Another Part of the Galaxy Read online

  WE UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEE

  each of the far-out worlds in this book to be among the most ingenious and provocative ever created by the human imagination.

  WE FURTHER GUARANTEE

  that a visit to any one of them will reward you with a universe of reading pleasure, and that a visit to all will multiply your pleasure by a factor of infinity.

  WE NATURALLY CANNOT GUARANTEE that you will ever want to come down to Earth again after your visit

  Other Fawcett Gold Medal Books edited by Groff Conklin:

  13 GREAT STORIES OF SCIENCE FICTION

  12 GREAT CLASSICS OF SCIENCE FICTION

  FIVE UNEARTHLY VISIONS

  ANOTHER

  PART

  OF

  THE

  GALAXY

  edited

  by

  Groff

  Conklin

  A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

  Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.

  Member of American Book Publishers Council, Inc.

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Poul Anderson, THE LIVE COWARD. Copyright © 1956 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., and the author, from Astounding Science Fiction, June 1956.

  Paul Ash, BIG SWORD. Copyright © 1958 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author from Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958.

  J. F. Bone, INSIDEKICK. Copyright © 1958 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Harry Altshuler from Galaxy, February 1959.

  J. T. Mclntosh, FIRST LADY. Copyright 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Lurton Blassingame from Galaxy, June 1953.

  Edgar Pangborn, THE RED HILLS OF SUMMER. Copyright © 1959 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and Robert Mills from Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1959.

  Eric Frank Russell, STILL LIFE. Copyright © 1959 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., and the author, from Astounding Science Fiction, January 1959.

  All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1966 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  Alt rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

  Printed in the United States of America

  INTRODUCTION

  "Act III. Scene V.

  Another Part of the Forest"

  —That (in some editions at least) is the stage direction in Shakespeare's As You Like It, surely one of his most entrancing plays, and one from which it is a pleasure to twist out the title of this new anthology of "possible worlds." Scene V is that wonderful episode where Rosalind, in her male disguise, scolds Phebe for spurning her faithful lover Silvius: "Thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love," she says to Phebe, and goes on, "For I must tell you friendly in your ear / sell where you can; you are not for all markets"—a pertinent comment on the foolish vanity of some women.

  (But what has this to do with science fiction? Not a thing; why should it?) (It should also be recalled that the American dramatist Lillian Hellman used the actual stage direction as the title of one of her plays some years back.)

  Anyhow, it is in "another part of the Galaxy," indeed, that you will find yourself in this collection—several other parts, as a matter of fact. Starting from our own inconspicuous and remote-from-the-center solar system in this enormous aggregation of stars, our authors take you millions of parsecs away to distant planets where they show man putting his imprint on whatever forms of life he finds there, and also taking with him all the foibles and frailties of the human species.

  Whether or not Homo sapiens will ever be able to venture beyond the confines of his own sun is one of those hard questions to which the present answer, as far as science has been able to look today (not necessarily very far, to be sure), is a reluctant "No." But as recently as 1900, Important People were saying that heavier-than-air flight was impossible; and as for television—!

  However, the story teller need not particularly worry whether his story is possible or not; this is just as true of science fiction as it is of "As You Like It." The thing is that the fun is in the story telling—and story hearing or reading—not in the story's possibility. At least this is true in works of science fiction and fantasy. It may not be true of "serious" novels—which is probably one reason why many of us do not read "serious" novels very often. Too imprisoning.

  The real meat and drink in all science fiction—and in tales of the Galaxy in particular—is the way they stretch the mind, expand the imagination, and, of course, make possible a generous amount of commentary on man's actual state through the means of satire, serious or comic. (Not all the stories in this book are satiric, of course; but some are.) This is why it has been such a pleasure to edit this little collection, just as I am sure you will find it pleasant to read. Any other part of our Galaxy is fascinating to contemplate; and here are a few fictional views for you to examine.

  Groff Conklin

  CONTENTS

  Edgar Pangborn - THE RED HILLS OF SUMMER

  Paul Ash - BIG SWORD

  J. T. Mclntosh - FIRST LADY

  J. F. Bone - INSIDEKICK

  Poul Anderson - THE LIVE COWARD

  Eric Frank Russell - STILL LIFE

  THE RED HILLS OF SUMMER

  BY EDGAR PANGBORN

  A not infrequent complaint against science fiction is that it usually does not deal with real-seeming people, but rather with caricatures, serious or otherwise; animated dolls performing deeds of derring-do or various and sundry other kinds of deeds. One of the reasons I am so fond of "Red Hills of Summer" is that—as in all of Edgar Pangborn's fiction, science or otherwise—the people are genuine human beings, vividly real. Pangborn's truly novelistic talent for character, which I think is a kind of artist's empathy for his puppets, is particularly well developed in this tale of the first voyage of man into the interstellar spaces of our Galaxy.

  In it he has his small group of completely believable people plan for the first landing on the soil of a planet belonging to another star. He has a landing party undertake it; and he pictures the logical and yet quietly heroic techniques of new-planet exploration which one member of that party carries out. They are techniques that seem almost inevitable if—a big if—the first planet man encounters turns out to be of the sort pictured here. As for the likelihood of that being possible in "true fact," your editor deposeth not.

  I

  Miranda caught my hand, her own soft small hands gone hard with tension. Captain Madison on the speaker's platform had mentioned the pilot mission, and possible lethal elements on the shining dot below us—bacteria, viruses, qualities of the lower atmosphere not discoverable from orbit. It had not dawned on me till then that my troubled Miranda might be desiring the pilot mission for herself and me. For the last year she had been in the shadow of private unhappiness, often remote even when she was in my arms.

  Below us. For the first time in fifteen years that word below was more than a reference to the place where your feet happened to be. It possessed a meaning in relation to the ship, to me as a unit of living matter, to black-haired Miranda.

  Madison's square face recaptured my attention. I had first glimpsed it at the beginning of the voyage, when I came aboard with the unsparing eyes of a boy of twelve. That year he was thirty-five. Now at fifty he looked little changed—more tired, hair grayer, voice flatter. Who wouldn't be tired, after the job of bringing our enormous sphere into a safe orbit? My own healthy red-haired carcass felt exhausted too, fro
m the excitement that had churned in all of us since the planet was sighted and we knew we must decide whether to risk a descent. We were in the meeting-room now, all three hundred, to make that decision.

  I, David Leroy, am not a scientist nor a technician. Miranda and I were Randies—chosen like most of the kids for good health and what the Builders' Directives solemnly call Random Talents. There's a pride in it. You discover the virtues of comprehensive wide-ranging ignorance.

  Captain Rupert Madison was saying: "If we go on, I don't suppose any of you, even children born in space, would live to see the end of the journey. The distances are too vast, Earth-type planets too far apart. The chance of finding another as promising as this one, within our lifetime, is small. The other choice is to go down—and stay."

  It was that simple. A huge frail sphere like ours, built to transport a colony for generations if necessary, doesn't land anywhere. You don't take it into atmosphere. Compartmented and honeycombed, spheres within spheres down to the core where the computer hummed its mathematical daydreams, the ship Galileo was designed for one purpose only: to bear our splinter fragment of humanity away from a world that humanity had apparently ruined, away to some cleaner place where the sickness in our germ plasm might work itself out—perhaps, always perhaps, and only after many generations. That errand performed, the emptied shell of Galileo would shine on as a satellite, a golden moon circling a second-chance world.

  When you live in close awareness of it for fifteen years, even the new curse of Cain can become a commonplace. But I had been obliged to learn it was not so for Miranda. Her trouble was there, a sense of futility forced on her by the radiation sickness of Earth: for what, her heart said, is the point of a million years of human evolution if it must end not even with a bang, only with the whimper of babies born armless, distorted, blind? She had grown terrified of the times when she couldn't care about anything. "Not even about you, Davy . ."

  Captain Madison was hammering home the truth of no return, speaking of what it requires—in terms of industry, labor, raw materials—to build just one launching center like the twelve that toiled eight years to send the bits and pieces of this vessel out of Earth's gravity. Earth had bled herself white for her children, after men once and for all faced the probability of racial extinction. They would build another Galileo, and another; would go on doggedly building, all else subordinated, so long as any courage and equipment remained. "The gravity of that planet down there is a bit greater than the gravity of Earth. Launching centers!" Madison said.

  "I remember. That was my life, you know, from teens into thirties, beginning as a grease monkey at Cape Kennedy… Well, you know the arithmetic: three hundred colonists don't reproduce a technology that was based on a population of three billion.

  "The know-how? We have it all, in the microfilm library. Raw materials, yes—down there we'll find the same minerals, same general chemical pattern. But the building of launching centers, new ships, the reconquest of space if you want that inflated language—let's say it just might be an enterprise of our great-great-grandchildren, if we have any, if enough of them are healthy and active human beings, and if space travel happens to be what they want most, at any cost, in their own far-off time."

  Nobody sighed or fidgeted, as many would have done if this had been another pep-talk by our Psychometric Coordinator Cecil Dorman, known to Miranda and me and others of the irreverent as Cecil Psycho.

  "The planet is habitable," said Captain Madison, "so far as we know from orbit study." Miranda felt my look but would not return it; her hands grasping mine were cold. "So far as we know," he repeated, "in advance of the pilot mission—which will consist of two men and two women who will go down, maintain radio contact at least four weeks, and make the final tests we can't make up here. Your only vote in this meeting, I suppose, will be to decide whether the pilot mission starts at all—remembering that whatever they find, those four volunteers can't come back."

  Behind me, I heard the suave voice of Andrea del Sentiero—fifty-eight, the only colonist older than Madison. His official title was Historian. "Does anything in the latest studies suggest a civilization?"

  "Nothing, sir. Forest, savannah, large lakes, marshes, deserts, mountain ranges running generally north and south, a few of the summits snow-capped." He was talking for all of us, who had had only brief chances at the telescopes; the view-plate in the panel behind him gave a low magnification, the planet a blur of blue and reddish green. "Six continental land masses paired north and south, three main oceans, polar caps small and broken up. Bound to be dense tropics near the equator, the rest sub-tropical, with narrow temperate zones. No roads in the open areas, nothing like cities. No vessels on the seas, river mouths surrounded by the same vegetation that covers most of the land. The reddish green deepens, on the seaward slopes of the hills, but that suggests—Dr. Bunuan agrees—a result of rainfall, not intelligent agriculture. Dr. Bunuan thinks we may find something like Earth in the time of dinosaurs. He calls that a half-educated guess."

  "Quarter-educated," the biologist's mellow voice corrected him.

  Captain Madison grinned. "If you insist, Jose. No, Andrea, if there's life at the social, technological level it would have to be hidden under forest cover—unlikely."

  "Yes," said del Sentiero. "I have no other questions."

  "Maybe something to add?"

  "Only two things," said the Historian. "One, that my vote will be for going down and making the best of it. Two, that the pilot mission ought to be a privilege of the old."

  Captain Madison winced. "You mean, why risk the young?"

  Del Sentiero said nothing. I knew, without seeing, the stoical Latin shrug, the dark eyes contemplating eternity, the mild outward motion of eloquent hands.

  "Anyone may volunteer for it," said Madison heavily, and he shut his eyes, his face freezing into difficult calm. "Responsibility for choosing the four is on me, Andrea, nowhere else." His eyes flew open, probing here and there. "Questions? Discussion?"

  I had expected that Paul Cutter would seize this moment to sound off on the revision of the model constitution, which could not even begin to function until after a landing. The constitution was an attempt of the Builders to suggest the framework of such government as a colony of 300 might be expected to need. Mirthless and lonely Paul Cutter had grappled with it, conceiving amendment after amendment, identifying his unhappy self with each improvement to the point of monomania. He ate and drank the constitution, slept and got up with it. At any time his blaring monologue might nail you to the wall explaining how it must be amended or the whole expedition would Betray the Human Heritage.

  Paul was younger than Miranda and myself, a boy of ten at the start of the voyage. Some hereditary slant made him grow from a normal-looking child into a small bandylegged man, gnarled, not misshapen but seeming so, a bulging head connected by a weak neck to a tight barrel of torso. A bore, comical and ugly through no fault of his own. He had chosen psychology as his field of specialization, becoming a noisy satellite of Cecil Dorman. Unfortunately for Paul's ambitions, not Dorman but the learned, humorous and peaceful Dr. Carey was boss of the Psychology Department. Galileo was certainly in its way a college; I still think of it so.) Paul Cutter never earned a title: a Randy still, the fact no source of pride to him but an ingrowing pain.

  I saw Cutter in the front row, big head alertly cocked. Nothing happened. No fresh amendment, no bray of earnest argument. Maybe Cecil Dorman had persuaded him to let the constitution wait a minute or two…

  We were voting, by a simple show of hands. No opposition. No one could bear the thought of another fifteen years, or another generation, or another century, in space. But I remember that when my own hand went up I was not thinking of that, but of red-green seaward hills, and of the sound of ocean that might resemble 'what I had heard when I was a boy at Martha's Vineyard watching the loud hurry and change of waves under the sudden winds of September.

  I believe this was the only unanimous deci
sion ever taken by the colonists of the planet Demeter.

  Madison was speaking evenly: "The pilot mission. You know the Builders' Directives. You know the necessity. We can't take down the whole colony to be destroyed by something not discoverable from orbit. We haven't the means to break out of gravity and come back. Directives recommend the mission consist of two men and two women. Partly to avoid trusting the judgment of one volunteer. Partly because one sex might be immune to a lethal factor that would kill the other. Partly on the chance that the four might pull through with their survival equipment, and multiply, even if they had to tell the rest of us to stay away. So I want four guinea-pigs. Whoever they are, they'll be four individuals whom we love and can't spare. I am now calling for them."

  This was the way it came, like all great questions, not with trumpets but plainly spoken and quiet as morning. I thought at first there was also a question in Miranda's brown-eyed gaze, one not weighted toward yes or no. Then I understood she was not asking me: Are you going to stand up? She was silently saying: I must do this, I'm driven from within. Whether you stand up or not, Davy, I must and I will.

  I took her hand again and I was on my feet.

  Five or six other couples were standing, and a surprising number, ten or a dozen, stood up alone. I heard a murmuring, voices here and there attempting the unsayable, as Rupert Madison looked us over through his captain's mask.

  I supposed he would choose the volunteers from among the Randies. Breezy Arthur Clay for instance, standing alone two rows ahead of us, solemn as I had never seen him. Or Joe and Miriam Somers, solidly married with the formalities Miranda had never quite wanted for us, decent, unexciting Joe and Miriam who rather thought they'd like to be farmers if we ever landed. Or Laurette Vieuxtemps, a housewife temperament but not committed to any man, religious, reservedly sweet.