Still More Merril-approved 1960 stories: Clarke, Kapp, Knight, Lafferty, Leinster

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading short stories published in 1960 which Judith Merril included in her list of Honorable Mentions at the end of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F.  Last time we read stories by Poul Anderson, J. G. Ballard, James Blish and Algis Budrys; today we've got stories from five more writers we are in interested here at the blog: Arthur C. Clarke, Colin Kapp, Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty and Murray Leinster.

"Inside the Comet" AKA "Into the Comet" by Arthur C. Clarke

"Inside the Comet" was first printed in the same issue of F&SF as the James Blish story we read in our last episode, "The Oath," as well as Richard Matheson's salacious black magic story "From Shadowed Places," which we read in November.  "Inside the Comet" would go on to be reprinted many times in numerous Clarke collections, generally as "Into the Comet."  I am reading it in a scan of that issue of F&SF.

This is a brief standard issue hard science fiction story, complete with science lectures, scientists risking their lives to expand knowledge, and then using technology and ingenuity to escape death.

In the 21st century a spaceship with like fifty scientists aboard is sent to explore a spectacular comet.  While in the comet the ship's computer breaks down, and the ship is considered doomed--they can't navigate through space what with all the overlapping gravity fields without a computer to do all the calculations, and they are too far from Earth to exchange data with a computer back home.  Luckily a journalist aboard has experience using an abacus.  He trains everybody on the ship to use an abacus so they can manually perform a sufficient quantity of calculations to thrust the ship within communications range of Earth. 

The pace is brisk, and the story is just the right length--I like this one.  

"Enigma" by Colin Kapp

Way back in 2016 we read Kapp's novel Patterns of Chaos and we haven't dealt with him since.  Well, here's our chance to get reacquainted with Kapp.  "Enigma," a novelette, was printed in New Worlds by editor John Carnell, who was in charge of the British magazine for like seventeen years before Michael Moorcock famously took over.  

Europe is engulfed in a sort of low-intensity nuclear war!  The British and their enemies on the Continent don't want to detonate too many atomic weapons, because nuclear detonations destroy valuable infrastructure that a conqueror will want and increase the level of unhealthy radiation across the Earth.  So the combatants lay siege to each other, trying to wear each other down by damaging each others' productivity.  One way the enemy tries to diminish British productivity is to launch into an industrial area a missile or bomb that instead of detonating on impact, lies dormant, acting as a mine or trap--factories and housing from miles around must be abandoned, radically diminishing productivity but leaving valuable industrial plant intact and desirable real estate unirradiated.  The counter to such an attack is an expert bomb squad that can deactivate the bomb, and by the time this story takes place the British have a highly experienced crew of engineers who have deactivated many bombs while the enemy has developed many ways of rendering bombs extremely dangerous to them, equipping their bombs with radar and a battery of other sensors that can detonate a bomb if efforts to neutralize it are detected.

"Enigma" follows a British team of engineers and technicians as they strive to defuse a brand new type of bomb sitting in a sector essential to the United Kingdom's productive capacity.  Kapp's story is laden with technical jargon, with pivotal passages that sound like this one: 

"The bomb transmitters are on automatic gain control.  By keeping the sound level unreasonably high we force the gain, and thus the sensitivity, right down low and we can crawl up real close without detection."

Kapp also tries to offer human drama, depicting manly men sweating, cursing, and making wise cracks as they face death, the constant pressure putting them forever on the brink of a mental breakdown.  Here's another representative passage: 

Sandor therefore sweated it out quietly, manually inserting octave filters into a haywire circuit at seven second intervals, and slowly losing his nerve as he heard Gruman's anguished battle relayed by the pickups on the bomb. 

As far as I understand it, the bomb in the story has super-powerful microphones, and technicians back in Germany are listening for signs that their bomb is being defused.  After efforts to jam the bomb's transmissions fail, the British surround the bomb with loudspeakers playing extremely loud and annoying radio jingles mixed with a high pitched whistle--this noise will drown out the sounds of the bomb squad's approach and fatigue the Germans listening, dulling their minds and maybe even forcing them to take a break from listening so the engineers can get to the bomb and start dismantling it.  Of course, the horrible noise also fatigues the bomb squad, and its members suffer ear damage and even more severe psychological injury in the course of neutralizing the bomb.

A curious thing about the story is that Kapp doesn't refer to "Russia" or "the USSR" or "the communists" or "the Warsaw Pact;" when the text is specific it refers to the enemy as "the Germans" and the two German cities which are receiving transmissions from the bomb are Kiel and Bremen, which I think were in West Germany.  The international political situation in the story must be very different from the real one at the time it was different, I guess Kapp seeking to exploit reader antipathy towards Germany rather than relying entirely on Cold War tensions for drama.  

I'll call this one acceptable.  Judith Merril may be this story's biggest fan--she included it in her Honorable Mentions list, but it looks like it has never actually been reprinted.

"Time Enough" by Damon Knight

Here is a tale by the famous editor of such anthologies as the Orbit series and writer of overrated "sardonic" stories.  "Time Enough" first appeared in Amazing and was never anthologized, but would be reprinted in multiple Knight collections, including The Best of Damon Knight.  I've got my fingers crossed that this isn't a joke story.

To my relief, "Time Enough" isn't a joke story, but is sort of trifling.  I guess the story is about how we have to accept that what's done is done and move on, and maybe that, without risk, there is no real accomplishment.  

Jimmy is a thirty-year-old man traumatized by a childhood incident.  He was the youngest of a group of friends who went into the woods to swim in an old quarry; to get to the water you had to walk along a fallen tree that hung over the abyss.  Last in line, Jimmy was too scared to follow his friends along the narrow trunk and had to turn back, humiliated.  This episode, apparently, has psychologically scarred him for life.

Luckily (?) Jimmy lives in the future of 1978 and Dr. Vogel, a shrink, has a device that allows you to cast your mind back in time and relive moments of your life when you screwed up so that this time, with all your experience and the benefit of hindsight, you can make a better decision.  You'd think people would use this to prevent the Russian Revolution or tighten up safety procedures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or something, but it seems instead people use it to get over childhood embarrassments and to give voice to comebacks they hadn't come up with until it was too late (the famous l'esprit d'escalier.)  Anyway, Jimmy's family pays Vogel a thousand bucks and the machine sends Jimmy back in his childhood body at the crucial moment, about to walk across that fallen tree.  But he finds he still can't bring himself to cross this obstacle, and returns to 1978 frustrated.  He is, however, assured he can try again tomorrow.  It seems he can just keep going back in time and trying again and again until success is finally achieved.

Vogel, it appears, has lost faith in the value of this sort of therapy, admitting to himself that it almost never works.  He gently, and without success, suggests to Jimmy that he just "forget the past" and endeavor to deal with his problems "in the present."  I thought I detected implications that Vogel himself keeps going back in time to this very date to try to help Jimmy again and again, equally in vain; I am even entertaining the possibility that Vogel is Jimmy, thirty or so years older, but can't argue that conclusively.  There must be some kind of twist or trick about the ending, because otherwise "Time Enough" is pretty bland and flat.

Acceptable.

"McGonigal's Worm" by R. A. Lafferty

This is a charming little story written in Lafferty's fun colloquial folksy style, chock full of anecdotes, jokes and comments that will make you smile.  I guess it is something of a shaggy dog story--the catastrophe that is the foundation of the plot is not caused by anybody, and the solution to the crisis is equally an act of God for which nobody can take credit, and the events in between the beginning and end of the story are inconsequential to the bigger picture.  While the story depicts human fecklessness and futility, with people acting irrationally or self-importantly in response to the crisis, and nothing anybody does making any difference, the tale is light-hearted and told with good humor.

All of a sudden, nearly all the world's chordates (on the first page of the story Lafferty uses a bunch of biology terms you rarely see in the wild) are found to be unable to reproduce.  Lafferty relates a bunch of amusing and absurd anecdotes about the human response to this civilization-threatening natural disaster over the next few decades.  For example, a massive testing regime discovers only two people, a prudish woman with an ironclad dedication to the rights of the individual and an "Arabian black" who is a thief and a drunk, still capable of producing offspring.  The authorities try to force this odd couple to mate, but the woman resists on principle and the man, upon seeing a photo of the woman, risks--and loses!--his life in his desperation to escape coupling with her.  People place bets on who will be the last child born, and then on who will be the last human alive.  A certain type of worm--McGonigal's Worm, AKA M.W.--is discovered to have retained the ability to reproduce, and a crash program is launched to study this worm for clues to human salvation--maybe the intelligence of the worm can be increased to the point that it could preserve memory of humanity's intellectual accomplishments!  The economy having crashed, there are few jobs available, and a young woman--one of the youngest people in the world at this point, she being in her thirties--has to take a job at the M.W. Institute, even though she finds worms repulsive, and when M.W.I. staff try to indoctrinate her in the wonders of M.W. ("You must learn to think of M.W. as the hope of the world") all she can say in response is "oog." 

In the end, people and other chordates just start reproducing again.  It turns out that (in a way that reminds us of Poul Anderson's 1953 serial/1954 novel Brain Wave) the Earth was just passing through a field of radiation for thirty-five years and now that we are beyond it everything is hunky dory. 

So many of the anecdotes in "McGonigal's Worm" are about scientists, academics and authorities acting in ways that are bootless and ridiculous, we might see the story as a satire of all the SF stories in which ultracompetent leaders and genius polymath scientists save the day against all odds.  (The story may also cut against the pervasive elitism of so much SF by depicting both the common masses and educated people acting absurdly and by suggesting that the educated man's clinging to a faith in science in the face of disaster is little different from the hoi polloi's seeking comfort in superstition.)  We might also suspect Lafferty, a committed Christian, means to remind us that "Man proposes, but God disposes"--however smart we may be (or think ourselves to be), what happens on this Earth is up to God.

Thumbs up!  This entertaining diversion debuted in H. L. Gold and Fred Pohl's If, and can also be found in two Lafferty collections I believe are somewhat rare.

"The Ambulance Made Two Trips" by Murray Leinster

Here we have a story that dramatizes how, should the government fail to keep crime under control, vigilantes will take justice and the maintenance of order into their own hands.  Also, a story featuring a device that alters the laws of probability.  Plus, a reminder that women are greedy, acquisitive, manipulative, and have no sense of honor or community spirit.  Don't get too excited, though--"The Ambulance Made Two Trips" is primarily a specimen of that bugbear of MPorcius's mind, the not in the least bit funny joke story. 

Organized crime is taking over the town!  Big Jake Connors starts a cab company and a juke box company and a beer distributorship and any of the businesses in town that don't want to partner up with Big Jake's firms are suddenly afflicted with "accidents" that make doing business impossible.  Big Jake protects himself from interference from the cops by "anonymously" giving expensive gifts of perfume and minks and other luxuries to the wives of all the police officers in town, who pressure their husbands to look the other way when it comes to Big Jake's infractions.

Our main character is Detective Serjeant Fitzgerald, one of the few boys in blue still committed to bringing down Big Jake.  Some of Big Jake's hoods run into accidents themselves, and Fitzgerald tracks the source of these mishaps to a dry cleaner who has refused to give in to the threats of the mob boss, and also declines to report Big Jake's threats to the police.  This dry cleaner, it turns out, has a device that creates good luck charms that disrupt the laws of probability in their vicinity as they relate to acts of violence.  If someone tries to harm a person bearing one of these charms their efforts will backfire in extravagantly slapstick fashion.  

This is a pedestrian filler story, written in a light-hearted tone and meant to be funny rather than to make your blood boil about injustice or make you shiver in fear of the paranormal or lead you to consider what deference we citizens of a republic owe to the law and the authority of the executive branch if the government fails to fulfill its obligation to defend our property and persons.  Every scene is overly long and the whole production is irritatingly repetitive; Leinster describes four different protection racket schemes when he could have just described one representative one, and he describes too many instances of the hoods' efforts to harm the dry cleaner and in mountainously superfluous detail.  None of this is amusing or surprising--it is tedious.  

I have a reservoir of good will towards Leinster after reading all those 1930s and '40s stories by him, but I have to sadly condemn this 1960 work as marginally below an acceptable rating.  (Leave the jokes to Lafferty!)  

"The Ambulance Made Two Trips" would be included in a German Leinster collection and in the anthology Never in This World.

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It is sad to see Leinster stumble but we have a commitment to the truth here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Clarke and Lafferty's stories are solid successful efforts that showcase what we life about those guys.  Kapp works hard to make his story exciting and it isn't bad, while the Knight feels undercooked, like there should be more to it, but it is not a failure.

More stories from 1960 await us in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!