Contact

  Jerry eBooks

  No copyright 2019 by Jerry eBooks

  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  At the moment of contact,

  when man first meets beings from outer

  space, how will we recognize the alien?

  Can we assume that we will be able to see,

  hear, feel or smell the alien?

  If we do, will we be able to communicate with it?

  The alien may be friendly, hostile or

  indifferent. But if it has no mouth, no

  voice, no method of transmitting its

  thoughts—if it has thoughts—how

  can we find out?

  It may have a purpose. And then again it

  may not. But how can we know if we’ve never

  experienced anything like it before?

  CONTACT represents the efforts of the world’s

  greatest science fiction writers to provide the

  answer to a question which may confront us in

  actuality tomorrow. What will man’s inevitable

  contact with extra-terrestrial life be like?

  “First Contact”—Copyright by Smith and Smith Publications, 1945. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Intelligence Test”—Copyright by Gernsback Publications, Inc., 1953. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Large Ant”—Copyright by Great American Publications, Inc., 1959. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “What’s He Doing In There?”—Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corp., 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Chemical Plant”—Copyright by New Worlds, 1950. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Limiting Factor”—Copyright by Better Publications, Inc., 1949. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Fire Balloons”—Copyright by Ray Bradbury, 1951. Reprinted from the “Illustrated Man” with the permission of the author.

  “Invasion From Mars”—Adapted from H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” Copyright 1940 Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of Monica McCall, Inc.

  “The Gentle Vultures”—Copyright by Headline Publications, 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Knock”—Copyright 1948 by Standard Magazines, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  “Specialist”—Copyright by Galaxy Publishing Corp., 1953. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Lost Memory”—Copyright 1952 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  CONTACT, Copyright © 1963, by Paperback Library, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

  First Printing: May, 1963

  Paperback Library books are published by Paperback Library, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Paperback Library” and associated distinctive design, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Paperback Library, Inc., 260 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Introduction

  MAN THE DISCOVERER

  First Contact by Murray Leinster

  Intelligence Test by Harry Walton

  The Large Ant by Howard Fast

  What’s He Doing In There? by Fritz Leiber

  Chemical Plant by Ian Williamson

  Limiting Factor by Clifford D. Simak

  The Fire Balloons by Ray Bardury

  MAN THE DISCOVERED

  Invasion from Mars by Howard Koch

  The Gentle Vultures by Isaac Asimov

  Knock by Fredric Brown

  Specialist by Robert Sheckley

  Lost Memory Peter Phillips

  “The Universe is everywhere full of life, but the modes of this life are infinitely diversified, and yet every form of it must be enjoyed and known by every spiritual nature before the consummation of all things.”

  Sir Humphry Davy, 1830

  INTRODUCTION

  A wilderness of space, dust, stars, and planets, the universe is as vast as man’s imagination and as rich in possibilities. The ultimate possibility—that life exists beyond earth—is no longer a fantasy but the subject of scientific experimentation. The astronomers of Project Ozna turn radio telescopes towards Tau Ceti, listening for messages whispered across the void. Meteorites are examined for traces of alien micro-fossils. Bacteria are subjected to the rigorous conditions of outer space to determine their capacity for planet-hopping. Most exciting of all, the basic chemicals of life, the hydrocarbons, have been synthesized in the laboratory under conditions that might exist on any planet undergoing the pangs of fiery birth and subsequent cooling.

  The scientists are not whistling in the darkness of space. Billions of stars in the Milky Way alone probably give heat and light to planetary systems. And there are at least a billion other galaxies. Where the right conditions exist—as they appear to do on planets around trillions of stars—organic life may exist; the odds, no matter how they are whittled down, are not unreasonable.

  The odds can be whittled down, for intelligent life, taking billions of years to evolve, may flourish—and vanish from a planet—within a period of a few hundred centuries. The existence of another civilization is not enough. It must exist at the same time as ours. Nevertheless, when all the pros and cons are considered, it has been estimated that there are perhaps ten civilized communities within one thousand light-years of earth. Large though that distance appears, human life and extra-terrestrial life may one day make contact. How such contact may prove possible—atomic rockets, use of the space-warp, telekinesis, travel in the fourth dimension, and so on—is not the primary concern of the twelve stories in this book. What such contact will involve is.

  Comic-book mythology sees all life from outer space as irrevocably hostile or infinitely beneficent, usually the former. And the reasons are clear. The unknown is always a threat and a cut-and-dried solution provides not only reassurance but a good story line. Ray guns, tentacled monsters, and fabulous civilizations ruled by women rigged out with chrome trim and tail fins have a marvellously sedative effect. But they are no longer exciting and the stories in this book avoid the stereotype. There is no reason—no human reason, at least—to believe that contact will be that simple. Man, sexually attractive to none of the other creatures on his own planet, can hardly expect better luck elsewhere. And for inter galactic neighbors to travel some quadrillions of miles simply to exterminate us would be rather like running non-stop from Nome to Patagonia to swat a fly. “Aliens”, in fact, may be indifferent to the peoples of Earth. They may exterminate us, as almost happens in Frederick Brown’s “Knock”, but they may do so like a lepidopterist mounting butterflies for his collection.

  But in all probability, contact, if it comes, will have an immense impact on our daily lives, on our philosophy, on our religion, on the question of our survival. We are still involved in the Copernican revolution that displaced man, first from the center of the heavens, then to the edge of a galaxy, then to the midst of a super-galaxy in a universe yet to be measured. How much greater the displacement if Man discovers he is not the crown but merely a twig on the tree of life—a tree whose roots and branches he can barely guess at. Religion certainly will face new questions, not only about sending missions to the aliens, but about the omnipotence and universality of any earthly God. Two of the most sophisticated stories in this collection, Ray Bradbury’s “The Fire Balloons” and Howard Fast’s “The Large Ant” suggest dissimilar yet sobering suggestions about how a first contact may affect our philosophy—social or religious.

  For we may not be the only chil
dren of God. And we may not even be the most gifted. Our sun is young as stars go, our planet a late starter in the course of evolution. Man, as he moves forward, first into orbit and then towards the moon, may be the Columbus of the heavens, voyaging as no others have done before. Or he may be a laggard, fitting out coracles and outriggers while great galleons and even liners already plough the intergalactic seas. If life does exist elsewhere in the universe, we may be the discoverers—or the discovered. The difference, as the stories that follow make clear, will be of supreme importance.

  One thing is clear: contact, in whichever direction it runs, will be complex. Can we generalize at all about that first contact? Only to say that there will, inevitably, be shock. The twelve stories in this anthology have been chosen because they capture a sense of shock—not the shock of tripping over a bug-eyed monster (a shopworn, creaky device today), but the shock to mind and spirit of meeting a truly alien sensibility, as though one had gulped down a glass of apple cider to discover, seconds later, that it was cider vinegar. It is the astringent shock of the unexpected that penetrates deep inside.

  In addition to shock, there may well be an overpowering sense of the enigmatic. Harry Walton’s “Intelligence Test” and Clifford Simak’s “Limiting Factor” present the “puzzle” of contact in its purest form. And “The Large Ant” by Howard Fast suggests even deeper mystery, suggests in fact, that the greatest dangers may come not from the alien life, but from our own too-human response.

  Writers have avoided the moment of contact because it raises staggering problems of communication. Telepathy, translating machines, or aliens who have monitored earth’s radio stations, are among the devices used to leap the language barrier. But there may be no talk at all. H. G. Wells’ and Howard Koch’s Martians have no more communication with earthlings than the exterminator with cockroaches. In Ian Williamson’s “Chemical Plant”, the silent processes of alien life are as eloquent as any language could be. But these stories reveal one simple truth: One can only question the unknown in terms of the known. Man has no fresh words to talk about the unknown, nor will he have until he experiences it. Every story here then, is in a sense a metaphor about the unknown. And the power of metaphor, as Isaac Asimov suggests in “The Gentle Vultures,” the power of human metaphor to subvert an alien mind, may well be man’s best, though unwitting, defense.

  Contact, then, will involve learning and discovery. What will be discovered, what may be learned—that is an open question, fascinating, unanswerable with sureness, yet of great potential importance. Man is incapable of answering the question—or even of asking it—in non-human terms. But that is not a limitation. Whatever we find, or whatever finds us, we will have to deal with it on the only terms we have—our own. Will such-and-such a power be friendly, hostile, indifferent? Will it ally with one earthly power bloc against another? Will it compete in our struggle for lebensraum? Such internecine problems are the stuff of our daily lives. It is inevitable that they spill over into our dreams, or nightmares, of the future. In the hands of many science-fictioneers contact with aliens progresses from trade, to mining rights, to cargo rockets, to planetary colonization, to over-population, to intergalactic war. But the stories in this volume have been chosen because they avoid these well travelled orbits. They are not stories of dressed-up economics, stellar demography, cosmic skullduggery; they are encounters, often intensely personal, between Man-and-Alien. Anthropocentrism is inevitable, but the selections with greatest shock value are those such as Robert Sheckley’s “Specialist”, or Peter Phillips’ “Lost Memory”, which show, not aliens as Man might see them, but Man as an alien might see him.

  Last but not least there is the matter of humor. At least two of the authors in this book—Murray Leinster in “First Contact” and Fritz Leiber in “What’s He Doing in There?”—have allowed a laugh or two to warm the black coldnesses of outer space. Invaders from Mars may be no joke, but whatever exists in outer space, Man’s chances of survival—and the very value of what survives—will be enhanced if he faces it with good humor. We, after all, may no longer be alone in the universe, and may never have been. That is something of a joke in itself. “A funny thing happened to me on my way back to earth”—and we may have to grin and face it sooner than we think. The twelve stories here, then, suggest various ways of doing so. They are a not insignificant contribution to our preparations for that historic moment when the punchline explodes in our skull, an alien finger is thrust between our ribs, and we find that a New World has made contact with, or has been contacted by, the Old.

  MAN THE DISCOVERER

  First Contact

  by MURRAY LEINSTER

  Tommy Dort went into the captain’s room with his last pair of stereo photos and said:

  “I’m through, sir. These are the last two pictures I can take.” He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates which showed all space outside the ship. Subdued, deep-red lighting indicated the controls and such instruments as the quartermaster on duty needed for navigation of the spaceship Llanvabon. There was a deeply cushioned control chair. There was the little gadget of oddly angled mirrors—remote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth century motorists—which allowed a view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.

  The Llanvabon was a long way from home. The plates which showed every star of visual magnitude and could be stepped up to any desired magnification, portrayed stars of every imaginable degree of brilliance, in the startingly different colors they showed outside of atmosphere. But every one was unfamiliar. Only two consellations could be recognized as seen from Earth, and they were shrunken and distorted. The Milky Way seemed vaguely out of place. But even such oddities were minor compared to a sight in the forward plates.

  There was a vast, vast mistiness ahead. A luminous mist. It seemed motionless. It took a long time for any appreciable nearing to appear in the vision plates, though the spaceship’s velocity indicator showed an incredible speed. The mist was the Crab Nebula, six light-years long, three and a half light-years thick, with outward-reaching members that in the telescopes of Earth gave it some resemblance to the creature for which it was named. It was a cloud of gas, infinitely tenuous, reaching half again as far as from Sol to its nearest neighbor-sun. Deep within it burned two stars; a double star; one component the familiar yellow of the sun of Earth, the other an unholy white.

  Tommy Dort said meditatively:

  “We’re heading into a deep, sir?”

  The skipper studied the last two plates of Tommy’s taking, and put them aside. He went back to his uneasy contemplation of the vision plates ahead. The Llanvabon was decelerating at full force. She was a bare half light-year from the nebula. Tommy’s work was guiding the ship’s course, now, but the work was done. During all the stay of the exploring ship in the nebula, Tommy Dort would loaf. But he’d more than paid his way so far.

  He had just completed a quite unique first—a complete photographic record of the movement of a nebula during a period of four thousand years, taken by one individual with the same apparatus and with control exposures to detect and record any systematic errors. It was an achievement in itself worth the journey from Earth. But in addition, he had also recorded four thousand years of the history of a double star, and four thousand years of the history of a star in the act of degenerating into a white dwarf.

  It was not that Tommy Dort was four thousand years old. He was, actually, in his twenties. But the Crab Nebula is four thousand light-years from Earth, and the last two pictures had been taken by light which would not reach Earth until the sixth millennium A.D. On the way here—at speeds incredible multiples of the speed of light—Tommy Dort had recorded each aspect of the nebula by the light which had left it from forty centuries since to a bare six months ago.

  The Llanvabon bored on through space. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the incredible luminosity c
rept across the vision plates. It blotted out half the universe from view. Before was glowing mist, and behind was a star-studded emptiness. The mist shut off three-fourths of all the stars. Some few of the brightest shone dimly through it near its edge, but only a few. Then there was only an irregularly shaped patch of darkness astern against which stars shone unwinking. The Llanvabon dived into the nebula, and it seemed as if it bored into a tunnel of darkness with walls of shining fog.

  Which was exactly what the space ship was doing. The most distant photographs of all had disclosed structural features in the nebula. It was not amorphous. It had form. As the Llanvabon drew nearer, indications of structure grew more distinct, and Tommy Dort had argued for a curved approach for photographic reasons. So the spaceship had come up to the nebula on a vast logarithmic curve, and Tommy had been able to take successive photographs from slightly different angles and get stereopairs which showed the nebula in three dimensions; which disclosed billowings and hollows and an actually complicated shape. In places, the nebula displayed convolutions like those of a human brain. It was into one of those hollows that the spaceship now plunged. They had been called “deeps” by analogy with crevasses in the ocean floor. And they promised to be useful.

  The skipper relaxed. One of a skipper’s functions, nowadays, is to think of things to worry about, and then worry about them. The skipper of the Llanvabon was conscientious. Only after a certain instrument remained definitely nonregistering did he ease himself back in his seat.

  “It was just barely possible,” he said heavily, “that those deeps might be nonluminous gas. But they’re empty. So we’ll be able to use overdrive as long as we’re in them.”

  It was a light-year-and-a-half from the edge of the nebula to the neighborhood of the double star which was its heart. That was the problem. A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a comet’s tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive—above the speed of light—does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. It needs pure emptiness, such as exists between the stars. But the Llanvabon could not do much in this expanse of mist if it was limited to speeds a merely hard vacuum will permit.