Presently he moved Sam over to the freshly moved waste. From there Sam held the light; the work went faster. Bruce began to sweat. After a while he had to switch air bottles; he sucked on his water tube and ate a march ration before getting back to work.
He began to see the hole opening above him. A great pile collapsed on him; he backed out, looked up, then went to Sam. "Turn out the light!"
There was no doubt; a glimmer of light filtered down. Bruce found himself pounding Sam and shouting. He stopped and said, "Sam, old boy, did I ever say what patrol I'm from?"
"No. Why?"
"Badger Patrol. Watch me dig!" He tore into it. Shortly sunlight poured into the hole and reflected dimly around the cavern. Bruce shoveled until he could see a straight rise from the base of the pile clear to the edge of the morning glory high above them. He decided that the opening was wide enough to tackle.
He hitched himself to Sam with the full length of all the glass ropes and then made a bundle of Sam's pack save air and water bottles, tied a bowline on Sam's uninjured foot, using the manila line, and secured the bundle to the end of that line. He planned to drag Sam out first, then the equipment. Finished, he bound on skis.
Bruce touched helmets. "This is it, pal. Keep the line clear of the sand."
Sam grabbed his arm. "Wait a minute."
"What's the matter?"
"Bruce—if we don't make it, I just want to say that you're all right."
"Uh . . . oh, forget it. We'll make it." He started up.
A herringbone step suited the convex approach to the hole. As Bruce neared the opening he shifted to side-step to fit the narrow passage and the concave shape of the morning glory above. He inched up, transferring his weight smoothly and gradually, and not remaining in one spot too long. At last his head, then his whole body, were in sunshine; he was starting up the morning glory itself.
He stopped, uncertain what to do. There was a ridge above him, where the flakes had broken loose when he had shoveled away their support. The break was much too steep to climb, obviously unstable. He paused only a moment as he could feel his skis sinking in; he went forward in half side-step, intending to traverse past the unstable formation.
The tow line defeated him. When Bruce moved sideways, the line had to turn a corner at the neck of the hole. It brushed and then cut into the soft stuff. Bruce felt his skis slipping backwards; with cautious haste he started to climb, tried to ride the slipping mass and keep above it. He struggled as the flakes poured over his skis. Then he was fouled, he went down, it engulfed him.
Again he came to rest in soft, feathery, darkness. He lay quiet, nursing his defeat, before trying to get out. He hardly knew which way was up, much less which way was out. He was struggling experimentally when he felt a tug on his belt. Sam was trying to help him.
A few minutes later, with Sam's pull to guide him, Bruce was again on the floor of the cave. The only light came from the torch in Sam's hand; it was enough to show that the pile choking the hole was bigger than ever.
Sam motioned him over. "Too bad, Bruce," was all he said.
Bruce controlled his choking voice to say, "I'll get busy as soon as I catch my breath."
"Where's your left ski?"
"Huh? Oh! Must have pulled off. It'll show up when I start digging."
"Hmmm . . . how much air have you?"
"Uh?" Bruce looked at his belt. "About a third of a bottle."
"I'm breathing my socks. I've got to change."
"Right away!" Bruce started to make the switch; Sam pulled him down again.
"You take the fresh bottle, and give me your bottle."
"But—"
"No 'buts' about it," Sam cut him off. "You have to do all the work; you've got to take the full tank."
Silently Bruce obeyed. His mind was busy with arithmetic. The answer always came out the same; he knew with certainty that there was not enough air left to permit him again to perform the Herculean task of moving that mountain of dust.
He began to believe that they would never get out. The knowledge wearied him; he wanted to lie down beside the still form of Abner Green and, like him, not struggle at the end.
However he could not. He knew that, for Sam's sake, he would have to shovel away at that endless sea of sand, until he dropped from lack of oxygen. Listlessly he took off his remaining ski and walked toward his task.
Sam jerked on the rope.
Bruce went back. "What's got into you, kid?" Sam demanded.
"Nothing. Why?"
"It's got you whipped."
"I didn't say so."
"But you think so. I could see it. Now you listen! You convinced me that you could get us out—and, by Jiminy! you're going to! You're just cocky enough to be the first guy to whip a morning glory and you can do it. Get your chin up!"
Bruce hesitated. "Look, Sam, I won't quit on you, but you might as well know the truth: there isn't air enough to do it again."
"Figured that out when I saw the stuff start to crumble."
"You knew? Then if you know any prayers, better say them."
Sam shook his arm. "It's not time to pray; it's time to get busy."
"Okay." Bruce started to straighten up.
"That's not what I meant."
"Huh?"
"There's no point in digging. Once was worth trying; twice is wasting oxygen."
"Well, what do you want me to do?"
"You didn't try all the ways out, did you?"
"No." Bruce thought about it. "I'll try again, Sam. But there isn't air enough to try them all."
"You can search longer than you can shovel. But don't search haphazardly; search back toward the hills. Anywhere else will be just another morning glory; we need to come out at the hills; away from the sand."
"Uh . . . look, Sam, where are the hills? Down here you can't tell north from next week."
"Over that way," Sam pointed.
"Huh? How do you know?"
"You showed me. When you broke through I could tell where the Sun was from the angle of the light."
"But the Sun is overhead."
"Was when we started. Now it's fifteen, twenty degrees to the west. Now listen: these caves must have been big blow holes once, gas pockets. You search off in that direction and find us a blow hole that's not choked with sand."
"I'll do my darndest!"
"How far away were the hills when we got caught?"
Bruce tried to remember. "Half a mile, maybe."
"Check. You won't find what we want tied to me with five or six hundred feet of line. Take that pad of paper in my pouch. Blaze your way—and be darn sure you blaze enough!"
"I will!"
"Attaboy! Good luck."
Bruce stood up.
* * *
It was the same tedious, depressing business as before. Bruce stretched the line, then set out at the end of it, dropping bits of paper and counting his steps. Several times he was sure that he was under the hills, only to come to an impasse. Twice he skirted the heaps that marked other morning glorys. Each time he retraced his steps he gathered up his blazes, both to save paper and to keep from confusing himself.
Once, he saw a glimmer of light and his heart pounded—but it filtered down from a hole too difficult even for himself and utterly impossible for Sam.
His air got low; he paid no attention, other than to adjust his mix to keep it barely in the white. He went on searching.
A passage led to the left, then down; he began to doubt the wisdom of going further and stopped to check the darkness. At first his eyes saw nothing, then it seemed as if there might be a suggestion of light ahead. Eye fatigue? Possibly. He went another hundred feet and tried again. It was light!
Minutes later he shoved his shoulders up through a twisted hole and gazed out over the burning plain.
* * *
"Hi!" Sam greeted him. "I thought you had fallen down a hole."
"Darn near did. Sam, I found it!"
"Knew you would. Let's get going
."
"Right. I'll dig out my other ski."
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Look at your air gauge. We aren't going anywhere on skis."
"Huh? Yeah, I guess not." They abandoned their loads, except for air and water bottles. The dark trek was made piggy-back, where the ceiling permitted. Some places Bruce half dragged his partner. Other places they threaded on hands and knees with Sam pulling his bad leg painfully behind him.
Bruce climbed out first, having slung Sam in a bowline before he did so. Sam gave little help in getting out; once they were above ground Bruce picked him up and set him against a rock. He then touched helmets. "There, fellow! We made it!"
Sam did not answer.
Bruce peered in; Sam's features were slack, eyes half closed. A check of his belt told why; the blood-oxygen indicator showed red.
Sam's intake valve was already wide open; Bruce moved fast, giving himself a quick shot of air, then transferring his bottle to Sam. He opened it wide.
He could see Sam's pointer crawl up even as his own dropped toward the red. Bruce had air in his suit for three or four minutes if he held still.
He did not hold still. He hooked his intake hose to the manifold of the single bottle now attached to Sam's suit and opened his valve. His own indicator stopped dropping toward the red. They were Siamese twins now, linked by one partly-exhausted bottle of utterly necessary gas. Bruce put an arm around Sam, settled Sam's head on his shoulder, helmet to helmet, and throttled down both valves until each was barely in the white. He gave Sam more margin than himself, then settled down to wait. The rock under them was in shadow, though the Sun still baked the plain. Bruce looked out, searching for anyone or anything, then extended his aerial. "M'aidez!" he called. "Help us! We're lost."
He could hear Sam muttering. "May day!" Sam echoed into his dead radio. "May day! We're lost."
Bruce cradled the delirious boy in his arm and repeated again, "M'aidez! Get a bearing on us." He paused, then echoed, "May day! May day!"
After a while he readjusted the valves, then went back to repeating endlessly, "May day! Get a bearing on us."
He did not feel it when a hand clasped his shoulder. He was still muttering "May day!" when they dumped him into the air lock of the desert car.
* * *
Mr. Andrews visited him in the infirmary at Base Camp. "How are you, Bruce?"
"Me? I'm all right, sir. I wish they'd let me get up."
"My instructions. So I'll know where you are." The Scoutmaster smiled; Bruce blushed.
"How's Sam?" he asked.
"He'll get by. Cold burns and a knee that will bother him a while. That's all."
"Gee, I'm glad."
"The troop is leaving. I'm turning you over to Troop Three, Mr. Harkness. Sam will go back with the grub car."
"Uh, I think I could travel with the Troop, sir."
"Perhaps so, but I want you to stay with Troop Three. You need field experience."
"Uh—" Bruce hesitated, wondering how to say it. "Mr. Andrews?"
"Yes?"
"I might as well go back. I've learned something. You were right. A fellow can't get to be an old Moon hand in three weeks. Uh . . . I guess I was just conceited."
"Is that all?"
"Well—yes, sir."
"Very well, listen to me. I've talked with Sam and with Mr. Harkness. Mr. Harkness will put you through a course of sprouts; Sam and I will take over when you get back. You plan on being ready for the Court of Honor two weeks from Wednesday." The Scoutmaster added, "Well?"
Bruce gulped and found his voice. "Yes, sir!"
PANDORA'S BOX
Once opened, the box could never be closed. But after the myriad swarming Troubles came Hope.
Science fiction is not prophecy. It often reads as if it were prophecy; indeed the practitioners of this odd genre (pun intentional—I won't do it again) of fiction usually strive hard to make their stories sound as if they were true pictures of the future. Prophecies.
Prophesying is what the weatherman does, the race track tipster, the stock market adviser, the fortuneteller who reads palms or gazes into a crystal. Each one is predicting the future—sometimes exactly, sometimes in vague, veiled, or ambiguous language, sometimes simply with a claim of statistical probability, but always with a claim seriously made of disclosing some piece of the future.
This is not at all what a science fiction author does. Science fiction is almost always laid in the future—or at least in a fictional possible-future—and is almost invariably deeply concerned with the shape of that future. But the method is not prediction; it is usually extrapolation and/or speculation. Indeed the author is not required to (and usually does not) regard the fictional "future" he has chosen to write about as being the events most likely to come to pass; his purpose may have nothing to do with the probability that these storied events may happen.
"Extrapolation" means much the same in fiction writing as it does in mathematics: exploring a trend. It means continuing a curve, a path, a trend into the future, by extending its present direction and continuing the shape it has displayed in its past performance—i.e., if it is a sine curve in the past, you extrapolate it as a sine curve in the future, not as an hyperbola, nor a Witch of Agnesi, and most certainly not as a tangent straight line.
"Speculation" has far more elbowroom than extrapolation; it starts with a "What if?"—and the new factor thrown in by the what-if may be both wildly improbable and so revolutionary in effect as to throw a sine-curve trend (or a yeast-growth trend, or any trend) into something unrecognizably different. What if little green men land on the White House lawn and invite us to join a Galactic union?—or big green men land and enslave us and eat us? What if we solve the problem of immortality? What if New York City really does go dry? And not just the present fiddlin' shortage tackled by fiddlin' quarter-measures—can you imagine a man being lynched for wasting an ice cube? Living, as I do, in a state (Colorado—1965) which has just two sorts of water, too little and too much—we just finished seven years of drought with seven inches of rain in two hours, and one was about as disastrous as the other—I find a horrid fascination in Frank Herbert's Dune World, in Charles Einstein's The Day New York Went Dry, and in stories about Bible-type floods such as S. Fowler Wright's Deluge.
Most science fiction stories use both extrapolation and speculation. Consider "Blowups Happen," elsewhere in this volume. It was written in 1939, updated very slightly for book publication just after World War II by inserting some words such as "Manhattan Project" and "Hiroshima," but not rewritten, and is one of a group of stories published under the pretentious collective title of The History of the Future (!) (an editor's title, not mine!)—which certainly sounds like prophecy.
I disclaim any intention of prophesying; I wrote that story for the sole purpose of making money to pay off a mortgage and with the single intention of entertaining the reader. As prophecy the story falls flat on its silly face—any tenderfoot Scout can pick it to pieces—but I think it is still entertaining as a story, else it would not be here; I have a business reputation to protect and wish to continue making money. Nor am I ashamed of this motivation. Very little of the great literature of our heritage arose solely from a wish to "create art"; most writing, both great and not-so-great, has as its proximate cause a need for money combined with an aversion to, or an inability to perform, hard "honest labor." Fiction writing offers a legal and reasonably honest way out of this dilemma.
A science fiction author may have, and often does have, other motivations in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create "art for art's sake," he may want to warn the world against a course he feels to be disastrous (Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World—but please note that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, or uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fictio
n writer—any fiction writer—must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose . . . or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton sack.
If he succeeds in this purpose, his story is likely to remain gripping entertainment long years after it has turned out to be false "prophecy." H. G. Wells is perhaps the greatest science fiction author of all time—and his greatest science fiction stories were written around sixty years ago (i.e., about 1895) . . . under the whip. Bedfast with consumption, unable to hold a job, flat broke, paying alimony—he had to make money somehow, and writing was the heaviest work he could manage. He was clearly aware (see his autobiography) that to stay alive he must be entertaining. The result was a flood of some of the most brilliant speculative stories about the future ever written. As prophecy they are all hopelessly dated . . . which matters not at all; they are as spellbinding now as they were in the Gay 'Nineties and the Mauve Decade.
Try to lay hands on his When the Sleeper Wakes. The gadgetry in it is ingenious—and all wrong. The projected future in it is brilliant—and did not happen. All of which does not sully the story; it is a great story of love and sacrifice and blood-chilling adventure set in a matrix of mind-stretching speculation about the nature of Man and his Destiny. I read it first in 1923, and at least a dozen times since . . . and still reread it whenever I get to feeling uncertain about just how one does go about the unlikely process of writing fiction for entertainment of strangers—and again finding myself caught up in the sheer excitement of Wells' story.
"Solution Unsatisfactory" herein is a consciously Wellsian story. No, no, I'm not claiming that it is of H. G. Wells' quality—its quality is for you to judge, not me. But it was written by the method which Wells spelled out for the speculative story: Take one, just one, basic new assumption, then examine all its consequences—but express those consequences in terms of human beings. The assumption I chose was the "Absolute Weapon"; the speculation concerns what changes this forces on mankind. But the "history" the story describes simply did not happen.
However the problems discussed in this story are as fresh today, the issues just as poignant, for the grim reason that we have not reached even an "unsatisfactory" solution to the problem of the Absolute Weapon; we have reached no solution.