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//-->FLEUVE REDROBERT F. YOUNGRobert Young returns with a sequel to his "The Earth Books" (last issue) inwhich the author again follows his Muse to an unlikely world . . .ILLUSTRATED by RICHARD OLSENWELL, here I am on Alpheratz VI."Be sure and take your umbrella," my Muse told me just before I left Earth. "On Alpheratz VI it rainsthree hundred and sixty-four days out of the year."As usual, she was exaggerating. I would estimate Alpheratz VI's rainfall to be about that of Earth's.The temperature and the topography aren't much different either.Immediately after my arrival, I chose a commodious country named Vespucha to live in and acolorful city named Serice to write in. Then I set about learning the Vespuchan language. In this, I wasassisted by a beautiful native girl named Wenda, and it is she to whom I am indebted for my presentprowess in the conjugation of Vespuchan verbs and the diagraming of Vespuchan sentences.Not only did Wenda help me learn the language, she got me a room in a pleasant inn and kept mecompany between lessons. She is a tall, willowy girl with chestnut hair and luminous gray eyes. I owe hera great deal. Almost as much as I owe my Muse.I hadn't been on Alpheratz VI very long before I became acquainted with the brome. This uniqueherbivore is endowed by nature with circular appendages instead of feet, and it rolls instead of running. Itis covered with curious, fuzz-like hair that reflects light, and is all one color—generally blue or red oryellow, although green ones aren't unusual. Broad and low-slung, it has three eyes, two of which areround, phosphorescent, and located just above the fore-appendages, and the third of which isrectangular, exceedingly large, and located just beyond the long snout, forming the front part of theslightly slanted hump that comprises the creature's back.The brome is used by the Vespuchans both as a beast of burden and as a means of transportation.Sometimes they ride on its back, but most of the time they ride on carriages attached to its rearend bymeans of a light wooden pole. The carriages are unique in their own right. They're constructed principallyof wood, painted various colors, have an overall length of about ten feet and consist of a "tonneau" and a"forestructure". The former is cylindrical and rests on four articulated stilts with inflated rubber bases; thelatter joins the former at a 45" angle, is slightly tapered and terminates in an oblong horizontal trunk forcarrying baggage.Inside the tonneau there's a device called a "shuttleplate" that's connected to the four articulated stiltsvia four different gear trains. The back-and-forth motion created in the shuttle-plate when the brome pullsthe carriage is transmitted via the different gear trains to the stilts, causing then to rise, swing forward andlower in alternating sequence. Extra stress upon either of the two fore-stilts, as when the brome turnsright or left, causes it to disengage from the shuttle-plate and function as a pivot till stress returns tonormal.Bromes are taught to respond to four simple commands—a trisyllabic one meaningGoand threemonosyllabic ones meaningStop, Turn leftandTurn rightrespectively. Lines held in the carriagedriver's hands and attached to the hubs of the brome's fore-appendages provide additional control.After my introduction to this remarkable conveyance, I concluded naturally enough that Vespuchaningenuity had outdone itself and that further innovations in the field of transportation couldn't fail to beanticlimactic. Consider my amazement then, when, returning from a stroll late one afternoon, I saw aVespuchan riding on a rapidly moving carriagethat was unattached to a brome!THE BROMELESS CARRIAGE was made primarily of metal instead of wood and differed frombrome-drawn ones in certain other respects. On the front of its baggage trunk were two tiny headlamps,and just above them were two pointed knobs—clearly controls of some kind. It sounded different too.Brome-drawn carriages emit a faint clacking noise caused by the vacillations of their shuttle-plates; thisone emitted a continuous series ofputs,which, as nearly as I could determine, came from an orifice in itsrear region that was partly hidden by a curious queue of fine, wool-like wires.I wasted no time in finding Wenda and describing the phenomenon to her. It was then that I learnedthat on the east bank of the Serice River, just south of the city, there is a factory devoted exclusively tothe manufacture of locomobiles, as these bromeless carriages are called. They are nothing new, Wendatold me, but as yet they're relatively rare because before the introduction of revolutionary productiontechniques by the owner and builder of the Serice River Plant, producing them in sufficient quantities tocreate a market wasn't practicable. The locomobile I'd seen was merely one of the forerunners ofthousands—more likely, millions—to come.The very next morning Wenda, who is as much at home among the upper echelons of Serice societyas she is among the lower, took me to visit the Serice River Plant and introduced me to its owner andbuilder, whose office is on the 26th floor of the towering Administrative & Engineering Building. Heproved to be a quiet, unassuming man of medium height somewhere in his 50's who, when I inadvertentlyreferred to him as an "inventor" immediately disclaimed the honor. His name is Enryh Ordf.Word had already got around that I was a writer, and since the Vespuchan language doesn'tdifferentiate between the terms "writer" and "journalist", Mr. Ordf naturally assumed that my reason forvisiting him was to do a piece on him and his factory for one of the Vespuchan periodicals. I saw no pointin disillusioning him. After Wenda left, he offered me a cigar, and both of us lit up. Then he stepped overto a big bay window behind his desk and beckoned to me to join him.He pointed. "Those corrugated-steel structures way in the background are the Serice River SteelMill. That big blue building in the middle distance is the Serice River Stamping Plant. The ferrousfoundry's on one side of it, the non-ferrous on the other. Those long warehouses next to the river are forstoring the parts and material that are shipped in from other Ordf factories, including the engines thatmake the locomobiles go. The long building in the foreground running kitty-corners to this one is theSerice River Assembly Plant. If you'll strain your eyes just a little you'll be able to see the new Ordfs thathave just come off the assembly line being driven onto the rivercraft moored at the docks."I squinted into the morning sunlight. Sure enough, a steady stream of shiny new Ordfs was emergingfrom the end of the building and flowing up a boarding ramp onto the deck of one of a quartet of riverboats.I was awed. Not so much by the magnitude of the Serice River Plant as by the magnitude of theVespuchan who had built it. On the surface, he might seem as common as an old shoe, and on paper, hemight seem no more than an engineer turned entrepreneur; but I knew I was standing beside a geniussuch as Alpheratz VI has never seen before and will probably never see again. I wished fervently that Iwerea journalist so that Icouldgive the Vespuchan people a stirring story about him and his factory; butbeing a mere creative writer, all I could do was stand there and gape.Mr. Ordf stepped over to the door. "Come along," he said. "I'm hard-pressed for time, but I canspare enough of it to show you how Ordfs are put together."WE DESCENDED from his aerie through successive layers of offices teeming with administrators,executives, engineers, technicians, bookkeepers, secretaries, receptionists and just plain office girls, tothe ground floor. Presently we stepped outside, and Mr. Ordf led the way to the Assembly Plant, fromwhich weird medleys of clangs, crashes and screeches were emanating. Just inside the entrance, a seriesof steel stairs led upward to a lofty catwalk, and when Mr. Ordf began mounting them, I followed.At first, after gaining the catwalk and looking down, I couldn't make heads or tails out of what wasgoing on below. But I gradually sorted things out as I walked along the catwalk in Mr. Ordfs wake: themoving platform immediately below and running the entire length of the building was a conveyor; themiscellany of objects hanging on hooks just above and within easy reach of the workers were tools; andthe metal objects of various shapes and sizes piled behind the workers were the components, or parts, ofOrdfs-to-be.I saw these remarkable vehicles grow from piles of nuts and bolts into semi-cylindrical tonneaus, intofull-fledged tonneaus, and into one-stilted, two-stilted, three-stilted and four-stilted tonneaus. Presently,far below, I saw workers lifting the fore-structures into place and securing them with rivets."In designing Ordfs," Mr. Ordf shouted above the din, "we stuck pretty close to basiccarriage-design. It's sound, and people've become pretty well accustomed to it. So an Ordf doesn't looka great deal different from an ordinary brome-drawn carriage—on the outside. The inside, though—that'sanother matter. In Ordfs, those forestructures you see being attached are more than just glorifiedbaggage-compartments: they house the fuel tanks too. The top part of the trunk lifts up, just as in thebrome-drawn carriage type; but on the bottom of the baggage compartment is a tube that runs down intothe tank, making it easy to fill 'er up whenever it's necessary. Naturally the tube is kept capped at allother times to prevent spillage."The two pointed knobs I'd noticed on the trunk of the bromeless carriage I'd seen in Serice weremissing from the forestructures below. I asked Mr. Ordf where they were and what they were for."They'll be installed later," he replied. "The one on the left lights the headlamps and the one on theright blows the horn, both of which'll also be installed later, as well as the tonneau storage-battery theydraw on."We had continued walking along the catwalk and were now directly above an oval vat brimming withbrown fluid. The conveyor ended on one side of it, then began again on the other. Over it, a winch swungrhythmically back and forth, lifting each Ordf-to-be by means of a sling passed beneath its undercarriageby two workers, dipping it into the brown fluid, then lifting it out and setting it down on the secondsection of the conveyor, where a second pair of workers removed the sling. The Ordf was then bornebetween two opposing rows of powerful blowers that dried it to a crisp, lustrous brown.I was favorably impressed by the efficiency of the operation, but one point puzzled me. "Is that theonlyvat?" I asked Mr. Ordf.He nodded. "The undercoat's incorporated in the lacquer."I saw he hadn't got my point. "I mean," I elaborated, "don't you paint them other colors besidesbrown?""Of course not!""But Mr. Ordf, suppose some of your customers should want red Ordfs or blue Ordfs or yellowOrdfs?"He laughed. "They can have any color they want—so long as it's brown!"I let the matter drop.FOR SOME TIME NOW I'd noticed certain individuals on the floor below who differed somewhatfrom the workers and who didn't seem to be engaged in any of the operations. They wore shiny blacksuits with leather elbow pads, black caps with long, pointed visors, and square-toed black shoes. All ofthem carried little black notebooks in which they periodically made entries with stubby yellow pencils.For the most part, they stood some distance back from the assembly line, sometimes between the piles ofparts, but every once in a while one of them would run over to one of the workers, shouting at the top ofhis voice and waving his arms.Finally my curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Mr. Ordf who they were. "Why, they're myforemen, of course," he replied."But there's so many of them!" I gasped. "Surely your employees don't needthatmuch supervision!""Supervision's only part of their job. What they're there for mostly is to find ways to speed upproduction so we can cut costs. My aim it to produce Ordfs everybody can afford, and to do that I haveto keep upping the daily quota. The more unnecessary motions my foremen eliminate, the moremachine-like and efficient the workers become. Eventually, of course, everything you see being donehere today by unskilled labor will be done by regular machines.""But Mr. Ordf," I objected, "I know little about such matters, but aren't regular machines—exceptperhaps prohibitively expensive ones—incapable of performing any but the simplest of tasks, and as timegoes on, won't more and more improvements and additions cause locomobiles to become more andmore complicated?""Not in my factory!" Enryh Ordf said."Perhaps not in yours, sir. But sooner or later, won't other entrepreneurs—if they haven'talready—build other factories? And lacking your idealism, won't they deliberately add accessories totheir vehicles and keep changing their lines in order to attract more customers and justify higher prices?And won't such practices eventually complicate locomobiles to such an extent that making them withmachines will be economically unfeasible?""Whattheydo is no concern of mine!""But you'll have to compete with them. And to do so successfully, you'll have to complicate yourlocomobiles too. So won't you wind up being even more dependent on unskilled labor than you are now,and if machines ever take over the jobs in other industries, won't the locomobile industry feel kind offoolish?""Bosh!" Enryh Ordf said. But I could see he was worried.BELOW US, workers were raising the hinged upper sections of the tonneaus and lowering largemulti-finned mechanisms into the interiors of the Ordfs by means of a chainfall. These were the enginesthat made the Ordfs go, Mr. Ordf informed me. As I watched, other mechanisms were set into place andinstalled. One of these, I learned, was the steering unit, which, in response to pressure exerted on eitherof two "knee-plates" incorporated in the tonneau's sides, causes one of the two fore-stilts to function as apivot for the duration of the pressure.The engine intrigued me most, and I asked Mr. Ordf how it worked. "Basically what it does," heexplained, "is employ a series of alternating explosions to move four pistons back and forth in fourelongated horizontal cylinders at a speed governed by the frequency of the explosions. Each piston isattached to one of the stilts by a connecting rod that's so designed that when it's engaged it lifts the stilt upas the piston moves forward and lowers it just before the piston moves back. All our engines are timed toproduce what we call a 'double alternate stilt-movement'—right rear stilt, right front stilt, left rear stilt, leftfront stilt, and so forth. Any number of other 'gaits' are possible, but we've found that this one providesthe smoothest ride with a minimum of wear and tear on the engine. As yet, we haven't devised a means ofmaking an Ordf back up, or of braking it; but we're working on both problems.""How do you cause the explosions?" I asked."Putting it as simply as possible, we vaporize a combustible fuel, combine it with air and force it intothe cylinders, where it's ignited by a spark.""And where do you get the fuel?""By distilling grain. Oh, we don't do it ourselves—the grain distilleries do. Wheat, corn, rye, oats. Forsome reason nobody's been able to figure out yet, locomobiles run best on fuel distilled from oats."THE REST of the operations were anticlimactic and involved the installation of such uninspiring itemsas storage batteries, headlamps, horns, exhaust pipes, exhaust filters (the -queues of fine, wool-like wiresthat cover the exhaust vents), seats, and so forth. The last item to be set in place was the instrumentpanel, which is located at the juncture of the tonneau and the forestructure.Finally Mr. Ordf and I came to a railed platform over-looking the end of the assembly line. Below us,the finished Ordfs were being inspected, fueled and started up to the accompaniment of innumerableput-put-putsthat drowned out the clangs, crashes and screeches of the plant proper.In trying to sort out the seeming confusion, I noticed two gray-suited men lurking in the shadows justto one side of the wide doorway through which the new Ordfs were being driven. Both of them had theirhats pulled down over their eyes, and one of them held a little notebook in which he was furtively makingentries, while the other one held a camera with which he was surreptitiously snapping pictures.Mr. Ordf caught sight of them almost the same time I did. His face went white. "Get those two!" heshouted to one of his foremen, pointing toward the two men. "They're spies!"Not one, but six foremen responded, closing in on the two interlopers, carrying wrenches, crowbars,hammers, chains, and whatever else they could grab in a hurry. The interlopers shot out the door, runningfor their lives, the one with the camera dropping it in his haste to escape.A narrow steel stairway zigzagged down from the platform to the floor. Mr. Ordf was alreadypounding down it, shouting instructions to the six foremen, who presently disappeared through thedoorway. I followed at a more leisurely pace, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. By thetime I reached the floor, Mr. Ordf had vanished, and when at last I made my way through the workersand theput-put-puttingOrdfs he was already returning from the river bank, the six foremen trailingdejectedly behind him.Presently he joined me in the doorway. He looked crushed. "They got away," he said hoarsely. "Theyhad a boat hidden downstream."Who were they, sir?" I asked."The Odged brothers. They've been snooping around here for months, copying my techniques andstealing my ideas!""Oh. Do they make locomobiles too?"He looked at me. "Hah!" he said.I didn't press him for further information. I could see he was too upset. Anyway, the time he'd had tospare for my visit had already run out, and shortly after the unfortunate incident I accompanied him backto the Administrative & Engineering Building, where we shook hands and parted.I WISH I could tell the reader how Enryh Ordf ultimately made out with the dastardly Odgedbrothers and whether he succeeded in realizing his dream of turning out Ordfs everybody could afford tobuy; but writers as well as industrialists have to apportion their time, and soon after my visit to the SericeRiver Plant I said good by to Wenda and returned to Earth.When I got home, my Muse was sitting on the living-room floor, putting a jigsaw puzzle together."Hi," she said, as casually as though I'd just come from my study down the hall instead of from a planetlight years away. "How are things on Alpheratz VI?""Fine."I told her about the bromes, the brome-drawn carriages, the locomobiles and the Serice River Plant,being careful to make no mention of Wenda. (Muses are funny about certain things, and you have to becareful.) "Sounds something like a civilization I know of on Earth 4II," she said when I finished."Earth II?""A planet in a universe next to ours. It's really a rather dreadful place, and I wouldn't advise you tovisit it.""Do they have bromeless carriages there too?""No. They have carriageless bromes."I looked at her. Her elfin face was guileless. Beyond it, through the living-room window, I caught avista of afternoon hill and the distant footpaths and buildings of the city. "I think you're pulling my leg," Isaid."No I'm not—honest. The people of Earth it had living carriages but no bromes; so they built bromesfor the carriages to pull and eventually found a way to make the bromes propel themselves. People arenever satisfied with what they already have—don't you know that by this time?"I looked at her again. "I think I'll go fix supper," I said.My Muse exaggerates, but she never lies, so if she says there's such a civilization, there must be one.Apparently the only beings in all creation who like to walk are the beings of Earth I; and I sometimeswonder whether we really like to, or are just too lazy to look for a suitable substitute.—ROBERT F. YOUNG [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]