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Clifford D. Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin on August 3, 1904, son of John Lewis and Margaret (nee Wiseman) Simak.
Simak attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then taught in the public schools until 1929. He married Agnes Kuchenberg on April 13, 1929, and they had two children, Richard Scott and Shelley Ellen.
Soon after his marriage, Simak worked at various newspapers in the Midwest. He began a lifelong association with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune (in Minneapolis, Minnesota) in 1939, which continued until his retirement in 1976. He became Minneapolis Star’s news editor in 1949 and coordinator of Minneapolis Tribune’s Science Reading Series in 1961.
Simak became interested in science fiction after reading the works of H.G. Wells as a child. His first contribution to the literature was “The World of the Red Sun”, published by Hugo Gernsback in the December 1931 issue of Wonder Stories with one opening illustration by Frank R. Paul. Within a year he placed three more stories in Gernsback’s pulp magazines and one in Astounding Stories, then edited by Harry Bates. Mostly because of “creative differences” between Bates and himself, Simak only published one story between 1932 to 1938.
Once John W. Campbell, at the helm of Astounding from October 1937, began redefining the field, Simak returned and was a regular contributor to Astounding Science Fiction (as it was renamed in 1938) throughout the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1938–1950).
At first, as in the 1939 serial novel Cosmic Engineers, Clifford D. Simak wrote in the tradition of the earlier “super science” subgenre that E.E. “Doc” Smith perfected, but he soon developed his own style, which is usually described as gentle and pastoral. During this period, Simak also published a number of war and western stories in a variety of non-SF pulp magazines. His best-known book may be City, a “fix-up” novel based on short stories with a common theme of mankind’s eventual exodus from Earth.
Clifford D. Simak continued to produce award-nominated novels throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Aided by a friend, he continued writing and publishing science fiction and, later, fantasy, into his 80s. He believed that science fiction not rooted in scientific fact was responsible for the failure of the genre to be taken seriously, and stated his aim was to make the genre a part of what he called “realistic fiction.”
In a blurb in Time and Again he wrote, “I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty three years and have two children. My favorite recreation is fishing (the lazy way, lying in a boat and letting them come to me). Hobbies: Chess, stamp collecting, growing roses.” He dedicated the book to his wife Kay, “without whom I’d never have written a line”.
Simak was well liked by many of his science fiction-writing friends, especially Isaac Asimov.
Clifford D. Simak died in Minneapolis on April 25, 1988.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cosmic Engineers, Astounding Science-Fiction, February-April 1939
Time Quarry, Galaxy Science Fiction, October-December 1950
Ring Around the Sun, Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952-February 1953
The Fisherman, Analog Science Fact->Fiction, April-July 1961
Here Gather the Stars, Galaxy Science Fiction, June-August 1963
Goblin Reservation, Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1968-June 1968
Cemetery World, Analog, November 1972-January 1973
Our Children’s Children, Worlds of If, May/June 1973-July/August 1973
The Visitors, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October-December 1979
COSMIC ENGINEERS
Beginning a three-part serial of mighty science facing the vastest forces of space end time—out at the end of space itself!
HERB HARPER snapped on the radio and a voice snarled, billions of miles away: “Police ship 968. Keep watch for freighter Vulcan on the Earth-Venus run. Search ship for drugs. Believed to be—”
Herb spun the dial. A lazy voice floated through the ship: “Pleasure yacht, Helen, three hours out of Sandebar. Have you any messages for us?”
He spun the dial again. The voice of Tini Donovan, radio’s ace newscaster, rasped: “Tommy Evans will have to wait a few more days before attempting his flight to Alpha Centauri. The Solar Commerce Commission claims to have found some faults in the construction of his new generators, but Tommy still insists those generators will shoot him along at a speed well over that of light. Nevertheless, he’s been ordered to bring his ship back to Mars so that technicians may check it before he finally takes off. Tommy is out on Pluto now, all poised for launching off into space beyond the Solar System. At last reports, he had made no move to obey the order of the commission. Tommy’s backers, angered by the order, called it high-handed, charge there are politics back of it—”
Herb shut off the radio and walked to the door separating the living quarters of the Space Pup from the control room.
“Hear that, Gary?” he asked. “Maybe we’ll get to see this guy, Evans, after all.”
Gary Nelson, puffing at his foul, black pipe, scowled savagely at Herb. “Who wants to see that damn glory grabber?” he snorted.
“What’s biting you now?” asked Herb.
“Nothing,” said Gary, “except Tommy Evans. Ever since we left Saturn we haven’t heard a thing but Tommy Evans out of Donovan.”
Herb stared at his tall, lanky partner.
“You sure got a bad dose of space poison,” he declared. “You been like a dog with a sore head the last few days.”
“Who in hell wouldn’t get space poison?” snarled Gary. He gestured out through the vision-plate. “Nothing but space,” he said. “Blackness with little stars. Stars that have forgotten how to twinkle. Going hundreds of miles a second and you wonder if you’re moving. No change in scenery. A few square feet of space to live in. Black space pressing all around you, leering at you, making foul gestures at you—”
He stopped and sat down limply in the pilot’s chair.
“How about a game of chess?” asked Herb.
Gary twisted about and snapped at him:
“Don’t mention chess to me again, you sawed-off shrimp. I’ll space-walk you if you do. So help me Hannah if I don’t.”
“Thought maybe it would quiet you down,” said Herb.
Gary leveled his pipestem at Herb.
“Listen,” he said, “if I had the guy that invented three-dimensional chess, I’d wring his blasted neck. The old kind was bad enough, but three-dimensional, ten-man—”
He shook his head dismally.
“He must have been half nuts,” he said.
“He did go off his head,” said Herb, “but not from inventing three-way chess. Guy by the name of Konrad Fairbanks. In an asylum back on Earth. I took a picture of him once, when he was coming out of the courtroom. Just after the judge said he was only half there. The cops chased hell out of me but I got away. The Old Man paid me ten bucks bonus for the shot.”
Gary mused.
“I remember that,” he said. “Best mathematical mind in the whole system. Worked out equations no one could understand. Went screwy when he found that there were times when one and one didn’t quite make two.”
Herb walked across the room, stood beside Gary.
“Everything been going all right?” he asked.
Gary growled deep in his throat.
“Sure,” he said. “What in hell could go wrong out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit and watch. And there isn’t much need of that. The robot navigator handles everything.”
THE SOFT PUR of the geos
ectors filled the ship. There was no other sound. The ship seemed standing still in space. Saturn swung far down to the right, a golden disk of light with thin, bright rings. Pluto was a tiny speck of light almost dead ahead, a little to the left. The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their vision.
The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a second. The geosectors, warping the curvature of space itself, hurled the tiny ship through the void at a speed unthought of less than a hundred years before.
And now Tommy Evans, out on Pluto, was ready, if only the Solar Commerce Commission would stop its interference, to bullet his experimental craft away from the Solar System, out toward the nearest star, 4.29 light-years distant. Providing his improved electro-gravitic geodesic deflectors lived up to the boast of their inventors, he would exceed the speed of light, would vanish into that limbo of impossibility that learned savants only a few centuries before had declared was unattainable.
“It kind of makes a fellow dizzy,” said Herb.
“What does?” asked Gary.
“Why,” said Herb, “this Tommy Evans stunt. The boy is making history. And maybe we’ll be there to see him do it. He’s the first to make a try at the stars—and if he wins, there will be lots of others. Men will go out and out . . . and still farther out, maybe clear out to where space is still exploding.”
Gary grunted. “They sure will have to hurry,” he observed, “because space is exploding fast.”
“Now look here,” said Herb. “You can’t sit there and pretend the human race has made no progress. Take this ship, just for example. We don’t rely on rockets any more except in taking off and landing. Once out in space and what do we do? We set the geosectors to going, and we warp space and build up speed that no rocket could ever hope to give you. We got an atmosphere generator that manufactures air. No more stocking up on oxygen and depending on air purifiers. Same thing with food. The machine just picks up matter and energy out of space and transmutes them into steaks and potatoes—or at least their equivalent in food value. And we send news stories and pictures across billions of miles of space. You just sit down in front of that space-teletypewriter and whang away at the keys, and in a few hours another machine back in New York writes what you have written.”
Gary yawned. “Aw, hell,” he said, “we haven’t started yet. What we have done isn’t anything to what the human race is going to do. That is, if it don’t get so downright ornery it kills itself off first.”
The teletypewriter in the corner of the room stuttered and gibbered, warming up under the impulse of the warning signals, flung out, hours before, three billion miles away.
The two men hurried across the room and hung over it.
Slowly, laboriously the keys began to tap.
NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. HAVE INFORMATION EVANS MAY TAKE OFF FOR CENTAURI WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION OF SCC. MAKE ALL POSSIBLE SPEED TO PLUTO. INTERVIEW EVANS IF HE IS THERE, IF HE HAS GONE FLASH US STORY SOON AS POSSIBLE. FOLLOW WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. MOST IMPORTANT. RUSH. REGARDS.
EVENING ROCKET.
Gary looked at Herb across the machine.
“Maybe that guy Evans has got some guts after all,” he said. “Maybe he will tell the SCC where to go. They’ve been asking for it for a long time. Telling everyone where they can go and where they can’t go.”
Herb grunted. “They won’t chase after him, that’s sure.”
HE SAT DOWN before the sending board and threw the switch. The hum of the electric generators drowned out the geosectors as they built up the power necessary to hurl a beam of energy across the void to Earth.
“Only one thing wrong with this setup,” said Gary. “It takes too much power and it takes too long. I wish someone would hurry up and figure out a way to use the cosmic rays for carriers.”
“Doc Kingsley, out on Pluto, has been fooling around with the cosmics,” said Herb. “Maybe he’ll turn the trick in the next year or two.”
“Doc Kingsley has been fooling around with a lot of things out there,” declared Gary. “If he’ll talk, we’ll have more than one story to send back from Pluto.”
The dynamos had settled into a steady drone of power. Gary glanced at a dial and reached out nimble fingers to the keyboard.
NELSON ANSWERING DAILY ROCKET. WILL CONTACT EVANS AT ONCE IF THERE. IF NOT WILL SEND STORY ABOUT FLIGHT. NOTHING TO REPORT OUT HERE. WEATHER FINE. HERB BROKE OUR LAST QUART OF SCOTCH. ASK OLD MAN HOW ABOUT RAISING OUR SALARY.
He grinned at Herb. “How’s that?” he asked.
“You didn’t have to put that in about the Scotch,” declared Herb. “It just slipped out of my fingers.”
“Sure,” said Gary. “It just slipped out of your fingers. Right smack-dab onto a steel plate and broke all to hell. After this I handle our liquor. When you want a drink, you ask me.”
“Maybe Kingsley will have some liquor,” said Herb hopefully. “Maybe he’ll lend us a bottle.”
“If he does,” declared Gary, “you keep your paws off of it. Between you sucking away at it and dropping it, I don’t get more than a drink or two out of each bottle. We still got Uranus and Neptune to do after Pluto and it looks like a long dry spell ahead.”
He got up from the teletype and walked to the fore part of the ship, staring out through the vision-plate.
“Only Neptune and Uranus left,” he said. “And that’s enough. If the Old Man ever thinks up any more screwy stunts, he can find somebody else to do them. When I get back I’m going to ask him to give me back my old beat at the space terminal and I’m going to stay there the rest of my days. I’m going to watch ships take off and come in and I’m going to be thankful every time that I’m not on them.”
“He’s paying us good dough,” said Herb. “We got bank accounts piling up back home.”
Gary pretended not to hear him.
“ ‘Know Your Solar System,’ ” he said. “ ‘Special articles run every Sunday in the Evening Rocket. Story by Gary Nelson. Pictures by Herbert Harper. Intrepid newspapermen brave perils of space to bring back true picture of the Solar System’s planets. One year alone in a spaceship, bringing to the readers of the Evening Rocket a detailed account of life in space, of life on the planets.’ ”
He spat.
“Stuff for kids,” he said.
“The kids probably think we’re heroes,” said Herb. “Probably they read your stories and look at my pictures and then pester their folks to buy them a spaceship. Want to go out and see Saturn.”
“The Old Man said it would boost circulation,” declared Gary. “Hell, he’d commit suicide if he thought it would boost circulation. Remember what he told us. Says he: ‘Go out and visit all the planets. Get firsthand information and pictures. Shoot them back by radio-teletype and space-photo. We’ll run them every Sunday in the magazine section.’ Just like he was sending us around the corner to cover a fire. That’s all there was to it. Just a little over a year out in space. Living in a spaceship and a spacesuit. Hurry through Jupiter’s moons to get out to Saturn and then take it on the lam for Pluto. Soft job. Nice, soft, easy job.”
His pipe gurgled threateningly and he knocked it out viciously against the palm of his hand.
“Well,” said Herb, “we’re almost to Pluto. A few days more and we’ll be there. They got a fueling station and a radio station and Doc Kingsley’s laboratories out there. Maybe we can promote us a poker game and relax a bit.”
Gary walked over to the telescopic screen and switched it on.
“Let’s take a look at her,” he said.
THE GREAT circular screen glowed softly. Within it swam the image of Pluto, still almost half a billion miles away. A dead planet that shone dully in the faint light of the far-distant Sun. A planet locked in the frigid grip of naked space, a planet that had been dead long before the first stirring of life had taken place on Earth.
The vision was blurred and Gary manipulated dials on a small panel to bring it more sharply into focus.
<
br /> “Wait a second,” snapped Herb. His fingers reached out and grasped Gary’s wrist.
“Turn it back a ways,” he said. “I saw something out there. Something that looked like a ship. Maybe it’s Evans coming back.”
Slowly Gary twisted the dial back. A tiny spot of light danced indistinctly on the screen.
“That’s it,” breathed Herb. “Easy now. Just a little more.”
The spot of light leaped into sharper focus. But it was merely a spot of light, nothing more, a tiny, shining thing in space. Some metallic body that was catching and reflecting the light of the Sun.
“Give it more power,” said Gary.
Swiftly the spot of light grew, assumed definite shape. Gary stepped the magnification up until the thing filled the entire screen.
It was a ship—and yet it couldn’t be a ship.
“It has no rocket tubes,” said Herb in amazement. “Without tubes how could it get off the ground? You can’t use geosectors in taking off. They twist space all to hell and they’d turn a planet inside out.”
Gary studied it. “It doesn’t seem to be moving,” he said. “Maybe some motion, but not enough to detect.”
He hummed softly under his breath. “Funny as hell,” he said.
“A derelict,” suggested Herb.
Gary shook his head. “Still doesn’t explain the lack of tubes,” he declared.
The reporter and photographer lifted their eyes from the screen, stared at one another.
“The Old Man said we were to hurry to Pluto and catch Evans,” Herb reminded Gary.
Gary looked at the screen again. “To hell with the Old Man,” he exploded.
He wheeled about and strode back to the controls. He lowered his gangling frame into the pilot’s chair and disconnected the robot control. His fingers reached out, switched off the geosectors, pumped fuel into the rocket chambers.
He glanced over his shoulder.
“Find something to hang onto,” he warned. “We’re going to stop and see what this is all about.”
The Complete Serials Page 1