The Pratt place on the shore had been known for some time as "The Ipsey Wipsy Institute," for an amusing reason. It started during the war, before they owned the place, as follows:
As a test--don't ask me for what, or why--the military wanted to check-test the immediate memory of the testee. This gave them a problem; there were several various tricks and routines that serve to heighten one's immediate memory, and the military wanted to find out the un-heightened memory. That is, to separate one with quick immediate memory from those who used some stunt.
Someone devised a routine in which the memory-filing stunts went askew because the thing was gummed up with sense and nonsense, and adjectives that didn't apply, and nouns that did not all make literary sense. The tester would start with the first line, and the testee would repeat it. Then the tester would state the second line, but the testee had to go back to the beginning and run through the whole, adding that last line at the end. The number of errors went down as the score--and I have only known one, a young fellow, who went through it without once pausing or losing his way:
"One duck."
"Two hens."
"Three squawking geese."
"Four corpulent porpoises."
"Five Limerick oysters."
"Six pairs of Don Alphonso tweezers."
"Seven hundred Macedonian warriors in full battle array."
"Eight golden crowns for the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt."
"Nine lymphatic, asthmatic, peripatetic old men on crutches."
"Ten revolving heliotropes from the Ipsey Wipsy Institute."
(I may have slightly misquoted it, because it's been twenty years. But any misquotation is honestly slight.)
Fletcher and Inga moved to the Ipsey in the spring of 1955, and that took more of my free time. Somehow I did manage to write a bit, especially during the winter, since one could hardly go a-boating on the Shrewsbury. George Washington could stand up in a boat, pushing large ice cubes aside, but not George O. About once a month, I'd stay in New York, to meet Fletcher, to attend one of the dinner meetings of the "Trap Door Spiders."
It began just after the war. Fletcher fancied himself a gourmet cook, and managed fairly well except that he had the great fear that one of his roasts might get within a shouting distance toward "medium rare." With a bunch turning up for weekend dinner, Fletcher was wont to visit a butcher in New York who specialized on rarities; for example, the whole of a buffalo roast. These were frozen; the call for such is low so that keeping the buffalo un-frozen would have been ridiculous. Fletcher used to put it in the oven still frozen, and many the time we've eaten buffalo roast so nicely done red and rare that there were ice crystals in the center.
In any event, the original idea of the Trap Door Spiders was to create; first, a dinner-meeting society in which each member, in taking his turn, provided a table different than usual, and preferably symbolic. This may be difficult to understand, but one of Willy Ley's meetings presented the customary dinner that a German burgomeister might give to welcome a citizen to become a personal friend. Second, the Trap Door Spiders had been created to provide a masculine society. Not that we all weren't cheerfully married and enjoyed the company of women, except one who wasn't cheerfully married, and whose woman none of the rest of us enjoyed. It was to get him out of the house once in a while where we could talk without interruption.
At this moment, Isaac Asimov's series about the "Black Widowers" that turn up in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine are based on characters from the Trap Door Spiders. I won't tell you who's for who, but we know, don't we, Ike?
But I will tell you one incident. Part of the gimmick was to have the oberspinnenfuhrer provide a guest whom we questioned by starting to ask him to
"justify his existence." One fellow, after long questioning, admitted that he was the adopted father of a hippopotamus. Seems that he'd given one as a gift to some zoo in the middle west. I was hailed because (aside from the boss who helped me, and who is now long dead) I claimed to be the only one who has ever had the opportunity and the chance to push a standard upright piano out of a fourth-floor building onto a concrete courtyard. (The Lost Chord!)
This time I was off on a business trip, and arrived at the Pratt apartment just in time to see the whole bunch call it off and head for home. In the course of events, Doc Clark had gone to sleep on one of the sofas. It was, say, midnight. I'd flown and taken an airplane nap, and I wanted some conversation and a drink. Fletcher agreed that he wasn't tired either. So we went pub crawling through what Fletcher used to call the "Hitchcock Circuit."
We returned about 2:00, to find that Doc was not only still asleep, but that he'd removed his shoes and his trousers. Now, Fletcher and Inga had moved, but they were maintaining the apartment, thus we were there without Inga, who frequently used her studio when one of the fashion outfits wanted a quick study for an ad. So Fletcher and I filled one of Doc Clark's shoes with cooking sherry and, because Inga had taken her personal belongings down to the Ipsey, we found an oil-paint tube of vermillion, and decorated Doc's trousers.
Then we hit the sack--and locked the door with a chair under the knob, in case Doc should break the lock. Well, he didn't, but he sure tried.
* * * *
Over in the other alley, Fred Pohl and Lester del Rey were living in Red Bank, not very far from Highlands. They were always invited to the weekend dinners, and on one of those evenings one of the houses across the Shrewsbury (in Sea Bright) caught on fire and went up in a blaze.
We watched from the Ipsey, with fire department pumpers arriving from here and there to back up the Sea Bright department. Each pumper arrived with a pumper-hose which they tossed into the river as the source of water.
Fred said to me, "George, shouldn't you think that by now, after a couple of thousand years of simply pumping water on a fire, that there ought to be a better way?"
I agree. There ought to be a better way, and if there were, it would have been invented well before now. As I pointed out to a critic who objected to some doodad in one of my stories because "it wouldn't work," that I hadn't been inventing the doodad, for if it would work, I'd hardly be scribbling science fiction about it. Since there hasn't been a better way to control a gone-off fire--oh, yes, those fire foam tankers they use at airports work fine, but the problem isn't just killing a strong local blaze, part of it is soaking down the neighborhood to prevent the blaze from taking off--the best I could do is to write a story about fire-fighting in the future.
Which I sold to Fred Pohl, then editor of
IF and Galaxy magazines. It's called--
Fire, 2016!
I
The scene was eerie, as ugly as fire at night in a dwelling has always been and always will be. The searchlights of the fire department gave no feeling of comfort; rather, they added to the conflict between man and the element of fire. The dancing flames threw their yellow flickerings on the firemen, as they raced back and forth arranging things, making observations, calculating how this fire was to be stopped.
It was not done in silence!
"Get that hose line in there!"
"Get me a three-inch wye!"
"Water ready."
"Pumper running!"
"Steady, now. Steady! Got her set?"
"Right!"
"Okay, give her the works!"
The hose bucked as the high-pressure water hit the nozzle. It roared forth, arched toward the blaze, and crashed through a window. The color of the smoke began to change immediately, as the dancing flames within the house fought their losing battle. No more than minutes later, the stream of water was cut. The firemen went into the house with hand extinguishers to kill the few remaining sparks and to quench smouldering embers. Now all there was left was the dirty clean-up job, and the task of packing the fire equipment and returning to the station.
Fire Chief Mooney looked at the rookie beside him. "Still want to be a fireman?" he asked.
"More than ever," said the rookie, whose name was Bill Lansing.
"Did this one give you enough to write your thesis?" asked the chief, pointing at the ruined home with his thumb.
"I'm not certain. Could be," replied Bill.
"Well, if you've an idea, let me know. If it's good, I can tell you to go ahead. If it isn't, I can save you the trouble of trying something foolish," said Fire Chief Mooney.
"Chief, the process of adding something significant to the field of fire-fighting isn't very easy. On the other hand, it isn't necessary to know the answer before you can point out that a problem does exist, or that there is room for improvement."
"This is true; of course, if you do a thesis on those lines, it will get you your appointment if it's good enough. But it's not the best way, nor the surest way."
"I know. But what can be added to the field of fire fighting in the year of twenty-sixteen?"
"You'll have to add something, or you won't be appointed."
"I know. I didn't mean that nothing could possibly be added, chief. What I meant is that a rookie can't very well increase die scope of knowledge. Not when experienced, dedicated men have been working to advance the science. But I can point out one rather odd area, Chief."
"Go on."
"Chief, do you realize that here in twenty-sixteen, we're still fighting fire in the same way that they did in the day of Julius Caesar? We pour water on it. All that's changed is our more efficient ways of delivering the water."
* * * *
The fire chief smiled. "Not quite. Back in the day of Julius Caesar, they had private fire-fighting concerns, run as a business. If you were a customer of the Mooney Fire Company, and your neighbor's house caught fire, we wouldn't touch it unless he were our customer, too. We'd go out all right, just to keep the fire from spreading to your house, but we'd let your neighbor's house burn to the ground. And if your neighbor's fire company happened to be a bitter rival of ours, we might even start a street fight."
"That's not a matter of fire-fighting," objected Bill. "It's just organization."
"Of course. But I did want you to understand that things are not exactly the same as they were a couple of thousand years ago."
"Other things have changed, too," said the rookie thoughtfully. "They used to race through the streets carrying buckets, because they hadn't invented the pump. The gizmo that Archimedes invented wasn't much of a pump, sir. It was more of a water lifter. I grant that the mobile steam engine, with its pump, was a vast improvement over the hand pump... which was superior to the bucket brigade. Then the gasoline engine replaced the horses, and the high-pressure rotary pump was driven by the same engine when the vehicle got to the scene. But the same argument still stands, Chief. For all of our modern science, we still pour water on the fire."
"I can point out one other item that's changed."
"Yes?"
"The nature of the fireman, Bill."
"Yes?"
"A long time ago; in fact, it was a long, long time ago, your fireman was not of an admirable, civic-minded character. The work was rough, and largely physical, and its nature was such that it attracted the kind of man who did not mind sitting on his duff playing checkers for days on end, waiting for the alarm to ring."
"That must have been a long time ago."
"It was. Then came a breed of a better cut. These men held jobs and public offices, and instead of a man joining the fire department because the job was easy, a man was accepted by his local fire department in about the same way that a candidate was accepted for a lodge or a freshman to a fraternity. This was the beginning. Fire-fighting operations took a sudden upswing; the men took pride in their equipment and in their work. It was an honor, and they accepted it as such. They were not paid.
"But the standard was set, and the results were visible. And so now we have the present system of rewarding deserving citizens by appointing them to the fire department and paying them an honorarium. This makes it possible for a truly talented man to be an artist or a writer, or to study for advanced degrees, or to devote himself to civic betterment."
"This much I know."
"Then you also know that the mere proclamation that you propose to be a deserving citizen isn't going to make you a scholar."
"I do."
"And I'm also afraid that your criticism isn't going to get you very far. I doubt that merely pointing out that we're still dousing a fire with water despite our vaunted science is going to do it, Bill. The criticism may be valid, but in this case, I think someone is going to pose the question, 'If, in two thousand and more years, no one has discovered anything more efficient, isn't it just barely possible that there isn't anything more efficient?"
"Thomas Edison had a slogan," said Bill. "There's a better way to do it--find it!"
"Edison wasn't always right," objected the chief. "And he could have made a vast improvement on his slogan by starting it with the word, 'if.'
IF there's a better way to do it--find it!"
* * * *
II
Bill Lansing's thesis was thorough, but its scientific excellence was marred by a strong taint of emotion. His theme, that the basic improvements in fire fighting were only to deliver a larger volume of water in a shorter time, concluded by suggesting that other substances and processes were ignored simply because water was so cheap and so plentiful that it hardly paid a man to rack his brains to improve upon it. It was, he said, plain laziness.
Fire Commissioner Frank T. Edwards arose at the end of Bill Lansing's treatise and asked, "I presume that you are aware of the fundamental principle of extinguishing a fire, young man?"
"Of course."
"Not 'of course.' You haven't proved that you know it at all."
With a labored, overly patient tone of voice, Bill Lansing replied, "Water is the total product of combustion; it can't be oxidized any further. Technically, it is the ultimate ash. As such, it smothers the blaze by keeping out the oxygen of the atmosphere. Second, the specific heat of water--that is, the number of calories required to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter of water by one degree centigrade--is exceeded only by hydrogen.
The on-pour of water therefore reduces the temperature of the burning stuff until the latter is below the kindling point."
"Then you will grant that insofar as its smothering and cooling properties are concerned, there is nothing better?"
"This I concede," smiled Bill. "Since the substance with the highest specific heat is hydrogen, second-best water indeed becomes first-best."
"Then what is your point?" demanded the commissioner. "If water is the best, what better can you want?"
"My father," said Bill, "was a fire claim adjuster. I learned some things from him--for example, that the damage caused by water generally exceeds the damage caused by the fire, a fact for many hundreds of years."
"Your father was hardly fool enough to suggest that we avoid the water damage by letting the fire run on," snapped Commissioner Edwards. "What's your point? Do you want someone to invent or discover some substance that will do a better job?"
"I am no chemist," said Bill. But I do know that specific heat is not the entire answer to the problem of heat absorption. There's the heat of conversion, for example. When the one degree centigrade variation in the definition of specific heat happens to span the freezing point, the amount of heat required to thaw a gram of ice into a gram of water--or boil water into steam--is considerably higher than the specific heat--maybe a thousand times greater."
"And you propose to use this sort of thing?"
"It's already in use," said Bill. "When the water hits a hot fire, the first cooling is done when the heat boils the water into steam."
"And so we're right back to the same argument. We use water, just as they did in Rome, because it is the best."
Lansing shook his head. "There are many substances with a higher heat of conversion."
"Yes," sneered the commissioner, "and I'll bet that when you look them up, you'll find that they are corrosive as the devil, or that their fine high heat
of conversion takes place either at minus two hundred, or at plus fifteen hundred. But let's abandon that for a moment.
Just why are you so all-fired interested in becoming a fireman?"
"I thought we were here to evaluate my thesis," objected Lansing.
"Young man, you want an appointment to the Academy of Fire Fighters. You've received your proper degrees in the humanities and the sciences, and you've produced a thesis of dubious worth. I--"
"Of dubious worth?" exploded Bill Lansing.
"Yes," said the commissioner calmly. "I'd have said totally worthless if I were as sure of my facts as I am of my opinion. This is just a simple admission that I do not know all there is to know about everything. Therefore it may be possible that your thesis has a trace of merit; now drop it, and let's examine your motives."
"You can't!"
"Yes, I can: I have that prerogative as fire commissioner. I said 'examine,' not
'question.' If your motives are about reproach, a strong mark will be made in your favor."
"All right. Go ahead."
"Isn't it true that all you want is the honor and glory of having been appointed?"
"The honor exists, sure. But there's more. I am ambitious. I believe that I can go far as a member of the Academy of Fire Fighters."
"And, maybe, a little ambitious for Gloria Mooney's favor?"
Lansing tensed, then controlled himself and said easily, "Sir, a rather staggering proportion of all male effort is undertaken to make an impression on a girl."
"All right, I grant your argument. Ambition is by no means wrong."
Commissioner Edwards paused, then said to the assembly, "Gentlemen, I move that we do not accept this thesis, on the grounds that it offers nothing constructive. However, for his honesty in telling of his ambition instead of mouthing some platitude about service and civic consciousness, I move that Bill Lansing be retained as a rookie and that he be urged to attack his appointment thesis from another angle."
* * * *
While fire fighting was still a matter of flooding the blaze with water, as it had been for several thousands of years, the city of twenty-sixteen and its component parts were quite different than the city of nineteen-sixty.
The Worlds of George O Page 26