A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  “You didn’t . .

  “Certainly, why not? If I didn’t somebody else would.”

  “But you’ve already got the closet overflowing with—” “Now Marget, don’t look that way. One of these days some museum or collector . .

  She grunted skeptically and turned back into the house.

  3.

  SPACE

  Stories of wonderful journeys are as old as tale-telling; and if you want to be very technical, you can say that the earliest known story of space travel is the True History of Lucian of Samosata, c. 200 B.C. (See the Introduction.) But Lucian’s narrator got to the moon by magical means; so did Cyrano de Bergerac’s, Defoe’s and Godwin’s; Kepler’s got there in a dream. These are proto-science-fiction narratives, if you like; but the history of space travel in science fiction does not begin until about the turn of the century, when such stories began to be written using means that might actually work.

  Three cases in point:

  The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal, by Edgar Allan Poe (1835). This story is sometimes cited as the first scientific story of space travel. The protagonist gets to the moon in a balloon, which is minutely described.

  From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne (1865). Verne’s adventurers are shot into orbit around the moon by a gigantic cannon, also minutely described.

  The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells (1901). The means used is an imaginary substance, “Cavorite,” which is impervious to gravity.

  These three novels are all close to the line where the magical space-travel story becomes science fiction. To my mind, the Wells belongs on this side of the line, and the other two just short of it. There is no such thing as Cavorite, and theoretical considerations suggest that there never will be; but we don’t really know. Therefore Cavorite has to be admitted, even if dubiously, whereas we know with certainty that neither balloons nor giant cannon can ever get anybody to the moon.

  Science fiction writers to this day are confronted with the same alternatives—to invent something out of whole cloth, which cannot be challenged but carries no plausibility of its own, or to use something real and familiar, whose only drawback is that it would not work.

  The trouble with balloons is that the atmosphere does not extend, as Poe must have thought, all the way from here to the moon. The trouble with cannon is that even if it were possible to build one of the required size, the acceleration involved would flatten the passengers into a thin red mush. Curiously enough, Wells himself used the gun idea in his War of the Worlds (1898); the rocket principle, although it has a venerable history of its own, does not seem to have occurred to any serious writer of science fiction until about thirty years later, when Otto Willi Gail used a chemical-fueled step rocket to transport his adventurers around the moon, in The Shot into Infinity. An English translation of this novel appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1929.

  Space-travel stories in American s.f. magazines began somewhat soberly, but quickly turned into wild and woolly space opera* in which larger and larger fleets of rocket ships went faster and farther, with less and less regard for prosaic considerations of fuel and acceleration. The king of this kind of space-adventure writing was Edmond Hamilton.

  * Wilson Tucker is the inventor of this useful term.

  A realist revolt took place in the early thirties, but was aborted. 1 am talking about a story called “What’s It Like Out There?” by Edmond (World-Wrecker) Hamilton.

  Hamilton, a quiet, scholarly-looking man, has been writing s.f. since 1928 and has probably turned out more of it than anyone else, living or dead. He is married to writer Leigh Brackett; they spend part of their time in an isolated farm house near Kinsman, Ohio, and part in the talent mills of Hollywood.

  “It was in 1933,” Hamilton says, “when Jack Williamson and I were batching out a depression winter in Key West, that 1 wrote the first form of this story. 1 was sick of reading, and writing, stories that made going to space so easy. 1 determined to write one absolutely realistic yarn, insofar as 1 could, about what a grueling thing it could be.

  “I did it, and the story fell stone dead. Nobody would have it, not even at a half-cent a word. The cry was that it was too gruesome. Amazing Stories (I still have their letter) said flatly, 'It is well written but it is too horrible.’ That damn thing even went twice to fugitive English s.f. mags, and was hastily shipped back. Cured for the time being of realism, I threw it into my file and went back to world-wrecking.

  “Almost twenty years later, Leigh found it in my file, read it, and nagged me till 1 did a new version of it. The original story was a straight narrative, and somewhat longer. I cast it into dramatic flashback form, made some obvious updating of technical points, and was delighted to sell it and thumb my nose at the horrified editors of 1933.”

  The story appeared in Startling Stories in 1952, under a blurb by the editor hailing it as evidence of a new, mature Hamilton. Here it is.

  WHAT’S IT LIKE OUT THERE?

  BY EDMOND HAMILTON

  1

  I hadn’t wanted to wear my uniform when I left the hospital, but I didn’t have any other clothes there and I was too glad to get out to argue about it. But as soon as I got on the local plane I was taking to Los Angeles, I was sorry I had it on.

  People gawked at me and began to whisper. The stewardess gave me a special big smile. She must have spoken to the pilot, for he came back and shook hands, and said, “Well, I guess a trip like this is sort of a comedown for you.”

  A little man came in, looked around for a seat, and took the one beside me. He was a fussy, spectacled guy of fifty or sixty, and he took a few minutes to get settled. Then he looked at me, and stared at my uniform and at the little brass button on it that said “TWO.”

  “Why,” he said, “you’re one of those Expedition Two men!” And then, as though he’d only just figured it out, “Why, you’ve been to Mars!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”

  He beamed at me in a kind of wonder. I didn’t like it, but his curiosity was so friendly that I couldn’t quite resent it. “Tell me,” he said, “what’s it like out there?”

  The plane was lifting, and I looked out at the Arizona desert sliding by close underneath.

  “Different,” I said. “It’s different.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy him completely. “I’ll just bet it is,” he said. “Are you going home, Mr. . .

  “Haddon. Sergeant Frank Haddon.”

  “You going home, Sergeant?”

  “My home’s back in Ohio,” I told him. “I’m going in to L.A. to look up some people before I go home.”

  “Well, that’s fine. I hope you have a good time, Sergeant. You deserve it. You boys did a great job out there. Why, I read in the newspapers that after the U.N. sends out a couple more expeditions, we’ll have cities out there, and regular passenger lines, and all that.”

  “Look,” I said, “that stuff is for the birds. You might as well build cities down there in Mojave, and have them a lot closer. There’s only one reason for going to Mars now, and that’s uranium.”

  I could see he didn’t quite believe me. “Oh, sure,” he said, “I know that’s important too, the uranium we’re all using now for our power stations—but that isn’t all, is it?”

  “It’ll be all, for a long, long time,” I said.

  “But look, Sergeant, this newspaper article said . . .”

  I didn’t say anything more. By the time he’d finished telling about the newspaper article, we were coming down into L.A. He pumped my hand when we got out of the plane.

  “Have yourself a time, Sergeant! You sure rate it. I hear a lot of chaps on Two didn’t come back.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I heard that.”

  I was feeling shaky again by the time I got to downtown L.A. I went in a bar and had a double bourbon and it made me feel a little better.

  I went out and found a cabby and asked him to drive me out to San Gabriel. He was a fat
man with a broad red face.

  “Hop right in, buddy,” he said. “Say, you’re one of those Mars guys, aren’t you?” •

  I said, “That’s right.”

  “Well, well,” he said. “Tell me, how was it out there?”

  “It was a pretty dull grind, in a way,” I told him.

  “I’ll bet it was!” he said, as we started through traffic. “Me, I was in the Army in World War Two, twenty years ago. That’s just what it was, a dull grind nine tenths of the time. I guess i,t hasn’t changed any.”

  “This wasn’t any Army expedition,” I explained. “It was a

  United Nations one, not an Army one—but we had officers and rules of discipline like the Army.”

  “Sure, it’s the same thing,” said the cabby. “You don’t need to tell me what it’s like, buddy. Why, back there in ’forty-two, or was it ’forty-three?—anyway, back there I remember that . . .”

  I leaned back and watched Huntington Boulevard slide past. The sun poured in on me and seemed very hot, and the air seemed very thick and soupy. It hadn’t been so bad up on the Arizona plateau, but it was a little hard to breathe down here.

  The cabby wanted to know what address in San Gabriel. I got the little packet of letters out of my pocket and found the one that had “Martin Valinez” and a street address on the back. I told the cabby and put the letters back into my pocket.

  I wished now that I’d never answered them.

  But how could I keep from answering when Joe Valinez* parents wrote to me at the hospital? And it was the same with Jim’s girl, and Walter’s family. I’d had to write back, and the first thing I knew I’d promised to come and see them, and now if I went back to Ohio without doing it I’d feel like a heel. Right now, I wished I’d decided to be a heel.

  The address was on the south side of San Gabriel, in a section that still had a faintly Mexican tinge to it. There was a little frame grocery store with a small house beside it, and a picket fence around the yard of the house; very neat, but a queerly homely place after all the slick California stucco.

  I went into the little grocery, and a tall, dark man with quiet eyes took a look at me and called a woman’s name in a low voice and then came around the counter and took my hand.

  “You’re Sergeant Haddon,” he said. “Yes. Of course. We’ve been hoping you’d come.”

  His wife came in a hurry from the back. She looked a little too old to be Joe’s mother, for Joe had been just a kid; but then she didn’t look so old either, but just sort of worn.

  She said to Valinez, “Please, a chair. Can’t you see he’s tired? And just from the hospital.”

  I sat down and looked between them at a case of canned peppers, and they asked me how I felt, and wouldn’t I be glad to get home, and they hoped all my family were well.

  They were gentlefolk. They hadn’t said a word about Joe, just waited for me to say something. And I felt in a spot, for

  I hadn’t known Joe well, not really. He’d been moved into our squad only a couple of weeks before take-off, and since he’d been our first casualty, I’d never got to know him much.

  I finally had to get it over with, and all I could think to say was, “They wrote you in detail about Joe, didn’t they?”

  Valinez nodded gravely. “Yes—that he died from shock within twenty-four hours after take-off. The letter was very nice.”

  His wife nodded too. “Very nice,” she murmured. She looked at me, and I guess she saw that I didn’t know quite what to say, for she said, “You can tell us more about it. Yet you must not if it pains you.”

  I could tell them more. Oh, yes, I could tell them a lot more, if I wanted to. It was all clear in my mind, like a movie film you run over and over till you know it by heart.

  I could tell them all about the take-off that had killed their son. The long lines of us, uniformed backs going up into Rocket Four and all the other nineteen rockets—the lights flaring up there on the plateau, the grind of machinery and blast of whistles and the inside of the big rocket as we climbed up the ladders of its center well.

  The movie was running again in my mind, clear as crystal, and I was back in Cell Fourteen of Rocket Four, with the minutes ticking away and the walls quivering every time one of the other rockets blasted off, and us ten men in our hammocks, prisoned inside that odd-shaped windowless metal room, waiting. Waiting, till that big, giant hand came and smacked us down deep into our recoil springs, crushing the breath out of us, so that you fought to breathe, and the blood roared into your head, and your stomach heaved in spite of all the pills they’d given you, and you heard the giant laughing, b-r-room! b-r-r-room! b-r-r-oom!

  Smash, smash, again and again, hitting us in the guts and cutting our breath, and someone being sick, and someone else sobbing, and the b-r-r-oom! b-r-r-oom! laughing as it killed us; and then the giant quit laughing, and quit slapping us down, and you could feel your sore and shaky body and wonder if it was still all there.

  Walter Millis cursing a blue streak in the hammock underneath me, and Breck Jergen, our sergeant then, clambering painfully out of his straps to look us over, and then through the voices a thin, ragged voice saying uncertainly, “Breck, I think I’m hurt . .

  Sure, that was their boy Joe, and there was blood on his lips, and he’d had it—we knew when we first looked at him that he’d had it. A handsome kid, turned waxy now as he held his hand on his middle and looked up at us. Expedition One had proved that take-off would hit a certain percentage with internal injuries every time, and in our squad, in our little windowless cell, it was Joe that had been hit.

  If only he’d died right off. But he couldn’t die right off, he had to lie in the hammock all those hours and hours. The medics came and put a strait-jacket around his body and doped him up, and that was that, and the hours went by. And we were so shaken and deathly sick ourselves that we didn’t have the sympathy for him we should have had—not till he started moaning and begging us to take the jacket off.

  Finally Walter Millis wanted to do it, and Breck wouldn’t allow it, and they were arguing and we were listening when the moaning stopped, and there was no need to do anything about Joe Valinez any more. Nothing but to call the medics, who came into our little iron prison and took him away.

  Sure, I could tell the Valinezes all about how their Joe died, couldn’t I?

  “Please,” whispered Mrs. Valinez, and her husband looked at me and nodded silently.

  So I told them.

  I said, “You know Joe died in space. He’d been knocked out by the shock of take-off, and he was unconscious, not feeling a thing. And then he woke up, before he died. He didn’t seem to be feeling any pain, not a bit. He lay there, looking out the window at the stars. They’re beautiful, the stars out there in space, like angels. He looked, and then he whispered something and lay back and was gone.”

  Mrs. Valinez began to cry softly. “To die out there, looking at stars like angels . .

  I got up to go, and she didn’t look up. I went out the door of the little grocery store, and Valinez came with me.

  He shook my hand. “Thank you, Sergeant Haddon. Thank you very much.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I got into the cab. I took out my letters and tore that one into bits. I wished to God I’d never got it. I wished I didn’t have any of the other letters I still had.

  2.

  I took the early plane for Omaha. Before we got there I fell asleep in my seat, and then I began to dream, and that wasn’t good.

  A voice said, “We’re coming down.”

  And we were coming down, Rocket Four was coming down, and there we were in our squad cell, all of us strapped into our hammocks, waiting and scared, wishing there was a window so we could see out, hoping our rocket wouldn’t be the one to crack up, hoping none of the rockets cracked up, but if one does, don’t let it be ours. . . .

  “We’re coming down. . .

  Coming down, with the blasts starting to boom again underneath us, hitting us
hard, not steady like at take-off, but blast-blast-blast, and then again, blast-blast.

  Breck’s voice, calling to us from across the cell, but I couldn’t hear for the roaring that was in my ears between blasts. No, it was not in my ears, that roaring came from the wall beside me: we had hit atmosphere, we were coming in.

  The blasts in lightning succession without stopping, crash-crash-crash-crash-crash! Mountains fell on me, and this was it, and don’t let it be ours, please, God, don’t let it be ours. ... *

  Then the bump and the blackness, and finally somebody yelling hoarsely in my ears, and Breck Jergen, his face deathly white, leaning over me.

  “Unstrap and get out, Frank! All men out of hammocks— all men out!”

  We’d landed, and we hadn’t cracked up, but we were half dead and they wanted us to turn out, right this minute, and we couldn’t.

  Breck yelling to us, “Breathing masks on! Masks on! We’ve got to go out!”

  “My God, we’ve just landed, we’re torn to bits, we can’t!”

  “We’ve got to! Some of the other rockets cracked up in landing and we’ve got to save whoever’s still living in them! Masks on! Hurry!”

  We couldn’t, but we did. They hadn’t given us all those months of discipline for nothing. Jim Clymer was already on his feet, Walter was trying to unstrap underneath me, whistles were blowing like mad somewhere and voices shouted hoarsely.

  My knees wobbled under me as I hit the floor. Young Lassen, beside me, tried to say something and then crumpled up. Jim bent over him, but Breck was at the door yelling, “Let him go! Come on!”

  The whistles screeching at us all the way down the ladders of the well, and the mask clip hurting my nose, and down at the bottom a disheveled officer yelling at us to get out and join Squad Five, and the gangway reeling under us.

  Cold. Freezing cold, and a wan sunshine from the shrunken little sun up there in the brassy sky, and a rolling plain of ocherous red sand stretching around us, sand that slid away under our feet as our squads followed Captain Wall toward the distant metal bulk that lay oddly canted and broken in a little shallow valley.