“How could you fail to move on? What sort of a person would you be? An ancestor worshiper, or something like that.”
“They withdrew from the world,” said Vins. “It’s vacant possession. It’s ours, now. All the rainy, stony spaces of it.”
“And I say this is the same, this place we’ve stumbled into. I say this Murphytopia is the same case—it’s vacant possession.”
He was quiet for a while. Vins was scanning the sky through the branches, looking for signs if the human.
“I say it’s ours and I say the hell with him,” said Murphy, rolling his fist through the air
“Here,” repeated Vins. “It’s forbidden us. He says it’s forbidden to us.”
“He says?” boomed Murphy, climbing up on his legs on the bough to shout the phrase at the manufactured sky. “And who’s he to stop us?”
“Will you hush?” snapped Vins.
The sky was a clear watercolor wash from high dark blue to the pink of the low eastern sky. There were a few thready horizontal clouds, like loose strands of straw. The sun itself, or whatever device it was that circled the world to reflect sunlight upon it, was a small circle of chili-pepper red.
“It is beautiful here,” said Murphy. Sitting down again on the turf.
“It’s mild,” agreed Vins.
“Does that mean that those old children’s stories are true?” Murphy asked. “They, the sapiens, messed up the climate and then just walked away. Pumped up some homo sapiens bodies to neanderthalis endurance levels, crash-loaded their minds with English and French and Russian and whatever and just ran away.”
“Who knows?”
“But this is what bugs me,” said Murphy. “If they had the—if they have the capacity to build whole new worlds, like this one, and provide it with a beautiful climate, you know, why not simply sort out the climate on Earth? Why not reach their godlike fingers into the ocean flow and the airstream and dabble a bit and return the Earth to a temperate climate?”
Vins didn’t answer this at first; he didn’t think it was really addressed to him. But Murphy wouldn’t let it go.
“Left the mess and just ran away. Cold and snow and rain and deserts of broken rock. That’s downright irresponsible. Why not mend the mess they’d made? Why not?”
“I suppose,” said Vins, reluctantly, “it’s easier to manage a model like this one. Even a rather large model, like this one. The climate of the whole Earth—that’s a chaotic system, isn’t it? That’s not a simple circular body of air a thousand miles across, that’s a three-dimensional vortex tens of thousands of miles arc by arc. Big dumb object, he called it.”
“He?”
“Maybe they can’t crack the problem of controlling chaotic systems any more than we can. He is the homo sapiens I met. When I said he called it that, I meant Ramon Harburg Guthrie called it that.”
“Doesn’t sound very godlike at all.”
“No.”
“And doesn’t excuse them from fleeing their mess.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that it did.”
“And what were you suggesting?”
Vins coughed. “I’ll tell you—I’ll say what I’m suggesting. Ramon Harburg Guthrie said that the elder sapiens, the wealthiest thousands, fled throughout the system. They built themselves little private utopias of all shapes and sizes. They’re living there now, or their descendents are. But these should be our lands. Why would we struggle on with the wastelands and the ice—or,” and he threw his hands up, “or Mars, for crying in the wilderness, Mars?” He spoke as an individual who had lived two full terms on Mars, once during his compulsory military training and once during his scientific education. He knew whereof he spoke: the extraordinary cold, the barrenness, the slow and stubborn progress of colonization. “Why would we be trying to bully a life out of Mars, of all places, if the system is littered with private paradises like this one?”
“I like the cut of your jib, the shape of your thinking, young Vins,” said Murphy, saluting him and then shaking his hand. “But what of the man who scratched your head, there? What of that bold sapiens fellow himself?”
“He thinks he’s hunting us,” said Vins. There was something nearly sadness in his voice, a species of regret. “He doesn’t yet realize.” He pulled the gun out of the bag.
They sat for a while in silence. From time to time Murphy would go, “Remind me what we’re waiting for, here?” And Vins would explain it again. “He’ll come back,” he said. “He’ll get his skull bandaged, or get it healed-up with some high-tech magic-ray, I don’t know. But he’ll be back. He has to eliminate all four of us before we can put a message where others can hear it.”
“And shouldn’t we be doing that? Putting the message out there for others to know where we are—to know that such a place as here even exists?”
“That would require us to stay at . . .” prompted Vins.
“Stay in the shuttle,” said Murphy. “I see. So you reckon he’ll? You think he’ll?”
“What would you do? He came before with some sort of personal flying harness, like a skyhook, and a handgun. He’ll come back heavier. He’ll hit the ship first, to shut that door firm.”
“I guess we already tried the radio. Broadcast, I mean. But who’d be listening? Who’d be monitoring this piece of sky? Nobody.” He picked some bark from the bough and crumpled it to papery shards between his strong fingers. “I suppose,” he continued, “that this homo sapiens feller, he’s not to know how long we’ve been here. For all he knows we just crashed here, this morning. Or we’ve been here a month.”
“He’ll have to take his chances,” agreed Vins. “He’ll come back and hammer the ship, smash and dint it into the dirt.”
“Then what?”
“There are several ways it could go. If he’s smart, if he were as smart as me, he’d lay waste to the whole area. I’d scorch the whole thousand-square-mile area.”
“But he lives here!”
“He lives on the other side. He don’t need here. But he won’t do that. He’s attached to it, he’s sentimentally connected with the landscape, its beauty. With its vacuity and its possibility. He won’t do that. So, if he’s smart, he’ll do the second-best option.”
“Which is what?”
“He’ll wait until dark and then overfly the area with the highest-power infrared detection he can muster. He’d pick out our body heat. Or, at least, it would be hard for us to disguise that.”
“You think he’ll do that?”
Vins bared his teeth and then sealed his lips again. “No I don’t think so. He’ll want to hunt us straight down. He’ll blow the ship and then come galloping down these paths we’ve trailed through the long grass. He’ll try and hunt us down. He’ll have armor on, probably. Big guns. He’ll have big guns with fat barrels.”
“Other people? Other sapiens?”
“That,” said Vins, “is the real question. That’s the crucial thing. He called this world me-topia. Does that suggest to you, Murphy, a solitary individual, living perhaps with a few upgraded cats and dogs, maybe a metal mickey or two?”
“I’ve no notion.”
“Or does it suggest a population of a thousand sapiens , or a hundred thousand, living in the clean open spaces on the far side of this disk—living a medieval Europe, perhaps. Riding around dressed in silk and hunting the white stag?”
“I’ve really no notion.”
“And neither have I. That’ll be what we find out.”
“You’re a regular strategos,” said Murphy, and he whistled through his two front teeth. “A real strategic thinker. And then?”
“Then?”
“Then what?”
“Well,” said Vins. “That’ll depend, of course. If it’s just him, I don’t see why we don’t take the whole place to ourselves. There’s a lot of fertile ground here, a lot of settlement potential for people back home. And if it’s more than just him—”
“Maybe the far side is crawling with homo sapiens.”
“Maybe it is. But this side isn’t. We could pile our own people onto this side of the world and see what happens. See if we can arrive at an understanding. Who knows? That’s a long way in the future.” He peered through the leaves at the luster of the meadows, the beaming waters, the warm blue sky.
Murphy dozed, and was not awakened by the brittle sound of something scratching along the sky. But he was awakened by the great basso profundo whumph of the shuttle exploding: a monstrous booming, then a squat eggshaped mass of fire that mottled and clouded almost at once with its own smoke, and pushed a stalk of black up and out in an umbrella-shape into the sky. Some moments later the tree shook heartily. After that there was the random percussion and thud of bits of wreckage slamming back to earth.
Murphy almost fell out of the tree. Vins grabbed him.
Their ship was a crater now, and a scattering pattern of gobbets of plasmetal flowing into the sky at forty-five degrees and crashing down again to earth at forty-five degrees, the petal pattern all around the central destruction.
“Look,” Vins hissed.
A ship, shaped like the sleek head of a greyhound, flew through, banked, and landed a hundred yards from the crater. It ejected a single figure and lifted off again.
The sound of the explosion was still rumbling in the air.
“Was that our ship?” said Murphy, stupidly. “Did he just destroy our—”
“Shush, now,” said Vins, in a low voice. “That’s him.”
“Then who’s flying the ship?”
“It’ll be another sapiens or else an automatic system; that hardly matters. The ship will circle back there, in case Edwards or Sinclair are nearby and come running out to see what the noise is. But he’ll come after us. He knows I won’t be fooled by—” And even as Vins was speaking, the figure, armored like an inflated figure, like a man made of tires, turned its head and selected one of the trails through the grass and starting trotting along it.
“That’s a big gun he’s carrying,” Murphy pointed out. “He’s coming this way with a very big gun.”
“He’s coming this way,” said Vins, taking the gun out of his sack and prepping it, “with his eggshell skull and his sluggy reactions.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Murphy.
“Do you think he’ll look upward as he comes under this tree?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
“And if you kill him, what then?”
“I hope not to kill him, not straight off,” said Vins, in a scientific voice. “I’ll need him to get that plane to come down so we can use it.”
He was coming down the path. Vins and Murphy waited in the tree, waiting for him to pass beneath them—or for him to notice them, the two of them, in the tree and shoot them down.
He was armored of course. He came closer.
Maybe that’s the way it goes. It’s hard for me to be, from this perspective, sure. Indeed it’s hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the two different sorts of human. These neanderthals, after all, are not created ex nihilo via some genetically engineered miracle; they were ordinary sapiens adapted and enhanced (strengthened, given more endurance) the better to carry on living on their home world. The stay-at-homes. The ones sentimentally attached to where they happened to be. They’re the same people as the sapiens, whom they—perhaps surprisingly quickly—supplanted. Does it matter if they come swarming all over Guthrie’s bubble-wrapped world? Is that a better, or a worse, eventuality than that place remaining the rich man’s private fiefdom?
It’s all lotus.
The seventh day.
The sun rose in the west, as it did. Clouds clung about the lower reaches of the sky like the froth on the lip of a gigantic ceramic mug of cappuccino: white and frothy and stained hither and thither with touches of golden brown.
The grasslands rejoiced in the touch of the sun. I say rejoiced in the strong sense of the word. Light passed through reality filters. Wind passed over the shafts of grass, moving them, pausing, moving again; but light passed through them. Wind made a lullaby song of hushes and then paused to make even more eloquent moments of silence. But the light shone right through. Light passed through two profound reality filters. This is photons. These are photons. Photons were always already rushing faster than mass from the surface of the sun. They were passing through a hunk of crystal in the sky, modified with various other minerals and smart-patches, and were deflected onto the surface of the world. This globe served the world as its illumination. The photons passed again through the slender sheaths of green and yellow, those trillions of close-fitting rubber bricks we call cells; cells stacked multiple-layered and rippling out in all directions, gathered into superstructures of magnificent length and fragility; and in every single cell the light chanced through matter and came alive, alive, with the most vibrant and exhilarating and ecstatic thrumming of the spirit. That’s where it’s at. The light, the translucence of matter, the inflection of the photons, the grass singing, and just after.
Forbidden Planet
Stephen Baxter
If you have a nodding acquaintance with the long history of Star Trek, you’ll probably know that the original 1960s series was allowed not just one but two pilot episodes before its final green light. But if you watch the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, you might be forgiven for thinking you’re viewing an even earlier Trek pilot. And in a sense you are.
It is the year 2257. Under the command of brave and handsome Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen, who eventually morphed into the straight-faced hero of the Naked Gun comedies), United Planets space cruiser C57-D lands on the planet Altair IV, in search of the lost spacecraft Bellerophon. They discover obsessive scientist Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), living in an impressive home with a sophisticated robot, Robby, who speaks 187 languages and can make diamonds, and Morbius’ teenage daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). Nobody else survives.
Morbius warns Adams he must leave, before his crew are hunted down by a “planetary force” that destroyed the Bellerophon—a horror we come to know as the “id-monster.” Adams wonders how come only Morbius, his wife (now dead), and Altaira were spared, and how philologist Morbius, a language expert, managed to build Robby. Meanwhile, the crewmen drool over Altaira. In the end Adams bags her for himself, and Morbius shows disturbing signs of jealousy.
And the crew come under attack by the monster. A spectral outline hurls itself against their perimeter shielding—but it disappears when Morbius wakes from a nightmare. . . .
At last Morbius reveals his secret. He has been exploring stunning machinery left behind by the long-dead alien Krell. In the film’s finest sequence the men explore a twenty-mile-wide cubical machine buried in the ground; walkways, with ant-sized astronauts passing along them, bridge what looks like the interior of an immense valve radio.
There are headsets to boost your intelligence—which is how Morbius was able to build Robby—and the machine’s purpose is to enable the materialization of thoughts: Think it, and it becomes real. But as well as crystallizing conscious ideas, the machine also unleashes the subconscious rage of your deeper mind, the id. This unfortunate side effect killed off the Krell themselves.
And as he unwisely tinkered with the machinery, Morbius’ own released demons did for his crewmates: the id-monster is Morbius’ other darker self. Now Morbius’ unhealthy jealousy over his daughter threatens to wipe out Adams and his crew—but Morbius at last sacrifices himself, leaving Altaira in Adams’ arms.
Planet, made in 1956, is distinguished from other genre movies of its time in that it is actually quite good science fiction. This was recognized by the field’s practitioners. It is said that one master sf author (Lester Del Rey) remarked to another (Frederik Pohl), “That’s the first original science fiction movie I’ve seen that could have made a fine novelette for Astounding” (the top sf magazine of its day).
This was despite the fact that none of the principals involved in Planet had
had much involvement with the genre before. Before Planet, director Fred McLeod Wilcox was best known for his work on Lassie Come Home. With a screenplay by Cyril Hume from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler, the story was original (or at least, as Shakespeare was long dead, out of copyright—see below).
The production, filmed in Cinemascope and bright Eastman Color, took two years, costing a then-hefty $1.6 million—indeed this was the first sf film to cost in excess of $1 million. But it was money well spent. The production design was fine throughout—arguably the finest in genre movies until 2001 a decade later. The id-monster was effectively animated by Josh Meador, who had worked at the Disney studios. The planet Altair IV, around the landed spacecraft, was created on a vast set with a circular wall painting; in some sequences you can see the crewmen actually walk off into the distance, without ever colliding with the painted mountains. The soundtrack by Louis and Bebe Barron, or rather the “electronic tonalities,” without a bar of melody, was created entirely electronically and cost a cool $25,000.
Planet was unusual for its time in showing a relatively positive future, of men (mostly) and technology united in a future of prosperity and peaceful exploration. In the 1950s Cold War fears shaped sf. Many of the finest genre movies dealt with the horrors of Communist invasion and nuclear war either directly, like On the Beach (1959), or through metaphors of alien invasion and mind control, like The War of the Worlds (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). It wasn’t an age of exploration and wonder but of hunkered-down fear, in which you didn’t go seek out the alien, but it came to hunt you down in your home.
But that’s not to say that Planet was escapism. Planet has an intellectual depth that remains impressive. This colorful genre movie, all spaceships and ray guns, is a steal from Shakespeare! The Bard’s play The Tempest (written about 1611) is beamed up from an island on Earth to an island in space. Shakespeare’s Duke Prospero becomes Morbius. The virginal Miranda is Altaira. The supernatural sprite Ariel becomes Robby, and the subhuman creature Caliban is the id-monster.
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