The Worlds of George O

by George O. Smith

  Brains would have turned the vast machine aside to direct its voracious appetite against a less threatening ice-scape. But the undirected machine gouged and tore at the insurmountable rise, and more ice slid down to fill the gap, to fill the insatiable maw of the uncontrolled machine. The process was without interruption: and endless Niagara of ice poured downward into the matter-transmitter plane.

  From a cosmic viewpoint, a forty-mile cliff of ice ava-launched across space to the Mercury Canal. And one step farther, Mars was under the hammer of a forty-mile avalanche of rain.

  "How d'ye feel, Tom?"

  "Fit. I've been slumbering."

  "Want to take over?"

  "Sure. We can handle this. We'll back Station One out of the mess.

  That'll relieve Mercury Inlet, and eventually the canal will go down to a reasonable level. We'll stay here to patch up." Tom Britton called his crew together, and they donned spacesuits.

  Phil Watson waited until Station One began to move backwards, away from the downpour of cold-flowing ice. As the transmitter's cutting action withdrew, the down-flow lessened. Phil sighed, and lifted the ship, and headed it towards Mars.

  "I hope," he said to Louise, "you don't mind if I collapse."

  She cradled his head in her lap. Phil squirmed into a comfortable position. He slept almost at once.

  Louise slipped out from under and went to sit in the pilot's chair. The maze of instruments meant little to her, but so long as the autodriver registered on the green lamp they were in no danger. She dozed, herself, from time to time, shaking herself awake to cast an anxious glance at the few meters that she could read.

  Turnover-time came, and Louise debated if she should awaken Phil.

  But she remembered that space is a large bit of vacant lot, and so she took the levers and produced one of the most wide-spread turnovers in the history of space flight.

  Eventually a planet came up out of the ambiguous stellar display below, and Louise went over to awaken Phil. A couple of million miles tossed off in a ragged turnover was one thing, but landing a spacecraft was definitely another.

  She touched him gently and he came awake. He drew her down and she snuggled beside him for a moment before she said, "Mars is dead below."

  He got up quickly. "All I'm getting out of this shindig is hard work and frustration."

  "Does it make you think of a white cottage and--"

  Phil grunted. "Me? I'm too young to be a father--"

  * * * *

  He set the ship down near the weather control station. The marks of its previous landing were obliterated by the rain, but of that rain there was no longer much trace.

  Above, in the blue sky, the smallish sun shone brightly, and the air was chill and bracing. A cloud or two was billowing in the Martian sky. The rain had soaked in, and the ground was muddish and wetly red, but not mushy. People lined the landing field, waiting for them.

  "Expecting a reception?" asked Louise.

  "No. But the gang will be waiting for me to give them the lowdown on the cloudburst and how it happened."

  "Looks larger than the gang."

  "There's always Senator Longacre and his crew of plug-hatted characters."

  The air was moist, and it smelled of spring and growing green things.

  It rolled into the airlock, fresh and pleasant. The ramp went out, and Phil waved Louise first.

  Halfway down the ramp a cameraman called, "Hey! Watson! Let her come second!"

  Louise let him pass; Phil went down the ramp and turned to take her hand as she stepped from the ramp onto Mars.

  There was a flaring of flashes and a crescendo of music from a portable sound projector parked somewhere. A hubbub of voices rose and grew into a cheer.

  Senator Longacre stepped forward and shouldered Phil aside. He handed Louise a large bouquet as the flashers flared again, and from the back there came a battery of dolly-trucked television cameras.

  In the midst of the racket, Phil heard the good senator start a bit of carefully prepared oratory:

  "--the one billionth space traveler to set foot upon Mars--"

  "--she's got legs," said one of the photogs, "let's cheesecake her--"

  "--a few words, Mrs. Watson--"

  "--wife of the weather control manager--"

  "--smile, please, Mrs. Watson--"

  "--who cares about him--?"

  "--schoolteacher."

  "Schoolteachers didn't look like that in my day!"

  "You were young and--"

  Louise turned back. There was a humorous glint in her eye. "Phil,"

  she whispered, "you're in the middle. After what you did to Senator Longacre, he'd like nothing better than to get you in a jam."

  Phil nodded. He looked around the field. People were arriving in droves; the field was becoming jammed with revelers. The sound wagon had been hooked up with the MCOC network, and was blaring something about a Marswide holiday for the billionth visitor. He looked at the billionth visitor, and found her attractive. He remembered the billionth visitor's quick mind, and he found it attractive, also. And then he realized that he knew something about woman that Louise did not: that the lure was the lip and the breast and the round hip, but the door to the trap was the character and the personality and the rather intriguing question of what kind of intellect might spring from--

  "Louise--will you wed with me?"

  "I told you--"

  Phil stretched himself tall and extended his chest. "I shall flick a finger and bring ammonia to Terra; I shall twist a dial and rain methane on Mars. I shall start this goddam deluge again. Or I can go on a nice drunken spree and let the whole damned solar system scratch for itself."

  "But--"

  "It might have my brains and your looks."

  "But if it had my brains and your looks?"

  Phil grinned. He knew what to say: "My looks aren't too bad."

  They rode through the streets of Marstown, arm in arm under a blue sky. It was spring, and there were violets thrusting their heads up through the ruddy soil. And while nobody would ever see Phillip Watson's name in the Books, or see Louise Hannon Watson carved in marble, their future would someday ride through the streets of Pluto, or Aldebaran IV, or--

  * * * *

  In the chronos, the War in Europe was on its last, and the War in the Pacific was being waged relentlessly. The emphasis on Europe was, as the historians can now say, because Hitler's invasion of Norway touched off a line of consciousness, since Norway was perhaps the only major supplier of "heavy" water, deuterium oxide, and because the discovery of the fission of U-238 had been in Germany in 1938 by Hahn and Strassmann.

  Oddly, some of us were sort-of in on our program, vaguely. Work on the proximity fuse had been top priority, and through 1942 and 1943 the only thing we got hung up on was that the Navy used a mixture of tallow and graphite as a "luting" compound; that's the stuff put on pipe threads to keep them from leaking. Well, we needed a fifty-gallon drum of the stuff, but the Ration Board said we must have fifty thousand red stamps since tallow, theoretically, was edible. (Not me, Uncle Joseph!)

  Then one fine day, we got a notice from the War Production Board that instead of plating the parts with cadmium, we must use zinc. Zinc? Why zinc? Aren't we hot enough to ask and take parts from the battleship-building program?

  Well, yes, said one of the senior scientists at Crosley, picking up his copy of Pollard & Davidsons Applied Nuclear Physics and pawing through the appendix that listed what was known at the time about isotopes--and pointed out that cadmium had a long list of neutron-absorbing isotopes.

  And, says he, someone is playing around with atomic energy.

  Well, as I said, the struggle was about over, but a lot of it remained, and this was no time to pause.

  But we had concluded the crash program to write manuals for sonar, and I was in the awkward position of being without a job. However, one of the top Navy officers with the crash writing program suggested that they might be able to use me on a ra
dar program at the Submarine Signal Company, in Boston. I went and was interviewed and was accepted--provided I got clearance. One did not swap jobs without approval from his draft board, nor change addresses, nor anything. And to do anything, one had to fill out forms in multiplicate and return them through channels. I won't imply that this was a go-to-or-else, but I received a reply from my draft board with A) a 1-A draft classification, and B) approval to change my residence and accept the position from SubSig. And C) a form which, properly filled out in multiplicate, requested that I be deferred from the draft since I was occupied in a position of importance to the war effort.

  I left for Boston the following morning, a bit hung over because the night before had started the morning before: it was the cessation of hostilities in Europe.

  The guy at the bar said that he hadn't heard the news, and if he did, he'd have to close up, and why didn't we keep our big mouths shut!

  Boston has no slums. It has a lot of "historic sites," and I lived in one of them, not far from the Fenway. I was hard at work when the telephone rang. I was told that the radio (Radio? That's a cabinet that gives noise with the pictures out) just said that an atomic bomb had been dropped on (sounded like Iwo Jima, but that wasn't right, was it?). I said, "No, but get off the phone, I've got calling to do!"

  "John, did you hear the news?"

  "No, what news?"

  "Says we dropped the atom bomb on Japan."

  "Oh, my God! It's started"

  World War Two was ended, and after another wild night of relief and celebration, two more things took place.

  First, I was out of a job once more, and no draft board to control my comings and goings. They'd given me a draft classification that put me shoving a broom along Massachusetts Avenue IF and AFTER the enemy walked along the streets of Boston. Second, John W. Campbell went the way of the prophets of doom, and it quickly became boring to hear him lecture that New York City was going to disappear in a ball of "incandescent flame" within five years. (I'm aware that there are "incandescences that aren't flame, but I fail to know of any flame that isn't incandescent!) With no job, but with remaining expenses, and with industry busy undoing what had been done in 1942 without making new plans yet, one takes up writing whole-time.

  Robert A. Heinlein called from Philadelphia; they were folding up their apartment and about to trot back to California with a cortege of a few of their friends they'd found pleasant during the war years, and would I join them? Well, not yet. Maybe later. L. Sprague de Camp said he'd been saved by the bell; it turned out that for some oddball reason he had been the ranking officer at a time when there was a squadron of destroyers that had to be run from Philadelphia to Norfolk and he, with a Naval Reserve status, would have been in command. Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, now that their place on Laguna Beach was open and free once more, took no time to go back home.

  John, who had been beating the management of Street & Smith to let him start a real science magazine, got a cold turkey instead. Back in the barnstorming days, there were a number of pulps about flying, real shoot-em-up jobs in aircraft reminiscent of those biplanes that shot King Kong off the Empire State Building in his first appearance, and one of them was a Street & Smith pulp known as Air Trails. But the years had passed, and Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic, and commercial air traffic had been going on, and the shoot-em-up air story lost its flavor, and Air Trails meandered into a sort of semi-technical book about glider operations, with substantial sections about flying models, but the public was losing track of that, too.

  John was told that if he wanted a real science magazine, why didn't he take on Air Trails and slip the editorial policy and slowly slide the title into his project.

  And that was going to take some time, and a lot of some doing, because when you change the editorial policy that much, those who bought it for what it was, now drop it because it isn't any more. And those you would like to pick it up won't look at it now because they couldn't know that it was changed. This meant that John was going to spend most of his time on the conversion, and the least of his time on Astounding. In other words, he needed help to handle the groundwork.

  John had an excellent secretary-assistant, one Katy Tarrant, who kept the Ts all crossed and the Is and Js dotted, and carefully removed, with a blue pencil, anything that looked even slightly blue. But she was not to make editorial decisions. John hired L. Jerome Stanton to be an editorial assistant, to read the slush pile, to select (at regular intervals) the series of possible stories that counted into the whole book-length for Astounding, that John was to review and select. Incoming works were divided, as always, into two piles, those from the known writers and those from the unknowns, but now John read only those from the known writers, and L.

  Jerome read the slush pile and forwarded anything that looked reasonable to John for final approval.

  And I, living in one of the points of historical interest in Boston, was slowly running myself into the ground. There were, at the time, only two strings of magazines that were worth working for: Street & Smith's Astounding, and Standard Magazines' twin science fiction books Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder. One fills the files rather quickly when one writes only as a sole occupation and there are only two markets.

  * * * *

  What brought everything up short was "Catspaw," which comes out-of-line in the chronology because it was too long to fit well into Astounding's format. Fred Pohl, an editor at Bantam Books, clocked it to be 15,000

  words, but John paid for 20,000 and yelped (in one of his eight-page letters) that if I'd made it another 5,000, and put in a cliff-hanger, he might have printed it as a two-part serial. He went on to point out that the George O. Smith inventory was too high, and that the S&S auditors were breathing down his throat because he was buying G.O. Smith faster than he could print it. And was I a reincarnation of the fabulous Frederick Faust?

  So the publication date of "Catspaw" has no connection to when it was written.

  "Catspaw," by the way, is based upon the idea that something that sounds just swell might be deadly. The platitude about looking the gift horse in the teeth is, just that, a platitude; one might very well eyeball the gift horse critically because it might not be the horse you'd want your daughter to ride.

  Altruism is a myth. There ain't none. Everything is done with some purpose in mind; it may be personal, or it may be for the benefit of a group, or a sect, or a society. For example, the Eighteenth Amendment was passed to upgrade the morals and ethics of life in the United States by eradicating the Demon Rum from our society. That's the way it was put to us, and that's the way it looked for enough of the people to pass it. But as it stood, organized crime might well have put their own effort to the bill because, in those years, the Eighteenth Amendment did more for organized crime than it did to raise the society toward purity.

  The Catspaw

  Thomas Barden slept fitfully. The dream was not nightmare, but it was annoying. It was like the important thought that does not quite struggle up through into consciousness but which remains unformed, though the mind is aware of the hidden importance. It was like trying to read small print through a silk screen, or to see fine detail through a sheet of florentine glass.

  Furthermore, it was recurring.

  Strangely, Tom Barden seemed to know that there was something strange about the dream, that it was more than just the ramblings of the subconscious mind. He knew that there was something to be gained by permitting the dream to run while he watched, so to speak. But the trouble was that the dream could not run so long as he remained cognizant enough in sleep to make mental notes. When he slept deep enough to permit the strange dream, he was deep enough to lose track of the delicate, and so very alien, train of thought.

  The fitful sleep itself was a contributing factor to ultimate success.

  Since he slept not, he became drowsily tired, and found himself lying wide awake time and again with strange semi-daydreams in which conscious thought and dream intermingled in
a bizarre fantasy of fact and fiction.

  He had been asleep or awake for hours. It was nearing four o'clock in the morning when Tom Barden slipped into a prolonged half-sleep and the dream, as it had before, came again.

  He slipped into sleep, and in dream he saw himself luxuriously lounging on a broad couch. Above his head was a draped canopy of silk, its draped folds hanging low in a gorgeous pattern of silken folds. It was gently tinted in delicate colors that blended in a complete lack of regular pattern. It seemed more beautiful for lacking pattern than it could have been with any regularity.

  It was non-ending, that canopy. From the draped dome above his couch the silken cyclorama fell in a colorful swirl to the floor where it folded over and over somewhere miles below the couch.

  He--was isolated. He was protected. No intrusion could come, even though Thomas Barden wanted the intrusion. Certainly, if he denied entry, nothing could enter.

  And yet he knew that beyond the many layers of flowing silk there was something demanding entry. He could not see nor hear the would-be intruder. He could not even see motion of the silk to show that there was such a being. Yet he seemed to sense it.

  And when, finally, the intruder breached the outer layers of shrouding silk, Tom Barden knew it and was glad. Course after course of silken screen was opened by the intruder, until finally the silk parted before his eyes and there entered--

  Sentience!

  * * * *

  It was without form and void.

  But it was sentience and it was there for a definite purpose. It came, and it hovered over Thomas Barden's broad couch, and its thoughts were apparent. It was in communication with another sentience outside--

  "I am in."

  "Good," was the mental reply, also clear to Thomas Barden. It was not a direct communication from the other. It came relayed through the sentience above his bed, and since he was in direct mental communication with the other, thought and reply were clear also to Barden. "Good," replied the other. "Be quick and be thorough. We may never return!"

  "You, sentience, listen for we have too little time. Those of your system are numbered in the billions, and of them all, you are the only one we have been able to contact, though we have tried constantly for several years.