Takeoff! Read online

  Takeoff

  By Randall Garrett

  Copyright © 1979

  Cover illustration by Phil Foglio

  Interior illustrations by Kelly Freas

  Edited by Polly and Kelly Freas

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to Jerry Moore, without whose indefatigable research it would not have been possible.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  FOREWORD

  GENTLEMEN: PLEASE NOTE

  BACKSTAGE LENSMAN

  THE BEST POLICY

  THE COSMIC BEAT

  DESPOILERS OF THE GOLDEN EMPIRE

  THE HORROR OUT OF TIME

  LOOK OUT! DUCK!

  MASTERS OF THE METROPOLIS

  MUSTANG

  ...NO CONNECTIONS

  ON THE MARTIAN PROBLEM

  PREHISTORIC NOTE

  “REVIEWS IN VERSE”

  ISAAC ASIMOV’S “THE CAVES OF STEEL”

  ALFRED BESTER’S “THE DEMOLISHED MAN”

  L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP’S “LEST DARKNESS FALL”

  A.E. VAN VOGT’S “SLAN”

  POUL ANDERSON’S “THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS”

  JOHN W. CAMBELL’S “WHO GOES THERE?”

  THE ADVENTURES OF “LITTLE WILLIE”

  INTRODUCTION TO BENEDICT BREADFRUIT

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH BENEDICT BREADFRUIT

  INTRODUCTION

  By A. E. van Vogt

  In my opinion, the author of Takeoff should have been under official surveillance from the day he was conceived. At some distant future time, when we really know how to do things right, such as Randall Garrett will be watched closely from a very early age.

  Why?

  About 10 years ago I read a new work by the famous Russian psychologist, A. R. Luria (whose book The Nature of Human Conflicts made him world famous many decades earlier). The new work, possibly Luria’s last, was about a man with the “greatest” memory in all of Russia.

  Well! ...I don’t know whether Randall Garrett has in his time possessed the greatest memory in North America, or if he still possesses it. But I am sure that he has been right up there with the finalists.

  I cannot recall anyone ever mentioning Randall’s super ability. No American Luria sought him out, tested him periodically, and finally wrote him up as a case history of eidetic recall.

  Actually, the Luria account of the Russian memory wizard was not up to the standard of this scientist’s earlier work—from my point of view. It gave the numerous tests and their results. It described to a small extent some of the memory aids the Russian had worked out all by himself. (There were some elements in these of the Roth memory-by-association system.) But it failed to describe any of the commonplaces of, or the side effects of the ability on, the man’s daily life. The commonplaces of Randall’s life shall come under closer scrutiny—let me assure you—right here in these pages. Though neither I nor anyone else has apparently ever received direct replies from him on basic aspects of his life. When was Randall born? The only printed clue I have been able to find is given in the editor’s introduction to the original magazine version of Masters of the Metropolis, as follows:

  “Randall Garrett and Lin Carter had not been born when Hugo Gernsback created RALPH 124C 41+. To stress their youth further (for one can, like me, be far from young and still have been born after the first appearance of RALPH in Modern Electrics), they had not even been born when Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first all-science-fiction magazine….”

  Yet, sitting across from me and my Russian princess at the L,A. airport Mariott Hotel Capriccio Restaurant recently, Randall made the statement that he had known me for 30 years.

  He is the one with the eidetic memory. So, since Gernsback founded Amazing in 1926 (and Randall wasn’t born by then), and thirty years ago was 1948, we can put two and one together into twenty-one, or two and zero together into twenty.

  Randall, did you emerge into this cruel world in 1927.? Or was that strange party you gave in the spring of 1978 a celebration of half a hundred years of life?

  Where was I in 1948 that our paths crossed? I have many memories of Randall over the years. But that ‘48 meeting is a blur to a memory-mine-that cannot even recall the title of Luria’s book on Russia’s greatest observed rememberer.

  (Alas, I bought the book. Read it. Gave it as a gift to a friend. And have never been able to locate another copy.)

  Are Randall’s parents still alive? Where was Randall born? Where did he go to school’? What was the title of his first published work? Does he have brothers and sisters? Was he born a Catholic? Or did he convert?

  These last two, particularly, are relevant questions, Because Randall for ten years (after his initial foray into SF) attended seminary training, and became a Catholic priest.

  Did his Russian alter ego experience some similar moral concern? There is no record of such details in Luria’s work.

  It is interesting that the Russian with the supermemory was a newspaper reporter when Luria first met him. I mean, both men—Randall and the Russian—became writers automatically. Since Luria does not mention it, and because newspapermen do not normally have their works collected, we cannot examine the writings of the Russian mental marvel for clues about his personal life.

  Fortunately, that is not our problem with Randall. He has a body of literature to his credit. Of which you, dear reader, hold a portion in your hands. And a very revealing portion it is.

  In these pages you will find...pastiches. Stories written in the styles of other writers. Here you will find E. E. Smith, Ph.D. and H. P. Lovecraft and Eric Frank Russell as if returned from the dead, etc. Randall remembers each author’s style exactly. In the case of the E. E. Smith “takeoff’ he actually, after more than thirty years, repeated an entire paragraph of E. E. Smith’s without having seen the story in the interim. Since he had made no conscious effort to memorize the story at the time he read it, he subsequently realized by vivid recall what he had done, and rewrote the offending item. Rewrote it because there are unknowing people who would have considered it plagiarism if it had ever come to light.

  The pastiche, though not called such, is a well-known phenomenon of the Hollywood film game. It is an act of paralleling someone else’s work, using a new concept. So far as I know, no psychologist has ever made a serious study of the TV writers—particularly—who do this well. (Do they also have exceptional memories?)

  Each week these men and women write the exact same format for a continuing series, but with a different story. If you think this is easy, try it some time. (The writers who find such paralleling sheer agony are the ones you hear screaming about TV censorship. The others collect their $10,000 or so for an hour script without a peep of protest. And in fact they seem to wonder what all the fuss is about.)

  Randall is a mimic in voice, also. Like an actor, he can duplicate the way other people talk, and imitate the exact intonation of a foreign language. I am personally, currently, in process of learning 200 languages, and, not being the mimic type, am learning them on the hearing level only, to start. As a consequence of this study, I have observed that less than 5% of the populace are mimics.

  One of the first things to notice about a Randall Garrett story, pastiche or otherwise, is the elegance of his style. The beauty of his imagery. The easy insertion of difficult technical information. No matter what he writes, the style flows poetically.

  Which reminds me that in England, until recently, students were required to memorize thousands of lines of poetry during a school year. Shakespeare, in the days of Elizabeth I, had to do the same. Virtually all the men and women who gave England such a rich poetic heritage were forced memorizers.

  So it is interesting that we find our Randall of
the marvelous natural memory writing his reviews in poetic form. Entire novels are condensed, and commented on-poetically. Think about that. And when you read the reviews in this collection bear in mind that no one ever told Randall to do it that way.

  Undoubtedly, perfect memory has its drawbacks. For example’ one is bound to recall—perfectly—the unpleasant along with the pleasant. Once again, Luria—from whom we could have learned so much that would be useful-fails us. He does not mention that aspect of the greatest memory in all the Russias.

  Indeed, toward the end of his book we suddenly find him referring to the man as having died several years before. How did he die? From what? Was the death memory-related? Not a mention of such in Luria’s work.

  At this point let me apologize slightly for these criticisms of the great Russian psychologist. I believe he was over eighty years old when he wrote this final book. Also, we have to credit him with having done anything at all. So far as I know, it is the only work of its kind ever published by a psychologist.

  But it’s true, alas, that he has no advice for Randall as to what to watch out for as he grows into his second half century.

  I do have one comment. It is significant that Randall, when he drinks, takes his liquor straight—no water, no 7-Up, no dilution with ice. What is significant about this is that liquor is the one thing that can temporarily dim vivid unpleasant memory images.

  We live in an intermediate stage of history. The great scientific millennium is still ahead of us. When that millennium arrives, both special and unspecial—an even more difficult type to evaluate or help-people will be noticed early for what they are, or are capable of.

  And the correct action will be taken.

  Until then, here’s Randall who, in doing the best he could on his own with a perfect memory, has given us a few glimpses of that strange, wonderful world of the human mind. Question: is it possible that all people with good memories have a need to write pastiches?

  Which brings us back to what I said earlier: somebody in authority should be looking into Randall Garrett. And maybe even looking after him.

  FOREWORD

  By Randall Garrett

  In the first chapter of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, the venerable Bilbo Baggins makes a speech at the party he is giving to celebrate his eleventy-first birthday. In that speech, he tells the assembled hobbits that he does not know half of them as well as he should like, and he likes less than half of them half as well as they deserve.

  Most of his guests sit around trying to work it out and see if it comes out a compliment.

  I am still doing exactly the same thing with Van’s introduction to this book.

  Van vastly underrates his own memory and even more vastly overrates mine. I remember our first meeting well, but

  Why should A. E. Van Vogt, who has been a glittering star in the science fiction firmament since 1939, remember an unimpressive, awestruck fan who had one very minor story published under another name four years before? That summer of 1948, I found his name in the L.A. phone book and trepidatingly called him up. I must have said something right, for he invited me to his home.

  I showed up, but I have the feeling that Van was far more impressed by the blue-eyed ‘honey blonde I brought with me.

  Van’s working out of my age is a marvel of mathematical exactitude. I was born in 1927. Unlike Bilbo, I have never liked birthday parties, especially my own. Just for the novelty, I decided to celebrate my fiftieth, but only after it had passed;

  You are all invited to my next such party, to be held sometime after my eleventy-first birthday.

  By that time, I may have enough material to put together another book like this, but that is problematical. You see, I only do them when I bloody well feel like it. If the right idea for a pastiche or parody hits me, I do it, but that doesn’t happen often. This book represents some twenty years of that kind of work.

  The difference between a pastiche and a parody is, perhaps, a subtle one..

  A pastiche attempts to tell a story in the same way that another author would have told it. In this book, The Best Policy is a pastiche, not a parody. I used, to the best of my ability, Eric Frank Russell’s style of writing and his way of telling a story.

  A parody, when properly done, takes an author’s idiosyncrasies—of style, content, and method of presentation—and very carefully exaggerates them. You jack them up just one more notch. The idea is to make those idiosyncrasies blatantly visible. Thus, Backstage Lensman is a parody. Doc Smith would never have-very probably could never have-written it. It is very difficult indeed for a writer to see his own idiosyncrasies; they are too much a part of him.

  But the line between parody and pastiche is not hard and thin; it is broad and fuzzy. Is The Horror Out of Time a pastiche or a parody? I don’t know. You tell me.

  I do not decide to write a pastiche or parody just for the sake of writing one. The story idea comes first. In 99.44% of the cases, I write my own story in one of my own styles. But once in a very great while it seems to me that the idea belongs in someone else’s universe. Then I write a pastiche. See, herein, No Connections.

  And when the idea belongs in another’s universe—except that it is patently ridiculous—I write a parody. The idea for Backstage Lensman, for instance, you will find in the next-to-last scene, in a simple mathematical formula. All the rest of it came from that.

  The “Reviews in Verse” are a different breed of mutant. They are quite deliberate. The idea is to tell the plot with reasonable accuracy—and leave out the entire point that the author was trying to make! So even if you do not heed my warning at the beginning of that section, you will still not know what the story is really about. For that, go to the originals.

  The “Little Willies” are takeoffs of an Englishman named Harry Graham, who originated them. Since he was a retired officer of Her Majesty’s [Victoria, that is.] Coldstream Guards, he wrote under the name “Col. D. Streamer.”

  The Benedict Breadfruit stories need no introduction from me. My very good friend, Reginald Bretnor, got his very good friend, Grendel Briarton, to do an introduction for them. And Mr. Briarton, apparently, had to go to Ferdinand Feghoot for the final copy.

  I have not, by any means, given what might be called The Garrett Treatment to all the writers I admire. Although Van’s Slan is in here, his distinctive style is ripe for story treatment. Ted Sturgeon would be fun. Fritz Leiber is on my little list. Bob Silverberg is begging for it. Lester del Rey is going to get his one of these days. Cordwainer Smith has it coming. Frank Herbert will not go unscathed. Mack Reynolds is overdue. Avram Davidson will not be neglected. Neither will Michael Kurland. There are others. Just wait.

  Maybe before my eleventy-first...

  Wait! Don’t go away! This book is like a tapestry. I supplied the basic material, and Frank Kelly Freas supplied the lovely embroidery. [Is that a crewel remark?] When this book becomes an expensive collector’s item (when. not if). it will be because of Kelly’s work, not mine.

  (Kelly, if you or Polly cut what follows because of some false feeling of modesty, may your pencils break, your inkpots run dry, your typewriter clog, your paints become gelatinous, and your canvas rot. Truth, dammit, is truth!)

  This book is Kelly’s work in more than one way. Let me give you some background, and then I’ll tell you a true story.

  I met Kelly in the early fifties at a science fiction convention. I don’t remember which one; they all begin to blend into one another after all this time. (See, Van? I told you!) I don’t remember the con, but I remember Kelly. At that time, he sported a large red mustache and a smile which kept it turned up at the ends. I loved the man immediately.

  Kelly is witty, outgoing, friendly, gregarious, and articulate. He is shrewd, careful, intelligent, and analytical. He is sensitive, understanding, warm and compassionate. And he knows the science and technique of art as few people in history have known it.

  He is, of course, a science fiction fan of the highest cal
iber. It shows in every illustration he does. He cares about science fiction. And he cares about the people who write and read it.

  That’s not all the background I could give you on the man, but it will have to do for the nonce. Now comes the story.

  A while back, I was talking to Kelly on the phone about a book of mine that didn’t quite measure up to his and Polly’s specifications. Suddenly, he said: “Hey! What about a book of your parodies and pastiches?”

  “Is the world ready for this?” I asked.

  “Damn right it is!” and he mentioned several stories he liked. He got me enthusiastic, and I went to work finding them.

  About a week later he called me. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he shouted into my tender ear.

  Carefully easing the receiver back toward that offended organ, I said: “you do? Is it contagious?”

  “No, no! I’ve got the title for your book!”

  Nero Wolfe once said: “I have no talent. I have genius or nothing.” The thing about Kelly is that he has both.

  His talent lies in his ability to use any and every artistic medium that exists. His genius lies in the way he uses them. And that genius shows through every medium.

  Let me give you an imaginative example-what Albert Einstein called a “thought experiment.”

  I am fond of churches as works of art; I am a church buff, among other things, and I go absolutely ape over the Gothic style. The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe really turn me on, and if I were going to build a church, it would be in that style. Suppose I had enough money to build the church of my dreams. It would take many tens of millions of dollars today.

  With that vast sum in my pocket, I would go to Frank Kelly Freas and say: “Kelly, build me that church. Hire engineers, hire architects, hire artisans of any kind you need. Money is no object, but build me that church.”

  He could do it; you damn well betcha he could. The spires, the gargoyles, the statues, the stained glass windows-all. And when he was through (assuming a lifespan of some three centuries), it would be the most beautiful church in all Christendom. That is his talent.