"The Mole Pirate" by Murray Leinster
This story starts with a bang when we are told that one of America's top scientists, Durran, has become America's Public Enemy Number One! Durran recently announced that he was rejecting all conventional morality and taking up a life guided entirely by selfishness, and soon after providing humanity this sporting warning he started robbing and murdering people!
We then meet Jack Hill, a young scientist. Hill has invented a method of aligning the atoms of a material so that it can pass through most other materials; this process of aligning atoms can be reversed just as easily as it is initiated. (We get a lecture on magnetism from Hill as he explains this process to a journalist.) Before an audience of reporters and the famous white-haired European émigré Professor Eisenstein (oh, brother), Hill demonstrates the process and then reveals the thirty-foot long torpedo-like vehicle he has built that takes advantage of his process--this thing, christened the Mole, can safely pass through walls and descend beneath the Earth's surface and so forth. Hill takes it on its maiden voyage to show off its capabilities, bringing along an eager Eisenstein as a passenger who is full of questions on how to operate the novel machine. As we readers already know, this man with the German accent is not Eisenstein--he's Durran in disguise and, right in front of the assembled press corps, he kicks Hill out of the vehicle he built and drives off with it!
The rest of the story, which is pretty long (isfdb categorizes "The Mole Pirate" as a novella,) describes Durran's campaign of terror as he murders innocent people, liberates criminals, and robs banks, jewelry stores, arsenals and construction sites, and Hill's desperate and ultimately successful effort to develop countermeasures that can end Durran's depredations.
This is a decent science-oriented story--the early parts, in which we meet Durran and witness the first of his atrocities, is fun, and the science stuff feels fresh and interesting. There is a somewhat superfluous relationship subplot tacked on to the story--Hill has a courageous and clever girlfriend who helps in the struggle against Durran, and as the story starts, her father doesn't approve of Hill, but dear old Dad comes around when Hill demonstrates his good qualities during the crisis--but this subplot doesn't substantially weigh down the story. I'm judging "The Mole Pirate" moderately good.
Sam Moskowitz included "The Mole Pirate" in his oft-republished anthology of three short novels that has appeared variously as A Sense of Wonder, The Moon Era, and Three Stories. In his introduction to the 1967 book, Moskowitz complains that current SF too often has "dispensed with the romance" and "literary 'magic'" that gave readers of earlier SF "emotional breathlessness as well as intellectual stimulation." "It [recent SF] seems to make the most profound and thrilling mysteries commonplace," says Moskowitz. I don't want to put words in Moskowitz's mouth, but he seems to be trying to say (particularly with his choice of epigraph for his intro) that 1960s SF has replaced the optimism and excitement of earlier SF at the idea that there is much more to learn about the universe and so many adventures humankind has to look forward to with cynicism and pessimism, and he does not find this substitution an improvement.
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| The epigraph that precedes Moskowitz's introduction to A Sense of Wonder |
Moskowitz tells us he selected the three works in A Sense of Wonder because they exemplify his idea of what "a sense of wonder" is and also have the literary merit modern practitioners claim earlier SF lacked. "The Mole Pirate" certainly offers what I am thinking of when I use the somewhat vague term "a sense of wonder" here at this blog. Multiple times in Leinster's novella Hill thinks about how his invention can be used to open up new avenues of exploration and trade, can lead to safer and more comfortable and more exciting lives for everybody, and once Durran is defeated we readers are lead to expect that a paradigm shift in human life, for the better, is just ahead thanks to Hill's innovation.
Like a thousand years ago, Earth people colonized Venus. After they had built up a viable high tech civilization there, they went to war against Earth! For five centuries the Venus people tried to conquer Terra, but their rockets were always shot down by Earth's defense forces. Eventually Venus gave up their dream of conquest, and so deep were the psychological scars that for 300 years there was no intercourse between Venus and Earth--the people of Venus even refused to look at Earth through their telescopes!
Just recently, Venusians started looking at Earth again, only to find the mother planet deserted! A powerful fleet of rockets was built to have another crack at Earth, and our protagonist, Flason, is on the first ship. He parachutes down through Earth's atmosphere and wins the title of first Venusian ever to land on Earth!
On Earth, Flason, via the media of a mass grave and a machine which presents centuries-old news broadcasts, learns the horrible truth of why Terra is abandoned--extrasolar aliens attacked, their strange gasses killing everybody and preserving their bodies so they could be used as components in macabre art installations! Suddenly, one of those alien invaders appears, a giant thing of amorphous bat-like shape. It is about to kill Flason when suddenly an attractive woman appears and slays the monster with a "flame ejector." The woman tells Flason that she stowed away on his ship because she also had a desire to see Earth, and she has had a crush on him since they were kids, even though he never noticed her.
"Lost Planet" has a good premise and setting and I like the images of the desolated Earth and the monster, but in plot and character it is kind of slight. Long does try to portray a character arc for Flason--Venusians endeavor to be cold and intellectual and are ashamed of any animalistic passions they might have, saying these emotions are a disgusting throwback to their Earth ancestry, and Flason is more bookish and intellectual than most, but then contact with Earth and the love of the woman who suddenly appears on the penultimate page of the eight-page story awakens his emotions--but it feels sort of perfunctory, almost all of that character stuff being jammed into the last two pages of the tale.
I still like it, though. I guess "Lost Planet" doesn't pass the Bucharest test, but maybe it deserves feminist points anyway because a woman rescues a man by killing the monster--it at least is a counterexample to the stereotype that old SF was always men rescuing women from the monsters.
"Lost Planet" would reappear in 1975 in the 72nd volume of the American edition of Perry Rhodan, of which Forrest J. Ackerman was co-editor.
"The Machine from Ganymede" by Raymond Z. Gallun
This story is written in the style of a popular non-fiction article describing an historical event, an event taking place in the future of 1951.
There is a lot of international tension in 1951, and a scientist, Boris Lutkin, announces that he has the solution to international conflict--he has developed a superweapon and if any wars break out he will use his superweapon to resolve the war at once. (The solution to the problem of violence is more violence!) In a bizarre coincidence, later that very same month comes even more mind-blowing and consequential news from the world of science: astronomers have spotted phenomena in the area of Ganymede and Europa that indicate that those moons are inhabited by space faring civilizations, and that those civilizations are waging upon each other a titanic war!
Lutkin is among those people who fear that these belligerent Jovians might in the near future try to take over Earth, and so he decides to give his superweapon to the governments of the ten most important nations in the world so Earth will be ready should aliens attack us. (One minute he's berating us because we are too violent and the next minute he's trusting us with a superweapon--in his defense, he thinks fear of interplanetary enemies has united us all under one banner and rendered international war obsolete.) Lutkin convenes a meeting of politicians and scientists and demonstrates to them his awesome weapon.
Lutkin's weapon is a ray projector which has an effective range of 500 miles. Within the ray's area of effect atoms and molecules are stabilized, so no chemical reactions can take place; for example, nothing upon which the ray is playing can burn. More importantly for military purposes, perhaps, is the fact that the ray ceases all chemical reactions within a living creature, causing instant death.
While Lutkin is giving his demonstration a flying machine less than two feet long bursts into the room, kills everybody with electrical blots, grabs the weapon and blueprints, and flies back out into space. All of Lutkin's notes and diagrams about the weapon have been destroyed, leaving the Earth defenseless! A short time later, astronomers watching the progress of the war among the moons of Jupiter report that the side that was losing is now winning, presumably because they have mass produced the Lutkin weapon. Earth is in trouble! But the story ends on a hopeful note, as Lutkin's daughter and his assistant (they were on a date during the attack instead of helping out Lutkin at the historic meeting of statesmen and geniuses, which is a little hard to believe) express their determination to rediscover the principles behind the Lutkin weapon.
This is a fun little story because it has fun concepts, and works even though there is almost no characterization or individual human drama. "The Machine from Ganymede" has never been republished, however; luckily the internet archive is there to provide easy access to this work.
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Three entertaining stories full of science and technology and the sense that the universe is full of knowledge and adventure we haven't yet scratched the surface of, but which is within our ability to master. A good issue of Astounding.
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