“I'm sorry for you,” said Smith in a monotone. “If you try to tell this story back on Earth, I'm sorry for you.”
“I have no illusions,” muttered Chouns, “yet-what can I do but try to warn Earth. You see what they do to animals.”
“They make slaves of them, according to you.”
“Worse than that. Either the tailed creatures or the snake-things, or both, must have been civilized enough to have developed space travel once; otherwise the plants couldn't be on both planets. But once the plants developed psionic powers (a mutant strain, perhaps), that came to an end. Animals at the atomic stage are dangerous. So they were made to forget; they were reduced to what they are. -Damn it, Smith, those plants are the most dangerous things in the universe. Earth must be informed about them, because some other Earthmen may be entering that cluster.”
Smith laughed. “You know, you're completely off base. If those plants really had us under control, why would they let us get away to warn the others?”
Chouns paused. “I don't know.” Smith's good humor was restored. He said, “For a minute you had me going, I don't mind telling you.”
Chouns rubbed his skull violently. Why were they let go? And for that matter, why did he feel this horrible urgency to warn Earth about a matter with which Earthmen would not come into contact for millennia perhaps?
He thought desperately and something came glimmering. He fumbled for it, but it drifted away. For a moment he thought desperately that it was as though the thought had been pushed away: but then that feeling, too, left.
He knew only that the ship had to remain at full thrust, that they had to hurry.
So. after uncounted years, the proper conditions had come about again. The protospores from two planetary strains of the mother plant met and mingled, sifting together into the clothes and hair and ship of the new animals. Almost at once the hybrid spores formed; the hybrid spores that alone had all the capacity and potentiality of adapting themselves to a new planet.
The spores waited quietly, now, on the ship which, with the last impulse of the mother plant upon the minds of the creatures aboard, was hurtling them at top thrust toward a new and ripe world where free-moving creatures would tend their needs.
The spores waited with the patience of the plant (the all-conquering patience no animal can ever know) for their arrival on a new world-each, in its own tiny way, an explorer-
The stories in this book have not been much anthologized. That is the very reason I have chosen them, and it was one of the points Doubleday urged on me. EACH AN EXPLORER has, however, been anthologized twice, once by Judith Merril in 1957 and once by Vic Ghidalia in 1973.
That still isn't much, though. Some of my stories tend to appear many times. A little story I wrote called THE FUN THEY HAD has appeared, to date, at least forty-two times since it was first published, in 1951, and is currently in press for eight more appearances. It may have appeared in other places, too, but I only have forty-two in my library.
You can find the story, if you wish, in my book EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH (Doubleday, 1957). That's one of the forty-two places.
Editors are always trying to think up gimmicks. Sometimes I am the victim.
On November 14, 1956, I was in the office of Infinity Science Fiction, talking to the editor, Larry Shaw. We got along well together, he and I,* [* I mustn't make that sound exceptional. I get along with nearly everyone.] and I often dropped in to see him when I visited New York.
That day he had an idea. He was to give me the title for a story-the least inspirational title he could think of-and I was to write a short-short, on the spot, based on that title. Then he would give the same title to two other writers and they would do the same.
I asked, cautiously, what the title was, and he said, “Blank.”
“Blank?” I said.
“Blank,” he said.
So I thought a little and wrote the following story, with the title of BLANK! (with an exclamation point).
Randall Garrett wrote a story entitled Blank? with a question mark, and Harlan Ellison wrote one called Blank with no punctuation at all.
B;ank!
“Presumably,” said August Pointdexter, “there is such a thing as overweening pride. The Greeks called it hubris, and considered it to be defiance of the gods, to be followed always by ate, or retribution.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes uneasily.
“Very pretty,” said Dr. Edward Barron impatiently. “Has that any connection with what I said?” His forehead was high and had horizontal creases in it that cut in sharply when he raised his eyebrows in contempt.
“Every connection,” said Pointdexter. “To construct a time machine is itself a challenge to fate. You make it worse by your flat confidence. How can you be sure that your time-travel machine will operate through all of time without the possibility of paradox?”
Barron said, “I didn't know you were superstitious. The simple fact is that a time machine is a machine like any other machine, no more and no less sacrilegious. Mathematically, it is analogous to an elevator moving up and down its shaft. What danger of retribution lies in that?”
Pointdexter said energetically, “An elevator doesn't involve paradoxes. You can't move from the fifth floor to the fourth and kill your grandfather as a child.”
Dr. Barron shook his head in agonized impatience. “I was waiting for that. For exactly that. Why couldn't you suggest that I would meet myself or that I would change history by telling McClellan that Stonewall Jackson was going to make a flank march on Washington, or anything else? Now I'm asking you point blank. Will you come into the machine with me?”
Pointdexter hesitated. “I…I don't think so.”
“Why do you make things difficult? I've explained already that time is invariant. If I go into the past it will be because I've already been there. Anything I decided to do and proceed to do. I will have already done in the past all along, so I'll be changing nothing and no paradoxes willresult. If I decided to kill my grandfather as a baby, and did it I would not be here. But I am here. Therefore I did not kill my grandfather. No matter how I try to kill him and plan to kill him, the fact is I didn't kill him and so I won't kill him. Nothing would change that. Do you understand what I'm explaining?”
“I understand what you say, but are you right?”
“Of course I'm right. For God's sake, why couldn't you have been a mathematician instead of a machinist with a college education?” In his impatience, Barron could scarcely hide his contempt. “Look, this machine is only possible because certain mathematical relationships between space and time hold true. You understand that, don't you, even if you don't follow the details of the mathematics? The machine exists, so the mathematical relations I worked out have some correspondence in reality. Right? You've seen me send rabbits a week into the future. You've seen them appear out of nothing. You've watched me send a rabbit a week into the past one week after it appeared. And they were unharmed.”
“All right. I admit all that.”
“Then will you believe me if I tell you that the equations upon which this machine is based assume that time is composed of particles that exist in an unchanging order; that time is invariant. If the order of the particles could be changed in any way-any way at all-the equations would be invalid and this machine wouldn't work; this particular method of time travel would be impossible.”