Classic Fiction Read online

  Dust Rag, Astounding Science Fiction, September 1956

  E

  Exchange Rate, Absolute Magnitude, Winter 1999

  Eyeball Vectors, Isaac’s Universe, Volume Three: Unnatural Diplomacy, July 1992

  F

  Fireproof, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1949

  The Foundling Stars, If, August 1966

  G

  The Green World, If, May 1963

  Ground, Science Fiction Adventures, December 1953

  H

  Halo, Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1952

  Hot Planet, Galaxy Magazine, August 1963

  I

  Iceworld (First of three parts), Astounding Science Fiction, October 1951

  Iceworld (Second of Three Parts), Astounding Science Fiction, November 1951

  Iceworld (Third of Three Parts), Astounding Science Fiction, December 1951

  Impediment, Astounding Science Fiction, August 1942

  L

  Lecture Demonstration, Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, November 1973

  The Logical Life, Stellar 1, September 1974

  Longline, Faster Than Light, 1976

  The Lunar Lichen, Future Science Fiction, February 1960

  M

  The Mechanic, Analog Science Fiction -> Science Fact, September 1966

  Mission of Gravity (First of Four Parts), Astounding Science Fiction, April 1953

  Mission of Gravity (Second of Four Parts), Astounding Science Fiction, May 1953

  Mission of Gravity (Third of four parts), Astounding Science Fiction, June 1953

  Mission of Gravity (Conclusion), Astounding Science Fiction, July 1953

  Mistaken for Granted, If, January/February, January 1974

  N

  Needle (First of two parts), Astounding Science Fiction, May 1949

  Needle (Second of three parts), Astounding Science Fiction, June 1949

  O

  Ocean on Top (First of Three Parts), If, October-December 1967

  Ocean on Top (Part Two), If, October-December 1967

  Ocean on Top (Conclusion), If, October-December 1967

  Office Politics, Readercon 15 Souvenir Book, July 2003

  Oh, Natural, Absolute Magnitude, Spring 1998

  Options, Lamps on the Brow, August 1998

  P

  Phases in Chaos, Isaac’s Universe, Volume Two: , July 1991

  Planet for Plunder, Satellite Science Fiction, February 1957

  Planetfall, Strange Tomorrows, October 1972

  Proof, Astounding Science Fiction, June 1942

  R

  Raindrop, If, May 1965

  S

  Seasoning, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September/October, September 1978

  Seismic Sidetrack, Absolute Magnitude, Spring 1995

  Settlement, Absolute Magnitude, Fall/Winter 1994

  Simile, Absolute Magnitude, Summer 1995

  Sortie, Harsh Mistress,, Spring/Summer 1994

  Starlight (First of Four Parts), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1970

  Starlight (Second of Four Parts), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1970

  Starlight (Part III of IV), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1970

  Starlight (Conclusion), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1970

  Status Symbol, Intuit, September 1987

  Stuck with It, Stellar 2, February 1976

  Sunspot, Analog Science Fact -> Fiction, November 1960

  T

  Technical Error, Astounding Science Fiction, January 1944

  Trojan Fall, Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944

  U

  Uncommon Sense, Astounding Science Fiction, September 1945

  Under, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 2000

  FICTION SERIES

  [N] = Novel

  [SER] = Serial

  [SF] = Short Story/Novelette

  Mesklin

  Mission of Gravity [SER]

  Close to Critical [SER]

  Star Light [SER]

  Lecture Demonstration [SF]

  Under [SF]

  Needle

  Needle [SER]

  Through the Eye of a Needle [N]

  Sortie

  Sortie [SF]

  Settlement [SF]

  Seismic Sidetrack [SF]

  Simile [SF]

  1942

  PROOF

  It’s a little hard for us to realize, but the fact is that the condition we know as “solid” matter is a freak, an abnormality that, practically speaking, doesn’t exist in the universe . . .

  Kron held his huge freighter motionless, feeling forward for outside contact. The tremendous interplay of magnetic and electrostatic fields just beyond the city’s edge was as clearly perceptible to his senses as the city itself—a mile-wide disk ringed with conical field towers, stretching away behind and to each side. The ship was poised between two of the towers; immediately behind it was the field from which Kron had just taken off. The area was covered with cradles of various forms—cup-shaped receptacles which held city craft like Kron’s own; long, boat-shaped hollows wherein reposed the cigarlike vessels which plied between the cities; and towering skeleton frameworks which held upright the slender double cones that hurtled across the dark, lifeless regions between stars.

  Beyond the landing field was the city proper; the surface of the disk was covered with geometrically shaped buildings—cones, cylinders, prisms, and hemispheres, jumbled together.

  Kron could “see” all this as easily as a human being in an airplane can see New York; but no human eyes could have perceived this city, even if a man could have existed anywhere near it. The city, buildings and all, glowed a savage, white heat; and about and beyond it—a part of it, to human eyes—raged the equally dazzling, incandescent gases of the solar photosphere.

  The freighter was preparing to launch itself into that fiery ocean; Kron was watching the play of the artificial reaction fields that supported the city, preparatory to plunging through them at a safe moment.

  There was considerable risk of being flattened against the edge of the disk if an inauspicious choice was made, but Kron was an experienced flier, and slipped past the barrier with a sudden, hurtling acceleration that would have pulped any body of flesh and bone. The outer fringe of the field flung the globe sharply downward; then it was free, and the city was dwindling above them.

  Kron and four others remained at their posts; the rest of the crew of thirty relaxed, their spherical bodies lying passive in the cuplike rests distributed through the ship, bathing in the fierce radiance on which those bodies fed, and which was continually streaming from a three-inch spheroid at the center of the craft. That an artificial source of energy should be needed in such an environment may seem strange, but to these creatures the outer layers of the Sun were far more inhospitable to life than is the stratosphere of Earth to human beings.

  They had evolved far down near the solar core, where pressures and temperatures were such that matter existed in the “collapsed” state characteristic of the entire mass of white dwarf stars. Their bodies were simply constructed: a matrix of close-packed electrons—really an unimaginably dense electrostatic field, possessing quasi-solid properties—surrounded a core of neutrons, compacted to the ultimate degree. Radiation of sufficient energy, falling on the “skin,” was stabilized, altered to the pattern and structure of neutrons; the tiny particles of neutronium which resulted were borne along a circulatory system—of magnetic fields, instead of blood—to the nucleus, where it was stored.

  The race had evolved to the point where no material appendages were needed. Projected beams and fields of force were their limbs, powered by the annihilation of some of their own neutron substance. Their strange senses gave them awareness not only of electromagnetic radiation, permitting them to “see” in a more or less normal fashion, but also of energies still undreamed of by human scientists. Kron, hundreds of miles below the city now, was still
dimly aware of its location, though radio waves, light and gamma rays were all hopelessly fogged in the clouds of free electrons. At his goal, far down in the solar interior, “seeing” conditions would be worse—anything more than a few hundred yards distant would be quite indetectable even to him.

  Poised beside Kron, near the center of the spheroidal sunship, was another being. Its body was ovoid in shape, like that of the Solarian, but longer and narrower, while the ends were tipped with pyramidal structures of neutronium, which projected through the “skin.” A second, fainter static aura enveloped the creature outside the principal surface; and as the crew relaxed in their cups, a beam of energy from this envelope impinged on Kron’s body. It carried a meaning, transmitting a clear thought from one being to the other.

  “I still find difficulty in believing my senses,” stated the stranger. “My own worlds revolve about another which is somewhat similar to this; but such a vast and tenuous atmosphere is most unlike conditions at home. Have you ever been away from Sol?”

  “Yes,” replied Kron, “I was once on the crew of an interstellar projectile. I have never seen your star, however; my acquaintance with it is entirely through hearsay. I am told it consists almost entirely of collapsed matter, like the core of our own; but there is practically no atmosphere. Can this be so? I should think, at the temperature necessary for life, gases would break free of the core and form an envelope.”

  “They tend to do so, of course,” returned the other, “but our surface gravity is immeasurably greater than anything you have here; even your core pull is less, since it is much less dense than our star. Only the fact that our worlds are small, thus causing a rapid diminution of gravity as one leaves them, makes it possible to get a ship away from them at all; atoms, with only their original velocities, remain within a few miles of the surface.

  “But you remind me of my purpose on this world—to check certain points of a new theory concerning the possible behavior of aggregations of normal atoms. That was why I arranged a trip on your flier; I have to make density, pressure, temperature, and a dozen other kinds of measurements at a couple of thousand different levels, in your atmosphere. While I’m doing it, would you mind telling me why you make these regular trips—and why, for that matter, you live so far above your natural level? I should think you would find life easier below, since there would be no need to remain in sealed buildings, or to expend such a terrific amount of power in supporting your cities.”

  Kron’s answer was slow.

  “We make the journeys to obtain neutronium. It is impossible to convert enough power from the immediate neighborhood of the cities to support them; we must descend periodically for more, even though our converters take so much as to lower the solar temperature considerably for thousands of miles around each city.

  “The trips are dangerous—you should have been told that. We carry a crew of thirty, when two would be enough to man this ship, for we must fight, as well as fly. You spoke truly when you said that the lower regions of Sol are our natural home; but for aeons we have not dared to make more than fleeting visits, to steal the power which is life to us.

  “Your little worlds have been almost completely subjugated by your people, Sirian; they never had life forms sufficiently powerful to threaten seriously your domination. But Sol, whose core alone is far larger than the Sirius B pair, did develop such creatures. Some are vast, stupid, slow-moving, or immobile; others are semi-intelligent and rapid movers; all are more than willing to ingest the ready-compacted neutronium of another living being.”

  Kron’s tale was interrupted for a moment, as the Sirian sent a ray probing out through the ship’s wall, testing the physical state of the inferno beyond. A record was made, and the Solarian resumed.

  “We, according to logical theory, were once just such a race—of small intelligence, seeking the needs of life among a horde of competing organisms. Our greatest enemy was a being much like ourselves in size and power—just slightly superior in both ways. We were somewhat ahead in intelligence, and I suppose we owe them some thanks—without the competition they provided, we should not have been forced to develop our minds to their present level. We learned to cooperate in fighting them, and from that came the discovery that many of us together could handle natural forces that a single individual could not even approach, and survive. The creation of force effects that had no counterpart in nature was the next step; and, with the understanding of them, our science grew.

  “The first cities were of neutronium, like those of today, but it was necessary to stabilize the neutrons with fields of energy; at core temperature, as you know, neutronium is a gas. The cities were spherical and much smaller than our present ones. For a long time, we managed to defend them.

  “But our enemies evolved, too; not in intelligence, but in power and fecundity. With overspecialization of their physical powers, their mentalities actually degenerated; they became little more than highly organized machines, driven, by an age-old enmity toward our race, to seek us out and destroy us. Their new powers at last enabled them to neutralize, by brute force, the fields which held our cities in shape; and then it was that, from necessity, we fled to the wild, inhospitable upper regions of Sol’s atmosphere. Many cities were destroyed by the enemy before a means of supporting them was devised; many more fell victims to forces which we generated, without being able to control, in the effort. The dangers of our present-day trips seem trivial beside those our ancestors braved, in spite of the fact that ships not infrequently fail to return from their flights. Does that answer your question?”

  The Sirian’s reply was hesitant. “I guess it does. You of Sol must have developed far more rapidly than we, under that drive; your science, I know, is superior to ours in certain ways, although it was my race which first developed space flight.”

  “You had greater opportunities in that line,” returned Kron. “Two small stars, less than a diameter apart, circling a larger one at a distance incomparably smaller than the usual interstellar interval, provided perfect ground for experimental flights; between your world and mine, even radiation requires some one hundred and thirty rotations to make the journey, and even the nearest other star is almost half as far.

  “But enough of this—history is considered by too many to be a dry subject. What brings you on a trip with a power flier? You certainly have not learned anything yet which you could not have been told in the city.”

  During the conversation, the Sirian had periodically tested the atmosphere beyond the hull. He spoke, rather absently, as though concentrating on something other than his words.

  “I would not be too sure of that, Solarian. My measurements are of greater delicacy than we have ever before achieved. I am looking for a very special effect, to substantiate or disprove an hypothesis which I have recently advanced—much to the detriment of my prestige. If you are interested, I might explain: laugh afterward if you care to—you will not be the first.

  “The theory is simplicity itself. It has occurred to me that matter—ordinary substances like iron and calcium—might actually take on solid form, like neutronium, under the proper conditions. The normal gas, you know, consists of minute particles traveling with considerable speed in all directions. There seems to be no way of telling whether or not these atoms exert appreciable forces on each other; but it seems to me that if they were brought closely enough together, or slowed down sufficiently, some such effects might be detected.”

  “How, and why?” asked Kron. “If the forces are there, why should they not be detectable under ordinary conditions?”

  “Tiny changes in velocity due to mutual attraction or repulsion would scarcely be noticed when the atomic speeds are of the order of hundreds of kilometers per second,” returned the Sirian. “The effects I seek to detect are of a different nature. Consider, please. We know the sizes of the various atoms, from their radiations. We also know that, under normal conditions, a given mass of any particular gas fills a certain volume. If, however, we surro
und this gas with an impenetrable container and exert pressure, that volume decreases. We would expect that decrease to be proportional to the pressure, except for an easily determined constant due to the size of the atoms, if no interatomic forces existed; to detect such forces, I am making a complete series of pressure-density tests, more delicate than any heretofore, from the level of your cities down to the neutron core of your world.

  “If we could reduce the kinetic energy of the atoms—slow down their motions of translation—the task would probably be simpler; but I see no way to accomplish that. Perhaps, if we could negate nearly all of that energy, the interatomic forces would actually hold the atoms in definite relative positions, approximating the solid state. It was that somewhat injudicious and perhaps too imaginative suggestion which caused my whole idea to be ridiculed on Sirius.”

  The ship dropped several hundred miles in the few seconds before Kron answered; since gaseous friction is independent of change in density, the high pressures of the regions being penetrated would be no bar to high speed of flight. Unfortunately, the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature; and at the lower levels of the sun, travel would be slow.

  “Whether or not our scientists will listen to you, I cannot say,” said Kron finally. “Some of them are a rather imaginative crowd, I guess, and none of them will ignore any data you may produce.

  “I do not laugh, either. My reason will certainly interest you, as your theory intrigues me. It is the first time anyone has accounted even partly for the things that happened to us on one of my flights.”

  The other members of the crew shifted slightly on their cradles; a ripple of interest passed through them, for all had heard rumors and vague tales of Kron’s time in the space carrier fleets. The Sirian settled himself more comfortably; Kron dimmed the central globe of radiance a trifle, for the outside temperature was now considerably higher, and began the tale.

  “This happened toward the end of my career in space. I had made many voyages with the merchant and passenger vessels, had been promoted from the lowest ranks, through many rotations, to the post of independent captain. I had my own cruiser—a special long-period explorer, owned by the Solarian government. She was shaped like our modern interstellar carriers, consisting of two cones, bases together, with the field ring just forward of their meeting point. She was larger than most, being designed to carry fuel for exceptionally long flights.