Gregory Benford - Essays and Short Stories Part 10

"For long range thinking I trust in the real visionaries--the ones I prefer to read, at least. The science fiction writers. I haf always liked Mr. Heinlein, Mr. Asimov, of course Mr Clarke --they are much more important in the long run than any Secretary of Defense."

So we talked on about how he had read magazines in the 1940s Los Alamos, bought similar hardbacks as they began to appear in the 1950s, and eventually from the press of events kept up with only a few favorites--the hard sf types, mostly but not exclusively.

He pointed out to me an interesting paragraph in an old paperback.

We were searching...for a way to use U 235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center... If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make almost anybody say 'uncle' to Uncle Sam.

We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on. After Italy folded up...

That was Robert A. Heinlein as "Anson MacDonald" in "Solution Unsatisfactory," in the May 1941 Astounding . It even gets the princ.i.p.al events in the war in the right order.

"I found that remarkable," Teller said, describing how Manhattan Project physicists would sometimes talk at lunch about sf stories they had read. Someone had thought that Heinlein's ideas were uncannily accurate. Not in its details, of course, because he described not a bomb, but rather using radioactive dust as an ultimate weapon. Spread over a country, it could be decisive.

I recalled thinking in the 1950s that in a way Heinlein had been proved right. The fallout from nuclear bursts can kill many more than the blast. Luckily, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air bursts, which scooped up little topsoil and so yielded very low fallout. For hydrogen bombs, fallout is usually much more deadly.

In Heinlein's description of the strategic situation, Teller said, the physicists found a sobering warning.

Ultimate weapons lead to a strategic standoff with no way back--a solution unsatisfactory. How to avoid this, and the whole general problem of nuclear weapons in the hands of brutal states, preoccupied the physicists laboring to make them. Nowhere in literature had anyone else confronted such a Faustian dilemma as directly, concretely.

Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline" provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos. It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its princ.i.p.al plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it? To the physicists from many countries cl.u.s.tered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a joint responsibility laid upon many nations.

Discussion of Cartmill's "Deadline" was significant. The story's detail was remarkable, its sentiments even moreso. Did this rather obscure story hint at what the American public really thought about such a super-weapon, or would think if they only knew?

Talk attracts attention. Teller recalled a security officer who took a decided interest, making notes, saying little. In retrospect, it was easy to see what a wartime intelligence monitor would make of the physicists' conversations. Who was this guy Cartmill, anyway? Where did he get these details? Who tipped him to the isotope separation problem? "And that is vhy Mr. Campbell received his visitors."

So the great, resonant legend of early hard sf was, in fact, triggered by the quiet, distant "fan" community among the scientists themselves. For me, closing the connection in this fundamental fable of the field completed my own quizzical thinking about the link between the science I practice, and the fiction I deploy in order to think about the larger implications of my work, and of others. Events tinged with fable have an odd quality, looping back on themselves to bring us messages more tangled and subtle than we sometimes guess.

I am sure that the writers of that era, and perhaps of this one as well, would be pleased to hear this footnote to history. Somebody really was listening out there. I suspect today is no different. Perhaps the sf writers are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of tomorrow.

GREGORY BENFORD and DAVID BRIN PARIS CONQUERS ALL.

* The second of our War of the Worlds stories is the third story in the issue by a columnist. Gregory Benford collaborated with award-winner David Brin in this tale of yet another writer, Jules Verne, and his encounter with the Martians.

I commence this account with a prosaic stroll at eventide -- a saunter down the avenues of la Ville Lumiere, during which the ordinary swiftly gave way to the extraordinary. I was in Paris to consult with my publisher, as well as to visit old companions and partake of the exquisite cuisine, which my provincial home in Amiens cannot boast. Though I am now a gentleman of advanced age, nearing my 70th year, I am still quite able to favor the savories, and it remains a treat to survey the lovely demoiselles as they exhibit the latest fashions on the boulevards, enticing smitten young men and breaking their hearts at the same time.

I had come to town that day believing -- as did most others -- that there still remained weeks, or days at least, before the alien terror ravaging southern France finally reached the valley of the Seine. Ile de France would be defended at all costs, we were a.s.sured. So it came to pa.s.s that, tricked by this false complaisance, I was in the capital the very afternoon that the crisis struck.

Paris! It still shone as the most splendid exemplar of our progressive age -- all the more so in that troubled hour, as tense anxiety seemed only to add to the city's loveliness -- shimmering at night with both gas and electric lights, and humming by day with new electric trams, whose marvelous wires crisscrossed above the avenues like gossamer heralds of a new era.

I had begun here long ago as a young attorney, having followed into my father's profession. Yet that same head of our family had also accepted my urge to strike out on a literary road, in the theater and later down expansive voyages of prose. "Drink your fill of Paris, my son!" the good man said, seeing me off from the Nantes railway station. "Devour these wondrous times. Your senses are keen. Share your insights. The world will change because of it."

Without such help and support, would I ever have found within myself the will, the daring, to explore the many pathways of the future, with all their wonders and perils? Ever since the Martian invasion began, I had found myself reflecting on an extraordinary life filled with such good fortune, especially now that all human luck seemed about to be revoked. Now, with terror looming from the south and west, would it all soon come to nought? All that I had achieved? Everything humanity had accomplished, after so many centuries climbing upward from ignorance?

It was in such an uncharacteristically dour mood that I strolled in the company of M. Beauchamp, a gentleman scientist, that pale afternoon less than an hour before I had my first contact with the horrible Martian machines. Naturally, I had been following the eye-witness accounts which first told of plunging fireb.a.l.l.s, striking the Earth with violence that sent gouts of soil and rock spitting upward, like miniature versions of the outburst at Krakatau. These impacts had soon proved to be far more than mere meteoritic phenomena, since there soon emerged, like insects from a subterranean lair, three-legged beings bearing incredible malevolence toward the life of this planet. Riding gigantic tripod mechanisms, these unwelcome guests soon set forth with one sole purpose in mind -- destructive conquest!

The ensuing carnage, the raking fire, the sweeping flames -- none of these horrors had yet reached the fair country above the river Loire . . . not yet. But reports all too vividly told of villages trampled, farmlands seared black, and hordes of refugees cut down as they fled.

Invasion. The word came to mind all too easily remembered. We of northern France knew the pain just twenty-eight years back, when Sedan fell and this sweet land trembled under an attacker's boot. Several Paris quarters still bear scars where Prussian firing squads tore moonlike craters out of plaster walls, mingling there the ochre life blood of communards, royalists and bourgeois alike.

Now Paris trembled before advancing powers so malign that, in contrast, those Prussians of 1870 were like beloved cousins, welcome to town for a picnic!

All of this I pondered while taking leave, with Beauchamp, of the Ecole Militaire, the national military academy, where a briefing had just been given to a.s.sembled dignitaries, such as ourselves. From the stone portico we gazed toward the Seine, past the encampment of the Seventeenth Corps of Volunteers, their tents arrayed across trampled gra.s.s and smashed flower beds of the ironically named Champ-de-Mars. The meadow of the G.o.d of war.

Towering over this scene of intense (and ultimately futile) martial activity stood the tower of M. Eiffel, built for the recent exhibition, that marvelously fashioned testimonial to metal and ingenuity . . . and also target of so much vitriol.

"The public's regard for it may improve with time," I ventured, observing that Beauchamp's gaze lay fixed on the same magnificent spire.

My companion snorted with derision at the curving steel flanks. "An eyesore, of no enduring value," he countered, and for some time we distracted ourselves from more somber thoughts by arguing the relative merits of Eiffel's work, while turning east to walk toward the Sorbonne. Of late, experiments in the transmission of radio-tension waves had wrought unexpected pragmatic benefits, using the great tower as an antenna. I wagered Beauchamp there would be other advantages, in time.

Alas, even this topic proved no lasting diversion from thoughts of danger to the south. Fresh in our minds were reports from the wine districts. The latest outrage -- that the home of Vouvray was now smashed, trampled and burning. This was my favorite of all the crisp, light vintages--better, even, than a fresh Sancerre. Somehow, that loss seemed to strike home more vividly than dry casualty counts, already climbing to the millions.

"There must be a method!" I proclaimed, as we approached the domed brilliance of Les Invalides.

"There has to be a scientific approach to destroying the invaders."

"The military is surely doing its best," Beauchamp said.

"Buffoons!"

"But you heard of their losses. The regimants and divisions decimated --" Beauchamp stuttered. "The army dies for France! For humanity -- of which France is surely the best example."

I turned to face him, aware of an acute paradox -- that the greatest martial mind of all time lay entombed in the domed citadel nearby. Yet even he would have been helpless before a power that was not of this world.

"I do not condemn the army's courage," I a.s.sured.

"Then how can you speak --"

"No no! I condemn their lack of imagination!"

"To defeat the incredible takes --"

"Vision!"

Timidly, for he knew my views, he advanced, "I saw in the Match that the British have consulted with the fantasist, Mr. Wells."

To this I could only c.o.c.k an eye. "He will give them no aid, only imaginings."

"But you just said --"

"Vision is not the same as dreaming."

At that moment the cutting smell of sulfuric acid waited on a breeze from the reducing works near the river. (Even in the most beautiful of cities, rode work has its place.) Beauchamp mistook my expression of disgust for commentary upon the Englishman, Wells.

"He is quite successful. Many compare him to you."

"An unhappy a.n.a.logy. His stories do not repose on a scientific basis. I make use of physics. He invents."

"In this crisis --"

"I go to the moon in a cannon ball. He goes in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ca c'est tres joli! -- but show me this metal. Let him produce it!"

Beauchamp blinked. "I quite agree -- but, then, is not our present science woefully inadequate to the task at hand -- defending ourselves against monstrous invaders?"

We resumed our walk. Leaving behind the crowds paying homage at Napoleon's Tomb, we made good progress along rue de Varenne, with the Pet.i.te Palais now visible across the river, just ahead.

"We lag technologically behind these foul beings, that I grant. But only by perhaps a century or two."

"Oh surely, more than that! To fly between the worlds --"

"Can be accomplished several ways, all within our comprehension, if not our grasp."

"What of the reports by astronomers of great explosions, seen earlier this year on the surface of the distant roddy planet? They now think these were signs of the Martian invasion fleet being launched.

Surely we could not expend such forces!"

I waved away his objection. "Those are nothing more than I have already foreseen in From the Earth to the Moon. which I would remind you I published thirty-three years ago, at the conclusion of the American Civil War."

"You think the observers witnessed the belching of great Martian cannon ?"

"Of course! I had to make adjustments, engineering alterations, while designing my moon vessel. The sh.e.l.l could not be of steel, like one of Eiffel's bridges. So I conjectured that the means of making light projectiles of aluminum will come to pa.s.s. These are not basic limitations, you see --" I waved them away -- "but mere details."

The wind had shifted, and with relief I now drew in a heady breath redolent with the smells of cookery rising from the city of cuisine. Garlic, roasting vegetables, the dark aromas of warming meats -- such a contrast with the terror which advanced on the city, and on our minds. Along rue St. Grenelle, I glanced into one of the innumerable tiny cafes. Worried faces stared moodily at their reflections in the broad zinc bars, stained by spilled absinthe. Wine coursed down anxious throats. Murmurs floated on the fitful air.

"So the Martians come by cannon, the workhorse of battle," Beauchamp murmured.

"There are other methods," I allowed.

"Your dirigibles?"

"Come come, Beauchamp! You know well that no air permeates the realm between the worlds."

"Then what methods do they employ to maneuver? They fall upon Asia, Africa, the Americans, the deserving British -- all with such control, such intricate planning."

"Rockets! Though perhaps there are flaws in my original cannon ideas --I am aware that pa.s.sengers would be squashed to jelly by the firing of such a great gun -- nothing similar condemns the use of cylinders of slowly exploding chemicals."

"To steer between planets? Such control!"

"Once the concept is grasped, it is but a matter of ingenuity to bring it to pa.s.s. Within a century, Beauchamp, we shall see rockets of our own rise from this ponderous planet, into the heavens. I promise you that!"

"a.s.suming we survive the fortnight," Beauchamp remarked gloomily. "Not to mention a century."

"To live, we must think. Our thoughts must encompa.s.s the entire range of possibility."

I waved my furled umbrella at the sky, sweeping it around and down rue de Rennes, toward the southern eminence of Montparna.s.se. By chance my gaze followed the pointing tip -- and so it I was among the first to spy one of the Martian machines, like a monstrous insect, cresting that ill-fated hill.

There is something in the human species which abhors oddity, the unnatural. We are double in arms, legs, eyes, ears, even nipples (if I may venture such an indelicate comparison; but remember, I am a man of science at all times). Two-ness is fundamental to us, except when Nature dictates singularity -- we have but one mouth, and one organ of regeneration. Such biological matters are fundamental. Thus, the instantaneous feelings horror at first sight of the three-ness of the invaders -- which was apparent even in the external design of their machinery. I need not explain the revulsion to any denizen of our world. These were alien beings, in the worst sense of the word.

"They have broken through!" I cried. "The front must have collapsed."

Around us crowds now took note of the same dread vision, looming over the sooty Montparna.s.se railway station. Men began to run, women to wail. Yet, some courageous ones of both s.e.xes ran the other way, to help bolster the city's slim, final bulwark, a line from which rose vollies of crackling rifle fire.

By unspoken a.s.sent, Beauchamp and I refrained from joining the general fury. Two old men, wealthier in dignity than physical stamina, we had more to offer with our experience and seasoned minds than with the frail strength of our arms.

"Note the rays," I said dispa.s.sionately, as for the first time we witnessed the fearful lashing of that horrid heat, smiting the helpless trains, igniting rail cars and exploding locomotives at a mere touch. I admit I was struggling to hold both reason and resolve, fastening upon details as a drowning man might cling to flotsam.

"Could they be like Hertzian waves?" Beauchamp asked in wavering tones.

We had been excited by the marvelous German discovery, and its early application to experiments in wireless signaling Still, even I had to blink at Beauchamp's idea -- for the first time envisioning the concentration of such waves into searing beams. "Possibly," I allowed. "Legends say that Archimedes concentrated light to beat back Roman ships, at Syracuse. . . . But the waves Hertz found were meters long, and of less energy than a fly's wingbeat. These --"

I jumped, despite my efforts at self control, as another, much larger machine appeared to the west of the first, towering majestically, also spouting bright red torrents of destruction. It set fires on the far southern horizon, the beam playing over city blocks, much as a cat licks a mouse.

"We shall never defeat such power," Beauchamp said morosely.

"Certainly we do not have much time," I allowed. "But you put my mind into harness, my friend."

Around us people now openly bolted. Carriages rushed past without regard to panicked figures who dashed across the avenues. Horses clopped madly by, whipped by their masters. I stopped to unroll the paper from a Colombian cigar. Such times demand clear thinking. It was up to the higher minds and cla.s.ses to display character and resolve.

"No, we must seize upon some technology closer to hand," I said. "Not the Hertzian waves, but perhaps something allied . . . "

Beauchamp glanced back at the destructive tripods with lines of worry creasing his brow. "If rifle and cannon prove useless against these marching machines --"

"Then we must apply another science, not mere mechanics."

"Biology? There are the followers of Pasteur, of course." Beauchamp was plainly struggling to stretch his mind. "If we could somehow get these Martians -- has anyone yet seen one? -- to drink contaminated milk . . . "

I had to chuckle. "Too literal, my friend. Would you serve it to them on a silver plate?"

Beauchamp drew himself up. "I was only attempting --"

"No matter. The point is now moot. Can you not see where the second machine stands, atop the very site of Pasteur's now ruined Inst.i.tute?"

Although biology is a lesser cousin in the family of science, I nevertheless imagined with chagrin those fine collections of bottled specimens, now kicked and scattered under splayed tripod feet, tossing the remnants to the swirling winds. No help there, alas.

"Nor are the ideas of the Englishman, Darwin, of much use, for they take thousands of years to have force. No, I have in mind physics, but rather more recent work."

I had been speaking from the airy spot wherein my head makes words before thought has yet taken form, as often happens when a concept lumbers upward from the mind's depths, coming, coming . . .

Around us lay the most beautiful city in the world, already flickering with gas lamps, lining the prominent avenues. Might that serve as inspiration? Poison gas? But no, the Martians had already proved invulnerable to even the foul clouds which the Army tried to deploy.

But then what? I have always believed that the solution to tomorrow's problems usually lies in plain sight, in materials and concepts already at hand -- just as the essential ideas for submarines, airships, and even interplanetary craft, have been apparent for decades. The trick lies in formulating the right combinations.

As that thought coursed through my mind, a noise erupted so cacophonously as to over-ride even the commotion further south. A rattling roar (accompanied by the plaint of already-frightened horses) approached from the opposite direction! Even as I turned round toward the river, I recognized the clatter of an explosive-combustion engine, of the type invented not long ago by Herr Benz, now propelling a wagon bearing several men and a pile of glittering apparatus! At once I observed one unforeseen advantage of horseless transportation -- to allow human beings to ride toward danger that no horse on Earth would ever approach.