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| Jacket of the hardcover first edition of Time To Come, and cover of the abridged 1958 paperback edition |
"Butch" by Poul Anderson
This is one of those traditional SF stories full of science in which a guy solves a problem through quick-thinking and trickery. An alien space ship crashes on 1950s Earth, and the only survivor is captured in Maine after killing some people and a dog and some cows. The government scientists try to communicate with the alien, a hermaphrodite who is given the moniker "Butch," but Butch spends most of its time refusing to respond, and occasionally flies into a violent rage--seeing as Butch has very sharp claws and powerful muscles, its rages are very dangerous, and many government employees are injured and a few are killed. Butch's actions are so irrational and counterproductive that it is decided that Butch is probably insane, due to undiagnosed physical or psychological trauma suffered due to the crash, and so in a few days a psychiatrist will try out shock therapy and lobotomy techniques--hopefully these will bring Butch to its senses so it will be eager to trade the secret of space flight with us humies.
Our narrator, Bob Muir, doubts the alien is insane and fears tinkering with Butch's brain will just wreck it and make acquiring the secret of space flight impossible. Muir figures out why Butch is not cooperating, and comes up with a way to make friends with the alien.
Butch's people have a super duper sense of smell, and on their world their natural enemies smell like adrenaline--by a compulsive instinct, they instantly attack any creature that smells like adrenaline. Human beings secrete adrenaline when scared, and Muir deduces that all the people Butch has killed were particularly scared of Butch. Butch now recognizes that the people it has killed aren't really a threat to it, but it can't control its instinctive response to the smell of adrenaline. Realizing it has killed people unfairly, it assumes the humans must hate it and want to achieve revenge on its race, and so it has kept mum, lest the humans learn where it comes from and how to get there.
Muir puts into action an elaborate scheme that convinces Butch that Earth people don't really hate it and don't really want to attack its home planet. Muir believes Butch has never seen a woman, and because Butch is a hermaphrodite assumes there is no sexual dimorphism on its planet. Muir gets a bunch of women with very pronounced secondary sexual characteristics and lies to them, telling them that Butch is totally harmless, so they won't be scared and set off its adrenaline alarm. Muir coaches these curvaceous women in how to behave around Butch--they are to treat men with contempt, push them around, but be very kind and solicitous of Butch. Butch comes to believe that men and women are different species, with men as a subordinate slave race, and so no longer worries that it has offended Earth people by killing a bunch of men, who are after all just expendable subordinates, and so opens up communication with the women.
Maybe a little gimmicky, but not bad. One wonders if the scenes of men grovelling before women and of women whipping men are perhaps meant to appeal to SF readers with S&M fetishes. (I know you are out there!)
For more MPorcius coverage of 1950s short stories by Poul Anderson check out my assessment of three stories by Anderson that appeared in 1951 issues of Planet Stories with heavily armed women on their covers or of his 1954 tale "The Chapter Ends" which contrasts the lifestyles of people with the brains God intended us to have with those whose noggins are packing superpowerful genetically-modified brains.
"Keeper of the Dream" by Charles Beaumont
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| 1970 German abridged edition of Time to Come |
"Keeper of the Dream" is a sort of philosophical story consisting mostly of a conversation. It is the 22nd century, mankind has abandoned religion and war, disease and hunger are a thing of the past. Almost nobody has to work, thanks to automation. The conversation is between two scientists. Scientist A tells Scientist B that his top secret research project, the work of many years, is complete--he has determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that Earth is the only planet in the universe capable of supporting life; mankind is truly alone and exploring the universe would be a waste of time because we couldn't stop anywhere. "By a freak arrangement, Earth happens to be the only inhabited planet, from the beginning of time...." Scientist B is the first to hear of these findings.
Scientist B says that conquering outer space was the only dream, the only goal, mankind had left, and the only job for scientists, now that there is no war, diseases, hunger, or work. Without some dream or goal, life will be meaningless and society will collapse. Scientist A is quickly convinced, and the two scientists take the masses of paper on which all of Scientist A's work has been recorded and throw them in an incinerator. Now they will start the same exact project over, from scratch, in order to keep busy and in hopes that they will, somehow, get a different result.
This is more of an idea than an actual story. The idea is OK as far as it goes, so I guess I'll judge this story acceptable.
It looks like "Keeper of the Dream" has only ever appeared in the various printings of Time to Come.
For more MPorcius coverage of Charles Beaumont stories from the 1950s, check out my assessment of his widely reprinted 1955 story "The Vanishing American," which I dismissed as "sappy filler," or of his 1954 tale about jazz, "Black Country." (I have no doubt that my sophisticated readership is full of people who love jazz.)
"No Morning After" by Arthur C. Clarke
"No Morning After" is a sort of misanthropic joke story. During the Cold War, an engineer is getting drunk because he wants to build space craft but the government just wants him to design guided missiles--also, his girlfriend just left him. He gets a telepathic message from outer space--some friendly aliens have discovered that Sol is going to explode in three days, and they can set up teleporters on Earth if only Earthlings cooperate by opening their minds to telepathic communication. (The protagonist's inebriation and obsession with space flight and other random factors fortuitously opened his mind.) The aliens implore the engineer to contact the government and spread the word so the human race can be saved!
Of course, the engineer thinks this is just a drunken hallucination, and tells the aliens that the human race would be better off dead because humans are violent and miserable and so forth. So the beneficent aliens abandon their mission of mercy, the engineer falls asleep and forgets the whole thing, and in three days the Earth is destroyed by the explosion of the Sun.
Acceptable.
For more MPorcius coverage of 1950s Arthur C. Clarke short stories, check out my assessment of "This Earth of Majesty," which might be dismissed as propaganda for the English royal family, or of "The Deep Range," which I call "a perfect example" of a science fiction story of its type, the "realistic, straightforward, day-at-the-office-of-a-man-in-the-future" story.
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Interestingly, all three of these stories, published like three years before Sputnik, are about people who want to achieve space flight. Of the three, I like the Anderson the best as it is an actual story and not just an idea or a joke, but it is not exactly great. At the same time we have to admit that of the three, only the Beaumont story is actually a "story of tomorrow;" the Anderson and Clarke stories are about how the Cold War influences human response to first contact with aliens.
We'll see if the next batch of stories from Time to Come is more spectacular, and hews more closely to the "stories of tomorrow" brief.
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