Damon Knight - Orbit 19

—”First Flight,” by Wilson Shepherd,

in The Phantagraph,

July-August, 1939

* * * *

Hip, hip . . .

Three rousing cheers for Donald G. Turnbull for his valiant attack on those favoring mush. When we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames, and that goes double. You needn’t worry about Miss Evans, Donald, us he-men are for you and if she tries to slap you down, you’ve got an able (I hope) confederate and tried auxiliary right here in the person of yours truly. Come on, men, make yourself heard in favor of less love mixed with our science!

Isaac Asimov

174 Windsor Place

Brooklyn, New York

—Astounding Stories, September, 1938

* * * *

Try Harder

When one sees his sketches of flying machines, parachutes, submarines, tanks and guns, and realizes that he knew the distant stars to be suns and postulated the existence of other earths, it is difficult to believe that Leonardo da Vinci was not a science fiction fan.

—The Immortal Storm, by

Sam Moskowitz (Atlanta

Science Fiction Organization

Press, 1954)

* * * *

Me Tarzan, Him Cthuthu

—”Beyond,” by Lin Carter,

in Arnra, II, 47 (1968)

Here is a story on a theme that has been treated before in science fiction—in “The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham” by H. G. Wells, in “The Master Shall Not Die” by R. DeWitt Miller, and in “The Indesinent Stykal” by D. D. Sharp, among others—but never as poignantly as this.

He is utterly humorless and determined. This morning he learned he will die. He has said nothing since. Brooding? Possibly. He had never brooded before. The sensation is annoying. I have my work to do. His silence is more unnerving than his usual chatter. This morning, idly, just after breakfast, he asked about death.

Tomus, what is death?

I answered frankly. I always try to answer frankly. We have come, over the years, to an uneasy, communicative peace. I don’t know.

You must know, Tomus. You know everything.

I noticed his voice. It came through the thin barrier between our personalities with a changed quality, retaining its usual impression of wide-eyed innocence, but somehow different. The quality escaped me.

Not everything. I don’t know everything , I answered, only half paying attention, my mind occupied with my own work. My mathematical model of our galaxy, the core of my interstellar navigator, had yet to crystallize in my mind. Reconciling the converging series of equations demanded by the curvature of space with the infinite series demanded by the expanding universe, is, as one might imagine, taxing. His questions, by comparison, are merely annoying, tedious, usually simpleminded, seldom humorous, always without wit. He is uncultivated.

You must know, he insisted.

Will you please shut up!

Tomus, this, I think, is important.

Not very.

You must tell me about death.

It is one of the few things I have never experienced.

But you know about it.

It is the maximum entropy of a biochemical system.

He chewed on that awhile, allowing me to work through several equations. Ultimately my galactic model will be used to program a navigational computer, the perfect map. I was deep into a conflicting pair of equations when he finished chewing.

Tomus.

What?

Somehow your answer is unsatisfying.

It is accurate.

What is entropy? What is a biochemical system? Tomus, what is death?

Do you remember the dog? The dog, a friend of our early years together, the years after I allowed him to remain, had died, as dogs do, after fifteen years. It grew old. Entropy increased. It died. Maximum entropy, its scampering quantum of energy spreading back to the universe.

I remember the dog.

That is death.

I got a great amount of work done after that. Occasionally he began to ask something, then fell silent. About noon he broke the silence.

Will I die?

Yes.

And you, Tomus? Will you die?

It’s possible.

But I will die. You are sure of that.

Yes.

He said nothing else. He says nothing else. He is brooding. I sense his determination. He wants to live. To think of himself gone, nonexistent, expired, kaput, upsets him. He broods. At least he is quiet.

I finish my day’s work and go out to eat. The sun, a dull fat orange on the horizon, autumn fruit, has nothing in it of summer. Winter approaches. It is still beautiful. My four hundred summers and winters merge in my mind, each beautiful, each different. Only my work is the same, unchanging, new problems but the same mental processes.

I walk across the broad lawn in front of the Center. I recognize few of the strollers. It is too much trouble to keep track of who is where. If I need them, I can find them. The faces change. Only the people remain the same.

I walk out the gates and glance back at the building. It is anonymous. Since the Life Riots three hundred years ago, there has been nothing but anonymity for us. Once a sign hung over the main entrance, Center for Anentropic Maintenance. I was one of the first. In those days I was a black man. It helped during the riots. The mobs, thinking on a primitive, stereotyped level, could never conceive of a black Longevitor. They left me alone. I worked out the basic principles of the modular city while they rampaged, destroying the old, permanent city. Now, new modules—neighborhoods, they were called— are installed at regular intervals. The old modules are reconditioned and used elsewhere. Times change. Places change. Only the Longevitors remain the same.

Over dinner, he continues to be troubled. It disturbs my digestion.

Tomus, he says during dessert, why do I have to die?

It is the nature of things.

But you—

I have my work to do.

I could do your work.

I doubt it.

Test me.

If the polynomial equation F times X equals zero—with rational coefficients—has a root of A plus the square root of B, where A and B are rational and B is greater than zero but not a square, is A minus the square root of B also a root of the equation F times X equals zero? I sense confusion.

I could learn.

I doubt that, too. The problem I gave you is simple, fundamental.

What was it again?

I tell him.

And if I do not know the answer, I will die?

There’s more to it than that.

That is enough for now. I will work on it.

I finish eating and go to Madline’s. She is the only Longevitor with whom I keep contact. This time she is tall and thin and bony. Last time she was short, dumpy and slightly repulsive. I avoided her. When she reembodied, tall and thin, I had already been with him forty years. He had ceased gibbering and begun to speak. The gibbering, romping around in the unused portions of the brain, throwing tantrums, crying out in the middle of the night like a wild man so that I was startled awake, passed into mumbling, then speech.