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megapolisomancy's review
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Year 7. Only seven books in, and I’ve been at this for almost two years - at my current rate of 3.5 books a year, I’ll be caught up in about two decades. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess. Then again, my reviewing has fallen off in general (2013 has been one of those years), but maybe things have stabilized enough for me to be productive again? We’ll see.
At any rate, this is another one where I’ve let a stupid amount of time lapse between reading and reviewing, and even starting the review and finishing it, so I don’t have much to say about the volume overall at this point. It’s a slight improvement overall, although we’re down to a single woman-authored story this year (Norton). If I’m ever going to do anything with all this data I’ll need to quantify it a bit more rigorously, so I’m holding off on that for now. For the most part, it’s more of the same (mostly set on Earth, mostly contemporary or near future, etc).
Bleiler bailed on Dikty this year, and the latter chose to combine the year’s best short stories series with his concurrent year’s best novels series, so the last two entries this year are longer, although they are probably more either novellas or novelettes. Whatever you call them, they are just padded out short stories - they bring nothing more substantial to the table than anything else here.
The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin
Where to even start with this story, surely one of the most-discussed short stories in the genre (and, at least at one point, tied for 5th-most-reprinted)? To begin, a quick summary: the male pilot of a small “Emergency Dispatch Ship” discovers he has a stowaway, prepares himself to shoot a crazy (male) interloper, and then finds himself at a loss when it turns out to be an “innocent girl” who was hoping to visit her brother. After explaining to her that her additional weight dooms his mission to deliver a vaccine to a small colony, she willingly walks out of the airlock into space.
Apparently, (apocryphally?) Godwin intended to have the protagonist figure out some ingenious way to save her, but editor John Campbell decided this story was not going to fall prey to such sentimentality, and forced Godwin to bow to the so-called inexorable logic of physics. This becomes the relentlessly over-emphasized message of the story: “It was a law not of men’s choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier... It has to be that way and no human in the universe can change it.”
It is, of course, very telling that the sacrificial victim in this tale of humanity’s abasement before the universe is a “girl” who is both “innocent” and “small” whose only fault was ignorance. The execution takes place through no fault of the man, either - the math simply doesn’t allow her to live. The idea that this was an unprecedented development pushed by Campbell doesn’t stand up to the fact that 1951’s “Balance” also featured a male protagonist forced to kill a woman for the greater good.
The cold equations themselves, meanwhile, are not the product of physics, as the text would have us believe, but of economic/social conditions and illogical bureaucracy- and if Godwin was conscious of that fact then this could have been an excellent story. The story acknowledges early on that the hyperspace drives that allow interstellar travel are _expensive_ and therefore outside the means of most colonies. Hence the “Emergency Dispatch Ship” - a bare-bones, one-way, one-man vehicle that is launched from an interstellar ship when a problem arises. In order to make sure that his point about gravity stands, these ships are built and equipped with no safety margin whatsoever, and are further unguarded and unsearched before their launch. This stacking of the deck aside, though, readers still insist that this is the ur-text of “hard science fiction,” as when John Clute at the SF encyclopedia says:
The story itself is precisely told in accordance with the constraints described above, which are described as absolutely binding (no miracle solution, like jettisoning ship innards, or slingshotting around the target planet as a braking manoeuvre, is permitted); "toughminded" readings of the story, which have been frequent, tend not to reflect upon these minutely worked-out constraints… It is this double-edged "hardness" – minute obedience to minutely circumscribed premises – that may have inspired David G Hartwell to suggest that the tale is a metaphor for reading Hard SF in general.
"Of Course", by Chad Oliver
Humans from space arrive on Earth in an invincible space ship and send a message to every governing body in the world: they have come in peace to determine which is the best culture on the planet, from which they will take a representative back to their world and pay back the nation with whatever it desires most. Every country assumes it will be them, although there is a lot of hand-wringing on the American part about what the outcome will be if the Soviets are chosen.
While everyone is waiting for the aliens to make their decision, it’s noted that people accept the spaceship as just a new manifestation of modernity. “People had been more or less expecting a spaceship, and they tended to accept it philosophically, as they had accepted electricity and airplanes and telephones and atom bombs. Fine stuff, naturally. What’s next?” I couldn’t have made a wittier ironic comment about the strikingly non-alien aliens of these stories if I’d tried.
Eventually, an Eskimo is chosen, and his people are repaid with all the seals they can eat. In the closing scene, the aliens reveal to the reader that this was a trick to get the planet to work on self-improvement, as it had been “getting to be the eyesore of our sector.” By not revealing the (fake) criteria on which they had made their decision, they had duped all of the other peoples of the world into blindly improving everything.
”Dominions Beyond", by Ward Moore
In which the supposed first expedition to Mars, in 2002, turns out actually to be the second, following the accidental firing of a magnetic rocket that transported Humphrey Beachy-Cumberland there in 1887. Finding that the (human) Martians had reverted to barbarism a thousand generations earlier, Beachy-Cumberland undertakes a successful British colonization of the planet. The international expedition of 2002, who, en route, just so happened to be making fun of the declining fortunes of the English (who declined to participate), therefore finds Martians who greet them with ““From Earth, what? Good show,” fly Union Jacks, and decline to join the UN as they are not a sovereign nation but rather “Her Majesty’s Dominion of Mars.”
Like Moore’s “Lot” last year, I think this is supposed to be somewhat satirical in its approach, but like “Lot” it fails in that regard, with the barbarian Martians (who call Beachy-Cumberland “Mister”) fulfilling every colonialist stereotype you could think of. Even if the stuffy, post-imperial British were supposed to be the butt of the joke, it just shows that their indigenous subjects weren’t even worth taking seriously enough to pick on.
"Guilty as Charged", by Arthur Porges
Two men use a future-viewing gadget to look 225 years into the future, finding a Massachusetts courtroom in 2181. The protagonist is disappointed in this, reasoning that “two centuries and a quarter could not have seen any vast changes in English common law, already hallowed by time... new crimes, sure, but not changes the same way transportation, communication, or recreation would have.” Unable to hear anything in the courtroom, he learns from a placard that he is witnessing the prosecution of Frances Wills, an elderly woman who seems to be provoking an undue amount of hostility from the witnesses.
The prosecution then moves on to a series of tests mostly measuring things he doesn’t understand, but he does glean that her body temperature is 115 degrees and her pulse is only 40. These findings, combined with the earlier, hostile testimony, is enough for the court to sentence Wills to death, and she is quickly incinerated.
This provokes an understandably horrified reflection on progress (or the lack thereof) on the part of our narrator. The death penalty, he thought, was “hardly acceptable even today,”and he cannot believe that this could be “the humanitarian climax of over two hundred years more of civilization?” It is only then that the bulletin board outside the courtroom comes into focus:
STATE vs. FRANCES WILLS
CHARGE: WITCHCRAFT
VERDICT: GUILTY AS CHARGED
PENALTY: DEATH BY FIRE
The question of whether this is an example of cyclical history featuring the return of unwarranted witch hunts, or a future where witchcraft (or some approximation thereof) has inexplicably come into being is wisely left unresolved.
"Careless Love", by Albert C. Friborg
In which nuclear war with Russia has left most of the United States living in huge underground bunkers, and the war effort is led by the Harvard Mark Fifty-Four, a supercomputer named for a college that only a few people could remember having seen, “in a corner of the continent where nothing had lived since the first rockets came over the pole.” We’re given glimpses of the hellish new world, but only through dialogue taking place in New Washington: as all production is focused on war materials, the population is undernourished, undereducated, and unfulfilled; bacteria and radioactivity have destroyed the country’s fresh air and green fields; Russia has taken to strewing around packets of heroin via rocket; births are down while illegal abortions are up; and so on. Our protagonist is the supercomputer’s handler, who refers to it lovingly as “Dinah” (shades of Leiber’s “Maisie”), and who oversees her reallocation from war to figuring out how to solve the mass neuroses of the population. In introducing her to the human spirit, though, she is also introduced to “love” and decides that the cure for her loneliness lies with her closest counterpart in the world: the Russian supercomputer. The two of them shoot all their rockets into space, blow up all the gunpowder in the world, drive all their tanks into the ocean, and elope together into orbit around Saturn. Aside from the usual over-reliance on dialogue, one of the stronger entries this year.
"Memento Homo", by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
An underwhelming follow-up to Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” of last year, this story also looks at work and class in a near-future idiom, this time through the lens of a dying spaceman, too old and decrepit at the age of 63 to be able to make the moon run any more. He reminisces about the good old days and the not-so-good old days to himself, the memory of his partner, and his wife, endures a visit from his disappointing non-spaceman grandson (a student with aspirations to move up in the world, if I recall correctly - the lower-working-class status of his profession is one of the main themes of the piece). Along those lines, space travel is presented not as a romanticized frontier, but as a workaday profession in which your time is spent in a cramped, hot, metal box. He is holding on to hear the liftoff of the moon run one last time, and the conflict of the piece is provided by a rich neighbor’s party - the “brassy blare of modern ‘slide’” from next door” threatens to drown out the shuttle’s engines. At the last minute, the neighbor has the band play “Taps” in his honor, and his dying wishes to hear the shuttle and have his wife put his space boots on are fulfilled. With just a few words changed this could just as easily have been a sub-Raymond-Carver story of realist working-class fiction, and was apparently based on the life of a railroad laborer Miller knew.
"Mousetrap", by Andre Norton
Mars is an Old West frontier kind of place, full of men prospecting around Terraport for “Star Stones, Gormel Ore, and like knickknacks,” and hoping someday to be able to claim the cash reward for figuring out how to move the “sand monsters” - mysterious statues of a huge variety of horrific aliens (“Spider Man,” “Armed Frog,” “Ant King” and so on) that litter the landscape, but which disintegrate at the slightest touch. “Mousetrap” follows Sam, a down-on-his-luck, drunken prospector who comes into a saloon one night boasting of having discovered a new statue of a beautiful winged woman. Sam is then talked into revealing its location by a local con-man who wants to try out a new goop he’s invented to solidify the statues. This doesn’t go well, and Sam later perfects the goop and tricks the con-man into kicking a native plant, which turns out to be the means by which all of the sand monsters were created. Sam safely transports this newly-created statue out of the wilderness and then, cash award in hand, jets off into the universe to find the planet of angels. This, the only story by a woman this year, features no women characters, only a beautiful statue of one that is inadvertently destroyed by men. Make of that what you will.
"Christmas Trombone", by Raymond E. Banks
In which music is now produced for the most part not by humans, but by cones made up of “wafer-thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which sift together music from a quarter million musicians, “all dissonance matched out by the peculiar properties” of the discs. One intrepid soul refuses to give up the old ways before this march of progress, though - Shorty “had always made his own music, always would,” and that means he is constantly in trouble for “peace-disturbing” for playing his trombone and bothering people, who wish that he would just stick to his day job of repairing aircars. The singing cones have pervaded seemingly all public and private spaces, and the most impressive around is the one in the Church of All-Comers - not a “factory job stuffed with water discs,” but a real cone from Venus, eight feet high - “This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on Earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
Shorty knows that his music is what has always set him apart and made him special (instead of “merely” a mechanic), and he has refused to record it for a cone for that reason - until, inspired on Christmas day and having alienated everyone around him, he goes up a nearby mountain and blows his “perfect uniqueness” out on his trombone - “It had been inside and he knew it, but nobody else did-now they did. There was no need to play anymore.” It then becomes a Christmas tradition for everyone with the means to get there to come here the Christmas Trombone recording, and Shorty is the happiest air mechanic around.
A weirder take on the impact of modernity and the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, to be sure, but it’s easy to forget that the transition to musical recordings was a tough one for some musicians - there were at least two strikes in the 1940s by the American Federation of Musicians seeking more favorable treatment from the record companies that were replacing live musicians with “canned music.”
"One Thousand Miles Up", by Frank M. Robinson
Two years ago, the UN launched a space station equipped with nuclear warheads, manned by five nationalities: American, English, Italian, Russian, and Chinese - “a safety margin for West of one man.” The Cold War has been steadily heating up, and the story opens with an American secret agent being sent up to replace the American scientist whose term has ended, which is the first such replacement. The agent tries to sway the Italian to the side of democracy, but the latter is unmoved: he points out that the communists are just as sincere in their own beliefs as the liberals are in theirs. The Russian, motivated like the American by the fear of seeing his home cities reduced to radioactive rubble, beats him to the punch and demands at gunpoint that everyone surrender their nuclear keys to him - he does not care about the Communist Party and is not even a Party member, but he loves his country.
In the nick of time, a teletype arrives - the American scientist who had left the space station had died upon reentry, and the same fate awaits all of them (the heart, being weakened by zero gravity, cannot last). Facing banishment together, all five resolve to police the Earth and promise to nuke the next country that exhibits aggression toward any other, in the belief that peace would eventually “become a habit.”
Teamwork aside, just so that we know the American is the real hero it is revealed that because he had been there such a short time that he could have safely returned home, but he has chosen to sacrifice himself for the greater good.
Into the comments.
At any rate, this is another one where I’ve let a stupid amount of time lapse between reading and reviewing, and even starting the review and finishing it, so I don’t have much to say about the volume overall at this point. It’s a slight improvement overall, although we’re down to a single woman-authored story this year (Norton). If I’m ever going to do anything with all this data I’ll need to quantify it a bit more rigorously, so I’m holding off on that for now. For the most part, it’s more of the same (mostly set on Earth, mostly contemporary or near future, etc).
Bleiler bailed on Dikty this year, and the latter chose to combine the year’s best short stories series with his concurrent year’s best novels series, so the last two entries this year are longer, although they are probably more either novellas or novelettes. Whatever you call them, they are just padded out short stories - they bring nothing more substantial to the table than anything else here.
The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin
Where to even start with this story, surely one of the most-discussed short stories in the genre (and, at least at one point, tied for 5th-most-reprinted)? To begin, a quick summary: the male pilot of a small “Emergency Dispatch Ship” discovers he has a stowaway, prepares himself to shoot a crazy (male) interloper, and then finds himself at a loss when it turns out to be an “innocent girl” who was hoping to visit her brother. After explaining to her that her additional weight dooms his mission to deliver a vaccine to a small colony, she willingly walks out of the airlock into space.
Apparently, (apocryphally?) Godwin intended to have the protagonist figure out some ingenious way to save her, but editor John Campbell decided this story was not going to fall prey to such sentimentality, and forced Godwin to bow to the so-called inexorable logic of physics. This becomes the relentlessly over-emphasized message of the story: “It was a law not of men’s choosing but made imperative by the circumstances of the space frontier... It has to be that way and no human in the universe can change it.”
It is, of course, very telling that the sacrificial victim in this tale of humanity’s abasement before the universe is a “girl” who is both “innocent” and “small” whose only fault was ignorance. The execution takes place through no fault of the man, either - the math simply doesn’t allow her to live. The idea that this was an unprecedented development pushed by Campbell doesn’t stand up to the fact that 1951’s “Balance” also featured a male protagonist forced to kill a woman for the greater good.
The cold equations themselves, meanwhile, are not the product of physics, as the text would have us believe, but of economic/social conditions and illogical bureaucracy- and if Godwin was conscious of that fact then this could have been an excellent story. The story acknowledges early on that the hyperspace drives that allow interstellar travel are _expensive_ and therefore outside the means of most colonies. Hence the “Emergency Dispatch Ship” - a bare-bones, one-way, one-man vehicle that is launched from an interstellar ship when a problem arises. In order to make sure that his point about gravity stands, these ships are built and equipped with no safety margin whatsoever, and are further unguarded and unsearched before their launch. This stacking of the deck aside, though, readers still insist that this is the ur-text of “hard science fiction,” as when John Clute at the SF encyclopedia says:
The story itself is precisely told in accordance with the constraints described above, which are described as absolutely binding (no miracle solution, like jettisoning ship innards, or slingshotting around the target planet as a braking manoeuvre, is permitted); "toughminded" readings of the story, which have been frequent, tend not to reflect upon these minutely worked-out constraints… It is this double-edged "hardness" – minute obedience to minutely circumscribed premises – that may have inspired David G Hartwell to suggest that the tale is a metaphor for reading Hard SF in general.
"Of Course", by Chad Oliver
Humans from space arrive on Earth in an invincible space ship and send a message to every governing body in the world: they have come in peace to determine which is the best culture on the planet, from which they will take a representative back to their world and pay back the nation with whatever it desires most. Every country assumes it will be them, although there is a lot of hand-wringing on the American part about what the outcome will be if the Soviets are chosen.
While everyone is waiting for the aliens to make their decision, it’s noted that people accept the spaceship as just a new manifestation of modernity. “People had been more or less expecting a spaceship, and they tended to accept it philosophically, as they had accepted electricity and airplanes and telephones and atom bombs. Fine stuff, naturally. What’s next?” I couldn’t have made a wittier ironic comment about the strikingly non-alien aliens of these stories if I’d tried.
Eventually, an Eskimo is chosen, and his people are repaid with all the seals they can eat. In the closing scene, the aliens reveal to the reader that this was a trick to get the planet to work on self-improvement, as it had been “getting to be the eyesore of our sector.” By not revealing the (fake) criteria on which they had made their decision, they had duped all of the other peoples of the world into blindly improving everything.
”Dominions Beyond", by Ward Moore
In which the supposed first expedition to Mars, in 2002, turns out actually to be the second, following the accidental firing of a magnetic rocket that transported Humphrey Beachy-Cumberland there in 1887. Finding that the (human) Martians had reverted to barbarism a thousand generations earlier, Beachy-Cumberland undertakes a successful British colonization of the planet. The international expedition of 2002, who, en route, just so happened to be making fun of the declining fortunes of the English (who declined to participate), therefore finds Martians who greet them with ““From Earth, what? Good show,” fly Union Jacks, and decline to join the UN as they are not a sovereign nation but rather “Her Majesty’s Dominion of Mars.”
Like Moore’s “Lot” last year, I think this is supposed to be somewhat satirical in its approach, but like “Lot” it fails in that regard, with the barbarian Martians (who call Beachy-Cumberland “Mister”) fulfilling every colonialist stereotype you could think of. Even if the stuffy, post-imperial British were supposed to be the butt of the joke, it just shows that their indigenous subjects weren’t even worth taking seriously enough to pick on.
"Guilty as Charged", by Arthur Porges
Two men use a future-viewing gadget to look 225 years into the future, finding a Massachusetts courtroom in 2181. The protagonist is disappointed in this, reasoning that “two centuries and a quarter could not have seen any vast changes in English common law, already hallowed by time... new crimes, sure, but not changes the same way transportation, communication, or recreation would have.” Unable to hear anything in the courtroom, he learns from a placard that he is witnessing the prosecution of Frances Wills, an elderly woman who seems to be provoking an undue amount of hostility from the witnesses.
The prosecution then moves on to a series of tests mostly measuring things he doesn’t understand, but he does glean that her body temperature is 115 degrees and her pulse is only 40. These findings, combined with the earlier, hostile testimony, is enough for the court to sentence Wills to death, and she is quickly incinerated.
This provokes an understandably horrified reflection on progress (or the lack thereof) on the part of our narrator. The death penalty, he thought, was “hardly acceptable even today,”and he cannot believe that this could be “the humanitarian climax of over two hundred years more of civilization?” It is only then that the bulletin board outside the courtroom comes into focus:
STATE vs. FRANCES WILLS
CHARGE: WITCHCRAFT
VERDICT: GUILTY AS CHARGED
PENALTY: DEATH BY FIRE
The question of whether this is an example of cyclical history featuring the return of unwarranted witch hunts, or a future where witchcraft (or some approximation thereof) has inexplicably come into being is wisely left unresolved.
"Careless Love", by Albert C. Friborg
In which nuclear war with Russia has left most of the United States living in huge underground bunkers, and the war effort is led by the Harvard Mark Fifty-Four, a supercomputer named for a college that only a few people could remember having seen, “in a corner of the continent where nothing had lived since the first rockets came over the pole.” We’re given glimpses of the hellish new world, but only through dialogue taking place in New Washington: as all production is focused on war materials, the population is undernourished, undereducated, and unfulfilled; bacteria and radioactivity have destroyed the country’s fresh air and green fields; Russia has taken to strewing around packets of heroin via rocket; births are down while illegal abortions are up; and so on. Our protagonist is the supercomputer’s handler, who refers to it lovingly as “Dinah” (shades of Leiber’s “Maisie”), and who oversees her reallocation from war to figuring out how to solve the mass neuroses of the population. In introducing her to the human spirit, though, she is also introduced to “love” and decides that the cure for her loneliness lies with her closest counterpart in the world: the Russian supercomputer. The two of them shoot all their rockets into space, blow up all the gunpowder in the world, drive all their tanks into the ocean, and elope together into orbit around Saturn. Aside from the usual over-reliance on dialogue, one of the stronger entries this year.
"Memento Homo", by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
An underwhelming follow-up to Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” of last year, this story also looks at work and class in a near-future idiom, this time through the lens of a dying spaceman, too old and decrepit at the age of 63 to be able to make the moon run any more. He reminisces about the good old days and the not-so-good old days to himself, the memory of his partner, and his wife, endures a visit from his disappointing non-spaceman grandson (a student with aspirations to move up in the world, if I recall correctly - the lower-working-class status of his profession is one of the main themes of the piece). Along those lines, space travel is presented not as a romanticized frontier, but as a workaday profession in which your time is spent in a cramped, hot, metal box. He is holding on to hear the liftoff of the moon run one last time, and the conflict of the piece is provided by a rich neighbor’s party - the “brassy blare of modern ‘slide’” from next door” threatens to drown out the shuttle’s engines. At the last minute, the neighbor has the band play “Taps” in his honor, and his dying wishes to hear the shuttle and have his wife put his space boots on are fulfilled. With just a few words changed this could just as easily have been a sub-Raymond-Carver story of realist working-class fiction, and was apparently based on the life of a railroad laborer Miller knew.
"Mousetrap", by Andre Norton
Mars is an Old West frontier kind of place, full of men prospecting around Terraport for “Star Stones, Gormel Ore, and like knickknacks,” and hoping someday to be able to claim the cash reward for figuring out how to move the “sand monsters” - mysterious statues of a huge variety of horrific aliens (“Spider Man,” “Armed Frog,” “Ant King” and so on) that litter the landscape, but which disintegrate at the slightest touch. “Mousetrap” follows Sam, a down-on-his-luck, drunken prospector who comes into a saloon one night boasting of having discovered a new statue of a beautiful winged woman. Sam is then talked into revealing its location by a local con-man who wants to try out a new goop he’s invented to solidify the statues. This doesn’t go well, and Sam later perfects the goop and tricks the con-man into kicking a native plant, which turns out to be the means by which all of the sand monsters were created. Sam safely transports this newly-created statue out of the wilderness and then, cash award in hand, jets off into the universe to find the planet of angels. This, the only story by a woman this year, features no women characters, only a beautiful statue of one that is inadvertently destroyed by men. Make of that what you will.
"Christmas Trombone", by Raymond E. Banks
In which music is now produced for the most part not by humans, but by cones made up of “wafer-thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which sift together music from a quarter million musicians, “all dissonance matched out by the peculiar properties” of the discs. One intrepid soul refuses to give up the old ways before this march of progress, though - Shorty “had always made his own music, always would,” and that means he is constantly in trouble for “peace-disturbing” for playing his trombone and bothering people, who wish that he would just stick to his day job of repairing aircars. The singing cones have pervaded seemingly all public and private spaces, and the most impressive around is the one in the Church of All-Comers - not a “factory job stuffed with water discs,” but a real cone from Venus, eight feet high - “This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on Earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
Shorty knows that his music is what has always set him apart and made him special (instead of “merely” a mechanic), and he has refused to record it for a cone for that reason - until, inspired on Christmas day and having alienated everyone around him, he goes up a nearby mountain and blows his “perfect uniqueness” out on his trombone - “It had been inside and he knew it, but nobody else did-now they did. There was no need to play anymore.” It then becomes a Christmas tradition for everyone with the means to get there to come here the Christmas Trombone recording, and Shorty is the happiest air mechanic around.
A weirder take on the impact of modernity and the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, to be sure, but it’s easy to forget that the transition to musical recordings was a tough one for some musicians - there were at least two strikes in the 1940s by the American Federation of Musicians seeking more favorable treatment from the record companies that were replacing live musicians with “canned music.”
"One Thousand Miles Up", by Frank M. Robinson
Two years ago, the UN launched a space station equipped with nuclear warheads, manned by five nationalities: American, English, Italian, Russian, and Chinese - “a safety margin for West of one man.” The Cold War has been steadily heating up, and the story opens with an American secret agent being sent up to replace the American scientist whose term has ended, which is the first such replacement. The agent tries to sway the Italian to the side of democracy, but the latter is unmoved: he points out that the communists are just as sincere in their own beliefs as the liberals are in theirs. The Russian, motivated like the American by the fear of seeing his home cities reduced to radioactive rubble, beats him to the punch and demands at gunpoint that everyone surrender their nuclear keys to him - he does not care about the Communist Party and is not even a Party member, but he loves his country.
In the nick of time, a teletype arrives - the American scientist who had left the space station had died upon reentry, and the same fate awaits all of them (the heart, being weakened by zero gravity, cannot last). Facing banishment together, all five resolve to police the Earth and promise to nuke the next country that exhibits aggression toward any other, in the belief that peace would eventually “become a habit.”
Teamwork aside, just so that we know the American is the real hero it is revealed that because he had been there such a short time that he could have safely returned home, but he has chosen to sacrifice himself for the greater good.
Into the comments.
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