Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  Harrison nodded. “Had a little trouble with the Music people till I used your priority. They said they’d have Program R-147 piped into the flower room. Frankly, I think R-215 is better.”

  Scholar Ross laughed gently. “Probably happy association.”

  “Wife and I still have it piped in for our anniversary,” Mr. Harrison admitted.

  “Good for you! But R-215 is for normal, happily well-balanced young people who’d probably fall in love without it. R-147 is sure-fire for emotional opposites.”

  “Well, we finally got the program piped in, so what do we do now?”

  Scholar Ross smiled quietly. “We wait. We get acquainted, because there is a very high probability that you two families will be united through the marriage of your children. Then I shall enter a new file in the Genetics Bureau of the Department of Domestic Tranquility. We shall watch through the years as your grandchildren grow, and make periodic checks, and thereby advance mankind’s knowledge of genetics.”

  “Doesn’t this sort of master-minding ever give you a God complex?” asked Mr. Hanford.

  “Not at all. Were I God, I’m sure I could arrange things a lot better.”

  “In what way?”

  “By Man’s own laws, we are prevented from doing active genetic research on the human race. We apply what happens to mice and fruit flies to the human family tree. We’ve known for centuries how to breed blue-eyed or brown-eyed people, or, if we wanted, we could make the race predominantly fat or thin, tall or short. However, our main aim is not the ultimate purity of any physical characteristic. Our goal is to produce a stable, happy people by eliminating the lethargic personality below and the excitable types above.”

  The scholar thought for a moment, and then, remembering Bertram’s error in forgetting to take his go-pills, said, “But we are blocked by law. I can prescribe medication and therapy, but I have no power to force the patient to take the treatment. This is a most difficult problem, believe me.”

  “In what way?” asked Mrs. Harrison with some interest.

  “The lethargic types are very apt to forget, or to dismiss the medication or the therapy as too much trouble. The overactive type is more likely to be water skiing on Lake Superior than sitting and listening to the tranquilizing strains of prescribed music, and the medication dumped down the drain instead of taken.”

  “You do have your problems, don’t you?” said Mrs. Hanford sympathetically.

  “Ah, yes. But our greatest problem is the overactive young female. Young males can be siphoned off in one way or another—work to be done that, unfortunately, females, can’t also do.” Scholar Ross smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. “So we actually are grateful for the lethargic types. They provide us with a fine sobering influence upon the—”

  The scholar was interrupted by a wordless cry from beyond the French windows.

  The Harrisons, the Hanfords, and Scholar Ross leaped to their feet and started for the terrace. They did not get all the way to the French doors, for Gloria Hanford came stamping in. Her eyes were bright, and she was dusting one palm with the other.

  “What—?”

  Gloria snapped, “Someone been feeding that oaf red meat?”

  “But what happened?” asked Mr. Harrison.

  “Oh, I could stand the big dummy acting as if he’d never been alone with a girl before in all his life. But to ask me for a kiss!”

  “Is that what caused the eruption?” said Scholar Ross.

  “When he asked me for a kiss, I told him that I was saving my kisses for a man!”

  “And then?”

  “Then he decided that I meant a man big enough to wrestle.” Gloria laughed and then looked thoughtful.

  “What’s so funny—and not so funny now?”

  “I just realized that I like men!”

  “But Bertram?”

  “Darned if it isn’t the first time I’ve ever resented being pawed,” said Gloria in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it were her hair-do rather than her virtue that was the subject of discussion. “So I grabbed a hand, hung the arm over my shoulder with the inside upward, and hip-tossed the big oaf over the railing into that silly little fish pond.”

  “Gloria!” exploded her mother.

  “Poor Bertram!” exclaimed his mother.

  Scholar Ross sighed. “These things often go awry at first. Bertram shouldn’t have taken a double dose of his medication. And I’d guess that Gloria hasn’t been meticulous about hers, either. Now—”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of Bertram Harrison, who looked as if he’d just waded home across a mud flat at low tide. He stepped toward Gloria purposefully; the girl crouched in a judo position and said, “Want some more? Come and get it!”

  “Now wait a moment,” said Scholar Ross. “Gloria, where did you ever learn such brutal, belligerent tactics?”

  Gloria faced him, but kept one eye on Bertram. “Out of a book—where else in this calm old world?”

  The scholar said, “You see, Miss Hanford, the results of your outrageous behavior? You’ve committed an act of physical violence. You’ve—”

  The girl gave one sharp bark of laughter. “Who started it with whose caveman technique?”

  “I think,” said Scholar Ross to the four parents, “that this meeting should be resumed at a later date. Bertram must not overdose himself in a misguided effort to make up for omitted medication. Gloria must not avoid hers—and, Mrs. Hanford, you’ll not only have to watch closely to see that she does take her pills; you’ll also have to make sure that Gloria doesn’t counteract them by surreptitiously acquiring some agitators to neutralize the tranquilizers.”

  “And suppose I call the whole thing off?” demanded Gloria. “Suppose I don’t agree to share bed and board with this souped-up sardine?”

  The room grew quieter until the background sounds were gone and from the patio came the faint, sweet strains of romantic music: Program R-147.

  Finally Scholar Ross said, “Miss Hanford, we cannot force you to do anything, but we can make your life extremely uncomfortable if you do not comply with what we believe to be best for society. You will find—if you care to look it up—that there is a drastic shortage of eligible young women on the planet Eden, Tau Ceti.”

  “You mean—migrate—to the colony?”

  “I mean just that.”

  Gloria Hanford’s face went white. She understood that if Scholar Ross decreed Eden, Tau Ceti, for her, then she would end up on Eden, Tau Ceti, and it made no difference whether by force, coercion, or gentle persuasion.

  Mrs. Hanford took a step forward and opened her mouth to speak. But before she could protest, her husband put out a hand and stopped her. His act was an admission that not money, position, nor logic would overrule such a decision.

  “Eden, Tau Ceti,” breathed Gloria. She turned and faced Bertram Harrison. “Junior,” she said in a dry, strained voice, “if you’ll wear mittens and handcuffs, let’s go back in the garden and get acquainted.”

  Her father exhaled a full breath.

  Mr. Harrison tapped him on the shoulder. “How about a sample of that bottle of natural bourbon?” he suggested.

  “Not,” Mrs. Hanford said shakily, “without me!”

  IV

  Man’s first sally across the gulf of interstellar space had been more fruitful than his first fumbling exploration of the Solar System by a score of one to nothing. Of all the celestial real estate that orbits around old Sol, only the Earth will support life—at least as we know it. Survival elsewhere depends upon taking enough of Earth environment along to last of the trip. From the scientific standpoint, the first exploration of space was a brilliant operation, but before finding a place to accept the teeming millions of Earth’s exploding population, the patient nearly died. For it was a quarter of a century until Murray, Langdon, and Hanover cracked the Einstein barrier.

  By careful design, and then by counting the last gram and striking a mathematically adjusted balance between power bank and crew spa
ce, the range of a spacecraft was found to be slightly more than seventeen light-years to the point of no return.

  Within seventeen light-years of Sol, there are forty-one other stars.

  Of these forty-one stars, three are triple-sun systems, and twelve are doubles, which eliminates fifteen of them. Of the remaining twenty-six single stars, one is the blinding-blue giant Altair, two are white dwarf stars, and nineteen of them are the faint red dwarf stars of Spectral Class M, and that eliminates all but four of the original forty-one. Of this remaining four, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, and Groombridge 1618 fall into the orange Spectral Class K, which is not too far away from Sol’s Spectral Class G. But K is only close; it is no bull’s eye when the combination of all the factors must add up to produce a planetary environment that will support human life.

  And so, having eliminated forty out of the forty-one stars in Sol’s neighborhood, only Tau Ceti remains. Tau Ceti is also a Spectral Class G star and therefore Tau Ceti was voted the star most likely to succeed, long before Man had the foggiest notion of how to cross the light-years, long before instruments sensitive enough to ascertain that Tau Ceti possessed a planetary system were developed.

  Tau Ceti’s planetary system can be used as an example of the brilliance of logic and reasoning. The second planet in the family of Tau Ceti is the planet Eden.

  Eden supports life.

  Or perhaps it is more proper to say that Eden’s environment permits life to support itself. Voltaire, through the mouths of his characters Candide and Pangloss, had a lot to say about Earth being the best of all possible worlds, both pro and con. He had never been to Eden. Eden was christened by the rules of real estate that dictate that a housing development situated on a tree-bald plain in central Kansas shall be called “Sylvan Heights.”

  V

  Junior Spaceman Howard Reed went through a brief period of excitement and then settled down to boredom. The excitement came from his first experience in space travel, and the thrill of standing on soil almost twelve light-years from home base. This thrill faded as soon as he discovered that the people on Eden, Tau Ceti, were far too busy to be bothered with the reactions of a junior spaceman.

  If his duties had been demanding, Reed might have gone on for some time without becoming bored. But as a junior officer in the Space Service, Reed had no roots, no property, no basic interests on Eden.

  The Space Service had been born out of interservice rivalry during a tense period of international competition. There had been a strong upsurge during the early years of the initial interstellar exploration. The leaders of the Space Service were quite willing to featherbed themselves into permanent positions of high authority. They discovered the best method lay in exploiting every method of scaring the public with the bogey of meeting some warlike culture “Out There.” Then the years passed with neither sight nor evidence of any other form of life but Man and the creatures he carried with him. The Space Service found itself with little to do.

  It did not stop the clamor for money, men and materiel. But the job of the Space Service was not hunting space pirates. The only place where the power banks of a spacecraft could be restored was in the hands of the Space Service itself, and it was an installation vast enough to tax the wealth and ingenuity of a whole continent to create. The job was not fighting interstellar wars with fierce, super-intelligent interstellar aliens with a taste for human flesh—not, at least, until human and alien met.

  So, in a desultory manner, the Space Service maintained a perimeter of lookout and detection stations that could have been completely automated…if it hadn’t been that there were more Space Service Personnel than the Service could find work for.

  The whole situation gave Junior Spaceman Howard Reed a lot of time to think.

  The culture of Eden, Tau Ceti, completed the process.

  Eden used old-fashioned telephones because its people were too widespread across the face of the planet to make the use of the vidphone practical. Radio broadcasting was maintained by the government as a public service information agency. It had to be. There were not commercial enterprises enough to support radio broadcasting on a profit-making basis. For there simply were not enough people. And if simple radio broadcasting could not be supported, there was not yet room for even the old flat-faced television, much less trivideo.

  Theirs was a culture in a mixed state. They had the know-how for a highly technical, closely-integrated urban civilization, but lacked the hardware necessary to construct it. They were an aircar people, but they used horses. Horses can be raised. Aircars have to be fabricated. It would not have been prohibitive to trans-ship the basic tools and dies for aircar assembly from Earth, Sol, to Eden, Tau Ceti. But it would have been economic suicide to attempt to keep the voracious maw of an automated assembly plant satiated with raw material shipped from home base. And then, one week’s run would have saturated the Tau Ceti market. They were a people who played their own musical instruments because they were faced with the very odd economic fact that the first phonograph record from the die costs five thousand dollars. Nobody makes a dime until fifty thousand of its brothers are sold. The population to buy fifty thousand did not exist.

  In simple fact, Eden, Tau Ceti, was far from a flourishing colony. It was a classic example of the simple economic truth that a fully integrated mechanistic society can not be supported by a sparsely populated region.

  * * * *

  Ambition has many origins. The urge to return home became a drive. The result was Junior Spaceman Howard Reed’s complete preoccupation with the mathematics known as Hansen’s Folly.

  As the months went by he exhausted his original knowledge. He took to the library, to the local schools, and to self-study to improve his grasp. He approached the basic mathematics of the space drive from several different angles, even going back to the old original Einstein Equations and learning their fault in the hope that this study might point the way.

  Then, as the months began to grow into the close of his first year, Reed took advantage of the casually informal operation at the Space Service Base. He began to experiment with hardware on the theory that he would have a better grasp of the problem if he tried some empirical work as well as the academic approach.

  Junior Spaceman Howard Reed had been on Eden, Tau Ceti, for eighteen terrestrial months before his superior officer, making a tour of inspection, opened the office reserved for him at the Administration Building. On the eighth day of his visit, Commander Breckenridge summoned the junior spaceman to his office. He asked, “Mr. Reed, have you been successful in solving the flaw in Hansen’s Folly?”

  “Well, sir, not exactly.”

  “Have you improved your grasp of the facts of life?”

  “Sir? I don’t quite understand.”

  “You don’t? Well, perhaps you need some help. For instance, Mr. Reed, can you give me an estimate of the useful land area of Eden, Tau Ceti?”

  “Sir, the total land area is about fifty million square miles. Perhaps about half of that is useful, or could be.”

  “Ah. You said ‘could be’. Why, Mr. Reed?”

  “Let’s put it this way, sir. Whether a given acreage is useful often depends upon how badly it is needed. For instance, a plot of wooded land might well be ignored for centuries by a sparsely populated agrarian culture who had a lot of open plain to cultivate. At a later date, an increasing pressure of population might make it expedient and sensible to clear vast areas of tree stumps, boulders and all sorts of hazards.”

  “And here on Eden?”

  “Well, sir, at the present time the population of Eden is about a hundred thousand. Fertile plains are growing wild with weeds because the land isn’t needed yet. That is—er—”

  “That is what?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘wild with weeds’ sir. After all, they have been encouraged. I’m told that the atmosphere smelled a lot stronger when Man first arrived.”

  The commander sniffed and said, “It’s pretty strong r
ight now.”

  “You don’t notice it after a couple of months,” said Reed.

  “I don’t propose to be here that long,” said the commander curtly. “Let’s get back to your grasp of the overall picture.” Commander Breckenridge leaned back in his chair and said, “No doubt you were exposed to Early North American History. You will recall that there was a strong pioneering drive in the human race that went on almost from the date of the discovery of North America until the opening phases of the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’—that is, beginning of the electro-mechanical era. Am I not correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, young man, what has become of this strong pioneering drive? How did it ooze out of the human race? Where did it go, and why? Why are six billion people living in crowded conditions on Earth, while here upon Eden, Tau Ceti, a mere hundred thousand people occupy—by your estimate—some twenty million square miles? Why haven’t the crowded millions of Earth clamored for all this extra space?”

  “Perhaps because space travel is so expensive.”

  “Only in terms of cash. To be sure, it might take practically everything that a man has to buy passage. I now ask you to estimate how many men and their families sacrificed everything they had, packed a few treasured possessions into a Conestoga wagon and headed for the West.”

  “I have no way of knowing, sir.”

  “No, of course not. Let me tell you what happened. In that glorious phase of Early North America, men, women, and even their children toiled from sunrise to sunset to scratch out their living. From the dawn of history, luxury and leisure belonged to the landed baron. Since wealth went with acreage, any man who could stake out a claim to acreage could also claim wealth. It was a matter of finding the unclaimed acreage first.”

  The commander leaned forward to press his point. “Then came the industrial revolution and the age of automation. Industrial slavery ended in a clank of gears. Your little man no longer starved to death nor toiled twelve hours a day. The finest automobile that the wealthy man could buy was only three or four times as expensive as the car driven by the average workman. Therefore the idea of staking out arable land as a means to wealth became less and less desirable. Automation hit the farm. The landed baron changed into the elected presiding officer over a stock-secured corporation.