Subspace Encounter

Book 423: Gateway Essentials

by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, E.E. ''Doc'' Smith

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Bursting right through the four-dimensional travel zone of subspace, Tellurian psiontists make an amazing discovery on the other side. Beyond the bounds of subspace, a parallel universe is cruelly ruled by a violent, murderous empire, the Justiciate, where psiontists are ruthlessly hunted down and fed to giant eagles. And within the Justiciate are lodged spies and traitors, dedicated to its overthrow - evil agents of the proud Garshan 'master race'. The arrival of the psiontists from Tellus triggers off a truly spectacular space adventure...

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 231

Sample

Subspace Encounter is the last science fiction written by Edward E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Other novels bearing his name and first published since his death in 1965 were either expanded short stories or new books based on his notes or concepts – but this is Doc’s work, and except for an unpublished ‘whodunit,’ his last.

In the late 1960s rumors circulated among his fans who had known him well that there existed an unpublished sequel to Subspace Explorers, but since no manuscript had surfaced the rumors had died and the story was forgotten.

This was the situation when in the winter of 1978 I visited David and Ruth Kyle in Florida. Dave had begun writing additional Lensman stories at the suggestion of Frederik Pohl, then editor of a major paperback publisher; and Dave showed me a photocopy of a Smith manuscript which Fred had sent him with the suggestion that he might be able to use some of the ideas in his plotting.

I read the manuscript – and was startled to find notations in my own handwriting and signed ‘LAE’ – suggestions I had made to Doc early in 1965. The typescript was a copy of material I had sent to Fred shortly after Doc’s death, thinking then that something might be done with it. But it was not a complete story.

Memory started working and pieces began falling into place. After returning home, taking a copy of the script with me, I consulted my correspondence files and was able to reconstruct the total picture.

In 1962 Doc had completed a novel called Subspace Safari with John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction in mind. It was a sequel to a novelette, Subspace Survivors, which Campbell had published. Campbell wanted extensive changes made – Doc had refused to rewrite the story, disagreeing with John – so he had a novel on his hands which he couldn’t even submit to other magazines since he had used parts of the original novelette in the sequel.

He began reworking the manuscript and in the course of time decided the story could not be told in one book. He completed the first section of the story, which he called Subspace Explorers, and which appeared in book form in 1965. With the novel accepted he got to work on the second book, using me by correspondence as a sounding board – then one evening he phoned to tell me of an exciting new idea for the story that had just occurred to him. He began working on this development, sending me the pieces as he wrote them, asking for my suggestions and comments. He took time out to write Skylark Du-Quesne for Fred Pohl – and then Doc died.

I felt the book should be published – but the story was incomplete. There were tantalizing directions written on the part I had, such as: ‘See Page – of the one book version.’ I finally phoned Doc’s daughter, Verna Smith Trestrail, telling her I wanted to get the book ready for publication, giving her the background information, and asking her to search for the one book version and any other pertinent material that might be in her possession. It took a lot of searching, but finally the one book version turned up. And that was all she found. The copy of the later work that I had sent Fred Pohl was the only one to survive. If I had not sent and Fred had not kept that manuscript this story wouldn’t exist.

I know what Doc had had in mind – and certainly I am the only one who knows – so from the pieces in my possession I have been able to reconstruct the present book, Subspace Encounter. I believe Doc would have approved what I have done.

Lloyd Arthur Eshbach

To ascribe the occurrence of two or more events to coincidence is either to admit ignorance of, or to deny the existence of, some fundamental relationship. Nevertheless, all previous investigations into the Early Psionic Age ‘explained’ it, as can be shown by rigorous analysis, by employing coincidence to an extent that is scientifically preposterous. This one does not: as a matter of fact, it denies the existence of coincidence.

This work is the result of years-long study of that Age. It is not, however, strictly speaking, a history; since it does contain some material that is not incontrovertibly factual. On the other hand, it is far from being a mere historical novel. Therefore it should, perhaps – and using the term more or less loosely – be called a chronicle.

At the time in which this chronicle is laid, interstellar flight, while not the one-hundred-percent-safe matter it now is, was far and away the safest means of travel known. Insurance companies offered odds of tens of thousands of dollars to one dollar that any given star-traveler would return unharmed from any given startrip to any one of the ninety five colonized planets of explored space aboard any starship he chose.

There were a few accidents, of course. Worse, there were a few complete disappearances of starships; cases in which no calls of distress were sent out and of which no traces were ever found.

Aboard the starship Procyon there were four psychics.* Barbara Warner was a full-fledged psiontist. She knew it and worked at me trade. Whenever her father, the owner of WarnOil (Warner Oil, to give the business entity its full name), wanted another million-barrel gusher she went out, looked around, and told him where to bore his well. In ten years, on ninety six planets, WarnOil had not drilled a dry hole. All were gushers of fantastic production.

The other three were latents. Carlyle Deston, First Officer of the Procyon, and Theodore Jones, its Second, had always had hunches, but neither had ever mentioned the fact. Bernice Burns, a post-deb of upper crust Society, was actually a clairvoyant psiontist, but she would not admit the fact even to herself. Deston and Barbara fell in love at first sight and were married a few minutes later, and Jones and Bernice were not far behind them.

Catastrophe struck – without warning, with split-second speed and with utter and incredible devastation, reducing the great starship to a fused hulk of destructively radioactive metal. Its cause? There was nothing whatever to indicate the source, no follow-up attack; and for almost all aboard the Procyon it was instant death. Like all starship disasters, there was no time for any report to be made.

The four – Carlyle Deston, Barbara Warner Deston, Theodore Jones and Bernice Burns Jones – being highly psychic, had enough warning of catastrophe so that each couple reached a lifeboat. The Destons found already in their lifeboat, studying subspace, one Doctor Andrew Adams, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. These five were the only survivors of the disaster to get back to Civilization.

Decontamination – thorough but most unpleasant – followed; as soon as it was safe to do so, they reboarded the hulk, finding all subspace gear inoperable. Most normal-space equipment, however, would work – after a fashion. It would take a year or more to reach the nearest solar system, but they had plenty of power, air, water, and food.

Shortly after the shipwreck both girls became pregnant; and long before the year was up, it became evident that both periods of gestation were going to be extraordinarily long. This gave super-mathematician Adams new data with which to work, and he proved that time was not an absolute constant, but could, under certain conditions, become a parameter. (Cf The Adams Theory and The Adams Effect.) He deduced: 1) That the Procyon had struck a field of subspatial force that he called the ‘zeta’ field; 2) That the entire mass of the ship and all its contents were charged to an extremely high potential with a force more or less analogous to that which produces lightning; 3) That the ships which had disappeared had been completely destroyed by the discharge of zeta force to a planet upon approach; and 4) That extreme precautions must be observed if they themselves were not to be destroyed in the same way.

In due time – or rather, about five months after due time – two babies were born: Theodore Warner Deston and Barbara Bernice Jones.

A barren planet was found and plans were made to rid the Procyon of zeta force. Extreme caution was observed. The force was discharged in successive decrements by means of twenty-five-mile lengths of ultra-high-tensile wire. With all potentials at the zero of normal space, the subspace communicators were again in working order and Deston reported in. It was of course a simple matter for the subspace-going machine shops to jury-rig enough subspace gear for the Procyon to get back to her home port under her own power.

Both Deston and Jones were promoted on the spot; but, since both were now married, neither could serve InStell (The Interstellar Corporation) in either subspace or space. Captain Theodore Jones went back to Earth – Bernice was not very rich – to work in the main office. Captain Carlyle Deston resigned and went with Barbara to the palatial Warner home – her home now, since her parents had died in the wreck – on the planet Newmars. He was not going to live on his wife’s money all the rest of his life.

Barbara knew that Deston had tremendous latent powers, and she helped him develop them. He became able to do with metals what she had done with oil. He found a mountain of uranium, which Deston and Deston, Incorporated, sold to Galactic Metals. He also found copper in quantities which made automation feasible, a discovery which played an important role in early psionic history.

The Destons and Joneses (psiontists now, too) and Adams went into space in search of other natural resources. They found everything they sought and eventually what Maynard of GalMet wanted most – rhenium, the rarest and costliest ingredient of an ultra-alloy, leybyrdite. Deston met Doctor Cecily Byrd, Director of Project Rhenium; a woman whom Maynard described as ‘a carrot-topped, freckle-faced, shanty-Irish mick – with the shape men drool about, with a megavac for a brain and an ice-cube for a heart.’

The source of this rarest of minerals they called Rhenia Four, a hellish planet indeed, one of its creatures, the ‘kittyhawks,’ having teeth and claws of the very alloy MetEnge had been developing. ‘Curly’ Byrd proved herself able to set up full automation even there. She was helped by, among others, an engineer named Percival Train, whom she married. Surprisingly, the Trains also developed psionic abilities, as did Dr Adams and his wife Stella, to bring to eight the unmatched psiontists who made up the brains of the new super starship Explorer.

The remainder of the first volume of this chronicle is devoted to the beginnings of the Psionic Age on Tellus; the three-pronged conflict between Communism, corrupt labor and capital, and what became the Galactic Federation; and the unaccountably rapid growth of psionics through the ninety five colonized planets.

Volume two continues the chronicle – the record of two psionic civilizations.

The Justiciate, composed at that moment of one hundred eighty three Tellus-type planets, lay in a part of the Cosmos the very existence of which no mind of the ninety six planets of Tellurian civilization had ever envisioned. Not even the farthest ranging subspacer of either civilization had ever discovered any hint of the presence of the other. Nevertheless the Justicians were human beings to the last letter of classification; human even to the extent of varying skin color from white through different shades of yellow and red and brown to almost black. Unlike racial distinctions as they occurred on Tellurian planets, with different races inhabiting single worlds, normally each world of the Justiciate was the home of a single race. There was little interracial marriage, joining lives as they put it – not because any race felt itself superior to any other – except for the insufferable red-brown Garshans – but because most ordinary people never left their home worlds.

All the Justician planets were linked together by hundreds of subspace freight or passenger lines and by hundreds of thousands of subspace communications channels. They were also linked together in that they were ruled by, and were more or less willingly obedient to, a harsh and dictatorial government known as the Council of Grand Justices; of which His Magnificence Supreme Grand Justice Sonrathendak Ranjak of Slaar was the unquestioned and unquestionable BOSS.

The planet Slaar was and is the Justiciate’s most populous planet; and the city Meetyl-On-Slaar, the Justiciate’s largest city – population ten and a quarter million – was and is the capital of both planet and the empire.

To Tellurian eyes Meetyl would have looked very little indeed like a city. It was built on and inside a rugged, steep – in many places sheerly precipitous – range of mountains; it extended upward from an ocean’s rockily narrow beach to an altitude of well over ten thousand feet.

If structures built inside of and outside of a mountain can be called, respectively, internal and external buildings, some of Meetyl’s external buildings were one story high, some were a thousand; but all were in harmony with each other and with the awesomely rugged terrain. There were no streets: all traffic, freight and passenger alike, moved via air or via tunnel.

In a pressurized section of the ten-thousand-foot level, in a large and sumptuous office on the glass door of which there was an ornately gold-leafed gladiatorial design and the words ‘Sonfayand Faylor – Games,’ a fat man reclined at an elaborately-inlaid piece of free-form furniture that was his desk. He was a big man, with a fish-belly-pale face and small, piercing, almost-black eyes. He was three-quarters bald and what hair he had left was a pepper-and-salt gray.

Three of the room’s walls, its floor, and its ceiling, were works of sheerest art in fine-particled mosaic. Its front wall, one great sheet of water-clear plastic, afforded a magnificent view of turbulent ocean, of stupendous cliffs, and of cloud-flecked, sunny sky. The man was concerned, however, neither with art nor with nature; he was watching a young man and a young woman who, arrowing through the air from the north and from the south respectively, were climbing fast and would apparently hit his landing stage at the same time. He glanced at the timepiece on his desk and said aloud to himself, ‘Good – they’re both exactly on time.’

He pushed the button to open the outer valve of his airlock and turned on the ‘Come in and shed and stow’ sign: the two visitors let themselves in and, without a word, began to ’shed’ their flying harnesses and to ‘stow’ them in a closet designed for the purpose.

The male visitor was of medium height and medium build, with the broad somewhat sloping shoulders, the narrow waist, and the long-fibered, smoothly-flowing muscles of the hard-trained athlete who specializes in speed and maneuverability rather than in brute strength. His eyes were a cold gray; his thick, bushy hair was a sun-faded brown. So was what little clothing he wore – singlet, shorts, and plastic-soled ground-gripper canvas shoes. His smooth-shaven face and bare legs and arms and shoulders were deeply tanned – and were marked and cross-marked with the hair-thin, almost invisible scars of the expertly-treated wounds of the top-bracket knife-fighter. Top bracket? Definitely. Only the very best of the best lived long enough in that game to acquire as many scars as this man bore.

The girl, rid of her flying helmet, shook her head vigorously, so that a mass of brilliant violet-colored hair, hitherto so tightly confined, swirled about her head. Then, reaching up with both hands, she fluffed her hair into shape with her fingers. She was almost as tall as her fellow visitor, was not too many pounds lighter than he in weight, and was super-superbly built. Her eyes were a gold-flecked hazel. Her clothing, while newer and more ornamental than the man’s, was no more abundant nor cumbersome, and – femininity all solar systems over! – she wore, dangling from a fine platinum chain encircling her left ear, a two-inch octagonal diffraction grating.

Like the man’s, her face and shoulders and arms and legs were deeply tanned; and, like his, they too were plenteously and finely scarred: if not quite as abundantly as his, numerously enough to show unmistakably that the worn rawhide haft of the knife at her belt did not get that way from skinning orksts.

With no change of expression – or rather, with no expression at all on his face – the male visitor tuned his mind to the girl’s and drove a thought. ‘You’re Daught …’

‘Quiet!’ she interrupted mentally. Not a muscle of her face moved. Her eyes showed, strictly unchanged, only the customary interest in a strange young man who was as much of a man as this man very evidently was. ‘Are you sure this fat slob can’t varn? Or anyone else within range, so you’re sure you’re not making eaglemeat out of both of us?’

‘Positive,’ he telepathed. ‘He’s no more psionic than the toad he looks like, and Knuaire of Spath’s on guard. You know him?’

‘Songladen Knuaire? The theoretician? I’ve met him once, is all. He’s an operator.’

‘You can carve that on the highest cliff in town.’

All this, of course, at the transfinite speed of thought, had taken the merest fraction of a second of time. The fat man was speaking. ‘Sonrodnar Rodnar of Slaar – Daughtmarja Marrjyl of Orm – I greet,’ he said formally, and the two replied in unison, ‘Sonfayand Faylor of Slaar, I greet.’

‘You two haven’t met, I understand,’ the gamesmaster said, and went on to introduce his two visitors to each other, using the informal mode. ‘Rodnar, Status Thirty Eight …’ – the person of higher status was always named first – ‘… and Marrjyl, Status Forty, meet each other.’

Both smiled and bowed. ‘I’m very glad to, Marrjyl,’ and ‘I am, too, Rodnar – so glad!’ they said; and as they clasped hands firmly, Rodnar went on, ‘No, Faylor, we’ve never met before. And Marrjyl, when I said I was mighty glad to meet you, I wasn’t just being polite. I’ve heard a lot about you – all good.’

She smiled again. ‘Thanks, Rodnar, but not half as much as I’ve heard about you, I’m sure.’

‘Maybe you know, then, Rod,’ the fat man said, ‘that she isn’t a real pro, either. Like you, she’s a spare-time gamesman, in it partly for the junex, but mostly for augmentation of status. She’s a Designer First – just in from Orm – this is her first stab at the big time and the big chance and the big money – but, as you can see, she’s good. Okay, peel your jerseys and turn around.’

The word ‘peel’ was strictly appropriate, especially in the girl’s case. Her upper garment was almost as tight as the skin of an orange.

Her jersey came off to reveal that her firm, boldly outstanding breasts were startlingly white, showing that she was not in the habit of exposing them to the public eye. Yet she neither showed nor felt any twinge of embarrassment at baring them here. Also, her breasts were not scarred, showing that she wore breast-shields in combat – which was logical enough. Female gladiators, if they lived long enough to become mothers, were such excellent breeding stock that their mammary glands were held inviolate.

Naked to their waists, the two turned their backs to the promoter, showing fourteen-digit numbers tattooed in black across their backs from shoulder to shoulder. The fat man aimed a mechano-optical instrument – that looked like a cross between a typewriter and a Questar ’scope – first at Rodnar’s back, then at Marrjyl’s; and the machine, after chattering busily for a few seconds, disgorged four eighteen-inch lengths of tape. Faylor thumb-printed all four of these slips, then handed two of them to the man and two to the girl; who each thumb-printed both and handed one back.

‘That for that,’ the fat man said. ‘Thanks. And here . . .