The Space Opera Renaissance

by Kathryn Cramer, David G. Hartwell

Genres: Space Opera; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

"Space opera", once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas, and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space opera" is one of the defining streams of modern SF.

Now, World Fantasy Award-winning anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have compiled a definitive overview of this subgenre, both as it was in the days of the pulp magazines, and as it has become in 2005. Included are major works from genre progenitors like Jack Williamson and Leigh Brackett, stylish midcentury voices like Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R. Delany, popular favorites like David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and modern-day pioneers such as Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter, Scott Westerfeld, and Charles Stross.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: July 10, 2007

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 944

Sample

THE SPACE OPERA RENAISSANCE

I.
REDEFINED WRITERS
Chubby, brownette Eunice Kinnison sat in a rocker, reading the Sunday papers and listening to the radio. Her husband Ralph lay sprawled upon the davenport, smoking a cigarette and reading the current issue of EXTRAORDINARY STORIES against an unheard background of music. Mentally, he was far from Tellus, flitting in his super-dreadnaught through parsec after parsec of vacuous space.
--E. E. "Doc" Smith, Ph.D., Triplanetary, Chapter 5: "1941"
EDMOND HAMILTON
Edmond Hamilton [1904-1977] (tribute page: www.pulpgen.com/pulp/edmond_hamilton) was the great original writer of space opera in science fiction. Jack Williamson says: "With his tales of the Interstellar Patrol, beginning with 'Crashing Suns' (1928), he was arguably the inventor of space opera. Long on future progress, if a bit short on hard science, he imagined a vast interstellar civilization, always in danger of some cosmic catastrophe to be averted at the last instant by his little band of human and alien heroes."
Hamilton was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and lived with his parents across the state line in New Castle, Pennsylvania, until the 1940s, when he married Leigh Brackett. He said in an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in 1975 (www.pulp-gen.com/pulp/edmond_hamilton/twibbet_interview.html), that he was profoundly influenced as a young man in the teens and early twenties by the pulp SF of Homer Eon Elint. "He'd write stories about moving the Earth to Jupiter and things like that. And those fired my imagination. I've always been glad to say, I owe this and that to Mr. Flint." He sold his first story to Weird Tales in 1925, and his next forty stories thereafter. Most of them were science fiction, which Weird Tales (since the term "science fiction" was not coined until 1930) called "weird-scientific" tales.
By the early 1930s he was one of the giants of science fiction. He was the first genre writer to conceive of interstellar flight ("I think so. On a wide scale, anyway. One thing I've found out, over the years, is that, anytime you think that you were the originator of some new idea, 'I was the first to do that,' you'll find some old fellow who did it back around 1895. Every darn time."--PNH interview), and also the first to write of friendly aliens ("Yes ... I think I was, in one sense. I began that in 1932, with a story called 'Renegade.' It was published under the title of 'Conquest of Two Worlds.' They thought the title wasn't science-fictional enough ... . But it seemed to me wrong to always make the Earthman in the right. Let's show him up to be something different."--PNH interview).
It is one of the sad ironies of literary history that his work is nearly forgotten today, while the work of his contemporary, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Ph.D., who died in the 1960s, although in some ways inferior to Hamilton's, is still popular and in print. His best friend, Jack Williamson, is still alive and writing SF and space opera in his nineties. Williamson says:
Hamilton's skills were perfectly tuned for the pulps ... his stories moved fast. He wrote them fast, commonly sending them out in first draft. He was prolific, his space operas earning him a reputation as "World-Wrecker" or "World-Saver" Hamilton.
...
He wrote nearly all the short novels for Captain Future, which was published quarterly from 1940 through 1944. They were the purest sort of pulp, tailored to fit a formula devised by Mort Weisinger, his editor at the "Thrilling" group. Besides the captain himself, the characters were a robot, an android, and a brain in a box. The pattern dictated everything, even the paragraphs in which the characters were introduced and the order of events in the opening chapter.
...
World War II changed everything. The old pulp markets disappeared. Though Ed was able to adapt when he tried, with such fine stories as "He That Hath Wings," he spent most of the next twenty years as one of the top script writers for the Superman and Batman comics.
(all three quotes from "Edmond Hamilton: As I Knew Him" by Jack Williamson)
Hamilton also says in the PNH interview that he (and his wife also) declined to submit stories to John W. Campbell after he became editor at Astounding, because it cost too much in time to rewrite and revise to Campbell's edits. "I never sent him a story again. Reason being: I could not make a living writing for John Campbell. And he didn't like his writers ... to write for other magazines."
Unfortunately this is the career of a good writer who developed a successful repository of techniques and a set of professional attitudes in the pulp era and never changed them entirely, even after the era ended.
It is easy to assume with historical hindsight that Wilson Tucker in his fanzine in 1941--when Hamilton was hacking out Captain Future pulp novellas for a living--did not have Hamilton's early work in mind when he defined space opera as "filthy, stinking hackwork." But on the other hand it may plausibly have seemed that the former great was going downhill at the same time that Smith and Williamson were selling to Campbell at higher rates, with more ambitious material. Gary Westphal (who assumes that "space opera" is a term of approval) makes that case in his essay on space opera in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction:
Despite the accomplishments of Smith and contemporaries like Campbell, Williamson, Ray Cummings, and Clifford D. Simak, the most prolific and prominent writer of classic space operas was Edmond Hamilton. Particularly fond of stories involving planets being threatened or blown to pieces, Hamilton earned the epithets "World-Saver" and "World-Wrecker," and the reference to "world-saving" in Tucker's definition suggests that Hamilton might have been the principal target of his approbation [sic--ed.]. Yet Hamilton proved capable of producing more subdued, even wistful, varieties of space opera, like "The Dead Planet" (1946), where a group of explorers hear the holographic testimony of a long-dead alien civilization that sacrificed itself to save the galaxy from virulent energy-beings; finally, we learn the aliens were in fact the human race. Hamilton also crafted the first space opera franchise, Captain Future, a magazine said to prefigure Star Trek in describing the recurring exploits of a spaceship captain and his crew--a robot, an android, and a disembodied brain.
But we think it is not necessarily the case. Nor did Hamilton: "In a 1977 interview given just before his death, Edmond Hamilton, one of the founders of the subgenre, was still able to say, 'Bob Tucker invented that term when he was a fan, and I was reproaching him last spring again for having done so. I'm an old space opera fan; I don't like to see it mocked.'" (Quoted in David Pringle's essay "What Is This Thing Called Space Opera?") We think that the pejorative term was aimed at the much less capable imitators of the patterns of world-saving and warring interstellar fleets originated by Hamilton, then prevalent in the lesser pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories in the early 1940s. But it is also very likely that as the years passed and the term became more widely used, it became easy to assume that Hamilton and Smith and Williamson were the original targets of opprobrium.
After Hamilton married Brackett, and after he became a successful script writer for comic books--in those days considered a form lacking in any aesthetic value, lower class than the pulps (and at about the same time that Alfred Bester gave up writing for comics)--he did produce more ambitious work from time to time, since the pressure of paying the bills was less and the time to revise and rewrite available. He continued to publish new material into the 1970s, but was not regarded as having kept up with the genre. His collection The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977) is a worthwhile sampling of his short fiction, most of it from before 1939. The first volumes of a new set of Hamilton story collections appeared in 1999 and 2002, and athird, collecting his early SF, has been announced, so the new fashion for space opera may be doing his posthumous reputation some good. His work deserves reassessment. He should be remembered for his best, not his average.
"The Star Stealers" is from the very beginning of his career and from near the very beginning of genre science fiction. It was first published in Weird Tales in February 1929. One can see how both comics and TV space opera (Star Trek, in particular) and later movies such as the Star Wars films were influenced by this strain of adventure SF. It was all there in 1929, fast-paced, large-scale, a bit clunky and absurd, and filled with images of wonder. There are many crudities, but one can easily apprehend how this fiction moved in the estimation of generations of SF readers from astonishing cutting-edge SF to trash to pulp nostalgia over the decades.
THE STAR STEALERS
EDMOND HAMILTON
1
As I stepped into the narrow bridgeroom the pilot at the controls there turned toward me, saluting.
"Alpha Centauri dead ahead, sir," he reported.
"Turn thirty degrees outward," I told him, "and throttle down to eighty light-speeds until we've passed the star."
Instantly the shining levers flicked back under his hands, and as I stepped over to his side I saw the arrows of the speed-dials creeping backward with the slowing of our flight. Then, gazing through the broad windows which formed the room's front side, I watched the interstellar panorama ahead shifting sidewise with the turning of our course.
The narrow bridgeroom lay across the very top of our ship's long, cigarlike hull, and through its windows all the brilliance of the heavens around us lay revealed. Ahead flamed the great double star of Alpha Centauri, two mighty blazing suns which dimmed all else in the heavens, and which crept slowly sidewise as we veered away from them. Toward our right there stretched along the inky skies the far-flung powdered fires of the galaxy's thronging suns, gemmed with the crimson splendors of Betelgeuse and the clear brilliance of Canopus and the hot white light of Rigel. And straight ahead, now, gleaming out beyond the twin suns we were passing, shone the clear yellow star that was the sun of our own system.
It was the yellow star that I was watching, now, as our ship fled on toward it at eighty times the speed of light; for more than two years had passed since our cruiser had left it, to become a part of that great navy of the Federation of Stars which maintained peace over all the Galaxy. We had gone far with the fleet, in those two years, cruising with it the length and breadth of the Milky Way, patrolling the space-lanes of the Galaxy and helping to crush the occasional pirate ships which appeared to levy toll on the interstellar commerce. And now that an order flashed from the authorities of our own solar system had recalled us home, it was with an unalloyed eagerness that we looked forward to the moment of our return. The stars we had touched at, the peoples of their worlds, these had been friendly enough toward us, as fellow-members of the great Federation, yet for all their hospitality we had been glad enough to leave them. For though we had long ago become accustomed to the alien and unhuman forms of the different stellar races, from the strange brain-men of Algol to the birdlike people of Sirius, their worlds were not human worlds, not the familiar eight little planets which swung around our own sun, and toward which we were speeding homeward now.
While I mused thus at the window the two circling suns of Alpha Centauri had dropped behind us, and now, with a swift clicking of switches, the pilot beside meturned on our full speed. Within a few minutes our ship was hurtling on at almost a thousand light-speeds, flung forward by the power of our newly invented de-transforming generators, which could produce propulsion-vibrations of almost a thousand times the frequency of the light-vibrations. At this immense velocity, matched by few other craft in the Galaxy, we were leaping through millions of miles of space each second, yet the gleaming yellow star ahead seemed quite unchanged in size.
Abruptly the door behind me clicked open to admit young Dal Nara, the ship's second-officer, descended from a long line of famous interstellar pilots, who grinned at me openly as she saluted.
"Twelve more hours, sir, and we'll be there," she said.
I smiled at her eagerness. "You'll not be sorry to get back to our little sun, will you?" I asked, and she shook her head.
"Not I! It may be just a pin-head beside Canopus and the rest, but there's no place like it in the Galaxy. I'm wondering, though, what made them call us back to the fleet so suddenly."
My own face clouded, at that. "I don't know," I said, slowly. "It's almost unprecedented for any star to call one of its ships back from the Federation fleet, but there must have been some reason--"
"Well," she said cheerfully, turning toward the door, "it doesn't matter what the reason is, so long as it means a trip home. The crew is worse than I am--they're scrapping the generators down in the engine-room to get another lightspeed out of them."
I laughed as the door clicked shut behind her, but as I turned back to the window the question she had voiced rose again in my mind, and I gazed thoughtfully toward the yellow star ahead. For as I had told Dal Nara, it was a well-nigh unheard-of thing for any star to recall one of its cruisers from the great fleet of the Federation. Including as it did every peopled star in the Galaxy, the Federation relied entirely upon the fleet to police the interstellar spaces, and to that fleet each star contributed its quota of cruisers. Only a last extremity, I knew, would ever induce any star to recall one of its ships, yet the message flashed to our ship had ordered us to return to the solar system at full speed and report at the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge, on Neptune. Whatever was behind the order, I thought, I would learn soon enough, for we were now speeding over the last lap of our homeward journey; so I strove to put the matter from my mind for the time being.
With an odd persistence, though, the question continued to trouble my thoughts in the hours that followed, and when we finally swept in toward the solar system twelve hours later, it was with a certain abstractedness that I watched the slow largening of the yellow star that was our sun. Our velocity had slackened steadily as we approached that star, and we were moving at a bare one light-speed when we finally swept down toward its outermost, far-swinging planet, Neptune, the solar system's point of arrival and departure for all interstellar commerce. Even this speed we reduced still further as we sped past Neptune's single circling moon and down through the crowded shipping-lanes toward the surface of the planet itself.
Fifty miles above its surface all sight of the planet beneath was shut off by the thousands of great ships which hung in dense masses above it--that vast tangle of interstellar traffic which makes the great planet the terror of all inexperienced pilots. From horizon to horizon, it seemed, the ships crowded upon each other, drawn from every quarter of the Galaxy. Huge grain-boats from Betelgeuse, vast, palatial liners from Arcturus and Vega, ship-loads of radium ores from the worlds that circle giant Antares, long, swift mailboats from distant Deneb--all these and myriad others swirled and circled in one great mass above the planet, dropping down one by one as the official traffic-directors flashed from their own boats the brilliant signals whichallowed a lucky one to descend. And through occasional rifts in the crowded mass of ships could be glimpsed the interplanetary traffic of the lower levels, a swarm of swift little boats which darted ceaselessly back and forth on their comparatively short journeys, ferrying crowds of passengers to Jupiter and Venus and Earth, seeming like little toy-boats beside the mighty bulks of the great interstellar ships above them.
As our own cruiser drove down toward the mass of traffic, though, it cleared away from before us instantly; for the symbol of the Federation on our bows was known from Canopus to Fomalhaut, and the cruisers of its fleet were respected by all the traffic of the Galaxy. Arrowing down through this suddenly opened lane, we sped smoothly down toward the planet's surface, hovering for a moment above its perplexing maze of white buildings and green gardens, and then slanting down toward the mighty flat-roofed building which housed the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge. As we sped down toward its roof I could not but contrast the warm, sunny green panorama beneath with the icy desert which the planet had been until two hundred thousand years before, when the scientists of the solar system had devised the great heat-transmitters which catch the sun's heat near its blazing surface and fling it out as high-frequency vibrations to the receiving-apparatus on Neptune, to be transformed back into the heat which warms this world. In a moment, though, we were landing gently upon the broad roof, upon which rested scores of other shining cruisers whose crews stood outside them watching our arrival.
Five minutes later I was whirling downward through the building's interior in one of the automatic little cone-elevators, out of which I stepped into a long white corridor. An attendant was awaiting me there, and I followed him down the corridor's length to a high black door at its end, which he threw open for me, closing it behind me as I stepped inside.




It was an ivory-walled, high-ceilinged room in which I found myself, its whole farther side open to the sunlight and breezes of the green gardens beyond. At a desk across the room was sitting a short-set man with gray-streaked hair and keen, inquiring eyes, and as I entered he sprang up and came toward me.
"Ran Rarak!" he exclaimed. "You've come! For two days, now, we've been expecting you."
"We were delayed off Aldebaran, sir, by generator trouble," I replied, bowing, for I had recognized the speaker as Hurus Hol, chief of the Bureau of Astronomical Knowledge. Now, at a motion from him, I took a chair beside the desk while he resumed his own seat.
A moment he regarded me in silence, and then slowly spoke. "Ran Rarak," he said, "you must have wondered why your ship was ordered back here to the solar system. Well, it was ordered back for a reason which we dared not state in an open message, a reason which, if made public, would plunge the solar system instantly into a chaos of unutterable panic!"
He was silent again for a moment, his eyes on mine, and then went on. "You know, Ran Rarak, that the universe itself is composed of infinite depths of space in which float great clusters of suns, star-clusters which are separated from each other by billions of light-years of space. You know, too, that our own cluster of suns, which we call the Galaxy, is roughly disklike in shape, and that our own particular sun is situated at the very edge of this disk. Beyond lie only those inconceivable leagues of space which separate us from the neighboring star-clusters, or island-universes, depths of space never yet crossed by our own cruisers or by anything else of which we have record.
"But now, at last, something has crossed those abysses, is crossing them; since overthree weeks ago our astronomers discovered that a gigantic dark star is approaching our Galaxy from the depths of infinite space--a titanic, dead sun which their instruments showed to be of a size incredible, since, dark and dead as it is, it is larger than the mightiest blazing suns in our own Galaxy, larger than Canopus or Antares or Betelgeuse--a dark, dead star millions of times larger than our own fiery sun--a gigantic wanderer out of some far realm of infinite space, racing toward our Galaxy at a velocity inconceivable!
"The calculations of our scientists showed that this speeding dark star would not race into our Galaxy but would speed past its edge, and out into infinite space again, passing no closer to our own sun, at the edge, than some fifteen billion miles. There was no possibility of collision or danger from it, therefore; and so though the approach of the dark star is known to all in the solar system, there is no idea of any peril connected with it. But there is something else which has been kept quite secret from the peoples of the solar system, something known only to a few astronomers and officials. And that is that during the last few weeks the path of this speeding dark star has changed from a straight path to a curving one, that it is curving inward toward the edge of our Galaxy and will now pass our own sun, in less than twelve weeks, at a distance of less than three billion miles, instead of fifteen! And when this titanic dead sun passes that close to our own sun there can be but one result. Inevitably our own sun will be caught by the powerful gravitational grip of the giant dark star and carried out with all its planets into the depths of infinite space, never to return!"
Hurus Hol paused, his face white and set, gazing past me with wide, unseeing eyes. My brain whirling beneath the stunning revelation, I sat rigid, silent, and in a moment he went on.
"If this thing were known to all," he said slowly, "there would be an instant, terrible panic over the solar system, and for that reason only a handful have been told. Flight is impossible, for there are not enough ships in the Galaxy to transport the trillions of the solar system's population to another star in the four weeks that are left to us. There is but one chance--one blind, slender chance--and that is to turn aside this onward-thundering dark star from its present inward-curving path, to cause it to pass our sun and the Galaxy's edge far enough away to be harmless. And it is for this reason that we ordered your return.
"For it is my plan to speed out of the Galaxy into the depths of outer space to meet this approaching dark star, taking all of the scientific apparatus and equipment which might be used to swerve it aside from this curving path it is following. During the last week I have assembled the equipment for the expedition and have gathered together a force of fifty star-cruisers which are even now resting on the roof of this building, manned and ready for the trip. These are only swift mail-cruisers, though, specially equipped for the trip, and it was advisable to have at least one battle-cruiser for flag-ship of the force, and so your own was recalled from the Federation fleet. And although I shall go with the expedition, of course, it was my plan to have you yourself as its captain.
"I know, however, that you have spent the last two years in the service of the Federation fleet; so if you desire, another will be appointed to the post. It is one of danger--greater danger, I think, than any of us can dream. Yet the command is yours, if you wish to accept it."
Hurus Hol ceased, intently scanning my face. A moment I sat silent, then rose and stepped to the great open window at the room's far side. Outside stretched the greenery of gardens, and beyond them the white roofs of buildings, gleaming beneath the faint sunlight. Instinctively my eyes went up to the source of light, the tiny sun, small and faint and far, here, but still--the sun. A long moment I gazed up toward it, and then turned back to Hurus Hol.
"I accept, sir," I said.
He came to his feet, his eyes shining. "I knew that you would," he said, simply, and then: "All has been ready for days, Ran Rarak. We start at once."
Ten minutes later we were on the broad roof, and the crews of our fifty ships were rushing to their posts in answer to the sharp alarm of a signal bell. Another five minutes and Hurus Hol, Dal Nara and I stood in the bridgeroom of my own cruiser, watching the white roof drop behind and beneath as we slanted up from it. In a moment the half-hundred cruisers on that roof had risen and were racing up behind us, arrowing with us toward the zenith, massed in a close, wedge-shaped formation.
Above, the brilliant signals of the traffic-boats flashed swiftly, clearing a wide lane for us, and then we had passed through the jam of traffic and were driving out past the incoming lines of interstellar ships at swiftly mounting speed, still holding the same formation with the massed cruisers behind us.
Behind and around us, now, flamed the great panorama of the Galaxy's blazing stars, but before us lay only darkness--darkness inconceivable, into which our ships were flashing out at greater and greater speed. Neptune had vanished, and far behind lay the single yellow spark that was all visible of our solar system as we fled out from it. Out--out--out--rocketing, racing on, out past the boundaries of the great Galaxy itself into the lightless void, out into the unplumbed depths of infinite space to save our threatened sun.
2
Twenty-four hours after our start I stood again in the bridgeroom, alone except for the silent, imperturbable figure of my ever-watchful wheelman, Nal Jak, staring out with him into the black gulf that lay before us. Many an hour we had stood side by side thus, scanning the interstellar spaces from our cruiser's bridgeroom, but never yet had my eyes been confronted by such a lightless void as lay before me now.
Our ship, indeed, seemed to be racing through a region where light was all but non-existent, a darkness inconceivable to anyone who had never experienced it. Behind lay the Galaxy we had left, a great swarm of shining points of light, contracting slowly as we sped away from it. Toward our right, too, several misty little patches of light glowed faintly in the darkness, hardly to be seen; though these, I knew, were other galaxies or star-clusters like our own--titanic conglomerations of thronging suns dimmed to those tiny flickers of light by the inconceivable depths of space which separated them from ourselves.
Except for these, though, we fled on through a cosmic gloom that was soul-shaking in its deepness and extent, an infinite darkness and stillness in which our ship seemed the only moving thing. Behind us, I knew, the formation of our fifty ships was following close on our track, each ship separated from the next by a five hundred mile interval and each flashing on at exactly the same speed as ourselves. But though we knew they followed, our fifty cruisers were naturally quite invisible to us, and as I gazed now into the tenebrous void ahead the loneliness of our position was overpowering.
Abruptly the door behind me snapped open, and I half turned toward it as Hurus Hol entered. He glanced at our speed-dials, and his brows arched in surprise.
"Good enough," he commented. "If the rest of our ships can hold this pace it will bring us to the dark star in six days."
I nodded, gazing thoughtfully ahead. "Perhaps sooner," I estimated. "The dark star is coming toward us as a tremendous velocity, remember. You will notice on the telechart--"
Together we stepped over to the big telechart, a great rectangular plate of smoothly burnished silvery metal which hung at the bridgeroom's end-wall, the one indispensable aid to interstellar navigation. Upon it were accurately reproduced, by means of projected and reflected rays, the positions and progress of all heavenly bodies near the ship. Intently we contemplated it now. At the rectangle's lower edge there gleamed on the smooth metal a score or more of little circles of glowing light, of varying sizes, representing the suns of the edge of the Galaxy behind us. Outermost of these glowed the light-disk that was our own sun, and around this Hurus Hol had drawn a shining line or circle lying more than four billion miles from our sun, on the chart. He had computed that if the approaching dark star came closer than that to our sun its mighty gravitational attraction would inevitably draw the latter out with it into space; so the shining line represented, for us, the danger line: And creeping down toward that line and toward our sun, farther up on the blank metal of the great chart, there moved a single giant circle of deepest black, an ebon disk a hundred times the diameter of our glowing little sun-circle, which was sweeping down toward the Galaxy's edge in a great curve.
Hurus Hol gazed thoughtfully at the sinister dark disk, and then shook his head. "There's something very strange about that dark star," he said, slowly. "That curving path it's moving in is contrary to all the laws of celestial mechanics. I wonder if--"
Before he could finish, the words were broken off in his mouth. For at that moment there came a terrific shock, our ship dipped and reeled crazily, and then was whirling blindly about as though caught and shaken by a giant hand. Dal Nara, the pilot, Hurus Hol and I were slammed violently down toward the bridgeroom's end with the first crash, and then I clung desperately to the edge of a switch-board as we spun dizzily about. I had a flashing glimpse, through the windows, of our fifty cruisers whirling blindly about like wind-tossed straws, and in another glimpse saw two of them caught and slammed together, both ships smashing like eggshells beneath the terrific impact, their crews instantly annihilated. Then, as our own ship dipped crazily downward again, I saw Hurus Hol creeping across the floor toward the controls, and in a moment I had slid down beside him. Another instant and we had our hands on the levers, and were slowly pulling them back into position.
Caught and buffeted still by the terrific forces outside, our cruiser slowly steadied to an even keel and then leapt suddenly forward again, the forces that held us seeming to lessen swiftly as we flashed on. There came a harsh, grating sound that brought my heart to my throat as one of the cruisers was hurled pa