“There's footprints up there,” he told
Jonnie. “And tire treads!”
This being in the world of tracking, Jonnie was very interested. They speculated on the possibility they had invaders. But the Desperation Defense people pooh-poohed it: nothing could get through their defenses. They then wondered if it might not have been the visitors putting down there during the war.
Jonnie wasn't going to spend weeks in space in an orbit miner so he chartered Dries Gloton's space yacht for a weekend and he and Stormalong were taken up to have another look.
Yessir! Footprints! Tire treads!
Then the sharp, trained eye of Jonnie spotted a paper wrapper that must have been discarded and lay almost covered with dust. It said “Carefree Sugarless Gum, Spearmint, 15 sticks, Life Savers, Inc., New York City.”
Stormalong thought it must be some salvage gear from a wreck maybe. But there was no wreck. Dries thought that maybe it was used to repair holes. Gum, you know.
Jonnie wouldn't let them mess up the tracks with their own. He picto-recorded them and then backtracked them and found a cairn with the very faded remains of what might have been a flag. Then, although he had trouble walking with almost no weight, he hiked around and found another cairn with another flag in it, also faded beyond recognition. That was all they found. But Jonnie showed them that the exposed edge of the wrapper was much more faded than the buried part and from that he deducted that these tracks and cairns were hundreds of years old. So they decided it was not an immediate danger and started back home.
The real discovery was made on the way back. Jonnie was admiring Dries' communication gear and Dries showed him the first pictures he had taken of the planet and Jonnie noticed there seemed to be much more cloud cover now.
He did more comparisons. They were flashing down toward Europe, of course, but they could still see northern Africa and the Middle East. The latter was green. And the former had a new sea in the middle of it.
Landed again, even though he was late for Sunday night supper, Jonnie got right onto the Desperation Defense duty officer and wanted to know if he was aware of planetary changes. He was and referred Jonnie to the general manager of Buildstrong.
“You ordered us to show a profit,” the general manager said defensively. “So we hired some more Chatovarians and started a Health Subsidiary. We figured 'Buildstrong' could also be interpreted to mean strong bodies.”
Jonnie wanted to know what the devil he had done now. And it seemed there was a below-sea-level spot in the dry wasteland of the Sahara Desert so they let the Mediterranean in and made a new sea that would furnish rainfall. And they had machine-gun-planted eighty-five quadrillion trees there, and also in the Middle East where they wouldn't require much water. Good varieties, slow growing, but very tasty. And they'd planted another sixteen quadrillion in the middle west of the American continent...oh, Jonnie hadn't seen that part of the continent? Well, there used to be trees on that huge, central, flat plain; they could prove it by fossil remains. Anyway, he was sorry if it had changed the climate. But it usually did, you know. Cleaned up the air, too.
Jonnie wanted to know how spending that much money and hiring that new army of Chatovarians was going to make a profit. And the general manager showed him the balance sheets now. They were all in the black. They were exporting food trees to food-short Chatovarian planets. Jonnie forgave him, raised his pay, and went home to a very late Sunday dinner.
Another incident worthy of note happened about that time.
Jonnie, wearing an extraterrestrial atmosphere mask to keep from being stopped on the street and gathering crowds, attended a fair in Zurich, and there he saw Pierre Solens. The ex-pilot was in beggar's rags and holding forth to an audience about how he personally, with his own eyes, had seen Jonnie Goodboy Tyler walk on a cloud and, not only that, pull a demon out of it and sing a duet with him. When he had finished his story, he passed around a battered cup for offerings. It seemed he made his living this way. When he got to Jonnie, Jonnie pulled his mask down and Pierre nearly fainted again.
There were so many exaggerations and lies going around about Jonnie that he figured he didn't need another one. So he forced Pierre into a plane, took him right down to Africa, and made him get into another plane at Victoria and by himself fly it up to the peak where the Psychlo cadavers still lay in the snow, land, look, fly back down through the overcast, and land. Pierre made it without wrecking himself and Jonnie took him back to Luxembourg. Pierre said “Thank you” and he meant it. He went back to his old job of moving the compound planes around the hangar and in time became an acceptable pilot.
There was a bizarre incident that occurred in Edinburgh. The sarcophagus of Bittie MacLeod had been miraculously preserved in the bombings: three beams of the collapsing cathedral had fallen across it almost protectively; the Chatovarians had repositioned it in the new cathedral crypt in a row of dead war heroes which included Glencannon's recovered remains.
When she was sixteen, Pattie demanded that she be taken to the crypt and married to Bittie MacLeod. Nothing could dissuade her and she stood there beside the sarcophagus in a white wedding dress, holding Bittie's locket with “To my future wife” on it. The parson, who could find no law against it, went through the wedding ceremony. She then changed to widow's weeds and after that called herself Mrs. Pattie MacLeod.
Still continuing with her medical training, she founded the MacLeod Intergalactic Health Organization. Jonnie funded it and it became a standard stop-point on and off all firing platforms throughout the galaxies. It also provided instant medical service.
Two other events had occurred. Jonnie and Chrissie had a boy born to them, Timmie Brave Tyler, an absolute carbon copy of Jonnie as everybody swore. And two years later they had a girl, Missie, that everyone affirmed was a mirror-image of Chrissie.
When Timmie was six, Jonnie blew up. Their boy was not getting properly educated. He had “uncles” by the absolute score. “Uncle” Colonel Ivan, “Uncle” Sir Robert, “Uncle” Dunneldeen. And every Scot who had mined or served with Jonnie was an “uncle.” They spoiled the child rotten. They brought him things from all over the world. But were they seeing to it that Timmie was properly educated? No! He did speak several languages after a fashion– Russian, Chinese,
Chatovarian, Psychlo, and English. He could do sums in his head when it suited him. And he could drive a teleportation go-cart Angus and Tom Smiley had made for him. But Jonnie was faced with the specter of a son who would grow up totally ignorant of the vital things in life.
Jonnie had made up his mind. Affairs were running fine– handled mostly by others anyway. So he took a few bare necessities, bundled Timmie and
Chrissie and Missie and four horses into an old marine attack plane, and flew to southern Colorado. He disconnected the plane's phone and radio and hid the ship in a clump of trees and made camp.
For the whole of the next year, rain or shine, Jonnie worked on Timmie. Missie was fine and she helped her mother very well and learned all about real tanning and cooking and things like that. But it was Timmie who got the attention.
At first Jonnie had it a little rough for the boy obviously was getting a delayed start. But after a few months he saw he was making real progress. The boy learned to track, to spot different animals and their immediate intentions. He learned to round up wild horses and train them and he didn't need a sissy thing like a saddle. He came right along and was quite cheerful about it. Jonnie got him to throw kill-clubs with considerable accuracy and he even nailed a coyote with one. Jonnie was just beginning to feel some security about the boy's future and was about to post-graduate him into stalking wolves and then pumas. But on the very first day of this, he heard a plane in the afternoon sky. It wasn't a drone. It was a plane. Heading for the plume of smoke that marked their current camp.
Jonnie and the boy trotted back, Jonnie with uneasy forebodings.
It was Dunneldeen and Sir Robert.
Timmie sprang at them like
a small windstorm, shrieking glad shrieks of welcome. “Uncle Dunneldeen! Uncle Wobert!"
Jonnie's manners let Chrissie fix them some supper. They didn't seem to be in any hurry to get on with their business. Evening came and the two of them and the family sat around the bonfire singing Scottish songs. Then Timmie showed them he hadn't forgotten the Highland fling and danced it for them like Thor had taught him.
Finally, when the children and Chrissie had gone to bed, Dunneldeen made the wholly unnecessary statement, “I suppose you're wondering why we're here.”
“What's the bad news?” said Jonnie.
“It isn't any bad news,” grumped Sir Robert. “We've been holding sixteen universes together like glue. Why should there be any bad news?”
It's been a year,” said Dunneldeen.
“You came for something,” said Jonnie suspiciously.
“Well,” said Dunneldeen, “as a matter of fact, come to think of it, we did. A couple of years ago you made a tour of all the Earth tribes. It 's been proposed that you make a tour of the major civilizations of the galaxies. A lot of governments want to bestow honors and estates and medals and things on you because galactic conditions are so prosperous.”
It made Jonnie very cross. “I told you I was taking a year off! Don't you realize I have family responsibilities?
What kind of father would I be to let my son grow up like an educated savage!” He really let them have it.
Dunneldeen heard him out and then laughed. “We thought you'd say that, so we sent Thor instead.”
Jonnie studied that over. Then he said, “So if you handled it, why have you come?”
Sir Robert looked at him. “Your year is up, laddie. Doesn't it ever occur to you that your friends miss you?”
So Jonnie went back home, and while Timmie learned to speak fifteen languages and do five kinds of math, while he learned to drive a ground car like Ker and drive and fly anything the company made, on any planet, including Dries Gloton's new yacht, his education was never finished. It was probably the one failure in Jonnie Goodboy Tyler's life.
Doctor MacDermott, the historian who considered himself expendable, lived on and on.
He wrote a book: The Jonnie Goodboy Tyler I Knew, or The Conqueror of Psychio, Prine of the Scottish Nation. It was not as good as this book, for it was intended for semiliterate people. But it had three-dimensional pictures that moved in full color– he had access to several archives– and it sold two hundred fifty billion copies in its first printing. It was translated into ninety-eight thousand different galactic languages and went into many editions.
Doctor MacDermott received royalties so far in excess of anything his simple life needed that he endowed the Tyler Museum. It is the first building you see, the one with the golden dome, when you leave the MacLeod Intergalactic Health Organization exit at the Denver terminal.
Not too long after his return from America, Jonnie disappeared. His family and his friends were very concerned. But they knew that he disliked adulation and being unable to move about without attracting crowds. He had remarked that he was not needed now and that he had done his work. A pouch, two kill-clubs, and a knife were also missing. The dragon helmet and bright-buttoned tunic were still there on a peg where he had last hung them.
But people in the galaxies do not know that he is gone. If you ask almost anyone on a civilized planet where he is, you are likely to be told that he is there, just over that hill, waiting in case the lords or the Psychlos come back. Try it. You'll see. They will even point.
– The End -
1.[Introduction moved to footnotes, since it have a little relevance to the text (and it’s BORING) – tbma]
(<< back)
Introduction.
Recently there came a period when I had little to do. This was novel in a life so crammed with busy years, and I decided to amuse myself by writing a novel that was pure science fiction.
In the hard-driven times between 1930 and 1950, I was a professional writer not simply because it was my job, but because I wanted to finance more serious researches. In those days there were few agencies pouring out large grants to independent workers. Despite what you might hear about Roosevelt “relief,” those were depression years. One succeeded or one starved. One became a top-liner or a gutter bum. One had to work very hard at his craft or have no craft at all. It was a very challenging time for anyone who lived through it.
I have heard it said, as an intended slur, “He was a science fiction writer, ”and have heard it said of many. It brought me to realize that few people understand the role science fiction has played in the lives of Earth's whole population.
I have just read several standard books that attempt to define “science fiction” and to trace its history. There are many experts in this field, many controversial opinions. Science fiction is favored with the most closely knit reading public that may exist, possibly the most dedicated of any genre. Devotees are called “fans,” and the word has a special prestigious meaning in science fiction.
Few professional writers, even those in science fiction, have written very much on the character of "sf". They are usually too busy turning out the work itself to expound on what they have written. But there are many experts on this subject among both critics and fans, and they have a lot of worthwhile things to say.
However, many false impressions exist, both of the genre and of its writers. So when one states that he set out to write a work of pure science fiction, he had better state what definition he is using.
It will probably be best to return to the day in 1938 when I first entered this field, the day I met John W. Campbell, Jr., a day in the very dawn of what has come to be known as The Golden Age of science fiction. I was quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently. I was not there of my own choice. I had been summoned to the vast old building on Seventh Avenue in dusty, dirty, old New York by the very top brass of Street and Smith publishing company– an executive named Black and another, F. Orlin Tremaine. Ordered there with me was another writer, Arthur J. Burks. In those days when the top brass of a publishing company– particularly one as old and prestigious as Street and Smith-'invited" a writer to visit, it was like being commanded to appear before the king or receiving a court summons. You arrived, you sat there obediently, and you spoke when you were spoken to.
We were both, Arthur J. Burks and I, top-line professionals in other writing fields. By the actual tabulation of A. B. Dick, which set advertising rates for publishing firms, either of our names appearing on a magazine cover would send the circulation rate skyrocketing, something like modern TV ratings.
The top brass came quickly to the point. They had recently started or acquired a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside from our A. B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first place, calling in top-liners would ruin his story budget due to their word rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To
fill his pages even he, who had considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.
I cannot tell you how many other writers were called in. I do not know. In all justice, it may have been Campbell himself who found them later on. But do not get the impression that Campbell was anything less than a master and a genius in his own right. Any of the stable of writers he collected during this Golden Age will tell you that. Campbell could listen. He could improve things. He could dream up little plot twists that were masterpieces. He well deserved the title that he gained and kept as the top editor and the dominant force that made science fiction as respectable as it became. Star Wars, the all-time box office record movie to date (exceeded only by its sequel), would never have happened if science fiction had not become as respectable as Campbell made it. More than that-Campbell played no small part in driving this society into the space age.
You had to actually work with Campbell to know where he was trying to go, what his idea was of this thing called “science fiction.” I cannot give you any quotations from him; I can just tell you what I felt he was trying to do. In time we became friends. Over lunches and in his office and at his home on weekends– where his wife Dona kept things smooth– talk was always of stories but also of science. To say that Campbell considered science fiction as “prophecy” is an oversimplification. He had very exact ideas about it.
Only about a tenth of my stories were written for the fields of science fiction and fantasy. I was what they called a high-production writer, and these fields were just not big enough to take everything I could write. I gained my original reputation in other writing fields during the eight years before the Street and Smith interview.
Campbell, without saying too much about it, considered the bulk of the stories I gave him to be not science fiction but fantasy, an altogether different thing. Some of my stories he eagerly published as science fiction– among them Final Blackout. Many more, actually. I had, myself, somewhat of a science background, had done some pioneer work in rockets and liquid gases, but I was studying the branches of man's past knowledge at that time to see whether he had ever come up with anything valid. This, and a love of the ancient tales now called The Arabian Nights, led me to write quite a bit of fantasy. To handle this fantasy material, Campbell introduced another magazine, Unknown. As long as I was writing novels for it, it continued. But the war came and I and others went, and I think Unknown only lasted about forty months. Such novels were a bit hard to come by. And they were not really Campbell's strength.
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