Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others

Sprague grinned. His brain had been operating at top speed since this incident began, combining disparate elements, putting together hints and rumors and troubling snatches of radio transmission that had been recorded, shown to him, and then stamped TOP SECRET and filed away forever. Now it processed all the information and spat out an answer: “It means Bob and Isaac are back!”

A couple of days later, Sprague dropped by Asimov’s office to find him fiddling with a radio. He had the Bakelite cover off and the innards all over his desk and was inexpertly making connections between vacuum tubes. It looked a terrible mess.

Sprague swept a corner of the desk clear and perched elegantly upon it. “I just ran into Bob in the hall,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him so angry.”

Without looking up from his work, Asimov said, “It’s the report Ensign Hopper submitted to the Navy. You know how when you’ve got a SNAFU, you put a good face on it by subtitling the report ‘Lessons Learned’, but when it’s FUBAR, you use ‘Early Lessons Learned’?”

“I hadn’t, but I’m always glad to learn the local lingo.” He picked up the report. “‘Project Rainbow: Some Early Cautionary Lessons Learned.’ This seems to go beyond FUBAR.”

“It’s governmentese for ‘Revive this project and watch your career die.’ We won’t be teleporting battleships again any time soon.”

“Well, that explains Bob’s mood.” Sprague stroked his mustache, ignoring the younger man’s puzzled look. “But, Isaac, don’t you think that’s a terrible shame? Imagine the adventures you’re missing out on. I would have loved to have gone with you on your little jaunt.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Oh, there are worse things to look at than bare-breasted girl pirates, I’ll grant you that. But when the god-creature first appeared, shrouded in darkness and rushing down upon us — ”

“Made your blood run cold, eh?” Sprague began. But Asimov was shaking his head in an it’s-not-that-way manner. “Well, humbling then, meeting a superior intellect like — no? Bob was ranting about how he wanted to go back with an arsenal.”

“But that’s it exactly! The first thing we did was to shoot at him! We didn’t know he was hostile. But he was strange and different, and so we met him with violence. Can you imagine how much trouble the Navy could stir up with an entire fleet of teleporting battleships and the key to infinity?”

This was too much. “Isaac, you’re a science fiction writer! How can you turn your back on all you’ve seen?”

“I’m afraid that for the good of humanity, our future journeys of exploration must henceforth take place solely in the realm of the imagination.” Asimov spoke with the full gravitas of all his twenty-three years. Despite himself, Sprague, more than a decade older, couldn’t help but smile. “The human race has to mature a little more before we can be allowed out into the larger universe. We have one World War to play with right now, and I think that’s quite enough.”

Before Sprague could think of an adequate response, Asimov looked at him with a troubled expression and blurted, “When did you grow a mustache?”

Astounded, Sprague said, “I had this mustache when we first met.”

“I don’t think so, Sprague. I always thought you might benefit from a little fur on the upper lip. Looks good.”

“Isaac, you are the quintessence of the absent-minded professor! You get more forgetful by the hour.” To change the subject from his friend’s shortcomings, Sprague said, “So how did you spend Yom Kippur? Not at synagogue, presumably.”

“I spent it at home, puttering around with the radio. Did you ever make a crystal radio set when you were young?”

“What boy didn’t? A chunk of quartz, a safety pin, a rubber eraser and an earphone. Simplest thing in the world.”

“Yes, and yet to look at the inside of a commercial radio, you’d think it was incredibly complicated. Well, I was thinking about the degaussing equipment, and it occurred to me that….” He made a final connection. “There!”

Green fire rippled over the radio, and it began to sink down through the surface of the desk.

Hastily, Asimov snatched it back up. He yanked a wire loose, and the device died.

Sprague’s eyes felt like they were bulging out of their sockets. His mouth moved up and down, but no words came out.

Asimov raised a finger to his lips. “The Navy classified this top-secret, remember. We’re not going to say another word on this matter.”

And they never did.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I think I was set up, but I’ve never dared inquire too deeply.

Ellen Datlow needed round-robin stories for her Event Horizon website. “It’ll be easy,” Ellen said. “No advance planning. One person starts, and the next person takes off from there, then the next builds on the first two, and so on. Four people, three rounds each. We’ll post the story to the website as you write it.”

Michael Swanwick had a story idea that he’d always wanted to write. Susan Caspar, who had just finished a round-robin for Ellen, had an important piece of advice.

“Cheat,” she said. “Plan it in advance. Work out the plot. Work out who’ll write what. Don’t make the same mistake we did.”

“Ellen won’t like that,” I said.

“Lie,” said Susan.

So we did.

Michael’s idea galloped off from the fact that science-fiction greats Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had actually been stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Base in 1943, the same year that the supposed “USS Eldridge ” experiment took place.

We added Grace Hopper in the interest of gender balance: in reality, she joined the WAVES in December of 1943, a few months later than the story. She was one of the first computer engineers, the inventor of the compiler program, and, of course, is famous as the programmer who found the first actual bug in a computer (a moth), and taped it into the log-book.

We recruited Pat Murphy and Andy Duncan as the other two writers. Each of us would take a different point of view, to make any stylistic differences seem natural. I took Asimov, Andy took Heinlein, and Pat took Hopper. Michael would go last in each round, and toss in an unscripted hand-grenade of plot, just to keep us from getting complacent.

It was great fun. I had never known Asimov personally, but I talked to people who had, and read four volumes of his autobiographical writing. I got to like him quite a bit. He hated to travel — planes, trains, or automobiles — and it amused me no end to send him, brave as only the truly terrified can be, across the Sargasso Sea on the back of a giant sea turtle.

My thanks to Michael Swanwick, Pat Murphy, and Andy Duncan for permission to reprint the story here, and to Michael for providing the above-mentioned turtle.

You don’t know what a joy it is to write about Eileen Gunn.

For one thing, she’s about the only writer I know who turns out stories even more slowly than I do, which is a rare thing in this damn field…

You’ve just read one long-overdue swell collection of her stuff: she’s waited thirty-something years for it, and so have you .

As Bill told you in his foreword, and the quite-capable Ms. Gunn has explained in the story-notes themselves, these stories are the product of a vast number of synchronicities, coincidences, and of having one of the screwiest of odd-job histories in the Western world. (Eileen has oiled cucumbers in the Pike Place Market: lots of people have had that Seattle entry-level job: how many people you know who’ve done that also worked with Bill Gates when he was still in the garage, too?)