Men Against the Stars - [Adventures in Science Fiction 01] Read online

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  Men Against the Stars

  [Adventures in Science Fiction 01]

  Ed by Martin Greenburg

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Willy Ley

  Introduction

  Isaac Asimov

  Trends

  Manly Wade Wellman

  Men Against the Stars

  Robert Moore Williams

  The Red Death of Mars

  H. B. Fyfe

  Locked Out

  Lewis Padgett

  The Iron Standard

  Harry Walton

  Schedule

  A. Van Vogt

  Far Centaurus

  Hal Clement

  Cold Front

  Murray Leinster

  The Plants

  E. M. Hull

  Competition

  Isaac Asimov

  Bridle and Saddle

  L. Ron Hubbard

  When Shadows Fall

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  FOREWORD

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  his 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 story which these different authors together tell is the story of the future conquest of space. Interplanetary travel has come nowadays to be accepted as definitely possible, if not inevitable, by people who once considered the thought ridiculously fantastic. For this reason this anthology, arranged coherently and representative of science fiction’s concern with every aspect of space travel, should be of interest to everyone.

  Willy Ley, in his excellent introduction, traces briefly the scientific evolution of spaceships. The facts mentioned by this noted authority on rocketry lead conclusively to the realization that space travel will be attempted within the lifetime of most of us. As factual preparation for the fiction which follows, his introduction contributes importantly toward fusing the many stories into a believable whole.

  The choice and arrangement of the dozen stories in this volume have been carefully considered. Material had to be judged not only on the basis of its contribution to the over-all pattern of the book, but also on its length and availability. The logical sequence of each incident with its appropriate scientific development was of primary importance. The reader, therefore, will find that he is carried on a swift flight of time and space from Willy Ley’s firm foundation of fact and the first attempt to reach the moon to the eventual conquest of the entire universe.

  If this book seems to be treated too seriously, there is some justification for doing so. No claim is made that these stories are good literature. But we do believe that the value lies in what the various authors have to say, not in the various writing techniques. From a science fiction point of view, the ideas, thoughts and theories are worthy of consideration. These are stories of tomorrow and as such have more than just transitory entertainment value. In the future there will be other books in the “Adventures in Science Fiction Series” based upon a central theme, such as Atomic Energy, Robots and Time Travel.

  The editor’s sincere gratitude is here extended to J. B. Cullum and Charles Dye for aiding in the selection of the material,

  David A. Kyle for assisting in the editing and for designing the book,

  Scott Meredith, Forrest J. Ackerman and Dirk Wylie literary agencies for obtaining copyrighted material,

  Julius Unger for obtaining magazines for research, Willy Ley, who is the author of Rockets and Space Travel; The Lungfish, The Dodo and The Unicorn; The Days of Creation; Bombs and Bombing; Shells and Shooting; and The Conquest of Space with Chesley Bonestell, for his splendid introduction,

  And to the many friends who gave their criticisms and suggestions.

  Martin Greenberg

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  Willy Ley

  INTRODUCTION

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  ear the end of the First World War an American physicist, the late Dr. Robert H. Goddard, wrote a strictly technical report on various aspects of rocket propulsion. That report was published in 1919 by the Smithsonian Institution and it contained a number of remarks and statements about an unmanned rocket to the moon.

  People laughed.

  In 1923 a German scientist, Prof. Hermann Oberth, published an even more severely technical treatise in which he prophesied manned spaceships, stating that the manufacture of such machines might be profitable under certain conditions. “Such conditions might develop within a few decades.”

  People laughed.

  In 1925 the City Architect of the city of Essen on the Ruhr, Dr. Walter Hohmann, followed up with an equally severe technical treatise on the orbits to be traveled from earth to other planets, on methods of landing on worlds with an atmosphere and worlds without one.

  People laughed.

  Now it must be understood that not all the people laughed. Those that did usually had derived what information they had from third-hand newspaper accounts without ever having seen the original publications or even the second-hand accounts. In fact they would not have been able to read the original publications even if they had been handed to them.

  The few that failed to laugh went ahead and progressed from theory to experimentation. Crude and blundering experimentation it was, groping around in an entirely new field of engineering where well-established ideas did not hold true and where “crazy schemes” suddenly proved workable. To make it somewhat more difficult a constant lack of funds had to be accepted as a matter of course. But in spite of the lack of money and in spite of the newness of the whole problem those experimenters did get some early results. And some information about the experimental work wormed its way into the daily papers, via publication in more specialized journals whose editors risked their reputations by publishing it.

  People continued to laugh.

  They were not only convinced that they were right, they were rather proud of their merriment, for didn’t they find themselves in good and famous company? Among the highly amused gentlemen there were professors of engineering and famous novelists, there were MPs and MDs, there were senators with excellent legal training and experience, there were colonels, generals and admirals. Even an aircraft manufacturer or two joined in the chorus.

  The contentment of all these hilarious gentlemen ended in the early evening hours of September 8, 1944. On that date the first V-2 rocket crashed down on London, having been fired from a point in The Netherlands, 200 miles away, and having climbed into stratosphere to some sixty miles in the course of its five minute journey.

  It turned out later that the Germans had fired two rockets at an interval of a few minutes. One must have malfunctioned and failed to reach its target. But, strangely enough, nobody found anything laughable any more in such a ridiculous fact as a malfunctioning rocket.

  On the contrary.

  Large rockets suddenly became respectable, because they had hit somebody on the head.

  The war ended soon after and the German plans, present and future, became available for study. And they were studied! Demand for the original publications which had been the foundation of these actually existing large rockets which soon began to soar even beyond the stratosphere from the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico became so large that reprint
s were made. And ever since the movement has been forward only, skepticism had changed into thirst for detailed information, laughter had given way to breathless wonderment.

  Nothing indicated this reversal in the trend of thought—or rather the replacement of a number of quite different things by thought—more dramatically than the fact that U. S. Army recruiting posters appeared, showing a spaceship on its way to the moon. And more recently it has been made known that the armed services are studying the idea of artificial satellites with great interest.

  We can be quite sure now that the “certain conditions” predicted by Prof. Oberth have arrived and that we shall have spaceships long before the twentieth century has run its course. This is, of course, just what those groups of early enthusiasts have been saying all along, beginning roughly in 1927, but the lines of development turned out to be somewhat different from what they had imagined them to be.

  When Dr. R. H. Goddard wrote his first Smithsonian publication he entitled it A method of reaching extreme altitudes and suggested the use of rockets as instrument carriers for research in those layers of the atmosphere which are inaccessible by any other means. It may be remarked here that the total altitude of our atmosphere is usually taken to be 250 miles. But only the first ten of these 250 miles have any appreciable density. Airplanes, other than rocket propelled, have about reached ten miles. Stratosphere balloons have gone somewhat higher than that. And those small unmanned balloons which carry meteorological instruments as a routine measure also attain roughly ten miles. Every once in a while one of them gets slightly higher, but only the new large plastic balloons of the U. S. Navy (also unmanned and carrying some 70 lbs. of instrumentation) can be counted upon to reach altitudes of 100,000 feet regularly. Everything above 100,000 feet is in the domain of rocket exploration.

  Dr. Goddard’s main suggestion, therefore, was the instrument-carrying rocket.

  Likewise Prof. Oberth devoted a good deal of space in his book to a rocket which he called Model B which was also planned as an instrument-carrying rocket. That Dr. Goddard did not describe his planned instrument carrier in detail and that Prof. Oberth described it almost down to the last rivet is unimportant, Oberth did not so much want to publish plans of a specific rocket which would be used for this purpose, he described it in so much detail because he used it as an example for mathematical analysis. He was perfectly well aware of the fact that the real instrument carrying rocket which would be built later might differ greatly from his example.

  In addition to this Model B, Prof. Oberth also described a large manned rocket which he called Model E and which was supposed to be a true spaceship. Making the assumption that a ship like this Model E would be placed into an orbit around the earth he could also describe the “station in space.” In between there were a few hints and remarks about mail rockets.

  A few years later an Austrian engineer, Count Guido von Pirquet, made an analysis of engineering versus economical factors and outlined the probable future development by setting a number of consecutive goals. The interesting point of his list was that any one of these consecutive stages could be expected to be economically self-supporting. Count von Pirquet made the comparison that an unfinished tunnel or bridge was useless, but that a highway supposed to connect five cities would still be useful even if it were pushed only to the point of connecting three cities. Rocket research, fortunately, compared to the highway and not to the bridge.

  The idea was that a rocket industry might go on building instrument carriers for a number of years and keep going while researching the problems posed by the next goal, the long-distance mail rocket. And that an industry could keep alive manufacturing mail rockets while doing research on the next problem, the space rocket. The space rocket was supposed to be an instrument carrier again, but this time one which would reach altitudes of several thousand miles.

  This sequence carried with it the idea of gradually increasing size, the very largest type of instrument carrying rocket would be about the smallest size of mail rocket and the largest size of mail rocket would be about the smallest size of space rocket. Enlarge the space rocket some more, so that it can carry a pilot, and you get the spaceship.

  It was all very logical, but the basic assumption, so basic that it was hardly mentioned at all, was that of peace time development. The second World War not only increased the speed of development, it also turned its logic upside down.

  Experimental work in Europe had been started in 1929 and while the engineers who did the actual work often enough followed the line of least resistance the models which took off from the proving ground very decidedly moved in the direction of instrument carrying rockets. The first goal seemed to be in sight.

  Then the Nazis took over and rocket research became an item in the military budget. Because of that the emphasis was now on range, instead of altitude. The first military-built German model was not much larger than those that had been built privately before. It was ready in 1933 and was code-named Aggregate No. 1. or A-1. It weighed about 330 pounds, was slightly more than 4½ feet long and one foot in diameter. A-2 followed one year later and was only slightly larger, but differed in many essentials. Fired it attained an altitude of 6500 feet. The next German military model, A-3, which followed in 1937, was a rocket 25 feet in length and 2½ feet in diameter, weighing 1650 pounds at take-off. In 1938 it reached an altitude of 40,000 feet and a range of about eleven miles.

  This would almost have been an instrument carrying rocket for meteorological purposes. But the ones who financed the work thought of it in terms of artillery. They caused the big jump to the next model: A-4. It had an overall length of 46 feet, a diameter of about 5½ feet (11 ft. 8 inches when measured over the fins), a take-off weight of 12½ tons. It carried a warhead weighing one ton, could reach slightly more than 200 miles horizontally and a little over 100 miles vertically. It became known to the world not under its proper designation A-4 but under a designation thought up by the German Ministry of Propaganda, namely V-2.

  Actual historical development had simply jumped across the first goal. Since then, of course, this gap has been filled to some extent, first by using captured V-2s as instrument carriers, then by constructing smaller rockets along the same lines, like the American-built rockets Aerobee and Nativ. Simultaneously work turned to a rocket which, while somewhat lighter than V-2, will reach much higher altitudes, the Navy’s Viking. The Viking (at first named Neptune) will reach an altitude of about 230 miles which makes it, using the original classification, the “smallest space rocket.”

  A dozen years of active work did not accomplish the first of the goals originally set, but the first three of them. In addition to that they produced a few sidelines, like take-off help for airplanes and several rocket propelled airplanes, the latter mostly for research purposes.

  The question is obvious now; “How will things go on from the space rocket?”

  It is not an easy question to answer, even discounting the fact that engineering logic has been upset in the past by “military intervention.” Originally it was thought that the space rocket by enlargement in steps of a size still to be determined would develop into the spaceship.

  Still, it was likely that the line of development would split at some point. Enlargement of the space rocket could lead to a manned spaceship which would “only” be capable of reaching a maximum distance of say 5000 or 8000 miles from the ground. But it would also lead to an unmanned rocket which would go to the moon and crash there, making a permanent mark of some kind so that it would testify to its own arrival. Obviously at some later time these two lines of development would merge again into the true manned spaceship.

  While these problems were still under theoretical investigation the theory took a surprising turn. There was that idea of the orbital rocket which was supposed to circle earth more or less permanently* It was supposed to be used mostly as an observer’s platform to see what was going on on earth (it would be a vantage point, for example, in determining the gene
ral meteorological conditions over the whole planet or to watch for iceberg movements) and also as a testing station for space equipment. Then it became evident, and the more evident the longer one thought about it, that such an orbital station would be a very superior research laboratory for many lines of research. Then the idea cropped up that such a station in space would make a fine fuel depot for spaceships.

  At that point a mathematical investigation revealed something else. If one assumed that rockets would have to depend on known chemical fuels (atomic energy seemed very far in the future and even now nobody really seems to know how it could be used for rocket propulsion) it turned out that high-altitude rockets, long-range rockets and space rockets could be built. Man-carrying space rockets were possible too and even the unmanned moon rocket. But the manned moonship which could land on the moon and then take off again seemed to be out of reach of present day fuels.

  The “station in space,” however, which had originally looked like a late accomplishment, preceded by the unmanned moon rocket and even by the manned moonship, was fully within reach of present day fuels. I do not mean to say that it looked “easy,” but it was possible, while the manned moonship and especially the ship to Mars or to Venus were not. However, and that was the really important turn of events, once you had accomplished the “station in space” as a re-fueling place, the trips to the moon from there, and even trips to Mars and to Venus were not only distinctly possible, but they were actually easier than the establishing of the station itself.