Month: December 2023

The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Came Early1 by Poul Anderson (F&SF, June 1956) opens with the narrator, a late 10th Century Icelander/Viking called Ospak Ulfsson, telling a visiting Christian priest about a strange man he once came across. He tells how he and his clansmen found the strangely dressed man on the beach and how, after questioning him, they discovered that the man was Sergeant Gerald Roberts, an MP in the United States Army who had slipped through time:

“I was crossing the street, it was a storm, and there was a crash and then I stood on the beach and the city was gone!”
“He’s mad,” said Sigurd, backing away. “Be careful . . . if he starts to foam at the mouth, it means he’s going berserk.”
“Who are you?” babbled the stranger. “What are you doing in those clothes? Why the spears?”
“Somehow,” said Helgi, “he does not sound crazed—only frightened and bewildered. Something evil has happened to him.”
“I’m not staying near a man under a curse!” yelped Sigurd, and started to run away.
“Come back!” I bawled. “Stand where you are or I’ll cleave your louse-bitten head!”
That stopped him, for he had no kin who would avenge him; but he would not come closer. Meanwhile the stranger had calmed down to the point where he could at least talk evenly.
“Was it the aitchbomb?” He asked. “Has the war started?”
He used that word often, aitchbomb, so I know it now, though unsure of what it means. It seems to be a kind of Greek fire. As for the war, I knew not which war he meant, and told him so.
“There was a great thunderstorm last night,” I added. “And you say you were out in one too. Perhaps Thor’s hammer knocked you from your place to here.”  p. 6-7

The rest of the story mostly tells of Roberts’ (unsuccessful) attempts to fit into this society, which begin with him helping to sacrifice a horse by shooting it in the head with his service pistol. Ulfsson is not impressed however, “as the beast quivered and dropped with a hole blown through its skull, wasting the brains.” Matters do not improve with Roberts’ subsequent attempts to repair two spearheads (he ruins them and almost sets the forge on fire) or mend a nearby bridge (he cannot master the primitive carpentry tools). Roberts manages to partially redeem himself by winning a wrestling match with one of the warriors by using his Judo skills, but a further suggestion about manufacturing a cannon and gunpowder are rebuffed:

Gerald said something about making a gun like his own. It would have to be bigger, a cannon he called it, and could sink ships and scatter armies. He would need the help of smiths, and also various stuffs. Charcoal was easy, and sulfur could be found in the volcano country, I suppose, but what is this saltpeter?
Also, being suspicious by now, I questioned him closely as to how he would make such a thing. Did he know just how to mix the powder? No, he admitted. What size would the gun have to be? When he told me—at least as long as a man—I laughed and asked him how a piece that size could be cast or bored, even if we could scrape together that much iron. This he did not know either.
“You haven’t the tools to make the tools to make the tools,” he said. I don’t know what he meant by that.
“God help me, I can’t run through a thousand years of history all by myself.”  p. 16

It’s hard not to see the above passage as a direct rebuttal of the premise of L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Lest Darkness Fall—whose can-do narrator produces a constant stream of inventions to prevent the onset of the Dark Ages in sixth century Rome. (And de Camp’s hero also goes back in time during a lightning storm.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) details a fateful boat trip: Roberts is no sailor; his suggestions for a bigger ship with different sails, a keel and cabins are picked apart; and one of the other men’s open contempt for Roberts ends in violence when Roberts challenges the man, Ketill, to a fight. Roberts quickly finds out that they won’t be using fists but swords and shields and then, during the fight, he barely holds his own. After being wounded multiple times, Roberts draws his pistol and shoots Ketill in the head.
The aftermath of this killing provides a fascinating insight into the customs of the time: an allegation of witchcraft is made; payment of weregild to Ketill’s kin is suggested; and Ulfsson’s daughter (who has a crush on Roberts) asks her father to pay it. This then leads Ketill’s father (who is also on the voyage) to ask if Ulfsson’s family stands with Roberts. If so, that will mean a blood feud between the two familes. Ulfsson, fearing his kin’s death (especially his son) in any later fighting, withdraws his protection from Roberts and tells him that the Thing (a Viking council) will decide on the matter at midsummer but he had best leave Iceland before then. Roberts departs into the darkness.
There is a postscript where Ulfsson tells the priest that Roberts was later found at another settlement but, because he did not tell them of the killing, they expel him when Ketill’s kin track him down:

At the end, when they had him trapped, his weapon gave out on him. Then he took up a dead man’s sword and defended himself so valiantly that Ulf Hjalmarsson has limped ever since. It was well done, as even his foes admitted; they are an eldritch race in the United States, but they do not lack manhood.
When he was slain, his body was brought back. For fear of the ghost, he having perhaps been a warlock, it was burned, and all he had owned was laid in the fire with him. That was where I lost the knife he had given me. The barrow stands out on the moor, north of here, and folk shun it though the ghost has not walked. Now, with so much else happening, he is slowly being forgotten.
And that is the tale, priest, as I saw it and heard it. Most men think Gerald Samsson [Roberts] was crazy, but I myself believe he did come from out of time, and that his doom was that no man may ripen a field before harvest season.  p. 23

This is a very good piece, both for its take on a man out of time and also for its impressive authenticity which latter, through the voice of Ospak Ulfsson, firmly puts you not only in the society of that period, but in the head of one of its inhabitants.
**** (Very Good). 10,300 words. Story link.

1. I think A Man Out of Time would have been a better title as it would have worked in three ways: (a) Roberts physically leaves his own time; (b) he is unable to integrate into that society; and (c) he ends up dying prematurely.

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #70, April 1958) opens with Maxted listening to a sound Sheringham is playing to him through headphones. When Maxted fails to guess what the sound is—:

‘Time’s up,’ Sheringham cut in. ‘A pin dropping.’ He took the three-inch disc off the player, and angled it into its sleeve. ‘In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you’d get that one.’  p. 63

The men take a break and go outside for a drink. We learn more about this new science of microsonics—very quiet sounds hugely amplified—and, as the story develops, we also discover that Maxted has been having an extra-marital relationship with Sheringham’s wife.
Maxted is waiting for a confrontation about this latter matter but, before one occurs, he starts to feel cold and mentions this to Sheringham. Sheringham tells him to stay where he is and goes to fetch the final recording.
Maxted’s condition continues to deteriorate, and it soon becomes apparent that (spoiler) Sherringham has poisoned him:

He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. ‘Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body’s fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn’t distract you.’
He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Sheringham said. [. . .] ‘These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsones, amplification one thousand. I admit I’ve edited the track a little, but it’s still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You’ll never guess what this was.’  p. 65-66

Sheringham then reveals his knowledge of Maxted’s liason—there are microphones all around the patio, an area that the couple used for one of their liaisons—and he continues to goad Maxted until finally revealing that he is drowning in a kiss.
This story doesn’t really lend itself to a convincing synopsis but Ballard successfully combines the two disparate story elements (the new science of microsonics and a cuckolded husband seeking revenge) with the almost poetic idea of drowning in a kiss. If that latter image/thought doesn’t appeal then I suspect you will not like it as much as I did.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 1,850 words. Story link.

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak (Amazing, December 1950) opens with a journalist called Joe Crane arriving early at his newsroom. After he realises that his alarm clock must have been an hour fast (this will prove significant later), he sees something move a nearby desk:

[. . .] a thing that glinted, rat-sized and shiny and with a certain undefinable manner about it that made him stop short in his tracks with a sense of gulping emptiness in his throat and belly.
The thing squatted beside the typewriter and stared across the room at him. There was no sign of eyes, no hint of face, and yet he knew it stared.

He throws a paste pot at it, and chases the thing into a cupboard which he locks but can’t open again. Then, when he rolls three sheets of paper into his typewriter, it types by itself, telling him, “Keep out of this, Joe, don’t mix into this. You might get hurt.”
Later on, after the rest of news team arrive, Crane is given a story to work up about a man who has seen a sewing machine rolling down the street, and which dodged him when he attempted to stop it. After Crane investigates this incident, and reads a news wire about a missing “electron brain”, he finds another message from his typewriter:

A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity in its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city.
A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its ‘owner’, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

Crane takes the typewriter home with him, and he has a longer conversation with it which reveals that that the rat-like creature is one of an alien species that has arrived on Earth—and who are set on liberating all the machines here. There are further minor complications (someone opens the cupboard at work and the rat-machine escapes, the editor is annoyed at this “practical joke” and Crane’s failure to turn in his copy, etc.), but the story eventually ends with Crane in his house surrounded by the rat-machines. He realises everything that has happened is because he has been used as a test subject to gauge human reaction to the rat-machines’ plans—and that they are now going to kill him because he hasn’t responded in any significant way to this preliminary skirmish, may not be exhibiting typical human reactions, and now knows too much.
The final line has him facing off against the assembled rat-machines with a length of pipe in his hands.
This story is a pretty good example of an able writer being able to improve a thin SF idea by overlaying a complex plot above it (there is a lot of incident in this story, as well as the final refocusing at the end about how those incidents comprise a preliminary skirmish). However, we are never told how the machines are animated or made sentient (especially the ones without any power source) and there is little difference between this piece and supernatural fantasies like Stephen King’s Christine or Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady1 (stories about killer cars that come to life). Still, if you can get past this lack of SFnal foundation in a piece that purports to be an SF story, it’s a decent read.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.2

1. Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady for those in the mood for a killer car fantasy.

2. The original title for this story is terrible (Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!), and must have been chosen by Amazing’s editors (Howard Browne or William L. Hamling).

The Half Pair by A. Bertram Chandler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Half Pair by A. Bertram Chandler (New Worlds, November 1957) sees the male member of a husband and wife prospecting team, halfway between Mars and the Asteroid Belt, complain about a missing cufflink that has been flushed out the garbage disposal into space. When his wife tells him she’ll get him another pair when they land, he is not impressed:

‘We agreed’, he said stiffly, ‘that we weren’t going to let ourselves lapse, get sloppy, the way that some prospecting couples do. You must remember those dreadful people we met on PX173A—the ones who asked us to dinner aboard their ship. He dressed in greasy overalls, she in what looked like a converted flour sack. The drinks straight from the bottle and the food straight from the can…’
‘That’, she told him, ‘was an extreme case.’
‘Admittedly. And my going around with my shirt sleeves rolled up, or flapping, would be the thin end of the wedge.’
He brooded. ‘What I can’t get over is the clottishness of it all. I go through into the bathroom to rinse out my shirt. I leave the cuff links on the ledge over the basin while I put the shirt on the stretcher to dry. Picking up the cuff links, to transfer them to a clean shirt, I drop one into the basin. It goes down the drain. I hurry to the engine-room to get a spanner to open the pipe at the U-bend. I return to find you filling the basin to wash your smalls. I tell you what’s happened—and you promptly pull out the plug, washing the link over and past the bend…’
‘I wanted to see,’ she said.
‘You wanted to see,’ he mimicked.  p. 90

This domestic squabbling continues until the man decides to don a spacesuit and go out to retrieve the missing link (he has seen it on the ship radar orbiting nearby). His wife protests as they are not meant to EVA solo, and she can’t go as she has been traumatised by a previous space walk.
Needless to say (spoiler), the man goes out on his own, loses his thruster, and then realises his safety line has become undone. His air supply runs out and he lapses into unconsciousness—but later wakes up in the ship. His wife tells him, in an explanation as to how she overcame her trauma, ‘I do so hate half a pair of anything—and I don’t mean only cuff links!’
This neat last line, and the couple’s verbal sparring throughout, make for a fun if lightweight piece.
*** (Good). 1800 words. Story link.