by William Tenn
II. Two billion years ago. The great ball clicked its photographs of the fiery, erupting ground below. Some red-hot crusts rattled off its sides. Five or six thousand complex molecules lost their basic structure as they impinged against it. A hundred didn’t.
“—will labor thirty hours a day out of thirty-three to convince you that black isn’t white, that we have seven moons instead of two. They are especially dangerous—”
A long, muted note as the apparatus collided with itself. The warm orange of the corner lights brightened as it started out again.
“—because of their learning, because they are sought for guidance in better ways of vegetation.” The government official was slithering up and down rapidly now, gesturing with all of his pseudopods. “We are faced with a very difficult problem, at present—”
III. One billion years ago. The primitive triple trilobite the machine had destroyed when it materialized began drifting down wetly.
“—a very difficult problem. The question before us: should we shllk or shouldn’t we shllk?” He was hardly speaking English now; in fact, for some time, he hadn’t been speaking at all. He had been stating his thoughts by slapping one pseudopod against the other—as he always had…
IV. A half-billion years ago. Many different kinds of bacteria died as the water changed temperature slightly.
“This, then, is no time for half measures. If we can reproduce well enough—”
V. Two hundred fifty million years ago. VI. A hundred twenty-five million years ago.
“—to satisfy the Five Who Spiral, we have—”
VII. Sixty-two million years. VIII. Thirty-one million. IX. Fifteen million. X. Seven and a half million.
“—spared all attainable virtue. Then—”
XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. Bong—bong—bong bongbong-bongongongngngngggg…
“—we are indeed ready for refraction. And that, I tell you, is good enough for those who billow and those who snap. But those who billow will be proven wrong as always, for in the snapping is the rolling and in the rolling is only truth. There need be no change merely because of a sodden cilium. The apparatus has rested at last in the fractional conveyance; shall we view it subtly?”
They all agreed, and their bloated purpled bodies dissolved into liquid and flowed up and around to the apparatus. When they reached its four square blocks, now no longer shrilling mechanically, they rose, solidified, and regained their slime-washed forms.
“See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”
Afterword
Nineteen forty-seven was the year of the first great science-fiction boom, following both the interest generated by the development of the atomic bomb and several highly successful science-fiction anthologies. The editor of one of these, Groff Conklin, was approached by moneyed people who offered to back him and Ted Sturgeon in a new magazine of which they were to be co-editors. This was a couple of years before Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were to get together to produce The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was a harbinger of the excitement that was to grip the science-fiction publishing field in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Ted and Groff in their turn approached me and a number of other writers, offering a rate unheard up to that time—four and five cents a word—“for the very best stories of which you guys are capable, something genuinely distinguished.” (The going rate for science fiction at that time was one-half cent to a dazzling two cents a word. Only John W. Campbell of Astounding ever paid at the high rate—and only when a story knocked him off his chair.)
I had been thinking for a number of months about a new kind of story and one which had hitherto been inexplicably absent from the magazines we all wrote for: straight down-the-line and overt political satire. I say “inexplicably” because such satire had been very successful at novel length—Zamiatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World, to mention only the first two examples that came to mind—and because the science-fiction magazine would seem to be the natural, even ideal, vehicle for such stories.
And the America of 1947 seemed made for such satire. The Federation of Atomic Scientists, a group composed of the younger physicists and chemists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and been terrified of what they had accomplished, was under attack from many official and unofficial quarters as unpatriotic or—much worse in those days—demonstrating outright friendliness with the potential enemy. We were then, you might remember, in the earliest stages of what came to be known as the Cold War.
On the Congressional front, Senator Joseph McCarthy had not yet appeared in all his rattling glory, but the matters he was to specialize in had been ably handled for some years now by Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The stage was being set.
Nineteen forty-seven was also the year, therefore, of a slashing attack on the entertainment industry by Martin Dies and HUAC: all kinds of celebrities and behind-the-scenes creative people had been subpoenaed and questioned most closely about their political associations and personal friendships—all in the name of national security and the protection of the manufacturing secrets of the atomic bomb. “Security” was the watchword of the day, a watchword invoked to cover all kinds of investigations and much more likely to be referred to at that time than the Constitution itself.
In the portentous name of Security, to mention just one hilarious example, supermarkets that stocked Polish hams (Poland, after all, was behind the Iron Curtain and was a full-fledged Communist state) were picketed as being of doubtful patriotism. There were prosecutions in the name of Security; there were suicides because of Security; there were heavily financed national campaigns in newspapers, magazines, and the broadcast media; there were even elections based on Security. And one especially enthusiastic junior Congressman had finally proposed that there be a seat in the Cabinet for Security.
It was this last development that sent me, halfway between laughter and outright terror, to the typewriter. I wrote and rewrote “Brooklyn Project” in a day and a half.
Both Sturgeon and Conklin liked it and marked it as their first purchase for the new magazine.
I was ecstatic. I blocked out a whole series of political and social satires I would write for that magazine. I had found the form I would be content to concentrate on for the next couple of decades. And I had found a well-paying market for that form.
Then the roof fell in. Or, rather, a whole series of roofs.
The backers of the magazine unbacked. They’d been involved in bad deals, assets that were supposed to be liquid had solidified on them, this, that—whatever: all plans for the new publication were cancelled. Conklin and Sturgeon tried to find financing elsewhere, and failed.
Sturgeon returned the manuscript to me with the comment: “Sorry, Phil, but you won’t have any trouble peddling a piece this good.”
He was wrong. Campbell called me to his office and skimmed the piece back to me across his desk. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no!”
Science-fiction magazine editors on the next level down reacted pretty much the same way. “I wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole,” one of them said. “Not in these times. I wish I could, though. The time-travel gimmick is lovely.”
The story finally found a home at what was then the very bottom of the field—Planet Stories, which paid a maximum one-half cent a word and specialized in action stories that took place anywhere but on Earth.
“The story doesn’t fit our book in any way,” Malcolm Reiss, the editor, told me, “and it’s dangerous as hell, but I figure this one is for God. An editor is entitled to at least one for God.”
Written 1947 / Published 1948
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