Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  In the meantime Bill kept his reserves, a picked corps of a hundred men (the same that had accompanied Hart and myself in our fight with the Han squadron) in the air, divided about equally among the “kite-tails” of four ships.

  A final roll call, by units, companies, divisions and functions, established the fact that all our forces were in position. No Han activity was reported, and no Han broadcasts indicated any suspicion of our expedition. Nor was there any indication that the Sinsings had any knowledge of the fate in store for them. The idling of rep-ray generators was reported from the center of their camp, obviously those of the ships the Hans had given them—the price of their treason to their race.

  Again I gave the word, and Hearn passed on the order to his subordinates.

  Far below us, and several miles to the right and left, the two barrage lines made their appearance. From the great height to which we had risen, they appeared like lines of brilliant, winking lights, and the detonations were muffled by the distances into a sort of rumbling, distant thunder. Hearn and his assistants were very busy: measuring, calculating, and snapping out ultrophone orders to unit commanders that resulted in the straightening of lines and the closing of gaps in the barrage.

  The White Division Boss reported the utmost confusion in the Sinsing organization. They were, as might be expected, an inefficient, loosely disciplined gang, and repeated broadcasts for help to neighboring gangs. Ignoring the fact that the Mongolians had not used explosives for many generations, they nevertheless jumped at the conclusion that they were being raided by the Hans. Their frantic broadcasts persisted in this thought, despite the nervous electrophonic inquiries of the Hans themselves, to whom the sound of the battle was evidently audible, and who were trying to locate the trouble.

  At this point, the swooper I had sent south toward the city went into action as a diversion, to keep the Hans at home. Its “kite-tail” loaded with long-range gunners, using the most highly explosive rockets we had, hung invisible in the darkness of the sky and bombarded the city from a distance of about five miles. With an entire city to shoot at, and the object of creating as much commotion therein as possible, regardless of actual damage, the gunners had no difficulty in hitting the mark. I could see the glow of the city and the stabbing flashes of exploding rockets. In the end, the Hans, uncertain as to what was going on, fell back on a defensive policy, and shot their “hell cylinder,” or wall of upturned disintegrator rays into operation. That, of course, ended our bombardment of them. The rays were a perfect defense, disintegrating our rockets as they were reached.

  If they had not sent out ships before turning on the rays, and if they had none within sufficient radius already in the air, all would be well.

  I queried Garlin on this, but he assured me Yellow Intelligence reported no indications of Han ships nearer than 800 miles. This would probably give us a free hand for a while, since most of their instruments recorded only imperfectly or not at all, through the death wall.

  Requisitioning one of the viewplates of the headquarters ship, and the services of an expert operator, I instructed him to focus on our lines below. I wanted a close-up of the men in action.

  He began to manipulate his controls and chaotic shadows moved rapidly across the plate, fading in and out of focus, until he reached an adjustment that gave me a picture of the forest floor, apparently 100 feet wide, with the intervening branches and foliage of the trees appearing like shadows that melted into reality a few feet above the ground.

  I watched one man setting up his long-gun with skillful speed. His lips pursed slightly as though he were whistling, as he adjusted the tall tripod on which the long tube was balanced. Swiftly he twirled the knobs controlling the aim and elevation of his piece. Then, lifting a belt of ammunition from the big box, which itself looked heavy enough to break down the spindly tripod, he inserted the end of it in the lock of his tube and touched the proper combination of buttons.

  Then he stepped aside, and occupied himself with peering carefully through the trees ahead. Not even a tremor shook the tube, but I knew that at intervals of something less than a second, it was discharging small projectiles which, traveling under their own continuously reduced power, were arching into the air, to fall precisely five miles ahead and explode with the force of eight-inch shells, such as we used in the First World War.

  Another gunner, fifty feet to the right of him, waved a hand and called out something to him. Then, picking up his own tube and tripod, he gauged the distance between the trees ahead of him, and the height of their lowest branches, and bending forward a bit, flexed his muscles and leaped lightly, some twenty-five feet. Another leap took him another twenty feet or so, where he began to set up his piece.

  I ordered my observer then to switch to the barrage itself. He got a close focus on it, but this showed little except a continuous series of blinding flashes, which, from the viewplate, lit up the entire interior of the ship. An eight-hundred-foot focus proved better. I had thought that some of our French and American artillery of the 20th Century had achieved the ultimate in mathematical precision of fire, but I had never seen anything to equal the accuracy of that line of terrific explosions as it moved steadily forward, mowing down trees as a scythe cuts grass (or used to 500 years ago), literally churning up the earth and the splintered, blasted remains of the forest giants, to a depth of from ten to twenty feet.

  By now the two curtains of fire were nearing each other, lines of vibrant, shimmering, continuous, brilliant destruction, inevitably squeezing the panic-stricken Sinsings between them.

  Even as I watched, a group of them, who had been making a futile effort to get their three rep-ray machines into the air, abandoned their efforts, and rushed forth into the milling mob.

  I queried the Control Boss sharply on the futility of this attempt of theirs, and learned that the Hans, apparently in doubt as to what was going on, had continued to “play safe,” and broken off their power broadcast, after ordering all their own ships east of the Alleghenies to the ground, for fear these ships they had traded to the Sinsings might be used against them.

  Again I turned to my viewplate, which was still focussed on the central section of the Sinsing works. The confusion of the traitors was entirely that of fear, for our barrage had not yet reached them.

  Some of them set up their long-guns and fired at random over the barrage line, then gave it up. They realized that they had no target to shoot at, no way of knowing whether our gunners were a few hundred feet or several miles beyond it.

  Their ultrophone men, of whom they did not have many, stood around in tense attitudes, their helmet phones strapped around their ears, nervously fingering the tuning controls at their belts. Unquestionably they must have located some of our frequencies, and overheard many of our reports and orders. But they were confused and disorganized. If they had an Ultrophone Boss they evidently were not reporting to him in an organized way.

  They were beginning to draw back now before our advancing fire. With intermittent desperation, they began to shoot over our barrage again, and the explosions of their rockets flashed at widely scattered points beyond. A few took distance “pot shots.”

  Oddly enough it was our own forces that suffered the first casualties in the battle. Some of these distance shots by chance registered hits, while our men were under strict orders not to exceed their barrage distances.

  Seen upon the ultroscope viewplate, the battle looked as though it were being fought in daylight, perhaps on a cloudy day, while the explosions of the rockets appeared as flashes of extra brilliance.

  The two barrage lines were not more than five hundred feet apart when the Sinsings resorted to tactics we had not foreseen. We noticed first that they began to lighten themselves by throwing away extra equipment. A few of them in their excitement threw away too much, and shot suddenly into the air. Then a scattering few floated up gently, followed by increasing numbers, while still others, preserving a weight balance, jumped toward the closing barrages and le
aped high, hoping to clear them. Some succeeded. We saw others blown about like leaves in a windstorm, to crumple and drift slowly down, or else to fall into the barrage, their belts blown from their bodies.

  However, it was not part of our plan to allow a single one of them to escape and find his way to the Hans. I quickly passed the word to Bill Hearn to have the alternate men in his line raise their barrages and heard him bark out a mathematical formula to the Unit Bosses.

  We backed off our ships as the explosions climbed into the air in stagger formation until they reached a height of three miles. I don’t believe any of the Sinsings who tried to float away to freedom succeeded.

  But we did know later, that a few who leaped the barrage got away and ultimately reached Nu-yok.

  It was those who managed to jump the barrage who gave us the most trouble. With half of our long-guns turned aloft, I foresaw we would not have enough to establish successive ground barrages and so ordered the barrage back two miles, from which positions our “curtains” began to close in again, this time, however, gauged to explode, not on contact, but thirty feet in the air. This left little chance for the Sinsings to leap either over or under it.

  Gradually, the two barrages approached each other until they finally met, and in the grey dawn the battle ended.

  Our own casualties amounted to forty-seven men in the ground forces, eighteen of whom had been slain in hand to hand fighting with the few of the enemy who managed to reach our lines, and sixty-two in the crew and “kite-tail” force of swooper No. 4, which had been located by one of the enemy’s ultroscopes and brought down with long-gun fire.

  Since nearly every member of the Sinsing Gang had, so far as we knew, been killed, we considered the raid a great success.

  It had, however, a far greater significance than this. To all of us who took part in the expedition, the effectiveness of our barrage tactics definitely established a confidence in our ability to overcome the Hans.

  As I pointed out to Wilma:

  “It has been my belief all along, dear, that the American explosive rocket is a far more efficient weapon than the disintegrator ray of the Hans, once we can train all our gangs to use it systematically and in co-ordinated fashion. As a weapon in the hands of a single individual, shooting at a mark in direct line of vision, the rocket-gun is inferior in destructive power to the dis ray, except as its range may be a little greater. The trouble is that to date it has been used only as we used our rifles and shot guns in the 20th Century. The possibilities of its use as artillery, in laying barrages that advance along the ground, or climb into the air, are tremendous.

  “The dis ray inevitably reveals its source of emanation. The rocket gun does not. The dis ray can reach its target only in a straight line. The rocket may be made to travel in an arc, over intervening obstacles, to an unseen target.

  “Nor must we forget that our ultronists now are promising us a perfect shield against the dis ray in inertron.”

  “I tremble though, Tony dear, when I think of the horrors that are ahead of us. The Hans are clever. They will develop defenses against our new tactics. And they are sure to mass against us not only the full force of their power in America, but the united forces of the World Empire. They are a cowardly race in one sense, but clever as the very Devils in Hell, and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency.”

  “Nevertheless,” I prophesied, “the Finger of Doom points squarely at them today, and unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shall live to see America blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth.”

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1928 by Experimenter Publishing Co., Inc.

  SCIENCE FICTION ON RADIO, by Tim DeForest

  Before the Internet—before MP3s and iPhones—before TV, there was radio.

  The Golden Age of Radio began in the 1920s, when the formation of NBC and CBS made national broadcasting possible. It ended in 1962, when the last network dramatic series was cancelled after television had driven a stake through the heart of the medium.

  During those four decades, radio was a primary source of entertainment for the American populace, rivaled only by motion pictures and pulp magazines. Some programs were so popular that movie theaters would schedule showings around them rather than try to compete. It was for radio that the situation comedy and the soap opera were created. Detective shows and Westerns were also very popular. It was a medium which by its very nature demanded its audience use their own imaginations. Each person listening did their own set and character designs to match the dialogue and sound effects. Radio forced its listeners to pay attention and rewarded them with storytelling that could not help but be immersive.

  Science fiction, therefore, was a perfect match for radio.

  Many early science fiction shows on radio were aimed primarily at children. Flash Gordon, based on Alex Raymond’s visually brilliant comic strip, had a brief run on radio in 1935. Buck Rogers first appeared in a pair of novellas written by Philip Francis Nowlan, published in Amazing Stories magazine in 1928 and 1929. This later became a comic strip, also written by Nowlan, before coming to radio in 1932. Buck remained sporadically on the air through 1947, usually as a serial running for 15 minutes on weekday afternoons, with each episode ending in a cliffhanger.

  Both of these shows were low on accurate science—in Buck Rogers’ universe, for instance, most of the planets in the Solar System and many of the moons have breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. Buck Rogers was known for the extraordinary number of wildly unlikely super-scientific devices that would play a role in the adventures. Rocket pistols and anti-gravity belts were joined by Thermal Radiation Projectors, Flexo-Impervium metal, Electro-Hypno Mentalo-Phones, Molecular Expansion Beam Projectors, Psychic Restriction Rays and Gyro-Cosmic Relativators.

  The most successful (both commercially and artistically) science fiction show aimed at children was The Adventures of Superman, based on the extremely popular comic book character.

  The Man of Steel came to radio in 1940 and remained there for eleven years. Like many children’s shows of that era, it was a serial for most of its run, broadcast on weekday afternoons after kids had gotten home from school. Bud Collyer played the title role until 1950, using a mild tenor voice when he was Clark Kent, then switching (often in mid-sentence) to a deep bass voice when he became Superman. (Collyer also voiced Superman in a series of animated cartoons produced in the 1940s.)

  Superman was fortunate in the quality of writers, directors and actors who worked on the show. All were talented professionals who understood how to tell stories effectively on radio. The cast knew that even though the subject matter was a little goofy, it was important to play the roles seriously. The writers were able to construct logical plots that generated suspense and excitement. The sound effects were particularly good—the whoosh of Superman taking flight, created by mixing the sound of an artillery shell with that of a wind tunnel, is still one of the most recognizable sounds in popular culture.

  On radio, Superman’s most common opponents were organized crime bosses, con artists and crooked politicians. But radio’s inherently unlimited special effects budget allowed the show to adapt science fiction elements into its plots beyond that of its main character. One story arc involved an undersea city used as a hideout by gangsters. Another took Superman to a distant planet to battle a ruthless dictator. The Man of Steel once foiled an invasion of America by a more local dictator who had acquired a fleet of atomic powered airplanes. Another adventure took place on the moon, which turned out to have an atmosphere populated by giant pterodactyls, as well as an underground civilization threatened by a large horde of carnivorous ants.

  The show’s most famous story arc, broadcast in 1945, involved a mad scientist who was able to distill a piece of kryptonite into liquid and inject it into the veins of a fanatical Nazi. The Nazi became the Atom Man, able to shoot destructive lightning out of his hands and cause Superman to weaken just by coming close to him.

 
; Yes, it was all silly and in violation of more than one Law of Physics. But, by golly, it was (and still is) fun to hear.

  Adult shows dabbled in science fiction less frequently, but often did so effectively. Sometimes, perhaps, too effectively.

  The Mercury Theatre on the Air, starring Orson Welles, began its run during the summer of 1938, specializing in adaptations of classic novels. For the October 30 episode, Welles decided to do H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, updating it to modern day and formatting the first half of the show as a news broadcast. Welles simply thought this was an effective way to give a sense of urgency to the story—there was no intention to deliberately fool anyone. In fact, the show clearly announced right up front that it was presenting War of the Worlds.

  But many listeners were tuned in to a more popular variety show playing on another network. A fair proportion of these switched channels when a singer they didn’t care for began to perform, stumbling across an interesting news item about a meteor strike in New Jersey. When alien fighting machines rose up out of the meteor crater and began spraying the countryside with heat rays and poison gas, approximately 1.2 million listeners thought it was really happening. A nationwide panic followed.

  One reason for this was the expertise with which the show was done. The actors played their parts perfectly (including one of them providing a spot on imitation of President Roosevelt) and the pacing of the story was very good. Consequently, few listeners noticed that events which would have stretched over hours or days were compressed into a few minutes. Amazingly, the panicky flight from cities to escape the Martians didn’t result in any injuries. In the end, the broadcast jump-started Orson Welles’ movie career and proved the power that good radio drama had over the public’s imagination.