A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  When I asked him how come, he said there’d been so much wild talk about grabbing the four rockets and going home that the M.P. force had been doubled and Nichols had issued stern warnings.

  “Walter?” I said, and Breck nodded. “He’s a leader and he’ll get hit with a court-martial when this is over. The blasted idiot!” '

  “I don’t get it—he’s got plenty of guts, you know that,” I said.

  “Yes, but he can’t take discipline, he never did take it very well, and now that the squeeze is on he’s blowing up. Well, see you later, Frank.”

  I saw him later, but not the way I expected. For that was

  the day we heard the faint echo of shots, and then the alarm siren screaming, and men running, and half-tracks starting up in a hurry. And when I managed to get out of my bunk and out of the hut, they were all going toward the big rockets, and a corporal yelled to me from a jeep, “That’s blown it! The damn fools swiped guns and tried to take over the rockets and make the crews fly ’em home!”

  I could still remember the sickening slidings and bouncings of the jeep as it took us out there, the milling little crowd under the looming rockets, milling around and hiding something on the ground, and Major Weiler yelling himself hoarse giving orders.

  When I got to see what was on the ground, it was seven or eight men and most of them dead. Walter had been shot right through the heart. They told me later it was because he’d been the leader, out in front, that he got it first of the mutineers.

  One M.P. was dead, and one was sitting with red all over the middle of his uniform, and that one was Breck, and they were bringing a stretcher for him now.

  The corporal said, “Hey, that’s Jergen, your squad leader!”

  And I said, “Yes, that’s him.” Funny how you can’t talk when something hits you—how you just say words, like “Yes, that’s him.”

  Breck died that night without ever regaining consciousness, and there I was, still half sick myself, and with Lassen dying in his bunk, and five of us were all that was left of Squad Fourteen, and that was that.

  How could H.Q. let a thing like that get known? A fine advertisement it would be for recruiting more Mars expeditions, if they told how guys on Two cracked up and did a crazy thing like that. I didn’t blame them for telling us to keep it top secret. Anyway, it wasn’t something we’d want to talk about.

  But it sure left me in a fine spot now, a sweet spot. I was going down to talk to Breck’s parents and Walter’s parents, and they’d want to know how their sons died, and I could tell them, “Your sons probably killed each other, out there.”

  Sure, I could tell them that, couldn’t I? But what was I going to tell them? I knew H.Q. had reported those casualties as “accidental deaths,” but what kind of accident?

  Well, it got late, and I had to go down, and when I did, Breck’s parents were there. Mr. Jergen was a carpenter, a tall, bony man with level blue eyes like Breck’s. He didn’t say much, but his wife was a little woman who talked enough for both of them.

  She told me I looked just like I did in the pictures of us Breck had sent home from training base. She said she had three daughters too—two of them married, and one of the married ones living in Milwaukee and one out on the Coast.

  She said that she’d named Breck after a character in a book by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I said I’d read the book in high school.

  “It’s a nice name,” I said.

  She looked at me with bright eyes and said, “Yes. It was a nice name.”

  That was a fine dinner. They’d got everything they thought I might like, and all the best, and a maid served it, and I couldn’t taste a thing I ate.

  Then afterward, in the big living room, they all just sort of sat and waited, and I knew it was up to me.

  I asked them if they’d had any details about the accident, and Mr. Millis said, No, just “accidental death” was all they’d been told.

  Well, that made it easier. I sat there, with all four of them watching my face, and dreamed it up.

  I said, “It was one of those one-in-a-million things. You see, more little meteorites hit the ground on Mars than here, because the air’s so much thinner it doesn’t burn them up so fast. And one hit the edge of the fuel dump and a bunch of little tanks started to blow. I was down with the sickness, so I didn’t see it, but I heard all about it.”

  You could hear everybody breathing, it was so quiet as I went on with my yarn.

  “A couple of guys were knocked out by the concussion and would have been burned up if a few fellows hadn’t got in there fast with foamite extinguishers. They kept it away from the big tanks, but another little tank let go, and Breck and Walter were two of the fellows who’d gone in, and they were killed instantly.”

  When I’d got it told, it sounded corny to me and I was afraid they’d never believe it. But nobody said anything, until Mr. Millis let out a sigh and said, “So that was it. Well . . . well, if it had to be, it was mercifully quick, wasn’t it?”

  I said, yes, it was quick. -

  “Only, I can’t see why they couldn’t have let us know. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  I had an answer for that. “It’s hush-hush because they don’t want people to know about the meteor danger. That’s why.”

  Mrs. Millis got up and said she wasn’t feeling so well, and would I excuse her and she’d see me in the morning. The rest of us didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, and nobody objected when I went up to my bedroom a little later.

  I was getting ready to turn in when there was a knock on the door. It w,as Breck’s father, and he came in and looked at me steadily.

  “It was just a story, wasn’t it?” he said.

  I said, “Yes. It was just a story.”

  His eyes bored into me and he said, “I guess you’ve got your reasons. Just tell me one thing. Whatever it was, did Breck behave right?”

  “He behaved like a man, all the way,” I said. “He was the best man of us, first to last.”

  He looked at me, and I guess something made him believe me. He shook hands and said, “All right, son. We’ll let it go.”

  I’d had enough. I wasn’t going to face them again in the morning. I wrote a note, thanking them all and making excuses, and then went down and slipped quietly out of the house.

  It was late, but a truck coming along picked me up, and the driver said he was going near the airport. He asked me what it was like on Mars and I told him it was lonesome. I slept in a chair at the airport, and I felt better, for next day I’d be home, and it would be over.

  That’s what I thought.

  4.

  It was getting toward evening when we reached the village, for my father and mother hadn’t known I was coming on an earlier plane, and I’d had to wait for them up at Cleveland Airport. When we drove into Market Street, I saw there was a big painted banner stretching across:

  “HARMONVILLE WELCOMES HOME ITS SPACEMAN!”

  Spaceman—that was me. The newspapers had started calling us that, I guess, because it was a short word good for headlines. Everybody called us that now. We’d sat cooped up in a prison cell that flew, that was all—but now we were “spacemen.”

  There were bright uniforms clustered under the banner, and I saw that it was the high-school band. I didn’t say anything, but my father saw my face.

  “Now, Frank, 1 know you’re tired, but these people are your friends and they want to show you a real welcome.”

  That was fine. Only it was all gone again, the relaxed feeling I’d been beginning to get as we drove down from Cleveland.

  This was my home country, this old Ohio country with its neat little white villages and fat, rolling farms. It looked good, in June.. It looked very good, and I’d been feeling better all the time. And now I didn’t feel so good, for I saw that I was going to have to talk some more about Mars.

  Dad stopped the car under the banner, and the high-school band started to play, and Mr. Robinson, who was the Chevrolet dealer and
also the mayor of Harmonville, got into the car with us.

  He shook hands with me and said, “Welcome home, Frank! What was it like out on Mars?”

  I said, “It was cold, Mr. Robinson. Awful cold.”

  “You should have been here last February!” he said. “Eighteen below—nearly a record.”

  He leaned out and gave a signal, and Dad started driving again, with the band marching along in front of us and playing. We didn’t have far to go, just down Market Street under the big old maples, past the churches and the old white houses to the square white Grange Hall.

  There was a little crowd in front of it, and they made a sound like a cheer—not a real loud one, you know how people can be self-conscious about really cheering—when we drove up. I got out and shook hands with people I didn’t really see, and then Mr. Robinson took my elbow and took me on inside.

  The seats were all filled and people standing up, and over the little stage at the far end they’d fixed up a big floral decoration—there was a globe all of red roses with a sign above it that said “Mars,” and beside-it a globe all of white roses that said “Earth,” and a little rocket ship made out of flowers was hung between them.

  “The Garden Club fixed it up,” said Mr. Robinson. “Nearly everybody in Harmonville contributed flowers.”

  “It sure is pretty,” I said.

  Mr. Robinson took me by the arm, up onto the little stage, and everyone clapped. They were all people I knew—people from the farms near ours, my high-school teachers, and all that.

  I sat down in a chair and Mr. Robinson made a little speech, about how Harmonville boys had always gone out when anything big was doing, how they’d gone to the War of 1812 and the Civil War and the two World Wars, and how now one of them had gone to Mars.

  He said, “Folks have always wondered what it’s like out there on Mars, and now here’s one of our own Harmonville boys come back to tell us all about it.”

  And he motioned me to get up, and I did, and they clapped some more, and I stood wondering what I could tell them.

  And all of a sudden, as I stood there wondering, I got the answer to something that had always puzzled us out there. We’d never been able to understand why the fellows who had come back from Expedition One hadn’t tipped us off how tough it was going to be. And now I knew why. They hadn’t because it would have sounded as if they were whining about all they’d been through. And now I couldn’t, for the same reason.

  I looked down at the bright, interested faces, the faces I’d known almost all my life, and I knew that what I could tell them was no good anyway. For they’d all read those newspaper stories, about “the exotic red planet” and “heroic spacemen,” and if anyone tried to give them a different picture now, it would just upset them.

  I said, “It was a long way out there. But flying space is a wonderful thing—flying right off the Earth, into the stars— there’s nothing quite like it.”

  Flying space, I called it. It sounded good, and thrilling. How could they know that flying space meant lying strapped in that blind stokehold listening to Joe Valinez dying, and praying and praying that it wouldn’t be our rocket that cracked up?

  “And it’s a wonderful thrill to come out of a rocket and step on a brand-new world, to look up at a different-looking sun, to look around at a whole new horizon . .

  Yes, it was wonderful. Especially for the guys in Rockets Seven and Nine who got squashed like flies and lay around there on the sand, moaning “First aid!” Sure, it was a big thrill, for them and for us who had to try to help them.

  “There were hardships out there, but we all knew that a big job had to be done . .

  That’s a nice word, too, “hardships.” It’s not coarse and ugly like fellows coughing their hearts out from too much dust; it’s not like having your best friend die of Martian sickness right in the room you sleep in. It’s a nice, cheerful word, “hardships.”

  “. . . and the only way we could get the job done, away out there so far from Earth, was by teamwork.”

  Well, that was true enough in its way, and what was the use of spoiling it by telling them how Walter and Breck had died?

  “The job’s going on, and Expedition Three is building a bigger base out there right now, and Four will start soon. And it’ll mean plenty of uranium, plenty of cheap atomic power, for all Earth.”

  That’s what I said, and I stopped there. But I wanted to go on and add, “And it wasn’t worth it! It wasn’t worth all those guys, all the hell we went through, just to get cheap atomic power so you people can run more electric washers and television sets and toasters!”

  But how are you going to stand up and say things like that to people you know, people who like you? And who was I to decide? Maybe I was wrong, anyway. Maybe lots of things I’d had and never thought about had been squeezed out of other good guys, back in the past.

  I wouldn’t know.

  Anyway, that was all I could tell them, and I sat down, and there was a big lot of applause, and I realized then that I’d done right, I’d told them just what they wanted to hear, and everyone was all happy about it.

  Then things broke up, and people came up to me, and I shook a lot more hands. And finally, when I got outside, it was dark—soft, summery dark, the way I hadn’t seen it for a long time. And my father said we ought to be getting on home, so I could rest. '

  I told him, “You folks drive on ahead, and I’ll walk. I’ll take the short cut. I’d sort of like to walk through town.”

  Our farm was only a couple of miles out of the village, and the short cut across Heller’s farm I’d always taken when I was a kid was only a mile. Dad didn’t think maybe I ought to walk so far, but I guess he saw I wanted to, so they went on ahead.

  I walked on down Market Street, and around the little square, and the maples and elms were dark over my head, and the flowers on the lawns smelled the way they used to, but it wasn’t the same either—I’d thought it would be, but it wasn’t.

  When I cut off past the Odd Fellows’ Hall, beyond it I met Hobe Evans, the garage hand at the Ford place, who was humming along half tight, the same as always on a Saturday night.

  “Hello, Frank, heard you were back,” he said. I waited for him to ask the question they all asked, but he didn’t. He said, “Boy, you don’t look so good! Want a drink?”

  He brought out a bottle, and I had one out of it, and he had one, and he said he’d see me around, and went humming on his way. He was feeling too good to care much where I’d been.

  I went on, in the dark, across Heller’s pasture and then along the creek under the big old willows. I stopped there like I’d always stopped when I was a kid, to hear the frog noises, and there they were, and all the June noises, the night noises, and the night smells.

  I did something I hadn’t done for a long time. I looked up at the starry sky, and there it was, the same little red dot I’d peered at when I was a kid and read those old stories, the same red dot that Breck and Jim and Walter and I had stared away at on nights at training base, wondering if we’d ever really get there.

  Well, they’d got there, and weren’t ever going to leave it now, and there’d be others to stay with them, more and more of them as time went by.

  But it was the ones I knew that made the difference, as I looked up at the red dot.

  I wished I could explain to them somehow why I hadn’t told the truth, not the whole truth. I tried, sort of, to explain.

  “I didn’t want to lie,” I said. “But I had to—at least, it seemed like I had to—”

  I quit it. It was crazy, talking to guys who were dead and

  forty million miles away. They were dead, and it was over, and that was that. I quit looking up at the red dot in the sky and started on home again.

  But I felt as though something was over for me too. It was being young. I didn’t feel old. But I didn’t feel young either, and I didn’t think I ever would, not ever again.

  Our civilization has taken a long time to accept the
notion that the truth, however grotesque or unpalatable, is better than any amount of highly colored falsehoods. It can hardly be said that this idea is widespread even yet; it holds in science and engineering, and in a few other egghead areas, but as citizens we are still surrounded and half smothered by a blanket of soothing lies. We believe that justice triumphs, that crime does not pay, that Our government is nobler and more disinterested than Their government, and a lot of other comforting things that do not happen to be eternally true.

  So I think we gain when a writer has the courage and insight to say, in a story about a Mars expedition, “Maybe lots of things I’d had and never thought about had been squeezed out of other good guys, back in the past”

  Robert A. Heinlein, a retired naval officer and mechanical engineer, entered the s.f. field in 1939 with a short story called “Lifeline.” In the next four years he produced seventeen more stories and nine novels, all characterized by an exuberant inventiveness and a scorn for conventional makeshifts. Like the young Wells, Heinlein staked out vast new territory and made it his own. His long novelettes Universe and the aptly named Common Sense introduced the idea of a generations-long voyage to the stars. Previous writers had merely overlooked the problem of the immense interstellar distances, or had elected to solve it with a magical phrase (t,spacewarp,> or “overdrive”). Heinlein began by approaching such problems seriously, an unheard-of thing in the science fiction of the forties. In stories like “Requiem,” “Universe,” “Methuselah’s Children” and “Coventry,” he said, in effect, “If you really want to get to the Moon, or the stars, or increase human longevity, or establish a civilized world order, this is the practical way to do it.”

  In magazine fiction, in the motion picture Destination Moon, in his Scribner’s juveniles, Heinlein has built up a consistent and detailed picture of the next century in space. Here is one of his space faring tales (Imagination, November 1953), a story about something that has never happened, and yet a story which is true in the sense that two-times-two« equals-four is true. The cold mathematics of space flight have a human meaning, as you are about to see.