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by Gideon Marcus
It shouldn't happen here (or anywhere)
It was a scene out of Saigon or Prague. It shouldn't be happening in Middle America. On May 4, Ohio National Guardsmen, shot four Kent State students dead, wounding ten more. Here's what we know:
On April 30, President Nixon announced that U.S. troops had entered Cambodia, expanding the war in Southeast Asia. This sparked mass May Day protests across the country. After the Kent State ROTC building was burned down over the weekend, Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom asked Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard to the campus.
Clashes between students and law enforcement escalated, with several students reportedly being stabbed by guardsman bayonets. Calls for the Guard troops to be recalled were refused. This set the stage for Monday's tragedy.
It is not certain what triggered the firing. Eyewitnesses said about 600 protestors surrounded a company of 100 Guardsmen and began pelting them with rocks and hunks of concrete. A single shot rang out, whether from a guardsman's rifle or someone else's firearm, is unknown. Without a warning, the guardsmen then began a three second volley, half of them pointing their guns into the air, the other aiming levelly—into the milling crowd of boys and girls.
Amont the dead were William K. Schroder, 19, a sophomore from Lorain, Ohio; Jeffery Miller, 19, a freshman from Plainview, New York; Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, a junior from Youngstown, Ohio; and Allison Krause, a 19-year-old freshman from Pittsburgh. John Cleary, 19, a freshman from Scotia, New York; Dean Kahler, a 20-year-old freshman from East Canton, Ohio; and Joseph Lewis, just 18, from Massillon, Ohio, were reported in critical condition at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna. They were not all protestors—indeed, Miss Krause had just telephoned her parents to express disgust at the demonstration.
A wave of new protests is wracking the country, now with fresh ammunition. And it is ammunition that is at the center of this outrage, for the Guard did not use tear gas, rubber bullets, or blanks. Never mind if they should have been on the campus at all. At the very least, their rules of engagement should not have incurred collateral deaths on innocent students.
There are just two positive consequences of this tragedy. The first is that if the goal of calling in the Guard was to cow protestors, it has backfired spectacularly. The second is that, on May 5, President Nixon announced that American troops would be withdrawn from Cambodia in seven weeks. How much this decision is in reaction to the demonstrations and how much is due to the heavier-than-expected resistance of the Communists is presently unknown.
I suppose there's one more result—I've been radicalized, and I plan to start marching. It's something I've always supported in the abstract, but observed a modicum of restraint, recalling Tom Lehrer's sentiment, "It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee house or college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against – like peace, and justice, and brotherhood, and so on."
But now we see that the audience doesn't all agree, and some of them shoot. I know I'm in the over-30 untrustworthy set, but you'll see my grizzled mug in among the protestors in the weeks to come.
Congratulations, Dick—you managed something Lyndon couldn't.
Shards
And so I plunge into fiction, hoping for a relief from the growing madness. I am greeted with more madness: each of the stories in The latest issue of Galaxy is broken into pieces, with their ends crammed into the latter half of the magazine, as if written like some strange BASIC program with too many GOTO commands. Nevertheless, it's the stories that count. How are they?
cover by Jack Gaughan illustrating The Moon of Thin Reality
In lieu of a traditional editor, editor Jakobsson gives us a page-long pitch for Heinlein's new serial, I Will Fear No Evil:
"Here is a novel that delivers, page by page, the thundering promise of its title. Mr. Heinlein, I am convinced, fears no evil. I like to think of myself as reasonably inured to the standard shivers but I found myself even more so after turning the last page. Don't miss that feeling. It's a good one."
I guess we'll see if it's a masterpiece, like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, an overblown dud, like Stanger in a Strange Land…or a limp timewaster like Podkayne of Mars.
The Player at Yellow Silence, by Carl Jacobi
illustration by Jack Gaughan
As tension between the Terrans and the Yansis heats up, threatening to break out into war, a certain Joseph Forbes tries to calm things down by arranging an interstellar golf open. Forbes is also rumored to be a healer, having brought a young woman who collapsed on a course back to life, and having restored the withered legs of another. Oh, and he's also been witnessed speaking to some otherworldly patriarchal figure…
Yes, it's Arnold Palmer styled as the Prince of Peace. I don't know. It all seemed kind of stupid to me.
Two stars.
Out of Mindshot, by John Brunner
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A cruel, ambitious man is in the high desert on the trail of a telepathic young woman, hiding out from a society whose mental emanations are too painful for her to endure. By cunning and force of arms, he plans to enslave her, using her powers to make him a fortune.
Ruthless and a combat veteran, he seems to have the upper hand. But who between them really holds all the cards?
This is a brilliant little tale, ripe for adaptation for a Twilight Zone revival (perhaps a second Night Gallery?) It drips with color, the characters and setting richly described, the hunter's motivations introduced at a perfect pace, and the ending sweet and suitable.
Five stars.
Ship Me Tomorrow, by William Rotsler
illustration by Jack Gaughan
In an overcrowded, overmechanized, oversterile world, sometimes the only love you can rely on is the love you buy. But is an android built to your specifications really what you're looking for?
Well, we'll never know since the story ends with our hero having ordered the robot but not yet having received her.
Buildup with no point. Two stars.
Galaxy Book Shelf (Galaxy, June 1970), by Algis Budrys
In which Budrys praises T. L. Sherred's 1940's Astounding story "E for Effort" to the Moon—and expressed disappointment that Sherred's new novel, Alien Island, is a far lesser work. Indeed, his thoughts closely mirror those of Brian when he covered the book earlier this year. Budrys also notes that D.G. Compton's The Steel Crocodile is a fine book, provided you haven't read Synthajoy, which covers the same ground, but better.
Oil-Mad Bug-Eyed Monsters, by Hayden Howard
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Not too long ago, a bunch of oil-eating bugs rammed their spaceship into a tanker, possessed the crew by inhabiting their bellies, and went to work buying up as many oil fields as possible. This tale follows one of the invaders, encased in the body of a young, innocent-looking man, who is going house to house in a neighborhood that sits atop a potential drilling site, getting homeowners to sell their land.
The last holdout, a beautiful human, excites the borrowed gonads of the alien, causing him to embrace a dual motivation.
This is the second story of Howard's to involve an oil spill, the first appearing in Analog not too long ago. I have to wonder if he lives within sight of Long Beach. Anyway, this probably could have been an effective, unsettling tale in the hands of someone like Sturgeon or Ellison. Hayden simply lacks the literary creativity to pull it off. Instead, it's a highly repetitive, flat-lying piece with far too many references to bumping carapaces.
Two stars.
The Moon of Thin Reality, by Duncan Lunan
illustration by Jack Gaughan
A Terran rescue ship, answering the distress call of an alien vessel, plunges wildly into hyperspace in an attempt to avoid crashing into the Moon on the way. Both ships find themselves within the confines of a "Dyson Sphere" enclosing a red dwarf sun. The science of this piece is immediately suspect: one of the characters observes that, because the star is a small one, it has a shorter lifespan. We've known for some time that the longevity of a star is inversely proportional to its mass.
Anyway, because of the ships' initial velocity, they cannot circularize their orbit; they will intersect with the surface of the sphere. All attempts at communication are answered with silence. In desperation, the Terrans hurl the crippled, rescued ship at the shell. Still no response. But as the Terrans prepare to blast their way through with missiles, the sphere-builders make their presence known.
The story begins confusingly, such that I had to read the first page several times. Ultimately, I gave up and figured things out in retrospect. Once in the sphere, things move more smoothly, but the resolution is far too quick for the setup. If you're going to introduce a civilization that can englobe a star, I want it to serve as more than a two-page gimmick.
Two stars.
The Tower of Glass (Part 3 of 3) , by Robert Silverberg
illustration by Jack Gaughan
And now we pass the stone that is Silverbob's newest novel, taking up a good half of the magazine's pages. The background is still the same: Simeon Krug's tachyonic transmission tower is rising above the Canadian tundra; Krug scion Manuel is diddling an upper-class android; the artificially generated humans are rallying for rights; female characters exist to be vessels for wombs, breasts and hips.
Some new developments: Manuel's android mistress Lillith Meson is actually manipulating Krug's son, showing him the sad plight of the androids to get him to sway his father into supporting their cause. We learn that a twin project to Krug's tower is a relativistic space ship that can, in twenty years subjective, get to the system that is the source of the signal that triggered the building of the tower.
And that's it.
No, really. Hardly a damned thing happens in these 70 pages, and what does happen is outlined at the beginning before being superfluously acted out in detail over the rest. Lillith does show Manuel a "Gamma town" and the chapels where Beta androids worship the image of Krug and the holy DNA double-helix that emblemizes their artificial existence. Manuel does confront his father. His father has a mental communion with his right-hand robot, Thor Watchman, who discovers that his creator his human after all. Over the course of a few pages, mass hysteria breaks out amongst the androids, the tower is sabotaged, and Krug flies off to deep space in the starship. The end.
Along the way, we get some android sex, a lot of plodding descriptions of scenery and crowds, and a great deal of narrative repetition. This is, in effect, an over-padded novelette.
Did I mention the boobs?
Tower of Glass reminds me of a lot of other pieces. Dune Messiah for one, with its plodding pace and inaction. Silverberg's own Up the Line—just substitute scenes of Canadian wastes, android worship, and futuristic drug trips for the tour of old Constantinople. Silverberg can offer up compelling views of a weird tomorrow, even mixed with crackpot techno-religions: viz. his Blue Fire stories, but those also had plots, and none overstayed their welcome.
But if he really wanted to make a story about android liberation, or what it means to be human, he could have done a lot better than this piece with its MacGuffin Tower and its lifeless characters.
Two stars for this installment; two and a half for the whole.
Children's Crusade, by Lawrence Mayer
illustration by Jack Gaughan
Last up, but wedged in the middle of the above serial, is the second story published by Lawrence Mayer. It follows the tribulations of Gladys and Herman Green, who give birth to a vampire. It's a modern, technological kind of vampire—no supernatural beast, it just has a short, inefficient gut, large teeth, and can only survive on human blood. And it's not alone; vampire babies are being born all over.
Being dutiful parents, the Greens nurse their child, though it is debilitating. Sadly, all the vampire kids grow up to be no-goodniks, with lots of violence and leathers like you see in the biker movies. I think Mayer is trying for Cheeky Metaphor.
He achieves Crashing Bore. Two stars.
Crashing Down
The world explodes before our eyes; the world explodes inside our sanctuarial pages. The Age of Aquarius is stillborn. It's a hell of a time we live in. Can anything get us out of this? Perhaps… Dianetics?
No, probably not.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]