Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  Major Kurt Dixon, one-time sergeant in the 427th Light Maintenance Battalion of the Imperial Space Marines, grinned happily as he looked out at the spreading cloud of space debris that was all that was left of the Kierian mother ship. Then he punched the stud that sent a communication beam hurtling through hyperspace to Imperial Headquarters. “Commander Krogson, please. Dixon calling.”

  “One second, Major.”

  The Inspector General’s granite features appeared on Kurt’s communication screen. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Clobbering Kierians,” Kurt said smugly, “but before we get into that, I’d like to have you relay a few impolite words to the egghead who put together the talking machine I have for a control computer.”

  “Oh, sorry about that, Kurt. You see, it was designed with Osaki in mind, and he does have a rather odd taste in women. When you get back, we’ll remove the old personality implant and substitute one that’s tailored to your specifications.”

  Kurt shook his head. “No, thanks. The old girl and I have been through some rather tight spots together, and even though she is a pain in the neck at times, I’d sort of like to keep her around just as she is.” He reached over and gave an affectionate pat to the squat computer that was bolted to the deck beside him.

  “That’s nice,” Krogson said, “but what’s going on out there? What was that about clobbering Kierians?”

  “They’re finished. Kaput. Thanks to Zelda.”

  “Who?”

  “My computer.”

  “What happened?”

  Kurt gave a lazy grin. “Well, to begin with, I got laid.”

  PROBABILITY ZERO!: THE POPULATION IMPLOSION

  JUST AS more radioactivity is released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels than by a properly designed nuclear power plant (all coal containing substances other than hydrocarbons, some of which are radioactive), so also is the present world population a mere drop in the bucket compared with what it was only one thousand years ago. In fact, the population of our planet has been shrinking geometrically since the time of Christ. It is true that local urban clusters such as New York, Los Angeles and Chinchilla, Pennsylvania, have been expanding rapidly during the last few decades, but if one considers the entire land mass, a quick examination of available genealogical statistics will show that the average population per square mile is steadily and rapidly decreasing.

  The key to the proof of this is the geometrical expansion in the number of ancestors one has as one moves back generation by generation. Assuming no inbreeding, your four grandparents had eight parents, who in turn had sixteen, etc. For purposes of demonstration, assume that each generation produces a new one in twenty-five years. Using 1950 as a convenient starting point, 1850 would see a generation of 16 ancestors; 1750: 256; 1650: 4,096; 1550: 65,536; 1450: 1,048,576; 1350: 16,777,136; 1250: 268,434,176; 1150: 4,294,946,816; 1050: 68,719,149,056; and A.D. 1000: 274,876,596,224.

  Now two hundred and seventy-four billion-plus great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greatgreat-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents is a sizable number to have, especially if, as in my case, they were all Anglo-Saxon, miscegenation with Normans and other breeds without the law who slipped over from the Continent during the temporary alien quota relaxation of 1066 always having been frowned on by my progenitors.

  I assume that the 50,874-square-mile land area of England proper hasn’t changed substantially since the year 1000, so simple division will establish that there were 4,872,913 of my people jammed into every square mile of that little country. This works out to an average of a little less than six square feet per person, or a six-by-six-foot lot for each family of six, with no provision for throughways, supermarkets, jails, churches and other amenities of gracious living. Certainly the population problem then, especially the disposal of sewage, makes that of today shrink to nothingness in comparison. There were certain compensations, however.

  Nobody ever got lonely. With an average of 7,642 persons per acre, computer dating and singles bars were unnecessary.

  Where the other gentry lived, let alone the lower classes and the Scottish, Welsh and Irish servants, I haven’t the slightest idea. But with my kin alone, the population density per square mile of all of England was some sixty-six times that of Manhattan today. The only obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this is that there has been a fantastic population implosion during the last thousand years.

  Take England alone. If you divide her present population of some forty-four million by the almost 275 billion living there in the year 1000, you’ll note that today she has only about 1.6 ten-thousandths of the population she had ten centuries ago, a shrinkage of 6,250 percent. If we assume that some of the original population and I are not related, the latter figure is greatly inflated and the shrinkage becomes even more astronomical.

  Since English and American birth rates are roughly the same, we can take the English historical experience as an approximate analog of what is happening in America. So the next time you hear a prophet of doom moaning about the horrible future that awaits us if something isn’t done to defuse the population bomb, laugh in his face. Statistics show that you have nothing to worry about.

  1975

  PLAYERS AT NULL-G

  In which three of sf’s most distinguished practitioners consider one of the field’s favorite devices and come up with a crisp and entertaining new wrinkle.

  The wreckage was unbelievable. A diminishing sound like the last moan of a dying banshee still vibrated in the air and made Nathaniel Wollard’s teeth ache. He gingerly shook off several bricks, the plastic cover of a control cabinet, some shards of glass, a sprinkling of plastic dial covers, a section of a computer memory core, and several small branches of a pin oak. Then he sat up.

  Wollard’s glasses had snapped at the bridge, and the two lenses dangled by their earpieces. He held them together over his eyes and looked around in disbelief. Every building had been leveled. There wasn’t even a grain of dust on the service apron of what had been the only usable hangar remaining on the old airstrip McNeil Aerospace had occupied. The hangar had been torn to pieces. Its parts, and those of the once tumble-down structures around it, were still thudding down around him. He hunched his shoulders and clasped his hands over his head, and his glasses fell apart again. His farsightedness showed him banners of roofing felt and whirligigs of siding departing northeastward over the whipping tops of the low trees.

  Nathaniel Wollard sat there, winner of the Enrico Fermi Award, the U. S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal, the Morris N. Liebman Award, the Benjamin Apthorp Gould Award, the Irving Langmuir Prize, and the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal—he sat there and wondered what had happened. Then he remembered the others.

  He jumped to his feet and began scanning the nearby rubble. “Joe,” he called. “Frank, where are you?”

  Within twenty feet of him, in what remained of the control center they’d established in a corner of the hangar, two piles of rubble stirred and shifted. Wollard jumped to the nearer one and swept away a piece of Celotex ceiling, some fragments of a folding chair, a clipboard whose jaws gripped only a torn end of what had been a yellow pad, a Styrofoam coffee cup with a paper clip embedded in its surface, some shards of glass, and a thick layer of dust. He hauled Joseph Barnett to his feet. Barnett, winner of the Rutherford Medal, the Guthrie Medal and Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Exceptional Civilian Service Award, the Trent-Crede Medal, the David Sarnoff Award, and the Bertram Eugene Warren Diffraction Physics Award, said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wollard. “We had the car a few feet off the ground, so the gravity shield was working perfectly. Then. . . .”

  “Right,” Barnett said. “We’d been drawing power for about thirty seconds, and I didn’t even get a chance to shut it off. Everything built up so fast and just
. . . exploded. What was that godawful noise?”

  “And that wind?” Wollard stared over at the takeoff pad that made up the gravity shield. The old Buick was still there, but it looked like a squashed grapefruit. He groaned. “We should have thought this out more. We know better than to dive into an experiment just because somebody else might beat us to it. I told Frank that. . . .” Suddenly aware that there were only two of them, he began to look around wildly. “Frank.”

  The other pile of debris shifted again. A splintered sheet of plywood fell aside and a grimy figure struggled to its feet, dislodging a section of snow fence, a circuit board, an Ozalid print, a transformer cover, some shards of glass, and an old tennis sneaker.

  Wollard and Barnett finished pulling McNeil erect. His jacket and shirt were gone, and his knitted tie hung limply down his T-shirt. He looked around in disbelief at the tumbled power poles, the station wagon resting on its side with pieces of aluminum conduit punched cleanly through the underbody panels. “It’s a miracle no one was killed,” he said.

  Barnett said, “You have any idea what happened, Frank?”

  Frank McNeil, holder of the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal, the George Washington Award, the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize, the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, and the E. O. Lawrence Memorial Award, scratched his head and then shook it. “Nope. Though the car looks as if somehow the field reversed and it got hit with five hundred G’s instead of zero. Which,” he added hurriedly, “is not only theoretically impossible but wouldn’t explain the rest of the destruction.”

  “Well,” said Barnett, “let’s look at this again. We got together here for a little hunting. Three nights ago over a few beers we got this idea for a grid that nullifies gravity. It’s so simple we slap it together and put an old car on it to see what happens. Now this.” He paused and surveyed the demolished assets of the run-down air field. “It costs us a lousy eighteen hundred dollars to build the gravity shield, and look what it’s done.”

  Wollard said impatiently, “What I want to know is, what the hell happened? Even if the antigravity field did malfunction, it shouldn’t have caused this. It’s effective radius is only fifty feet.”

  “Maybe the car’s gas tank exploded.”

  Wollard shook his head. “If it had, you could tell by looking at it. It’s still in one piece, sort of. We never should have tried to beat Charles Garnett to the punch. We should have done more thinking and less building in the last three days.”

  “But on paper. . . .” Barnett said weakly.

  “And we couldn’t afford to let Charles Garnett get ahead of us,” chimed in McNeil. “He’d have skimmed the cream off the whole concept.”

  “Some cream,” said Wollard sourly, gesturing toward the crumpled Buick. “But let’s reconstruct. When we switched on the antigravity field, the car went null-G. And then all of a sudden the sky fell in. It had to be an external force.”

  McNeil sucked morosely on a skinned knuckle and then pointed to an approaching cloud of dust. “Hey, looks like we’re going to have company.”

  The three turned to stare at the battered old pickup truck that was charging down the field toward them, its fenders flapping visibly and a light cloud of chicken feathers floating up from its loadbed.

  “It’s our landlord,” groaned McNeil. “What do you want to bet he’s going to claim this place was in practically commercial-airport status before we wantonly destroyed it?”

  A moment later the truck screeched to an oscillating halt beside them, and the driver’s door draped open.

  “You boys all right?” It was Silas Whitemountain and his straw hat. “Way stuff was flying around, I figured you was all heading toward Kansas like everything else.”

  McNeil studied the overalled, white-haired man whose farmland adjoined the abandoned airstrip. “Guess we lucked out.” And then, thinking quickly, he added: “Well, whatever it was, you’ve had a lot of help in clearing off this land. It’s a lot closer to being an alfalfa field than it was this time yesterday. Saved you a lot of wrecking expense.”

  “Pea patch sure got torn up, didn’t it?” said the old man as he looked over the devastated field. “Them was valuable buildings, mighty valuable. What with inflation and all, I calculate replacement would run a good two hundred thousand. And that ain’t counting the historical value. First airport in Sugwash County, this was. Lindbergh landed here once when he made his big tour after getting back from Paris.”

  “Must have got off course,” muttered McNeil.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, he did. But even so, I always figured I’d put up a marker and charge admission. Got to figure intangibles when you’re collecting on tornado insurance.”

  “Insurance?” Wollard said. He and McNeil and Barnett looked at the old man as if hypnotized. “Oh-ho,” Wollard continued. “What kind of insurance?”

  “Tornado. Last thing I ever expected. Never saw one start up this season, and I’ve been living with the weather ‘round here, man and boy, nigh on eighty years. Seen it clear as a bell from my place.

  Look there.” He pointed up. “You can still make out the tail of it.” For the first time the trio of physicists looked up into the sky. Diminishing into the northeast was a harmless-seeming little white pigtail of a cloud. “Goin’ off now,” the farmer said, lowering his tendon-ridged forearm. “Sure didn’t run long, but it was a heller while it lasted. Made an awful mess of your gadgets. Doesn’t seem to have done your airplane much good, either. First time I’ve had a chance to look at it.” He wandered toward the remains of the Buick, kicking litter out of his way and shaking his head.

  McNeil exchanged glances with Wollard and Barnett. In a low voice he said, “I think we’re off the hook. He really believes it was a tornado.” Wollard’s eyes widened and a look of comprehension dawned on his face. “It was. By god, that’s it. We turned on a tornado.”

  “We did it?” McNeil snorted. “How could we? Do you realize the forces involved? All we did was allow air mass to lift a two-ton mass ten feet in the air.”

  Barnett, his head tilted back to watch the pigtail cloud dwindling into nothingness, shook his head. “The air couldn’t buoy up the weightless two-ton mass. The air was weightless, too. We never stopped to think. . . .”

  Now it was McNeil’s turn to absorb the implications. He became almost as pale as Wollard. “We interposed a shield between the Earth’s gravity and a column of air one hundred feet in diameter and as tall as the atmosphere. Gravity propagates at the speed of light. It must have been inrushing air that kicked the car around and formed the tornado.”

  Barnett was nodding vigorously. “Right. We made the column of air weightless. The surrounding air rushed into the space, became weightless, followed the original air into space, and the air behind it came rushing in. Coriolis force took care of the rest of what happened. It’s a damned good thing the power did get cut off, or we’d be in trouble, and so would the rest of the world. My god.” He stopped and pressed a hand to the top of his head. “We could pump the entire Earth’s atmosphere out into space if we left that gravity shield on long enough.”

  Wollard’s mouth dropped open, and he began fingering the buttons on his SR-11 calculator. In a moment he said, “Whew. Well, it would take something over thirteen million years for the Earth’s atmosphere to leak out, assuming constant pressure.”

  “Yeah,” said Barnett, “but most life would be dead long before that. Not enough air, you know?” Then, a new look of dismay came over Wollard’s face, and he went to work again on his SR-11.

  “What is it, Nat?” McNeil demanded.

  “We shot a thirty-second cylindrical pulse of antigravity into space. What happens if it hits the Sun? It was almost directly overhead when we started the test.” Mouths open, all three of them stared upward. Barnett glanced at his watch and then, shielding his eyes, stared approximately into the noonday glare. “Here comes the empirical evidence. Five hundred seconds to get there, fiv
e hundred seconds for us to see the effect, if any. Sixteen and a half minutes. It ought to come anytime now.” They held their breaths. Gradually, the minutes dragged by. The rough time-limit passed, and then a safety margin. Barnett shrugged and turned toward the other two. “See? Nothing.”

  Wollard said, “We missed, that’s all. It’s still going.”

  McNeil nodded. “And what happens when it hits another star? Or suppose it hits a populated planet.” He stopped and shook his head. “Would those other intelligent people be able to trace it back here? Would they come to find us?” He looked at the other two. “Would they consider it a weapon? Aimed at them?”

  Wollard said, “We’d better put the astronomers to work to see if anything’s in the path of that beam. Lord, what have we done?”

  Silas Whitemountain and his straw hat rejoined them. “Moves in a mysterious way, He does. That twister took the wings off your airplane so slick the damn thing looks like a car now.”

  The three looked glumly at him for a moment, and then suddenly McNeil straightened. “Wings. Of course,” he said softly. “We could put the gravity shield on the bottom of a plane or rocket, put wings on her if we want, fly her up through most of the atmosphere, and then turn on the shield. That would eliminate the tornado and atmosphere loss problems.”

  “Good,” said Barnett. “And our insurance ought to help us pay for this mess.” He waved at the rubble around them.

  “Yes,” said Wollard softly. “And that leaves us with only one problem.” He looked up in the direction the beam had gone. The other two looked up with him, looking along the same line of sight, wondering.

  GRANDFATHER CLAUSE

  In which Mr. Cogswell takes on an ancient idea and makes it seem at least as fresh as a Summer rain, and maybe then some.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Carl said as he limped into Dr. Ackerman’s office. “Stopped by to see Mother on the way over and I couldn’t get away. She was feeling more than usually mortal. Actually, all she’s suffering from is a monumental hangover; but every time she gets on the tail end of one of those four-day binges, she insists she isn’t long for this world and lays some more family heirlooms on me. This time I got some of her father’s stuff.” He tossed a small package on the doctor’s desk. “Present for you from Grandfather Petrovich.”