Space on My Hands
TO SAM MERWIN, JR.
Introduction
AS I SIT DOWN at the Smith-Corona to write an introduction to this collection of stories, the first thing that comes to my mind is the question: «Why write an introduction at all?» None of these tales is conventional enough to feel in the least slighted if someone reads it without having been formally introduced to it. Yes, definitely I have failed in what I tried to do in writing these stories if even one of them turns out to be stuffy enough to want to know your name and murmur politely that it is pleased to meet you before it wants to be read.
So why, then, am I writing this? Why does any writer — unless he has a serious message that he’s afraid you might miss and he wishes to point it out to you — write an introduction to a book? I’ll let the cat out of the bag; it’s because the publisher of the book, avid for a bit of extra wordage free, has put him on the spot by telling him an introduction is necessary. So the writer wastes an evening that could be much better spent in any of the more pleasant ways in which an evening can be spent, such as — but why go into that? I could be doing one of those pleasant things right now.
You see, since I’ve been hornswoggled into writing this introduction anyway, I’m going to be honest. I’m going to admit that I hate writing — introductions, stories, novels, letters or postcards. None of these stories was written because I enjoyed writing it — much as I may have enjoyed having written it, once it was out of the typewriter and in the mail.
But this I must also confess: Science-fiction stories are the least painful of all stories for me to write, and when I have put THE END on the final page of one, I feel greater satisfaction than with any other kind of story. Possibly a factor in this is that I’ve written relatively few science-fiction stories compared to mystery and detective stories, but I don’t think that’s too much of a factor. The important reason is that science-fiction, by giving greater scope to the imagination and by imposing fewer rules and limitations, comes closer than any other type of fiction to being honest writing.
The science-fiction writer has the privilege denied to writers in all other fields, except sheer fantasy, to tailor his background, his universe, to the story he wants to write; he can thereby, achieve an integration and an integrity denied the writer who has only one universe to work in and who must twist and trim the products of his imagination to fit the inflexible mold of fact. A horrid word, fact, when it denies you the future and the stars.
Big words, I notice now, for such small tales. But I’m glad that I wrote them because, until I did, I didn’t realize how true they are. I apologize, Shasta; I’m glad now that you made me write them; I take back my snide remarks.
I shall, in repentance, write an introduction after alclass="underline"
Reader, meet stories; meet the mouse who missed the moon; meet the Bems who came to the aid of the party; meet the man who fell in love with the thought projection of a cockroach; meet the detective in the inconspicuous bright red suit; meet the ostrich in the polka-dot neck-tie and meet the spaceship in the sandwich and the chicken who couldn’t talk.
And may you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed cashing the checks for them!
FREDRIC BROWN
Taos, N. M.
4 January 1951
SOMETHING GREEN
THE big sun was crimson in a violet sky. At the edge of the brown plain, dotted with brown bushes, lay the red jungle.
McGarry strode toward it. It was tough work and dangerous work, searching in those red jungles, but it had to be done. And he’d searched a thousand of them; this was just one more.
He said, «Here we go, Dorothy. All set?»
The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn’t answer, but then it never did. It couldn’t talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.
He’d had Dorothy for … How long? At a guess, four years. He’d been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he’d found her. Anyway, he assumed Dorothy was of the gentler sex, if for no other reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman’s hand.
«Dorothy,» he said, «reckon we’d better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there.»
He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun merely needed exposure to the rays of a sun — any bright and close sun — for an hour or two a day; it soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun, he’d never have lasted five years here on Kruger III.
Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so that he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant’s trunk, and a scaly head with a bill like a toucan’s.
McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry’s, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he’d been looking for it systematically for the five years he’d been here.
If he found it, it might — just barely might — contain, intact, some of the electronic tubes which had been smashed in the crash landing of his own spacer. And if it did, he could get back to Earth.
He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger, and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful — oh, so beautiful — and then the bushes weren’t there any more, nor was the eight-legged lion.
McGarry chuckled softly. «Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don’t have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe. Dorothy. Green! And I know where there’s a world that’s mostly green, and we’re going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It’s the world I came from, and it’s the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You’ll love it.»
He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, the sun that never set on the day side of this planet, which always faced it as one side of Earth’s moon always faces Earth.
No day and night — unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.
He thought for the thousandth — or the millionth — time that it wouldn’t be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. Breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature — ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he’d learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible, and which made him ill. Nothing he’d tried was poisonous.
Yes, a wonderful world. He’d even got used, by now, to the solitude of being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn’t talk back.