by Isaac Asimov
He said, “All right, the Emotional’s interest is in saving the other world—Earth—only because she can’t bear the thought of the meaningless destruction of intelligent beings. She knows the triple-beings are carrying through a scientific project, necessary for the welfare of her world and caring nothing for the danger into which it puts the alien world—us.
“She tries to warn the alien world and fails. She knows, at last, that the whole purpose of melting is to produce a new set of Rational, Emotional and Parental, and then, with that done, there is a final melting that would turn the original set into a triple-being. Do you have that? It’s a sort of larval form of Separates and an adult form of triples.
“But the Emotional doesn’t want to melt. She doesn’t want to produce the new generation. Most of all, she doesn’t want to become a triple-being and participate in what she considers their work of destruction. She is, however, tricked into the final melt and realizes too late that she is not only going to be a triple-being but a triple-being who will be, more than any other, responsible for the scientific project that will destroy the other world.
“All this Laborian could describe in words, words, words, in his book, but we’ve got to do it more immediately and more forcefully, in images and sublimination as well. That’s what we’re now going to try to do.”
They were three days in the trying before Willard was satisfied.
The weary Emotional, uncertain, stretching outward, with Cathcart’s sublimination instilling the feeling of not-sure, not-sure. The Rational and Parental enfolded and coming together, more rapidly than on previous occasions—hurrying for the superimposition before it might be stopped—and the Emotional realizing too late the significance of it all and struggling—struggling—
And failure. The drenching feeling of failure as a new triple-being stepped out of the superimposition, more nearly human than anyone else in the compu-drama—proud, indifferent.
The scientific procedure would go on. Earth would continue the downward slide.
And somehow this was it—this was the nub of everything that Willard was trying to do—that within the new triple-being the Emotional still existed in part. There was just the wisping of drapery and the viewer was to know that the defeat was not final after all.
The Emotional would, somehow, still try, lost though it was in a greater being.
They watched the completed compu-drama, all of them, seeing it for the first time as a whole and not as a collection of parts, wondering if there were places to edit, to reorder. (Not now, thought Willard, not now. Afterwards, when he had recovered and could look at it more objectively.)
He sat in his chair, slumped. He had put too much of himself into it. It had seemed to him that it contained everything he wanted it to contain; that it did everything he wanted to have done; but how much of that was merely wishful thinking?
When it was over and the last tremulous, subliminal cry of the defeated-but-not-yet-defeated Emotional faded, he said, “Well.”
And Cathcart said, “That’s almost as good as your King Lear was, Jonas.”
There was a general murmur of agreement and Willard cast a cynical eye about him. Wasn’t that what they would be bound to say, no matter what?
His eye caught that of Gregory Laborian. The writer was expressionless, said nothing.
Willard’s mouth tightened. There at least he could expect an opinion that would be backed, or not backed, by gold. Willard had his hundred thousand. He would see now whether it would stay electronic.
He said, and his own uncertainty made him sound imperious, “Laborian. I want to see you in my office.”
They were together alone for the first time since well before the compu-drama had been made.
“Well?” said Willard. “What do you think, Mr. Laborian?”
Laborian smiled. “That woman who runs the subliminal background told you that it was almost as good as your King Lear was, Mr. Willard.”
“I heard her.”
“She was quite wrong.”
“In your opinion?”
“Yes. My opinion is what counts right now. She was quite wrong. Your Three in One is much better than your King Lear.”
“Better?” Willard’s weary face broke into a smile.
“Much better. Consider the material you had to work with in doing King Lear. You had William Shakespeare, producing words that sang, that were music in themselves; William Shakespeare producing characters who, whether for good or evil, whether strong or weak, whether shrewd or foolish, whether faithful or traitorous, were all larger than life; William Shakespeare, dealing with two overlapping plots, reinforcing each other and tearing the viewers to shreds.
“What was your contribution to King Lear? You added dimensions that Shakespeare lacked the technological knowledge to deal with; that he couldn’t dream of; but the fanciest technologies and all that your people and your own talents could do could only build somewhat on the greatest literary genius of all time, working at the peak of his power.
“But in Three in One, Mr. Willard, you were working with my words which didn’t sing; my characters, which weren’t great; my plot which tore at no one. You dealt with me, a run-of-the-mill writer and you produced something great, something that will be remembered long after I am dead. One book of mine, anyway, will live on because of what you have done.
“Give me back my electronic hundred thousand, Mr. Willard, and I will give you this.”
The hundred thousand was shifted back from one financial card to the other and, with an effort, Laborian then pulled his fat briefcase onto the table and opened it. From it, he drew out a box, fastened with a small hook. He unfastened it carefully, and lifted the top. Inside it glittered the gold pieces, each one marked with the planet Earth, the western hemisphere on one side, the eastern on the other. Large gold pieces, two hundred of them, each worth five hundred globo-dollars.
Willard, awed, plucked out one of the gold pieces. It weighed about one and a quarter ounces. He threw it up in the air and caught it.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“It’s yours, Mr. Willard,” said Laborian. “Thank you for doing the compu-drama for me. It is worth every piece of that gold.”
Willard stared at the gold and said, “You made me do the compu-drama of your book with your offer of this gold. To get this gold, I forced myself beyond my talents. Thank you for that, and you are right. It was worth every piece of that gold.”
He put the gold piece back in the box and closed it. Then he lifted the box and handed it back to Laborian.
Part Two
On Science Fiction
The Longest Voyage
Suppose you want to take a trip across the country from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. That’s roughly 3,000 miles. A trip around the world along the equator is only a little over eight times that, 25,000 miles.
To go from the Earth to the moon is only about nine times the equatorial jaunt, about 240,000 miles. Beyond that? Well, Venus at its closest is just over a hundred times the distance to the moon; it is about 25,000,000 miles away. And right now, Pluto is just about as near to Earth as it ever gets, but it is over a hundred times the distance to Venus. It is about 2,800,000,000 miles away.
So far we’ve stayed in our solar system, but beyond that are the stars. Even the nearest star is nearly 9,000 times as far away as Pluto is right now. The nearest star is Alpha Centauri and it is 25,000,000,000,000 miles away. And that’s the nearest star.
The distance across the Milky Way galaxy is 23,000 times the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri. The distance from here to the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own, is about twenty-three times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. And the distance from here to the farthest quasar is about 4,000 times that from here to the Andromeda.
What about time? It takes a few days to get to the moon; a few months to get to Venus or Mars; a few years to get to the giant planets of the solar system. But that’s about as far as we can go
and have it make reasonable sense.
To get to even the nearest star, at the present state of the art, would take hundreds of thousands of years. All that NASA has so far done in sending probes as far as Saturn has been to play games in our backyard. It is interstellar travel, trips to the stars, that represent the longest voyage.
And it is in trips to the stars that science fiction writers and readers are most interested. Our solar system is too well known and too limited. The solar system (outside Earth) is not at all likely to bear life of any kind—certainly not intelligent life. So we’ve got to take the longest voyage and get to the stars, if we’re to find extraterrestrial friends, competitors, and enemies. As long ago as 1928, in The Skylark of Space, E. E. (Doc) Smith took the first science-fictional trip to the stars, and how the readers loved it.
Good old Doc was a little vague on just how his interstellar ships managed to cross those huge spaces, however, and, to tell you the truth, we’re not much better off now. Let’s list the possibilities:
1. We can keep accelerating; going faster and faster and faster until we’re going fast enough to cover vast interstellar and intergalactic distances in a matter of months, or even days.
Objection: Physicists are strongly of the opinion that the speed of light in a vacuum, 186,000 miles per second, is as fast as anyone can go. At that speed, it will still take years to reach the nearest star, millions of years to reach the nearest large galaxy.
2. Even if we’re limited to the speed of light, that could be good enough. As one approaches the speed of light, the rate of time passage on the speeding object slows steadily, and at the speed of light itself, the rate of time passage is zero. At light speed, then, the crew of a starship would cover enormous distance practically instantaneously.
Objection: Interstellar and intergalactic space is littered with occasional hydrogen atoms. At light speed, these atoms would strike the ship with the energy and force of cosmic ray particles and would quickly kill the starship’s crew and passengers. Probably, the ship would have to go no faster than one-tenth light speed, and at that speed the time effects are not great enough to help us much.
3. Suppose we attach a kind of “atom-plow” arrangement in front of the starship. It would scoop up all the atoms in front of it, thus preventing cosmic ray problems and, in addition, gathering material to serve as fuel for its nuclear fusion engines.
Objection: Such atom-plows would have to be many thousands of miles across to be effective. Building such things would represent enormous and perhaps insuperable problems.
4. We can evade the speed-of-light limit altogether by making use of tachyons, subatomic particles that move much faster than the speed of light and that, as a matter of fact, cannot move slower than the speed of light.
Objection: Tachyons exist only in theory, and have not actually been detected. Most physicists think they will never be detected. Even if they were detected, no one has even come close to figuring out a way of putting them to use.
5. Perhaps we can evade the speed-of-light limit by going through black holes. They at least are known to exist.
Objection: If black holes exist (and astronomers are not yet unanimous on this), no one is even close to suggesting how any starship might approach one without being destroyed by tidal forces. In addition, there is by no means general agreement that one can negotiate long distances quickly by going through black holes.
6. In that case, we might find some other way of leaving this universe. We could then travel through hyperspace in “jumps” that will carry us enormous distances in zero time.
Objection: So far hyperspace exists only within the imagination of science fiction writers.
7. Well, then, we can submit to the speed-of-light limit, but freeze the crew and passengers, and arrange to have them restored to conscious life after thousands of years have passed and the destination has been reached.
Objection: No one really knows how human bodies can be frozen without being killed; or whether such frozen bodies, even if retaining a spark of life, can retain it over a period of thousands of years.
8. In that case, there seems nothing left to do but to coast—to travel at ordinary speeds, considerably less than that of light, with all people aboard thoroughly conscious. This means it will take many thousands of years to reach even the nearer stars, so that many generations will have to spend their lifetimes aboard the starship. That may be bearable if the starship is large enough.
Objection: None, really, if people want to do it.
So much for hardheaded realism. In science fiction, we tend to have faith that problems that seem insuperable now will be solved—perhaps in ways that are utterly unexpected.
Therefore we are offering you a baker’s dozen of stories, all involving starships. In these are explored the various strategies I have described above for covering long distances, and perhaps one or two that are too far-out for me to have even mentioned.
What’s more, the stories explore the effect of the long voyages on the people on board the starship, and the kind of events that might take place on them.
Since it is not likely that such voyages will be undertaken in our lifetime (and certainly not completed, if the generations-long coasting starship should indeed prove to be the only practical alternative), these exciting science-fictional speculations are the only way we can experience, if only vicariously, the long voyages that are the quintessential dreams of the far-flung imagination.
Inventing a Universe
Why have I gone to the trouble of inventing a universe for other writers to exploit?
No, it isn’t the money or the fame. Most of the royalties and all of the fame will go, as they should, to the authors who actually write the stories in this book and (it is to be hoped) in later companion pieces. My own return is, as it should be, miniscule.
But there are other reasons and I would like to explain them at some length, for among other things, they involve my feelings of guilt. Now guilt (for those of you who have never experienced the emotion) is a dreadful annoyance, souring one’s life and making one unable to enjoy properly any renown or riches that come one’s way. One is bowed down by its weight and is rendered fearful of the (usually imaginary) accusing eye of public disapproval.
In my case, it came about this way. I hadn’t been writing for more than ten or fifteen years when I began to have the uneasy suspicion that I was becoming rather well known as a science fiction writer. In fact, I was even getting mentioned as one of the “Big Three,” the other two being Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.
It only got worse as the decades continued to fly by. We were not only cursed with prolificity, but with longevity, so that the same old Big Three remained Big for nearly half a century. Heinlein died in 1988 at the age of 80, but Clarke is still going strong as I write this and, obviously, so am I.
The result is that, at present, when there are a great many writers attempting to scale the mountainside of science fiction, it must be rather annoying for them to see the peak occupied by elderly has-beens who cling to it with their arthritic paws and simply won’t get off. Even death, it seems, won’t stop us, since Heinlein has already published a posthumous book and reissues of his old novels are in the works.
Thanks to the limited space on the shelves of bookstores (themselves of sharply limited number), large numbers of new books of science fiction and fantasy are placed on them for only brief intervals before being swept off by new arrivals. Few books seem to manage to exist in public view for longer than a month before being replaced. Always excepting (as some writers add, with a faint snarl) the “megastars.”
“So what?” I can hear you say in your warm and loving way. “So you’re a megastar and your books are perennial sellers and the economic futures of yourself and your eventual survivors are set. Is that bad?”
No, it isn’t bad, exactly, but that’s where the guilt comes in. I worry about crowding out newcomers with my old perennials, about smothering them with the we
ight of my name.
I’ve tried to justify the situation to myself. (Anything to make it possible for me to walk about science fiction conventions without having to skulk and hide in doorways when other writers pass.)
In the first place, we started in the early days of science fiction—not only the Big Three, but others of importance such as Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury, and even some who died young: Stanley Weinbaum, Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, for instance. In those early days, the magazines paid only one cent a word or less, and there were only magazines. There were no hardcover science fiction publishers, no paperbacks, no Hollywood to speak of.
For years and decades we stuck it out under starvation conditions, and it was our efforts that slowly increased the popularity of science fiction to the point where today’s beginners can get more for one novel than any of us got in ten years of endless plugging. So, if some of us are doing unusually well now, it is possible to argue that we earned it.
Secondly, from the more personal standpoint, back in 1958 I decided I had done enough science fiction. I had been successful in writing nonfiction of various types and it seemed to me I could make a living if I concentrated on nonfiction (and, to tell you the truth, I preferred nonfiction). In that way I could leave science fiction to the talented new writers who were making their way into the field.
So from 1958 to 1981, a period of nearly a quarter of a century, I wrote virtually no science fiction. There was one novel and a handful of short stories, but that’s all. And meanwhile, along came the “New Wave.” Writing styles changed drastically, and I felt increasingly that I was a back-number and should remain out of science fiction.
