The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

THE THUNDER-THIEVES by Isaac Asimov

S-f writers are restless types, generally. They seem to come from—and be forever going off to—bizarre employments and unlikely places. Even inside the field there are few “name writers” who have not at some time switched teams, and tried their hands at editing or criticism.

Dr. Asimov lives quietly in Boston, and his career as a Professor of Biochemistry is just what one might expect (but seldom find) in a science-fiction writer. He has never edited a magazine or conducted a review column. Apparently he is content with two fictional personalities (the other is juvenile author Paul French). Co-author of five (at last count) biochemistry textbooks, Isaac Asimov has a growing reputation for non-fiction science writing. As a notorious composer of hoax and spoof articles, he is among the leaders of the slim ranks of s-f humorists. He is the author of many, many short stories, and a versifier and parodist of note.

The verse reprinted here, which goes to the tune of “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,” was first published in Future Science Fiction. The article following was written especially for this book.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a science-fiction story called “Trends.” It dealt with a man who was building a spaceship which would take him to the Moon. The ship, alas, blew up in its first attempt and there was an outcry against him and space-flight in general. My hero, who survived, went into hiding, built another ship in secret, shot himself to the Moon, circled it, and returned safely.

Now I have lived to see events not only spoil this plot but make it seem more than faintly ridiculous.

What! A spaceship built in secret by one man? Spaceflight with the military not interested? (There wasn’t a single general in my story.) No countdown? No radiation bands in space? No re-entry problem? And, heaven help us, no Russians???

People in general are aware of this turn of events and many a dear acquaintance turns to me with a happy smile and says: “What are you s-f writers going to write about, now that they’re shooting to the Moon?”

(Fortunately, I have a reasonable answer to that question, which I invariably use. It’s, “Oh, shut up.”)

Space-flight isn’t even the first great s-f concept stolen by scientific advance. What about atomic power? Robert Heinlein’s story, “Blowups Happen,” published in 1940, concerned life in a uranium-fission power plant. By war’s end in 1945, most of the fantasy element had gone out of the story. Now nuclear power plants are hard fact and, as a matter of stern reality, the fission-power being made use of today already bears the flavor of decay. We are looking forward to fusion power ahead and to solar power.

But this is past. What of the future? What may science-fiction writers (and readers) expect to have stolen in the years to come? Where will the thunder-thieves strike next? Nothing is safe.

At a party a few weeks ago, a guest was introduced to me as a research man at an electronics laboratory. I said, “And what are you working on these days?”

Very casually, he said (between yawns, as it were), “Powering space-stations.”

“Ah,” I said, trying to sound intelligent. “Designing compact generators for assembly in space.”

“No, no,” he said. “The generators will be here on Earth. We’ll beam the energy.” I smiled weakly. I had written stories at various times between 1941 and 1957 that dealt with beamed energy to or from space-stations. Now they were assaulting that bastion of the imagination, too.

Nothing is too “science-fictional” for the thunder-thieves.

Consider the question of “anti-matter.” In 1934, the first of the “anti-particles,” the positron, was discovered. It was just like an electron in mass and behavior, but whereas the electron was negatively charged, the positron was positively charged. The two were opposites.

In 1937, John D. Clark wrote a story called “Minus Planet,” in which he envisioned anti-matter—with atoms made up of positrons circling negatively charged nuclei. (The actual atoms with which we are familiar contain electrons circling a positively charged nucleus.) A collision of anti-matter with ordinary matter involves a vast explosion since electrons and positrons combine to form pure energy. In Clark’s story, a mass of anti-matter heading for the Earth is destroyed by having the Moon steered into its path.

But now the anti-proton has been artificially formed and anti-matter is no longer to be found only in the speculations of science fiction.

True, no one has actually been able to create anti-matter itself out of individual anti-particles, since any given anti-particle only exists for a millionth of a second or less before combining with an ordinary particle and vanishing in a blaze of energy. However, astronomers such as Fred Hoyle (who has also taken to writing science fiction) are speculating on the possible existence of chunks of antimatter elsewhere in the universe.

For instance, there are two galaxies in the constellation of Cygnus that are colliding and releasing incredible floods of radio waves. Is this just due to the turbulence of colliding dust clouds? Probably. On the other hand, what if one galaxy is matter and one anti-matter? Hoyle’s calculations lead him to think the amount of energy being released as radio waves is just the amount a gradual matter/anti-matter collision would release.

There is also Messier 87, an unusually bright galaxy which emits copious radio waves although it is not colliding with another galaxy. Has it picked up a sizable gob of anti-matter somewhere that is not yet completely digested?

A physicist named Goldhaber, at Brookhaven, speculates that two universes were formed at the beginning, a universe of matter and an anti-universe of anti-matter, the two flying apart because of gravitational repulsion (anti-gravity).

But is such a thing as anti-gravity conceivable? There are electrostatic forces that attract (between unlike charges) and repel (between like charges). There are magnetic forces that attract (between unlike poles) and repel (between like poles). Gravitational forces, however, are only attractive and Einstein’s theories make no provisions for anything like gravitational repulsion.

And yet, in the last month, I have read a report to the effect that, under special circumstances, subatomic particles acting as though they were made up of “negative mass” could be detected. “Negative mass” would be mass which, under the influence of a gravitational field would show an acceleration opposite in direction to that of “positive mass.” In other words, something of negative mass would fall upward. In still other words, you have anti-gravity.

The implications of all this serious scientific work and thought is colossal. If you can find bodies of anti-matter anywhere, you have a source of energy far greater per unit mass than even hydrogen-fusion. Anti-matter is a fuel that could convert all its own mass and an equivalent mass of ordinary matter into energy. Hydrogen-fusion converts less than one per cent of the mass of hydrogen into energy.

On the other hand, any sizable chunk of anti-matter would be the most dangerous explosive conceivable, and the most un-handleable. How, then, would it be handled?

Jack Williams, among others, dealt with this problem in his book, See-Tee Shock. (In those days, a long decade ago, anti-matter was called “contra-terrene matter” and “see-tee” is the phonetic equivalent of the abbreviation c. t.) But now the purely science-fictional quality of the notion is weakened.

Or suppose we can make (or find) negative mass in quantity and add it to the ordinary positive mass of a spaceship? Would we not have, possibly, a spaceship with a total of zero mass and hence zero inertia? Is not this the inertialess drive featured in E. E. Smith’s famous “Lensman” stories?

Or if we had ways of varying the balance of positive and negative mass in the ship, we might maneuver in space by appropriately repelling or attracting cosmic bodies at any acceleration and do without power altogether—Oh, dreams, dreams!

Or are they dreams? How far can we expect the Thunder-Thieves to go?

If space is slipping out of the realm of s-f, what about time?

Einstein first suggested that time was not absolute; that to a person in motion, time passed more slowly than for a person at rest; and that with rapid motion, the difference in experienced time became sizable. With motion rapid enough, a speeding man could live one year while people on Earth were living through a million.

Various s-f writers have made use of this notion to allow their heroes to reach the stars. L. Sprague de Camp uses it routinely in his Viagens lnterplanetarias stories and L. Ron Hubbard centered his story “To the Stars” about it.

Recently, physicists have argued violently as to whether this “time dilatation” effect is a true one, or only an appearance depending on an observer’s frame of reference. As an amazing sign of the times, this rarefied argument has reached the public press.

What is still more exciting is that a definite experiment is being planned to take the question out of the realm of argument and into that of observation. New “clocks” have been invented which measure time by counting the vibrations within molecules. These vibrations are so unvaryingly constant that the new clocks, called masers will keep time within one part in ten billion (that is, with an error of not more than a third of a second per century).

Now suppose you synchronize two masers, so they are vibrating exactly in time. Keep one maser on Earth and send one up in a satellite which will circle Earth at the usual speed of twenty thousand miles an hour, or thereabouts. At that rate of motion, time within the satellite, if slowed according to theory, will cause the maser to lag 1/20,000 of a second each day. The satellite maser, sending back its radioed signals, will move out of phase with the Earth maser.

Perhaps by the time this sees print, the experiment will be performed. If it proves the existence of time dilatation (as I rather think it will) it means distant galaxies can, theoretically, be reached in one man’s lifetime. This will render old-fashioned such great stories as Heinlein’s “Universe” in which generations of men were required for the voyage to other stars.

Of course, while one man is making an inter-galactic trip and back, uncounted generations are living and dying on Earth, so this also makes one type of time-travel—into the future—a conceivable possibility, and weakens the purity of still another science-fictional plot variety.

Nor is our own Earth safe! Do we write about robots? (I do.) Well, World War II saw the development of the computer to the kind of perfection that points (as yet but distantly) toward A. E. van Vogt’s Games Machine in the “Null-A” stories. We now have computers which can be programed in such a way that they will play a fair game of chess or translate from Russian to English.

Of course, these are tremendous machines. To get a true science-fictional robot, we need a man-shaped, man-sized computer. That means miniaturization.

The real space-consumers in computers are the radio-tubes, or analogous devices which act as stop-and-go devices that determine the exact routes followed by electric currents. Transistors, composed of tiny germanium crystals, do the work of radio-tubes in much smaller space. And now “cryotrons” are being developed. These are merely two wires at liquid helium temperatures. By making use of superconductivity (the tendency of certain metals to have zero resistance to an electric current at temperatures near absolute zero) these wires can be made to stop-and-go electric currents in even less space than do transistors.

Miniaturization is proceeding apace. Robots, tremble!

Or perhaps it is a matter of androids, rather than of robots. Perhaps you’re thinking of mechanical men built out of artificial flesh and blood. Artificial life, to put it most bluntly.

Why not? Biochemists are isolating nucleoproteins from cells and are using them to synthesize proteins in the test-tube. (Nucleoproteins are the substances within cells that act as “blueprints” in protein formation.) Hemoglobin has thus been formed without the intervention of living, intact cells. Man is using the “blueprints” directly.

Experimenters at the Rockefeller Institute have taken nucleic acids out of cells and replaced them with synthetic polymers. Proteins continued being manufactured. Man, in a sense, was then using new and artificial “blueprints” for protein manufacture.

Is the interior of our Earth a mysterious domain, suitable only for science-fiction writers? So far, our only knowledge about it is indirect, derived from such things as earthquake shock-waves. These tell us, for instance, that the Earth’s crust (which we can see and study) ends some miles under our feet and something else, called the “mantle” begins. The mantle is quite different from the crust, chemically and physically, but it cannot be studied by us, in the sense that we can lay our hands upon it.

Or can it? The rather sharp dividing line between crust and mantle is called the Mohorovicic discontinuity (named after its discoverer). Its distance below Earth’s surface varies; from thirty-five miles underneath the mountain belts to twenty miles under land surface generally to barely eight miles under the ocean basins.

And where the oceans are concerned, the first five or six miles down are water, which offers no resistance to a drill. There would thus only be two or three miles of actual rock to penetrate. There are preparations being made, now, for an attempt to drill through that relatively thin rock barrier so that samples of mantle can be brought up to the open light of day.

Among other science-fictional engineering feats being soberly considered by sober scientists is that of damming the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. The waters of the warm Mediterranean evaporate more quickly than they can be replaced by river flow and must therefore be fed by a continuous flow of Atlantic Ocean water through Gibraltar. Blocking this flow will cause a lowering of the Mediterranean sea-level and would allow the building of the greatest hydroelectric power station Earth has ever seen. (Great as would be the engineering problems, here, however, the political problems would be even greater. Sea-coasts would change, sea-ports go out of business. New land—belonging to which powers?—would come into existence, etc.)

But if all its thunder is being stolen, what is left to science fiction?

The answer is—everything!

Let us not forget the function of science fiction. It is not to predict particular scientific advances. It is not to tie itself insolubly to some particular type of plot—such as space-exploration.

Science fiction is, first and foremost, a branch of literature. It deals, first and foremost, with people. Its specialized character is the consideration of people in connection with scientific advance (or retreat). How do people respond to changes in their ways of life brought about by science; to the new hopes; to the new fears?

The point of my story “Trends” lay not in the spaceship itself, which I didn’t even describe, or the flight to the Moon, which I dismissed in one paragraph—but in the reaction of public opinion to a flight to the Moon. The story could be written again now, or in any year of the future. Changing the flight to the Moon to a trip to another galaxy or to a burrowing underground, or to the creation of the first artificial man, or to the development of a telepathy machine, is but the change of a trifling detail.

Heinlein in “Blowups Happen” wasn’t interested primarily in the technology of a fission power-plant, but in the strains on the human technicians who ran it. The essentials of the story would not be changed if the fission plant were changed to a fusion plant or an anti-matter plant.

Whatever the rate of scientific advance, or its actual position at the moment, the capacity for further advance (whether for good or evil) is infinite.

The complexities of the human mind and the variety of ways in which it can react and interact is also infinite.

So, while science fiction deals with the effect of science on man, and man on science, the potentialities of science fiction are, and will remain, doubly infinite.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Robots, tremble!” says Asimov—but he didn’t tell the half of it. A few days after I received this article, I opened my newspaper to find a front-page article on a “machine language” developed by a young scientist at M.I.T. A vocabulary of 107 words (so far) now makes it possible for one machine to act as “foreman” for another— performing the programing that up till now has had to be done by a man. You tell the top machine what you want; it tells the slavey machine how to do it.

Another young man, this time at Cornell, is at work right now building a skimpy first working model of what he says will be the first really intelligent robot. “Dr. Rosenblatt . . . believes his ‘perceptron’ concept developed for the Navy, can provide electronic machines duplicating all functions of the human brain, including consciousness,” says the UPI report. Which brings it very close to home for Dr. Asimov’s famous science-fictional “positronic” robots.

—J. M.