by Various
Edna moved toward them.
Harold stumbled. He lifted his face. His mouth twisted. He groaned. He collapsed to the pavement.
One of the policemen knelt, touched Harold's cheek, studied him a moment. "Heart," he said.
He bent forward to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His partner hurried to the station wagon for an oxygen tank. Other police kept the crowd back. When the oxygen mask was fitted to Harold's face, the kneeling officer removed the handcuffs and loosened Harold's clothing.
Harold's left hand was splayed and limp; his right was curled into a tight fist beside his hip.
A policeman said, "Come on, lady. It's not a circus. Get back now."
"I'm his wife," Edna said through tears.
The policeman let her through. Two officers were lifting Harold onto a stretcher. His eyes were closed. There were lines of pain in his face. His clenched right hand moved up to lie on his stomach. It trembled there.
Edna walked beside him as they carried him to the station wagon, her hand on his shoulder, crying quietly. A policeman helped her into the vehicle, where she sat cumbrously beside Harold. The station wagon pulled away with red light flashing and siren beginning an upward wail.
Harold's eyelids fluttered. They opened. He looked at Edna. He lifted his balled right hand. Shakily, the fingers loosened and opened. She looked at the lines and scars on his palm.
She took his hand in her own. She pressed her lips to the palm. He closed his eyes. His hand lowered back down to the stretcher beside him and lay open, and flat, and empty.
Science
ISAAC ASIMOV
MILTON! THOU SHOULD'ST BE LIVING AT THIS HOUR
Some time ago I was signing books at Bloomingdale's Department Store. I don't recommend this as a general practice if you are in the least bit shy or sensitive.
It involves sitting at some makeshift table with a pile of your books about you, amidst a vast display of women's garments (that happened to be the section near which I was placed). People pass you with expressions varying from complete indifference to mild distaste. Sometimes they look at the books with an expression that might be interpreted as "What junk is this that meets my eye?" then pass on.
And, of course, every once in a while someone comes up and buys a book, and you sign it out of sheer gratitude.
Fortunately, I am utterly without self-consciousness and can meet any eye without blushing, but I imagine that those who are more sensitive than I would experience torture. Even I would give it a miss were it not that my publisher arranges such things and I don't want to seem unreasonably uncooperative in measures designed to sell my books.
At any rate, there I was at Bloomingdale's and a tall woman in her thirties (I should judge) and quite attractive, rushed up smiling, with a pretty flush mantling her cheeks and said, "I am so glad and honored to meet you."
"Well," said I, becoming incredibly suave at once, as I always am in the presence of attractive women, "that is as nothing to my pleasure in meeting you."
"Thank you," she said, then added, "I want you to know I have just seen 'Teibele and the Demon.'"
That seemed irrelevant, but I said the polite thing. "I hope you enjoyed it."
"Oh, I did. I thought it was wonderful, and I wanted to tell you that."
There was no real reason for her to do so, but politeness above all. "That's kind of you," I said.
"And I hope you make a billion dollars out of it," she said.
"That would be nice," I admitted, though privately I didn't think the owners of the play would let me share in the proceeds even to the extent of a single penny.
We shook hands and separated, and I never bothered to tell her that I was Isaac Asimov and not Isaac Bashevis Singer. It would merely have embarrassed her and spoiled her kindly good wishes.
My only concern is that someday she will meet Isaac Bashevis Singer and will say to him, "You imposter! I met the real Isaac Bashevis Singer and he's young and handsome."
On the other hand, she may not say that.
But then, it's easy to make mistakes.
For instance, most people who have heard of John Milton think of him as an epic poet second only to Shakespeare in renown and genius. As evidence, they point to "Paradise Lost."
I, on the other hand, always think of Milton as something more than merely that.
The poet William Wordsworth, back in 1802, found himself in low spirits when he decided that England was a fen of stagnant waters and moaned. "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour."
Well, Bill, if Milton were living at this hour, here in the late 20th Century, I'm sure he would be that acme of art, a science fiction writer. As evidence, I point to "Paradise Lost."
"Paradise Lost" opens as Satan and his band of rebellious angels are recovering in Hell, after having been defeated in Heaven. For nine days the stricken rebels have been unconscious, but now Satan slowly becomes aware of where he is:
"At once as far as Angel's ken he views the dismal situation waste and wild, a dungeon horrible, on all sides round as one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible served only to discover sights of woe."
Milton is, essentially, describing an extra-terrestrial world. (As Carl Sagan has remarked, our present view of the planet, Venus, is not very far removed from the common conception of Hell.)
The remark about "darkness visible" is surely modeled on the description of Sheol (the Old Testament version of Hell) in the Book of Job: "A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness."
Milton's phrase makes it graphic, however, and is a daring concept; one that is a century and a half in advance of science, for what Milton is saying is that there can be some radiation that is not visible as ordinary light and yet can be used to detect objects.
"Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, but it was not until 1800 that the German-English astronomer, William Herschel, showed that the visible spectrum did not include all the radiation there was; that beyond the red there was "infra-red" radiation that could not be seen but could be detected in other ways.
In other words, with remarkable prescience, Milton had Hell lit by flames that gave off infra-red light, but not visible light (at least we can interpret the passage so). To human eyes Hell would be in darkness, but Satan's more-than-human retina could detect the infra-red and to him it was "darkness visible."
Where is the Hell that is occupied by Satan and his fallen angels? The common view of the location of Hell, from ancient times on, is that it is somewhere deep in the Earth. The fact that bodies are buried underground contributes, I suppose, to this feeling. The fact that there are earthquakes and volcanoes gives rise to the thought that there is activity down there and that it is a place of fire and brimstone. Dante placed Hell at the center of the Earth, and so would most unsophisticates of our culture today, I think.
Milton avoids that. Here's how he describes the location of Hell:
"Such place Eternal Justice had prepared for those rebellious, here their prison ordained in utter darkness, and their portion set as far removed from God and the light of Heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost Pole."
It is logical to suppose the "center" to be the center of the Earth, since that was also taken to be the center of the observable Universe in the Greek geocentric view of the Universe. This view was not shaken until Copernicus's heliocentric theory was published in 1543, but the Copernican view was not instantly accepted. Scientific and literary conservatives held to the Greek view. It took Galileo and his telescopic observations in 1609 and thereafter to establish the Sun at the center.
Milton, however, although writing a good half-century after the discoveries of Galileo, could not let go of the Greek view. After all, he was dealing with the Biblical story, and the Biblical picture of the Universe is a geocentric one.
Nor was this because Milton did not know about the telescopic findings. Milton
had even visited Galileo in Italy in 1639 and refers to him in "Paradise Lost". At one point, he finds it necessary to describe Satan's round and gleaming shield. (All the characters in "Paradise Lost" act and talk as much like Homeric heroes as possible and are armed just as Achilles would be — that's part of the epic convention.)
Milton says that Satan's shield is like the Moon "whose Orb through optic glass the Tuscan artist views...to descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her spotty globe." There is no question but that the "Tuscan artist" is Galileo.
Nevertheless, Milton doesn't want to be involved in astronomical controversy, and in Book VIII of the epic he has the archangel Raphael respond to Adam's questions on the workings of the Universe in this way:
"To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heaven is as the Book of God before thee set, wherein to read his wondrous works, and learn his seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years: This to attain, whether Heaven move or Earth, imports not, if thou reckon right; the rest from man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire."
In other words, all that human beings need out of astronomy is a guide whereby to form a calendar, and to do this, it doesn't matter whether Earth moves or the Sun. I can't help but feel this to be a very cowardly evasion. The pious of the world were willing to denounce, excommunicate and even burn those who claimed the Earth moved — until the evidence began to show clearly that Earth did move, and when that came about, they then said, "Oh, well, it imports not; what's the difference?" If it imports not, why did they make all that fuss earlier?
So the Miltonic Universe remains geocentric, the last important geocentric Universe in Western culture. The "center" Milton speaks of in locating Hell is the center of the Earth.
The distance from the center of the Earth to its pole, either the North Pole or the South Pole, is 4,000 miles, and this figure was known to Milton. The Earth had been several times circumnavigated by Milton's time, and its size was well-known.
In that case, "thrice" that distance would be 12,000 miles, and if this is the interpretation of "from the center thrice to the utmost Pole," then Hell would be 12,000 miles from Heaven.
It seems reasonable to suppose that Earth is equidistant between Hell and Heaven. If, then, Heaven were 2,000 miles from Earth in one direction and Hell 2,000 miles from Earth in the opposite direction, that would allow Hell to be 12,000 miles from Heaven if we count in Earth's 8,000 miles diameter.
But this is ridiculous. If Heaven and Hell were each 2,000 miles away, surely we would see them. The Moon is 240,000 miles away (something the Greeks, and therefore Milton, knew), and we see it without trouble. To be sure, the Moon is a large body, but surely Heaven and Hell would be large also.
Something is wrong. Let's reconsider—
The line in Milton reads, "from the center thrice to the utmost pole." What is the utmost pole? Surely, it is the Celestial Pole, the point in the sky that is directly overhead when you stand on a Terrestrial Pole.
No one in Milton's time knew how far away the Celestial Pole was. Astronomers knew the Moon was a quarter of a million miles away, and the best guess the Greeks had been able to make where the distance of the Sun was concerned was 5 million miles. Since the Sun was the middle planet of the seven (in the Greek view, which listed them in order of increasing distance as Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), it would be fair to consider the farthest planet, Saturn, to be 10 million miles away. The sky itself, with the stars painted upon it, would be immediately beyond Saturn.
A reasonable guess, then, for the shape of the Universe in Milton's time, would be that of a large sphere about 10 million miles in radius and, therefore 20 million miles in diameter. Such a size would be acceptable to the astronomers of the day whether they thought the Earth was at the center or the Sun.
If, then, we imagine Heaven to lie outside the Celestial Sphere in one direction and Hell in another, we have a vision of three separate universes, each enclosed by a spherical "sky." In Book II, Milton speaks of "this firmament of Hell" so that he must be thinking of Hell as having a sky of its own (with planets and stars of its own, I wonder?) Presumably, so would Heaven.
Milton doesn't indicate anywhere in the epic, just how large he thinks the Celestial Sphere is, or how large Heaven and Hell are, or exactly what their spatial relationship to each other is. I suppose that the simplest setup would be to have the three of them arranged in an equilateral triangle so that, center to center, each is 30 million miles from the other two. If all are equal in size and each is 10 million miles in radius, then each is 10 million miles from the other two, firmament to firmament. This is an un-Miltonic picture, but at least it is consistent with what he says and with the state of astronomy at the time.
Milton, having postulated three separate Universes, each neatly enclosed in a solid, thin curve of metal, called the "firmament," invites the question: What lies outside these three Universes?
This question arises in modern science, too, which visualizes our Universe expanding from a small condensed body some 15 billion years ago. What lies beyond the volume to which it has now expanded? ask the questioners.
Scientists might speculate, but they have no answer, and it may even be that there will prove no conceivable way in which they can find an answer.
Milton was more fortunate, for he knew the answer.
Later, Milton has Satan point out that the storm is over, that the Divine attack which hurled the rebelling angels out of Heaven and down a long, long fall into Hell has now died away:
"And the thunder, winged with red lightning and impetuous rage, perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now to bellow through the vast and boundless Deep."
In the Biblical story of Creation, it is stated that, to begin with, "darkness was on the face of the deep." The Biblical writers apparently saw the Universe at its beginning as a formless waste of waters.
Milton must accept the word for he cannot deny the Bible, but he grafts onto it Greek notions. The Greeks believed that the Universe was originally Chaos; that is "Disorder," with all its fundamental building blocks ("elements") randomly mixed. The Divine Creation, in this view, consisted not in bringing matter into existence out of nothing, but in sorting out those mixed elements and creating Cosmos (an ordered Universe) out of Chaos.
Milton, in the epic, equates the Biblical "deep" with the Classical "chaos" and has it "boundless."
In other words, in the Miltonic view, God, who is eternal, existed to begin with but for countless eons was surrounded by an infinite waste of Chaos.
At some time, presumably, he created Heaven, along with hordes of angels who were given the job of singing the praises of their Creator. When some of the angels got bored with the task and rebelled, God created the companion world of Hell and hurled the rebels into it. Immediately thereafter, he created a Celestial sphere within which a new experiment might be housed—humanity.
All three, then, are embedded in the still infinite sea of Chaos in which, if God chose, innumerable more celestial spheres might be formed, though Milton nowhere says so.
(This view is rather similar, in some ways, to a speculation of my own in I'M LOOKING OVER A FOUR-LEAF CLOVER, F&SF, September 1966.)
Milton goes on to describe how the fallen angels, in their new home, so different from their old and so much worse, nevertheless get to work to try to make it as livable as possible. "Soon had his crew opened into the hill a spacious wound and digged out ribs of gold."
Although gold is an entirely unsuitable structural metal (too soft and too dense) and is valued only for its beauty and rareness, human beings, completely mistaking a subjective assigned value for the real thing, have unimaginatively dreamed of golden buildings and golden streets (studded with equally unsuitable precious stones) as the highest form of luxury. They have imagined Heaven to consist of such structures and apparently the fallen angels want to make their new habitation as much like home as poss
ible.
They build a city, which they call "All-Demons" in a democratic touch that contrasts with the absolute autocracy of Heaven. Of course, the name is given in Greek so that it is "Pandemonium." Because all the denizens of Hell meet there in conference, the word has entered the English language from Milton's epic to mean the loud, confused noise that would seem characteristic, in our imaginings, of a Hellish gathering.
There follows a democratic conference in which Satan, who has rebelled against God's dictatorship, welcomes the views of anyone who wishes to speak. Moloch, the most unreconstructed of the angelic rebels, advocates renewed war: meeting God's weapons with an armory drawn from Hell—
"To meet the noise of his Almighty Engine he shall hear Infernal thunder, and for lightning see black fire and horror shot with equal rage among his angels; and his Throne itself mixt with Tartarean sulfur, and strange fire."
The "black fire" is the "darkness visible" of Hell. "Strange fire" is an expression from the Bible. Two sons of Aaron burned "strange fire" at the altar and were struck dead in consequence. The Bible doesn't explain what is meant by "strange fire." One can guess that the unfortunates didn't use the proper ritual in starting the fire or in blessing it.
Here, however, we can't help think in the hindsight of our recent knowledge that infrared is not the only direction in which we can step out of the visible spectrum. There is also ultraviolet at the energetic end, along with x-rays and gamma rays. Is Moloch suggesting that the demons counter the lightning with energetic radiation (black fire) and nuclear bombs (strange fire)?
After all, Milton can't be thinking merely of gunpowder when he speaks of "strange fire." As is explained later in the epic, the rebelling angels used gunpowder in their first battle and were defeated anyway. So it has to be something beyond gunpowder! (What a science fiction writer was lost in Milton by virtue of his being born too soon!)
