Infinity One

by Robert Hoskins (Ed. )

  infinity

  one

  a magazine

  of speculative fiction

  in book form

  edited by

  Robert Hoskins

  INFINITY ONE

  Copyright © 1970. Lancer Books, Inc.

  The Star, Copyright © 1955 by Royal

  Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of

  the author and his agents. Scott

  Meredith Literary Agency. 'Inc.

  Much of the material In The Fun In Future Fun

  appeared originally In Lithopinton Six,

  Copyright © 1967 by Local One. Amalgamated

  Lithographers of America. Reprinted by

  permission of the author.

  All rights reserved Printed In the U.8.A.

  LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

  NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: The Fun In Future Fun - Isaac Asimov

  A WORD FROM THE EDITOR

  THE PLEASURE OF OUR COMPANY - Robert Silverberg

  3 Fables: One

  THE ABSOLUTE ULTIMATE INVENTION - Stephen Barr

  3 Fables: Two

  Xp

  3 Fables: Three

  THE MAN ON THE HILL - Michael Fayette

  THE STAR - Arthur C. Clarke

  ECHO - Katherine MacLean

  THE GREAT CANINE CHORUS - Anne McCaffrey

  PACEM EST - Kris Neville and K. M. O’Donnell

  KEEPING AN EYE ON JANEY - Ron Goulart

  THE PACKERHAUS METHOD - Gene Wolfe

  THE WATER SCULPTOR OF STATION 233 - George Zebrowski

  OPERATION P-BUTTON - Gordon R. Dickson

  THE TIGER - Miriam Allen deFord

  HANDS OF THE MAN - R. A. Lafferty

  NIGHTMARE GANG - Dean R. Koontz

  THESE OUR ACTORS - Edward Wellen

  INSIDE MOTHER - Pat De Graw

  THE COMMUNICATORS - Poul Anderson

  INFINITY ONE

  INTRODUCTION: The Fun In Future Fun

  Isaac Asimov

  Fun is where you find it and it is always to be found in feasting and laughing and loving and roughhousing and gambling and hiking and noise-making and yelling and moving chessmen and chasing rubber balls and sleeping in the sun and dancing and swimming and watching entertainers and risking one’s neck for foolish reasons. There are even some fortunates who find their fun in their work—as does your humble servant.

  Man was a tropical animal originally, confined to such areas as central Africa and to Indonesia (where the great apes of today are still confined); but then he discovered fire and all the realm of winter was open to him. Not only did the colder regions offer new lands, new foods and new dangers, but (eventually) a new world of fun, too, from snowball fights to skating and skiing.

  The consequences of this long-past conquest of winter have about run their course. All the world now belongs to man and settlements can be established with reasonable comfort even in Greenland and Antarctica. For now, those polar establishments are intended for scientists and soldiers, but the tourists will eventually follow. People now alive may yet see the establishment of^a Hilton-Antarcdca or Sheraton-Greenland.

  But by this opening of “all the world” to human occupancy, we mean dry land, of course. What about the sea and, in particular, the continental shelves?

  If man can solve his social problems; if he can restrain his itch to set nuclear fire to himself, or breed himself into starvation; surely he will soon step back into the sea from which he sprung and the spires of his towers will begin to shine dimly beneath the waves.

  Consider the dwellings of man-in-the-sea. Inside his water-tight sea-buildings, or perhaps under the water-tight dome that will enclose an entire settlement, he will live in air and have his usual fun. But outside the dome, there will be a world of water at his disposal.

  To the sea-dwellers, water will be an ever-constant fact of life. Children will learn to swim as they learn to walk, and scuba-diving will be as common to them as hiking is to us. The sea will fill with flippered humanity hunting barracuda and exploring the drowned bottoms.

  And how friendly will the new aquanauts become with sea-creatures? Will boys have their pet salmons, so to speak, who will follow them about in the water?

  I suspect not. Fish are not very brainy. Yet there are sea-birds and sea-mammals that offer a far more hopeful prospect. There are penguins and seals and, in particular, dolphins, which are intelligent and friendly.

  Even land-lubbing men get along with dolphins—but when men enter the sea, the friendship ought to get closer still. Dolphins are more intelligent than dogs (some suspect they may be more intelligent than men) and it may be that for the first time in history two species of intelligent creatures may meet on roughly equal terms.

  And fun? Dolphin-riding ought to be a sensation that cannot possibly be duplicated on land, and I am certain that dolphins will instantly get into the spirit of the thing.

  In all ordinary sea-sports, even for the sea-dwellers, humans must remain air-breathing. The buildings and settlements themselves will be air-immersed and a man who ventures into the sea will do so with oxygen cylinders strapped to himself.

  But will that always be necessary? Sucessful experiments have already been conducted with water that has been oxygenated under pressure. (After all, it is not the water that drowns you, but the oxygen-lack.) Enough oxygen can be forced into solution in water to support an air-breathing animal. Dogs can breathe such water and their lungs can scrabble enough oxygen out of it to support life. Dogs have remained under water for extended periods and emerged none the worse for the ordeal.

  Naturally, we can’t oxygenate the entire ocean, but surely we can oxygenate indoor pools under pressure. Within those pools, men can swim as water-breathing creatures and, with no equipment at all, stay immersed for hours at a time. How it would feel, I can’t possibly imagine. But I suspect it would introduce a new kind of freedom and a new sort of sensation that would be completely exciting to many.

  Theoretically, we don’t need a sea environment to make this form of recreation possible. (Let’s call it “sub-water and breathing,” or “swab” for short.) We can construct “swab” pools in Rockfeller Center if we wish and do so right now. However, persuading land-dwellers to immerse themselves in water and breathe may be most difficult. It would be far less difficult to persuade sea-dwellers—used to the friendly ocean—to do so. “Swab” may be the recreation of sea-dwellers only, however much it may be possible on land.

  Then, of course, we have the Moon. This, at first, will consist only of specialists, scientists, technicians and explorers, remaining for short watches upon our satellite. Give us another generation and commercial flights to the Moon will be possible.

  That might give us an answer, for the while, to the problem of “But where can one go that’s really exciting?”

  Just being on the Moon will certainly be fun and excitement enough for tourists. The scenery will be novel, and the sky overhead, in particular, will have the beauty of the never-seen. Imagine a black sky in which there are more and brighter stars than ever we see on Earth (because there is no atmosphere on the Moon to dim them).

  Imagine too the Earth, as it hangs almost motionless in the sky, going through its phases like a vast and brilliant Moon!

  The Earth in the Moon’s sky is four times the width of the Moon as we see it from Earth. When the Earth is full it will be seventy times as bright as our full Moon. The Earth’s globe will be bluish-white and its cloud pattern will mark it in stripes and whirlpools. Faint washes of green and brown may indicate the continents at time, but their outlines will rarely if ever be made out clearly.

  At this writing, only two men have been fortunate
enough to see these sights. By the time it appears, they will be joined by two, and perhaps four, more. Can anyone doubt that by the time this century is over, they will have been joined by many more?

  There will be dangers on the Moon, of course, well familiar to readers of science fiction. Underground, however, none of these dangers, and the surface extremes of temperature, will exist and the Moon will be very comfortable.

  Nor need the underground be viewed as nothing more than forever-imprisoning caves. Through television receivers, views of the outside and even (properly filtered) of the Sun itself can be shown. And men will be able to emerge comfortably in the early night when the Sun is below the horizon and when the cold is not yet at its worst.

  Undoubtedly, the greatest sight of all, bar none— whether seen directly or by closed-circuit television within the underground—will be the occasions when the Sun slips behind the Earth. We see such occasions from the Earth as an eclipse of the Moon.

  Once the Sun is behind the Earth, the globe of our planet will be entirely black (we will be seeing the night-side) but the atmosphere all about will blaze orange-red with the slanting rays of the Sun. It will be as though we were watching a sunset scene through all Earth’s atmosphere at once. And around that large bright orange circle in the sky will be the pearly streamers of the Sun’s corona, visible far more brightly and clearly than ever on Earth. Beyond the corona will be the hard brilliance of the stars.

  Passage to the Moon will surely be at a premium in the weeks before an eclipse of the Earth is due.

  But the Moon will be more than a sight-seeing paradise. It will offer active sport to Earthmen, too, thanks to its gravity. Anyone on the Moon will be pulled downward with a force only one-sixth that which is experienced on the Earth. A man who weighs 180 pounds on the Earth will weigh only 30 pounds on the Moon. This will give rise to a whole new range of sensations and offer the pleasure of mastering a whole new range of skills.

  Any physical activity from walking to playing football will require bodily maneuvering that will be perfected only after considerable practice. This is so, particularly, since although weight decreases, the mass of an object (the amount of matter it contains—which determines the difficulty of setting it into motion and getting it to stop) isn’t changed. A medicine ball may weigh no more on the Moon than a football does on the Earth, but the medicine ball there will not at all be manipulated as easily as a football here. Its great mass will make the ball just as hard to throw on the Moon as on the Earth.

  Eventually, games of “moon-ball” will have their own practitioners and their own expertise, their own rules and strategies and excitements. The “World Series on the Moon” between teams from underground stations at Tycho and Copernicus may well be followed avidly on Earth.

  There will be mountain-climbing on the Moon, too, less dangerous and difficult—and therefore more nearly a mass sport in potentiality—than on the Earth. This is not a paradox. The mountain slopes on the Moon are gentle and the weak gravity is easy to overcome in the upward climb. Nor do the conditions on the mountain tops grow difficult. They are airless but so are the valleys.

  On the other hand, if the mountain slopes are sandy enough, the weak gravity will make them quite slippery (the smaller the force pulling you down against the surface, the less the friction). There is already intimation that such might be the case, from the experiences of the Apollo 11 crew. Men, using flat-bottomed canes for support and balance, may go sliding down a mountain slope with all the effect of skiing, and do so (despite the necessity for spacesuits and oxygen cylinders) in greater safety than on Earth.

  Lunar skiing may yet be the Moon’s most popular sport in its early history as a human settlement.

  But what about a world of no gravity at all? What about artificial space-stations built in orbit about the Earth?

  The purposes of such space-stations will surely be purely scientific and astronautic (a discussion of militarism has no place in an examination of the fun aspects of human living) at first, but by the time the Moon has become a tourists’ paradise (and perhaps a little “spoiled”) surely some space station will be hanging in the Earth’s sky that will have been built primarily for recreation.

  It will have to be built outside the main regions of the Van Allen belts, and once placed in a nearly circular orbit out there, it will remain indefinitely circling Earth—for millions of years, if not struck by a sizable meteor.

  Such a pleasure-satellite might have many of the ordinary pleasures of Earth and wine-women-and song there may be essentially the same as that trio down here.

  It will also have pleasures that cannot possibly be duplicated on Earth—or even on the Moon. For instance, what about space-walking? For people who like the “wide, open spaces,” what can possibly be more wide and more open than space itself? One could have a small reaction motor for maneuvering and one would have to be careful to remain in the satellite’s shadow (or, preferably, to choose space-walking time when the satellite was in Earth’s shadow).

  Then, for those who like it, there may he nothing quite like a few hours spent in the awful emptiness and silence of the void, when a man can really be alone with his thoughts and when he can look at the Earth’s swollen body, at the Moon’s more distant shape, and at the quiet stars.

  You might imagine that our space-walker can indulge in acrobatics, but if he does he will not be conscious of them. It will be the rest of the universe that will seem to jump about and he himself may merely become dizzy.

  For acrobatics, I suggest another recreation that can probably be found only on our space-station. Why not a large empty cavernous room somewhere in the station, filled with air—possibly under pressure, to make it denser.

  A man’s arms can then be outfitted with “wings” for maneuvering and he can launch himself into space. The sensation of air about him will give him the feeling of movements he could not have had in empty space, and his wings will give him a personal control of his maneuvering far more delicate than would be possible by means of a reaction motor.

  In short, he would be flying under his own power and, with sufficient practice, he could gain the proficiency of a bird on Earth. There would be others using the “fly-room” at the same time and a whole new spectrum of fun and games would become possible.

  How about three-dimensional square-dancing? Why not have two couples do-si-do-ing at right angles to each other—one couple does it right-to-left-to-right; the other up-to-down-to-up. Would this not be “cube-dancing?”

  But is nothing left for us Earth-lubbers down here? Are the new excitements to be found only in sea and space?

  Not at all! The greatest new world of all lies within ourselves. There are mental recreations as well as physical ones.

  Consider chess—an endlessly fascinating game which involves not the muscles but the mind. It is at present of limited interest because only a few people have the temperament and ability to make worthwhile chess players.

  That can also be said about baseball, yet baseball is popular because millions, who could not play except in the most amateurish fashion, are willing to spend hours upon hours in watching professionals. I understand there are people in the Soviet Union and elsewhere who will similarly stand and watch large chess-boards on which the moves of grand-master tournaments are displayed but this can never grow as popular a spectator sport as such games as baseball or soccer.

  The trouble is that where ball games are fast and simple, chess is slow and subtle. But computers can play chess, too. Even as I write, a computer at Stanford University is playing another at the Institute of Experimental and Theoretical Physics in Moscow.

  Computers are pretty poor chess players at present, but they will improve. Perhaps the day will come when computers will play chess at great speed and men will watch large reproductions of the swiftly changing patterns on chess-boards with interest and absorption. Great games can be repeated in “slow motion” and analyzed. We could become a nation of chess-watchers.
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  And why just chess? New games can be invented— deliberately complicated ones with tantalizing rules that would be far too difficult to serve as efficient recreation for men, but which could tickle the fancies of computers -three-dimensional chess, for one thing.

  To be sure, computers can’t play by themselves. They have to be programmed by men; the rules of the game must be fed into them together with a description of desirable courses of action. Computers may start as fifth-rate players indeed, but if they are programmed to modify their play in accord with experience, they can improve just as humans do. Computers may even become more proficient than any human being at some game in wliich they are designed to specialize.

  We may eventually have a whole family of computer-games to serve mankind.

  You might ask if this is indeed the sort of thing to which one ought to apply computers and programmers, and the answer is a clear and loud, “Yes!” In the first place, what is wrong with entertaining human beings? Man must be amused as well as fed, or in what way is he different from an ox?

  Then, too, computer games will serve a purpose. We call them “games” but any decent game has an underlying order and pattern which, when properly studied, can serve as contributions to mathematics. To program a computer to play chess is a way of testing mathematical techniques that can then be applied to more serious problems. And programmers who whet their mathematical fangs on chess will find them all the sharper in other directions.