Expanded Universe (59 page)

Newton's "Constant" of Gravitation is a decreasing variable. 
Just as I was about to dispatch this hook MS to New York, through the good offices of Dr. Yoji Kondo (astrophysicist NASA Goddard) I received from Dr. Thomas C. Van Flandern a preprint of his latest results. They tend to confirm Dr. Dirac's 1937 prediction even more closely AND ARE BACKED UP BY TWO OTHER APPROACHES; all three show Gravitation as a variable decreasing with time. 
I have just telephoned Dr. Van Flandern. With caution proper to a scientist he does not say that he has "proved" Dr. Dirac's prediction . . . but that data to date support it; no data that he knows of contradict it—and adds that some of his colleagues disagree with him. 
I don't have to be cautious; this man has established the fact beyond any reasonable doubt. Twenty-odd years of endless Lunar data, done by atomic (cesium) clock, electrically-automatically timed occultations of stars, backed by both triangulation and radar ranging, counterchecked by similar work done on the inner planets by other astronomers at other observatories—Certainly he could be wrong . . . and I could be elected President! 
T. C. Van Flandern turns out to be the sort of Renaissance Man Dirac is, but a generation younger (38 years). B.S. mathematics, Xavier, Cincinnati; Ph.D. astronomy, Yale—he has three other disciplines: biochemistry, nutrition, psychiatry. (When does he sleep?) 
Reread that list of sciences affected (p. 397), then batten down the hatches! Dirac has done it again, and the World will never be the same. 
 

August 1940—a back road near Jackson, Michigan—a 1939 Chevrolet sedan:

"Doc" Smith is at the wheel; I am in the righthand seat and trying hard to appear cool, calm, fearless—a credit to the Patrol. Doc has the accelerator floor-boarded . . . but has his head tilted over at ninety degrees so that he can rest his skull against the frame of the open left window—in order to listen by bone conduction for body squeaks.

Were you to attempt this position yourself—car parked and brakes set, by all means; I am not suggesting that you
drive
—you would find that your view of the road ahead is between negligible and zero.

I must note that Doc was
not
wearing his Lens.

This leaves (by Occam's Razor) his sense of perception, his almost superhuman reflexes, and his ability to integrate instantly all available data and act therefrom decisively and correctly.

Sounds a lot like the Gray Lensman, does it not?

It should, as no one more nearly resembled (in character and in ability—not necessarily in appearance) the Gray Lensman than did the good gray doctor who created him.

Doc could do almost anything and do it quickly and well. In this case he was selecting and road-testing for me a secondhand car. After rejecting numberless other cars, he approved this one; I bought it. Note the date: August 1940. We entered World War Two the following year and quit making automobiles. I drove that car for twelve years. When I finally did replace it, the mechanic who took care of it asked to be permitted to buy it rather than have it be turned in on a trade . . . because, after more than thirteen years and hundreds of thousands of miles, it was
still a
good car. Doc Smith had not missed
anything.
 

Its name?
Skylark Five,
of course.

So far as I know, Doc Smith could not play a dulcimer (but it would not surprise me to learn that he had been expert at it). Here are some of the skills I know he possessed:

Chemist & chemical engineer—and anyone who thinks these two professions are one and the same is neither a chemist nor an engineer. (My wife is a chemist and is also an aeronautical engineer—but she is not a chemical engineer. All clear? No? See me after class.)

Metallurgist—an arcane art at the Trojan Point of Black Magic and science.

Photographer—all metallurgists are expert photographers; the converse is not necessarily true.

Lumberjack

Cereal chemist

Cook

Explosives chemist—research, test, & development—product control

Blacksmith

Machinist (tool & diemaker grade)

Carpenter

Hardrock miner—see chapter 14 of
First Lensman
, titled "Mining and Disaster." That chapter was written by a man who had
been
there. And it is a refutation of the silly notion that science fiction does not require knowledge of science. Did I hear someone say that there is no
science
in that chapter? Just a trick vocabulary—trade argot—plus description of some commonplace mechanical work—

So? The science (several sciences!) lies just below the surface of the paper . . . and permeates every word. In some fields I could be fooled, but not in this one. I've been in mining, off and on, for more than forty years.

Or see
Spacehounds of IPC
, chapters 3 & 4, pp. 40–80 . . . and especially p. 52 of the Fantasy Press hardcover edition. Page 52 is almost purely autobiographical in that it tells
why
the male lead, "Steve" Stevens, knows how to fabricate from the wreckage at hand everything necessary to rescue Nadia and himself. I once discussed with Doc these two chapters, in detail; he convinced me that his hero character could do these things by convincing me that he, Edward E. Smith, could do all of them . . . and, being myself an experienced mechanical engineer, it was not possible for him to give me a "snow job." (I think he lacked the circuitry to give a "snow job" in any case; incorruptible honesty was Dr. Smith's prime attribute—with courage to match it.)

What else could he do? He could call square dances. Surely, almost anyone can square-dance . . . but to become a caller takes longer and is much more difficult. When and how he found time for this I do not know—but, since he did everything about three times as fast as ordinary people, there is probably no mystery.

Both Doc and his beautiful Jeannie were endlessly hospitable. I stayed with them once when they had
nine
houseguests. They seemed to enjoy it.

But, above all, Doc Smith was the perfect, gallant knight, sans peur et sans reproche.

And all of the above are reflected in his stories.

It is customary today among self-styled "literary critics" to sneer at Doc's space epics—plot, characterization, dialog, motivations, values, moral attitudes, etc. "Hopelessly old-fashioned" is one of the milder disparagements.

As Al Smith used to say: "Let's take a look at the record."

Edward Elmer Smith was born in 1890, some forty years before the American language started to fall to pieces—long, long before the idiot notion of "restricted vocabulary" infected our schools, a half century before our language was corrupted by the fallacy that popular usage defines grammatical correctness.

In consequence Dr. Smith made full use of his huge vocabulary, preferring always the exact word over a more common but inexact word. He did not hesitate to use complex sentences. His syntactical constructions show that he understood and used with precision the conditional and the subjunctive modes as well as the indicative. He did not split infinitives. The difference between "like" and "as" was not a mystery to him. He limited barbarisms to quoted dialog used in characterization.

("Oh, but that dialog!") In each story Doc's male lead character is a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man who talks exactly like Doc Smith, who was a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man.

In casual conversation Doc used a number of clichés . . . and his male lead characters used the same or similar ones. This is a literary fault? I think not. In casual speech most people tend to repeat each his own idiosyncratic pattern of clichés. Doc's repertory of clichés was quite colorful, especially so when compared with patterns heard today that draw heavily on "The Seven Words That Must Never Be Used in Television." A 7-word vocabulary offers little variety.

("But those embarrassing love scenes!") E. E. Smith's adolescence was during the Mauve Decade; we may assume tentatively that his attitudes toward women were formed mainly in those years. In 1914, a few weeks before the war in Europe started, he met his Jeannie—and I can testify of my own knowledge that, 47 years later (i.e., the last time I saw him before his death) he was still dazzled by the wonderful fact that this glorious creature had consented to spend her life with him.

Do you remember the cultural attitudes toward romantic love during the years before the European War? Too early for you? Never mind, you'll find them throughout Doc Smith's novels. Now we come to the important question. The Lensman novels are laid in the far future. Can you think of any reason why the attitudes between sexes today (ca. 1979) are more likely to prevail in the far future than are attitudes prevailing before 1914?

(I stipulate that there are many other possible patterns. But we are now comparing just these two.)

I suggest that the current pattern is contrasurvival, is necessarily most temporary, and is merely one symptom of the kaleidoscopic and possibly catastrophic rapid change our culture is passing through (or dying from?).

Contrariwise, the pre-1914 values, whatever faults they may have, are firmly anchored in the concept that a male's first duty is to protect women and children.
Pro
survival!

"Ah, but those hackneyed plots!" Yes, indeed!—and for excellent reason: The ideas, the cosmic concepts, the complex and sweeping plots, all were brand new when Doc invented them. But in the past half century dozens of other writers have taken his plots, his concepts, and rung the changes on them. The ink was barely dry on
Skylark of Space
when the imitators started in. They have never stopped—pygmies, standing on the shoulders of a giant.

But all the complaints about "Skylark" Smith's alleged literary faults are as nothing to the (usually unvoiced) major grievance:

Doc Smith did not go along with
any
of the hogwash that passes for a system of social values today.

He believed in Good and Evil. He had no truck with the moral relativism of the neo- (cocktail-party) Freudians.

He refused to concede that "mediocre" is better than "superior."

He had no patience with self-pity.

He did not think that men and women are equal—he would as lief have equated oranges with apples. His stories assumed that men and women are
different,
with different functions, different responsibilities, different duties. Not equal but complementary. Neither complete without the other.

Worse yet, in his greatest and longest story, the 6-volume Lensman novel, he assumes that all humans are
un
equal (and, by implication, that the cult of the common man is pernicious nonsense), and bases his grand epic on the idea that a planned genetic breeding program thousands of years long can (and
must
)
produce a new race superior to
h. sapiens . . . 
supermen who will become the guardians of civilization.

The Lensman novel was left unfinished; there was to have been at least a seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail but never (so far as I know) wrote it down . . . because it was unpublishable—then. But he told me the ending, orally and in private.

I shan't repeat it; it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a manuscript—I
hope
so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in
Children of the Lens
.

So work it out for yourself. The original Gray Lensman left us quite suddenly—urgent business a long way off, no time to spare to tell us more stories.

On 2 July 1979 I received a letter calling me to testify July 19th before a joint session of the House Select Committee on Aging (Honorable Claude Pepper, M.C., Chairman) and the House Committee on Science and Technology (Honorable Don Fuqua, M.C., Chairman)—subject: Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped.

I stared at that letter with all the enthusiasm of a bridegroom handed a summons for jury duty. Space technology? Yeah, sure, I was gung-ho for space technology, space travel, spaceships, space exploration, space colonies—anything about space, always have been.

But "applications of space technology for the elderly and the handicapped"? Why not bee culture? Or Estonian folk dancing? Or the three-toed salamander? Tantric Yoga?

I faced up to the problem the way any married man does: "Honey? How do I get out of this?"

"Come clean," she advised me. "Tell them bluntly that you know nothing about the subject. Shall I write a letter for you to sign?"

"It's not that simple."

"Certainly it is. We don't want to go to Washington.
In July?
Let's not be silly."

"You don't have to go."

"You don't think I'd let you go alone, do you? After the time and trouble I've spent keeping you alive? Then let you drop dead on a Washington sidewalk?
Hmmph!
You go—
I
go."