* * * *
Within minutes, the information was complete and the counter-attack planned with computer accuracy.
"Can we get the Mooneys, Lansing? Haven't you stalled long enough? What'll happen if we open that lower bedroom now?"
"The computer says it is a little early," said Bill Lansing. "And the book says that it's frequently better to let it burn a bit longer and tend to smother itself. We've come a long way from the day when the first act was to chop a hole in the roof to vent the explosive gases.
Now we can afford to wait until they get threatening before starting the inevitable fire-draft up through the house. But my experience," he went on, "isn't extensive enough to furnish a considered opinion, other than to believe that there is a reasonable period during which only a computer could tell the difference. So I'll say go in and get them."
"Thanks," said Commissioner Edwards. "Mooney? We're coming in!"
"I hear you. We're ready."
There was a quick roar of engines as the twin rotors of the flying bridge fired up. The flying bridge, parked in the street and poised for the operation, took no spare time in rising to window height and plunging forward to thrust its covered outrigger through the bedroom window behind which the Mooneys were waiting. Smoke burst forth around the bridge, and a gout of flame followed as the hot volatiles belched forth, rose, and created an out-draft.
The fire fighter in the hot papa suit aboard the flying bridge did not make it all the way to the end of the covered runway. The Mooneys, she first and he second, were already aboard and running toward the body of the vehicle.
"Baby's aboard," yelled hot papa, "and cryin' for cool air!"
The flying bridge backed, turned and dropped to the street. Fire Chief Mooney came out the exit door, steadying his wife by a hand at her elbow.
Commissioner Edwards said, "Want to take over?"
Mooney shook his head. "No. The headache they promised me is here, all right. It's a pip. I couldn't think straight."
"You better get some treatment, Chief."
"After this thing is out. Let Lang go on. He's done a fine job so far."
Walter Lang said, "Thanks, Chief." Then he asked, "Lansing? When is whoosh second?"
Lansing looked at the last tape from the computer. "We've still a large margin of safety before it goes whoosh," said Lansing. "But I don't think we'll gain much by waiting, especially now that the bedroom window is gone. Hit it when you're ready, Lang."
Then, with the precision of computer programming, Pumper One hurled 1,750 liters of water through the smashed bedroom window; Pumper Two delivered. 2,500 liters through a second-floor window; and a hose line rigged to the sawing circle dropped 500 liters through the re-opened hole in the roof.
The smoke billowed briefly through the shattered windows, then made its characteristic change from dirty brown to the steamy white that comes when water fights fire.
There was only one re-burst. Just as the mop-up squad was about to enter with their absorbent machines, a flare was seen in the living room. Pumper Two responded with an additional 500 liters, a quantity determined by human estimate and not by the computer. As a result, the mop-up squad found puddles on the floor when they entered ten minutes later to finish off the job.
* * * *
Voices died around the table as Fire Commissioner Edwards arose; there was one tiny clink as one of the Board of Regents put down his coffee cup. The Regents of the Academy of Fire Fighters were present in their full red-suspendered regalia. But they were all uncomfortably aware of the stranger in their midst.
For he, too, was in full regalia. There was the shiny blue-serge suit and the hard white hat of the fire claim adjuster, and he carried the small, leather-covered attache case which contained the decimal computer used during on-the-spot estimates of fire, smoke, and water damage.
Commissioner Edwards said, "I am in the very uncomfortable position of having to offer an honor upon a man who has already received what he may well believe to be a higher one. In retrospect, I regret that Mr. Lansing did not make a material contribution to the science of fire fighting. He did not invent some new process of extinguishing the blaze or eliminating the smoke, nor did he discover some fabulous new chemical that would kill the fleas without drowning the dog. In fact, Mr. Lansing did not even prove his own contention that fire fighting was unchanged from the day when our remote ancestors discovered that water was the master of fire, provided you poured enough of it on the blaze."
"Indeed, gentlemen, I can only apologize for being impatient. I take the responsibility for having urged the premature action that required a second charge of water, hastily estimated instead of carefully computed, to be hurled into the Mooney dwelling."
"But in the act of acquiescing to our premature pleas, Mr. Bill Lansing, recently appointed Adjuster First Class, and a member of the College of Fire Claim Adjusters, revealed a part of his human nature seldom displayed by other members of his college.
Humanely and humanly, Mr. Lansing understood that our natural enemy is Fire, to be killed
at all cost and at once.
"And to continue this understanding, and to hope that it becomes mutual, I am conferring upon him the highest office that a non-member can hold, the unglorious, undignified, unrewarding post of Associate Member. By appointment."
"And I," added Fire Chief Mooney, "find myself appointing him to the post of son-in-law, first class. By marriage."
To his bride-to-be, Bill Lansing whispered, "I still say there's a better way to do it."
"Than marriage?"
"No. A better way to put out a fire."
"There is," she chuckled. "And I'll show you the way after the ceremony."
* * * *
In the spring of 1957, Emerson took on a new look in radio and electronic manufacturing. My boss had quit. The new management disbanded the components engineering department. I was a department manager without a department to manage, and anyone with sense will conclude that this is a delicate position to be in.
Meanwhile, Fletcher had died, and life at the Ipsey Wipsy had lost its get-up-and-go attitude; Inga did not have the diabolical mind that let Fletcher fill the weekend with guests who had some opinions that made the after-dinner talk stimulating. Those who came were either old friends of all of us who came to visit, or a few who were arguing that Inga should give up the Ipsey and move into New York.
The handwriting on the wall was thin, but beginning to show. The business prospects were bad. So with less to do, since the weekends weren't so busy, and eyeballing the future with a dim view, I began to write.
Of course, knowing that John Campbell was a dog person, and that he enjoyed
"History Repeats," it hit me that the process of communication between a dog and a man requires something that is not quite available. For example, if the fiendish doctor in Edgar Rice Burroughs'
Mastermind of Mars had put a human brain in the dog's skull, the human brain couldn't talk through the dog's noise-making and control system.
So I wrote "Understanding" and sent it off. But--
Let's let it sit for a moment. I'm quite aware that "Understanding" was printed in Galaxy instead of
Analog-Astounding, but that's another story that must be related at the right moment.
Late in 1957, Emerson and I came to the end. Business was bad, and every place was cutting right to the bone. I caught it on the bone when my boss pointed out that every department was ordered to cut the payroll by fifteen percent, and that it took quite a number of stenogs and pencil pushers, file clerks and print room operators to make up the loss of one department manager who had no department to manage. He wasn't going to fire me, but he certainly would look upon my resignation as the easier way out for everyone.
It was in this period, quite early in 1958, that I'd adapted "Meddler's Moon" for radio and I'd sold a novel to Ballantine, which has an oddball background.
Those of you who remember Doc Smith's
Skylark seri
es will recall that Richard
Seaton got involved with a teaching machine, and thereafter solved all of his problems by looking for advanced cultures and teaching himself how to run their machines, invariably to do in one of his cosmic enemies because these advanced cultures he found were placidly unwarlike and would mildly brush away a mosquito instead of smashing it the size of a quarter with the flat of the hand. Among other things that occurred to me was a sort-of internal feeling that popping all over the universe to collect the finest technical information might make a fine series of stories in the style that Campbell used to call "super-colossal!"
but the process, in the real world, might have limitations. Don't ask me my objections; I couldn't argue very hard nor come up with one flat reason.
But more, Seaton's journeys took him everywhere but home, except on the last page of whatever he was up to at the time. So I began to wonder what might happen if this educating machine were to turn up right here on Earth in about the present time. I talked the idea over with John, who shook his head and said that he didn't think the story could be written. I'd had a lot of sideline gimmicks to the story; for example, a revised version of that old story about the air pilot (s?) who used to take the deaf up and dive straight down to do things to the ear--mine was to have the hero-inventor fall flat on his face as a story-problem by attempting to use the educating machine in an attempt to raise the level of a moron to normal.
Then, with Emerson no longer taking my time, I started to really plan the idea. John continued to wave his face from left to right, so I went on ahead and sent about the first third to Ballantine, who said yes. Actually, it was Fred Pohl who said yes; he was either editing or advising their science fiction at the time.
So far, that was fine. But we ran into a snag. It had occurred to me that the electromechanical educator provided a "Rapid" education, and I wrote the story under the title "The Fourth 'R,'" and it was printed that way, and both were mistakes. For, unknown to us or those of us who were interested, there was an after-midnight television show going on by the same name, but the show's "fourth '
R"" meant Religion. It did not sell like hotcakes. It fell like Humpty Dumpty.
I got the final check from Ballantine on Good Friday 1958. Dona and I celebrated rather late, and on Saturday morning, I was a very sick man. Everyone called it a hangover, but as it went on for hours, it made a bit of sense to see a doctor. It turned out to be a coronary. And that's where I was when "Meddler's Moon" went on the air.
To end this, I went through convalescence, eating nitroglycerine pills in a program that started about one per hour at first, and slowly tapered off until late in 1958.
Then in the February of 1959 Robert Ferrar, then the Director of Laboratory Operations for the ITT Complex in Nlutley, New Jersey, and an old-time reader of science fiction, decided that their technical documentation might be less obscure if they had someone there who had experience in both technical engineering and writing.
So if someone really wants to know why I didn't turn up much in the period from 1959
to a fairly recent date, let me point out that eight hours a day removing state-of-the-art cliches and off-the-shelf redundancies created by those who have to utilize something
instead of using it, gets a writer a bit tired of writing. Besides, it is much more fun to get in the boat and take a ride when one has free time.
So as I was saying earlier, in the midst of this, during one of the winter weeks when boating isn't much indicated, it occurred to me that John was a dog lover, and that he had liked "History Repeats," which centers around the intelligent dog, Beauregarde.
It came to mind that if the evil surgeon in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mastermind of
Mars had put a man's brain into the skull of a dog, the man-dog might communicate by pointing his nose or a foot at letters painted on the wall, possibly quite well at such a scheme, but he could not talk. The entire noise-making operation of the dog is wholly un-adapted to forming words. The dog can make understandable sounds, and a few dogs have been taught to make noises that sound like words, but these are simple and can be made without the agile tongue and lips of the speaking human.
So I wrote "Understanding," and sent it off to John. Now, there was a three-way understanding between John, my agent, Mr. Lurton Blassingame, and I that we'd save postage if I sent my stuff right to John, but when there was a reply, yes or no, it went back to my agent.
John did not like the ending. He sent (returned) the story to Mr. Blassingame with a brief note of objection--but he took off on one of his nine-page letters to me. The gist of his letter was that the villains of the piece were clever conspirators, high in the ranks of the Galactic Empire of Xanabar, who would fight to the death to preserve the superiority of the empire over its neighbors. He might like it if I were to finish the piece with the same clever conspiratorial tone and do the evil villains in by cleverness.
Meanwhile, Mr. Blassingame, having a rejected manuscript on his hands, sent it to Galaxy, where Fred Pohl was editor.
Great minds run in the same channel. Fred bought the story, but wrote me that he didn't like the ending, and would I please--
Sure, I would. I re-wrote the ending, but it got lost in the files at Galaxy, and the
story was published with the old ending--
Understanding
I
Scholar's Cluster is a globular aggregation of about a quarter of a million stars, so young a cluster that it has no visible sign of dispersion. Its stars are heavy with the metals created in earlier novae, and the stellar population is high with the middle-sequence suns centering around Types F, G, and K.
More important, Scholar's Cluster got its name from its own mysterious environment.
Studying there will not make a scholar of a dolt, nor a genius of a straight-A student, but studying there will guarantee that each will be educated to his maximum ability to absorb knowledge. Once this end is reached, there is no point in remaining--for exactly the same reason that one stops pouring when the gallon measure has taken on four quarts. Scholar's Cluster was a going operation when Earth attained the stars and took her place among the galactic cultures; and Earth, like the myriad of other galactic cultures, sends her brightest to her educational colony on one of the pleasanter planets that revolves about a G-3 star not much different than Sol.
While this is not an account of Scholar's Cluster, Scholar's Cluster is important to the adventures of young Terence Lincoln, for Scholar's Cluster lies toward the center of the galaxy, a few thousand light-years to the inward side of the sprawling empire of Xanabar.
It is the existence of Scholar's Cluster that placed young Terence Lincoln on the spot in Xanabar. Otherwise, he would hardly have been so far from home....
* * * *
Terry Lincoln skylarked through the streets of Coleban, one of the capital cities of Xanabar, with a babble of his classmates.
They were stopping over in Xanabar on their way home to Mother Earth. They all had fine grades from primary school and were all looking forward to the three-month vacation before returning to enter secondary school: neither success, nor freedom, nor the city of Coleban itself did anything to dampen their exuberance.
Lincoln and his classmates bracketed age fifteen.
So all of them were on the verge of, but none of them had yet crossed, the big line between adolescence and maturity. That is, none of them had gained Understanding.
Without Understanding, the gold and the glitter of Coleban was pure crystal-cut of proof perfect, and the stopover was simply a matter of imperfect spaceline scheduling. With Understanding, they would have labeled Coleban as a tourist trap and realized that the stopover was a condition for interstellar license through Xanabar, so that those who passed through could be parted from a measure of their wealth.
Still, those who disdainfully label Coleban tinsel, and damn the whole of Xanabar are hardly fair.
For the shops of Coleban displayed to their very best the most at
tractive wares of ten thousand worlds. The universal diamond, sapphire, and emerald are commonplace; second-rate to the star-drop of Manark, the frauland of Selira that shines of its own internal light, or the glorious oyster-pearl of Earth, that is said to lose its luster if it does not lie upon the throat of a woman in love. There were fabrics so delicate that they could be worn but once, and others so durable that they would outlast their makers. There were tools to fit the hands of a thousand worlds, knives that could split the hair or cleave plate armor with equal facility; instruments with gleaming dial and engraved calibration.
And there were animated displays.
These caught young Terry Lincoln's eye. He was a gamesman. The displays were programmed by master artisans to show the finer points and the flashy parts, and done with an ease that convinced the onlooker that he, too, could gain such skill with a little practice.
Time and again, Terry found himself rapt as his companions moved onward.
And each time he had to make his way through a bedlam of humanity to regain his companions.
Humanity came in an assortment of sizes, from a small meter and a half to a stalwart two meters plus, and in a bracket of weights to match the skinny and the gross in each height class. Humanity's color varied from peppermint white to deep chocolate, with side flavors of saffron, tints of lemon, and the reds from pale pink to ruddy. There were the usual superficial differences in the makeup of the hands, and some startling facial arrangements, but they were all of Humanity--and they all had two things in common: They were all oxygen-breathing, water-based, hydrocarbon life with red blood and omnivorous appetites--and they all had Understanding, for Understanding is the mature way of life for those whose culture has attained the stars.
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