Corbell donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. He took it slow. The suit came in two pieces: a skintight rubbery body stocking, and a helmet attached to a heavy backpack. On the chest was a white spiral with tapered ends: the sign of the State.
An electric cart came for them. Apparently Corbell was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ship. It was a long way off.
It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath. A fat cylinder the size of a house swelled above the jeep: the life-support section, bound to the main hull by a narrower neck. The smaller dome at the nose must be the control room.
The guard said, “Now you inspect your ship.”
“You can talk?”
“Yes. Yesterday, a quick course.”
“Oh.”
“Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me. I tell him.”
“Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?”
“Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you.”
It was another test, of course. Maybe the last. Corbell was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbell’s impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the—the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn’t wait.
“I’ll slurry this now,” he told the guard. “Get a tanker over there to top it off.” He bled hydrogen gas slowly through the valve, lowering the fuel’s vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the valve itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.
He finished the external inspection without finding anything more. It figured: The banks of dials would hold vastly more information than a man’s eyes could read through opaque titan-alloy skin.
The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbell shut the outer door, used the others when green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.
Vacuum?
He stopped. The ship’s gauges said air. The suit’s said vacuum. Which was right? Come to that, he hadn’t heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?
Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in a vacuum. Well, how to test?
Hah! Corbell found the head, turned on a water faucet. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.
Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship?
Corbell doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.
There was no way to test the ram-field generators without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the telltales, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.
He decided to finish his inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life.
The cold-sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbell shuddered, remembering two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbell were really dead—and then he shook off the thought and went to work.
No flaws in the cold-sleep system. He went on.
The computer was acting vaguely funny.
He had a hell of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. Bastards. He donned his suit and went out to report.
The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbell, “You did good. Now finish with the topping-off procedure. We fix the other things.”
“There’s something wrong with my suit, too.”
“New suit aboard now.”
“I want some time with the computer. I want to be sure it’s all right now.”
“We fix it good. When you top off fuel you leave.”
That suddenly, Corbell felt a vast sinking sensation. The whole Moon was dropping away under him.
They launched him hard. Corbell saw red before his eyes, felt his cheeks dragged far back toward his ears. The ship would be all right. It was built to stand electromagnetic eddy currents from any direction.
He survived. He fumbled out of his couch in time to watch the moonscape flying under him, receding, a magnificent view.
There were days of free-fall. He was not yet moving at ramscoop speeds. But the State had aimed him inside the orbit of Mercury, straight into the thickening solar wind. Protons. Thick fuel for the ram fields and a boost from the sun’s gravity.
Meanwhile he had most of a day to play with the computer.
At one point it occurred to him that the State might monitor his computer work. He shrugged it off. Probably it was too late for the State to stop him now. In any case, he had said too much already.
He finished his work with the computer and got answers that satisfied him. At higher speeds the ram fields were self-reinforcing—they would support themselves and the ship. He could find no upper limit to the velocity of a seeder ramship.
With all the time in the world, then, he sat down at the control console and began to play with the fields.
They emerged like invisible wings. He felt the buffeting of badly controlled bursts of fusing hydrogen. He kept the fields close to the ship, fearful of losing the balance here, where the streaming of protons was so uneven. He could feel how he was doing. He could fly this ship by the seat of his pants, with RNA training to help him.
He felt like a giant. This enormous, phallic, germinal flying thing of metal and fire! Carrying the seeds of life for worlds that had never known life, he roared around the sun and out. The thrust dropped a bit then, because he and the solar wind were moving in the same direction. But he was catching it in his nets like wind in a sail, guiding it and burning it and throwing it behind him. The ship moved faster every second.
This feeling of power—enormous masculine power—had to be partly RNA training. At this point he didn’t care. Part was him, Jerome Corbell.
Around the orbit of Mars, when he was sure that a glimpse of sunlight would not blind him, he instructed the computer to give him a full view. The walls of the spherical control room seemed to disappear; the sky blazed around him. There were no planets nearby. All he saw of the sky was myriads of brilliant pinpoints, mostly white, some showing traces of color. But there was more to see. Fusing hydrogen made a ghostly ring of light around his ship.
It would grow stronger. So far his thrust was low, somewhat more than enough to balance the thin pull of the sun.
He started his turn around the orbit of Jupiter by adjusting the fields to channel the proton flow to the side. That helped him thrust, but it must have puzzled Pierce and the faceless State. They would assume he was playing with the fields, testing his equipment. Maybe. His curve was gradual; it would take them a while to notice.
This was not according to plan. Originally he had intended to be halfway to Van Maanan’s Star before he changed course. That would have given him fifteen years’ head start, in case he was wrong, in case the State could do something to stop him even now.
That would have been wise; but he couldn’t do it. Pierce might die in thirty years. Pierce might never know what Corbell had done—and that thought was intolerable.
His thrust dropped to almost nothing in the outer reaches of the system. Protons were thin out here. But there were enough to push his velocity steadily higher, and that was what counted. The faster he went, the greater the proton flux. He was on his way.
He was beyond Neptune when the voice of Pierce the checker
came to him, saying, “This is Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbell. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We cannot send rescue but we can advise. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State—”
Corbell smiled tightly. Peerssa? The checker’s name had changed pronunciation in two hundred years. Pierce had slipped back to an old habit, RNA lessons forgotten. He must be upset about something.
Corbell spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling. When he had it adjusted he said, “This is Corbel for himself, Corbell for himself. I’m fine. How are you?”
He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return to Sol system. He planned to be away longer than the State would have expected. Suppose there was nobody on the Moon when he returned?
It was a problem, he found. If he could reach the Moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth’s atmosphere. The ship was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his attitude jets would not land him, properly speaking.
Unless he could cut away part of the ship. The ram-field generators would no longer be needed then…Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.
The answer from the Moon took nine hours. “Peerssa for the State. Corbell, we don’t understand. You are far off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan’s Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike world in that direction. What the bleep do you think you’re doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa—”
Corbell tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn’t told him about an off switch. Finally, and it should have been sooner, he told the computer to switch the receiver off.
Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission.
“This is Corbell for himself, Corbell for himself. I’m getting sick and tired of having to find you every damn time I want to say something. So I’ll give you this all at once.
“I’m not going to any of the stars on your list.
“It’s occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the ship in one direction and keep it going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor.
“It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, ship’s time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can’t resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren’t like the stars in the arms. And they’re packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be passing strange in there.
“So I’ll go exploring on my own. Maybe I’ll find some of your reducing-atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won’t. I’ll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away, or you’ll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I’ll join one of them. Or—”
Corbell thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. “I’ll have to check it out on the computer,” he said. “But if I don’t like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I’ll bet they aren’t more than twenty-five years away, ship’s time.”
After “Rammer” I couldn’t just let Corbell drop. Ultimately I took him around the galactic core and back to earth three million years hence. Somewhere in there the State evolved into the civilization that settled the Smoke Ring in two subsequent novels. But this is still one of my best short stories.
• • •
• • •
“Hey!”
The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I’d never have seen her if everyone else hadn’t been short too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting my name.
Waving my wallet.
“Flatlander,” 1967
KNOWN SPACE
“Known Space” now runs from now to a thousand years further. That’s not large, as future histories go. Many of my early stories were set somewhere/somewhen in known space.
The worlds of known space were stranger than what I found in other fiction…
From “The Ethics of Madness”
Tau Ceti Is a small cool-yellow G0 dwarf with four planets. Strictly speaking, none of the planets is habitable. Two are gas giants. The third inward has no air; the innermost has too much.
That innermost world is about the size of Venus. With no oversized moon to strip away most of its air, it has an atmosphere like Venus’: thick and hot and corrosive. No human explorer would have marked it for colonization.
But the ramrobots were not human.
During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called “known space.” They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet.
Unfortunately they were programmed wrong.
The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrobot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, and other conditions. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat.
Unlike the ramrobots, the man-carrying slowboats could not use interstellar ramscoops. They had to carry their own fuel. It meant that the slowboats took a long time to get where they were going, and there were no round-trip tickets. The slowboats could not turn back.
So We Made It was colonized because a ramrobot elected to settle in spring. Had it landed in summer or winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation points through its primary, Procyon, it would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
So Jinx was colonized. Jinx, with a surface gravity of 1.78 and two habitable bands between the ocean, where there is too much air, and the Ends, where there is none at all. Jinx, the Easter Egg Planet, home of men and women who are five feet tall and five feet wide, the strongest bipeds in known space. But they die young, of heart trouble.
So Plateau was colonized. For the innermost world of Tau Ceti is like Venus in size and atmosphere, save for one mountain. That straight-sided mountain is forty miles tall, and its nearly flat top is half the size of California. It rises out of the searing black calm at the planet’s surface to the transparent atmosphere above; and that air can be breathed. Snow covers the peaks near the center of the Plateau, and rivers run lower down—rivers that tumble off the void edges of the Plateau into the shining mist below. The ramrobot landed there. And founded a world.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Within Known Space I count twelve books, novels and collections and anthologies, and six general historical periods:
1
The immediate future. Exploration of the solar system.
2
The early twenty-second century, the era of Lucas Garner and Gil “the ARM” Hamilton. Industry is spreading through the solar system; other solar systems are being explored. The organ bank problem is at its sociological worst on Earth. Nonhuman intelligence has become obtrusively real; humanity must adjust.
3
Intermediate period centering around 2340 A.D. Sol System is in a period of peace and prosperity. On colony worlds like Plateau times are turbulent. At the edge of Sol System, a creature that used to be Jack Brennan fights a l
one war. The era of peace began with the subtle interventions of the Brennan-monster.
4
Contact and war with the Kzinti Patriarchy. THE MAN-KZIN WARS, volumes 1-3, include only one story of mine. I’m not good at war stories…but my friends are.
5
The period following the Man-Kzin Wars covers part of the twenty-sixth century A.D. It is a time of easy tourism and interstellar trade, in which the human species neither rules nor is ruled. New planets have been settled, some of which were wrested from the Patriarchy during the wars.
6
Little has changed. Thrusters have replaced fusion drives, there’s a new sapient species about…but the fundamental change is subtle. The Teela Brown gene complex—the “ultimate psychic power”—is spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.
A lucky human makes a poor protagonist. I’m reluctant to go past the Teela barrier.
Be warned: don’t take this historical organization too seriously. I kept Known Space chaotic, like the history of the past.
Known Space was never my prison. This imaginary future was an elaborate background, like other alternate futures and alternate pasts. When a story idea fit Known Space, it joined Known Space. Otherwise I worked out something else.
In Known Space I allowed faster-than-light travel, a prevalence of intelligent life, near-magical engineering, and other unlikely things. Known Space gradually grew cluttered with implausible assumptions, inconsistent dating, half-fantastic hardware, obsolete astrophysics, and limits. I came to prefer the slower-than-light universe, which has room enough for miracles.
[The Ringworld properly belongs to a slower-than-light universe. You don’t need to build vast habitats when habitable worlds are so easily available.]
But known space won’t let go of me. WORLD OF PTAVVS was the beginning; “Madness Has Its Place” is the latest; and there is no end.
• • •
• • •
The other nonhumans aboard would have to stay in their rooms. Rooms 14-16-18 were joined and half full of water, occupied by a dolphin. His name was Pszzz, or Bra-a-ack, or some such impolite sound. Human ears couldn’t catch the ultrasonic overtones of that name, nor could a human throat pronounce it, so he answered to Moby Dick. He was on his way to Wunderland, the Argos’ next stop. Then there were two sessile Grogs in 22, and a flock of jumpin’ jeepers in 24, with the connecting door open so the Grogs could get at the jumpin’ jeepers, which were their food supply. Lloobee, the Kdatlyno touch-sculptor, had room twenty.