Sauron Defeated (29 page)

'Oh! difficulties of that sort will be got over all right,' said Frankley. 'At least that is what most of the scientists say who are concerned with space-projects.'

'Scientists are as prone to wishful thinking (and talking) as other men, especially when they are thinking about their own romantic hopes and not yours,' said Guildford. 'And they like opening vague, vast, vistas before gapers, when they are performing as public soothsayers.'

'I'm not talking about that kind,' said Frankley. 'There are quiet unpublicized people, quite scientific medicos, for instance, who'll tell you that your heart and digestive arrangements, and all that, would function all right, even at, say, zero gravity.'

'I dare say they will,' said Guildford. 'Though I still find it difficult to believe that a machine like our body, made to function under definite earth-conditions, would in fact run on merrily when those were greatly changed - and for a long time, or permanently. Look how quickly we wilt, even on this globe, if we're transferred to unusual heights or temperatures. And the effect on you of greatly increased gravity is rather hushed up, isn't it? * Yet after all that is what you'd be most likely to get at the other end of your journey.'

'That's so,' said Lowdham. 'But people of this blessed century think primarily of travelling and speed, not of destination, or (* Not, of course, in Scientifiction. There it is usually exorcized by mere abracadabra in bogus 'scientific' form. N.G.)

settling. It's better to travel "scientifically", in fact, than to get anywhere; or the vehicle justifies the journey.'

'Yes, and it is speed that really bothers me,' said Guildford,

'more than these other difficulties. I don't doubt the possibility of sending a rocket to the Moon. The preparations were knocked back by the Great Explosion,(11) but they say they're under way again. I'll even admit the eventual possibility of landing undamaged human goods on the lunar landscape -

though what they'll do there is dubious. But the Moon is very parochial. Rockets are so slow. Can you hope to go as fast as light, anything like as fast?'

'I don't know,' said Frankley. 'It doesn't seem likely at present, but I don't think that all the scientists or mathema-ticians would answer that question with a definite no.'

'No, they're very romantic on this topic,' said Guildford. 'But even the speed of light will only be moderately useful. Unless you adopt a Shavian attitude and regard all these light-years and light-centuries as lies, the magnitude of which is inartistic. If not, you'll have to plan for a speed greater than light; much greater, if you're to have a practical range outside the Solar System. Otherwise you will have very few destinations. Who's going to book a passage for a distant place, if he's sure to die of old age on the way?'

'They still take tickets on the State Railways,' said Lowdham.

'But there's still at least a chance of arriving before death by coach or train,' said Guildford. 'I don't ask for any greater degree of probability from my author: just a possibility not wholly at variance with what we know.'

'Or think we know,' Frankley murmured.

'Quite so,' Guildford agreed. 'And the speed of light, or certainly anything exceeding it, is on that basis incredible: if you're going to be "scientific", or more properly speaking

"mechanical". At any rate for anyone writing now. I admit the criteria of credibility may change; though as far as I can see, genuine Science, as distinct from mechanical romance, narrows the possibilities rather than expands them. But 1 still stick to my original point: the "machine" used sets the tone. I found space-ships sufficiently credible for a raw taste, until I grew up and wanted to find something more useful on Mars than ray-guns and faster vehicles. Space-ships will take you to that kind of country, no doubt. But I don't want to go there. There's no need now to travel to find it.'

'No, but there is an attraction in its being far away, even if it's nasty and stupid,' said Frankley. 'Even if it's the same! You could make a good story - inevitably satirical in effect, perhaps, but not really primarily so - out of a journey to find a replica of Earth and its denizens.'

'I daresay! But aren't we getting a bit mixed?' said Lowdham.

'Nick's real point, which he seems to have forgotten as well as the rest of us, was incoherence - discord. That was really quite distinct from his dislike, or his disbelief in mechanical vehicles; though actually he dislikes them, credible or not. But then he began confusing scientific probability with literary credibility.'

'No, I didn't and I don't,' said Guildford. 'Scientific probability need not be concerned at all. But it has to be, if you make your vehicle mechanical. You cannot make a piece of mechanism even sufficiently credible in a tale, if it seems outrageously incredible as a machine to your contemporaries - those whose critical faculties are not stunned by the mere mention of a machine.'

'All right, all right,' said Lowdham. 'But let's get back to the incoherence. It's the discord between the objects and the findings of the better tales and their machines that upsets you. And I think you have something there. Lewis, for instance, used a space-ship, but he kept it for his villains, and packed his hero the second time in a crystal coffin without machinery.'

'Half-hearted,' said Guildford. 'Personally, I found the com-promise very unconvincing. It was wilfully inefficient, too: poor Ransom (12) got half toasted, for no sound reason that I could see.

The power that could hurl the coffin to Venus could (one would have thought) have devised a material that let in light without excessive heat. I found the coffin much less credible than the Eldils,(13) and granted the Eldils, unnecessary. There was a page or two of smoke-screen about the outward journey to Perelandra, but it was not thick enough to hide the fact that this semi-transparent coffin was after all only a material packing-case, a special one-man space-ship of unknown motive power.

It was necessary to the tale, of course, to have safe delivery of Ransom's living terrestrial body in Venus: but this impossible sort of parcel-post did not appeal to me as a solution of the problem. As I say, I doubt if there is a solution. But I should prefer an old-fashioned wave of a wizard's wand. Or a word of power in Old Solar (14) from an Eldil. Nothing less would suffice: a miracle.'

'Why have anything at all?' little Jeremy asked suddenly. So far he had sat curled up on the floor, as near to the fire as he could get, and he had said nothing, though his black birdlike eyes had hopped to and fro from speaker to speaker. 'The best stories I know about imaginary times and lands are just stories about them. Why a wizard? At least, why a wizard, outside the real story, just to waft you into it? Why not apply the Once-upon-a-time method to Space? Do you need more than author's magic? Even old Nick won't deny authors the power of seeing more than their eyes can. In his novels he lets himself look into other people's heads. Why not into distant parts of Space? It's what the author has really got to do, so why conceal it?'

'No, of course I don't deny authors their right of invention, seeing, if you like to call it that,' said Guildford.

At that point Dolbear stirred and seemed about to wake up; but he only settled more comfortably into his chair, and his loud breathing went on, as it had since the early part of Ramer's story.

'But that's a different kind of story, Jeremy,' objected Frankley. 'Quite good in its way. But I want to travel in Space and

' Time myself; and so, failing that, I want people in stories to do it. I want contact of worlds, confrontation of the alien. You say, Nick, that people cannot leave this world and live, at least not beyond the orbit of the Moon?'

'Yes, I believe they could not, cannot, and never will.'

'Very well then, all the more reason for having stories about they could or they will. Anybody would think you'd gone back to all that old-fashioned stuff about escapism. Do you object to fairy-tales? '

'No, I don't. But they make their own worlds, with their own laws.'

'Then why can't I make mine, and let its laws allow spaceships?'

'Because it won't then be your private world, of course,' said Guildford. 'Surely that is the main point of that kind of story, at an intelligent level? The Mars in such a story is Mars: the Mars that is. And the story is (as you've just admitted) a substitute for satisfaction of our insatiable curiosity about the Universe as it is. So a space-travel story ought to be made to fit, as far as we can see, the Universe as it is. If it doesn't or doesn't try to, then it does become a fairy-story - of a debased kind. But there is no need to travel by rocket to find Faerie. It can be anywhere, or nowhere.'

'But supposing you did travel, and did find Fairyland?' asked Ramer, suddenly. For some time now he had been staring at the fire, and had seemed to take very little interest in the battle that had been going on about him. Jeremy gaped at him, and jumped to his feet.

'But not by space-ship surely!' he cried. 'That would be as depressingly vulgar as the other way about: like an awful story I came across once, about some men who used a magic carpet for cheap power to drive a bus.'

'I'm glad to get you as an ally!' laughed Guildford. 'For you're a hardened sinner: you read that bastard stuff, scientific-tion, not as a casual vice, but actually as a professional interest.'

'The stuff is extremely interesting,' said Jeremy. 'Seldom as art. Its art level is as a rule very low. But literature may have a pathological side - still you've heard me on all that often enough. On this point I'm with you. Real fairy-stories don't pretend to produce impossible mechanical effects by bogus machines.'

'No. And if Frankley wants fairy-tales with mechanized dragons, and quack formulas for producing power-swords, or anti-dragon gas, or scientifictitious explanations of invisibility, well, he can have 'em and keep 'em. No! For landing on a new planet, you've got your choice: miracle; magic; or sticking to normal probability, the only known or likely way in which any one has ever landed on a world.'

'Oh! So you've got a private recipe all the time, have you?'

said Ramer sharply.

'No, it's not private, though I've used it once.'

'Well? Come on! What is it?'

'Incarnation. By being born, said Guildford.(15)

At that point Dolbear woke up. He yawned loudly, lifted his heavy lids, and his blue-bright eyes opened wide under his red brows. He had been audibly sleeping for a long while,* but we (* He often slept loudly, during a long reading or discussion. But he would rouse up in the middle of a debate, and show that he had the odd faculty of both sleeping and listening. He said that it was a time-saving habit that long membership of the Club had forced him to acquire. N.G.)

were used to the noise, and it disturbed us no more than the sound of a kettle simmering on the fire.

'What have you got to say to that, Ramer?' he asked. He shot a sharp glance at him, but Ramer made no reply. Dolbear yawned again. 'I'm rather on Nick's side,' he said. 'Certainly about the first chapter in this case.'

'Well, that was read at the beginning, before you settled down for your nap,' said Lowdham.

Dolbear grinned. 'But it was not that chapter in itself that interested me,' he said. 'I think most of the discussion has been off the point, off the immediately interesting point. The hottest trail that Nicholas got on to was the discord, as you said yourself, Arry.(16) That's what you should follow up now. I should feel it strongly, even if space-ships were as regrettably possible as the Transatlantic Bus-service. Michael! Your real story is wholly out of keeping with what you called the frame.

And that's odd in you. I've never felt such a jar before, not in any of your work. I find it hard to believe that the machine and the tale were made by the same man. Indeed, I don't think they were. You wrote the first chapter, the space-voyage, and also the homecoming (rather slipshod that, and my attention wandered): you made it up, as they say. And as you've not tried your hand at that sort of thing before, it was not much above the average. But I don't think you wrote the story inside. I wonder what you've been up to?'

'What are you driving at?' said Jeremy. 'It was typical Ramer all through, nearly every sentence was hall-marked. And even if he wanted to put us off with borrowed goods, where could he get them from?'

'You know his itch to re-write other people's bungled tales,'

said Lowdham. 'Though certainly he's never tried one on us before, without telling us.'

'I know all that,' said Jeremy, hopping about angrily. 'I mean: where could he get this tale from? If he has found any printed space-travel story that I don't know, then he's been doing some pretty hot research. I've never met anything like it at all.'

'You're missing my point,' said Dolbear. 'I shouldn't have said wrote. I should have said made up, invented. I say again: I wonder what you've been up to, Ramer?'