“This won’t take much of your time. I want you to locate Braxn and give him a message.”
”Why can’t you find him yourself?
“It’s a rather large planet, Brohass, and he’s thrown up a strong communication block.”
“We’re on a planet? Which one?”
The captain thought a long string of figures. “They call it ‘Earth.’”
“I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with it. Please open your mind and let me extract the relevant details.”
The captain did so, with chagrin. Brohass could easily have asked the computer, but his people were born voyeurs, and never would pass up a chance to probe another’s mind.
“Interesting, savage—I can see why he was drawn to it. Incidentally, your treatment of Llarvl was shameful. In his place, you would have lost control of my son just as quickly.
“And your knowledge, captain, of the people on this planet, is encyclopedic, but imperfect. You misunderstand both catechism and tautology, you used the expression coup de grace where coup de theatre would have been more fitting, and your Middle German would send a Middle German into convulsions. Furthermore, you are an ambulatory vegetable.
“To your credit, however, you were correct in assessing my son’s plans. He is now in possession of a minute of ‘time,’ as they say, on the planet’s communication network.
“Funny idea, that; beings possessing time rather than the other way around ...”
“Brohass!”
“Captain?”
“Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“Interfere with my child’s development?”
“He’s going to kill several billion entities!”
“Yes ... he probably is. Mammals, though. You have to admit they’d probably never make anything of themselves, anyhow.”
“Brohass! You’ve got to stop him!”
“I’m pulling your spindly leg, captain. I’ll talk to him. Just once, just once I would like to have a captain who could take a joke. You know, you vegetable people are unique in the civilized universe in your. . .”
“How much time do you have?”
“Oh, two thousand three hundred thirty-eight years, four days and . . .”
“No, no! How much time before Braxn gets on the air?”
“If Braxn got on the air, he would fall to the ground, even as you and I.”
The captain made a strangling noise.
“Oh, don’t bust a root. I have several seconds yet.” Brohass reverted to his native formlessness and sent a piercing tendril of thought through his son’s massive block.
“Braxn! This is your father. Will you slow down just a little bit?”
Braxn concentrated, and the bustling studio slowed down and froze into a tableau of suspended action. “Yes, Father. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Well, first, tell me what you’re doing in a television studio.”
“At the minute of maximum saturation, I’m going to broadcast the Vegan death-sign. That’s all.”
“That’s all. You’ll kill everybody.”
“Well, not everybody. Just those who are watching television. Oh, yes, and I’ve worked out a phonetic equivalent for simultaneous radio transmission. Get a few more that way, if it works.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can do it, son. But, Braxn, that’s what I wanted to think to you about.”
“You’re going to try to think me out of it.”
“Well, if you want to put it that way...”
“I bet that joke of captain put you up to it.”
“You know that that vegetable who walks like a man...”
“Hey; that’s a good one, Father. When’d you—”
“—neither he nor anyone else on this tin can could make me do anything that I...” Brohass sighed. “Look, Braxn. You’re poaching on a game preserve. Worse, shooting fish in a barrel. With a fission bomb, yet. How can you get any aesthetic satisfaction out of that?”
“Father, I know that quantity is no substitute for quality. But there are so many here!”
“—and you want to be poet laureate, right?” Brohass snorted mentally.
“There’s something wrong in that? This will be the biggest epic since Jkdir exterminated the . . .”
“Braxn, Braxn; my son—you’re temporizing. You know what’s wrong, don’t you? Surely you can feel it.”
Braxn fell silent as he tried to think of a convincing counterargument. He knew what was coming.
“The fact is that you are maturing rapidly. It’s time to put away your blocks—sure, you can go through with this trivial exercise. But you won’t be poet laureate. You’ll be dunce of the millennium, prize buffoon. You’re too old for this nonsense anymore; I know it, you know, and the whole race would know it eventually. You wouldn’t be able to show your mind anywhere in the civilized universe.”
He knew that his father was telling the truth. He had known for several days that he was ready for the next stage of development, but his judgment was blinded by the enormity of the canvas he had before him.
“Correct. The next stage awaits you, and I can assure you that it will be even more satisfying than the aesthetic. You have a nice planet here, and you might as well use it as the base of your operations. The captain is easily cowed—after I assure him that you no longer wish to, shall we say, immortalize these people in verse, he’ll be only too glad to move on without you. We’ll be back to pick you up in a century or so. Good-bye, son.”
“Good-bye, Father.”
The filament of the green light on the camera facing him was just starting to glow. He had something less than a hundredth of a second.
Extending his mental powers to the limit, he traced down every network and advertising executive who knew of the deal he had made. From the minds of hundreds of people he erased a million memories, substituting harmless ones. Two hundred pounds of gold disappeared back into thin air. Books were balanced.
Everyone in the studio had the same memory: Five minutes ago a police-escorted black limousine screeched to a halt out front, and this man, familiar face lined and pale with shock, stormed in with a covey of Secret Service men and commandeered the studio.
Braxn filled out his face and body with paunch. The man who owned this face died painlessly, as soon as Braxn had assimilated the contents of his brain. The body disappeared; his family and associates “remembered” that he was in New York for the week.
A finger of thought pushed into another man’s heart and stopped it. Convincing—he was overworked and overweight, anyhow. But to be on the safe side, Braxn adjusted his catabolism to make it look as if he had died ten minutes earlier. He manufactured appropriate cover stories.
All this accomplished, Braxn let time resume its original rate of flow.
The light winked green. A voice offstage said, “Ladies and gentlemen”— what else could one say—”the, uh, vice president of the United States.”
Braxn assumed a tragic and weary countenance. “It is my sad duty to inform the nation…”
Nine stages in the development of a G’drellian, from adolescence to voluntary termination.
The first stage is aesthetic, appreciation of an Art alien to any human, save a de Sade or a Hitler.
The second stage is power...
~ * ~
Joe Haldeman
J
oe Haldeman has a mixed relationship with writing advice, and for good reason—having sold the first two stories he ever wrote to Galaxy and The Twilight Zone, and his first novel to the first publisher he showed it to, Haldeman is living proof that sometimes you can succeed right out of the gate, with nothing more than raw talent and effort. Yet as a longstanding writing teacher everywhere from MIT to the prestigious Clarion writers’ workshops, Haldeman still does his best to teach the rest of us just what it is about his own writing that has brought him such success.
And success it is, by anyone’s standards. The science fiction classic The Forever War, published just three years
after his mainstream debut novel War Year, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Ditmar awards, and is held up alongside Heinlein’s Starship Troopers by many fans as the best science fiction war novel of all time, drawing heavily on Haldeman’s own wartime experiences as a combat engineer in Vietnam. It sequel, The Forever Peace, won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards—the first such “triple crown” in more than two decades. Along the way, Haldeman’s authored more than thirty other books and graphic novels, picking up several more Hugos and Nebulas, multiple Rhyslings for SF poetry, a World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, making him one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers in the genre.
Yet even the best have to start somewhere, and before the military service that would come to influence Haldeman’s most famous works, there was “Out of Phase,” in which a young author introduces us to the myriad and fascinating alien races inside his head...
Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?
I guess most of the humor holds up. And the horror. (It was written before I went to Vietnam, interestingly enough, though rewritten afterward.)
If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?
I couldn’t write this story today, because I’m not 23 years old anymore. If I were to write a similar story, it would be more tightly focused; there are a few pages where I obviously didn’t know where the story was going. But that doesn’t mean that I can go to those pages and fix them, because the flawed passages generated the rest of the story, for better or for worse. The actual rewrite of “Out of Phase” is the novel Camouflage, written some thirty years later.
What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?
The story was inspired by a writing class deadline. It started with a detailed description of a pool game, which I later cut, at editor Fred Pohl’s suggestion. It was initially published in Galaxy magazine.
Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?
I’d just gotten back from Vietnam. The army gave you 30 days’ “compassionate leave,” and one thing I did with the time was retype the two SF stories I’d written in my last semester in college, and send them out. (The other one, “I of Newton,” eventually wound up as an episode on Twilight Zone.) It sold in a couple of months, and I realized that writing would be an important part of my life, if not a significant source of income.
How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?
My writing has gotten smoother, if not easier. I write almost every day, which was not true in the very beginning.
What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Listen to advice but don’t take it.
Any anecdotes regarding the story or your experiences as a fledgling writer?
An almost impossible coincidence . . . when this story was supposed to come out, August 1969 (for the September issue), we were traveling around in Mexico. We headed up toward St. Louis for the World Science Fiction Convention. Checked dozens of convenience stores and drug stores driving up through Texas and Oklahoma; no one had the current Galaxy. When I got to the convention, I found out why—the whole print run of the issue was stranded in a freight yard in New Jersey, so the magazine would go out to distributors late or not at all. I was devastated, of course; no one at the con saw my maiden effort.
Driving home to College Park, Maryland, we stopped one night to camp at Hungry Mother State Park in Virginia. There was one other camper, a guy who was sitting at a picnic table, reading a magazine in the light of a Coleman lantern.
It was the September 1969 Galaxy. I got all excited and told him I had a story in it. He thought I was nuts, but did agree that my driver’s license identified me as Joe Haldeman.
<
~ * ~
The Coldest Place
by Larry Niven
I
n the coldest place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it.
"See anything?" asked Eric.
"No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe."
"Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go."
I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.
I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them. Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared.
There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. Two years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the snow and out of the light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had suggested that they were only shadows.
I'd seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light. Something out there in the dark. Something huge…"Eric, you there?"
"Where would I go?" he mocked me.
"Well," said I, "if I watched every word I spoke I'd never get anything said." All the same, I had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn't be going anywhere unless the ship went along.
"Touché," said Eric. "Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?"
"Very little." In fact, the frozen air didn't even melt under the pressure of my boots.
"They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light." He knew I hadn't seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet.
"Okay, I'll climb that mountain and turn it off for a while."
I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the moon, without fear of a rock's edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.
My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared.
I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth. The air renewer sucked air and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realised I was sweating. The suit was almost too well insulated.
Our ion-drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving very fast, and disappeared as it hit the planet's shadow. Time was passing. The charge in my pipe burned out and I dumped it.
"Try the light," said Eric.
I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around; a white fairy landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking, looking…and saw it.
Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp. "The collector!" Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could
find it in the collector's peeper. The collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now.
After a moment I asked, "Should I come back?"
"Certainly not. Stay there. I can't bring the collector back to the ship! You'll have to wait and carry it back with you."
The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector's rocket went after it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter, "Got it." The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.
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