The Space Beyond

by John W. Campbell

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

Synopsis

Three Mind-Jarring Space Operas Marooned: Four giant ships made of the wonder element synthium crash the asteroid belt and brave the cold of Jupiter's moons in mans last reckless dash to adventure. All: The Chinese have brutally conquered the Earth and out of their ruthless tyranny evolves the last great religious war, and the first God of Nuclear Divinity. The Space Beyond: When you wake up 75 billion miles from Earth in a crippled ship hurtling towards a blistering Mega-Sun, with a crew of insane gangsters and a Texan, what you don't need to run into is a galactic war. Or was that their only chance of survival?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 294

Sample

by Isaac Asimov

The thing about John Campbell is that he liked things big. He liked big men with big ideas working out big applications of their big theories. And he liked it fast. His big men built big weapons within days; weapons that were, moreover, without serious shortcomings, or at least, with no shortcomings that could not be corrected as follows: “Hmm, something’s wrong—oh, I see—of course.” Then, in two hours, something would be jerry-built to fix the jerry-built device.

The big applications were, usually, in the form of big weapons to fight big wars on tremendous scales. Part of it was, of course, Campbell’s conscious attempt to imitate and surpass Edward E. (“Doc”) Smith. The world-shaking, escalating conflicts in Campbell’s stories, as in The Space Beyond in this collection, is a reflection of the escalating conflict on the printed page between John and Doc.

A great deal of Campbell’s science is sheer gobbledygook that you must not take seriously. You have to read it as a foreign language that the characters understand and for which the action and the astronomical background serve as a translation.

In some places, Campbell is deliberately and bullheadedly wrong and one can never be sure whether he actually believes the nonsense, or whether he is doing it just to irritate and provoke his readers into thinking hard.

In the December 1934 Astounding Stories, John Campbell, writing under the pseudonym, Karl van Campen, published “The Irrelevant,” in which the heroes were rescued from a deadly interplanetary dilemma by working out a method for creating energy out of nothing. In this way, they defied the law of conservation of energy which, it can be argued, is the most fundamental law of the universe.

Campbell did this by arguing that the quantity of energy produced by a change in velocity was different according to the frame of reference you chose for it, and that by switching from one frame to another you could create more energy than you consumed.

This is dead wrong. I won’t argue the reasons here because I don’t want to start a controversy. The argument that began with “The Irrelevant” continued in the letter columns of Astounding for an incredible length of time, with Campbell (always writing letters under the name of Karl van Campen) maintaining his views against all attacks—as in later years, he would maintain, with equal unswerving vigor, all attacks against his equally indefensible views in favor of dianoetics the Hieronymus machine, the Dean drive, and so on. He might stop arguing points and allow them to drop into oblivion, but he would never openly admit he was wrong.

“The Irrelevant” was the only story that John ever published under the van Campen pseudonym, but Marooned was a sort of never-published (till now) sequel under the same pseudonym, and it made use, in the end, of the same fallacy of a broken law of conservation of energy. I don’t even feel guilty about giving away the climax in that story because I don’t want anyone to be fooled by it. It doesn’t work. You have been warned!

 

Yet, on the other hand, John’s incredibly vivid imagination would sometimes strike gold and would inspire other writers into striking gold also. The great writers of the Golden Age in Astounding were more Campbell than themselves. I admit, freely and frequently, that this was so in my case. Other writers are perhaps more reluctant to do so.

Campbell’s hand is, I believe, quite obvious in the early work of the greatest of all writers of the Golden Age, Robert A. Heinlein. All, included in this volume, became “Sixth Column” by Heinlein, published under the pseudonym of Anson MacDonald, in the January, February, and March 1941 issues of Astounding.

The example of Campbell’s golden prescience that struck me most forcibly in the stories of this collection occurs in The Space Beyond. There, Campbell mentions that lithium bombarded with protons gives off alpha particles and that beryllium bombarded with alpha particles gives off protons and that the two mixed together can keep each other going in a “self-maintaining atomic explosion.”

Actually, this is not so. It takes a high-energy proton to initiate the lithium reaction and beryllium releases low-energy protons; at any rate, protons with too low an energy to break down the lithium. And the same is true in reverse for the alpha particles.

Nevertheless, the suggestion is remarkable. It was made in the mid-thirties and surely not many people were then thinking of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, which is what Campbell was suggesting. Eventually, not many years after The Space Beyond was written, a practical nuclear chain reaction was discovered, that of uranium fission. It was practical precisely because it worked under the impetus of low-energy neutrons.

Campbell’s brightness in seeing the importance of the nuclear chain reaction may well explain the most remarkable of his predictive visions. During World War II, he kept insisting that nuclear power would be developed before the war’s end. Once he heard of the discovery of uranium fission, his understanding of nuclear chain reactions made the atomic bomb seem to him a natural consequence. This was also true for the physicist, Leo Szilard, but for practically no one else.

Campbell went on to inspire a series of stories by other authors on the subject of power through uranium fission, the most notable being “Blowups Happen” by Robert A. Heinlein, “Nerves” by Lester del Rey, and “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill. (These all appeared in Astounding, in the September 1940, September 1942, and March 1944 issues respectively.)

Campbell was eventually investigated by a suspicious American government for knowing too much, but it was easy for him to demonstrate that he didn’t know too much—it was the world that knew too little.

With characteristic cosmic-optimism, Campbell carried nuclear power forward to its extremes without ever considering its danger. To control nuclear power meant, to him in All, the ability to cure disease miraculously; although, alas, the reality has shown us that radiation is the most deadly potential producer of disease the world has ever known.

In fact, there is a peculiar blind spot in prediction that affects us all, even Campbell. One sees the extrapolations of the present in a straight-line way. One misses the surprises.

In All, Campbell lists the few chemical specifics humanity had developed by the early 1930s and moves directly forward to nuclear panaceas—without ever foreseeing the antibiotics. And yet, I distinctly remember sitting with him in his office once, before antibiotics had been discovered, and listening to him tell me that since almost all pathogenic bacteria were destroyed in the soil, there must be substances in soil bacteria that would destroy harmful germs and cure disease.

In a way, Campbell’s vision of nuclear power was self-defeating. Lured by his success there, he went on to attempt to lead the way into a morass of semi-mystical pathways, through psi and related subjects, from which he never entirely emerged.

 

Campbell’s love of bigness showed itself at its most glamorous and remarkable in his tendency to describe astronomical bodies of the largest variety in dramatic but utterly realistic prose. It is here, for instance, that he shines in The Space Beyond and in Marooned.

But there, Campbell was, at times, betrayed. In the forty years since these stories were written, astronomy has made strides (thanks to radio telescopes and planetary probes) that not even Campbell could have foreseen, and the result has been to dwarf even the most liberal imaginations of earlier generations.

Campbell describes the super-giant stars vividly and beautifully in The Space Beyond and, indeed, they steal the show in that novelette. Making them Cepheids adds to the supernal glory (even though Campbell has the notion, it seems, that the more massive a Cepheid the shorter its period, when it is the reverse that is true).

However, no such super-star could exist by modern notions—or, indeed, by the astronomical notions of the time at which the story was written. In the 1920s, Arthur S. Eddington advanced the mass-luminosity law which made it quite clear that stars very much more massive than our Sun could not exist. The radiation pressure from within would cause them to explode at once. In the case of a star as large as those Campbell describes, the result would be an immediate supernova.

Furthermore, even if a star as massive as Campbell’s super-giants could be imagined to hang together, the rate of consumption of hydrogen fuel that would be required to keep it glowing at its incredible level would probably drag it through its entire stay in the main sequence for a hundred thousand years. It would only be during that stay that planets could form and evolve in a fashion that would produce life as we know it and if they had formed when the star itself had (at the appropriately colossal distance), there would simply have been no time for the planet to evolve any life at all, to say nothing of advanced intelligences.

Imagine what Campbell could have done had he been able to write the story a generation later. In place of such super-giant stars, even groups of them, he could have had a quasar—an entire galactic center of millions of stars interacting in some fashion to form something as far beyond a star as a star is beyond a planet.

Or he could have imagined his stars collapsing (as they would surely have done) into black holes. Given an area in space where there were black holes by the dozens, whatever problems would have arisen, as sure as Campbell was Campbell, they would have been solved.

Or perhaps, he would have had his environment filled with a white hole—that area in space where the matter endlessly pushing into a black hole somewhere else is emerging in great gouts of radiating energy. Perhaps a quasar is a white hole and he could have combined concepts and driven through space and time by using the cosmic ferry of a black hole.

 

And if, since these stories were written, our knowledge of the Universe has increased a thousandfold, our knowledge of our own Solar system has been refined ten-thousandfold. We have mapped, in detail, the hidden side of the Moon, and men have stood upon our satellite’s surface. Unmanned probes have landed on Mars and Venus, and the surfaces of Mars and Mercury have been mapped in detail, as well as those of the tiny Martian satellites, Phobos and Deimos. Jupiter has been seen at short distances, and a probe is gliding its way to Saturn even as I write.

How does Marooned seem in the light of all this?

We must begin by forgetting about “synthium” that beautiful example of one mainstay of early science fiction—the wonder-metal. Element 101 has indeed been discovered since Campbell wrote Marooned but it is named mendelevium and it is unstable, as are all elements beyond atomic number 83. Even if it were stable, we know what its properties would be like, and they would be nothing like those of synthium. In fact, the properties of no conceivable metal in the real world would be like those of synthium.

Next, there is another old standby—the difficulty of getting past the asteriod belt. I used that one myself in my very first published story “Marooned Off Vesta.” The asteroid belt, however, is a paper tiger. The material in it is strewn so widely over so vast a volume that any spaceship going through it is not at all likely to see anything of visible size. The Jupiter-probes, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, went through without trouble and detected less dust than had been expected.

Still a third commonplace of science fiction was its tendency toward water-oxygen chauvinism. Almost every world encountered in science fiction stories had its water ocean and its oxygen atmosphere.

Campbell needed an atmosphere for Ganymede, so he gave it one, but I think he knew better. Any gases in the vicinity of that satellite exist only in traces. However, Campbell was probably correct in placing quantities of ice on its surface. The low density of Ganymede and of its sister-world Callisto make the presence of such materials very likely. Campbell makes the ices those of water and carbon dioxide. It is likely, however, that frozen ammonia is there rather than frozen carbon dioxide.

And what about Jupiter? Campbell suggests that this could only be explored with something like synthium since without it, ships could not pass the asteroid belt and could not even penetrate to the depths of Earth’s own ocean. Not so, for within a quarter-century after the story had been written, not only had the asteroid belt been shorn of its terrors, but human beings had made it down to the deepest abyss of the ocean in bathyscaphes—and without synthium.

But Jupiter itself is a harder nut, and Campbell portrays its giant intractable nature gloriously well. He is wrong in details, inevitably. He describes its atmosphere as mostly nitrogen and water with helium and “some hydrogen.” Later on, he describes the hydrogen content as “a minute trace” and places a rather larger quantity of free oxygen there.

Undoubtedly, there is water in the Jovian atmosphere; it has been detected. So has helium been detected, but not nitrogen, and certainly not oxygen. Ammonia and methane, which Campbell doesn’t mention, are present, but the major component is hydrogen. In fact, all of Jupiter is at least 90 percent hydrogen, mostly in the liquid form.

Campbell correctly assumes there is a greenhouse effect in Jupiter’s atmosphere; that solar radiation is trapped and that the temperature is higher than it might otherwise be. But he has his heroes in the arctic zone where he describes it as fiercely cold.

Thanks to Jupiter-probe data, gathered in 1974, however, we believe that the temperature of Jupiter rises steadily as one penetrates the atmosphere. Six hundred miles below the cloud layer, the temperature is already 3600 C. It seems quite likely that by the time the ship had penetrated to a depth at which the atmosphere had become dense enough to resist further penetration, the problem would be heat and not cold.

 

But what’s the difference? Whenever a story is placed at the edge of science as it is known at the time, and whenever the author allows his imagination to steer him forward as best it can, making intelligent or dramatic extrapolations—the advance of real science is bound to outmode him in spots. This must be accepted, and to be wise after the event, as I have been here, or to shine in hindsight, as I do, is of no significance.

The question is this: Were Campbell’s extrapolations, whether right or wrong, nevertheless intelligent and dramatic? And the answer is: A thousand times, yes!

Campbell might be outwritten by many others, in and out of science fiction, in terms of characterization, plot, and dialog, but no one ever outdid him in visualizing the grandeur of the Universe.

In August 2133, Robert Randall discovered synthium. He announced simply that he had created element 101, which had, according to his modest report, “unusually interesting properties.” Since civilization has been based on metals for the past seven thousand years, and synthium’s “unusually interesting properties” included such things as its unheard of (and, because they had no machines at the time capable of determining it) undeterminedly great tensile strength, and its crystalline, transparent allotropic form with a strength only slightly less, Randall was most unnecessarily modest in his claims.

That was several years after the last expedition to Jupiter had been destroyed by the customary meteor, and the last of Stephenson’s three ships was tastefully draped over an asteroid. Naturally there were half a dozen expeditions trying to get the Interplanetary Committee’s consent to a new expedition. Bar Corliss had been trying patiently for four and a half years. Jimmie Mattorn had been trying to get permission for four of their “Explorer” type ships. They’d been turned down regularly and with punctuality by the Committee, because parium was the latest word in strong materials at the time—something like two and a quarter million pounds to the square inch. Good, but not good enough to stop a really determined meteor, of course—and most of those found out Jupiter’s way were very determined.

Then too, parium fuel tanks had a nasty habit of “failing” when one of the overanxious explorers loaded a twenty-ton tank with thirty-seven tons.

All in all, Jupiter kept pretty much to himself. Only one ship got past the asteroid belt—they couldn’t dodge out of the plane of the ecliptic in those days, because that meant taking more fuel for the dodging. Erickson did it. He fell back into the Minor Orbits some six years later, and the bodies of the crew were retrieved by the tow-cruiser “Maximum,” which pleased the widows to some extent.

But Randall’s mild “unusual properties” hid a world of high-explosive punch. Since all of the explorer’s gang was looking for the slightest thing in that line, undoubtedly they all read the line. Somewhere or other, though, Bar Corliss had met Randall. He read the thing, and he suddenly got a mental picture of Randall: a little sandy-haired man with pale-blue eyes and a pale-sandy mustache, rather moth-eaten in appearance, slightly stained by weather and his favorite pipe, wearing clothes apparently made by the American Packaging Bag company, fitted by the oldest of tailors, Guess and Gosh, and dyed by Laboratory Fumes. And he remembered him as the discoverer of triconite—familiarly known as “tricky-nite” and described by him as a “rather powerful explosive.”

So Corliss wandered down to Pittsburgh and American Metals. Randall had a piece of the stuff, paper thin and impossibly strong. Corliss looked at it, and grunted. It was the early product, not the refined stuff they turn out today, and it looked like a poorly tanned pig’s hide with the measles. Randall went into one of his quiet raptures about it, and tried to demonstrate its strength. He was rather handicapped, because he’d already broken most of the testing machines trying it out, and they hadn’t built a new one yet. But Corliss wasn’t slow in getting the possibilities. Corliss had more money than he could spend then anyway, so he found out what American Metal’s total possible production of synthium would be, and ordered it for the next six months.

Jimmie Mattorn got there two days later, and Norddeutscher Rakete, two and a half later—they couldn’t get in touch with their American representative. So Corliss wasn’t without competition on the thing. Norddeutscher, finding they couldn’t get more than a scrap of synthium from American Metals, bought German rights to the stuff, and wanted to start making it, and get a rocket under way.

Corliss was already moving.

That was probably why the things happened as they did. When Corliss built that ship, he hadn’t the faintest idea of the strength he put in it, because he didn’t have the ghost of an idea of the strength of synthium. Besides, he had carefully drawn plans for a parium ship—four of them actually—and so he just made them out of synthium instead. He did make a test tank, and broke down his pumps trying to break the tank. That was all he cared about though, so he let it go. He was in too much of a hurry.

He’d probably have forgotten something in the rush if he hadn’t planned on his parium ships for so long. If he’d known how long he’d have for planning afterwards, he’d probably have spent less before. He certainly wouldn’t have backed out.

You can weld synthium—they could then. But you can’t cut it with any saw, or tool. So the “Mercury” was slapped together in a remarkable hurry. The synthium plates had to be cast and heat-treated because Corliss wouldn’t wait while rolls and machines were built of it to bend and work it. So he allowed a little extra size over his original parium blueprints—he found out two years later that cast and heat-treated synthium was stronger than rolled—and plowed ahead.

The Germans were at his heels all the way. But his crew—with plenty of money and no budget—got four ships together in slightly less time than the German crew did. They loaded them up so fast that they had to get some of their supplies at the terrific rates prevailing on old Luna.

But the Committee didn’t know that; they saw four new ships, of a very strong metal, with very strong fuel tanks of unusual capacity, and a remarkably different course laid out that would take men around the asteroid belt—and the plans were stamped.

Automatically, they turned down the Norddeutscher people when they applied “until the success or failure of the present expedition has been determined.” The Norddeutscher people had a long wait. And then, of course, when Corliss’ fate was settled they couldn’t get approval of their ships, or, for that matter, any Jupiter-bound ships. Corliss settled that for once and for all with the result of his expedition. They couldn’t have gotten men anyway, probably, for none had the desire to have their ship christened “Mahomet’s Coffin” for so excellent a reason.

Corliss got off Earth in May 2134. The Corliss Jupiter Expedition was underway. A fleet of four tiny ships, each of five-thousand-ton mass, each looking, with their raw, unpainted synthium, like a farmer-boy’s unsuccessful effort toward a home-grown and tanned football, mottled with green and yellow and pink.

They were remarkable looking things, stubby, thick-bellied, and quite hideous, with their weirdly-shaped wing-attachments sticking out forlornly at a broken angle.

But they lifted off at ten A.M., May 17, 2134.

Bar Corliss looked at Brad Warren, second in command, with a sour, exaggerated grimace. “Great gang of planners we are,” he commented.

Brad Warren grinned back at him. “Forget something, Bar?”

“Only a few minor things—like soap, and coffee extract and antiseptics. Nothing really important of course—” Bar chuckled. “Wouldn’t the Norddeutscher crowd like to know that!”

Brad gestured out the port toward the blinding light and the sharp shadows of Luna. Half a mile distant loomed the dome of Lunar Metals and Mines No. 3. “When do we break loose?”

“Don’t say the words,” moaned Corliss. “Break loose, I mean. That’s what the clerk in the L.M. and M. keeps saying. And, dear God, has he been breaking me loose. I’ve got to have the stuff. It’s my own fault we haven’t got it—and is he ‘breaking me loose’ from plenty of cash. Only 22.50 a pound for coffee extract. Only a dollar a cake for five-cent laundry soap. And as for the water we’ve got to have for fuel—!” Bar shook his head and looked piously upward. “May God bless him—nobody else ever will.”

Brad grinned without sympathy. “You knew it was coming on that score; how else could you get away from old Earth? Even when the famous ‘Irrelevant’ disproved the law of conservation of energy in interplanetary work, she didn’t disprove the fact that you needed a lot of kick to climb away from Earth. We’ve still got to climb out most of the way from Earth, so far as gravity goes.”

“Uhmmm—but considering they generate power here directly from sunlight in the Davison photocells, get their water by cooking out the water of crystallization of the deeper rocks, and have plenty, you’d think they could sell it for less than thirty-two cents a gallon.

“What’s the latest figures on water at Phobos? Interplanetary Minerals sent anything yet?”

“Uhm,” said Brad. “It’s down. It seems they found it wasn’t selling well. Three and a half a gallon on Mars, and seventeen and a quarter on Phobos.”

“That’s not so stiff. It’ll change, though, by the time we get there. And we need tens of thousands of gallons of it!”

“Well, you still won’t be broke,” grinned Brad, “and you know damn well the kick you get out of this is worth it. Anyway—we lift off here any time you say now. We’re loaded with everything, I guess.”

“Make it two hours then. That is—two hours and whatever more is needed for aligning of orbits and so forth. How long did you say we’d have to wait on Phobos?”

“Randall was very timely in his invention. Jupiter and Mars will be right, in about three months. If we take off as you say, we ought to wait about three months, three days and four hours.”

“It could be worse,” sighed Bar.

 

Two hours, forty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the “Mercury” and her escorting squadron of three ships got underway. Pale-blue flames flared for a few seconds as they trembled, soundless in the vacuum of Moon’s surface; then they rose in slow sweeps, rocketing upward, and away. They were visible to the men watching in the protecting glass and steel of the L.M. and M. company. But finally, they were lost in the haze of stars that obscured almost all the heavens, flaring brightly despite the glaring yellow sun.

The steady drone of the great rocket tubes of infusible tungovan grumbled and echoed and murmured to itself in the metal shells of the ships. The rockets were marvelously well-designed. There was little wasted energy here, and therefore, little noise. Noise is the audible warning of waste energy. They could not afford wastage of the precious burden of fuel, so there was almost no noise, only the smooth, carefully engineered flow of gases rushing through ground, honed and polished rocket tubes, designed as nearly as possible for absolute stream flow.

To all new spacers, rocket tubes are flimsy-looking things. The metal is less than an eighth of an inch thick, flimsy, tinny in appearance. It would seem that those incredibly powerful and light engines, rocket engines, would certainly burst anything so slight. That again illustrates the refinements of rocket engineering. It is a well-known fact that the greater the velocity of a fluid stream, the less the side-pressure. Those tubes were designed for the greatest possible velocity, naturally, and since that meant almost no side-pressure, tons of metal could be shaved from the rocket tubes. Only the great pressure blocks seemed, and were, capable of resisting strain bracing the egg-shaped combustion chambers.

 

Hour after hour the tubes moaned and droned. They were running almost white hot, but they were polished more carefully than the finest telescope mirrors, and they were in vacuum jackets equally polished, so that almost no heat escaped from them—for heat, where it isn’t wanted, is not only a nuisance, but a warning of inefficiency.

Presently, the song of the fuel pumps started. They had been feeding the tubes on the original pressure in the tanks at first, but now this was falling. Pure hydrogen and oxygen were being taken from the tanks at seven tons, pressure, and stepped up to the necessary eight for efficient running in the tubes. It was a gas—but under that pressure, denser than water.

That might have warn. . .