Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  “Then you ask a more interesting question, ‘What effect does this have on the whole world?’” Horowitz says. “Do we immediately convert our swords into plowshares and grow wheat because now we realize that there’s a true religion and that the way to eternal nirvana and peace is there and will be explained in due course by these folks?”

  He pauses and shrugs again. “You can believe that if you like … but if you want my opinion, it will have both short-term and long-term effects, but neither will be quite what we think. Short-term effect will be, ‘Wow, great news! Even better than last week’s great news!’ It’s on the front page of everything, and this will probably last longer than your average thing. Y’know, the radon scare lasted about three days, so this will last about a week, then it will degenerate to the fifth page of The New York Times.

  “I think what will happen in the long term will be very interesting,” Horowitz continues. “I think it will soak into your consciousness … that things are forever different, that we’ve lost our unique position, that we know the answer to whether there’s other life, that we know the answer as to whether life can survive technology … You just don’t feel the same about your place in the universe, and the way you do your silly little things on Earth is affected by that.”

  If Paul Horowitz is the avatar of Project META, then Joe Caruso is the sentry. How he came to be in the unique position of possibly being, one day, the first human to look at an alien signal, is a story of how a hobby turned into a profession.

  Caruso had little more than a passing interest in astronomy until ten years ago, when he bought a little 60mm refractor telescope for fifty dollars at a flea market in his town in upstate New York. With no prior experience in star gazing and only a Golden Guide to astronomy to light his way, the junior college history teacher began looking at stars in his backyard at night. “I didn’t know right ascension, declination, nothing,” he says. “I just started finding my way around.”

  Hooked on his new hobby, he joined amateur astronomer groups and participated in organized “watches” of stellar phenomena. As he continued his night work, he became aware of how little people knew about astronomy. “I would be out in my backyard with my little telescope, and people who were college educated would come up to me and say things to me like, ‘Y’know, I always wondered, like, what the differences between planets and stars are.’ It got me to wondering why people don’t know this. People who are college educated who don’t know the basic geography of the heavens.”

  After instructing a course in astronomy at a small college and teaching history at the University of Hartford, Caruso went to Wesleyan College and earned a graduate degree in astronomy. Eventually he was hired by Paul Horowitz to be the curator of Project META. He couples this job with his observations at the Oak Ridge optical telescope down the road, and spends several days a week lecturing to the general public about astronomy and SETI. Although he works in a professional environment, Caruso still considers himself to be an amateur astronomer. He also still has the itch to teach and plans to eventually return to it.

  “I’m really a telescope operator,” he says. “But there’s a need for this sort of thing. There’s a lot of unemployed astronomers. People say that this is the age of science, [but] there’s 20,000 astrologers in America and fewer than 2,000 astronomers … but there’s a lot of technical jobs in astronomy. Computer operators and programmers and telescope drivers and things like that, there’s quite a need for [them] in astronomy.”

  Like Horowitz, Caruso finds that people are generally open-minded about the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence.

  “What I find is that most people have a need to believe that it’s there, just on a gut level,” he says. “But it is kind of a strange job. It’s kind of hard, when you’re talking to people on the phone, to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I gotta get off the phone, I have to go see if the aliens have contacted us.’”

  Joe Caruso is also an avid reader of science fiction. His favorite authors are the hard SF writers like Larry Niven who make plausible extrapolations about alien life. However, he believes that the chances of radio contact with an alien intelligence to be slim, at best. For one thing, Earth has been radio-visible—that is, detectable from deep space by humankind’s radio transmissions—for only about fifty years. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, this means an alien civilization looking for us would have to be within about fifty light-years of Earth, which is not a great distance on the galactic scale.

  And that’s not the only thing which weighs the chances against first contact any time soon. “There is a basic assumption that SETI makes which is untestable,” Caruso says, “and we won’t know until it happens or doesn’t happen, and that is whether there is the need to try to communicate among other beings that we feel. Now, most people think this would be a good thing, or at least an interesting thing. We don’t know if aliens would feel like that. They may be brighter than us, but they don’t have that need to communicate with other beings. It would never occur to them to do that.”

  On the other hand, Caruso recognizes that the implications of First Contact would be enormous. “It would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and that’s why it’s worth doing. People are always asking me, ‘What do you think the chances really are of this happening?’ And I tell them, ‘I think they’re very, very small … but I know what the chance is if you don’t look at all. It’s zero.’”

  Hapgood’s Hoax

  HAPGOOD, H.L (HAROLD LAPIERRE), Jr.—1911–1966; American pulp SF writer of the 1930s and 1940s. Although most of his short fiction is obscure today, Hapgood is best known (as Dr. H. LaPierre Hapgood) as the author of several allegedly non-fictional works on UFO contact, including Abducted to Space (1950) and UFO! (1952). These works were based on Hapgood’s claim that he was seized by aliens from space in 1948, which is widely regarded as a hoax.

  —The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Ursula May, editor (1981)

  Lawrence R. Bolger; Professor of English, Minnesota State University, and science fiction historian:

  Harry Hapgood. (Sighs.) It would figure that someone would want to interview me about Harry Hapgood, especially since the new collection of his work just came out. The field may not be able to get rid of him until someone digs up his coffin and hammers a stake in his heart …

  Okay, since you’ve come all this way, I’ll tell you about H.L. Hapgood, Jr. But, to tell the truth, I’d just as soon leave the bastard in his literary grave.

  There were pulp writers from the ’30s who managed to survive the times and outlast the pulps, to make the transition from pulp fiction to whatever passes as literature in this genre.

  Jack Williamson, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury … those are some of the ones whose work eventually broke out of the pulp mold. They’re regarded as the great writers of the field and we still read their stories. They still find their audience. Their publishers keep their classics, like City and The Humanoids and The Martian Chronicles in print.

  Those are the success stories. Yet for every Bradbury or Williamson, there’s a hundred other writers—some of them big names back then, you need to remember—who didn’t make it out of the pulp era. For one reason or another, their careers faded when the pulps died at the end of the ’40s. H. Bedford-Jones, Arthur K. Barnes, S.P. Meek … all obscure authors now. Just like H.L. Hapgood, Jr.

  Not that they were necessarily bad writers, either. I mean, some of their stories are no more crap than a lot of the stuff that gets into print today. But when the field started to grow up, when John Campbell began to demand that his Astounding contributors deliver realistic SF or else … well, Harry was one of those writers who fell into the “or else” category.

  But before that, he had been extraordinarily successful, especially when you consider the times. The Depression nearly killed a lot of writers, but those years were kind to him. He had a nonstop imagination and fast fingers, and for a penny a word, Harry Hapgood cranked out stori
es by the bushel. I was reading all the SF pulps at the time—I was in high school in Ohio then—so I can tell you with personal authority that there was rarely a month that went by without H.L. Hapgood’s byline appearing somewhere. If not in Amazing or Thrilling Wonder, then in Captain Future or the pre-Campbell era Astounding or someplace else. “The Sky Pirates of Centaurus,” “Attack of the Giant Robots,” “Mars or Bust!”—those were some of his more memorable stories. Rock-jawed space captains fighting Venusian tiger-men while mad scientists with Z-ray machines menaced ladies in bondage. Greasy kid stuff, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun when you were fourteen years old. Harry was the master of the space opera. Not even Ed Hamilton or Doc Smith could tell ’em like he could.

  You can still find some of his older work in huckster rooms at SF conventions, if you look through the raggy old pulps some people have on the tables. That’s about the only place you can find Harry Hapgood’s pulp stories anymore. I think his last published story, at least in his lifetime, was in Amazing in ’45 or ’46. The last time any of his early work was reprinted was when somebody put together a pulp anthology about ten years ago. When he died in ’66, his career in science fiction had been long since over.

  That’s the main reason why he’s been obscure all these years. But there was also the New Hampshire hoax. He died a rich man because of that stunt, but he also blackened his name in the field. I don’t think anyone wanted to remember Hapgood because of that. At least, not until recently …

  Startled and dazzled by the sudden burst of light, I looked up and saw a monstrous disk-shaped vehicle descending towards me. Rocket fighters raced from the sky to combat the weird machine, but as they got close, scarlet rays flashed from portals along the side of the spaceship. The rockets exploded!

  “Dirk, oh Dirk!” Catherine screamed from the bunker next to me, fearful of the apparition. “What can it be?”

  Before I could answer, Captain Black of the United Earth Space Force spoke up. “The Quongg death machine, Miss Jones,” he said, his chin thrust out belligerently.

  I reached for my blaster. “Oh, yeah?” I snarled. “Well, they’ll never take us alive!”

  Captain Black stared at me. “They’ll take us alive, all right!” he snarled. “They want us as specimens!”

  —“Kidnappers from the Stars”

  by H.L Hapgood Jr. Space Tales, December, 1938

  Joe Mackey; retired electrical engineer:

  If I remember correctly, I first met Harry Hapgood back in 1934 or 1935, when we both lived in the same triple-decker in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I was about nineteen at the time and was working a day job in a deli on Newbury Street to put myself through MIT night school. So, y’know, when I wasn’t making grinders or riding the trolley over to classes in Cambridge, I was at home hitting the books. I got maybe four hours of sleep in those days. The Depression was a bitch like that.

  I met Harry because he lived right upstairs. His apartment was directly above mine and he used to bang on his typewriter late at night, usually when I was studying or trying to sleep. Every time he hit the carriage return, it sounded like something was being dropped on the floor. I had no idea what he was doing up there … practicing somersaults or something.

  Anyway, one night I finally got fed up with the racket, so I marched upstairs and hammered on his door, planning on telling him to cut it out ’cause I was trying to catch a few winks. Well, he opened his door—very timidly—and I started to chew him out. Then I looked past him and saw all these science fiction magazines scattered all over the place. Piled on the coffee table, the couch, the kitchen table, the bed … Amazing, Astonishing, Thrilling Wonder, Planet Stories, Startling Stories. Heaps of them. My jaw just dropped open because, though I read all those magazines when I could afford to buy ’em, I thought I was the only person in Boston who read science fiction.

  So I said something like, “Holy smoke! You’ve got the new issue of Astounding!” I remember that was lying open on the coffee table. Brand new issue. I was too broke to pick it up myself.

  Harry just smiled, then he walked over and picked it up and brought it to me. “Here, you can borrow it if you want,” he said. Then he added, very slyly, “Read the story by H. L. Hapgood. You might like it.”

  I nodded and said, “Yeah, I really like his stories.” He just blushed and coughed into his fist and shuffled his feet, and then he told me who he was.

  Well, I didn’t say anything about his typing after that, but once he found out that I was taking night classes at MIT, he stopped typing late at night so I could get some sleep. He figured it out for himself. Harry was a good guy like that.

  Margo Croft; literary agent; former assistant editor, Rocket Adventures:

  I was the first-reader at Rocket back then, so I read Harry’s stories when they came in through the mail, which was once every week or two. Seriously. In his prime, he was more prolific than Bob Silverberg or Isaac Asimov ever was. But the difference was, Silverberg and Asimov were good writers, even in their pulp days.

  No, no, scratch that. At a certain level, Harry was good. He knew how to keep a story going. He was a master of pacing, for one thing. But it was all formula fiction, even if he didn’t recognize the formula himself. Anyone who compares him to E.E. Smith or Edmond Hamilton is fooling you. His characters were one-dimensional, his dialogue was vintage movie serial. “Ah-ha, Dr. Zoko, I’ve got you now!”—that sort of thing. His understanding of real science was nonexistent. In fact, he usually ignored science. When it was convenient, say, for a pocket of air to exist in a crater on the Moon, there it was.

  But his stories were no worse than the other stuff we published, and he got his share of fan mail, so we sent him lots of checks. For a long time, he was in our stable of regular writers. Whenever we needed a 6,000-word story to fill a gap in the next issue, there was always an H.L. Hapgood yarn in the inventory. He was a fiction factory.

  I finally met him at the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York back in ’39. I think it was Donald Wollheim who introduced us. I was twenty years old then, flat-chested and single, ready to throw myself at the first writer who came along, so I developed a crush on Harry at once. He might have been a hack, but he was a good-looking hack. (Laughs.)

  He had fans all around him, though, because he was such a well-known writer. I spent the better part of Saturday following him around Caravan Hall, trying to get his attention. It was hard. Harry was shy when it came to one-on-one conversation, but he soaked up the glory when a mob was around.

  Anyway, I finally managed to get him into a group that was going out to dinner that night. We found an Italian restaurant a few blocks away and took over a long table in the back room. There was a whole bunch of us—I think Ray Bradbury was in the group, though nobody knew who he was then—and I managed to get myself positioned across the table from Harry. Like I said, he was very shy when it came to one-on-one conversation, so I gave up on talking to him like a pretty girl and tried speaking to him like an editor. He began to notice me then.

  His lack of—well, for lack of a better term, literary sophistication—was mind-boggling. He had barely heard of Ernest Hemingway, and he only recognized Steinbeck as the name of his neighborhood grocer. The only classics he had read were by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. In fact, the only thing Harry seemed to have ever read was science fiction or Popular Mechanics, and that was all he wanted to talk about. I mean, there I was trying to show off my legs—maybe I had no chest back then, but my legs were Marlene Dietrich’s—and Harry only wanted to discuss the collected work of Neil R. Jones.

  So I lost a little interest in him during that talk, and after awhile I started paying attention to other people at the table. I do distinctly remember two things that Harry said that night. One was that his ambition was to get rich and famous. He was convinced that he would write for the pulps forever. “Science fiction will never change,” he proclaimed.

  The other was a comment which sounds rou
tine today. Every other SF writer has said it at least once, but I recall Harry saying it first, at least as far as I can remember. Probably, because of what happened years later, it’s why it sticks in my mind.

  “If aliens ever came to Earth to capture people,” he said offhandedly at one point, “they wouldn’t have to hunt for me. I’d volunteer for the trip.”

  Joe Mackey:

  Harry Hapgood was a hell of a good person back then. You can quote me on that. He put me up to a lot of meals when I was starving, and he always had a buck to spare even when his own rent was due. But the day I saw him begin to hurt was the day when John W. Campbell rejected one of his stories.

  I had dropped by his place after work. It was in the middle of winter—1940, I think—and the MIT semester hadn’t started yet, so I had some time to kill. The mail had just come, and when I came into Harry’s apartment he was sitting at his kitchen table, bent over a manuscript which had just come back in the mail. It was a rejection from Astounding.

  This almost never happened to him. Harry thought he was rejection-proof. After all, his stories usually sold on the first shot. That, and the fact that Astounding had always been one of his most reliable markets. But Harry’s old editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, had left a couple of years earlier, and the new guy, John W. Campbell, was reshaping the magazine … and that meant getting rid of the zap-gun school of science fiction.

  So here was Harry, looking at this story which had been bounced back, “Enslaved on Venus.” Just staring at it, that’s all. “What’s going on?” I asked, and he told me that Campbell had just rejected this story. “Did he tell you why?” I said. Harry told me he had received a letter, but he wouldn’t show it to me. I think it was in the trash. “Well, just send it out again to some other magazine,” I said, because this is what he had always told me should be done when a story gets rejected.