Worlds of Maybe

by Robert Silverberg

  “That moon radio is no delusion, I’ll grant you. What it is, I don’t know. But it’s not a Spanish or Portuguese ship. What about its different code? Even if it came from Lisbon, that ship would still have a Rogerian operator. And he would, according to our policy, be of a different nationality from the crew so he might the easier stay out of political embroilments. He wouldn’t break our laws by using a different code in order to communicate with Lisbon. We disciples of Saint Roger do not stoop to petty boundary intrigues. Moreover, that realizer would not be powerful enough to reach Europe, and must, therefore, be directed at us.”

  “How can you be sure?” said de Salcedo. “Distressing though the thought may be to you, a priest could be subverted. Or a layman could learn your secrets and invent a code. I think that a Portuguese ship is sending to another, a ship perhaps not too distant from us.”

  De Torres shivered and crossed himself again. “Perhaps the angels are warning us of approaching death? Perhaps?”

  “Perhaps? Then why don’t they use our code? Angels would know it as well as I. No, there is no perhaps. The order does not permit perhaps. It experiments and finds out; nor does it pass judgment until it knows.”

  “I doubt we’ll ever know,” said de Salcedo gloomily. “Columbus has promised the crew that if we come across no sign of land by evening tomorrow, we shall turn back. Otherwise”—he drew a finger across his throat—“kkk! Another day, and we’ll be pointed east and getting away from that evil and bloody-looking moon and its incomprehensible messages.”

  “It would be a great loss to the order and to the

  Church,” sighed the friar. “But I leave such things in the hands of God and inspect only what He hands me to look at.”

  With which pious statement Friar Sparks lifted the bottle to ascertain the liquid level. Having determined in a scientific manner its existence, he next measured its quantity and tested its quality by putting all of it in that best of all chemistry tubes, his enormous belly.

  Afterward, smacking his lips and ignoring the pained and disappointed looks on the faces of the sailors, he went on to speak enthusiastically of the water screw and the engine which turned it, both of which had been built recently at the St. Jonas College at Genoa. If Isabella’s three ships had been equipped with those, he declared, they would not have to depend upon the wind. However, so far, the fathers had forbidden its extended use because it was feared the engine’s fumes might poison the air and the terrible speeds it made possible might be fatal to the human body. After which he plunged into a tedious description of the life of his patron saint, the inventor of the first cherubim realizer and receiver, Jonas of Carcassonne, who had been martyred when he grabbed a wire he thought was insulated.

  The two sailors found excuses to walk off. The monk was a good fellow, but hagiography bored them. Besides, they wanted to talk of women. . . .

  If Columbus had not succeeded in persuading his crews to sail one more day, events would have been different.

  At dawn the sailors were very much cheered by the sight of several large birds circling their ships. Land could not be far off; perhaps these winged creatures came from the coast of fabled Cipangu itself, the country whose houses were roofed with gold.

  The birds swooped down. Closer, they were enormous and very strange. Their bodies were flattish and almost saucer-shaped and small in proportion to the wings, which had a spread of at least thirty feet. Nor did they have legs. Only a few sailors saw the significance of that fact. These birds dwelt in the air and never rested upon land or sea.

  While they were meditating upon that, they heard a slight sound as of a man clearing his throat. So gentle and far off was the noise that nobody paid any attention to it, for each thought his neighbor had made it.

  A few minutes later, the sound had become louder and deeper, like a lute string being twanged.

  Everybody looked up. Heads were turned west.

  Even yet they did not understand that the noise like a finger plucking a wire came from the line that held the earth together, and that the line was stretched to its utmost, and that the violent finger of the sea was what had plucked the line.

  It was some time before they understood. They had run out of horizon.

  When they saw that, they were too late.

  The dawn had not only come up like thunder, it was thunder. And though the three ships heeled over at once and tried to sail close-hauled on the port tack, the suddenly speeded-up and relentless current made beating hopeless.

  Then it was the Rogerian wished for the Genoese screw and the wood-burning engine that would have made them able to resist the terrible muscles of the charging and bull-like sea. Then it was that some men prayed, some raved, some tried to attack the Admiral, some jumped overboard, and some sank into a stupor.

  Only the fearless Columbus and the courageous Friar Sparks stuck to their duties. All that day the fat monk crouched wedged in his little shanty, dot-dashing to his fellow on the Grand Canary. He ceased only when the moon rose like a huge red bubble from the throat of a dying giant. Then he listened intently all night and worked desperately, scribbling and swearing impiously and checking cipher books.

  When the dawn came up again in a roar and a rush, he ran from the toldilla, a piece of paper clutched in his hand. His eyes were wild, and his lips were moving fast, but nobody could understand that he had cracked the code. They could not hear him shouting, “It is the Portuguese! It is the Portuguese!”

  Their ears were too overwhelmed to hear a mere human voice. The throat clearing and the twanging of a string had been the noises preliminary to the concert itself. Now came the mighty overture; as compelling as the blast of Gabriel's horn was the topple of Oceanus into space.

  Comment on “Sail On! Sail On!”

  Three years before “Sail On! Sail On!” was written, I had a dream. I saw the tiny galleon of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460 a.d.). It was sailing along in a heavy sea and on a dark night. A small building was on the poopdeck; in it sat a very fat monk. He had earphones on and was tapping out a coded message, in Latin, on a spark-gap transmitter.

  That was all. The dream ended. However, I never forgot it. And a year later, the dream came to me again, as many of my best dreams do. Six months afterward, the dream occurred again. For some reason, my unconscious insisted upon thrusting up this strange picture. Perhaps it was a rather bizarre form of warning to me. If so, I never got the message. Instead, I wondered what kind of story I could make out of it.

  Before I even worked the story out, I had exchanged Columbus for Prince Henry. As a child, I had always been fascinated by the idea of Columbus falling off the edge of the world. Even when I was told that the Earth was round, I did not quite believe it. I did not want to believe it. A square flat world seemed to me to be more romantic and satisfying than an orange-shaped planet. What a great sensation it would be to sit on the edge and dangle your feet over the abyss of space and the stars! What a deliciously terrifying feeling to climb down the cliff-like sides of Earth to the very bottom, clinging to the roots of trees and projecting rocks and wondering if you would fall off and hurtle forever through the nothingness!

  So I sat down (more than once) and wrote the story. It took place in a parallel universe and on an Earth with a more rapid advance of science than in the days of the Columbus of our world. At the time I wrote “Sail On! Sail On!” I had not completely worked out the universe in which it took place. All I considered were a few premises. The Earth was flat, was fixed in the center of the cosmos, other celestial objects revolved around Earth, a 50-pound cannonball fell faster than a 10-pound cannonball.

  Also, Roger Bacon, instead of being persecuted by the Church, had founded an order of truly experimental scientists. This order had tried to keep science as an ecclesiastical province.

  One other premise that I have now added is the simultaneous creation of the universe and of living beings. In other words, a creation which follows, more or less, the biblical acco
unt.

  In Columbus’ time, very few educated people believed the Earth to be flat. There were many different theories: the Earth was a sphere, was flat, was a cylinder, was a tabernacle in shape, and so on. The Church maintained that the universe was geocentric. It does not matter how many theories or near dogmas there were or how much they conflicted. I based the story on some of the then current theories, the simple premises stated above. These are not wholly Ptolemaic, Lactantian, or entirely derived from any of the ancient or medieval cosmologists. The premises are easily expressed in the very short “Sail On! Sail On!”

  At a later time, I expanded my own cosmology and at once ran into trouble. Eventually, I seemed to have solved all the problems. I forgot them until an editor asked me if I would write a sequel to the short story, preferably a short novel. As of now, I have not written the novel. However, another editor asked me for a favorite short story of mine and an essay about it. Then I did some more thinking.

  Remember that, in building this universe, I am trying to be logical and also trying to make the flat Earth resemble our round planet as much as possible in all its features, that is, human beings, climate, geography, etc. Unfortunately, all these have to deviate somewhat if logical extrapolation is to be strictly followed.

  One of the first things to consider is space itself. Is the tiny cosmos filled with air, as so many at that time believed? If so, how are the crushing effects of the immense amount of air avoided? Obviously, physical “laws” are different in my story. Could the ubiquitous atmosphere have properties which make it weightless? No. If air has no weight, there are no winds. If there are no winds, there are no sailships or windmills. Worse, the clouds would not be carried over the Earth to distribute their burden of rain or cooling moisture.

  Another thing to consider is the Sun. What keeps it from burning up the air which fills the universe? Would not, however, this combustion create a wind in space with the air continually moving in to fill the vacuum made by the consumed air? It might, but the wind would not be the kind we know on our Earth.

  As for the Sun itself, it cannot be the titanic fusion furnace that burns in our skies. It has to be a small low-grade nuclear reactor far enough from Earth so that the deadly radioactivity is absorbed by the spatial atmosphere (if it exists) or dissipated in space.

  This furnace would, however, in a relatively short time use up all the air in the Lilliputian world. So I apply the Hoyle-Gold speculation of the continuous creation of matter in space. I do not have to explain how this matter is spontaneously generated any more than the two astronomers do. If matter (hydrogen atoms, the building blocks of our universe) can come from a seeming nothing in the space of our world, why not oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements in this parallel world?

  I am still left with the problem of how to get the air to behave on the surface of the flat Earth as it does on our pear shape. Maybe oxygen, nitrogen, etc., have an exceedingly slight weight with the Earth piling up a denser atmosphere around it and the atmosphere thinner in interplanetary space? But if these elements are lighter than in our world, then the other elements should also be lighter. The table of chemical elements would be a different one than in that second world. The Columbus of it would not weigh as much as our Columbus. However, the objects and creatures of that second world are in an enclosed cosmos and are only weighted against each other, not against us.

  As you can see, I am getting into more and more trouble as I extrapolate. It is not easy to make your own universe, not if you insist on sticking to your own rules, and I do. If I cannot adhere to the rules, I hurl the aborted universe out the front door with utter ruin and furious imprecation and try to forget about it.

  So, air does have weight and concentrates around the Earth, Moon, Mars and other heavenly bodies. And it has the same weight and other properties of our air. I have to make it so because, if air were in interplanetary space, the friction would slow down the bodies revolving around the Earth. I hate to do this, since I had envisioned Columbus and his crew getting to the Moon through the cosmic atmosphere. But this idea just will not work.

  The flat Earth has much less mass than ours, about one sixteenth. The lesser mass is caused by the very flatness of Earth. The molten iron core is missing. This also means that the coreless nonrotating Earth has no magnetic field.

  The Moon, which is reduced in mass by one sixteenth and is flat, is tilted with one side always presented to Earth. That was my first thought, later abandoned. Why cannot the bodies orbiting about Earth be spheres? They can be. But then this means that the Earth and Moon are similar in mass, and I don’t want this. So I give Earth back its lost mass by adding to the level substructure of the planet.

  The Sun remains a small body. But if it orbits around the Earth and outside the Moon, it must have a very high velocity to make the circuit in time to give Earth the night and day we know. If it goes outside all the planets, it has to travel very swiftly indeed. The only way out is to have the Sun circle between the Moon and Mars, which makes a very peculiar setup. It takes us one more step away from the Earth that we know. I am having as much trouble explaining my universe as Ptolemy had with his cycles, epicycles, and deferents.

  Another thing that has to be readjusted is the mass of the other planets. Earth just does not have enough to hold the mighty giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in orbits around it. Even though Earth is fixed in the center of the universe, it would undergo a disrupting strain from the attraction of the giants. I can postulate some force (unknown in our universe) that keeps Earth pinned to the center, but I cannot overlook the pull of the other planets. So, the giants must become midgets, and if they are to keep the same apparent size as they have in our world, they must be brought much closer to Earth.

  Whew! I feel the strain of re-creation, which is beginning to require so much mental labor that ifs no longer a recreation. Challenging, yes, but exasperating because, as soon as 1 think of one facet of this little cosmos, something else contradicts it, and 1 have to go back to the beginning and do a rebalancing of forces and positions.

  This rearrangement affects all sorts of natural phenomena and human factors. Both astronomy and astrology would differ considerably in the second world. Then there are the tides, the seasons, equinoxes, solstices and a hundred other things to consider. Either the sun has to have an eccentric and variable orbit or the Earth is not rigidly fixed but has a wobble or libration, or both occur.

  Note also that various solar phenomena such as sunspots, flares, cosmic rays, etc., would be absent, unproduced by the low-grade nuclear furnace. Also absent would be ultraviolet radiation; in fact, the spectrum of the sun as we know it just would not exist. Thus, the lack of sun-sponsored radiations and cosmic rays, etc., could mean that mutations would be much less frequent on the flat Earth. A slower evolution of life would result.

  This does not bother me, since I am assuming that the biblical story of creation is true in the parallel universe. Do not tell me that this is fantasy, non scientific, and so not science fiction. If you will exert yourself enough to discard your prejudices for just a few minutes, you will see that split-second creation is just as possible (or scientific) as a billion-year evolution of physical matter and of life.

  I do not believe that our universe and the beings of our Earth originated as described in Genesis. 1 cannot believe because the weight (overwhelming) of evidence indicates that the Genesis story is only one of many ancient creation myths. Even that contains two somewhat dissimilar tales. However, I can believe that our universe could have originated in one day or a microsecond if the Creator had so desired. Why not!

  Furthermore, I am not convinced that our interpretation of evidence for evolution is the correct one or the only one. I would not be surprised if, some day, the theory of evolution as we know it is not topsy-turvied by some genius. Then we will wonder how ive all could have been so blind when we had all the testimony to the truth right before our eyes. I say this because, during my forty-eight and a half ye
ars on this Earth, I have seen too many “facts” of science refuted, not once but many times. The final word is far from being in.

  The adoption of the Genesis story of creation might seem to simplify matters. Actually, it complicates. If you assume (as most Orthodox Jews and Mohammedans and fundamentalist Christians do) that Adam and Eve were white and probably Semitic-speakers, then you have the problem of other races and other languages. If the universe is only six thousand years old (or even a hundred thousand), there just is not enough time for the formation of Negroes, Mongolians and Amerinds from the basic white couple. And the story of Noah and the Flood has to be a myth, even in the second world. Again, there is not nearly enough time for races and languages to develop from the little, white, and (presumably) Semitic-speaking family of Noah. Nor is there enough time to account for the distribution of animals in the continents, especially Australia.

  Many things have to be altered to present a consistent and logical universe. If the Earth is flat, it cannot be entirely so. It may be level on the sides and bottom, but the top, containing the continents and oceans, has to have some curvature. Otherwise, how will the rivers flow from source to mouth? And if the Sun strikes all areas of Earth with a nearly equal intensity, humanity will be nearly uniform in color. It’s no coincidence that the dark races and stocks are in the tropical or near-tropical regions. (Exceptions can be accounted for by migration.)

  I can postulate a simultaneous creation of all the races, have a white Adam and Eve, a black, a Mongolian, an Australoid, a pygmy Adam and Eve. But this does not help me in making sure that the Earth has different temperature zones.

  Thus, Earth, seen sidewise from space, looks like the profile of a lens or a flattened-out dome. The continents (the Americas missing, of course) are spread out over this dome. The waters of Oceanus, the great body surrounding Eurasia, Africa and Australia, are carried over the edge of Earth by their impetus and by lack of natural barriers. The oceanic waters roar out over the edge in a cataract, curve out, then fall back onto the sides of the understructure of the planet. They then proceed to spread out on the underside. Some peculiar effects would result from the Moons drag on the top, bottom and sides of this body of water.