Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The black ship loomed up. It was huge, as long as the Llanvabon and vastly thicker. The air lock did stand open. The two spacesuited men moved in and anchored themselves with magnetic-soled boots. The outer door closed. There was a rush of air and simultaneously the sharp quick tug of artificial gravity. Then the inner door opened.

  All was darkness. Tommy switched on his helmet light at the same instant as the skipper. Since the aliens saw by infrared, a white light would have been intolerable to them. The men’s helmet lights were, therefore, of the deep-red tint used to illuminate instrument panels so there will be no dazzling of eyes that must be able to detect the minutest speck of white light on a navigating vision plate. There were aliens waiting to receive them. They blinked at the brightness of the helmet lights. The space-phone receivers said in Tommy’s ear:

  “They say, sir, their skipper is waiting for you.”

  Tommy and the skipper were in a long corridor with a soft flooring underfoot. Their lights showed details of which every one was exotic.

  “I think I’ll crack my helmet, sir,” said Tommy.

  He did. The air was good. By analysis it was thirty percent oxygen instead of twenty for normal air on Earth, but the pressure was less. It felt just right. The artificial gravity, too, was less than that maintained on the Llanvabon. The home planet of the aliens would be smaller than Earth, and by the infrared data circling close to a nearly dead, dull-red sun. The air had smells in it. They were utterly strange, but not unpleasant.

  An arched opening. A ramp with the same soft stuff underfoot. Lights which actually shed a dim, dull-red glow about. The aliens had stepped up some of their illuminating equipment as an act of courtesy. The light might hurt their eyes, but it was a gesture of consideration which made Tommy even more anxious for his plan to go through.

  The alien skipper faced them with what seemed to Tommy a gesture of wryly humorous deprecation. The helmet phones said:

  “He says, sir, that he greets you with pleasure, but he has been able to think of only one way in which the problem created by the meeting of these two ships can be solved.”

  “He means a fight,” said the skipper. “Tell him I’m here to offer another choice.”

  The Llanvabon’s skipper and the skipper of the alien ship were face to face, but their communication was weirdly indirect. The aliens used no sound in communication. Their talk, in fact, took place on, microwaves and approximated telepathy. But they could not hear, in any ordinary sense of the word, so the skipper’s and Tommy’s speech approached telepathy, too, as far as they were concerned. When the skipper spoke, his space phone sent his words back to the Llanvabon, where the words were fed into the coder and short-wave equivalents sent back to the black ship. The alien skipper’s reply went to the Llanvabon and through the decoder, and was retransmitted by space phone in words read from the message frame. It was awkward, but it worked.

  * * * *

  The short and stocky alien skipper paused. The helmet phones relayed his translated, soundless reply.

  “He is anxious to hear, sir.”

  The skipper took off his helmet. He put his hands at his belt in a belligerent pose.

  “Look here!” he said truculently to the bald, strange creature in the unearthly red glow before him. “It looks like we have to fight and one batch of us get killed. We’re ready to do it if we have to. But if you win, we’ve got it fixed so you’ll never find out where Earth is, and there’s a good chance we’ll get you anyhow! II we win, we’ll be in the same fix. And if we win and go back home, our government will fit out a fleet and start hunting your planet. And if we find it we’ll be ready to blast it to hell! If you win, the same thing will happen to us! And it’s all foolishness! We’ve stayed here a month, and we’ve swapped information, and we don’t hate each other. There’s no reason for us to fight except for the rest of our respective races!”

  The skipper stopped for breath, scowling. Tommy Dort inconspicuously put his own hand on the belt of his spacesuit. He waited, hoping desperately that the trick would work.

  “He says, sir,” reported the helmet phones, “that all you say is true. But that his race has to be protected, just as you feel that yours must be.” “Naturally,” said the skipper angrily, “but the sensible thing to do is to figure out how to protect it! Putting its future up as a gamble in a fight is not sensible. Our races have to be warned of each other’s existence. That’s true. But each should have proof that the other doesn’t want to fight, but wants to be friendly. And we shouldn’t be able to find each other, but we should be able to communicate with each other to work out grounds for a common trust. If our governments want to be fools, let them! But we should give them the chance to make friends, instead of starting a space waxout of mutual funk!”

  Briefly, the space phone said:

  “He says that the difficulty is that of trusting each other now. With the possible existence of his race at stake, he cannot take any chance, and neither can you, of yielding an advantage.”

  “But my race,” boomed the skipper, glaring at the alien captain, “my race has an advantage now. We came here to your ship in atom-powered spacesuits! Before we left, we altered the drives! We can set off ten pounds of sensitized fuel apiece, right here in this ship, or it can be set off by remote control from our ship! It will be rather remarkable if your fuel store doesn’t blow up with us! In other words, if you don’t accept my proposal for a commonsense approach to this predicament, Dort and I blow up in an atomic explosion, and your ship will be wrecked if not destroyed—and the Llanvabon will be attacking with everything it’s got within two seconds after the blast goes off!”

  The captain’s room of the alien ship was a strange scene, with its dull-red illumination and the strange, bald, gill-breathing aliens watching the skipper and waiting for the inaudible translation of the harangue they could not hear. But a sudden tensity appeared in the air. A sharp, savage feeling of strain. The alien skipper made a gesture. The helmet phones hummed.

  “He says, sir, what is your proposal?”

  “Swap ships!” roared the skipper. “Swap ships and go on home! We can fix our instruments so they’ll do no trailing, he can do the same with his. We’ll each remove out star maps and records. We’ll each dismantle our weapons. The air will serve, and we’ll take their ship and they’ll take ours, and neither one can harm or trail the other, and each will carry home more information than can be taken otherwise! We can agree on this same Crab Nebula as a rendezvous when the double star has made another circuit, and if our people want to meet them they can do it, and if they are scared they can duck it! That’s my proposal! And he’ll take it, or Dort and I blow up their ship and the Llanvabon blasts what’s left!”

  He glared about him while he waited for the translation to reach the tense small stocky figures about him. He could tell when it came - because the tenseness changed. The figures stirred. They made gestures. One of them made convulsive movements. It lay down on the soft floor and kicked. Others leaned against its walls and shook.

  The voice in Tommy Dort’s helmet phones had been strictly crisp and professional, before, but now it sounded blankly amazed.

  “He says, sir, that it is a good joke. Because the two crew members he sent to our ship, and that you passed on the way, have their spacesuits stuffed with atomic explosives too, sir, and he intended to make the very same offer and threat! Of course he accepts, sir. Your ship is worth more to him than his own, and his is worth more to you than the Llanvabon. It appears, sir, to be a deal.”

  Then Tommy Dort realized what the convulsive movements of the aliens were. They were laughter.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t quite as simple as the skipper had outlined it. The actual working-out of the proposal was complicated. For three days the crews of the two ships were intermingled, the aliens learning the workings of the Llanvabon’s engines, and the men learning the controls of the black spaceship. It was a good joke—but it wasn’t all a joke. There were me
n on the black ship, and aliens on the Llanvabon, ready at an instant’s notice to blow up the vessels in question. And they would have done it in case of need, for which reason the need did not appear. But it was, actually, a better arrangement to have two expeditions return to two civilizations, under the current arrangement, than for either to return alone.

  There were differences, though. There was some dispute about the removal of records. In most cases the dispute was settled by the destruction of the records. There was more trouble caused by the Llanvabon’s books, and the alien equivalent of a ship’s library, containing works which approximated the novels of Earth. But those items were valuable to possible friendship, because they would show the two cultures, each to the other, from the viewpoint of normal citizens and without propaganda.

  But nerves were tense during those three days. Aliens unloaded and inspected the foodstuffs intended for the men on the black ship. Men transshipped the foodstuffs the aliens would need to return to their home. There were endless details, from the exchange of lighting equipment to suit the eyesight of the exchanging crews, to a final check-up of apparatus. A joint inspection party of both races verified that all detector devices had been smashed but not removed, so that they could not be used for trailing and had not been smuggled away. And of course, the aliens were anxious not to leave any useful weapon on the black ship, nor the men upon the Llanvabon. It was a curious fact that each crew was best qualified to take exactly the measures which made an evasion of the agreement impossible.

  There was a final conference before the two ships parted, back in the communication room of the Llanvabon.

  “Tell the little runt,” rumbled the Llanvabon’s former skipper, “that he’s got a good ship and he’d better treat her right.”

  The message frame flicked word-cards into position. “I believe,” it said on the alien skipper’s behalf, “that your ship is just as good. I hope to meet you here when the double star has turned one turn.”

  The last man left the Llanvabon. It moved away into the misty nebula before they had returned to the black ship. The vision plates in that vessel had been altered for human eyes, and human crewmen watched jealously for any trace of their former ship as their new craft took a crazy, evading course to a remote part of the nebula. It came to a crevasse of nothingness, leading to the stars. It rose swiftly to clear space. There was the instant of breathlessness which the overdrive field produces as it goes on, and then the black ship whipped away into the void at many times the speed of light.

  Many days later, the skipper saw Tommy Dort poring over one of the strange objects which were the equivalent of books. It was, fascinating to puzzle over. The skipper was pleased with himself. The technicians of the Llanvabon’s former crew were finding out desirable things about the ship almost momently. Doubtless the aliens were as pleased with their discoveries in the Llanvabon. But the black ship would be enormously worth while—and the solution that had been found was by any standard much superior even to combat in which the Earthmen had been overwhelmingly victorious.

  “Hm-m-m. Mr. Dort,” said the skipper profoundly. “You’ve no equipment to make another photographic record on the way back. It was left on the Llanvabon. But fortunately, we have your record taken on the way out, and I shall report most favorably on your suggestion and your assistance in carrying it out. I think very well of you, sir.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Tommy.

  He waited. The skipper cleared his throat.

  “You…ah…first realized the close similarity of mental processes between the aliens and ourselves,” he observed. “What do you think of the prospects of a friendly arrangement if we keep a rendezvous with them at the nebula as agreed?”

  “Oh, we’ll get along all right, sir,” said Tommy. “We’ve got a good start toward friendship. After all, since they see by infrared, the planets they’d want to make use of wouldn’t suit us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t get along. We’re almost alike in psychology.”

  “Hm-m-m. Now just what do you mean by that?” demanded the skipper.

  “Why, they’re just like us, sir!” said Tommy. “Of course they breathe through gills and they see by heat waves, and their blood has a copper base instead of iron and a few little details like that. But otherwise we’re just alike! There were only men in their crew, sir, but they have two sexes as we have and they have families, and…er… their sense of humor— In fact—” Tommy hesitated.

  “Go on, sir,” said the skipper.

  “Well— There was the one I call Buck, sir, because he hasn’t any name that goes into sound waves,” said Tommy. “We got along very well. I’d really call him my friend, sir. And we were together for a couple of hours just before the two ships separated and we’d nothing in particular to do. So I became convinced that humans and aliens are bound to be good friends if they have only half a chance. You see, sir, we spent those two hours telling dirty jokes.”

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1945, 1973 by the Estate of Will F. Jenkins; first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction; from THE BEST OF MURRAY LEINSTER; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

  ALIENS AND ALIEN WORLDS, by Ericka Hoagland

  The strange, dangerous, and mysterious figure of the alien is perhaps the most familiar trope of science fiction. From the ten-foot-tall blue Na’vi of the 2009 blockbuster film Avatar, to the terrifying, acid-spitting creatures of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien, or the golden-skinned, gentle telepaths of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, the alien embodies both our fears of the unknown and our desire to know it. Likewise, the worlds of these creatures present humanity with at once familiar and strange landscapes, arenas in which mankind may test their fortitude, as well as find potential new homes as space back on Earth grows increasingly precious. Indeed, as Gwyneth Jones notes,

  The career of ‘aliens’ in sf has reflected (as all sf concepts must) changes and developments in the real world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there was sober, Darwinian speculation about life and ecology on other planets, with the sensational corrective of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Aliens became competitors, and therefore our deadly enemies. In the chastened, exhausted years after the Second World War, and even more so in the 1960s, the decade of the Vietnam debacle and the Civil Rights Movement, peace was the message and aliens could be pitied, admired or defended, in print—though remaining monstrous invaders in the movies, battle providing better spectacle than trade missions. More recently, colourful (sic) (but conveniently humanoid) sf aliens—such as the aliens or demons in TV sci-fi and fantasy shows, such as Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel—have taken on a range of topical, dramatically useful roles: immigrants, ethnic minorities, underprivileged guest workers, wily diplomatic opponents. (168)

  Jones’s sweeping, but quite useful, overview of the ways in which aliens have been used throughout the history of science fiction, is just one starting point for establishing the function and meaning of the alien in the genre. As Ronnie D. Lipschultz notes, the term “alien” has “three common uses:”

  The first, of course, the creature, whether extraterrestrial or of this earth, who confounds “normalcy.” The second applies to those individuals who are not native to the country in which they reside, a conception that connotes, as well, a sense of unbridgeable cultural difference. The third means “out of place,” a definition that encompasses as well “alienation,” a notion that generally refers to those who feel that they do not belong to the society of which they are members. (80)

  All three definitions that Lipschultz outlines are linked by the specter of difference. Aliens are not “us,” they are intrinsically different: physiologically, linguistically, technologically, even ethically. Whether we perceive them as inferior to ourselves or frighteningly advanced, the primary function of aliens—that is, the “Other”—is to remind us of what (and who) we are. In o
ther words, the alien Other serves as a counterpoint, a way for humanity to define itself in opposition to the Other. Accepting an alien race as an ally, like the Vulcans in the Star Trek universe, does not mean that their otherness has been forgotten, however. Entire episodes throughout the Star Trek series have been devoted to just the sexuality of the Vulcans; thus while they may be our ally, they are still radically different from us.

  What the work of Lipschultz and Jones directs us towards is a specific function of the alien (and even their worlds) in science fiction, and that is their usefulness on an allegorical level. While it would be dangerous to assign an allegorical function to every alien in the science fiction pantheon, this lens has proven especially helpful in analyzing science fiction texts, as allegorical readings of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds shows, for example. Wells’s celebrated and highly influential novel presents an Earth under attack by blood-sucking Martians who terrorize the English countryside. Human weapons are no match for superior Martian technology, and all looks lost for humanity until a simple fact of biology saves the day: the Martians are not immune to the simplest of Earth germs. The Martians’ ruthlessness is not based in their otherness, however: They are, quite simply, mankind. Specifically, the Martians are imperialistic Great Britain, which is now at the receiving end of its own brutal imperialist practices. No longer the technological superior, England has been relegated to the position of the native / colonized that cannot protect itself from the greed of the Martian Empire. Once again, the allegorical function of the alien in science fiction is abundantly clear in Wells’s text, just as it is in the 1996 film Independence Day, a reimagining of Wells’s classic. Here the allegory resides not in a commentary on nineteenth-century imperialism, but rather on modern-day environmental devastation. The aliens’ sole focus is to deplete the Earth of every natural resource it has, and once done, the aliens move on to another planet. The aliens then are a not so subtle code for the rapaciousness of humanity, their very presence is a warning to protect Earth not just from external, extraterrestrial threat, but from humanity’s own thoughtlessness.