Explorers of Space
Jerry eBooks
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No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.
No character in these stories is intended to represent any actual person; all the incidents of the story are entirely fictional in nature.
Copyright © 1975 by Robert Silverberg
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson Inc., and simultaneously in Don Mills, Ontario, by Thomas Nelson & Sons (Canada) Limited. Manufactured in the United States of America.
First edition
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Silverberg, Robert, comp.
Explorers of space.
CONTENTS: Leinster, M. Exploration team.—Simak, C.
D. Beachhead.—Anderson, P. Kyrie. [etc.]
1. Science fiction. [1. Science fiction.
2. Short stories] I. Title.
PZ5.S596EX [Fic] 74-30399 ISBN 0-8407-6439-1
Explorers of Space
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Robert Silverberg
EXPLORATION TEAM
Murray Leinster
BEACHHEAD
Clifford D. Simak
KYRIE
Poul Anderson
JUPITER FIVE
Arthur C. Clarke
COLLECTING TEAM
Robert Silverberg
EACH AN EXPLORER
Isaac Asimov
VASTER THAN EMPIRES, AND MORE SLOW
Ursula K. le Guin
WHAT’S IT LIKE OUT THERE?
Edmond Hamilton
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Exploration Team, by Murray Leinster, copyright (c) 1956 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
Beachhead, by Clifford D. Simak, copyright (c) 1951 by Ziff-Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
Kyrie, by Poul Anderson, copyright © 1968 by Joseph Elder.
INTRODUCTION
For centuries readers have found pleasure in wondrous tales of expeditions to far-off places. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before the era of printed books, such narratives as those of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville circulated widely in Europe in manuscript form. It mattered very little that Marco Polo’s story of adventures in the Orient was authentic while Mandeville’s far more flamboyant account turned out to be a clever literary hoax; both books, and others like them, were eagerly sought. In the sixteenth century came the huge printed anthology of Giambattista Ramusio, a compilation of dozens of explorers’ narratives, and then the immense collection edited by Richard Hakluyt, which published the exploits of Columbus, the Cabots, Drake, Raleigh, and hundreds of others. These books were succeeded by even larger gatherings of first-hand tales of exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the many-volumed collections of Samuel Purchas, John Churchill, Alexander Dalrymple, and others.
Many motives drew the authors of those narratives of discovery into the world’s most distant regions. Some, like Marco Polo, were merchants; some, such as Columbus, were explorers seeking new trade routes; Drake was a pirate; Raleigh hoped to found colonies. A few traveled out of sheer curiosity and the love of adventure; but none were engaged in what we would regard as pure scientific research. That came later.
One of the first true scientific expeditions was that of the British astronomer Edmund Hailey, who commanded the sloop Paramour Pink from 1698 to 1700 on a voyage to study the Earth’s magnetic field. In the decades that followed, such
French explorers as La Condamine, Bougainville, and La Perouse brought back invaluable anthropological and geographical data from South America and the South Pacific, the great British explorer James Cook made three mighty voyages of scientific discovery that spanned the globe, Danish-born Vitus Bering penetrated the Arctic, and the eccentric Scot James Bruce went off to Ethiopia in search of the sources of the Nile.
The nineteenth century saw the indefatigable German scientist Alexander von Humboldt exploring South America, Charles Darwin circling the world aboard H.M.S. Beagle, Austen Henry Layard looking for the ruins of Nineveh in Iraq, Richard Burton prowling dark corners of Arabia and Africa, Heinrich Schliemann finding the ancient city of Troy in Asia Minor. In our own century we have seen Peary, Amundsen, and Byrd venturing into the polar wastelands, Beebe plumbing the ocean depths in his bathysphere, and a dozen American astronauts strolling across the face of the Moon. The narratives of these modern journeys of exploration have been as popular with readers as those of Marco Polo and Mandeville were five hundred years ago, and for the same reasons: they open new frontiers, they offer views of lands beyond the horizon.
Now space is our last frontier; and, though mankind has not yet gone beyond the orbit of the Moon, the imaginations of science-fiction writers have propelled explorers still unborn to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Just as people turned to the accounts of Captain Cook’s travels in the eighteenth century and Burton’s in the nineteenth, contemporary readers have begun to look toward science fiction for a glimpse of the realms of strangeness that lie outside the world of everyday reality. Stories of interplanetary and interstellar expeditions are innumerable in the literature of science fiction; out of that vast body of stories I have chosen eight that illustrate some of the challenges we think human explorers will face as they embark on the scientific expeditions of the day after tomorrow. What these stories tell us is something that explorers have been telling us since the time of Marco Polo: that the universe about us is a perilous and challenging place, full of marvels and dangers, and that the human drive to learn what lies beyond the next valley will lead us onward and onward regardless of the risks, ever onward in an unending quest.
Robert Silverberg
EXPLORATION TEAM
Murray Leinster
The first time a story labeled “by Murray Leinster” appeared in print, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House and Kaiser Wilhelm ruled Germany. Since then, kaisers and presidents and kings and tsars have come and gone, but Murray Leinster seems eternal. Actually, of course, there is no Murray Leinster—the name is a pseudonym for Will F. Jenkins, a courtly Southern type who, without fuss or effort, has flourished for six decades as a successful writer in five or six different branches of literature while carrying on a spectacular second career as an inventor and gadgeteer. It is his science fiction, perhaps, that has won him his most enduring literary acclaim—particularly this powerful story of an oddly assorted outfit of planetary explorers, for which he won the Hugo Award of the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention.
1
THE NEARER moon went by overhead. It was jagged and irregular in shape, and was probably a captured asteroid. Huyghens had seen it often enough, so he did not go out of his quarters to watch it hurtle across the sky with seemingly the speed of an atmosphere-flier, occulting the stars as it went. Instead, he sweated over paper work, which should have been odd because he was technically a felon and all his labors on Loren Two felonious. It was odd, too, for a man to do paper work in a room with steel shutters and a huge bald eagle—untethered—dozing on a three-inch perch set in the wall. But paper work was not Huyghens’ real task. His only assistant had tangled with a night-walker and the furtive Kodius Company ships had taken him away to where Kodius Company ships came from. Huyghens had to do two men’s work in loneliness. To his knowledge, he was the only man in this solar system.
Below him, there were snufflings. Sitka Pete got up heavily and padded to his water pan. He lapped the refrigerated
water and sneezed violently. Sourdough Charley waked and complained in a rumbling growl. There were divers other rumblings and mutterings below. Huyghens called reassuringly, “Easy there!” and went on with his work. He finished a climate report, and fed figures to a computer, and while it hummed over them he entered the inventory totals in the station log, showing what supplies remained. Then he began to write up the log proper.
“Sitka Pete,” he wrote, “has apparently solved the problem of killing individual sphexes. He has learned that it doesn’t do to bug them and that his claws can’t penetrate their hide—not the top hide, anyhow. Today Semper notified us that a pack of sphexes had found the scent-trail to the station. Sitka hid downwind until they arrived. Then he charged from the rear and brought his paws together on both sides of a sphex’s head in a terrific pair of slaps. It must have been like two twelve-inch shells arriving from opposite directions at the same time. It must have scrambled the sphex’s brains as if they were eggs. It dropped dead. He killed two more with such mighty pairs of wallops. Sourdough Charley watched, grunting, and when the sphexes turned on Sitka, he charged in his turn. I, of course, couldn’t shoot too close to him, so he might have fared badly but that Faro Nell came pouring out of the bear quarters to help. The diversion enabled Sitka Pete to resume the use of his new technique, towering on his hind legs and swinging his paws in the new and grisly fashion. The fight ended promptly. Semper flew and screamed above the scrap, but as usual did not join in. Note: Nugget, the cub, tried to mix in but his mother cuffed him out of the way. Sourdough and Sitka ignored him as usual. Kodius Champion’s genes are sound!”
The noises of the night went on outside. There were notes like organ tones—song lizards. There were the tittering giggling cries of night-walkers—not to be tittered back at. There were sounds like tack hammers, and doors closing, and from every direction came noises like hiccups in various keys. These were made by the improbable small creatures which on Loren Two took the place of insects. Huyghens wrote out:
“Sitka seemed ruffled when the fight was over. He painstakingly used his trick on every dead or wounded sphex, except those he’d killed with it, lifting up their heads for his pile-driverlike blows from two directions at once, as if to show Sourdough how it was done. There was much grunting as they hauled the carcasses to the incinerator. It almost seemed—”
The arrival bell clanged, and Huyghens jerked up his head to stare at it. Semper, the eagle, opened icy eyes. He blinked.
Noises. There was a long, deep, contented snore from below. Something shrieked out in the jungle. Hiccups. Clatterings, and organ notes—
The bell clanged again. It was a notice that a ship aloft somewhere had picked up the beacon beam—which only Kodius Company ships should know about—and was communicating for a landing. But there shouldn’t be any ships in this solar system just now! This was the only habitable planet of the sun, and it had been officially declared uninhabitable by reason of inimical animal life. Which meant sphexes. Therefore no colony was permitted, and the Kodius Company broke the law. And there were fewer graver crimes than unauthorized occupation of a new planet.
The bell clanged a third time. Huyghens swore. His hand went out to cut off the beacon—but that would be useless. Radar would have fixed it and tied it in with physical features like the nearby sea and the Sere Plateau. The ship could find the place, anyhow, and descend by daylight.
“The devil!” said Huyghens. But he waited yet again for the bell to ring. A Kodius Company ship would double ring to reassure him. But there shouldn’t be a Kodius Company ship for months.
The bell clanged singly. The space phone dial flickered and a voice came out of it, tinny from stratospheric distortion:
“Calling ground! Calling ground! Crete Line ship Odysseus calling ground on Loren Two. Landing one passenger by boat. Put on your field lights”
Huyghens’ mouth dropped open. A Kodius Company ship would be welcome. A Colonial Survey ship would be extremely unwelcome, because it would destroy the colony and Sitka and Sourdough and Faro Nell and Nugget—and Semper—and carry Huyghens off to be tried for unauthorized colonization and all that it implied.
But a commercial ship, landing one passenger by boat—There were simply no circumstances under which that would happen. Not to an unknown, illegal colony. Not to a furtive station!
Huyghens flicked on the landing-field lights. He saw the glare in the field outside. Then he stood up and prepared to take the measures required by discovery. He packed the paper work he’d been doing into the disposal safe. He gathered up all personal documents and tossed them in. Every record, every bit of evidence that the Kodius Company maintained this station went into the safe. He slammed the door. He touched his finger to the disposal button, which would destroy the contents and melt down even the ashes past their possible use for evidence in court.
Then he hesitated. If it was a Survey ship, the button had to be pressed and he must resign himself to a long term in prison. But a Crete Line ship—if the space phone told the truth—was not threatening. It was simply unbelievable.
He shook his head. He got into travel garb and armed himself. He went down into the bear quarters, turning on lights as he went. There were startled snufflings and Sitka Pete reared himself very absurdly to a sitting position to blink at him. Sourdough Charley lay on his back with his legs in the air. He’d found it cooler, sleeping that way. He rolled over with a thump. He made snorting sounds which somehow sounded cordial. Faro Nell padded to the door of her separate apartment—assigned her so that Nugget would not be underfoot to irritate the big males.
Huyghens, as the human population of Loren Two, faced the work force, fighting force, and—with Nugget—four-fifths of the terrestrial nonhuman population of the planet. They were mutated Kodiak bears, descendants of that Kodius Champion for whom the Kodius Company was named. Sitka Pete was a good twenty-two hundred pounds of lumbering, intelligent carnivore. Sourdough Charley would weigh within a hundred pounds of that figure. Faro Nell was eighteen hundred pounds of female charm—and ferocity. Then Nugget poked his muzzle around his mother’s furry rump to see what was toward, and he was six hundred pounds of ursine infancy. The animals looked at Huyghens expectantly. If he’d had Semper riding on his shoulder, they’d have known what was expected of them.
“Let’s go,” said Huyghens. “It’s dark outside, but somebody’s coming. And it may be bad!”
He unfastened the outer door of the bear quarters. Sitka Pete went charging clumsily through it. A forthright charge was the best way to develop any situation—if one was an oversized male Kodiak bear. Sourdough went lumbering after him. There was nothing hostile immediately outside. Sitka stood up on his hind legs—he reared up a solid twelve feet—and sniffed the air. Sourdough methodically lumbered to one side and then the other, sniffing in his turn. Nell came out, nine-tenths of a ton of daintiness, and rumbled admonitorily at Nugget, who trailed her closely. Huyghens stood in the doorway, his night-sighted gun ready. He felt uncomfortable at sending the bears ahead into a Loren Two jungle at night. But they were qualified to scent danger, and he was not.
The illumination of the jungle in a wide path towards the landing field made for weirdness in the look of things. There were arching giant ferns and columnar trees which grew above them, and the extraordinary lanceolate underbrush of the jungle. The flood lamps, set level with the ground, lighted everything from below. The foliage, then, was brightly lit against the black night sky—brightly lit enough to dim out the stars. There were astonishing contrasts of light and shadow everywhere.
“On ahead!” commanded Huyghens, waving. “Hup!”
He swung the bear-quarters door shut. He moved towards the landing field through the lane of lighted forest. The two giant male Kodiaks lumbered ahead. Sitka Pete dropped to all fours and prowled. Sourdough Charley followed closely, swinging from side to side. Huyghens came alertly behind the two of them, and Faro Nell brought up the rear, with Nugget following her closely.
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It was an excellent military formation for progress through dangerous jungle. Sourdough and Sitka were advance guard and point, respectively, while Faro Nell guarded the rear. With Nugget to look after she was especially alert against attack from behind. Huyghens was, of course, the striking force. His gun fired explosive bullets which would discourage even sphexes, and his night-sight—a cone of light which went on when he took up the trigger-slack—told exactly where they would strike. It was not a sportsmanlike weapon, but the creatures of Loran Two were not sportsmanlike antagonists. The night-walkers, for example—But night-walkers feared light. They attacked only in a species of hysteria if it was too bright.
Huyghens moved towards the glare at the landing field. His mental state was savage. The Kodius Company station on Loren Two was completely illegal. It happened to be necessary, from one point of view, but it was still illegal. The tinny voice on the space phone was not convincing, in ignoring that illegality. But if a ship landed, Huyghens could get back to the station before men could follow, and he’d have the disposal safe turned on in time to protect those who’d sent him here.
But he heard the faraway and high harsh roar of a landing-boat rocket—not a ship’s bellowing tubes—as he made his way through the unreal-seeming brush. The roar grew louder as he pushed on, the three big Kodiaks padding here and there, sniffing thoughtfully, making a perfect defensive-offensive formation for the particular conditions of this planet.
He reached the edge of the landing field, and it was blindingly bright, with the customary divergent beams slanting skyward so a ship could check its instrument landing by sight. Landing fields like this had been standard, once upon a time. Nowadays all developed planets had landing grids—monstrous structures which drew upon ionospheres for power and lifted and drew down star ships with remarkable gentleness and unlimited force. This sort of landing field would be found where a survey team was at work, or where some strictly temporary investigation of ecology or bacteriology was under way, or where a newly authorized colony had not yet been able to build its landing grid. Of course it was unthinkable that anybody would attempt a settlement in defiance of the law!