absolute measure of 9,413 kilometers per mean solar second of the Siemens unit, and the pyramids, forced to descend on their threads since they found themselves, like myself, in the movement of time, were obliged to come into equilibrium, in order to remain stable, by borrowing a sufficient quantity of Sir Humphrey Davy’s repulsive motion; and the fixed matter, the screw shafts and the screw nuts disappeared. The sun became viscous and began to turn on its axis in twenty-five-day cycles; in a few years you will see sunspots on it, and a few quarter-centuries will determine their periods. Soon, in its great age, it will shrink in a diminution of three-quarters.
And now I am being initiated into the science of all things (you will receive three new fragments from two of my forthcoming books), having reconquered all perception, which consists in duration and size. I understand that the weight of my brass wheel, which I clasp between the hebetude of the abstract fingers of my astral body, is the fourth power of eight meters per hour; I hope, deprived of my senses, to recognize color, temperature, taste, and various qua
lities other than the six, in the actual number of revolutions per second . . .
Farewell: I can glimpse already, perpendicularly to the sun, the cross with a blue center, the red brushes toward the nadir and the zenith, and the horizontal gold of foxes’ tails.
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* * * *
After which, the astral doctor goes on to a mathematical analysis of the “surface of God,” with the conclusion that “God is the tangential point between zero and infinity—” a concept which might be of use to some learned doctors currently embroiled in an effort to determine God’s viability.
Of course, all that (except the physics lessons and conclusions about God) is just the plot. The book is built out of forty-one “chapters,” some containing a eulogy, critique, polemic, or outright backstab, aimed at Jarry’s associates and enemies, and other prominent figures of the time; and each is a separate entity, containing a discourse or comment or allegory on art, science, politics, religion, metaphysics, literature . . . and, of course, ‘Pataphysics (which is the science).
Leaving Dr. Faustroll (and possibly his creator) to further examinations of infinity and The Infinite, we discern a mote on the space horizon, which grows and—no, it is not a bird, not a man, not Superman—but the spaceliner coming in from New Earth . . .
The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 17
