The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to quote excerpts from their publications:

Street & Smith Publications, Inc., New York, for the story “The Inspector’s Teeth”, published in Astounding Science-Fiction for April, 1950.

Standard Magazines, Inc., New York, for the story “Summer Wear”, published in Startling Stories for May, 1950, and republished in Bleiler’s and Dikty’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1951 (N.Y.: Frederick Fell, 1951).

Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for the story “Finished”, published in Astounding Science-Fiction for November, 1949.

Columbia Publications, Inc., New York, for the story “The Galton Whistle”, published in Future Combined with Science Fiction for July, 1951, as “Ultrasonic God.”

Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for the story “The Animal-Cracker Plot,” published in Astounding Science-Fiction for July, 1949.

Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for the story “Git Along!”, published in Astounding Science-Fiction for August, 1950, and republished in August Derleth’s The Outer Reaches (N.Y.: Pellagrini & Cudahy, 1951).

Columbia Publications, Inc., for the story “Perpetual Motion”, published in Future Combined with Science Fiction for August, 1950, as “Wide-Open Planet.”

Standard Magazines, Inc., for the story “The Continent Makers”, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories for April, 1951.

IN RE SPRAGUE

On June 6, 1939, I dropped in at the office of Mr. John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of
Astounding Science-Fiction,
to ask whether he had come to a decision about a story of mine which I had submitted a week earlier. He had, and handed back the manuscript to prove it. For once, however, a rejection threw me into something less than the usual delirium of despair because he simultaneously introduced me to a tall, thinnish chap who was in the office with him.

He said, “This is L. Sprague de Camp.”

I fell into an awe-struck silence that persisted until Sprague left, surrounded, in my eyes, by that gold-dust aura an established writer has for the unsuccessful novice. Make no mistake, Sprague is an impressive fellow for anyone to meet suddenly. Tall and, at that time, thinnish; a thin, square-jawed face; dark hair and eyes; a snappy, military mustache; and dark, luxurious eyebrows that can only be described as formidable. He looked like the younger son of a British peer. At the time, he frightened me silly.

(By a queer coincidence, Catherine de Camp, his wife, looks like the younger daughter of a British peer. I have long considered her the most beautiful blonde in science-fiction. I can say this safely as my own wife is a decided brunette.)

Thirteen years have passed and Sprague has not aged appreciably except that he is not quite as thin as he used to be. (Still, he hasn’t gained anywhere near the weight
I
have. Let’s be fair.) My early awe and fright have long since given way to feelings of the liveliest affection for a nice guy who happens to struggle under the disadvantage of an aristocratic cast of countenance.

Sprague, despite his cool, self-confident appearance, is essentially shy. People meet him once, combine his eyebrows, mustache and shy silence in their own minds, and walk away with the impression of having met a cold personality. Not so! Underneath the cool exterior there is a friendly and affectionate nature, even, on occasion, a demonstratively affectionate nature. I have seen Sprague run madly across a large and crowded hotel room to hug a friend he had not seen in some months.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Sprague de Camp is the amount of quaint and miscellaneous lore he has crammed within his head.

He is a historian of almost anything you can think of. It can be the Atlantis myth or magic and witchcraft; the abortive industrial age of Hellenistic times or Ostrogothic Italy; naval armament or hoaxes;—he can write entertainingly and authoritatively on any of them. I’m not just saying that. I can prove it. He
has
written entertainingly and authoritatively on all of them.

And this knowledge is not dry bones. He can give it out clothed with verve and life in speech as well as in writing. The enthusiasm with which he will hold forth on odd subjects conquers even his shyness.

I was part of an admiring audience once who heard Sprague give the details of a battle between Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria; the only battle, he explained, in which one side used Indian elephants and the other, African. In colorful detail, he described the causes of the war, the events leading to the battle, the battle itself. He was by turns an Egyptian spearman and a Syrian mahout. Sometimes he was an elephant. He leaped about vigorously, wielding an imaginary spear (a large, heavy imaginary spear) as he spoke. When he finished, he was breathless and so were we—he from exertion; we from laughter.

Sprague has written serious books on naval armaments, patent law, and myths and legends. He is a linguist and a phonetician and has contributed serious articles on phonetics to weighty journals in the field.

Let’s sum it up this way: Sprague can talk all evening on any subject you can name, without boring you.

It is too easy to get the idea, listening to Sprague, that he was born, somehow, knowing all these things or, at the most, had picked them up by walking rapidly through the reference section of the New York Public Library, flipping the pages of books as he went by.

No, sir! I was disillusioned on that score a couple of years ago when I spent a few days at his home. I was bedded down in his study and the morning after the first night, being an early riser, I poked through such of his papers as he had not wisely put under lock and key.

I found a stack of books on “Daily Life in Ancient Athens”, “Walks on the Acropolis”, “I Fought at Marathon”, “Why Persia Must be Destroyed” and so on. (Those are not the exact titles.) I found maps of ancient Greece, large and small. I found a graph of lifetimes of famous Athenians which would indicate which of them were alive in any given year and whether they were children, adults, or old men at the time.

I tackled him when he woke up. I pointed to the paraphernalia. I demanded an explanation. It turned out that he was writing “The Glory That Was.” The setting was to be in ancient Athens, and, by Zeus, it was going to be accurate.

There is no doubt but that Sprague is the greatest stickler for minutiae in science-fiction and invests the most time and energy per story. And there’s a return on the investment in that air of reality he gets into his stories; that extra grip upon your imagination.

I recall the time when his novel, “Lest Darkness Fall”, first appeared in
Unknown.
It was a Connecticut Yankee type of story in which a modern American found himself in the Italy of Cassiodorus and Belisarius (early sixth century, A.D.). I bought the magazine the day before I was due to take a final examination in physical chemistry. For reasons we need not go into here, I had to pass physical chemistry with a B or better to keep my academic career alive. For additional reasons we need not go into, I had grave doubts as to my ability to do this.

I sat down, in no very happy frame of mind, to study. To cheer myself up, since I reasoned that no man can study efficiently when in a state of depression, I decided to read just the tiniest little bit of “Lest Darkness Fall” before I opened my text. You guess the results? It was inevitable. You don’t read a “little bit” of a de Camp novel. I finished the yarn at a sitting and I never did get around to studying.

Nor was I sorry. The story was tabbed “fantasy” but it was the best historical novel I had ever read. It still is. Furthermore, its excellence so cheered me up that I took the finals next day in stride and got an A in the course. I would love to recommend Sprague as a mental stimulant for all readers shaky in their college courses, but maybe I had better not. All I can say is that it seems to work on me.

My only complaint is that Sprague limits himself by his own damned conscientiousness. Take the
Viagens Interplanetarias
stories which compose this book.
(Viagens Interplanetarias,
by the way, means “interplanetary tours” in Portuguese. At the time interstellar travel is developed, Sprague supposes Brazil to be the dominant power on Earth, as it well may be some day. In that case, of course, Portuguese would be the dominant language of the spaceways.) In this series, Sprague’s interstellar travel takes place in Earth’s backyard, so to speak; among stars, that is, within a reasonable number of light-years from the sun. Further, his concept of interstellar travel has queer effects on the subjective passage of time. This makes the stories harder to write.

I once asked him why he did this and he explained that since travel faster than the speed of light was impossible, it would take far too long to reach the really distant stars. I pointed out that if he used “hyper-space” as most writers did, that wouldn’t matter. (Hyperspace is a mythical term among s.f. writers and can be used in a vague and foggy way to excuse any speeds up to infinity.) Sprague said he didn’t believe in hyperspace. I said neither did I but I used it. He just put his pipe in his mouth and shook his head. “If I don’t believe a thing is possible,” he said, “I don’t use it.”

God knows how many stories he could write, but won’t—on principle. That’s Sprague.

But Sprague needs no one to teach him better habits. He has been among the top few in his profession for fifteen years now. He sells regularly and will continue to do so, I am sure, while he lives and while editors are sane. He has been repeatedly anthologized. In fact, two of the stories included here, “Summer Wear” and “Git Along!”, have been previously anthologized, but here they are at last where they belong—with the other tales of the Viagens. They make fine re-reading for themselves, but you will find them even richer in the context of the other tales.

But if what I am saying here has any meaning at all, you should be impatient to be off with me and on with Sprague. Perhaps you’ve already passed on to the book itself. If you have, I certainly can’t blame you. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Go ahead, turn the page

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When men attained interstellar travel in the early twenty-first century, they named the planets of other stars after gods of various Terran pantheons, following the analogy of their own system. Tau Ceti, a K-type star like Sol but dimmer and yellower, had its planets named for Hindu gods, the three inhabited planets of the group (reading from the star outward) becoming Vishnu, Krishna, and Ganesha, respectively. Krishna has a climate much like that of Earth; it is larger, but less dense, so that its surface-gravity is a little less though atmospheric pressure is a little greater. It is drier and smoother than Earth, having no true oceans but a lot of small seas; hence its land area is several times Earth’s.

The planet Vishnu, closer to Tau Ceti than Krishna, is hotter than Krishna, though not too hot for unprotected human beings. Osiris, Isis, and Thoth are inhabited planets of the star Procyon (Osiris having the most Earthlike surface conditions) while Thor is a planet of Epsilon Eridani.

As a result of the Third World War, the United States was reduced to a second-class power and the U.S.S.R. ceased to be a power at all. World leadership was taken over by fast-growing Brazil. Hence most early spatial exploration was done by Brazilians, and the government-owned space-transport system, the Viagens Interplanetarias, was largely Brazilian in control and personnel. The word
Viagens
rhymes roughly with “Leah paints”, with
g
as in “rouge”:
vee-
uh-
zhainhs.

Don’t worry about pronunciation of Krishnan names, because such is the multitude of languages and dialects that almost any guess will be right in one or another. The symbols:
’
,
q,
and
gh
stand for (a) a glottal stop or plosive (a cough); (b) a guttural variety of
k
; and (c) a uvular roll like French
r.
If you’re no linguist, ignore the first and pronounce the second and third as ordinary
k
and
g.
The letter
á
stands for
ah
, and final
é
for
eh
or
ay
. Samples: “Qarao” rhymes with “allow”, “Laiján” with “by John”, “Zerdai” with “hair-dye”, “dour” with “slower”, and “Balhib” with “Al Grebe”. “Castanhoso” is about “cas-
tahn
-yo-soo”; “Katai-Jhogorai”, “cat-eye jug-o’-rye”.

—L. Sprague de Camp