Author Archives: sydlogsdon

188. Before the Storm

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On July 28, 1914, 102 years ago Thursday, World War I began.

The years just before the war were a high point in British life, at least if we judge by Masterpiece Theatre. John Buchan set his early espionage novel The Thirty-nine Steps in that era, writing it shortly after WWI had begun. The Riddle of the Sands (see this Wednesday’s post) was an actual prophesy of the coming conflict, since it was published before the war began.

After the Great War, as it was then called, Buchan and many others looked back to the pre-war era with longing. They saw it as a golden age. Perhaps; it depends on your perspective. Young men who expected to work their way up through the ranks of British society – like Buchan when he was young – saw a world of opportunity before them. Their perspective was very different from the working class poor trapped by industrialism.

It was certainly different from the millions in British colonies, toiling to keep the Empire rich, and the ruling class richer.

Victoria was dead; Victorianism wasn’t, at least on the surface. Baden-Powell had just organized the Boy Scouts. Conservatism, especially in sexual matters, was the norm – on the surface.

What was going on at gatherings in the great houses of England was often a different matter. There:

much silent and furtive corridor-creeping between one double bedroom and another took place. . . . During the day, a clandestine affair could develop unobserved . . . At night, the names written on cards slotted into brass holders on the bedroom doors were as helpful to lovers as to the maids bringing early morning tea. Assignations confirmed by . . . a whispered exchange over the candle that lit the way up the stairs . . . ensured that extra-marital sex went on with ease. . . At six in the morning a hand-bell rung on each of the bedroom floors gave guests time to return to their own beds before the early morning tea trays arrived.

That quotation is from The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicholson. John Buchan’s world never looked like this. (Some critics suggest that it would have been better if it had.) Nicholson has clearly cherry picked among the movers and shakers, the avant-garde, the spoiled children of the rich to whom the rules didn’t apply, to find the subjects of her book. She portrays a world of arranged, often loveless, marriages with gatherings in the great houses designed to facilitate swapping partners on the sly.

Discretion was the watchword. Letting the rest of the world in on your secrets, even if they had similar secrets, could lead to social disaster. Mrs. Patrick Campbell said, “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do in the bedroom as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses?” The answer to her rhetorical question was, Yes. It mattered very much. Just ask Lady Cunnard, who was in bed with Thomas Beecham when an early morning workman on a ladder saw the two of them through a crack in her bedroom curtain. The scandal almost ruined her.

This is the atmosphere in which the ruling class of England spent the summer of 1911, while their servants scurried about facilitating their dalliances, while the working class struck for higher wages and better working conditions, while natives in tropical colonies slaved in the pitiless sun. And while Germany hungered for their own colonies in a world where the early arriving nations had already gathered them up and sucked them dry.

Their days were numbered.

Jandrax 72

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It would be necessary to go inland to hunt but Jean doubted his ability to do so on foot, so he found a creek, furled the sail and bent over the oars. The flood washed about him as he struggled upstream. He had drawn the sideboards up to reduce both draft and drag. After half an hour of struggling he had not gained a hundred meters. The flood was simply too strong. He let the gig slip back downstream. He was too tired to curse.

Jean rode the current out into the lake, caught fish, and ate them raw. The pain in his leg became excruciating from the unaccustomed strain at the oars, but the pain inside his chest was worse. Once again he had been frustrated; once again the verdict of his peers had been vindicated – he was a cripple and therefore unworthy.

***

That night he relived in dreams a portion of his island ordeal, and when he woke he could not sort the memory of dream from the memory of reality. Had the whole affair been hallucination? A comforting thought, but Jean found himself clinging to the memory. He feared it, but feared more to lose it.

By faint moonlight he let semen fall into the water, then lay back, scarcely relieved, to mourn the passing of a fantasy.

***

He made a final pull on the oars and the gig grounded against the gravel beach. Shipping the oars, he lifted his bad leg overside, then pivoted on the gunwale and dropped into the shallow water. He took the painter and painfully dragged the gig higher up on the beach. Jean was going hunting. He might not return, but he refused to acknowledge the doubts that tried to unman him. He took only his rifle and ammunition and the clothes he was wearing.

At this point the shore consisted of a beach backed by a steep embankment which Jean tried unsuccessfully to climb, then turned down the beach searching for a break. He found it in the form of a small stream which had cut through and won free to the lake. The ditch was too steep and muddy to negotiate, so Jean stepped into the stream and walked up the stream bed in knee-deep water. His feet had been numb for an hour in the snowmelt and now that numbness crept upward.

Out on top he was in a low jungle of mixed bushes, none of which were more than man-height and all of which had grown since the melt began. The first sprigs of gluegrass were appearing but would not become a gummy carpet until the waters had further receded. He could not see twenty meters ahead.

Here he would hunt. Here the reduced visibility gave even a slow-moving cripple a chance to blunder upon game. Of course, hunting alone like this he was not likely to survive long, but at least he could go out like a man.

Twenty minutes later something stirred in the bushes before him. Moving inland meant moving westward into the prevailing wind, so Jean could reasonably expect to catch the animal unaware. He moved carefully through the ankle-deep mud.

Trihorns! Of the creatures he might meet, only the longnecks were more dangerous. Jean faded back into a clump of siskal and waited, his rifle ready. There was a bull with two cows, all in full antler, along with three calves. He could probably kill the bull with his first shot; he might kill one cow with his untried underbarrel. Even if he were that fortunate, the other cow would kill him. more tomorrow

187. The Rest of the Landings

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Everybody remembers Apollo 11 because it was the first, and Apollo 13 because it failed. And because they made a movie about it. There were five other moon landings.

Apollo 12 — This flight made a precision landing in the Sea of Storms, near the landing place of the Surveyor 3 unmanned probe. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walked on the moon while Richard Gordon remained in the command module.

Apollo 13 — Once we had reached the moon with Apollo 11 and repeated with Apollo 12, public interest dropped off dramatically. The Apollo 13 flight saw reduced coverage until the explosion. In the movie, Marilyn Lovell says about the newsmen laying siege to her house, “Landing on the moon wasn’t dramatic enough for them – why should not landing on it be?” It is a fitting statement about the last half of the Apollo program.

Apollo 13 suffered a catastrophic explosion and barely got its crew back alive, without landing on the moon. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert became part of American myth, especially after the movie Apollo 13.

Apollo 14 — Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchel piloted their lander to Fra Mauro, the planned destination of Apollo 13. Stuart Roosa was command module pilot.

Apollo 15 — Al Wordon was the command module pilot. David Scott and James Irwin landed on the moon near Hadley rille. This was the first mission to carry a lunar rover, a powered wheeled vehicle that allowed the astronauts to range further from their landing site.

Apollo 16 — Ken Mattingly – who had missed the Apollo 13 mission due to a measles scare – was command module pilot. John Young and Charles Duke landed in the lunar highlands where they collected samples that were geologically older than those brought back by previous missions. Second use of a lunar rover.

Apollo 17 — Ronald Evans was the command module pilot of the last moon mission. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the last two men on the moon (so far). They carried the third lunar rover. Schmitt, a geologist, was the only scientist-astronaut to reach the moon.

Apollo 20 was cancelled so its Saturn five booster could be used to launch Skylab. Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled by budget cuts. All this was done before the launch of Apollo 16, so Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans knew that they would be the last.

For now.

*          *           *

There is one good video of a lunar lander launching from the moon, taken during the last mission. You see a few seconds of it occasionally on PBS space specials. I also found it a this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlGis35Epvs

This appears to be legit, although the things you can find on You-Tube are sometimes outrageously fake. The pictures were taken from a video-camera mounted on the lunar rover, remote controlled from Earth. Similar filming had been attempted on Apollo 15 and 16, without much success.

Jandrax 71

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By Jean’s calculations, the north tending melt would return to the latitude of the colony about 180 Harmony days after his departure. His excursion toward the center of the island had occurred on the eightieth day of his journey so it was clear that he would need speed to reach the opposite side of the lake in time to catch the returning melt.

He need not have worried. The new sail and sideboards gave him speed and, more important, let him lie closer to the wind so that he could proceed more directly toward the west. Where before he had fought helplessly against the wind, he now cut purposefully toward the southwest on an endless tack. From first light until long after dark he held his course and every night he wrapped himself in the hide sail for warmth.

Every night he dreamed of Aeolios and her beauty, and he dreamed also of the presence.

Had it been real?

Thirty-seven days out from the island, Jean sighted the opposite shore of the lake in the sunset. By noon of the next day he had reached it and beached the gig. It was a low shore, icy and snow-covered. He had not brought skis, for his crippled leg prevented their use, so he was restricted to floundering near the shore.

He shoveled away the snow from the lee of a cutbank and tore up the ragged remains of last melt’s bushes to build a fire. Wrapped in the sail, he luxuriated again in the feel of solid earth.

He stayed overnight, basking in the warmth of the fire and planning. He roasted fish in the coals. In the morning he would start south, following the shore until he reached the melt.

He followed the shore southward for two weeks, beaching the gig each night for the comfort of a fire. Soon the snow showed signs of noon melting; the surface was glazed and hard when he went ashore in the late afternoon. Then it was still liquid in the afternoon. Two days later he began seeing patches of bare earth.

Now he was coming into dangerous territory. Soon the first of the leers and krats would appear if his theory was correct. He stopped sleeping ashore, but anchored just off shore and watched. The next evening he saw a krat. It cautiously descended to the lake shore searching for danger. Jean tracked it with his rifle, but his ammunition was too scarce to waste on such a small, bad-tasting carnivore.

The next night he saw tracks of leer and krats. In the morning he waited until nearly noon before abandoning his post. That night he saw leers but they were too wary to approach the gig.

Jean was becoming angry. His hunts had been frustrated before and he had taken it in stride, knowing that there would always be another day. But then he had been whole. Now he knew that it was his lameness that stood between him and a kill and he was getting almighty tired of fish.

He put out further into the lake and sailed south four days without approaching the shore, intending to reach the region of high melt. When he put to shore again the character of the land had changed completely. The snow was gone and the creeks were flowing bank-full in roiling, muddy flood. His visibility was restricted, but he could see the tops of the lal bushes waving in the wind and the lakeshore was a sea of muddy tracks. more tomorrow

186. Apollo 11

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Apollo 11 was the first moon landing, but Apollo 13 got the movie because of the extra drama. Except for the absent landing, you probably won’t find a better picture of an Apollo mission than that film. This visuals are stunning and the portrayal of events is quite accurate.

Apollo 11, 47 years ago today, was a complete success, but it flirted with disaster twice, in two separate events, minutes apart during the landing. It was broadcast live, so everyone in America and half the rest of the world heard the crises in real time, but you would have needed to be an insider to understand them at the time. I was listening, glued to the TV screen, and I only later realized what was happening right in front of me.

The lunar lander separated from the command module as scheduled. Armstrong and Aldrin fired its rockets to slow its orbit. As it fell toward the moon, there was an alarm – a code 1202 – on the lander’s main computer. Only two men at mission control knew immediately what it meant. The mission was so complex that there were probably thousands of things only a few of those present fully understood.

The computer was overloading. Too many things were happening at once for it to handle. You need to remember the incredibly tiny capacity of 1969 computers. It could not keep up with events, the queue was getting long, so the alarm sounded. Steve Bales recognized that the computer was still doing everything it needed to do, that it would clear the queue in a few seconds, and said GO when most of those present were thinking ABORT. The mission continued, the computer worked through the queue, and then the alarm went off again. Bales said GO. A third time the computer overloaded and Bales shouted GO for the third time just as the lander was approaching touchdown.

The problems weren’t over. The lander had overshot its target and Armstrong found himself over a massive boulder field. There was nowhere to land.

An abort would have meant firing off the upper stage rocket and returning to the command module, allowing the now nearly empty lower section to crash to the moon, and missing the landing. Instead, Armstrong chose to adjust his rate of fall to a near hoover, tilt the entire lander – now top heavy and prone to flipping – to slide sideways and, just as the last of the fuel was nearly gone, reach a clear area where he set the lander down on the lunar surface.

On Earth, we had all been holding our breaths. We just didn’t realize how much reason we had had to worry.

Jandrax 70

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Only the dilwildi on this island and the herbies survived. The winged people were utterly destroyed. Why?

The presence was not bound by the material world.

It did not perceive time as a unidirectional flow but as a stationary axis along which its perceptions could move at will. To the presence the winged people still lived at the height of their glory, as did the ice ages and the new law of antler and fang. All was not “good,” for the concept had no meaning. All was. It was enough.

But now there was a disturbance in the all. The presence was questing for the source and meaning of the disturbance.

Intelligence was moving again on his planet. It had no place in his projection of the future, for this was a planet that could never produce intelligence, save when the presence moved in the world and made it so. This he had done once and was satisfied. That intelligence had come again was a negation of his powers of prediction.

It was a discontinuity in the all. He would investigate.

He observed the works of man, wingless man. His power was great, but here was a thing beyond his understanding so he bided his time. For one to whom eons were as heartbeats, the wait of a generation was not to be noticed. Then one came to the island! He moved to draw it to him.

And it had defied him! An insignificant creature that he could have snuffed with a thought; it had defied him!

None had ever defied him before. Anger warred with curiosity.

So it was that he took up the creature and showed it the wonders that were himself. Then he arrowed his consciousness into the pitiful mind before him.

***

Jean screamed!

***

The world was rocks and sunlight; harsh, unrelenting. No living thing moved. The wind sighed through the ruins and the dilwildi had gone.

Jean was alone.

He stood; swayed; pain was a living river of fire surging through his body. The ruins lay before him, waterless and forgotten.

Dismissed. He had been tried and found insignificant.

Did Moses feel like this? Should I carve tablets of stone to carry back from my Sinai?

Jean’s stomach contracted and his mouth was sand. Surely much time had passed since he had climbed the mountain. Starting down, he stumbled.

His crooked leg. It could have healed him, had it chosen to do so.

Should he take back his revelation to those who had cast him out? Should he claim holiness and its fruits – food for his table and a woman for his bed? A bitter taste of unlaughed jest was in his mouth. What woman could ever make him forget Aeolios?

***

Swaying slightly, the Prophet came down from his mountain.

*****

Was this a God or a hallucination. You decide. I’ve said all I intend to on the subject.

FYI, concerning the phrase, “But now there was a disturbance in the all.” This was written before Star Wars and its “disturbance in the force”. If you need know where I might have heard a similar phrase before, try Doc Smith. more tomorrow

185. The Flying Bedstead

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300px-LLRV_2Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. For most of the followers of this blog, it is part of history. I saw it happen, on a grainy black and white TV in the lounge of a college dorm. (see 27. That Was My Childhood)

You can’t land on the moon by parachute, nor by wings. No air. The only choice the Apollo program had was to land tail first, by rockets, something that had been a science fiction staple for decades, but was nothing like easy to manage. (see yesterday’s post)

Designing a craft to do the work was within the limits of the technology of the day. Vertical landings on Earth had been successfully accomplished. Pilot control on Apollo was expedited by having the astronauts stand to fly the Lunar Lander; the problem with VTOL planes had been that the pilots were strapped into a seat that kept them facing the wrong way when they landed.

The craft could be built, the astronauts were the best test pilots America had to offer. But how do you train?

Simulators? Maybe. Resurrect Pogo or Vertijet? Perhaps. Build a new craft just to use as a trainer? Better. But how do you build a trainer to react as if it were in a 1/6 gee field while landing in on Earth? You can’t just make gravity go away – or can you.

The answer is almost, more-or-less, and good enough to do the job. The first iteration of the trainer was the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, nicknamed the flying bedstead. You may have seen it. Neil Armstrong ejected from one of them after the controls failed; the footage of the crash is both exciting and brief, which gets it a lot of air play in retrospective specials, especially on anniversaries like tomorrow.

If you see footage of the LLRV not crashing, or of the advanced version LLTV (Lunar Landing Training Vehicle), you can easily see what it is all about. The vehicle consists of an open framework of tubing with the pilot sitting upright in the front (in an ejection seat, thank goodness) with a batch of somewhat shrouded equipment balancing the rear. In the middle, attached vertically, pointing downward and clearly throwing flames, is a jet engine. The craft is uneasily hovering.

Note, I didn’t say hovering on its jet. That is what it looks like, but that is not what is happening. Not quite. When the jet is fired up at takeoff, the LLRV or LLTV simply sits there. The jet has 5/6 of the thrust needed to lift the craft. While hovering, the rest of the thrust is provided by a separate set of hydrogen peroxide thrusters which are controlled by the pilot. If the pilot were to simply turn off his thrusters, the LLTV would crash to the ground at the same speed it would crash to the moon.

The jet subtracts enough of the LLTV’s mass to make it react as if it were in a 1/6 gee gravity field, allowing the pilot to maneuver his craft as if he were coming in for a lunar landing. Armstrong made over fifty LLTV landings before he landed on the moon.

If you want to know more about this craft, there is a half hour special full of information, old footage, and interviews with retired LLRV pilot and an engineer from the project. Huell Howser is the host. If you live in California, and you watch PBS, you know Huell. He is an acquired taste that I have never quite been able to acquire, but sometimes what he covers makes up for his idiosyncrasies. This is one of those cases. The program is California’s Gold #13003 – LUNAR LANDING. Try your local PBS station or check with the Huell Howser Archives at Chapman University.

Jandrax 69

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It was a temple or palace, no doubt, but it was not greatly different from the city at large. Before me was a parklike expanse of trees and grass; in the center of the park was a pavilion like the one I had found myself in when I arrived here.

The winged men were gone in a rumble of wings before I could ask them what was to come next. Either they feared this place or the felt that even one such as I would know what to do here. In that they were mistaken.

The pavilion sat in the center of the park and was the most likely place to go. No doubt those who had ordered my coming expected me to enter it.

I picked a fruit from a nearby siskal, eased myself to the ground and turned my back to the pavilion. The fruit was exceptionally sweet and I was glad to get off my feet.

The presence returned. I ignored it and continued to eat.

Are you unaware of us?

“Of course not.”

Then why do you ignore us?

“Among my people it is a gesture of contempt!”

The fruit was snatched from my hand, the sky darkened, the ground heaved, and I was thrown prone. Fear was in me, more fear than I had ever known. I strove to conquer it in the only way I could, by hurling curses at the presence. There was sudden silence.

There was more than silence.

There was a complete absence of light or sound, touch or feeling of warmth and cold. My mind was somewhere, still within my skull perhaps, but utterly bereft of sensory input.

I was alone, as utterly alone as human can ever be.

I was afraid, but that feeling passed.

I was beyond fear, but not beyond loneliness.

I was myself, but without others to lend boundaries to myself. I was everything; therefore I was nothing.

I was a lone dust mote floating forever in interstellar space and I was God. Nothing and everything; in the realm of uttermost loneliness both are the same.

As I was unbounded in space, so was I unbounded in time. My consciousness stretched eternally forward and backward and in that vast expanse there was none but me.

In the midst of nowhere, the presence came to sit by my side. It gestured with an absent hand and the stars shone about us. They wheeled in their courses and one grew until all others were occluded. About it swarmed planets and one of these grew until it blotted out the others. Gigantic polar caps receded and advanced and receded and advanced. Species were gained and lost until at last there rose a genus of winged animals capable of fleeing before the advancing ice. They multiplied and grew dominant. Species were formed and lost, but two outstripped the rest, one large and one small.

The presence made his will known on these unformed species and they worshipped him, but as their intelligence was imperfect their worship was imperfect, so the presence moved his will upon them and they were given speech. He made the larger dominant over the smaller and gave it intelligence far greater than the smaller so that even as the larger worshipped the presence, so the smaller would worship the larger.

Thus the world was made perfect.

Again the ice caps advanced and species were broken. The ice retreated and new species arose, horned and angry species, unlike the gentle creations of the presence. Only the dilwildi on this island and the herbies survived. The winged people were utterly destroyed.

Why? more tomorrow

184. Tail First

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The first manmade object to leave the atmosphere and enter space wasn’t American or Russian. It was German. In 1942, V-2 rockets, first as prototypes, then as weapons, entered space routinely at the top of their high-arching flightpath.

That was the picture of spaceflight that lived in the heads of the kids of my generation. On Saturday morning TV shows, heroic young spacemen went off to save the universe and all their spacecraft looked like V-2 rockets. No wonder; this was pre-George Lucas and special effects were minimal. However, captured German footage provided plenty of shots of V-2s taking off.

These Saturday morning specials also landed upright on their tailfins. (Yeah, you guessed it. They ran the films backward.) On Dec 21, 2015, Elon Musk and SpaceX finally pulled that off in the real world. It makes me wonder what he was watching when he was a kid.

In the early days of serious thinking about space, when WW II was freshly over and the V-2 had shown the way, there seemed to be only two ways to land a spacecraft: either tail-first at a prohibitive cost in fuel, or by flying back in a winged craft. Neither was possible with the technology of the day, but the folks at Edwards Air Base were working on the latter, culminating in the X-15 (see 164. Flight Into Space). Later came the Space Shuttle.

In my novel Cyan, VTOL rocket shuttles are used extensively on Earth, and of course are the basis for landing craft on unexplored worlds. There won’t be any runways when we reach Alpha Centauri.

There is actually has a long history of craft designed to explore tail first landings.

X-13 Ryan Vertijet took off vertically, rolled over to horizontal while the pilot changed to a separate set of controls, carried out its mission in horizontal mode, then, at altitude, transitioned again to vertical mode. The pilot then slowly dropped toward the ground to land. The limitations that make this a technology demonstrator rather than a workable aircraft all become obvious near the ground.

Before takeoff, the Vertijet reached the airfield horizontally, hooked to and riding on a trailer. The trailer then lifted like a drawbridge until the Vertijet was vertical, dangling from a cable that hooked under the Vertijet’s nose. It took off from that position, and then returned to the trailer to land. As it approached the ground, traveling nose skyward, the pilot would slide his craft carefully sideways until the nose of his jet came in contact with a horizontal bamboo pole. Using that as a guide, the pilot then moved his craft toward the trailer until his nosehook came into contact with the cable. Then he cut his power; he had landed by reaching a condition of dangling from the cable, bellied up to the vertical bed of the trailer. The trailer was then lowered to horizontal, Vertijet attached.

Not very practical, but it did work. Only two Verijets were built and only a few operational flights were attempted.

The X-14 was of different configuration, with vanes to deflect its thrust. It took off vertically, but with the plane itself horizontal, in the manner of a modern Harrier.

The Lockheed XFV-1 had the power and the configuration for vertical takeoff and landings, but they never managed to work out the issue of pilot control. No successful vertical takeoffs or landings were made. It flew only conventionally with makeshift landing gear bolted to its belly.

The Convair XFY Pogo took off vertically, transitioned to horizontal, and made vertical landings, but only with great difficulty, and only with extremely experienced pilots. It was impractical, largely because the pilot had to look over his shoulder at the ground during vertical landings.

If we could salvage the rear vision camera from any 2016 sedan and send it back by time machine, any one of these craft would have been successful, but in the fifties the idea of looking at the ground while your eyes were skyward was pure science fiction.

Reaching on the moon would require a vertical descent and landing. They built a special craft to train astronauts for that mission. We’ll look at it tomorrow.

Jandrax 68

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Aeolios emerged from her trance and crossed the park to me. There was a mixture of contrition and pity on her face as she touched my forehead. “I am sorry, Jeandubois. In my ignorance I think you mad, but in my understanding I know you are merely deluded. The masters tell me that you think the chronology to be real and that I should be patient with your lack of understanding. They say I am to tell you that, in your erroneous way of thinking, you are in the past, but that the term has no meaning. I am sorry, Jeandubois; it is all too much for me to understand, though I convey the message.”

“Who are the masters?”

She struggled visibly with her confusion, but did not break contact. “The masters are the masters! How can you ask such a question?”

“Have patience with my ignorance, Aeolios; I do not know your masters.”

This time she broke contact and fled, stumbling away, then taking to the air. I watched her spiral up and disappear beyond the trees that circled the park.

V

I wandered about the city, trying to make sense of my situation. At first I had merely accepted things as they were or seemed to be, much as one will accept the reality of a dream world. Now I was no longer able to do so, and my fear grew. Where or when was I; how had I come here; why was I here; would I be allowed to leave? Lovely as the city was, it was not of my world.

Wherever I went the dilwildi followed me, seeming to spy on me. Were they servants of the masters, and were the masters the same personages as the presence I had felt before?

A winged male dropped beside me, scattering the dilwildi in clumsy haste. Unlike Aeolios, he had no smile for me. “The masters wish your presence,” he announced.

“Excellent. I have a few questions to ask them.”

Irritation crossed his face at my statement.

“One does not ask the masters questions. One hears them and obeys.”

“Perhaps,” was my only reply as I sought to restrain my own irritation.

He guided me through the maze that was his city, moving ever upward. I lagged behind, hampered by my leg, and he waited for me, his face as cold as the stones around us. My fear had been growing since I woke this morning and was now a knot in my middle. I was unarmed. My rifle and blade were at the gig and even my antler cane was nowhere in sight.

We walked down grassy paths through the heart of the city. There were no boulevards, for the winged people would have no need of them, only the paths where the herbies roamed free. Finally we reached a wall twice man-height that stretched away in both directions until it was lost in the trees. My companion trilled loudly and a trio of others like him dropped down to his aid. They gripped my shoulders and, beating their wings heavily, lifted me into the courtyard beyond.

*****

Over the years, I have re-read Jandrax many times, but never with the intensity that serializing it demands. Now I keep hearing old Star Trek scripts in my head. Bow to the will of Landru!

That isn’t an apology. I would write the story differently today, but I stand by what is here. Either we created God, or God created us. One way or the other, there is a universal relationship between humans and a being who demands our loyalty and can strike us dead for failing him. We can deny his existence (and hope we are right), or write a script where he turns out to be a computer, or leave the matter undecided, but we have to address the question. And we have to do it in words and gestures and symbols that communicate. more tomorrow