Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02] Read online

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  Journey to Infinity

  [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]

  Ed by Martin Greenburg

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction Fletcher Pratt

  False Dawn A. Bertram Chandler

  Atlantis Edward E. Smith, PhD.

  Letter to a Phoenix Fredric Brown

  Unite and Conquer Theodore Sturgeon

  Breakdown Jack Williamson

  Dance of a New World John D. MacDonald

  Mother Earth Isaac Asimov

  There Shall Be Darkness C. L. Moore

  Taboo Fritz Leiber

  Overthrow Cleve Cartmill

  Barrier of Dread Judith Merril

  Metamorphosite Eric Frank Russell

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  FOREWORD

  I

  n the first Gnome Press anthology in the planned series of “adventures in science fiction” there was one thought in mind which motivated its publication. This second book represents a continuation of that idea. The first paragraph of the Foreword in that first book expressed the purpose so clearly, we believe, that it is worthy of repetition here. “This book was planned from the very beginning to be more than just a collection of interesting adventure stories. It was organized around a central idea, one theme which moves logically from story to story. By building upon this unifying theme, we who prepared this book sincerely believe, a new idea in science fiction anthologies has been developed—a science fiction anthology which, taken in its entirety, tells a complete story.”

  The central idea in this latest book concerns Mankind itself. Whereas the first in the series dealt with a phase in the life of Man, specifically interplanetary spaceships and space travel, these stories together consider the development of humanity and its culture as a whole. Science fiction writers have always concerned themselves with the direction in which the civilization of Earth is heading; likewise they have, with imaginative soarings, searched the past for clues to our inheritance. From their collective minds we have assembled what may well be called “a future history of Mankind,” together with some appropriate background material to round out the picture.

  Fletcher Pratt, noted as an historian and himself a writer of science fiction, has contributed an introduction which analyzes and develops the central theme. His remarks add a great deal to the coherency of this volume. In addition, his sympathetic discussion of the underlying principles around which science fiction is written ought to increase understanding among those to whom this is a new field of literature.

  Martin Greenberg

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  INTRODUCTION

  by Fletcher Pratt

  S

  cience fiction is unique among the modern groupings of literature in that the anthology is perhaps its most typical form. Not that there are no book-length novels in the field. There are some extremely good ones; but the method and material of science fiction lend themselves peculiarly well to the short story. The writer of science fiction is and must be concerned with the reactions of human beings in environments which, either by time or circumstance, are strikingly different from the world in which we spend our daily lives. If that writer elaborates the picture of his imagined world in every last logical detail, he risks losing track of the individual people he is writing about. That is, he turns out a treatise instead of a story; and in fact much book-length science fiction is more science than fiction, Bellamy’s Looking Backward being a famous example. The writer who is really telling a story can normally afford only a glimpse of the different world in which his tale is laid, enough to indicate its main lines and why it is provided with pleasures, duties and perils unlike those that normally surround us.

  Moreover, science fiction appears largely in magazines for the first time, and the modern American magazine reader has established his perfectly reasonable repugnance to being bothered either with very long stories or losing the thread of a type of story that always requires rather close reading while waiting for the next issue to come out. The short story has thus come to dominate the field of science fiction, and it is not surprising that various people have found many short stories too good to be left gathering dust in piles of back number magazines.

  But these same rescuers-from-oblivion generally operate on the theory that it is enough if a story be both good and science fiction. The collections normally represent nothing but their editors’ preference for a group of wholly unrelated stories. To this generalization the Spring of 1950 produced a brilliant exception—Men Against the Stars, edited by Martin Greenberg. The same editor now gives us another anthology with a genuine idea behind it.

  This time it is the history of the world; not the history of the world as dealt with by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and taught in the colleges, but the kind of history we cannot actually know, only view through the efforts of controlled scientific imagination. Or perhaps imagination is the wrong word when associating with science. Extrapolation, the prolonging of a thoroughly established curve to discover the end product of a known movement is a perfectly legitimate scientific technique.

  In this group of stories, then, the reader is presented with a series of extrapolations about the history of the Earth. It is by no means entirely extrapolation into the future, for in the first two stories of the collection we are living at the end of the curve and the authors have run back along it to see where we might have come from.

  One rather remarkable fact about these stories is that, although they are the work of many different hands, they might almost have had their origin in a single mind—or group of minds in agreement on essentials. One can accept the picture of the world in any of these stories, one can agree that current progress will one day carry us to the point at which the story takes place, without invalidating anything that has gone before in the book or anything that will come later. No doubt it represents a rather adroit piece of editing for such a result, but it is rather worth asking whether editing alone is responsible—whether it is not significant that among practitioners of the controlled scientific extrapolation there is such general agreement as to the probable development of the civilization of Man.

  We know that predictors of the future can be as wildly wrong as H. G. Wells when he had the war in the air fought out by gigantic fleets of hydrogen-filled balloons. But the point is that Wells’ balloons were merely a technical detail; there was a growing accumulation of evidence to indicate that he may have been quite right about the overall effects of prolonged and violent aerial warfare. So it may well be with these stories. The exact nature of an invention cannot usually be predicted, because if it could be, the thing would be invented instead of extrapolated; but the precise details are unimportant beside the indicated general trend of development. If the authors represented in this anthology have caught that, then the reader really has here before him something like the overall history of the world.

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  Deep in the debris of time are hidden the forgotten cultures of Man. Only whispered legends come to us now of the glories of Lur, Candra, Thragan, Kah, Mu, Attrin, Hyboria and Atlantis. Of these, Attrin is the earliest whose history might be pieced together, based upon present day evidence indicating its actual existence. What it was and what happened to it is related here as the first part of the imaginary history of Mankind.

  FALSE DAWN

  by A. Bertram Chandler

  A

  ngam Matangu stood with his two mates on the flat
roof of his house on the outskirts of Darnala. The summer air was heavy with the scent of the night-flowering shrubs that grew in profusion in the garden below, and flaunted their pallid, faintly luminous blossoms from the plot in the center of the wide expanse of roof. The stars hung low in the warm sky. To the east was a growing, spreading pallor—a light wan and ghostly in contrast to the live, pulsing stars, the sparse, ruddy-burning lamps irregularly spaced along the thoroughfares of the city.

  “The dawn,” said Evanee, the younger of the women.

  Linith laughed shortly, scornfully. This was not the first time that she had arisen early with her mate, left her bed to stand here on the rooftop to await the rising of Loana. She knew that the eastern light would fade again, that with its passing what little remained of the dark night would be even darker. Then would come the real dawn—and Ramanu, Lord of Life, would flood the world with his golden light.

  “The dawn,” said Evanee again, a faint yet sharp edge of irritation in her voice.

  “No, my dear.” It was Angara who spoke, his voice gentle as always. “The false dawn. But Loana will not be long—”

  The two women seated themselves upon a low seat running the inner perimeter of the parapet. Angam remained standing, statuesque in the darkness, bulking big in the robe he had donned against the slight morning chill. Watching him, Linith wondered what strange compulsion it was that brought him out on these mornings when Loana rose just a little before the sun, when the little sister world presented only a slim crescent to the eyes of her watchers. She pondered the essential un­wisdom of the male. She was moved to share her thoughts with the younger woman—then abruptly decided against it. She, Evanee, would learn. This now was very romantic. Linith had found it so the first few times. But when you had seen the young Loana, the ghost of the old Loana clasped in her arms, rise once before the dawn you had seen it for all time. She stifled a yawn. You could always see the same thing just after sunset at the beginning of the month—even though the hills inland did shut the sight from view all too soon.

  “Loana!” said Angam suddenly, a note almost of reverence in his deep voice. “Loana!”

  Evanee jumped to her feet and ran to his side. Linith rose slowly, not without dignity, her manner conveying just a hint of boredom. She was almost wishing that she had let Evanee come up here alone with Angam. Almost— But even the sacrifice of a lazy morning was better than being relegated to the contemptible status of so many senior wives of her acquaintance.,

  And even she had to admit to feeling a faint thrill as the slender crescent climbed out and up from the low, dark clouds along the sea’s eastern rim, trailing in its wake the first flush of the true dawn. And even she wondered, for the thousandth time, what was the nature of the beings who lived in the cities whose twinkling lights were spread in clusters over the night hemisphere. And she wondered why those lights, year by year, month by month, were thinning as the leaves of a tree are thinned by the onset of autumn, the first, chill blasts heralding the coming of winter. From nowhere a sentence formed itself in her mind—The lights are going out one by one, “The lights are going out one by one,” she said aloud. “Tell me, Angam, shall we see them relit in our time?”

  From the direction of the airport came a certain noise of shouting, distinctly audible in the still air, the dawn hush. Presently the northbound mail soared overhead, its gas bag a huge shadow against the stars, the whine of its turbines, the throb of its propellers disturbing the birds in the trees below. With its passing they ceased their indignant outcry—but before Linith could ask her question again Evanee broke the fresh woven spell of silence.

  “I read a story,” she said, “about an airship that was filled with a gas many times lighter than helium, than hydrogen even. And it went up to Loana—”

  Linith, although Angam’s face was invisible to her, could almost see his tolerant smile as he replied to the feather-brained little fool.

  “Just a story, Evanee. It couldn’t be done. It will never be done. Even the heavier than air flying machine that Mang is working on now could never do it. You see, between ourselves and Loana there is no atmosphere, no air. And we must have air so that our balloons may float like corks in water, so that the wings of the new airships may have something against which to beat. The most we can hope for is that some day they will answer our light signals. I wonder,” he said slowly, “what they are really like. Are they men and women like us? Or are they —things? But their life must be grim and hard. Loana has no air, and so they must live out their lives in their sealed cities under their air-tight domes.” His sweeping gesture included all the world with its fields and seas, its snow-covered mountains and verdant valleys. “They haven’t anything like this!”

  “And their lights are going out one by one,” said Linith.

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  As he drove to his place of work Angara found his vague forebodings of the dawn swiftly dispelled by the glory of the morning. He wondered why he should feel that the fate of his kind was linked up with that of the unknown, unguessable people of Loana. Their lights were going out one by one. He remembered the grave intonation of Linith’s voice as she said it, and a shiver ran over his body, made every hair of the ruddy pelt covering his body stand briefly on end. Absentmindedly he returned the salutation of the driver of a car bound in the opposite direction, then bent all his attention to the business of nursing his power. He had let his reserve fall perilously low.

  Yet he could not prevent his attention from wandering to his surroundings. The wide, clean road, the low houses on either side, each standing within its own gar­den, each half hidden by and blending with the luxuriant trees and shrubs, told him that this was a good world to be alive in. The throngs of cheerful people, afoot and awheel, confirmed him in this belief. Ramanu gilded their warm-tinted pelts with his mellow rays, struck scintillant fire from the jeweled ornaments worn by men and women alike. Truly, thought Angam, this is a good world and we are a good people. We—fit. There is no strife among us as among the beasts. Each has ample. And yet– we are nor too far removed from our four-footed brothers and sisters. Our feet are planted firm on the good earth. We are of the earth.

  Round the bend of the road glowed the orange pillar of a power station. Angam glanced at his gauges, cut his engine and silently coasted the last few yards. The attendant, aproned, gauntleted, hurried out from his little hut at the musical summons of Angain’s horn.

  “Angam Matangu!” he said. “Salutation!”

  “Salutation. Morrud. I have all but exhausted my power.”

  “Truly, Angam Matangu, none would guess that you stored power for the city. Many a time have I had to carry your cylinders a full ten yards from my hut to your car. Perhaps’’—a sly smile flickered over the broad, pleasant countenance “you are too interested in the source of your power to care overmuch for the power itself.”

  “Perhaps you are right, Morrud.”

  Angam kaned back in his seat, took his ease whilst the other went to the back of the vehicle, took therefrom the four compressed air cylinders, three empty and one almost so, that powered the efficient little engine of his car. As he had done many a time before he wondered whether or not it might be better to utilize the steam turbine for intramural transport, as already it was used for vehicles outside the city limits. But perhaps the city fathers were right. The compressed air motors made up for their minor inconveniences by a complete absence of smoke, heat or fumes. He tried to imagine what Darnala would be like were each car a source of such irrita­tions.

  Morrud returned with the fresh cylinders. Deftly he stowed them in their positions, made the necessary connections.

  “Warranted full pressure,” he grinned. “After all, they bear your seal.” Abruptly gravity fell on him like a cloak. “I watched Loana this morning. The lights are going out one by one. Tell me, Angam Matangu, what is it? Are they dying up there? Is their power failing fast so that they must economize? They say that there is no air, no water, that life is possib
le only in their sealed cities. And, city by city, the life is going out of Loana. Tell me. Angam Matangu, will the same fate overtake us in the end?”

  “In the end, Morrud. But that will not be for millions of years. And perhaps we shall have learned some way of holding off the cold and the dark.” He drew a pencil from his pouch, initialed the slip of paper that the attendant presented to him, opened his valve and drove off. And it seemed to him that the death of Loana, whatever that death might be, was casting its shadow over all the city of Darnala, over all the kindly, happy land of Attrin.

  It was not until he arrived at the power storage plant that Angam was able to shake off his pointless, uneasy foreboding. But here, surrounded by the familiar routine of his profession, the materials and tools of his trade, he was almost able to forget the beings who, unknown, unknowable close neighbors in space, .were face to face with the doom that must some day overtake all the worlds. He wished briefly that there were scale way of sending the cylinders of compressed air filled by the slow, inexorable upthrust of the tide-actuated rams—then pushed the impossible desire out of his mind as he was called to deal with a blown valve at the head of one of the great cylinders.