'There was a - a sort of machine in the chamber, just an enormous wheel that turned slowly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch - sand, stones, plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched, others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No rhyme nor reason to the whole thing - but that's characteristic of this crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to believe.
'One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later, another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.
'Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say, 'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or less about these creatures.
'Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel, something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a little crystal, about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge, and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my left thumb? Look!' Jarvis extended his hand. 'It dried up and fell off - just like that! And my abused nose - say, the pain went out of it like magic! The thing had the property of hard ex-rays or gamma radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy tissue unharmed!
'I was thinking what a present that'd be to take back to Mother Earth when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide had been careless, it seems.
'Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us; we backed out of what I thought was the passage we'd entered by, and they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy brutes! There was a whole chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I didn't like the 'ouch'; it was rather suggestive.
'Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts following - about twenty of them. Queer thing - the ones coming in with loaded carts moved past us inches away without a sign.
'Tweel must have noticed that. Suddenly, he snatched out that glowing coal cigar-lighter of his and touched a cartload of plant limbs. Puff! The whole load was burning - and the crazy beast pushing it went right along without a change of pace. It created some disturbance among our 'v-v-r-riends,' however - and then I noticed the smoke eddying and swirling past us, and sure enough, there was the entrance
'I grabbed Tweel and out we dashed and after us our twenty pursuers. The daylight felt like Heaven, though I saw at first glance that the sun was all but set, and that was bad, since I couldn't live outside my thermo-skin bag in a Martian night - at least, without a fire.
'And things got worse in a hurry. They cornered us in an angle between two mounds, and there we stood. I hadn't fired nor had Tweel; there wasn't any use in irritating the brutes. They stopped a little distance away and began their booming about friendship and ouches.
'Then things got still worse! A barrel-brute came out with a pushcart and they all grabbed into it and came out with handfuls of foot-long copper darts - sharp-looking ones - and all of a sudden one sailed past my ear - zing! And it was shoot or die then.
'We were doing pretty well for a while. We picked off the ones next to the pushcart and managed to keep the darts at a minimum, but suddenly there was a thunderous booming of 'v-v-r-riends' and 'ouches,' and a whole army of 'em came out of their hole.
'Man! We were through and I knew it! Then I realized that Tweel wasn't. He could have leaped the mound behind us as easily as not. He was staying for me!
'Say, I could have cried if there'd been time! I'd liked Tweel from the first, but whether I'd have had gratitude to do what he was doing - suppose I had saved him from the first dream-beast - he'd done as much for me, hadn't he? I grabbed his arm, and said 'Tweel,' and pointed up, and he understood. He said, 'No - no - no, Tick!' and popped away with his glass pistol.
'What could I do? I'd be a goner anyway when the sun set, but I couldn't explain that to him. I said, 'Thanks, Tweel. You're a man!' and felt that I wasn't paying him any compliment at all. A man! There are mighty few men who'd do that.
'So I went 'bang' with my gun and Tweel went 'puff' with his, and the barrels were throwing darts and getting ready to rush us, and booming about being friends. I had given up hope. Then suddenly an angel dropped right down from Heaven in the shape of Putz, with his underjets blasting the barrels into very small pieces!
'Wow! I let out a yell and dashed for the rocket; Putz opened the door and in I went, laughing and crying and shouting! It was a moment or so before I remembered Tweel; I looked around in time to see him rising in one of his nosedives over the mound and away.
'I had a devil of a job arguing Putz into following. By the time we got the rocket aloft, darkness was down; you know how it comes here - like turning off a light. We sailed out over the desert and put down once or twice. I yelled 'Tweel!' and yelled it a hundred times, I guess. We couldn't find him; he could travel like the wind and all I got - or else I imagined it - was a faint trilling and twittering drifting out of the south. He'd gone, and damn it! I wish - I wish he hadn't!'
The four men of the Ares were silent - even the sardonic Harrison. At last little Leroy broke the stillness.
'I should like to see,' he murmured.
'Yeah,' said Harrison. 'And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a century and a half.'
'Oh, that!' muttered Jarvis gloomily. 'That's what started the fight!' He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
'Here it is.'
An Autobiographical Sketch of
STANLEY G. WEINBAUM
Well, I was born, if it makes any difference, in Louisville, Ky., circa 1902, and educated, if at all, in the public schools of Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin. While at the latter institution I assisted in the demise of the now totally defunct Wisconsin Literary Magazine, succeeded once in having it suppressed (the only time, incidentally, that the publication ever showed a profit) and was ejected in 1923. All the same, that crowd made Middle Western literary history and is still making it, tho they've scattered. It included the rising star of Horace Gregory, the tragic Majory Latimer, Paul Gangelin, who writes plots for the movies (one smash to two flops), and the less literary but far more famous Charles Augustus Lindergh, who enjoyed the honor of "graduating" with me. They summoned him back for an honorary degree, but they haven't asked me yet.
Anyway, as to how I personally became interested in science fiction—I didn't. That's supposed to imply that I've always been interested in it, from the days of such juveniles as Robinson Crusoe, the Motor Boys series, and Tarzan, and eventually to the real classics of Verne and Wells. That doesn't exclude a few others who receive less attention from science fiction readers than they deserve, Bellamy (whose "Looking Backwood" is still a social influence in such movements as the erstwhile popular Technocracy) Conan-Doyle, Poe, and Mrs. Shelley. Those writers wrote with an attention to realistic detail that has been rather neglected in these days of purple, green, or crimson rays, of ant-men, beetlemen, lizard-men, and what not. Science fiction has slipped a peg or two, right into the epic stage, with heroes, demi-gods, and mythical monsters. Or such is my impression.
And as to how I write—well, in longhand, with a pencil, on a sheet of white paper. I can't type a first copy successfully because the mechanics of typing takes too much attention, at least the way I type. It isn't a total loss, however, since it saves revision, which takes place during the typing.
Other details—I suppose
I ought to claim to write by inspiration. I wish I did; it's far the easiest and most effective way, and don't think it can't be done either. It can; I've known people whose minds worked that way, but I'm not one of them. These fortunate souls suddenly receive an idea pre-cooked and ready to serve, and down it goes, fever hot, on paper. But I have to think up my ideas, plan them to a fair degree of completion, and then write them. They usually change somewhat in the writing, and I have had them escape entirely, go rampant, and end up quite differently from the original plan. That probably happens to anyone who writes; one character, intended to be subordinate, suddenly turns out to be too interesting an individual to ignore, and the plot gets warped around until he (or occasionally she) is carrying the burden of the story.
That's even happened in novels, of which I've written a few, not under my name, but I won't divulge the pseudonym. Of course it's a rarer occurrence, because novels have to be planned with some care, and even outlined on paper. One can't trust memory alone when sixty to one hundred twenty thousand words are involved. Anyway, I can't. They say Voltaire wrote his "Candide" in twenty hours, and Ben Hecht tried with fair success to duplicate the feat in his "Florentine Dagger," but I'll bet that Ben at least had a few ideas beforehand.
To return to science fiction, having made plain that I like it, now I'll tell why I don't. There's one general weakness and one universal fallacy in the material published today. It's a tough one to express but perhaps the proposition can be phrased as follows: Most authors, even the best, seem imbued with the idea that science is a sort of savior, a guide, the ultimate hope of mankind. That's wrong; science is utterly impersonal and never points a way, nor is it interested in either the salvation or the destruction of the human race. The words "should" and "ought", in their moral senses, are not scientific words at all, and when a scientist uses them he speaks not for science but for philosophy or ethics, not as a scientist but as a preacher. Science describes but does not interpret; it can predict the results of any given alternative actions, but cannot choose between them.
If that paragraph seems a little involved, here's an example. The great sociologist Doe, we'll say, has discovered that because of the unchecked breeding of the mentally deficient, the human race will degenerate to the moron level within fifty years. Now Doe can get excited as he wishes over this as a member of the race, but as a scientist, all he can say is something like this: "I call attention to the probability that if we permit this trend to continue, in half a century the average level of intelligence will have descended to that of a twelve year old mind. If the trend is to be checked, an effective means is sterilization of the unfit before reproduction is possible." Not "we ought to" or "we should" but just if.
That's all science has the right to say. The choice then enters the domain of ethics, and the battle is between those who feel that the good of the race is paramount and those who believe that the rights of the individual are sacred, and that we have no moral grounds for violating them. Science has indicated the roads, but ethics has to choose between them.
A propos of this, I suppose all of us know which road modern ethics would choose, but only a hundred and fifty years ago, during the highly individualistic eighteenth century, all the weight of the best minds was in the opposite scale. Even a simpleton had the right then to fulfill his life to the utmost, to find (theoretically at least) the greatest happiness he could, even tho that included feeble-minded offspring. In those years "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" meant exactly that.
All of which is quite beside the point. What course ethics chooses doesn't make a damn bit of difference in the argument, which holds that science is only a signpost and not a guide. Say it again: Science is neither judge nor savior. It cannot choose. It is a road map, not a standard.
Here's the element that makes so much science fiction seem unreal. Half our authors use the word "scientist" about as the ancient Egyptians used "priest"—a man of special and rather mystical knowledge that has set him apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, as soon as the word is mentioned, one visualizes either a noble, serious, erudite, high-principled superman, or depending on, the type of story, a crafty, ambitious, fiendish, and probably insane super-villain. But never a real human being.
As for the weakness, that's simpler. It's merely that most of our writers fail to take advantage of science fiction's one grand opportunity—its critical possibilities, if you get me. It's the ideal medium to express an author's ideas, because it can (but doesn't) criticize everything. I mean—well, Western stories, for instance, have no critical possibilities because they deal with conditions fifty years dead. Romance has only a few opportunities in sociological fields. Adventure is equally limited, but science fiction has no limits. It can criticize-social, moral, technical, political, or intellectual conditions—or any others. It's a weapon for intelligent writers, of which there are several, but they won't practice its use.
Oh, a few have tried it. Dr. Keller does it well occasionally, and Miles J. Breuer did it magnificently once or twice. Dr. Bell (John Taine) touches on it at times, but won't descend to practical suggestions. And by far the most of this sort of writing, when couched in the usual form of satire, is heavy, obvious, and directed at unimportant targets. No one has attempted it on the scale of Bellamy, who actually did criticize world social conditions in the form of a science fiction story, and presented a sort of solution.
For science fiction can do what science cannot. It can criticize, because science fiction is not science. It is, or at least ought to be, a branch of the art of literature, and can therefore quite properly argue, reject, present a thesis, proselytize, criticize, or perform any other ethical functions.
Or anyway, that's my opinion, and it won't make a bit of difference to those readers (if any) who've plowed thru to this point. The younger writers will stand by their guns—or purple rays—and the younger readers will take as much delight as ever in super-scientists, Earth-Mars wars, ant-men, tractor rays, and heroes who save country, earth, solar system, or universe from the terrible invaders from Outside.
More power to 'em. I'd like to experience those same thrills again myself.
DAWN OF FLAME
CHAPTER ONE
THE WORLD
HULL TARVISH LOOKED backward but once, and that only as he reached the elbow of the road. The sprawling little stone cottage that had been home was visible as he had seen it a thousand times, framed under the cedars. His mother still watched him, and two of his younger brothers stood staring down the Mountainside at him. He raised his hand in farewell, then dropped it as he realized that none of them saw him now; his mother had turned indifferently to the door, and the two youngsters had spied a rabbit. He faced about and strode away, down the slope out of Ozarky.
He passed the place where the great steel road of the Ancients had been, now only two rusty streaks and a row of decayed logs. Beside it was the mossy heap of stones that had been an ancient structure in the days before the Dark Centuries, when Ozarky had been a part of the old state of M'souri. The mountain people still sought out the place for squared stones to use in building, but the tough metal of the steel road itself was too stubborn for their use, and the rails had rusted quietly these three hundred years.
That much Hull Tarvish knew, for they were things still spoken of at night around the fireplace. They had been mighty sorcerers, those Ancients; their steel roads went everywhere, and everywhere were the ruins of their towns, built, it was said, by a magic that lifted weights. Down in the valley, he knew, men were still seeking that magic; once a rider had stayed by night at the Tarvish home, a little man who said that in the far south the secret had been found, but nobody ever heard any more of it.
So Hull whistled to himself, shifted the rag bag on his shoulder, set his bow more comfortably on his mighty back, and trudged on. That was why he himself was seeking the valley; he wanted to see what the world was like. He had been always a restless sort, not at all like the other six Tarvish sons, nor l
ike the three Tarvish daughters. They were true mountainies, the sons great hunters, and the daughters stolid and industrious. Not Hull, however; he was neither lazy like his brothers nor stolid like his sisters, but restless, curious, dreamy. So he whistled his way into the world, and was happy.
At evening he stopped at the Hobel cottage on the edge of the mountains. Away before him stretched the plain, and in the darkening distance was visible the church spire of Norse. That was a village; Hull had never seen a village, or no more of it than this same distant steeple, shaped like a straight white pine. But he had heard all about Norse, because the mountainies occasionally went down there to buy powder and ball for their rifles, those of them who had rifles.
Hull had only a bow. He didn't see the use of guns; powder and ball cost money, but an arrow did the same work for nothing, and that without scaring all the game a mile away.
Morning he bade goodbye to the Hobels, who thought him, as they always had, a little crazy, and set off. His powerful, brown bare legs flashed under his ragged trousers, his bare feet made a pleasant soosh in the dust of the road, the June sun beat warm on his right cheek. He was happy; there never was a pleasanter world than this, so he grinned and whistled, and spat carefully into the dust, remembering that it was bad luck to spit toward the sun. He was bound for adventure.
Adventure came. Hull had come down to the plain now, where the trees were taller than the scrub of the hill country, and where the occasional farms were broader, well tilled, more prosperous. The trail had become a wagon road, and here it cut and angled between two lines of forest. And unexpectedly a man – no, two men – rose from a log at the roadside and approached Hull. He watched them; one was tall and light-haired as himself, but without his mighty frame, and the other was a head shorter, and dark. Valley people, surely, for the dark one had a stubby pistol at his belt, wooden-stocked like those of the Ancients, and the tall man's bow was of glittering spring steel.
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 14