Infinity One (2 page)

Any physical activity from walking to playing football will require bodily maneuvering that will be perfected only after considerable practice. This is so, particularly, since although weight decreases, the mass of an object (the amount of matter it contains—which determines the difficulty of setting it into motion and getting it to stop) isn’t changed. A medicine ball may weigh no more on the Moon than a football does on the Earth, but the medicine ball there will not at all be manipulated as easily as a football here. Its great mass will make the ball just as hard to throw on the Moon as on the Earth.

Eventually, games of “moon-ball” will have their own practitioners and their own expertise, their own rules and strategies and excitements. The “World Series on the Moon” between teams from underground stations at Tycho and Copernicus may well be followed avidly on Earth.

There will be mountain-climbing on the Moon, too, less dangerous and difficult—and therefore more nearly a mass sport in potentiality—than on the Earth. This is not a paradox. The mountain slopes on the Moon are gentle and the weak gravity is easy to overcome in the upward climb. Nor do the conditions on the mountain tops grow difficult. They are airless but so are the valleys.

On the other hand, if the mountain slopes are sandy enough, the weak gravity will make them quite slippery (the smaller the force pulling you down against the surface, the less the friction). There is already intimation that such might be the case, from the experiences of the Apollo 11 crew. Men, using flat-bottomed canes for support and balance, may go sliding down a mountain slope with all the effect of skiing, and do so (despite the necessity for spacesuits and oxygen cylinders) in greater safety than on Earth.

Lunar skiing may yet be the Moon’s most popular sport in its early history as a human settlement.

But what about a world of no gravity at all? What about artificial space-stations built in orbit about the Earth?

The purposes of such space-stations will surely be purely scientific and astronautic (a discussion of militarism has no place in an examination of the fun aspects of human living) at first, but by the time the Moon has become a tourists’ paradise (and perhaps a little “spoiled”) surely some space station will be hanging in the Earth’s sky that will have been built primarily for recreation.

It will have to be built outside the main regions of the Van Allen belts, and once placed in a nearly circular orbit out there, it will remain indefinitely circling Earth—for millions of years, if not struck by a sizable meteor.

Such a pleasure-satellite might have many of the ordinary pleasures of Earth and wine-women-and song there may be essentially the same as that trio down here.

It will also have pleasures that cannot possibly be duplicated on Earth—or even on the Moon. For instance, what about space-walking? For people who like the “wide, open spaces,” what can possibly be more wide and more open than space itself? One could have a small reaction motor for maneuvering and one would have to be careful to remain in the satellite’s shadow (or, preferably, to choose space-walking time when the satellite was in Earth’s shadow).

Then, for those who like it, there may he nothing quite like a few hours spent in the awful emptiness and silence of the void, when a man can really be alone with his thoughts and when he can look at the Earth’s swollen body, at the Moon’s more distant shape, and at the quiet stars.

You might imagine that our space-walker can indulge in acrobatics, but if he does he will not be conscious of them. It will be the rest of the universe that will seem to jump about and he himself may merely become dizzy.

For acrobatics, I suggest another recreation that can probably be found only on our space-station. Why not a large empty cavernous room somewhere in the station, filled with air—possibly under pressure, to make it denser.

A man’s arms can then be outfitted with “wings” for maneuvering and he can launch himself into space. The sensation of air about him will give him the feeling of movements he could not have had in empty space, and his wings will give him a personal control of his maneuvering far more delicate than would be possible by means of a reaction motor.

In short, he would be flying under his own power and, with sufficient practice, he could gain the proficiency of a bird on Earth. There would be others using the “fly-room” at the same time and a whole new spectrum of fun and games would become possible.

How about three-dimensional square-dancing? Why not have two couples do-si-do-ing at right angles to each other—one couple does it right-to-left-to-right; the other up-to-down-to-up. Would this not be “cube-dancing?”

But is nothing left for us Earth-lubbers down here? Are the new excitements to be found only in sea and space?

Not at all! The greatest new world of all lies within ourselves. There are mental recreations as well as physical ones.

Consider chess—an endlessly fascinating game which involves not the muscles but the mind. It is at present of limited interest because only a few people have the temperament and ability to make worthwhile chess players.

That can also be said about baseball, yet baseball is popular because millions, who could not play except in the most amateurish fashion, are willing to spend hours upon hours in watching professionals. I understand there are people in the Soviet Union and elsewhere who will similarly stand and watch large chess-boards on which the moves of grand-master tournaments are displayed but this can never grow as popular a spectator sport as such games as baseball or soccer.

The trouble is that where ball games are fast and simple, chess is slow and subtle. But computers can play chess, too. Even as I write, a computer at Stanford University is playing another at the Institute of Experimental and Theoretical Physics in Moscow.

Computers are pretty poor chess players at present, but they will improve. Perhaps the day will come when computers will play chess at great speed and men will watch large reproductions of the swiftly changing patterns on chess-boards with interest and absorption. Great games can be repeated in “slow motion” and analyzed. We could become a nation of chess-watchers.

And why just chess? New games can be invented— deliberately complicated ones with tantalizing rules that would be far too difficult to serve as efficient recreation for men, but which could tickle the fancies of computers -three-dimensional chess, for one thing.

To be sure, computers can’t play by themselves. They have to be programmed by men; the rules of the game must be fed into them together with a description of desirable courses of action. Computers may start as fifth-rate players indeed, but if they are programmed to modify their play in accord with experience, they can improve just as humans do. Computers may even become more proficient than any human being at some game in wliich they are designed to specialize.

We may eventually have a whole family of computer-games to serve mankind.

You might ask if this is indeed the sort of thing to which one ought to apply computers and programmers, and the answer is a clear and loud, “Yes!” In the first place, what is wrong with entertaining human beings? Man must be amused as well as fed, or in what way is he different from an ox?

Then, too, computer games will serve a purpose. We call them “games” but any decent game has an underlying order and pattern which, when properly studied, can serve as contributions to mathematics.
To
program a computer to play chess is a way of testing mathematical techniques that can then be applied to more serious problems. And programmers who whet their mathematical fangs on chess will find them all the sharper in other directions.

Horse-racing “improves the breed,” they say. Game-programming will improve the breed of computer and programmers alike.

But even the computer is an artifact. What about man’s mind itself?

It may even be that the actual powers of the human mind itself will be intensified (with or without any enhancement by mechanical device) so that men may finally learn to be telepaths. Some more so than others, of course.

Who can imagine what fun it might be to think to one another rather than to talk? What wonders of the human spirit may emerge when each individual is no longer imprisoned by a wall of flesh, but can commune directly with others?

It may be, in fact, that this is the ultimate pleasure and recreation, the purpose toward which all of intelligent life has been tending since the beginning. The delight of direct communion may be such as to sink all other pleasures to nothing.

It may even be that, just as I sit here now trying to imagine the pleasures of the future, some centuries hence another man may sit and try to reconstruct, in sorrow and sympathy, the miseries of a past in which billions of human beings wandered lonely, seeking in the wildest physical and mental activities that pleasure which could only be obtained through the touch of the mental tendrils of a loved one.

It may be . . . but many things may be. I’ve tried to give some ideas of what the pleasures of tomorrow may be. In the following pages, my fellow compatriots examine other aspects of the future. For the future at present belongs to the realm of science fiction. And until the marvels of tomorrow actually arrive, we’ll have to settle for a vicarious look at possible and probable futures.

Telepathy may be for the future; science fiction is for today.

Sixty years ago, Hugo Gernsback coined the word
television
in his novel,
Ralph 124C41+.

Forty years ago, the first experiments in the transmission of television pictures were carried out. There were less than fifty receiving sets in existence.

Thirty years ago, the first commercial broadcasts were made, during the New York World’s Fair of 1939; programming was limited to two hours a day, and there were several thousand receivers in the New York area.

Twenty-two years ago, the first inter-city network was formed when stations in New York and Washington, D.C. were joined together.

1969 saw the first live transmission from the Moon!

From fictional conception to experiment to commercial realization took less than forty years; from coinage as a word to today less than the lifespan of a man. Hugo Gemsback died just a few years ago; he lived to see a world that depended on the living horse break into the age of space. Gemsback’s novel, unreadable by today’s standards, was a utopian story of the far future, several hundred years hence, when man’s problems were solved through the miracle of science. Yet even in his wildest dreaming, he failed to realize the immediate effect science would have on his own century.

Still, even considering his failures in societal and gadgetry extrapolation, Gernsback opened a window to the future, encouraged a generation of readers to think beyond today and the possible, to tomorrow and the improbable. And this is the role that science fiction still plays today. In Gemsback’s time, and during the next forty years, s-f was considered the poor relation of adventure fiction, the province of the wild-eyed and wooly-headed dreamer. Today, the genre has proven itself, and earned a place of respect. Tomorrow ... no matter what the general view of it as genre: category, science fiction will still be the opener of the door to the future for another generation. And from that generation will come the men who will invent...

What strange and wondrous devices will they invent? I don’t know. Possibly something that has already been described in a story of today, but now considered impossible.

Something as simple as television ...

—Robert Hoskins

Robert Silverberg is a man of many talents: biographer, anthologist, novelist, popularizer of science ... and author of some of the most compelling and disturbing science fiction being written today. Happily for we as readers, he is a man yet young enough that we can look forward to many years of producing stories such as
. ..

He was the only man aboard the ship, one man inside a sleek shining cylinder heading away from Bradley’s World at ten thousand miles a second, and yet he was far from alone. He had wife, father, daughter, son for company, and plenty of others: Ovid and Hemingway and Plato, Shakespeare and Goethe, Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great; a stack of fancy cubes to go with the family ones. And his old friend Juan was along, too, the man who had shared his dream, his utopian fantasy, Juan who had been with him at the beginning and almost until the end. He had a dozen fellow voyagers in all. He wouldn’t be lonely, though he had three years of solitary travel ahead of him before he reached his landfall, his place of exile.

It was the third hour of his voyage. He was growing calm, now, after the frenzy of his escape. Aboard ship he had showered, changed, rested. The sweat and grime of that wild dash through the safety tunnel were gone now, though he wouldn’t quickly shake from his mind the smell of that passageway, like rotting teeth, nor the memory of his terrifying fumbling with the security gate’s copper arms as the junta’s storm-troopers trotted toward him. But the gate had opened, and the ship had been there: he had escaped, and he was safe. He was safe.

I’ll try some cubes,
he thought.

The receptor slots in the control room held six cubes at once. He picked six at random, slipped them into place, actuated the evoker. Then he went into the ship’s garden. There were screens and speakers all over the ship.

The air was moist and sweet in the garden. A plump, toga-clad man, clean-shaven, big-nosed, blossomed on one screen and said, “What a lovely garden! How I adore plants! You must have a gift for making things grow.” “Everything grows by itself. You’re—”

“Publius Ovidius Naso.”

“Thomas Voigtland. Former President of the Citizens’ Council on Bradley’s World. Now President-in-exile, I guess. A coup d’etat by the military.”

“My sympathies. Tragic, tragic!”

“I was lucky to escape alive. I may never be able to return. They’ve probably got a price on my head.”