The Van Rijn Method

by Poul Anderson

"It was plenty," I answered. "We've contacted the head of the Chinese-American committee, and he likes our notion. But since it's on behalf of the schools, he wants your okay."

  "'We'?" My counselor frowned. "You have a partner?"

  "Chaos, sir, he is my project. What's a Chinese parade without a dragon? And what fake dragon can possibly be as good as a live one? Now we take this Wodenite, and just give him a wig and false whiskers, claws over his hoofs, lacquer on his scales—"

  "A nonhuman?" The frown turned into a scowl. "Jim, you disappoint me. You disappoint me sorely. I expected better from you, some dedication, some application of your talents. In a festival devoted to your race, you want to feature an alien! No, I'm afraid I cannot agree—"

  "Sir, please wait till you've met Adzel." I jumped from my chair, palmed the hall door, and called: "C'mon in."

  He did, meter after meter of him, till the office was full of scales, tail, spikes, and fangs. He seized Snyder's hand in a gentle but engulfing grip, beamed straight into Snyder's face, and thundered: "How joyful I am at this opportunity, sir! What a way to express my admiration for terrestrial culture, and thus help glorify your remarkable species!"

  "Um, well, that is," the man said feebly.

  I had told Adzel that there was no reason to mention his being a pacifist. He continued: "I do hope you will approve Jimmy's brilliant idea, sir. To be quite frank, my motives are not unmixed. If I perform, I understand that the local restaurateurs' association will feed me during rehearsals. My stipend is exiguous and—" he licked his lips, two centimeters from Snyder's nose—"sometimes I get so hungry."

  He would tell only the strict, if not always the whole truth. I, having fewer compunctions, whispered in my counselor's ear: "He is kind of excitable, but he's perfectly safe if nobody frustrates him."

  "Well." Snyder coughed, backed away till he ran into a computer, and coughed again. "Well. Ah . . . yes. Yes, Jim, your concept is undeniably original. There is a—" he winced but got the words out—"a certain quality to it which suggests that you—" he strangled for a moment—"will go far in life."

  "You plan to record that opinion, do you not?" Adzel asked. "In Jimmy's permanent file? At once?"

  I hurried them both through the remaining motions. My friend, my girl, and her father had an appointment with the chairman of the board of the San Francisco Opera Company.

  The parade went off like rockets. Our delighted local merchants decided to revive permanently the ancient custom of celebrating the Lunar New Year. Adzel will star in that as long as he remains on Earth. In exchange—since he brings in more tourist credits than it costs—he has an unlimited meal ticket at the Silver Dragon Chinese Food and Chop Suey Palace.

  More significant was the production of Richard Wagner's Siegfried. At least, in his speech at the farewell performance, the governor of the Integrate said it was significant. "Besides the bringing back of a musical masterpiece too many centuries neglected," he pomped, "the genius of John Riefenstahl has, by his choice of cast, given the Festival of Man an added dimension. He has reminded us that, in seeking our roots and pride, we must never grow chauvinistic. We must always remember to reach forth the hand of friendship to our brother beings throughout God's universe," who might otherwise be less anxious to come spend their money on Earth.

  The point does have its idealistic appeal, though. Besides, the show was a sensation in its own right. For years to come, probably, the complete Ring cycle will be presented here and there around the Commonwealth; and Freeman Riefenstahl can be guest conductor, and Adzel can sing Fafner, at top salary, any time they wish.

  I won't see the end of that, because I won't be around. When everything had been settled, Adzel, Betty, and I threw ourselves a giant feast in his new apartment. After his fifth magnum of champagne, he gazed a trifle blurrily across the table and said to me:

  "Jimmy, my affection for you, my earnest wish to make a fractional return of your kindness, has hitherto been baffled."

  "Aw, nothing to mention," I mumbled while he stopped a volcanic hiccough.

  "At any rate." Adzel wagged a huge finger. "He would be a poor friend who gave a dangerous gift." He popped another cork and refilled our glasses and his stein. "That is, Jimmy, I was aware of your ambition to get into deep space, and not as a plyer of routine routes but as a discoverer, a pioneer. The question remained, could you cope with unpredictable environments?"

  I gaped at him. The heart banged in my breast. Betty caught my hand.

  "You have convinced me you can," Adzel said. "True, Freeman Snyder may not give you his most ardent recommendation to the Academy. No matter. The cleverness and, yes, toughness with which you handled this problem—those convinced me, Jimmy, you are a true survivor type."

  He knocked back half a liter before tying the star-spangled bow knot on his package: "Being here on a League scholarship, I have League connections. I have been in correspondence. A certain Master Merchant I know will soon be in the market for another apprentice and accepts what I have told him about you. Are you interested?"

  I collapsed into Betty's arms. She says she'll find a way to follow me.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Three-Cornered Wheel

  NOTE OF LEITMOTIF

  Anybody not a scientific illiterate knew it was impossible to get power from the atomic nucleus. Then uranium fission came along.

  It was easy to show that energy projectors—the "ray guns" of popular fiction—must necessarily be hotter at the source than at the target, and thus were altogether impractical. Then someone invented the laser.

  Obviously spaceships must expel mass to gain velocity, and their crews must undergo acceleration pressure at all times when they were not in free fall, and must never demean themselves with daydreams about maneuvers akin to those of a water boat or an aircraft. Then people were iconoclastic enough to discover how to generate artificial positive and negative gravity fields.

  The stars were plainly out of reach, unless one was willing to plod along slower than light. Einstein's equations proved it beyond the ghost of a doubt. Then the quantum hyperjump was found, and suddenly faster-than-light ships were swarming across this arm of the galaxy.

  One after another, the demonstrated impossibilities have evaporated, the most basic laws of nature have turned out to possess clauses in fine print, the prison bars of our capabilities have gone down before irreverent hacksaws. He would be rash indeed who claimed that there is any absolutely certain knowledge or any forever unattainable goal.

  I am just that kind of fool. I hereby state, flatly and unequivocally, that some facts of life are eternal. They are human facts, to be sure. Mutatis mutandis, they probably apply to each intelligent race on each inhabited planet in the universe; but I do not insist on that point. What I do declare is that man, the child of Earth, lives by certain principles which are immutable.

  They include:

  Parkinson's Laws: (First) Work increases to occupy all organization available to do it. (Second) Expenditures rise with income.

  Sturgeon's Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

  Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will.

  The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: Everything takes longer and costs more.

  My assertion is not so unguarded as may appear, because characteristics like these form part of my definition of man.

  —Vance Hall

  Commentaries on the Philosophy

  of Noah Arkwright

  THE THREE-CORNERED WHEEL

  I

  "No!"

  Rebo Legnor's-Child, Marchwarden of Gilrigor, sprang back from the picture as if it had come alive. "What are you thinking of?" he gasped. "Burn that thing! Now!" One hand lifted shakily toward the fire in the great brazier, whose flames relieved a little the gloom of the audience chamber. "Over there. I saw nothing and you showed me nothing. Do you understand?"

  David Falkayn let fall the sheet of paper on which he had made the sketch. It fluttered to the table, slowly thr
ough an air pressure a fourth again as great as Earth's. "What—" His voice broke in a foolish squeak. Annoyance at that crowded out fear. He braced his shoulders and regarded the Ivanhoan squarely. "What is the matter?" he asked. "It is just a drawing."

  "Of the malkino." Rebo shuddered. "And you not even belonging to our kind, let alone a Consecrate."

  Falkayn stared at him, as if anyone of Terrestrial descent could read expressions on that unhuman face. Seen by the dull red sunlight slanting through narrow windows, Rebo looked more like a lion than a man, and not very much like either. The body was only roughly anthropoid: bipedal, two-armed, but short and thick in the torso, long and thick in the limbs, with a forward-leaning posture that reduced a sheer two meters of height to approximately Falkayn's level. The three fingers had one more joint than a man's, and narrow black nails; the thumbs were on the opposite side of the hands from those of Genus Homo; the feet were digitigrade. Mahogany fur covered the entire skin, but each hair bore tiny barbs, so that the effect was of rough plumage. The head was blocky and round-eared, the face flat, noseless, with breathing apertures below the angle of the great jaws and enormous green eyes above an astonishingly sensitive, almost womanlike mouth. But whatever impression that conveyed was overwhelmed by the tawny leonine mane which framed the countenance and spilled down the muscular back, and by the tufted tail that lashed the ankles. A pair of short scaly trousers and a leather baldric, from which hung a wicked-looking ax, enhanced the wild effect.

  Nevertheless, Falkayn knew, inside that big skull was a brain as good as his own. The trouble was, it had not evolved on Earth. And when, in addition to every inborn strangeness, the mind was shaped by a culture that no man really understood . . . how much communication was possible?

  The boy wet his lips. The dry cold air of Ivanhoe had chapped them. He didn't lay a hand on his blaster, but he became acutely aware of its comforting drag at his hip. Somehow he found words:

  "I beg your pardon if I have given offense. You will understand that foreigners may often transgress through ignorance. Can you tell me what is wrong?"

  Rebo's taut crouch eased a trifle. His eyes, seeing further into the red end of the spectrum than Falkayn's, probed corners which were shadows to the visitor. No one else stood on the floor or behind the grotesquely carved stone pillars. Only the yellow flames acrackle in the brazier, the acridity of smoke from unearthly wood, stirred in the long room. Outside—it seemed suddenly very far away—Falkayn heard the endless wind of the Gilrigor uplands go booming.

  "Yes," the Marchwarden said, "I realize you acted unwittingly. And you, for your part, should not doubt that I remain friendly to you—not just because you are my guest at this moment, but because of the fresh breath you have brought to this stagnant land of ours."

  "That we have perhaps brought," Falkayn corrected. "The future depends on whether we live or die, remember. And that in turn depends on your help." Well put! he congratulated himself. Schuster ought to have heard that. Maybe then he'd stop droning at me about how I'll never make merchant status if I don't learn to handle words.

  "I will not be able to help you if they flay me," Rebo answered sharply. "Burn that thing, I say."

  Falkayn squinted through the murk at his drawing. It showed a large flatbed wagon with eight wheels, to be drawn by a team of twenty fastigas. All the way from the spaceship to this castle, he had been aglow with visions of how awed and delighted the noble would be. He had seen himself, no longer Davy-this-and-Davy-that, hey-boy-c'mere, apprentice and unpaid personal servant to Master Polesotechnician Martin Schuster: but Falkayn of Hermes, a Prometheus come to Larsum with the gift of the wheel. What's gone wrong? he thought wildly; and then, with the bitterness common at his seventeen years: Why does everything always go wrong?

  Nevertheless he crossed the floor of inlaid shells and cast the paper into the brazier. It flared up and crumbled to ash.

  Turning, he saw that Rebo had relaxed. The Marchwarden poured himself a cupful of wine from a carafe on the table and tossed it off at a gulp. "Good," he rumbled. "I wish you could partake with me. It is distressful not to offer refreshment to a guest."

  "You know that your foods would poison my race," Falkayn said. "That is one reason why we must transport the workmaker from Gilrigor to our ship, and soon. Will you tell me what is bad about the device I have illustrated? It can be easily built. Its kind—wagons, we call them—were among the most important things my people ever invented. They had much to do with our becoming more than—"

  He checked himself just before he said "savages" or "barbarians." Rebo's hereditary job was to keep such tribes on their proper side of the Kasunian Mountains. Larsum was a civilized country, with agriculture, metallurgy, towns, roads, trade, a literate class.

  But no wheels. Burdens went on the backs of citizens or their animals, by boat, by travois, by sledge in winter—never on wheels. Now that he thought about it, Falkayn remembered that not even rollers were employed.

  "The idea is that round objects turn," he floundered.

  Rebo traced a sign in the air. "Best not to speak of it." He changed his mind with soldierly briskness. "However, we must. Very well, then. The fact is that the malkino is too holy to be put to base use. The penalty for transgressing this law is death by flaying, lest God's wrath fall on the entire land."

  Falkayn struggled with the language. The educator tapes aboard the What Cheer had given him fluency, but could not convey a better idea of semantic subtleties than the first expedition to Ivanhoe had gotten; and those men hadn't stayed many weeks. The word he mentally translated as "holy" implied more than dedication to spiritual purposes. There were overtones of potency, mana, and general ineffability. Never mind. "What does malkino mean?"

  "A . . . a roundedness. I may not draw it for you, only a Consecrate may do that. But it is something perfectly round."

  "Ah, I see. A circle, we would call it, or a sphere if solid. A wheel is circular. Well, I suppose we could make our wheels slightly imperfect."

  "No." The maned head shook. "Until the imperfection became so gross that the wheels would not work anyway, the thing is impossible. Even if the Consecrates would allow it—and I know quite well they will not, as much from hostility to you as from dogma—the peasants would rise in horror and butcher you." Rebo's eyes glowed in the direction of Falkayn's gun. "Yes, I realize you have powerful, fire-throwing weapons. But there are only four of you. What avail against thousands of warriors, shooting from the cover of hills and woods?"

  Falkayn hearkened back to what he had seen in Aesca, on his westward ride along the Sun's Way, and now in this stronghold. Architecture was based on sharp-cornered polygons. Furniture and utensils were square or oblong. The most ceremonial objects, like Rebo's golden wine goblet, went no further than to employ elliptical cross-sections, or mere arcs of true circles.

  He felt ill with dismay. "Why?" he choked. "What makes a . . . a figure . . . so holy?"

  "Well—" Rebo lowered himself uncomfortably to a chair, draping his tail over the rest across the back. He fiddled with his octagonal ax haft and didn't look at the other. "Well, ancient usage. I can read, of course, but I am no scholar. The Consecrates can tell you more. Still . . . the circle and the sphere are the signs of God. In a way, they are God. You see them in the sky. The sun and the moons are spheres. So is the world, however imperfect; and the Consecrates say that the planets have the same shape, and the stars are set inside the great ball of the universe. All the heavenly bodies move in circles. And, well, circle and sphere are the perfect shapes. Are they not? Everything perfect is a direct manifestation of God."

  Remembering a little about Classical Greek philosophy—even if the human colony on Hermes had broken away from Earth and established itself as a grand duchy, it remained proud of its heritage and taught ancient history in the schools—Falkayn could follow that logic. His impulse was to blurt: "You're wrong! No planet or star is a true globe, and orbits are ellipses, and your damned little red dwarf sun isn't the c
enter of the cosmos anyway. I've been out there and I know!" But Schuster had drilled enough caution into him that he checked himself. He'd accomplish nothing but to stiffen the enmity of the priests, and perhaps add the enmity of Rebo, who still wanted to be his friend.

  How could he prove a claim that went against three or four thousand years of tradition? Larsum was a single country, cut off by mountain, desert, ocean, and howling savages from the rest of the world. It had no more than the vaguest rumors of what went on beyond its borders. From Rebo's standpoint, the only reasonable supposition was that the furless aliens with the beaks above their mouths had flown here from some distant continent. Reviewing the first expedition's reports of how upset and indignant the Consecrates at Aesca had gotten when told that its ship came from the stars, how hotly they had denied the possibility, Schuster had cautioned his fellows to avoid that topic. The only thing which mattered was to get the hell off this planet before they starved to death.

  Falkayn's shoulders slumped. "My people have found in their travels that it does not pay to dispute the religious beliefs of others," he said. "Very well, I grant you wheels are forbidden. But then what can we do?"