The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  The captain stood up. “Philosophy. It might interest you to know that we will be hard put to find something to eat for the next month. An unfortunate spoilage—”

  “I know.” The wub nodded. “But wouldn’t it be more in accord with your principles of democracy if we all drew straws, or something along that line? After all, democracy is to protect the minority from just such infringements. Now, if each of us casts one vote—”

  The captain walked to the door.

  “Nuts to you,” he said. He opened the door. He opened his mouth.

  He stood frozen, his mouth wide, his eyes staring, his fingers still on the knob.

  The wub watched him. Presently it padded out of the room, edging past the captain. It went down the hall, deep in meditation.

  —

  The room was quiet.

  “So you see,” the wub said, “we have a common myth. Your mind contains many familiar myth symbols. Ishtar, Odysseus—”

  Peterson sat silently, staring at the floor. He shifted in his chair.

  “Go on,” he said. “Please go on.”

  “I find in your Odysseus a figure common to the mythology of most self-conscious races. As I interpret it, Odysseus wanders as an individual, aware of himself as such. This is the idea of separation, of separation from family and country. The process of individuation.”

  “But Odysseus returns to his home.” Peterson looked out the port window, at the stars, endless stars, burning intently in the empty universe. “Finally he goes home.”

  “As must all creatures. The moment of separation is a temporary period, a brief journey of the soul. It begins, it ends. The wanderer returns to land and race…”

  The door opened. The wub stopped, turning its great head.

  Captain Franco came into the room, the men behind him. They hesitated at the door.

  “Are you all right?” French said.

  “Do you mean me?” Peterson said, surprised. “Why me?”

  Franco lowered his gun. “Come over here,” he said to Peterson. “Get up and come here.”

  There was silence.

  “Go ahead,” the wub said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Peterson stood up. “What for?”

  “It’s an order.”

  Peterson walked to the door. French caught his arm.

  “What’s going on?” Peterson wrenched loose. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Captain Franco moved toward the wub. The wub looked up from where it lay in the corner, pressed against the wall.

  “It is interesting,” the wub said, “that you are obsessed with the idea of eating me. I wonder why.”

  “Get up,” Franco said.

  “If you wish.” The wub rose, grunting. “Be patient. It is difficult for me.” It stood, gasping, its tongue lolling foolishly.

  “Shoot it now,” French said.

  “For God’s sake!” Peterson exclaimed. Jones turned to him quickly, his eyes gray with fear.

  “You didn’t see him—like a statue, standing there, his mouth open. If we hadn’t come down, he’d still be there.”

  “Who? The captain?” Peterson stared around. “But he’s all right now.”

  They looked at the wub, standing in the middle of the room, its great chest rising and falling.

  “Come on,” Franco said. “Out of the way.”

  The men pulled aside toward the door.

  “You are quite afraid, aren’t you?” the wub said. “Have I done anything to you? I am against the idea of hurting. All I have done is try to protect myself. Can you expect me to rush eagerly to my death? I am a sensible being like yourselves. I was curious to see your ship, learn about you. I suggested to the native—”

  The gun jerked.

  “See,” Franco said. “I thought so.”

  The wub settled down, panting. It put its paw out, pulling its tail around it.

  “It is very warm,” the wub said. “I understand that we are close to the jets. Atomic power. You have done many wonderful things with it—technically. Apparently, your scientific hierarchy is not equipped to solve moral, ethical—”

  Franco turned to the men, crowding behind him, wide-eyed, silent.

  “I’ll do it. You can watch.”

  French nodded. “Try to hit the brain. It’s no good for eating. Don’t hit the chest. If the rib cage shatters, we’ll have to pick bones out.”

  “Listen,” Peterson said, licking his lips. “Has it done anything? What harm has it done? I’m asking you. And anyhow, it’s still mine. You have no right to shoot it. It doesn’t belong to you.”

  Franco raised his gun.

  “I’m going out,” Jones said, his face white and sick. “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Me, too,” French said. The men straggled out, murmuring. Peterson lingered at the door.

  “It was talking to me about myths,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  He went outside.

  Franco walked toward the wub. The wub looked up slowly. It swallowed.

  “A very foolish thing,” it said. “I am sorry that you want to do it. There was a parable that your Saviour related—”

  It stopped, staring at the gun.

  “Can you look me in the eye and do it?” the wub said. “Can you do that?”

  The captain gazed down. “I can look you in the eye,” he said. “Back on the farm we had hogs, dirty razorback hogs. I can do it.”

  Staring down at the wub, into the gleaming, moist eyes, he pressed the trigger.

  —

  The taste was excellent.

  They sat glumly around the table, some of them hardly eating at all. The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Captain Franco.

  “More?” he said, looking around. “More? And some wine, perhaps.”

  “Not me,” French said. “I think I’ll go back to the chart room.”

  “Me, too.” Jones stood up, pushing his chair back. “I’ll see you later.”

  The captain watched them go. Some of the others excused themselves.

  “What do you suppose the matter is?” the captain said. He turned to Peterson. Peterson sat staring down at his plate, at the potatoes, the green peas, and at the thick slab of tender, warm meat.

  He opened his mouth. No sound came.

  The captain put his hand on Peterson’s shoulder.

  “It is only organic matter, now,” he said. “The life essence is gone.” He ate, spooning up the gravy with some bread. “I, myself, love to eat. It is one of the greatest things that a living creature can enjoy. Eating, resting, meditation, discussing things.”

  Peterson nodded. Two more men got up and went out. The captain drank some water and sighed.

  “Well,” he said. “I must say that this was a very enjoyable meal. All the reports I had heard were quite true—the taste of wub. Very fine. But I was prevented from enjoying this pleasure in times past.”

  He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. Peterson stared dejectedly at the table.

  The captain watched him intently. He leaned over.

  “Come, come,” he said. “Cheer up! Let’s discuss things.”

  He smiled.

  “As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths—”

  Peterson jerked up, staring.

  “To go on,” the captain said. “Odysseus, as I understand him…”

  The Snowball Effect

  KATHERINE MACLEAN

  Katherine MacLean (1925– ) is an underrated US writer of science fiction specializing in short stories, most of which, including her first, “Defense Mechanism” (1949), appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. MacLean began to apply so-called soft science such as sociology to science fiction long before the rise of the Humanists in the 1980s. MacLean had a wide range of interests outside of writing that influenced her fiction. MacLean’s education background included a BA from Barnard with postgraduate work in psychology. Although her work was unique and
sophisticated, MacLean published little in the 1960s and her work was largely invisible to the New Wave writers who might have found it of interest.

  MacLean’s explorations in fiction often harness the hard sciences as well, to create a generally optimistic tone in stories that deal with a wide range of technological matters. Although she expressed feminist themes in some stories, MacLean did not restrict herself to those themes or protagonists, and did not generally use a male pseudonym. A number of her stories were assembled in The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy (1962) and The Trouble with You Earth People (1980).

  Many of MacLean’s early stories have been anthologized. Perhaps the best-known are “Pictures Don’t Lie” (Galaxy, August 1951), which tells of the arrival of an alien spaceship that seems normal according to advance radio signals but turns out to be little more than microscopic; “Unhuman Sacrifice” (Astounding Science Fiction, November 1958), an important piece of anthropological SF in which a visiting exploration/contact team on another planet misreads a painful initiation ceremony as needless when its purpose is to prevent a damaging biological change; and the story reprinted here, “The Snowball Effect.”

  “The Snowball Effect” (Galaxy, 1952) is unusual in subject matter. The story deals with academia in a sociology setting and shows how such research can make a huge impact in our future. In showcasing an insufficiently rigorous and absurdly failed experiment, the story also examines the ethics of experimenting on people without their knowledge (long before this issue was acknowledged). MacLean’s work as a college lecturer may also have influenced this story.

  THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

  Katherine MacLean

  “All right,” I said, “what is sociology good for?”

  Wilton Caswell, PhD, was head of my sociology department, and right then he was mad enough to chew nails. On the office wall behind him were three or four framed documents in Latin that were supposed to be signs of great learning, but I didn’t care at that moment if he papered the walls with his degrees. I had been appointed dean and president to see to it that the university made money. I had a job to do, and I meant to do it.

  He bit off each word with great restraint: “Sociology is the study of social institutions, Mr. Halloway.”

  I tried to make him understand my position. “Look, it’s the big-money men who are supposed to be contributing to the support of this college. To them, sociology sounds like socialism—nothing can sound worse than that—and an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album. We can’t appeal to them that way. Come on now.” I smiled condescendingly, knowing it would irritate him. “What are you doing that’s worth anything?”

  He glared at me, his white hair bristling and his nostrils dilated like a war horse about to whinny. I can say one thing for them—these scientists and professors always keep themselves well under control. He had a book in his hand and I was expecting him to throw it, but he spoke instead:

  “This department’s analysis of institutional accretion, by the use of open system mathematics, has been recognized as an outstanding and valuable contribution to—”

  The words were impressive, whatever they meant, but this still didn’t sound like anything that would pull in money. I interrupted. “Valuable in what way?”

  He sat down on the edge of his desk, thoughtful, apparently recovering from the shock of being asked to produce something solid for his position, and ran his eyes over the titles of the books that lined his office walls.

  “Well, sociology has been valuable to business in initiating worker efficiency and group motivation studies, which they now use in management decisions. And, of course, since the depression, Washington has been using sociological studies of employment labor and standards of living as a basis for its general policies of—”

  I stopped him with both raised hands. “Please, Professor Caswell! That would hardly be a recommendation. Washington, the New Deal, and the present administration are somewhat touchy subjects to the men I have to deal with. They consider its value debatable, if you know what I mean. If they got the idea that sociology professors are giving advice and guidance— No, we have to stick to brass tacks and leave Washington out of this. What, specifically, has the work of this specific department done that would make it as worthy to receive money as—say, a heart disease research fund?”

  He began to tap the corner of his book absently on the desk, watching me. “Fundamental research doesn’t show immediate effects, Mr. Halloway, but its value is recognized.”

  I smiled and took out my pipe. “All right, tell me about it. Maybe I’ll recognize its value.”

  Professor Caswell smiled back tightly. He knew his department was at stake. The other departments were popular with donors and pulled in gift money by scholarships and fellowships, and supported their professors and graduate students by research contracts with the government and industry. Caswell had to show a way to make his own department popular—or else. I couldn’t fire him directly, of course, but there are ways of doing it indirectly.

  He laid down his book and ran a hand over his ruffled hair.

  “Institutions—organizations, that is”—his voice became more resonant; like most professors, when he had to explain something he instinctively slipped into his platform lecture mannerisms, and began to deliver an essay—“have certain tendencies built into the way they happen to have been organized, which cause them to expand or contract without reference to the needs they were founded to serve.”

  He was becoming flushed with the pleasure of explaining his subject. “All through the ages, it has been a matter of wonder and dismay to men that a simple organization—such as a church to worship in, or a delegation of weapons to a warrior class merely for defense against an outside enemy—will either grow insensately and extend its control until it is a tyranny over their whole lives, or, like other organizations set up to serve a vital need, will tend to repeatedly dwindle and vanish, and have to be painfully rebuilt.

  “The reason can be traced to little quirks in the way they were organized, a matter of positive and negative power feedbacks. Such simple questions as, ’Is there a way a holder of authority in this organization can use the power available to him to increase his power?’ provide the key. But it still could not be handled until the complex questions of interacting motives and long-range accumulations of minor effects could somehow be simplified and formulated. In working on the problem, I found that the mathematics of open systems, as introduced to biology by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and George Kreezer, could be used as a base that would enable me to develop a specifically social mathematics, expressing the human factors of intermeshing authority and motives in simple formulas.

  “By these formulations, it is possible to determine automatically the amount of growth and period of life of any organization. The UN, to choose an unfortunate example, is a shrinker-type organization. Its monetary support is not in the hands of those who personally benefit by its governmental activities, but, instead, in the hands of those who would personally lose by an extension and encroachment of its authority on their own. Yet by the use of formula analysis—”

  “That’s theory,” I said. “How about proof?”

  “My equations are already being used in the study of limited-size federal corporations. Washington—”

  I held up my palm again. “Please, not that nasty word again. I mean, where else has it been put into operation? Just a simple demonstration, something to show that it works, that’s all.”

  He looked away from me thoughtfully, picked up the book, and began to tap it on the desk again. It had some unreadable title and his name on it in gold letters. I got the distinct impression again that he was repressing an urge to hit me with it.

  He spoke quietly. “All right, I’ll give you a demonstration. Are you willing to wait six months?”

  “Certainly, if you can show me something at the end of that time.”

  Reminded of time, I glanced at my watch
and stood up.

  “Could we discuss this over lunch?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing more, but I’m having lunch with some executors of a millionaire’s will. They have to be convinced that by ‘furtherance of research into human ills,’ he meant that the money should go to research fellowships for postgraduate biologists at the university, rather than to a medical foundation.”

  “I see you have your problems, too,” Caswell said, conceding me nothing. He extended his hand with a chilly smile. “Well, good afternoon, Mr. Halloway. I’m glad we had this talk.”

  I shook hands and left him standing there, sure of his place in the progress of science and the respect of his colleagues, yet seething inside because I, the president and dean, had boorishly demanded that he produce something tangible.

  I frankly didn’t give a hoot if he blew his lid. My job isn’t easy. For a crumb of favorable publicity and respect in the newspapers and an annual ceremony in a silly costume, I spend the rest of the year going hat in hand, asking politely for money at everyone’s door, like a well-dressed panhandler, and trying to manage the university on the dribble I get. As far as I was concerned, a department had to support itself or be cut down to what student tuition pays for, which is a handful of overcrowded courses taught by an assistant lecturer. Caswell had to make it work or get out.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to hear what he was going to do for a demonstration.

  —

  At lunch, three days later, while we were waiting for our order, he opened a small notebook. “Ever hear of feedback effects?”

  “Not enough to have it clear.”

  “You know the snowball effect, though.”

  “Sure, start a snowball rolling downhill and it grows.”

  “Well, now—” He wrote a short line of symbols on a blank page and turned the notebook around for me to inspect it. “Here’s the formula for the snowball process. It’s the basic general growth formula—covers everything.”