by Gideon Marcus

Monster-eyed bug

Last week, NASA released the news that the Apollo 12 astronauts brought back a fourth astronaut at the end of their flight last November.  A common human germ, Streptococcus mitis to be exact, was found to have hitched a ride back with Surveyor 3's camera, after surviving some 32 months in the harsh environment of the lunar surface.

Streptococcus mitis (c) Ansel Oommen

Frederick J. Mitchell, a scientist at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, stated that it was "notable, but not unexpected" that a bacterium might make and survive the trip to the Moon as a stowaway on a terrestrial spacecraft.  Thanks to insufficient clean-room procedures, it was probably deposited on Surveyor's camera when the camera's shroud was removed for repairs and then replaced, and then launched with the soft-lander in 1967.  The high vacuum of space actually freeze-dried the bug, allowing it to remain viable indefinitely. 

the Surveyor 3 camera

Given that we were unable to prevent terrestrial life forms from contaminating our nearest celestial companion, one has to wonder if we will taint Mars or Venus when we launch probes to the surfaces of those planets in the next decade.  It's a bit like Schrödinger's equations—just as you affect what you see by looking at it, you can't investigate a planet without risking an alteration of said planet.  It may well be that humans will land on Mars in the 1980s to find icy ponds rimed with Earth bacteria.

It's enough to make you want to leave well enough alone!

Bug-eyed caterpillars

by Kelly Freas

On the other hand, this month's Analog is quite good, and well worth your time.  Let's take a look:

Star Light (Part 1 of 4), by Hal Clement

Many folks remember and cherish Hal Clement's 1956 book, Mission of Gravity, which takes place on a most unique world, the planet Mesklin.  Its peculiar characteristics are related to its origin and composition.  You see, in our solar system, there are two types of worlds—terrestrial (rocky) planets like Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto; and gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  The rocky worlds are just that—rocky spheres with maybe a thin layer of liquid and/or air.  The gas giants, much more massive, but composed mostly of lighter materials, have much different innards. 

Take Jupiter.  Please!  ("Oh, that Henny Youngman!") It is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, like the Sun.  The prevailing view of its interior has been much the same since Analog editor John Campbell set it out in a 1937 article.  The small amount of heavy stuff sank to the middle, the oxygen combined with hydrogen to make water, which froze and became ice, and the rest is the atmosphere.  Thus, Jupiter has three layers: swirling hydrogen/helium atmosphere, water-ice "crust" (laced with compounds like ammonia and methane to facilitate exotic life forms), and a rocky core, maybe the size of the Earth underneath all of that.

According to my 1964 astronomy textbook (Exploring the Planets, by UCLA's George Abell), Jupiter is the biggest, volume-wise, a gas giant can get.  Any bigger, and the stuff in the core collapses in on itself, becoming "degenerate matter" as one finds making up a white dwarf star (the collapsed remnant of a regular sun that has run out of nuclear fuel to fuse).  Degenerate matter is so compressed that the repulsive quality of the electrons (like charges repel—like similarly poled magnets) is overcome by the crush of gravity, and they end up a shared electron soup among much more densely packed atoms.

Of course, this is all theoretical, and may well be disproven or changed significantly as we learn more about gas giants.

The idea Clement came up with is based on the reports of a planet around the nearby star, 61 Cygni A, with 16 times the mass of Jupiter.  Well, such a planet must then have degenerate matter in its interior.  Clement's Mesklin is a heavy gravity world on which live the Mesklinites, a race of intelligent caterpillars for whom 200gs of gravity is no big deal.  Mission of Gravity detailed the first contact between humans and these aliens.

Now, since one-offs are supposedly rare in the universe, it makes sense that Mesklin-type uber-Jupiters must not be uncommon, even if none exist in our own solar system.  And just as the supermen of Harrison's Deathworld are hired out to tame the tougher planets in his universe, the Mesklinites are contracted by humans to explore these "Type 3" worlds to gather scientific data.  The most pressing question: are they formed like planets, along with others around a protosun in a primordial solar nebula, or are they actually little stars that never quite got big enough to fuse hydrogen (what astronomer Shiv S. Kumar calls a "black dwarf")? 

by Kelly Freas

That's the setup for "Star Light", a serial about a Mesklinite survey team.  A population of Mesklinites has set up shop on the 40g planet of Dhrawn, and there are a dozen or so survey cruisers crawling over its landscape.  Each is a football field-sized metal caterpillar crewed by foot-and-a-half long sentient caterpillars with names like Dondgramer and Kervenser.  A full light minute away, a human outpost monitors and supports the Mesklinite team, most notably "Easy" Hoffman, ("the woman"), and her son, Benji.

If you're looking for characterization or interpersonal drama, forget it.  Clement's never written that, and he doesn't start here.  If you want a fairly dry, but scientifically interesting account of what happens to an elongated tank when the planetary thaws come, inundating the landscape and threatening to swamp the vehicle, then this story is for you.

A bare three stars.

Bioelectric Phenomena, by Carl A. Larson

It's not often Campbell runs a science article without pictures, but this one doesn't suffer too badly for the loss.  Larson starts with Galvani's frog legs experiment that kickstarted not just electrical research, but also inquiry into bioelectricity—electricity generated within a creature.  He ends with the electric eel and how it works.  In between, we learn a lot about discredited theories and evolutionary dead ends.

A bit long, a bit meandering, but an interesting piece.  Three stars.

A Tale of the Ending, by Hank Dempsey

by Vincent DiFate

Here we have another "Hank Dempsey" (Harry Harrison) story set in a galaxy populated by teleporter Doors.  This one is set, as the title might suggest, far in the future.  So far in the future, in fact, that Earth is a mythical place, and the users of the galactic matter transmitter network are virtual aliens.  When two of them decide to trace down the birthplace of humanity, they reach some unsettling conclusions.

It has already been complained, just a decade into the Jet Age, that the world is starting to homogenize.  Harrison takes this trend to its natural conclusion—one flits to one planet to swim, another to dry off, a third to relax.  Distance no longer exists as a concept, nor even do circadian rhythms.  What must the human race be like after millions of years in such a system?  The question is posed and answered satisfyingly.

Four stars.

Compulsion, by James H. Schmitz

by Kelly Freas

Telzey Amberdon, telepath extraordinaire, is back!  And this time, she has company…

Unusually for an Amberdon story, our guest star gets a good deal of the screen time.  Her name is Trigger Argee, and she is a Federation scout with an agenda.  It seems that she spent some time on a Precol—precolonized world—and there encountered what may be the most dangerous life form in the galaxy.

The "Sirens" seem harmless enough, just a bunch of trees that make humans euphoric in their proximity.  But it turns out that their induced good feelings are not only addictive, they are quickly debilitating.  Moreover, the Sirens have already been introduced to three former Earth colonies (former because the Sirens induced their collapse).  The Federation is now contemplating the complete eradication of the species.

Argee can't help feeling that the Sirens are an intelligent race, and therefore, their destruction would constitute genocide.  Worse, as our heroes find out, the Sirens are prepared for such a move…and have a deadly retaliation in mind…

This is yet another delightful story in the sequence, and it expands the universe of Telzey Amberdon quite a bit.  I expect that Trigger and her mysterious employer, Pilch, will be recurring characters.  It's also nice to see nothing but heroines starring in a story.

Four stars.

A Matter of Orientation, by Bob Buckley

by Vincent DiFate

ELMER the autonomous Venus rover takes shelter from a sandstorm.  While communications are lost, he comes across his Soviet counterpart.  Sparks fly as they shoot lasers at each other.  But when the boy robot realizes his adversary is a girl robot, they come to an understanding.

Never mind the lunacy (veneracy?) of arming sentient robot planet probes, the whole thing is very sexist and silly.  I would bet my hat that this was originally meant for Playboy.

Two stars.

Message to an Alien, by Keith Laumer

by P. Skirkas

Seven years prior, the Hukk had clashed with humans in a mighty interstellar war.  The Terrans won—barely—and then mediated a lenient peace treaty.  Now the Hukk are planning a clandestine invasion of a backwater world, and ex-Commodore Dalton, resigned in disgrace for being a reactionary Bircher type, is on a one-man crusade to wipe out the Hukk landing party before it can expand into a full blown beachhead.

It's another of Laumer's competent man-of-action tales that he can crank out in his sleep.  Which is to say, it's quite pleasant reading.  Dalton is a well written character, laconic and no-nonsense, without bravado or bluster, yet compelling somehow.  And it looks like this is only the beginning of adventures we might get starring the fellow.

Four stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

There's a new omnibus of Buck Rogers strips out, so Miller gets to expound on why he prefers Flash Gordon to the time traveling pilot.  In short, it's because Buck Rogers was far more indifferent when it came to science, art, and consistency.

Miller seems not to have hated Dune Messiah, but he definitely liked the first book better.  He samples the fourth book of Nebula winners, singling out Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight and Terry Carr's "Dance of the Changer and the Three" for praise.

Finally, he really likes John Boyd's The Pollinators of Eden, which we somehow missed on the Journey.

Doing the math

It's been a fair piece, but Analog tops out the mags this month with a solid 3.4 star score.  It edges out Vision of Tomorrow (3.3), Vortex (3.3), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.2), New Writings 17 (3.2), and it trounces. Fantastic (2.7), Galaxy (2.3), and Worlds of Tomorrow (1.9).

Because of the number of new mags/anthologies this month, it's no surprise that the four and five star stuff woul fill 3-4 full mags.  Women, however, only wrote 5% of the new fiction pieces.  If you want works by women, you're better off with the Trekzines like Ruth Berman's T-Negative.

Say, wouldn't it be swell if all these ladies honing their chops in the fanzines, like Ruth, and Astrid Anderson, and Lois McMaster made the transition to the pros?  It worked for Juanita Coulson and Lee Hoffman, after all…

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[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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