Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (173 page)

UP SHIP!
is not certainly authentic Rhysling throughout. Much of it is Rhysling’s, no doubt, and
Jet Song
is unquestionably his, but most of the verses were collected after his death from people who had known him during his wanderings.

The Green Hills of Earth
grew through twenty years. The earliest form we know about was composed before Rhysling was blinded, during a drinking bout with some of the indentured men on Venus. The verses were concerned mostly with the things the labor clients intended to do back on Earth if and when they ever managed to pay their bounties and thereby be allowed to go home. Some of the stanzas were vulgar, some were not, but the chorus was recognizably that of
Green Hills.

We know exactly where the final form of
Green Hills
came from, and when.

There was a ship in at Venus Ellis Isle which was scheduled for the direct jump from there to Great Lakes, Illinois. She was the old Falcon, youngest of the Hawk class and the first ship to apply the Harriman Trust’s new policy of extra-fare express service between Earth cities and any colony with scheduled stops.

Rhysling decided to ride her back to Earth. Perhaps his own song had gotten under his skin—or perhaps he just hankered to see his native Ozarks one more time.

The Company no longer permitted deadheads; Rhysling knew this but it never occurred to him that the ruling might apply to him. He was getting old, for a spaceman, and just a little matter of fact about his privileges. Not senile—he simply knew that he was one of the landmarks in space, along with Halley’s Comet, the Rings, and Brewster’s Ridge. He walked in the crew’s port, went below, and made himself at home in the first empty acceleration couch.

The Captain found him there while making a last minute tour of his ship. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Dragging it back to Earth, Captain.” Rhysling needed no eyes to see a skipper’s four stripes.

“You can’t drag in this ship; you know the rules. Shake a leg and get out of here. We raise ship at once.” The Captain was young; he had come up after Rhysling’s active time, but Rhysling knew the type—five years at Harriman Hall with only cadet practice trips instead of solid, deep space experience. The two men did not touch in background nor spirit; space was changing.

“Now, Captain, you wouldn’t begrudge an old man a trip home.”

The officer hesitated—several of the crew had stopped to listen. “I can’t do it. ‘Space Precautionary Act, Clause Six: No one shall enter space save as a licensed member of a crew of a chartered vessel, or as a paying passenger of such a vessel under such regulations as may be issued pursuant to this act.’ Up you get and out you go.”

Rhysling lolled back, his hands under his head. “If I’ve got to go, I’m damned if I’ll walk. Carry me.”

The Captain bit his lip and said, “Master-at-Arms! Have this man removed.”

The ship’s policeman fixed his eyes on the overhead struts. “Can’t rightly do it, Captain. I’ve sprained my shoulder.” The other crew members, present a moment before, had faded into the bulkhead paint.

“Well, get a working party!”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He, too, went away.

Rhysling spoke again. “Now look, Skipper—let’s not have any hard feelings about this. You’ve got an out to carry me if you want to—the ‘Distressed Spaceman’ clause.”

“‘Distressed Spaceman’, my eye! You’re no distressed spaceman; you’re a space-lawyer. I know who you are; you’ve been bumming around the system for years. Well, you won’t do it in my ship. That clause was intended to succor men who had missed their ships, not to let a man drag free all over space.”

“Well, now, Captain, can you properly say I haven’t missed my ship? I’ve never been back home since my last trip as a signed-on crew member. The law says I can have a trip back.”

“But that was years ago. You’ve used up your chance.”

“Have I now? The clause doesn’t say a word about how soon a man has to take his trip back; it just says he’s got it coming to him. Go look it up, Skipper. If I’m wrong, I’ll not only walk out on my two legs, I’ll beg your humble pardon in front of your crew. Go on—look it up. Be a sport.”

Rhysling could feel the man’s glare, but he turned and stomped out of the compartment. Rhysling knew that he had used his blindness to place the Captain in an impossible position, but this did not embarrass Rhysling—he rather enjoyed it.

Ten minutes later the siren sounded, he heard the orders on the bull horn for Up-Stations. When the soft sighing of the locks and the slight pressure change in his ears let him know that take-off was imminent he got up and shuffled down to the power room, as he wanted to be near the jets when they blasted off. He needed no one to guide him in any ship of the Hawk class.

Trouble started during the first watch. Rhysling had been lounging in the inspector’s chair, fiddling with the keys of his accordion and trying out a new version of
Green Hills.

“Let me breathe unrationed air again

Where there’s no lack nor dearth”

And “something, something, something ‘Earth’”—it would not come out right. He tried again.

“Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me

As they rove around the girth

Of our lovely mother planet,

Of the cool green hills of Earth.”

That was better, he thought. “How do you like that, Archie?” he asked over the muted roar.

“Pretty good. Give out with the whole thing.” Archie Macdougal, Chief Jetman, was an old friend, both spaceside and in bars; he had been an apprentice under Rhysling many years and millions of miles back.

Rhysling obliged, then said, “You youngsters have got it soft. Everything automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake.”

“You still have to stay awake.” They fell to talking shop and Macdougal showed him the direct response damping rig which had replaced the manual vernier control which Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company that any man could get into.

“I see you still have the old hand damping plates installed,” he remarked, his agile fingers flitting over the equipment.

“All except the links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials.”

“You ought to have them shipped. You might need them.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think—” Rhysling never did find out what Macdougal thought for it was at that moment the trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that burned him down where he stood.

Rhysling sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover and rang the alarm to the control room simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until he found them, while trying to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.

“Power room! Power room! What’s the alarm?”

“Stay out!” Rhysling shouted. “The place is ‘hot.’” He could feel it on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.

The links he got into place, after cursing someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish. Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.

First he reported. “Control!”

“Control aye aye!”

“Spilling jet three—emergency.”

“Is this Macdougal?”

“Macdougal is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by to record.”

There was no answer; dumbfounded the Skipper may have been, but he could not interfere in a power room emergency. He had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay closed.

The Captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record. It was:

“We rot in the molds of Venus,

We retch at her tainted breath.

Foul are her flooded jungles,

Crawling with unclean death.”

Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System as he worked, “—harsh bright soil of Luna—”, “—Saturn’s rainbow rings—”, “—the frozen night of Titan—”, all the while opening and spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus—

“We’ve tried each spinning space mote

And reckoned its true worth:

Take us back again to the homes of men

On the cool, green hills of Earth.”

—then, almost absentmindedly remembered to tack on his revised first verse:

“The arching sky is calling

Spacemen back to their trade.

All hands! Stand by! Free falling!

And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,

Far drives the thundering jet,

Up leaps the race of Earthmen,

Out, far, and onward yet—”

The ship was safe now and ready to limp home shy one jet. As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That “sunburn” seemed sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in which he worked but he knew it was there. He went on with the business of flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to permit the level of radioaction to drop to something a man might stand under suitable armor. While he did this he sent one more chorus, the last bit of authentic Rhysling that ever could be:

“We pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave us birth;

Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Earth.”

* * * *

Copyright © February 8, 1947 by Curtis Publishing Company.

(1911-1987)

“Science fiction writer” was seen as very much a male profession when Indiana native Catherine Lucille Moore broke into the field. Like other writers at the time whose names were too female (like Andre Norton who for a while wrote as Andrew North) or too ethnic (like Abraham Merritt, who wrote as A. Merritt), Moore used a more neutral form of her name. Ultimately, it led to her marriage: In 1936, writer Henry Kuttner wrote an enthusiastic letter to Moore, assuming she was male. The two of them married in 1940.

Forced to leave college during the Depression to work as a secretary, “Shambleau” was Moore’s first story sale in 1933, and it introduced her popular planetary romance character, Northwest Smith. (Another popular character of Moore’s was Jirel of Joiry, one of the first female leads in a sword and sorcery story, alongside her contemporary Robert E. Howard’s characters Red Sonja and Dark Agnes.)

Once they were married, Moore and Kuttner frequently wrote together, under at least seventeen pseudonyms. (The best known was Lewis Padgett.) Her emotionally evocative characters and gift for adventure blended surprisingly well with Kuttner’s more cerebral style. Settling in Garden City, New York, to be near the major pulp publishers, they became part of John W. Campbell’s stable of writers at
Astounding
.

The two of them wrote science fiction prolifically through the 1940s, but had turned to other things by 1950. They moved from New York to Kuttner’s native California so they could earn their college degrees and break into screenwriting. They succeeded in both, studying at the University of Southern California (where Kuttner eventually taught writing) and writing mysteries but little science fiction. When Kuttner died of a heart attack in 1958, Moore took over his classes, but stopped writing fiction. She did write television scripts for
Maverick
and other shows, but never returned to SF. When she remarried in 1963, Moore entirely stopped writing.

In 1981, Moore won a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. Although she may have done her best writing with Kuttner, in some ways Moore’s earlier solo writing, with its evocative landscapes and moody characters, was more influential on writers of both space opera and heroic fantasy. She died in 1987, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.