The Worlds of Robert F. Young - Robert F. Young, ebook, Temp
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY AVRAM DAVIDSON
THE GIRL WHO MADE TIME STOP
ADDED INDUCEMENT
HOPSOIL
FLYING PAN
EMILY AND THE BARDS SUBLIME
THE DANDELION GIRL
THE STARS ARE CALLING, MR. KEATS
GODDESS IN GRANITE
PROMISED PLANET
ROMANCE IN A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY USED-CAR LOT
THE COURTS OF JAMSHYD
PRODUCTION PROBLEM
LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE
WRITTEN IN THE STARS
A DRINK OF DARKNESS
YOUR GHOST WILL WALK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM,
COPYRIGHT © 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1965 BY ROBERT F. YOUNG.
COPYRIGHT © 1957 BY ROYAL PUBLICATIONS, INC.; COPYRIGHT © 1955 BY THE QUINN PUBLISHING CO.,
INC.; COPYRIGHT © 1956 BY GALAXY PUBLISHING CORPORATION.
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC., 630 5TH AVENUE NEW YORK 20, N. Y.
FIRST HUNTING
DESIGNED BY EVE METZ
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 65-11979 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNTIED STAIRS OF
AMERICA BY H. WOLFF BOOK MFG. CO., INC., NEW YORK
The Girl Who Made Time Stop: Reprinted from
The Saturday Evening Post,
April 22, 1961.
Added Inducement: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy
and
Science Fiction,
March 1957.
Hopsoil: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy
and
Science Fiction,
January 1961.
Flying Pan: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy
and
Science Fiction,
November 1956.
Emily and the Bards Sublime: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy
and
Science Fiction,
July 1956.
The Dandelion Girl: Reprinted from
The
Saturday
Evening Post,
April 1, 1961.
The Stars Are Calling, Mr. Keats: Reprinted from Amazing
Stories,
June 1959.
Goddess in Granite: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1957.
Promised Planet: Reprinted from
If
, December 1955.
Romance in a Twenty-FirstCentury Used-Car Lot: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction,
November 1960.
The Courts of Jamshyd: Reprinted from Infinity.
Production Problem: Reprinted from
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
June 1959.
Little Red Schoolhouse: Reprinted from
Galaxy,
March 1956.
Written in the Stars: Reprinted from
Venture Science Fiction,
September 1957.
A Drink of Darkness: Reprinted from
Fantastic, Stories of Imagination,
July 1962.
Your Ghost Will Walk... Reprinted from
The
Magazine
of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, July 1957.
INTRODUCTION
HE LIVES IN A house by the shore of a Great Lake, from which, on days as clear as
those he
writes about so lovingly, he can see
Canada—a sight on which he is sometimes reluctantly obliged to
draw the curtain in order to continue writing. He knows people, books, machinery, as
well as
scenery,
and—equally lovingly—this knowledge is reflected in his writing. I'm writing about Robert F. Young, a
man known to and appreciated by the editors, publishers, and readers of science fiction. One reason why
this book is a good thing is that it will acquaint a lot of people with him who perhaps don't often read the
genre.
There are, of course, many good reasons for
not
reading it; you won't find any of them here,
though. No cowboy or knighthood-gone-to-seed stories set on Betelgeuse, no
tonight-we-overthrow-the-23rd-century-Caligula yarns, no accounts of computers Taking Over,
thousand-times-twice-told tales of Doomsday and The Bomb, not a single insectoid or reptilian
Earth-conquering monster—with or without bug-eyes. None.
What you
will
find, though, is—as
I've said above—love. Calm. Compassion. Rational imagination.
Laughter. Sense. Excitement. Scorn. Integrity. And hope.
There's the sun and the moon, and night
and day, brother—all good things. . . . There's the wind
on
the heath, brother. I could gladly live
for that.
Nor, in dealing with Some Aspects of the Future, has Mr. Young ignored certain musty corners of
the present. Quasi-compulsory conformity and consumption, quiz shows, symbiosis on several times six
cylinders, planet-plundering, and quite a few others—all are carried to a logical confusion in sentences
which never stumble over one another. If Mr. Young, like the personal aides of Gulliver's Laputa,
thwacks us now and then with a pea-filled bladder, it is to waken the dozers among us from their daze.
No tax-free foundations subsidize him to give the world yet another damned dull book, nor is his eye
forever on the word rate. Once, in the dear, dead days when I was an editor, I said of someone that
He
writes with love.
Someone else wrote in, promptly and tartly,
Ink would be better.
Robert F. Young
uses both.
—AVRAM DAVIDSON
THE GIRL WHO MADE TIME STOP
LITTLE DID Roger Thompson dream when he sat down on the park bench that Friday morning in
June that in a celibate sense his goose was already in the oven and that soon it would be cooked. He may
have had an inkling of things to come when he saw the tall brunette in the red sheath walking down the
winding walk some several minutes later, but that inkling could not conceivably have apprised him of the
vast convolutions of time and space which the bowing out of his bachelorhood would shortly set in
motion.
The tall brunette was opposite the bench, and it was beginning to look as though Roger's goose was
in no imminent danger of being roasted after all when one of those incidents that so much inspire our
boy-meets-girl literature occurred: one of her spike heels sank into a crevice in the walk and brought her
to an abrupt halt. Our hero rose to the occasion admirably—especially in view of the fact that he was in
the midst of a brown study concerning a particularly abstruse phase of the poetic analysis of science
which he was
working on and was even less aware of girls than usual. In a
millisecond he was at her side;
in another he had slipped his aim around her waist. He freed her foot from the shoe, noticing as he did so
that there were three narrow golden bands encircling her bare leg just above her ankle, and helped her
over to the bench. "I'll have it out of there in a jiffy," he said.
He was as good as his word, and seconds later he slipped the shoe back upon the girl's dainty foot.
"Oh, thank you, Mr. . . . Mr. . . ." she began.
Her voice was husky, her face was oval; her lips were red and full. Looking into the pearly depths of
her gray eyes, he had the feeling that he was falling—as in a sense he was—and he sat dizzily down
beside her. "Thompson," he said. "Roger Thompson."
The pearly depths grew deeper still. "I'm glad to meet you, Roger. My name is Becky Fisher."
"I'm glad to meet you, Becky."
So far, so good. Boy has met girl, and girl has met boy. Boy is suitably smitten; girl is amenable. Both
are young. The month is June. A romance is virtually bound to blossom, and soon a romance does.
Nevertheless it is a romance that will never be recorded in the annals of time.
Why not? you ask.
You'll see.
They spent the rest of the day together. It was Becky's day off from the Silver Spoon, where she
waited on tables. Roger, who was sweating out the sixth application he had tendered since graduating
from the Lakeport Institute of Technology, had every day off for the moment. That evening they dined in
a modest café, and afterward they played the jukebox and danced. The midnight moment upon the steps
of the apartment house where Becky lived was a precious one, and their first kiss was so sweet and
lingering on Roger's lips that he did not even wonder, until he reached his hotel room, how a young man
such as himself —who saw love as an impediment to a scientific career—could have fallen so deeply into
it in so short a span of time.
In his mind's eye the bench in the park had already taken on the aspect of a shrine, and the very next
morning saw him walking down the winding walk, eager to view the sacred object once again. Consider
his chagrin when he rounded the last curve and saw a girl in a blue dress sitting on the very section of the
hallowed object that his goddess had consecrated the most!
He sat down as far away from her as the length of the bench permitted. Perhaps if she had been
glamorous he wouldn't have minded so much But she wasn't Her face was too thin, and her legs were too
long. Compared with the red dress Becky had worn, hers was a lackluster rag, and as for her feather-cut
titian hair, it was an insult to cosmetology.
She was writing something in a little red notebook and didn't appear to notice him at first. Presently,
however, she glanced at her wrist watch, and then—as though the time of day had somehow apprised
her of his presence—she looked in his direction.
It was a rather mild—if startled—look, and did not in the least deserve the dirty one he squelched it
with. He had a glimpse, just before she hastily returned her attention to her notebook, of a dusting of
golden freckles, a pair of eyes the hue of bluebirds and a small mouth the color of sumac leaves after the
first hard frost. He wondered idly if his initial reaction to her might not have been different if he bad used
a less consummate creature than Becky for a criterion.
Suddenly he became aware that she was looking at him again. "How do you spell matrimony?" she
asked.
He gave a start "Matrimony?"
"Yex. How do you spell it?'
"M-a-t-r-i-m-o-n-y," Roger said.
"Thankx." She made a correction in her notebook, then she turned toward him again. “I’m a very
poor speller—especially when it comes to foreign words."
"Oh, you're from another country, then?" That would explain her bizarre accent.
"Yex, from Buzenborg. It's a xmall provinxe on the xouthernmoxt continent of the sixth planet of the
star you call Altair. I juxt arrived on earth this morning."
From the matter-of-fact way she said it, you'd have thought that the southernmost continent of Altair
VI was no more remote from Lakeport than the southernmost continent of Sol III and that spaceships
were as common as automobiles. Small wonder that the scientist in Roger was incensed. Small wonder
that he girded himself immediately to
do battle.
His
best bet, be decided, would be a questions-and-answers campaign designed to lure her into
deeper and deeper water until finally she went under. "What's your name?" he began casually.
"Alayne. What'x yourx?"
He told her. Then: "Don't you have a surname?"
"No. In Buzenborg we dixpenxed with xurnamex centuries ago."
He let that go by. "All right, then, where's your spaceship?'
"I parked it by a barn on a dexerted farm a few milex outxide the xity. With the force field turned on,
it lookx xomething like a
xilo. People never notixe an obvious object, even if it’x right under their noxex,
xo long ax it blends in with its xurroundings."
"A silo?'
'Yex. A—a silo. I see I've been getting my 'X's' mixed up with my 'S's' again. You see," she went on,
pronouncing each word carefully, "in the Buzenborg alphabet the nearest sound to the 'S' sound is the 'X'
sound, so if I don't watch myself, whenever I say 'S' it comes out 'X,' unless it is followed or preceded by
a letter that softens its sibilance.”
Roger looked at her closely. But her blue eyes were disarming, and not so much as a smidgin of a
smile disturbed the serene line of her lips. He decided to humor her. "What
you need is
a good diction
teacher," he said.
She nodded solemnly. "But how do I go about getting one?”
"The phone directory is full of them. Just call one up and make an appointment." Probably, he thought
cynically, if he had met her before Becky swam into his ken he would have thought her accent charming
and have advised her not to go to a diction teacher. "But lees get back to what we were talking about,"
he went on. "You say you left your ship in plain sight because people never notice an obvious object so
long as it doesn't clash with its surroundings, which means that you want to keep your presence on Earth
a secret. Right?"
"Yes, that's right."
"Then why," Roger pounced, "are you sitting here in
broad daylight practically throwing the secret in
my face?”
"Because the law of obviousness works with people too. The surest way to make everybody believe
I'm not from Altair VI is
to keep saying that I am."
"O.K., we'll let that pass." Eagerly Roger launched Phase Two of his campaign. "Let's consider your
trip instead."
Inwardly he gloated. He was sure he had her now. However, as matters turned out, he didn't have
her at all, for in drawing up his plans to lure her into deeper and deeper water he had overlooked a very
pertinent possibility—the possibility that she might be able to swim. And not only could she swim, she
was
even more at home in the scientific sea than he was.
For instance, when he pointed out that, owing to the ratio between the mass and the velocity of a
moving body, the speed of light cannot be equaled and that therefore her journey from Altair VI to Earth
must have required more than the sixteen years needed by light to travel the same distance, she said,
"You're not taking the Lorentz transformation into consideration. Moving clocks slow down with
reference to stationary clocks, so if I traveled at just under the velocity of light my journey wouldn't have
lasted over a few hours."
For instance, when he pointed out that more than sixteen years would still have gone by on Altair VI,
and that her family and friends would be that much older, she
said, "Yes, but you're only assuming that
the speed of light can't be equaled. As a matter of fact, it can be doubled, tripled and quadrupled. True,
the mass of a moving body increases in proportion to its velocity, but not when a demassifier—a device
invented by our scientists to cancel out mass—is used."
For instance, when he conceded for the sake of argument that the velocity of light could be exceeded
and pointed out that if she had traveled a little in excess of twice its velocity she not only would have
traveled backward in time but would have finished her journey before she began it, thereby giving birth to
a rather awkward paradox, she said, "There wouldn't be a paradox because the minute one became
imminent a cosmic time shift would cancel it. Anyway, we don't use faster-than-light drives any more. We
used to, and our ships are still equipped with them, but we aren't supposed to resort to them except in
cases of emergency because too many time shifts occurring simultaneously could disrupt the space-time
continuum."
And for instance, when he demanded how she
had
made
her trip then, she said, "I took the short cut,
the same as anyone else on Altair VI does when he wishes to travel vast distances. Space is warped, just
as
your own scientists have theorized, and with the new warp drive our Altairian VI scientists have
developed it's no trick at all, even for an amateur to travel to any place he wants to in the galaxy in a
matter of just a few days."
It was a classic dodge, but dodge or not, it was
still unassailable. Roger stood up. He knew when he
was beaten. "Well, don't take any wooden meteorites," he said.
"Where—where are you going, Roger?"
"To a certain tavern I know of for a sandwich and a beer, after which I'm going to watch the New
York—Chicago game on TV."
"But—but aren't you going to ask me to come with you?"
"Of course not. Why should I?'
A transformation Lorentz had never dreamed of took place in her eyes, leaving them a misted and an
incredulous blue. Abruptly she lowered them to her wrist watch. I—I can't understand it. My wodget
registers ninety, and even eighty is considered a high-compatibility reading."
A tear the size of a
large dewdrop rolled down her cheek and fell with a soundless splash upon her
blue bodice. The scientist in Roger was unmoved, but the poet in him was touched. "Oh, all right, come
along if you want to," he said.
The tavern was just off Main Street. After phoning a diction teacher at the request of Alayne of Altair
and making an appointment for her for four-thirty that afternoon, he chose a booth that afforded an
unobstructed view of the TV screen and ordered two roast beefs on
kummelweck
and two glasses of
beer.
Alayne of Altair's sandwich disappeared as fast as his did. "Like another one?" he asked.
"No, thanks. Though the beef was really quite tasty considering the low chlorophyllic content of Earth
grass."
"So you've got better grass than we
have. I suppose you've got better cars and better TV sets too!"
"No, they're about the same. Except for its phenomenal advance in space travel, our technology is
practically parallel with yours."
"How about baseball? Do you have that too?'
"What's baseball?" Alayne of Altair wanted to know.
"You'll see," said Roger of Earth gloatingly. Pretending to be from Altair VI was one thing, but
pretending to be ignorant of baseball was quite another. She was bound to betray herself by at least one
slip of the tongue before the afternoon was very much older.
However, she did nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, her reactions strengthened rather than
weakened her claim to extraterrestrialism. "Why do they keep shouting, 'Go, go, go, Aparicio?” she
asked during the bottom half of the fourth.
"Because Aparicio is famous for his base stealing. Watch him now—he's going to try to steal
second."
Aparicio not only tried, he made it too. "See?” Roger said.
It was clear from the befuddled expression on Alayne of Altair's face that she did not see. "It doesn't
make any sense," she said. "If he's so good at stealing bases, why didn't he steal first base instead of
standing there swinging at that silly sphere?"
Roger gaped at her. "Look, you're not getting this at all. You can't steal
first
base."
"But suppose somebody did steal it. Would they let him stay there?"
"But you can't steal first base. It's impossible!"
"Nothing is impossible," Alayne of Altair said.
Disgusted, Roger let it go at that, and throughout the rest of the game he ignored her. However, he
was a White Sox fan, and when his idols came through with a 5-4 win his disgust dissipated like mist on a
summer morning, and so great was his euphoria that he told her he'd walk uptown with her to the diction
teacher's studio. On the way he talked about his poetic analysis of science, and he even quoted a few
lines from a Petrarchan sonnet he had done on the atom. Her warm enthusiasm sent his euphoria soaring
even higher. "I hope you had a pleasant afternoon," he said when they paused in front of the building in
which the diction teacher's studio was located.
"Oh, I did!" Excitedly she wrote something down in her notebook, tore out the page and handed it to
him. "My Earth address," she explained. 'What time are you going to call for me tonight, Rog?"
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