For now the wall of rock was only fifty miles away, and each time he spun helplessly in space it came ten miles closer. There was no room for optimism now, as he sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier. This was the end, and suddenly it became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned, like a coward.
No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. Now he was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled, the path that should have led to Earth. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him.
And then the moonscape exploded into silent flame. A light as fierce as that of the Sun banished the long shadows struck fire from the peaks and craters spread below. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, and had faded completely before he had turned toward its source.
Directly ahead of him, only twenty miles away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted in the Soviet Range—but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought—that by some fantastic feat of organization and logistics the Farside Engineering Division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.
For it was gone. A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five seconds ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.
He had made another complete revolution and was almost upon the mountains when he remembered that all this while there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule—a thousand tons, traveling at over a mile a second— was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he was now racing. The impact of the man-made meteor must have jolted the whole of Farside.
His luck held to the very end. There was a brief pitter-patter of dust particles against his suit, and he caught a blurred glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke clouds flashing beneath him. (How strange to see a cloud upon the Moon!) Then he was through the mountains, with nothing ahead but blessed, empty sky.
Somewhere up there, an hour in the future along his second orbit, Callisto would be moving to meet him. But there was no hurry now; he had escaped from the maelstrom. For better or for worse, he had been granted the gift of life.
There was the launching track, a few miles to the right of his path; it looked like a hairline scribed across the face of the Moon. In a few moments he would be within radio range; now, with thankfulness and joy, he could make that second call to Earth, to the woman who was still waiting in the African night.
Anyone who does not know by now that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick are collaborating on a novel and movie to be called 2001: A Space Odyssey (and completed well before that date, one assumes) has not been reading his London Sunday Times Magazine— or his New York Sunday Times Magazine, or Life, or these Annuals— or probably much of anything else. The news has grown from a trickle to a flood over the past year; it is even barely possible that the novel, at least, will be published before this book.
Well, we assume it is worth waiting for: Kubrick-and-Clarke can’t be all bad. In fact, things seem to be picking up in s-f movies, I have not seen The 10th Victim, but if the film compares to Sheckley’s “novelization” (of the movie made from his own story), it is good nervous fun. I have seen a preview of Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity, which has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with Einstein, and everything to do with S (for society, sex, sanity, science, speculation, surrealism, symbolism) F (for fantasy, fact, feelings, fluidity, and first-rate fotografy).
The situation in television is, perhaps, faintly promising. As I write, the offerings are primarily fantasy: I Dream of Jeannie, Stuart Little. Batman is not exactly fantasy—maybe the good old invidious term, “pseudoscience”? But ABC has announced a show called Time Tunnel, and is considering another. The Invaders, both of which are supposed to be bona-fide science fiction. Meantime from England comes word of a BBC-2 series initiated last fall under Producer Irene Shubik, which has done some acceptable, if not exciting, dramatizations of stories by such people as Asimov, Brunner, Pohl, Tenn, and Wyndham. And the late news is that Rattray Taylor, who has been responsible for some first-rate features and documentaries, will produce The World of J. G. Ballard.
On stage, of course, symbolism is the thing. Albee and Pinter and the New York production of Marat/Sade all veer continually into fantasy—but not often over the (shifting and frequently invisible) line into s-f. Closer to home were Durrenmatt’s The Physicists (now in print here, from Grove Press) and Loring Mandel’s Project Immortality, which saw only a two-week experimental production at Washington’s Arena Theatre in 1965, but will, hopefully, be more widely known by the time this is published.
And then of course there is Ubu Roi, by that spectacular scatologist, surrealist, speculative philosopher, and pataphysical scientist Alfred Jarry. Ubu is in.
Less well known is the “neo-scientific novel” Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician, written a full seventy years ago and first published posthumously (in France) in 1911, now in print in English for the first time.
To call Faustroll a novel is rather like referring to a Mariner space probe as a flying machine. The term is applicable, but a great deal less than adequate. Faustroll is a novel, and a rather old-fashioned one, as far as plot is concerned: The learned doctor, dunned for debts, escapes prison by luring the drink-loving bailiff, Panmuphle, into a Marvelous Invention (a copper-mesh skiff—perhaps the first amphibious vessel), in which, with the added company of the doctor’s friend (or familiar), the talking baboon Bosse-de-Nage, a Wonderful Voyage is conducted. After many strange adventures and exotic sights, including a holocaust in which Bosse-de-Nage dies (“provisionally”), the sieve-boat founders, and Panmuphle, the narrator up to this point, disappears (presumably, unprovisionally, dead). Faustroll takes up the (prophetically posthumous?) narrative in the last section (Book VIII, subtitled, Ethernity), from which the first two chapters are reprinted below.
(In the Selected Works, editors Ralph Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, supply footnotes and introductory explanations which I shall not include here, beyond commenting that the cosmological, physical, and metaphysical arguments advanced are in specific reply/parody to/of several essays and addresses of Lord Kelvin, then recently published; that the names mentioned are those of scientists of the time, mentioned in Kelvin’s works; and that “the measuring rod, the watch, the tuning fork, the luminiferous ether, the rotating flywheels and linked gyrostats,” as well as the Scottish shoemaker’s wax, the squares, pyramids, screws, and paddles, plus the reference to the sun as a “cool solid,” and the final reference to an optics phenomenon known as “Haidinger’s Brushes” are all lifted straight from Kelvin.)