Poul Anderson - Saturn Game
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2024-11-24
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The Saturn Game
Poul Anderson
One of the writing problems peculiar to science fiction is that science has a
way of catching up with your imagining. Just as you finish writing a book
about the poor folks who live on the perpetually dark side of Mercury, the
damned Mariner flyby shows that there's no such thing as a dark side. Out the
window with the manuscript (maybe followed by the typewriter and even the
writer).
Poul Anderson was one of the dozen or so science fiction writers invited
by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories to witness the first Saturn flyby at their
headquarters in Pasadena. Most of us adjourned to the company cafeteria,
getting out of the way of the working press and overworked scientists,
watching the marvelous pictures come in as we sipped coffee and swapped tales.
There was quite a feeling of suspense, since very little was known about any
of the planet's satellites, so in effect we had a brand-new world being
presented to us every few hours. Poul was the only one actually on the edge of
his seat, though; he said he had just finished a story set on Iapetus. The
background was perforce 95 percent imagination, since very little could be
deduced about the satellite from earthbound observation. One clear picture
could blow him out of the water. Fortunately for all of us, the Pioneer
cooperated with Poul's imaginings. The story was "The Saturn Game," and it won
the Nebula for best novella of the year.
No one but Poul Anderson could have written this story. That's true in a
literal sense of any story, any author, because even a tired, trite rehash of
boy-meets-girl will show some evidence of having been written by a particular
boy or girl. But "The Saturn Game, " besides being startlingly original in
structure and plot, reveals a combination of special knowledge and special
feeling that amounts to oblique autobiography. Poul is a consummate "hard
science" writer, who not only sports a degree in physics (with honors) but,
more important, reveals in books like Tau Zero that he keeps up with the
fast-changing science. He is also a swashbuckling romantic, with such titles
as Hrolf Kraki's Saga and The Last Viking to his credit. The association with
sword-and-sorcery derring-do percolates over into "real" life: Poul was one of
the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an outfit dedicated to
the re-creation and celebration of medieval life through costumed fairs and
tourneys, usually livened up with a certain amount of barely controlled mayhem
as the participants duel with somewhat blunted weapons.
In the man, these two worlds are well integrated, apparently Poul is a
soft-spoken charmer who wouldn't smite a fly. In the story, well, it's another
story.
If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we are to avoid
repeated and worse tragedies in the future we must begin by dismissing all
accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have
predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather
should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against
disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds
exist throughout reality, and that things on
their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides.
The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it` crossed a threshold of human
experience. -Francis L. Minamoto, Death:
Under Saturn: A Dissenting View
(Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)
I
"The City of Ice is now on my horizon," Kendrick says. Its. towers gleam blue.
"My griffin spreads his wings to glide." Wind whistles among those great,
rainbow-shimmering pinions ' His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air
strikes through'. his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. "I lean over and pee
after you." The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. It head flickers
palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith; hammered into the steel.
"Yes, I see the griffin," Ricia tells him, "high and far, like a comet
above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the: portico for a better
look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my; sleeve, but I tear the spider silk
apart and dash forth into the. open." The elven castle wavers as if its
sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, "Is it in truth
you, my darling?"
"Hold, there!" warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana, ten thousand
leagues away. "I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is
Sir Kendrick of the Isles,=, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you
off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back, Princess of Maranoa. Pretend' you
decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words."
"I stay far aloft," Kendrick says. "Save he use a crying~ stone, the Elf
King will not be aware this beast has a rider.. From here I'll spy out city
and castle." And then-? He knows.
not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long
will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King's embrace?
"I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus," Mark Danzig
interrupted.
His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg
flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso
shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he
sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and
radiance from the universe.
To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows from the
instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many
and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them.
The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase,
dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, night side
wanly ashimmer with starlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over
Luna. Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to
maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at
the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare,
crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier
country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached
fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.
"1'm sorry," Jean Broberg whispered. "It's too beautiful, unbelievably
beautiful, and . . . almost like the place where our game had brought us. Took
us by surprise-"
"Huh!" Mark Danzig said. "You had a pretty good idea of what to expect,
therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled
it. Don't tell me any different. I've watched these acts for eight years."
Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to
give noticeable weight, and his movement
sent him flying through the air, across the crowded cabin. He checked himself
by a handhold just short of the chemist. "Are you calling Jean a liar?" he
growled.
Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that,
he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his
mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl
on his face brought forth its ruggedness.
"Please!" Broberg exclaimed. "Not a quarrel, Colin."
The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At
her age of forty-two, despite longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that
fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were
engraved around large gray eyes.
"Mark is right," she sighed. "We're here to do science, not daydream."
She reached forth to touch Scobie's arm, smiling shyly. "You're still full of
your Kendrick persona, aren't you? Gallant, protective-" She stopped. Her
voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and
flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced
a laugh. "But I'm just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of
Johnnie and Billy."
Her glance went Saturn ward, as if seeking the ship where her family
waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars by the
solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even
such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.
Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot's chair: "What harm if we carry on
our little commedia dell' arte?" His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. "We won't
be landin' for a while yet, and everything's on automatic till then." He was
small, swarthy, and deft, still in his twenties.
Danzig twisted his leathery countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks
to his habits as well as to longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he
could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In this hour, he set humor
aside."Do you mean you don't know what's the matter?" His beak of a nose
pecked at a scanner screen which magnified the moonscape. "Almighty God!
That's a new world we're about to touch down on-tiny, but a world, and strange
in ways we can't guess. Nothing's been here before us except one unmanned
flyby and one unmanned lander that soon quit sending. We can't rely on meters
and cameras alone. We've got to use our eyes and brains."
He addressed Scobie. "You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if
nobody else aboard does. You've worked on Luna as well as on Earth. In spite
of all the settlements, in spite of all the study that's been done, did you
never hit any nasty surprises?"
The burly man had recovered his temper. Into his own voice came a
softness that recalled the serenity of the Idaho mountains from which he
hailed. "True," he admitted. "There's no such thing as having too much
information when you're off Earth, or enough information, for that matter." He
paused. "Nevertheless, timidity can be as dangerous as rashness-not that
you're timid, Mark," he added in haste. "Why, you and Rachel could've been in
a nice O'Neill on a nice pension-"
Danzig relaxed and smiled. "This was a challenge, if I may sound
pompous. Just the same, we want to get home when we're finished here. We
should be in time for the Bar Mitzvah of a great-grandson or two. Which
requires staying alive."
"My point is," Scobie said, "if you let yourself get buffaloed, you may
end up in a worse bind than- Oh, never mind. You're probably right, and we
should not have begun fantasizing. The spectacle sort of grabbed us. It won't
happen again."
Yet when Scobie's eyes looked anew on the glacier, they had not quite
the dispassion of a scientist in them. Nor did Broberg's or Garcilaso's.
Danzig slammed fist into palm. "The game, the damned childish game," he
muttered, too low for
his companions to hear. "Was nothing saner possible for them?"
11
Was nothing saner possible for them? Perhaps not.
If we are to answer the question, we should first review some history.
When early industrial operations in space offered the hope of rescuing
civilization, and Earth, from ruin, then greater knowledge of sister planets,
prior to their development, became a clear necessity. The effort started with
Mars, the least hostile. No natural law forbade sending small manned
spacecraft yonder. What did was the absurdity of using as much fuel. time, and
effort as were required, in order that three or four persons might spend a few
days in a single locality.
Construction of the J. Peter Vajk took longer and cost more, but paid
off when it, virtually a colony, spread its immense solar sail and took a
thousand people to their goal in half a year and in comparative comfort. The
payoff grew overwhelming when they, from orbit, launched Earthward the
beneficiated minerals of Phobos that they did not need for their own purposes.
Those purposes, of course, turned on the truly thorough, long-term study of
Mars. and included landings of auxiliary craft, for ever lengthier stays, all
over the surface.
Sufficient to remind you of this much; no need to detail the triumphs of
the same basic concept throughout the inner Solar System, as far as Jupiter.
The tragedy of the Vladimir became a reason to try again for Mercury, and, in
a left-handed, political way, pushed the Britannic-American consortium into
its Chronos project.
They named the ship better than they knew. Sailing time to Saturn was
eight years.
Not only the scientists must be healthy, lively-minded people. Crewfolk,
technicians, medics, constables, teachers. clergy, entertainers-.every element
of an entire community must be. Each must command more than a single skill,
for emergency backup, and keep those skills alive by regular, tedious
rehearsal. The environment was limited and austere; communication with home
was soon a matter of beamcasts; cosmopolitans found themselves in what
amounted to an isolated village. What were they to do?
Assigned tasks. Civic projects, especially work on improving the
interior of the vessel. Research, or writing a book, or the study of a
subject, or sports, or hobby clubs, or service and handicraft enterprises, or
more private interactions, or- There was a wide choice of television tapes,
but Central Control made sets usable for only three hours in twenty-four. You
dared not get into the habit of passivity.
Individuals grumbled, squabbled, formed and dissolved cliques, formed
and dissolved marriages or less explicit relationships, begot and raised
occasional children, worshiped, mocked, learned, yearned, and for the most
part found reasonable satisfaction in life. But for some, including a large
proportion of the gifted, what made the difference between this and misery
were their psychodramas.
-Mmamoto
Dawn crept past the ice, out onto the rock. It was a light both dim and harsh,
yet sufficient to give Garcilasothe last data he wanted for descent.
The hiss of the motor died away. A thump shivered through the hull,
landing jacks leveled it, and stillness fell. The crew did not speak for a
while. They were staring out at Iapetus.
Immediately around them was desolation like that which reigns in much of
the Solar System. A darkling plain curved visibly away to a horizon that, at
man-height, was a bare three kilometers distant; higher up in the cabin, you
could see farther, but that only sharpened the sense of being on a minute ball
awhirl among the stars. The ground was thinly covered with cosmic dust and
gravel; here and there a minor crater or an up thrust mass lifted out of the
regolith to cast long, knife edged, utterly black shadows. Light reflections
lessened the number of visible stars, turning heaven into a bowlful of
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