My Best Science Fiction Story

by Leo Margulies

  “Your civilization is not compatible with ours. We have studied your minds to make sure. We projected images from the images we found in your minds, to study your reactions to them. Our first images, our first thought-projections, were confused.

  But we understood your minds by the time you reached the farthest point of your walk. We were able to project beings similar to yourselves.”

  “Sam Heideman, yeah,” I said. “But how about the da—the woman? She couldn’t have been in the memory of any of us because none of us knew her.”

  “She was a composite—what you would call an idealization. That, however, doesn’t matter. By studying you we learned that your civilization concerns itself with things, ours with thoughts. Neither of us has anything to offer the other. No good could come through interchange, whereas much harm might come. Our planet has no material resources that would interest your race.

  I had to agree with that, looking out over that monotonous rolling clay that seemed to support only those few tumble-weedlike bushes, and not many of them. It didn’t look like it would support anything else. As for minerals, I hadn’t seen even a pebble.

  “Right you are,” I called back. “Any planet that raises nothing but tumbleweeds and cockroaches can keep itself, as far as we’re concerned. So—” Then something dawned on me. “Hey, just a minute. There must be something else or who the devil am I talking to?”

  “You are talking,” replied the voice, “to what you call cockroaches, which is another point of incompatibility between us. To be more precise, you are talking to a thought-projected voice, but we are projecting it. And let me assure you of one thing—that you are more repugnant physically to us than we are to you.”

  I looked down then and saw them, three of them, ready to pop into holes if I made a move.

  Back inside the ship, I said, “Johnny, blast off. Destination, Earth.”

  He saluted and said, “Yes, sir,” and went into the pilot’s compartment and shut the door. He didn’t cone out until we were on an automatic course, with Sirius dwindling behind us.

  Ellen had gone to her room. Ma and I were playing cribbage.

  “May I go off duty, sir?” Johnny asked, and walked stiffly to his room when I answered, “Sure.”

  After a while, Ma and I turned in. Awhile after that we heard noises. I got up to investigate, and investigated.

  I came back grinning. “Everything’s okay, Ma,” I said. “It’s Johnny Lane and he’s as drunk as a hoot owl!” And I slapped Ma playfully on the fanny.

  “Ouch, you old fool,” she sniffed. “I’m sore there from the curb disappearing from under me. And what’s wonderful about Johnny getting drunk? You aren’t, are you?”

  “No,” I admitted, regretfully perhaps. “But, Ma, he told me to go to blazes. And without saluting. Me, the owner of the ship.”

  Ma just looked at me. Sometimes women are smart, but sometimes they’re pretty dumb.

  “Listen, he isn’t going to keep on getting drunk,” I said. “This is an occasion. Can’t you see what happened to his pride and dignity?”

  “You mean because he—”

  “Because he fell in love with the thought-projection of a cockroach,” I pointed out. “Or anyway he thought he did. He has to get drunk once to forget that, and from now on, after he sobers up, he’s going to be human. I’ll bet on it, any odds. And I’ll bet too that once he’s human, he’s going to see Ellen and realize how pretty she is. I’ll bet he’s head-over-heels before we get back to Earth. I’ll get a bottle and we’ll drink a toast on it. To Nothing Sirius!”

  And for once I was right. Johnny and Ellen were engaged before we got near enough to Earth to start decelerating.

  WHY I SELECTED BLINDNESS

  This has always been one of my favorites because it is not a story about a colossal super-invention, but rather about a bubble-burster. It was written in 1935—and frankly there has been a minor alteration to suit the events of 1940-45, better known as the Manhattan Project—but the primary point of the story holds, and is somewhat more important than we sometimes think.

  We of today, living in what is, really, the beginning of a science-technical culture tend to think of machines, of great inventions, in terms of “huge” and “intricate” and “complex.” Those are the crude, unfinished, compromise machines. The perfect machine is small, compact, extremely simple in its mechanical structure, and has no mechanical moving parts, is not assembled in the ordinary sense, and is inherently incapable of wearing out. We have, today, two examples of machines that closely approach that ideal—such humble, simple things mechanically that we never think of them as machines.

  One is the ordinary electric transformer—from the toy-train size to the power-line sub-station variety. Mechanically, it consists of two hanks of wire and a hunk of iron. It has no moving mechanical parts—the movement is all done by atoms and electrons and magnetic fields that can’t wear out. Those large ones are 99.8% efficient. Of course, a 3500 horsepower aircraft engine roaring at take-off, with its myriad ingeniously shaped parts, is more impressive. But the transformer approaches perfection.

  More recently, the Bell Laboratories have produced another near-perfect machine—the transistor. It’s a crystal of germanium, with two wires and a tiny brass tube, and it does the work of a vacuum tube. No human fingers assemble complex grids and cathodes and electrodes; natural interatomic forces “assemble” the crystal. There is nothing to wear out. It’s immensely important—but the pencil-eraser size brass tube, with its two tiny wires, is so unimpressive—so much less spectacular than a new Diesel streamliner.

  The really important, really perfect machines are so easy to overlook!

  JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR.

  Blindness - John W. Campbell, Jr.

  Sometimes One Can’t See a Thing When One Is Too Close to It.

  Old Dr. Malcolm Mackay is dead and with more than usual truth, one may say he is at last at peace. His life was hard and bitter, those last few years. He was blind, of course, blinded as every one knew by the three-year-long exposure to the intolerable light of the Sun.

  And he was bitter, of course, as every one knew. But somehow they could not understand that; a man so great, so loved by the population of three worlds, it seemed there could be nothing in his life to embitter him, nor in the respect and love of the worlds for him.

  Some, rather unkindly, I feel, put it down to his blindness, and his age—he was eighty-seven when he died—and in this they were unjust. The acclaim his great discovery brought him was the thing which embittered him. You see, he didn’t want acclaim for that; it was for the lesser invention he really wanted praise.

  That the “Grand Old Man” may be better understood, I genuinely want people to understand better the story of his work. And his blindness, but not as most people speak of it. The blindness struck him long before the exposure to the Sun ruined his eyes. Perhaps I had better explain.

  Malcolm Mackay was born in 1974, just one year after Cartwright finally succeeded in committing suicide as he had always wanted to—by dying of asphyxiation on the surface of the Moon, when his air gave out. He was three when Gamall was drowned in Lake Erie, after returning from Luna, the first man to reach Earth again, alive. He didn’t go on living, of course, but he was alive when he reached Earth. That we knew.

  Mackay was eleven, and interested, when Randolph’s expedition returned with mineralogical specimens, and the records of a year’s stay on the Moon.

  Mackay went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology at seventeen, and was graduated a member of the class of 1995. But he took physics—atomic physics.

  Mackay had seen that on atomic power rested the only real hope of really commercial, economically sound, interplanetary travel. He was sure of that at seventeen when he entered M. I. T. He was convinced when he was graduated—and went back for more, because about that same time old Douglas A. Mackay died, and left him three-quarters of a million dollars.

  Malcolm Mackay saw that the hand
of Providence was stretched out to aid him. Money was the thing he’d needed. Mackay always claimed that money was a higher form of life; that it answered the three tests of life. It was sensitive to stimulation. It was able to grow by accretion. And finally—the most important, in Mackay’s estimation—the old Scot pointed out it was capable of reproduction. So Malcolm Mackay put his in an incubator, a large trust company, and left it to reproduce as rapidly as possible.

  He lived in shabby quarters, and in shabby clothes most of the time, so he’d have money later on, when he started his work. And he studied. Obviously, there is no question but that Mackay was one of the most highly intelligent human beings that ever lived. He started with the basis of atomic knowledge of that day, and he learned it all, too, and then he was ready to go ahead. He spent seventeen years at M. I. T. learning and teaching, till he felt that he had learned enough to make the teaching more of a nuisance than a worth-while use of his time.

  By that time, the money had followed the laws of money, and life, and had reproduced itself, not once, but twice, for the Scot had picked a good company. He had two and a quarter millions.

  He was now ready to start his search for atomic power from the light elements. Atomic power from the heavy elements— thorium, uranium, and above—had offered promise, but their high cost of extraction and production had made them always expensive, special-purpose fuels. What men needed was the cheap atomic fuel the Sun uses—the atomic energy of hydrogen, which was plentiful and easily extracted in unlimited quantities from water.

  There is no need to retell his early experiments. The story of the loss of three fingers on his left hand is an old one. The countless minor and semi-major explosions he had, the radiation bums he collected. But perhaps those burns weren’t so wholly injurious as was thought, for thirty-five years after he left M. I. T. he was still working at an age when most men are resting—either in coffins or wheel chairs. The Grand Old Man didn’t put his final determination into action until he was seventy-three.

  John Bums was his laboratory assistant and mechanician then. The loss of his fingers had been serious to him, because it made delicate instrument work difficult, and John Bums, thirty-two at the time, was his mechanician, his hand, and his highly technical assistant. In May, 2047, the latest experiment having revealed only highly interesting but negative results, Malcolm Mackay looked at Bums.

  “John, that settled it,” he said slowly. “Something is missing, and we won’t get it here in a pair of lifetimes, even long ones. You know the only place we can find it.”

  “I suppose you mean the Sun,” replied Bums sadly. “But since we can’t get near enough to that, it doesn’t do us a bit of good. Houston’s the only man who has come back alive, and his nearest approach was 41,743,560 miles. And it didn’t do any good, anyway. The automatic rockets get nearer, but not very much nearer, the heat beats them—all of them. And you, yourself, said we’d have to get within four millions, not four tens of millions of miles. And that’s utterly hopeless. Nothing could stand it that close to old Sol.”

  “Were going,” said Mackay grimly. “I’ve spent close to three-quarters of a century working on the problem of atomic energy, and we re going.” He paused a moment, then looked up at Burns with a kindly smile. “No, I guess it’s not we who are going, but I. I’m more than willing to go, and lose perhaps two years off the tail end of my overlong life, if need be, if I can send back the word to the world that will set it free of that age-old problem of power.

  “Power. Maybe we can use Sun power, after all. They’ve been talking about solar power since the beginning of the last century, and they haven’t got it yet. Never will, I guess, because the power’s too diluted. They can’t build a big enough Sun glass. But if we can steal the secret of the Sun, and give them little private suns right here on Earth, that will settle the question. And give rockets some real power too, incidentally.”

  The old man chuckled. “You know, John, when I started, it was the dream of my life that rockets should have atomic power so they could really reach the other planets. Atomic power! And now, here I am, close to three-quarters of a century old—and I’ve never even left Earth. A grounder.

  “And atomic power isn’t so badly needed for rockets, anyway. They have good fuels now, safe ones and powerful ones. Atomic power is needed here on Earth, where factories are, and men labor in Coal mines for fuel, and where they make the fuel for rockets. That’s where mankind needs atomic power.

  “And by all the powers of Heaven, if the Sun’s where I can learn, the Sun’s where I am going.”

  “But by that particular power of Heaven known as radiant energy, you can’t,” objected Bums. “The radiation makes it impossible.”

  “Well, I’ll kill that radiation, somehow. That’s the real problem now, I guess. Wonder how—we’ve developed a lot of different radiation screens and blocks since we began this work here; we ought to find something.”

  “Yes, doctor; we can stop any kind of radiation known, including Millikan, but we can’t stop three or four million tons of it a second. It’s not stopping it. Anything will do that.

  It’s a problem we’ve never before attempted—the problem of handling it after it’s stopped.”

  “We’ll stop it and handle it, somehow,” determined Mackay.

  Bums gave up. Mackay meant it, so that was the new problem. It was obviously impossible, Burns knew, but so was atomic power, evidently. They’d ran against all the blind alleys in the universe seeking that, so they might as well try a few more in a different direction.

  Malcolm threw himself into that problem with all the keenness and determination he had shown through fifty-five years of active research on the main line. This was just another obstacle on the main track. It stood between him and the Great Secret.

  He experimented a little with photo-electric cells, because he felt the way to do it was to turn the heat into electric energy. Electricity is the only form of energy that can he stepped up or down. Radiant energy can he broken down from X ray to ultra-violet, to blue to red, to infra-heat. But it can’t possibly be built up. Electricity can be built up or transformed down at will. So Mackay tried to turn heat into electricity.

  He wasn’t long in seeing the hopelessness of photo-cells. They absorbed some of the radiant energy as electricity, but about ninety-five percent turned into straight molecular motion, known as heat, just as it did anywhere else.

  Then he tried super-mirrors and gave up within three months. That was the wrong way. So it must be some way of turning molecular motion of heat into electric power.

  It was like threading the way through a maze. You found all the blind alleys first, then there were only the right paths left. So he started on molecular motion-electricity transformations. He tried thermo-couple metals. They worked only when you had a cool place. A cool place! That was what he was trying to get. So he quit that.

  Then he got mixed up with hysteresis. He was experimenting with magnets and alternating current and that gave him the right lead. He developed thermlectrium nearly a year and a half later, in 2049, of course.

  The first fragment of the new alloy was put in the coil, and heat-treated till the proper conditioning had been obtained, and the secret of the heat-treating is the whole secret, really. And finally it was taken out. It was dull, silvery gray, rather heavy, being nickel-iron-cobalt-carbon steel.

  It looked like any of a thousand thousand other alloys, felt like any of them then. But they put it in the closed coil. In fifteen seconds dew formed on it, in twenty, frost, and the coil was getting hot, a current of fifty amperes flowing through it. Mackay beamed on it with joy. The obstacle had been removed! The way to the Sun was clear.

  He announced his plans now to the news agencies, and to the Baldwin Rocket Foundry Co. They agreed to build him a ship according to his plans—and he made up his famous plans.

  Thermlectrium is a magnetic alloy, the unique property really being that its crystals are of almost exactly uniform size. W
hen a magnet is turned end for end in a coil of wire, when the magnetic polarity is reversed, a current is induced in the circuit, at the expense of the energy which turned the magnet.

  In any permanent magnet, the crystals are tiny, individual magnets, all lined up with their north poles pointing the same way. In magnetized steel, if the bar is heated, the heat-motion of the molecules turns some of them around, with the result that the magnetism is lost. In thermlectrium, even at low temperatures, the crystals turn—but they all turn together. The result is the same as though the bar had been inverted. A current is induced in the surrounding coil. And, of course, the energy which inverts the magnet, and drives the current of electricity, is the molecular motion known as heat. Heat was conquered!

  Dr. Mackay drove his plans on to rapid completion. Burns insisted on going, and Mackay could not dissuade him.

  The plans were strange. They were enough to dissuade any normal man. Only such a fanatic as Dr. Mackay really was, and as Burns had become, could have imagined them. Either that, or a man with colossal self-conceit. The Prometheus was to leave from Luna. Then she was to circle down toward the Sun, down very, very nearly one hundred million miles till she was within three million miles of the million-mile globe of incandescent fury, and stop her fall by going into a close, circular orbit.

  That means less, today. No one had ever imagined attempting anything like that. Houston, who had circled the Sun, had actually merely swung in on a comet’s orbit, and let his momentum carry him away again. That wasn’t difficult. But to break the vast, parabolic orbit a body would naturally attain in falling from Earth toward the Sun would require every pound of fuel the Prometheus could carry and break free of Luna.

  The Prometheus could set up her orbit about the Sun. That was going to be easy. But they couldn’t possibly pull loose with any known power. Only atomic power could do it. When and if they found it!