"Murray Leinster - The Best of Murray Leinster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Leinster was a rationalist, a term which often seems to be in disfavor-perhaps through association with the dismal utilitarianism of the Gradgrind School in Dickens' Hard Times. Anything but a Grandgrind, Leinster saw reason as a normal part of humanity, and his stories are always human dramas, not mere classroom exercises.
An admirer of Thomas Aquinas, Leinster believed that there is a natural order in the universe. In "The Ethical Equations," for instance, he even suggests the possibility of a natural moral order in the imagined "mathematical proof that certain patterns of conduct increase the probability of certain kinds of coincidences."
But he was never heavy-handed about presenting his philosophy in fiction. One of, his Med Service stories, concerning a doctor who deals with medical emergencies on far planets, quoted witty aphorisms from an imaginary book called The Practice of Thinking, by Fitzgerald. Intrigued readers pestered him for years afterward with inquiries about where they could obtain the book.
Nor did he ever forget ordinary human touches. On his interstellar ships, there are recorded sounds: "the sound of rain, and of traffic, and of wind in treetops and voices too faint for the words to be distinguished, and almost inaudible music-and sometimes laughter. The background tape carried no information; only the assurance that there were still worlds with clouds and people and creatures moving about on them."
Leinster saw no necessary conflict between reason and human emotional needs, but he was fully aware of the irrational in man and the evil men do. "Keyhole" is an emotional story, in which it is very fortunate for Butch and his kind that they are able to offer men a "reason" for, leaving them in peace. A convert to Catholicism, Leinster never mentioned religion in his sf, never sought to preach-but the idea of sin is certainly there.
"First Contact" is the most famous of Leinster's stories of encounters between men and aliens. Here he sees them sharing the same weaknesses-fear, greed, and mistrust-but also the same strength of intelligent life everywhere: the ability to use reason to overcome their own weaknesses as -well as the problems of their environment. The story earned Leinster a place in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, a volume of stories voted the classics of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
"First Contact" also occasioned a minor ideological flap in 1959, when Soviet sf writer Ivan Yefremov published "The Heart of the Serpent," a story in which humans and aliens make friendly contact and don't have any problems because they're all good Communists. A character in Yefremov's story speaks disparagingly of "First Contact," and sees in its author "the heart of a poisonous' snake." Characteristically modest and gentlemanly, Leinster refused to be drawn into a debate, and on one occasion expressed more disturbance over Yetremov's apparent prejudice against snakes than over any criticism of himself.
It would take a very casua1 reader to suspect Leinster of xenophobia. "Proxima Centauri" was as close as be came to the BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster) story in which innocent humans are threatened by the monsters. And even in this case, the aliens have a very specific-~and logical-reason for being a threat to their human visitors. One might almost view the conflict as the unfortunate by-product of a local environmental crisis.
In "The Lonely Planet," by contrast, the grim moments are all caused by the ignorance, malice, greed, and downright stupidity of humans. Leinster's sympathy for the world-brain of Alyx is characteristic of him-and of science fiction generally for the last forty years. There are those, not too well informed, who imagine this attitude to have been developed only within the last decade, usually by themselves.
Perhaps the most unusual of Leinster's contact stories, "The Strange Case of John Kingman," never moves off the Earth at all. There is a subtle irony to the story: the being in the mental hospital who has been classed as a lunatic' for nearly two hundred years really is insane-but not for the reasons human doctors have imagined.
In the 1930s, Leinster wrote several realistic stories of- future warfare, like "Tanks" and "Politics." In "Symbiosis," he returned to the future-war theme, but in a much subtler manner. Kantolia seems defenseless: no planes, tanks, or heavy guns, no fanciful death rays. But it has a truly deadly weapon-invaders are helpless against it. The fact that a man with a troubled conscience must wield that weapon makes this, too, a very human story.
"The Power" is a science-fiction story set in a period when science fiction would have been impossible. Before you can have either science or science fiction, you have to have the kind of imagination that makes both possible. Poor Carolus-he sees, but cannot observe, still less understand!
One collection could not possibly include all the best stories of a man who was a regular contributor to science-fiction markets for five decades-there are even important types of fiction Leinster wrote, which could not be represented, here because of space limitations. And there are, of course, novels like The Forgotten Planet, based on "The Mad Planet" and its sequels.
Readers haven't always had a chance to see Leinster at his best. After quitting an insurance company at age twenty-one--his boss wanted him to do something unethical, so he told the boss that he could do with the job-Leinster made his living as a writer, in other fields' as well as in science fiction. Unfortunately, it seems that some publishers would rather reprint his potboilers than his classics. Then too, some publishers couldn't tell the difference between them even when he was alive.
One of his novels, serialized in a magazine, dealt with space piracy. An old and hackneyed theme, but Leinster redeemed it with a climax in which the hero uses his knowledge of the hijacked ship's communications system to drive the pirates insane. When a paperback publisher picked up the novel, however, virtually all the good stuff was cut out, without the author even being informed.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to look down on the pioneers of science fiction. One contemporary author pretentiously dismissed Leinster with the comment that he wasn't a Dostoevski-a comment that means about as much as saying Scott Joplin Wasn't a Beethoven.
Leinster himself, of course, never claimed to be a Dostoevski-or anyone else so exalted. He took pride in doing what he could do well, but was never pretentious. Yet it was he, and others like him, who created a new kind of fiction with its own themes and traditions. Without them, there would be nothing for today's science-fiction writers to turn into Literature-indeed, today's science-fiction writers wouldn't be. Period.
A pioneer of the scientific imagination in fiction- Leinster was that. But more than a pioneer; that would not be enough to make him worth reading today. The history of any literary genre is littered with pioneering works that are of interest only to scholars, and plenty of those can be found in the sf magazines of thirty or forty years ago. Leinster's classics have escaped that fate.
Oh, you can tell which ones were written in the 1930s as opposed to the 1950s; styles change, after all. But his stories hardly seem dated at all. "The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator," for instance, could be made the basis for a television comedy tomorrow with only minor changes. Given human nature, the ethical problems of "First Contact" are as real today as in 1944-much as one might regret some ethnic references inspired by World War II.
Leinster was a man who was interested hi the world-in people and ideas. Too many writers can't seem to get interested in anything but themselves. Just as the best teacher is one who can get excited about what he's teaching, the best writer is one who can get excited about what he's writing. Leinster could and did, and his stories still communicate that excitement.
From the adventures in parallel worlds of "Sidewise in Time" to the moral conflicts of "First Contact" to the grim struggle to save a seemingly doomed world in "Critical Difference," Murray Leinster is still a good read.


John J. Pierce
Berkeley Heights, N.J.
June 28, 1977

Sidewise in Time



FOREWORD



LOOKING BACK, IT seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain, In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth's surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance.
A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun's photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, eggshaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.
A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals.
An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.
Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news service's of the nation were flooded with items of similar import.
For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to "drown" in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.
But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man In the world who even guessed the - meaning of these_Lto us-clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world, and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.
Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a "jerkwater". college without offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.
Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain cold-blooded daring, but neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida Hayns, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even her attention over the competition of most of the student body. So much of explanation is necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.
We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes-and those the most valuable into that unguessed at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.
He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps it is quite probable he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it; and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and futures all to be shattered into'nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt and what happened.