“Apply the data. Fire on the bell.”
Four hours later, Libby was still droning out firing data, his face gray, his eyes closed. Once he had fainted but when they revived him he was still muttering figures. From time to time the Captain and the Navigator relieved each other, but there was no relief for him.
The salvos grew closer together, but the shocks were lighter.
Following one faint salvo, Libby looked up, stared at the ceiling, and spoke.
“That’s all, Captain.”
“Call polar stations!”
The reports came back promptly, “Parallax constant, sidereal-solar rate constant.”
The Captain relaxed into a chair. “Well, Blackie, we did it — thanks to Libby!” Then he noticed a worried, thoughtful look spread over Libby’s face. “What’s the matter, man? Have we slipped up?”
“Captain, you know you said the other day that you wished you had Earth-normal gravity in the park?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“If that book on gravitation you lent me is straight dope. I think I know a way to accomplish it.”
The Captain inspected him as if seeing him for the first time. “Libby, you have ceased to amaze me. Could you stop doing that sort of thing long enough to dine with the Admiral?”
“Gee, Captain, that would be swell!”
The audio circuit from Communications cut in. “Helio from Flagship: ‘Well done, Eighty-eight.'” Doyle smiled around at them all. “That’s pleasant confirmation.”
The audio brayed again.
“Helio from Flagship: ‘Cancel last signal, stand by for correction.'”
A look of surprise and worry sprang into Doyle’s face — then the audio continued:
“Helio from Flagship: ‘Well done, E-M3′”
Concerning Stories Never Written: Postscript
THIS aside is addressed primarily to you who have read the first two volumes of this series rather grandly titled “Future History.” Volume One, The Man Who Sold the Moon,* is laid from right now until the closing years of this century and ends with mankind’s first faltering steps toward space. some of the stories are so close to the present time as already to be outdated by events—an occupational hazard I share with weather forecasters and fortune tellers. Volume Two, The Green Hills of Earth,** is concerned with the great days of exploration of the Solar System. All of the stories take place somewhere close around the year 2000 A.D. If you refer to the chart in the flyleaf of this volume, you will see that this second group of stories appears to cover about twenty-five years, but this appearance is a deceptive shortcoming of typography— printing the titles on the chart requires a certain minimum of space. Nor does the order matter materially—some of the stories overlap in time but concern different characters in differing scenes.
This present Volume Three starts about seventy-five years later than the end of the last story in Volume Two—and a great amount of “Future History” has taken place between the two volumes. Green Hills ended with the United States a leading power in a system wide imperialism embracing all the habitable planets. But the very first page of the first story in this book finds the United States plunged in a new Dark Ages no longer space minded, isolationist even with respect to this planet, and under a theocracy as absolute as that of Communism.
The effect on the reader could be a little like that which sometimes results from unskillful editing of magazine serials— the sort of thing in which one installment ends with the hero hanging by his heels over the snake pit while the sinister villain leers at him from above, only to have the next installment start with our hero walking up Fifth Avenue, debonair and undamaged.
I could plead the excuse that these stories were never meant to be a definitive history of the future (concerning which I know no more than you do), nor are they installments of a long serial (since each is intended to be entirely independent of all the others). They are just stories, meant to amuse and written to buy groceries.
* Shasta Publishers, Chicago, 1950; New American Library, 1951. ** Shasta Publishers, Chicago, 1951; New American Library, 1952.
Nevertheless, I think that you who are kind enough to buy this volume are entitled to more explanation as to the great hiatus between the second and the third volume. On the chart you will see three titles in parentheses between the last story in Green Hills and the first story in this book; these three stories, had they ever been written, would have covered the intervening three quarters of a century and might well have been an additional volume in this series.