George O. Smith Anthology Read online

  The George O. Smith Anthology

  In the spring of 1957, Emerson took on a new look in radio and electronic manufacturing. My boss had quit. The new management disbanded the components engineering department. I was a department manager without a department to manage, and anyone with sense will conclude that this is a delicate position to be in.

  Meanwhile, Fletcher had died, and life at the Ipsey Wipsy had lost its get-up-and-go attitude; Inga did not have the diabolical mind that let Fletcher fill the weekend with guests who had some opinions that made the after-dinner talk stimulating. Those who came were either old friends of all of us who came to visit, or a few who were arguing that Inga should give up the Ipsey and move into New York.

  The handwriting on the wall was thin, but beginning to show. The business prospects were bad. So with less to do, since the weekends weren’t so busy, and eyeballing the future with a dim view, I began to write.

  Of course, knowing that John Campbell was a dog person, and that he enjoyed “History Repeats,” it hit me that the process of communication between a dog and a man requires something that is not quite available. For example, if the fiendish doctor in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mastermind of Mars had put a human brain in the dog’s skull, the human brain couldn’t talk through the dog’s noise-making and control system.

  So I wrote “Understanding” and sent it off. But—

  Let’s let it sit for a moment. I’m quite aware that “Understanding” was printed in Galaxy instead of Analog-Astounding, but that’s another story that must be related at the right moment.

  Late in 1957, Emerson and I came to the end. Business was bad, and every place was cutting right to the bone. I caught it on the bone when my boss pointed out that every department was ordered to cut the payroll by fifteen percent, and that it took quite a number of stenogs and pencil pushers, file clerks and print room operators to make up the loss of one department manager who had no department to manage. He wasn’t going to fire me, but he certainly would look upon my resignation as the easier way out for everyone.

  It was in this period, quite early in 1958, that I’d adapted “Meddler’s Moon” for radio and I’d sold a novel to Ballantine, which has an oddball background.

  Those of you who remember Doc Smith’s Skylark series will recall that Richard Seaton got involved with a teaching machine, and thereafter solved all of his problems by looking for advanced cultures and teaching himself how to run their machines, invariably to do in one of his cosmic enemies because these advanced cultures he found were placidly unwarlike and would mildly brush away a mosquito instead of smashing it the size of a quarter with the flat of the hand. Among other things that occurred to me was a sort-of internal feeling that popping all over the universe to collect the finest technical information might make a fine series of stories in the style that Campbell used to call “super-colossal!” but the process, in the real world, might have limitations. Don’t ask me my objections; I couldn’t argue very hard nor come up with one flat reason.

  But more, Seaton’s journeys took him everywhere but home, except on the last page of whatever he was up to at the time. So I began to wonder what might happen if this educating machine were to turn up right here on Earth in about the present time. I talked the idea over with John, who shook his head and said that he didn’t think the story could be written. I’d had a lot of sideline gimmicks to the story; for example, a revised version of that old story about the air pilot (s?) who used to take the deaf up and dive straight down to do things to the ear—mine was to have the hero-inventor fall flat on his face as a story-problem by attempting to use the educating machine in an attempt to raise the level of a moron to normal.

  Then, with Emerson no longer taking my time, I started to really plan the idea. John continued to wave his face from left to right, so I went on ahead and sent about the first third to Ballantine, who said yes. Actually, it was Fred Pohl who said yes; he was either editing or advising their science fiction at the time.

  So far, that was fine. But we ran into a snag. It had occurred to me that the electromechanical educator provided a “Rapid” education, and I wrote the story under the title “The Fourth ‘R,’” and it was printed that way, and both were mistakes. For, unknown to us or those of us who were interested, there was an after-midnight television show going on by the same name, but the show’s “fourth ‘R’’” meant Religion. It did not sell like hotcakes. It fell like Humpty Dumpty.

  I got the final check from Ballantine on Good Friday 1958. Doña and I celebrated rather late, and on Saturday morning, I was a very sick man. Everyone called it a hangover, but as it went on for hours, it made a bit of sense to see a doctor. It turned out to be a coronary. And that’s where I was when “Meddler’s Moon” went on the air.

  To end this, I went through convalescence, eating nitroglycerine pills in a program that started about one per hour at first, and slowly tapered off until late in 1958.

  Then in the February of 1959 Robert Ferrar, then the Director of Laboratory Operations for the ITT Complex in Nlutley, New Jersey, and an old-time reader of science fiction, decided that their technical documentation might be less obscure if they had someone there who had experience in both technical engineering and writing.

  So if someone really wants to know why I didn’t turn up much in the period from 1959 to a fairly recent date, let me point out that eight hours a day removing state-of-the-art clichés and off-the-shelf redundancies created by those who have to utilize something instead of using it, gets a writer a bit tired of writing. Besides, it is much more fun to get in the boat and take a ride when one has free time.

  So as I was saying earlier, in the midst of this, during one of the winter weeks when boating isn’t much indicated, it occurred to me that John was a dog lover, and that he had liked “History Repeats,” which centers around the intelligent dog, Beauregarde.

  It came to mind that if the evil surgeon in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mastermind of Mars had put a man’s brain into the skull of a dog, the man-dog might communicate by pointing his nose or a foot at letters painted on the wall, possibly quite well at such a scheme, but he could not talk. The entire noise-making operation of the dog is wholly un-adapted to forming words. The dog can make understandable sounds, and a few dogs have been taught to make noises that sound like words, but these are simple and can be made without the agile tongue and lips of the speaking human.

  So I wrote “Understanding,” and sent it off to John. Now, there was a three-way understanding between John, my agent, Mr. Lurton Blassingame, and I that we’d save postage if I sent my stuff right to John, but when there was a reply, yes or no, it went back to my agent.

  John did not like the ending. He sent (returned) the story to Mr. Blassingame with a brief note of objection—but he took off on one of his nine-page letters to me. The gist of his letter was that the villains of the piece were clever conspirators, high in the ranks of the Galactic Empire of Xanabar, who would fight to the death to preserve the superiority of the empire over its neighbors. He might like it if I were to finish the piece with the same clever conspiratorial tone and do the evil villains in by cleverness.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Blassingame, having a rejected manuscript on his hands, sent it to Galaxy, where Fred Pohl was editor.

  Great minds run in the same channel. Fred bought the story, but wrote me that he didn’t like the ending, and would I please—

  Sure, I would. I re-wrote the ending, but it got lost in the files at Galaxy, and the story was published with the old ending—

  Understanding

  By George O. Smith

  I

  Scholar’s Cluster is a globular aggregation of about a quarter of a million stars, so young a cluster that it has no visible sign of dispersion. Its stars are heavy with the metals created in earlier novae, and the stellar population is high with the middle-sequence suns centering around Types F, G, and K.

  More important, Scholar’s Cluster got its name from its own mysterious environment. Studying there will not make a scholar of a dolt, nor a genius of a straight-A student, but studying there will guarantee that each will be educated to his maximum ability to absorb knowledge. Once this end is reached, there is no point in remaining—for exactly the same reason that one stops pouring when the gallon measure has taken on four quarts. Scholar’s Cluster was a going operation when Earth attained the stars and took her place among the galactic cultures; and Earth, like the myriad of other galactic cultures, sends her brightest to her educational colony on one of the pleasanter planets that revolves about a G-3 star not much different than Sol.

  While this is not an account of Scholar’s Cluster, Scholar’s Cluster is important to the adventures of young Terence Lincoln, for Scholar’s Cluster lies toward the center of the galaxy, a few thousand light-years to the inward side of the sprawling empire of Xanabar.

  It is the existence of Scholar’s Cluster that placed young Terence Lincoln on the spot in Xanabar. Otherwise, he would hardly have been so far from home….

  Terry Lincoln skylarked through the streets of Coleban, one of the capital cities of Xanabar, with a babble of his classmates.

  They were stopping over in Xanabar on their way home to Mother Earth. They all had fine grades from primary school and were all looking forward to the three-month vacation before returning to enter secondary school: neither success, nor freedom, nor the city of Coleban itself did anything to dampen their exuberance.

  Lincoln and his classmates bracketed age fif
teen.

  So all of them were on the verge of, but none of them had yet crossed, the big line between adolescence and maturity. That is, none of them had gained Understanding.

  Without Understanding, the gold and the glitter of Coleban was pure crystal-cut of proof perfect, and the stopover was simply a matter of imperfect spaceline scheduling. With Understanding, they would have labeled Coleban as a tourist trap and realized that the stopover was a condition for interstellar license through Xanabar, so that those who passed through could be parted from a measure of their wealth.

  Still, those who disdainfully label Coleban tinsel, and damn the whole of Xanabar are hardly fair.

  For the shops of Coleban displayed to their very best the most attractive wares of ten thousand worlds. The universal diamond, sapphire, and emerald are commonplace; second-rate to the star-drop of Manark, the frauland of Selira that shines of its own internal light, or the glorious oyster-pearl of Earth, that is said to lose its luster if it does not lie upon the throat of a woman in love. There were fabrics so delicate that they could be worn but once, and others so durable that they would outlast their makers. There were tools to fit the hands of a thousand worlds, knives that could split the hair or cleave plate armor with equal facility; instruments with gleaming dial and engraved calibration.

  And there were animated displays.

  These caught young Terry Lincoln’s eye. He was a gamesman. The displays were programmed by master artisans to show the finer points and the flashy parts, and done with an ease that convinced the onlooker that he, too, could gain such skill with a little practice. Time and again, Terry found himself rapt as his companions moved onward.

  And each time he had to make his way through a bedlam of humanity to regain his companions.

  Humanity came in an assortment of sizes, from a small meter and a half to a stalwart two meters plus, and in a bracket of weights to match the skinny and the gross in each height class. Humanity’s color varied from peppermint white to deep chocolate, with side flavors of saffron, tints of lemon, and the reds from pale pink to ruddy. There were the usual superficial differences in the makeup of the hands, and some startling facial arrangements, but they were all of Humanity—and they all had two things in common:

  They were all oxygen-breathing, water-based, hydrocarbon life with red blood and omnivorous appetites—and they all had Understanding, for Understanding is the mature way of life for those whose culture has attained the stars.

  That Terry Lincoln and his classmates lacked this important common denominator mattered not. His was a people who had attained Understanding, and he and his companions were on the verge.

  Without Understanding, the babble of tongues about him was babble indeed. This did not bother him. One day he, too, would attain it, and all would become clear. For this moment of celebration, all babble was noise; and Lincoln could not have cared less whether the humanity about him was echoing in their own way his own appreciation of the glitter of City Coleban or talking about him as an object of interest.

  Lincoln paused to watch a display of a game that combined the intricacy and plotting of chess with the speed and precision of hockey played on ice. It was a demonstration skillfully programmed so that even the youths without Understanding could follow the play.

  Rapt, young Terry watched until the game, again by skillful program, came to a brilliant climax of high-speed master moves that ended with one player downed in ignominious defeat. The close of this action was followed by a sales pitch in the tongue of Xanabar, which, of course, anyone with Understanding could follow. To Terry, it was babble, and so he turned to say—

  “That was quite a—”

  —only to find that his companions had left him, and were row turning the corner far along the street.

  Terry turned to follow. As he turned, the sales pitch stopped, ind a new demonstration began with appropriate announcements. His move to leave was blocked by a strong centripetal movement reward the exhibition. While he bucked this inward movement, his classmates turned the corner and were gone from sight.

  This bothered Terry very lightly; he knew he could make his way through this crowd and rejoin his companions. But the crowd that thronged the streets of Coleban had one more human attribute: they were egocentric. They blocked his path and barked at him in the tongues of the galaxy. They did not step aside or help, or seem to care that he was trying to make haste for a very good reason.

  Indeed, there seemed a perverse delight in their operations, as if they found it pleasant to block this rash youth who lacked Understanding. Openings closed as he approached. Strangers paused to speak to one another in the narrowest of ways. Pedestrian traffic, supposed to walk on the left by the law of Xanabar, filled the right-hand pedestrian lanes in the wrong direction. That others, trying to make their way in Terry’s direction, were also blocked and frustrated did not make Terry’s lot any easier.

  Then came the inevitable incident. Terry espied an opening between two walkers, and started through, only to plunge headlong into a saffron-colored man of gross proportions who had filled the gap. Terry hit and bounced backward, to land with a jarring thud on the base of his spine.

  The saffron-colored one laughed harshly, displaying a mouth full of disgustingly bad teeth. To finish this picture, the saffron-colored one had covered his visibly unbathed body with one of the gaudiest costumes to walk the streets of Coleban.

  Angered, Terry Lincoln arose and hit the line with a plunge that had gained him much yardage on the playing fields of Scholar’s Cluster—and once more bounced. This time the saffron-colored one kicked Terry in the ribs as he stepped over the lad to disappear in the crowd.

  This was the last straw. It was time to forget that politeness was a gentlemanly trait, and time to get where he was going.

  Starting with a brisk walk, and slowly accelerating into a dogtrot, Terry Lincoln zigged and zagged and darted, making long end runs around phalanxes of people, and driving himself between others that showed no more than half enough space. Soon he was in a semi-gallop, making wide swings here and taking a shortcut through an open alleyway there.

  He lost his sense of direction and, being young, forgot the name of the game he’d set out to win because there was a more frantic game at hand. Terry became turned around and continued to plunge through the crowd in the direction away from his local home base, the spaceport and its wall of hotels, conveniently provided by Coleban for the enforced lay-overs.

  He did not notice that the high polish was no longer about him, nor that the crowd was less dense. He had passed the unmarked boundary of the center city, and was now passing through the borderland, that ring that lies between the polish and the blight.

  Then came the second incident. Once more, Terry tried to plunge between two who walked a bit apart, and once more he hit gross weight and bounced.

  Once more the same saffron face with its mouth full of rotting teeth laughed at him, but this time the ugly one made a grab for Terry, bear-hugged the youth and smothered Terry’s mouth in the foul-smelling gaudy garment. Terry flailed, kicked the other’s shins, and broke free. Blindly, Terry swung and missed. Then his training rose to the surface, and he squared away. He led with his left and came forward with a right cross that should have made its mark, but failed to connect. Saffron-face countered with an open-handed chop that Terry blocked with his forearm. It stunned all feeling from lower arm and hand.

  Once more saffron-face made his grab, but this time Terry wasn’t having any. He managed to connect one shoulder-driven right jab that smashed the saffron mouth, broke off a few jagged stumps of the rotten teeth, and brought a quick flow of blood to the stranger’s mouth.

  Terry turned and ran, then made a wide curve that outdistanced the saffron one’s attempt to catch him. Terry proceeded once more in the direction his faulty sense said led toward home base: the spaceport and its hotels. Behind him in full chase came the gross one, surprisingly limber for that much visible flab.

  Ultimately, youth outdistanced the man, and Terry paused for breath.

  About him was slumland. Trash littered the sidewalks, and filth filled the gutter. Windows were nearly all cracked to some degree, many were broken and stuffed with dirty cloth, others were completely out and covered from within with some sort of reclaimed sheeting or discarded building material.