First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Read online

  FIRST CONTACTS:

  The Essential Murray Leinster

  by Murray Leinster

  First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster contains 24 stories covering the full spectrum of Leinster’s career. Included are such classic early works as “Proxima Centauri,” “First Contact,” and one of the earliest alternate timeline stories, “Sidewise in Time.” Included are “Keyhole,” “De Profundis,” and a story written in 1945 that anticipated the Internet, “A Logic Named Joe.” The Hugo Award-winning “Exploration Team” was the inspiration for our full-color cover art by Hannibal King. Also, here for the first time are “The Great Catastrophe,” his lost pulp epic, and the inspiring “To All Fat Policemen.” There is a four-page introduction by renowned author Hal Clement.

  First Contacts

  is humbly dedicated to the memory

  of

  Monty Wells

  TEACHER, FRIEND, FAN

  Copyright 1998 by the Estate of Murray Leinster

  Introduction

  Copyright 1998 by Hal Clement

  Dust jacket illustration

  Copyright 1998 by Hannibal King

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MAGICAL, OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER, WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: Pending

  International Standard Book Number:

  Trade: 0-915368-67-6

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction “Will” copyright © 1998 by Hal Clement.

  “A Logic Named Joe” copyright © 1946 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1946 as by Will F. Jenkins.

  “If You Was a Moklin” copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Co. First appeared in Galaxy, September 1957.

  “The Ethical Equations” copyright © 1945 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1945.

  “Keyhole” copyright © 1951 by Standard Magazines, Inc. First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1951.

  “Doomsday Deferred” copyright © 1949 by Curtis Pub. Co. First appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, September 24, 1949 as by Will F. Jenkins.

  “First Contact” copyright © 1945 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945.

  “Nobody Saw the Ship” copyright © 1950 by Columbia Publications, Inc. First appeared in Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, May 1950.

  “Pipeline to Pluto” copyright © 1945 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1945.

  “The Lonely Planet” copyright © 1949 by Standard Magazines, Inc. First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1949.

  “De Profundis” copyright © 1945 by Standard Magazine, Inc. First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1945.

  “The Power” copyright © 1945 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1945.

  “The Castaway” copyright © 1953 by Bell Publications, Inc. First appeared in Universe Science Fiction, June 1953.

  “The Strange Case of John Kingman” copyright © 1948 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1948.

  “Proxima Centauri” copyright © 1935 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1935.

  “The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator” copyright © 1935 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1935.

  “Sam, This Is You” copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Co. First appeared in Galaxy, May 1955.

  “Sidewise in Time” copyright © 1934 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1934.

  “Scrimshaw” copyright © 1955 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1955.

  “Symbiosis” copyright © 1947 by Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. First appeared in Collier’s Weekly, June 14, 1947, as by Will F. Jenkins.

  “Cure For a Ylith” copyright © 1949 by Better Publications. First appeared in Startling Stories, November 1949 as by William Fitzgerald.

  “Plague on Kryder II” copyright © 1964 by Condé Nast. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1964.

  “Exploration Team” copyright © 1956 by Street and Smith Co. First appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1956.

  “The Great Catastrophe” appears in this volume for the first time.

  “To All Fat Policemen” appears in this volume for the first time.

  Contents

  Will by Hal Clement

  Editor’s Introduction by Joe Rico

  A Logic Named Joe

  If You Was a Moklin

  The Ethical Equations

  Keyhole

  Doomsday Deferred

  First Contact

  Nobody Saw the Ship

  Pipeline to Pluto

  The Lonely Planet

  De Profundis

  The Power

  The Castaway

  The Strange Case of John Kingman

  Proxima Centauri

  The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator

  Sam, This Is You

  Sidewise in Time

  Scrimshaw

  Symbiosis

  Cure for a Ylith

  Plague on Kryder II

  Exploration Team

  Intro to the Unpublished Stories by Joe Rico

  The Great Catastrophe

  To All Fat Policemen

  WILL

  I started reading science fiction magazines in the early 1930’s when I was ten or twelve. At that age and state of maturity my tastes were pure space opera and weird life forms, with the result that my heroes were people like Jack Williamson and John Campbell and Neil R. Jones. Don’t get me wrong—I never fell out of love with stories of this type, but I was a little slow catching on to what writing was all about.

  There was no real excuse, not even at my age, for this. One of the earliest magazines I owned, as opposed to merely reading, was the February, 1932, issue of Amazing Stories, though I didn’t get hold of it until sometime in 1934 or 35. Its cover story was indeed one of Neil Jones’ Professor Jameson tales which first made a magazine reader out of me, but inside, there was among others a story called “The Racketeer Ray,” by Murray Leinster.

  It was not space opera. It was, admittedly, a “What if…” yarn, but the key invention was not, this time, a space ship or atomic generator, or even a death ray.

  Other authors would have called, and did call, it a tractor ray and simply used it to pull. Murray suggested a more or less plausible way for it to work, as an extension of a solenoid; it attracted only ferromagnetic materials. The inventor, who had the conventional lovely daughter with conventional brave boy friend, got into trouble with the police for selling condemned firearms which he had retrieved from the river with the device, and the criminal element got the word. The logical fact that any steel object on which the device was used became strongly magnetized, with the result that cars and watches stopped running, and the resultant attempts to blackmail the municipality, were to me fascinating and instructive (one of the police responses was to load small iron containers with butyl mercaptan. This was when I learned the composition of skunk juice. I also learned how demagnetizers worked).

  I don’t propose to summarize all of Murray Leinster/Will Jenkins’ work here; I have already made my main point. Murray was an idea writer at a time when an idea alone was
likely to sell a story, but he liked to, and could, carry the idea to a reasonable and, if the reader were sufficiently on his or her toes, predictable conclusion. He was, in effect, writing science fiction mystery stories long before John Campbell said this was impossible.

  I can’t guess how much of this can be attributed to his age. He was born in 1896, a decade before Jack Williamson and Sprague de Camp, and even longer before John Campbell, and started writing (not only science fiction, eventually) about 1919. He was not the first to come up with all the standard s-f themes, but he was frequently the first to make real stories out of them.

  “Sidewise in Time” (1934) was an early alternate-universe, or alternate time track, tale. Later he did it again with “The Incredible Invasion,” a six-part serial (just universes this time) in Astounding Stories. I remember the latter more for the writing than the basis; I still giggle at the thought of one character’s line—“Blast it, have I been dead again?” (The expletive I may not have remembered correctly; but this was the 1940’s, and it couldn’t have been more than mild.)

  He kept up with the new idea sources. Murder of the U.S.A. was not just one of the nuclear holocaust tales which filled editorial slush piles in the years immediately following the Hitlerian War. The book, or at least the copy I saw, first appeared under the by-line of Will Jenkins (or Will F. Jenkins), his real name. Again, it was a reasonable what-if, detailing background in a world where nuclear weapons existed. His proposed solution to the threat would be generally unacceptable today, though even now it might conceivably happen. There existed an international treaty, the Brienne Agreement, whose signatories obligated themselves to saturate with their own nuclear weapons any country which started a nuclear war. Most of the book was a detective story again; the aggressors had launched their missiles from Antarctica, and the problem was to find who they were. The story ended with missiles shrieking up the launching tubes of the Atomic Service base where most of the action took place, and of all the others in the world, but this was only after various technical devices had been developed (at the base) to detect, back-track, and sabotage warheads in orbit (no, not Star Wars). The development times were a bit unrealistic, even allowing for the fact that there was no political fussing or scientific breakthroughs involved, and Will seemed to give no consideration to the pollution results of his ending, but it was still an entrancing yarn.

  Murray’s writing was not confined to a single background. “The Power” consisted mostly of a medieval manuscript describing the writer’s interviews with a marooned alien who was trying to teach him the elements of electricity, while “Critical Difference,” though it did involve space travel, solved its mystery with quite straightforward electrical and radiation laws.

  I am not the only one to regard as his best work “First Contact,” which appeared in Astounding Stories in 1945. There are at least two reasons for this.

  First, Murray recognized as a real problem the implications of our meeting in deep space other species at a similar technical level. Idealism aside (the story was criticized in Russia because “obviously” any such species would be Communist and therefore completely trustworthy), the aims, intention, and moral background of the other species—and I mean this from the points of view of both meeting crews—would be completely unknown, and letting the other guys learn where your own planetary system was involved potentially an unacceptable risk. (Another story, not by Murray, in the same general period dealt with a psychologically similar problem: was an unrecognizable object under the waters of San Francisco Bay a planted nuclear mine?) This was the problem if one regards the yarn as a detective story.

  There may conceivably, somewhere, be someone who hasn’t read “First Contact,” so I won’t give the solution right out. A hint, however, can be found in the Mid-eastern story of a man with two sons whose will left all his possessions to the son whose horse entered Mecca last. (I can’t help wondering what the original story teller, or Murray, might have done by giving the old fellow three sons. The multiple-plot detective story might have become standard literation a millennium or two earlier.)

  The other groundbreaking effect, on me at least, of “First Contact” was to solve a major science-fiction problem. Just where do all these roughly human-tech aliens come from? In the early magazines, other planets in our own system were often simply stages for story-telling; the hero could rescue the heroine on Saturn or Ceres wearing shirtsleeves. Multi-planet governments were common. When we moved to the stars for scenarios, there was a tendency to find our aliens on at least one planet in every system the hero visited. By all reasonable estimates, however, only a very tiny percentage of planets, even granting that most stars have planets, will have races willing and able to capture heroines even if they want them only for food. With technical civilizations a hundred, or several thousand, parsecs apart, even with faster-than-light travel it’s going to be hard to run either an interstellar union or a Hanseatic (or Polesotechnic; sorry, Poul) League.

  But Murray’s two explorers had a very good reason to meet. They were both scientific expeditions studying the Crab Nebula.

  This, I submit, is the ideal way to bring technically advanced cultures together, given faster-than-light travel. I have used it myself, always giving Murray credit. I call celestial objects which are both peculiar in makeup and visible from a great distance “Leinster Sites” or “Leinster Objects.” The farthest I’ve carried the matter so far is to use Eta Carinae, which is certainly luminous enough for the purpose, as the site. I housed a seven-hundred-species interstellar university on the planets of a nearby binary sun.

  But I give full credit for, and feel all gratitude to, Murray Leinster for the basic idea.

  He was not (pardon the phrase, colleagues) “only” a writer. As a man with a large fund of knowledge which in turn disciplined a powerful imagination, he was also an inventor. Most people who know of him at all have heard that he made some important contributions in the motion picture industry, notably the development of a rear-projection system which avoided the nuisance of having a special-effects background projection show up on the bodies of the actors.

  Another bit of work—quite a bit, I understand—was for the Navy, though I am less familiar with the details. At least some of it apparently had to do with submarines. Several decades ago, when Murray was Guest of Honor at a World Science Fiction Convention (please don’t ask me which one; I’ve attended about thirty-five of them in the last four decades, and have not kept all their program books. If the editors of this publication want to look it up, they have my blessing [it was Discon I in 1963.—Ed.]), his GoH speech mentioned some of the Navy work. He described one of his meetings with a group of officers in which he reported doing some of his development work while in the bathtub.

  Now Murray could also have been a teacher if he had wanted; maybe he was, though I haven’t heard about it. He had a very good grasp of what makes a presentation memorable. He told the science-fiction audience that when he reported to the group of Naval officers about the bathtub, the first question he got back was, “What did you use for a periscope?”

  Some of the other Murray Leinster stories I have particularly enjoyed include:

  “A Logic Named Joe”: a blend of the Frankenstein-complex era and the just beginning computer age. This was one of the first stories ever written about the Internet.

  “Trog”: a paralysis-ray tale far beyond Buck Rogers.

  “Keyhole”: where Murray got far more out of the chimp than the psychologist (yes, he could do viewpoint stories, too).

  “The Lonely Planet”: It really was, and felt it.

  “The Strange Case of John Kingman”: Alien? Immortal? Actually, both. And nuts. How do you get information out of him? He must have some…And there’s no way of proving he’s immortal; how long do you wait?

  That’s Murray Leinster, whenever it isn’t William Fitzgerald Jenkins. But it’s nowhere near all of them. Perhaps unlike John Kingman, he wasn’t immortal; we lost him in 1976, bu
t he left his trail, not just his mark. Very few of us who write science fiction would deny having been influenced by him; or if they did, they probably have the grace to be ashamed.

  Hal Clement

  Milton, MA, Feb 98

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Murray Leinster was born William Fitzgerald Jenkins near Norfolk, Virginia, on June 16, 1896. He made his living almost exclusively from freelance writing. Characteristically he referred to his two stints of service to his country (in World War One as a soldier, in World War Two as a researcher for the War Department) as the only times he ever collected a paycheck. Beginning in his teens, he wrote romances, mystery stories, and cautionary tales of the perils that could await a young woman who, in all innocence, failed to insure that she was properly chaperoned at all times.

  One day in 1919, he looked up from his writing and saw the clock on the building across the street turning backwards (it was of course being reset). It was all the inspiration Leinster’s keen mind needed. And the resulting story about a time-traveling building, “The Runaway Skyscraper” (Argosy, Feb. 1919), began a career in science fiction that lasted over fifty years. Leinster may be the only S.F. author who wrote prior to 1920 who would later win a Hugo (for “Exploration Team,” March 1956).

  Time travel was a recurring theme for Leinster. He visited the subject in “Sam, This Is You,” “The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator,” and in “Sidewise in Time,” a work in which his love for his native Virginia clearly shows. But I found that solitude was Leinster’s most common theme. His heroes are isolated, marooned, scorned, and hunted. But they never compromise or surrender. They take the universe on its own terms and win or lose, remain true to themselves.

  Murray Leinster utilized dialects and slang current to his time, and he wasn’t above creating a neologism or two. He had definite ideas about when and when not to use hyphens and em-dashes. We have by and large kept his stories as they were originally written.