Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (20 page)

The mechanical laugh resounded. Stephen likes the tug of the philosophical, and he seemed amused by the notion that universes are simply one of those things that happen from time to time.

His nurse appeared for a bit of physical cleanup, and I left him. Inert confinement to a wheelchair exacts a demeaning toll on one’s dignity, but he showed no reaction to the daily round of being cared for by another in the most intimate way. Perhaps for him, it even helps the mind to slip free of the world’s rub.

I sat in the common room outside his office, having tea and talking to some of his post-doctoral students. They were working on similarly wild ideas and were quick, witty, and keenly observant as they sipped their strong, dark Ceylonese tea. A sharp crew, perhaps a bit jealous of Stephen’s time. They were no doubt wondering who this guy was, nobody they had ever heard of, a Californian with an accent tainted by Southern nuances, somebody who worked in astrophysics and plasma physics—which, in our age of remorseless specialization, is a province quite remote from theirs. I didn’t explain; after all, I really had no formal reason to be there, except that Stephen and I were friends.

Stephen’s secretary quietly came out and asked if I would join Stephen for dinner at Caius College. I had intended to eat in my favorite Indian restaurant, where the chicken vindaloo is a purging experience, and then simply rove the walks of Cambridge alone, because I love the atmosphere—but I instantly assented. Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.

We made our way through the cool, atmospheric turns of the colleges, the worn wood and gray stones reflecting the piping of voices and squeaks of rusty bicycles. In misty twilight, student shouts echoing, Stephen’s wheelchair jouncing over cobbled streets. He insisted on steering it himself, though his nurse hovered rather nervously. It had never occurred to me just how much of a strain on everyone there can be in round-the-clock care. A few people drifted along behind us, just watching him. “Take no notice,” his mechanical voice said. “Many of them come here just to stare at me.”

We wound among the ancient stone and manicured gardens, into Caius College. Students entering the dining hall made an eager rumpus. Stephen took the elevator, and I ascended the creaking stairs. The faculty entered after the students, me following with the nurse.

The high table is literally so. They carefully placed Stephen with his back to the long, broad tables of undergraduates. I soon realized that this is because watching him eat, with virtually no lip control, is not appetizing. He follows a set diet that requires no chewing. His nurse must chop up his food and spoon-feed him.

The dinner was noisy, with the year’s new undergraduates staring at the famous Hawking’s back. Stephen carried on a matter-of-fact, steady flow of conversation through his keyboard.

He had concerns about the physicists’ Holy Grail, a unified theory of everything. Even if we could thrash our way through a thicket of mathematics to glimpse its outlines, it might not be specific enough—that is, we would still have a range of choices. Physics could end up dithering over arcane points, undecided, perhaps far from our particular primate experience. Here is where aesthetics might enter.

“If such a theory is not unique,” he said, “one would have to appeal to some outside principle, which one might call God.”

I frowned. “Not as the Creator, but as a referee?”

“He would decide which theory was more than just a set of equations, but described a universe that actually exists.”

“This one.”

“Or maybe all possible theories describe universes that exist!” he said with glee. “It is unclear what it means to say that something exists. In questions like, ‘Does there exist a man with two left feet in Cambridge?,’ one can answer this by examining every man in Cambridge. But there is no way that one can decide if a universe exists, if one is not inside it.”

“The space-time Catch-22.”

“So it is not easy to see what meaning can be given to the question, ‘Why does the universe exist?’ But it is a question that one can’t help asking.”

As usual, the ability to pose a question simply and clearly in no way implied a similar answer—or that an answer even existed.

After the dining hall, high table moved to the senior common room upstairs. We relaxed along a long, polished table in comfortable padded chairs, enjoying the traditional crisp walnuts and ancient aromatic port, Cuban cigars, and arch conversation, occasionally skewered by a witty interjection from Stephen.

Someone mentioned American physicist Stephen Weinberg’s statement, in
The First Three Minutes
, that the more we comprehend the universe, the more meaningless it seems. Stephen doesn’t agree, and neither do I, but he has a better reason. “I think it is not meaningful in the first place to say that the universe is pointless, or that it is designed for some purpose.”

I asked, “No meaning, then, to the pursuit of meaning?”

“To do that would require one to stand outside the universe, which is not possible.”

Again the image of the gulf between the observer and the object of study. “Still,” I persisted, “there is amazing structure we can see from inside.”

“The overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so.”

One of the college fellows asked, “Rational faith?”

Stephen tapped quickly. “We shouldn’t be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics.”

Walnuts eaten, port drunk, cigars smoked, it was time to go. When we left, Stephen guided his wheelchair through the shadowy reaches of the college, indulging my curiosity about a time-honored undergraduate sport: climbing Cambridge.

At night, young men sometimes scramble among the upper reaches of the steepled old buildings, scaling the most difficult points. They risk their necks for the glory of it. Quite out of bounds, of course. Part of the thrill is eluding the proctors who scan the rooftops late at night, listening for the scrape of heels. There is even a booklet about roof climbing, describing its triumphs and centuries-long history.

Stephen took me to a passageway I had been through many times, a shortcut to the Cam River between high, peaked buildings of undergraduate rooms. He said that it was one of the tough events, jumping across that and then scaling a steep, often slick roof beyond.

The passage looked to be about three meters across. I couldn’t imagine leaping that gap from the slate-dark roofs. And at night, too. “All that distance?” I asked. My voice echoed in the fog.

“Yes,” he said.

“Anybody ever miss?”

“Yes.”

“Injured?”

“Yes.”

“Killed?”

His eyes twinkled and he gave us a broad smile. “Yes.” These Cambridge sorts have the real stuff, all right.

In the cool night Stephen recalled some of his favorite science fiction stories. He rarely read any fiction other than science fiction past the age of 12, he said. “It’s really the only fiction that is realistic about our true position in the universe as a whole.”

And how much stranger the universe was turning out than even those writers had imagined. Even when they discussed the next billion years, they could not guess the odd theories that would spring up within the next generation of physicists. Now there are speculations that our universe might have 11 dimensions, all told, all but three of space and one of time rolled up to tiny sizes. Will this change cosmology? So far, nobody knows. But the ideas are fun in and of themselves.

A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen’s secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.

Portraying the flinty faces of science—daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder—demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches—and more, if we can but invent them.

Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn, still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.

I had learned a good deal from those few days, I realized, and most of it was not at all about cosmology.

Copyright © 2005 by Gregory Benford

******************************************

Edmond Hamilton, husband of Leigh Brackett, is one of the great pioneers of this field. He’s the author of 17 Captain Future novels, 7 Interstellar Patrol novels, 3 Star Wolf novels, 3 Star Kings novels, and a dozen other novels. Along the way he wrote enough short fiction to fill 9 collections. He also wrote for Superman and Batman comics in the 1940s. He and Leigh were co-Guests of Honor at the 1964 Worldcon.

THE PRO

by Edmond Hamilton

The rocket stood tall and splendid, held for now in the nurse-arms of its gantry, but waiting, looking up and waiting…

And why the hell, thought Burnett, do I have to think fiction phrases even when I’m looking at the real thing?

“Must give you kind of a creepy feeling, at that,” Dan said.

“God, yes.” Burnett moved his shoulders, half grinning. “Creepy, and proud. I invented that thing. Thirty years ago come August, in my ‘Stardream’ novel, I designed her and built her and launched her and landed her on Mars, and got a cent a word for her from the old Wonder Stories.”

“Too bad you didn’t take out a patent.”

“Be glad I didn’t,” Burnett said. “You’re going to fly her. My Stardream was prettier than this one, but only had two short paragraphs of innards.” He paused, nodding slowly. “It’s kind of fitting, though, at that. It was the Stardream check, all four hundred dollars of it, that gave me the brass to ask your mother to marry me.”

He looked at his son, the slim kid with the young-old face and the quiet smile. He could admit to himself now that he had been disappointed that Dan took after his mother in the matter of build. Burnett was a big man himself, with a large head and large hands and heavy shoulders, and Dan had always seemed small and almost frail to him. And now here was Dan in his sun-faded khakis blooming like a rose after all the pressure tests and the vertigo tests and the altitude tests and the various tortures of steel chambers and centrifuges, tests that Burnett doubted he could have stood up to even in his best days. He was filled with an unaccustomed and embarrassing warmth.

“You won’t get to Mars in her, anyway,” he said.

Dan laughed. “Not this trip. We’ll be happy to settle for the Moon.”

They walked on across the sun-blistered apron, turning their backs on the rocket. Burnett felt strangely as though all his sensory nerve-ends had been sandpapered raw so that the slightest stimulus set them to quivering. Never had the sun been so hot, never had he been so conscious of his own prickling skin, the intimate smell of clean cotton cloth dampening with sweat, the grit of blown sand under his feet, the nearness of his son, walking close beside him…

Not close enough. Not ever close enough.

It was odd, Burnett thought, that he had never until this moment been aware of any lack in their relationship.

Why? Why not then, and why now?

They walked companionably together in the sun, and Burnett’s mind worked, the writer’s mind trained and sharpened by thirty-odd years of beating a typewriter for an always precarious living, the mind that could never any more be wholly engulfed in any personal situation but must stand always in some measure apart, analytical and cool, Burnett the writer looking at Burnett the man as though he were a character in a story. Motivation, man. An emotion is unreal unless it’s motivated, and this is not only unmotivated, it’s inconsistent. It’s not in character. People often seem to be inconsistent but they’re not, they always have a reason for everything even if they don’t know it, even if nobody knows it, and so what’s yours, Burnett? Be honest, now. If you’re not honest the whole thing, man and/or character, goes down the drain.

Why this sudden aching sense of incompletion, of not having done so many things, unspecified, for, by, and with this apparently perfectly happy and contented young man?

Because, thought Burnett. Because…

The heat waves shook and shimmered and the whiteness of sand and blockhouse and distant buildings were unbearably painful to the eye.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” asked Dan, sharp and far away.

“Nothing. Just the light—dazzling…”And now the sweat was cold on his big hard body and there was a cold evil inside him, and he thought, Well, hell, yes, of course. I’m scared. I’m thinking…Go ahead and drag it out, it won’t be any the better for hiding away there inside in the dark. I’m thinking that this boy of mine is going to climb into that beautiful horror back there, not very many hours from now, and men are going to fasten the hatch on him and go away, and other men will push buttons and light the fires of hell in the creature’s tail, and that it could be, it might be…

There’s always the escape tower.

Sure there is.

Anyway, there you have it, the simplest motivation in the world. The sense of incompletion is not for the past, but for the future.

“Sun’s pretty brutal here sometimes,” Dan was saying. “Maybe you should have a hat on.”

Burnett laughed and took off his sunglasses and wiped the sweat-damp out of his eyes. “Don’t sell the old man short just yet. I can still break you in two.” He put the glasses on again and strode strongly, cleanly, beside Dan. Behind them the rocket stood with its head in the sky.

In the common room of the astronauts’ quarters they found some of the others, Shontz who was going with Dan, and Crider who was back-up man, and three or four more of the team. Others had already left for the global tracking stations where they would sweat out the flight with Dan and Shontz. They were all stamped out of much the same mold as Dan, and that wasn’t a bad one, Burnett thought, not bad at all. Most of them had visited in his house. Three of them had even read his stories before they ever met either him or Dan. Now, of course, they all had. It seemed to delight them that they had on their team a top boy whose father was a writer of science fiction. He had no doubt that they had many a private joke about that, but all the same they greeted him with pleasure, and he was glad of them, because he needed some distraction to forget the coldness that was in him.

“Hey!” they said. “Here’s the old expert himself. Hi, Jim, how goes it?”

“I came down,” he told them, “to make sure you were doing everything according to the way we wrote it.”

They grinned. “Well, how does it look to an old pro?” asked Crider.

Burnett pulled his mouth down and looked judicial. “Pretty good, except for one small detail.”

“What’s that?”

“The markings on the rocket. You ought to paint them up brighter, good strong reds and yellows so they’ll show up against that deep, black, velvety, star-shot space.”

Shontz said, “I had a better idea, I wanted the top brass to paint the rocket black velvet and star-shot so Them Out There couldn’t see us going by. But the generals only looked at us kind of funny.”

“Illiterates,” said a tall solemn-faced young man named Martin. He was one of the three who had read Burnett’s stories. “Cut my teeth on them,” he had said, making Burnett feel more ancient than overjoyed.

“Right,” said Crider. “I doubt if they ever even watched Captain Marvel.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Fisher, “with a lot of people in Washington.” Fisher was round-faced and sunburned and cheerful, and he too had cut his teeth on Burnett’s stories. “When they were kids they never read anything but Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, and that’s why they keep coming out with questions like, Why put a man on the Moon?”

“Oh, well,” said Burnett, “that’s nothing new. People said that to Columbus. Fortunately, there’s always some idiot who won’t listen to reason.”

Crider held up his right hand. “Fellow idiots, I salute you.”

Burnett laughed. He felt better now. Because they were so relaxed and unworried he could loosen up too.

“Don’t get smart with me,” he said. “I wrote the lot of you. When you were drooling in your cribs I was making you up out of ink and sweat and the necessity to pay the bills. And what did you do, you ungrateful little bastards? You all came true.”

“What are you working on now?” asked Martin. “You going to do that sequel to ‘Child of a Thousand Suns’? That was a great story.”

“Depends,” said Burnett. “If you’ll promise to keep the hell out of the Hercules Cluster just long enough for me to get the book written…” He counted on his fingers. “Serialization, hard-cover, soft-cover…Three years at a minimum. Can you do that?”

“For you, Jim,” said Fisher, “we’ll hold ourselves back.”

“Okay, then. But I tell you, it isn’t funny. These probes peering around Mars and Venus and blabbing everything they know, and some smart-assed scientist coming up every day with a new breakthrough in psionics or cryogenics or see-tee or FTL drives…it’s getting tough. Nowadays I have to know what I’m talking about, instead of just elaborating on a theory or making something up out of my own head. And now my own kid going to the Moon so he can come back and tell me what it’s really like, and there will go a dozen more stories I can’t write.”

Talking, just talking, but the talk and the hearty, grinning young faces did him good and the coldness in him was gone…

“Have faith, Dad,” said Dan. “I’ll find you something down in the caverns. A dead city. Or at the least an abandoned galactic outpost.”

“Well, why not?” said Burnett. “Everything else has happened.”

He grinned back at them. “I’ll tell you one thing, science fiction is a tough living but I’m glad it all came true while I was around to see it, and to see how the people who laughed at such childish nonsense took it. The look of blank shock on their little faces when Sputnik first went up, and the lovely horror that crept over them as they gradually began to realize that Out There is a really big place…”

He was not just talking now, he felt a throb of excitement and pride that his own flesh and blood was a part of this future that had so suddenly become the present.

They talked some more and then it was time to go, and he said goodbye to Dan as casually as though the boy was taking a shuttle hop between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and he went away. Only once, when he looked back at the rocket, very distant now like a white finger pointing skyward, did the fear wrench at his guts again.

He flew home that night to Cartersburg, in central Ohio. He sat up very late talking to his wife, telling her about Dan, how he had looked and what he had said and how he, Jim, thought Dan was really feeling.

“Happy as a clam at high tide,” he told her. “You should have come with me, Sally. I told you that.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”

Her face was as calm and relaxed as Dan’s had been, but there was a note in her voice that made him put his arms around her and kiss her.

“Quit worrying, honey. Dan’s not worried, and he’s the one that’s doing it.”

“That’s just it,” she said. “He’s doing it.”

Burnett had an extra drink or two to sleep on. Even so he did not sleep well. And in the morning there were the reporters.

Burnett was beginning to not like reporters. Some of them were friendly guys, and some were just guys doing a job, but there were others…especially those who thought it intriguing that a science fiction writer should have fathered an astronaut.

“Tell me, Mr. Burnett, when you first started to write science fiction, did you really believe it would all happen?”

“That question’s a little sloppy, isn’t it?” said Burnett. “If you mean, did I think space-travel would happen…yes, I did.”

“I’ve been reading some of your early stories. Managed to get hold of some of the old magazines…”

“Good for you. Some of them are selling for nearly as much as I got for the stories. Go ahead.”

“Well, Mr. Burnett, not only in your stories but in almost all the others, I was struck by the faith in space-travel they showed. Tell me, do you think the science fiction you chaps wrote helped make space-travel come true?”

Burnett snorted. “Let’s be realistic. The big reason why rockets are going out now, instead of a century from now, is because two great nations are each afraid the other will get an advantage.”

“But you feel that science fiction did
something
to bring it about, don’t you?”

“Well,” said Burnett. “You could say that it encouraged unorthodox thinking and sort of prepared the mental climate a little for what was coming.”

The reporter had finally made his point and seized triumphantly upon it. “So that one might say that the stories you wrote years ago are partly responsible for the fact that your son is going to the Moon?”

The coldness came back into Burnett. He said flatly, “One might say that if one wanted some soppy human interest angle to add to the coverage of the moonflight, but there’s not any truth in it.”

The reporter smiled. “Come now, Mr. Burnett, your stories surely had some influence on Dan in making his choice of a career. I mean, having been exposed to these stories all his life, reading them, listening to you talk…wouldn’t all that sort of urge him into it?”

“It would not and it did not,” said Burnett. He opened the door. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

When he shut the door, he locked it. Sally had gone off somewhere to avoid the whole thing and the house was quiet. He walked through it to the back garden and stood there staring hard at some red flowers and smoking until he could hold his hand steady again.