L. Sprague de Camp Short Sories Read online

  Non But Lucifer and Other Stories

  A collection of L. Spargue de Camp Short Stories

  A Custom Book

  Contents:-

  L. Sprague de Camp

  Aristotle and the Gun

  Employment

  Hyperpilosity

  Judgement Day

  Language for Time Travellers

  Little Green Men From Afar

  None but Lucifer

  Nothing in The Rules

  The Better Mousetrap

  The Blue Griraffe

  The Care and Feeding of Mad Scientists

  The Command

  The Emperor's Fan

  The Exalted

  The Gnarly Man

  The Green Magician

  The Guided Man

  The Hardwood Pile

  The Inspector's Teeth

  The Merman

  The Space Clause

  The Stolen Dormouse

  Two Yards of Dragon

  L. Sprague de Camp

  L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. Much of the luster of the "Golden Age" of Astounding during the late `30s and the `40s is due to the presence in those pages of de Camp, along with his great contemporaries Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. Van Vogt. At the same time, for Astounding's sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, he helped to create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing--funny, whimsical, and irreverent--of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. De Camp's stories for Unknown are among the best short fantasies ever written, and include such classics as "The Wheels of If." "The Gnarly Man." "Nothing in the Rules." "The Hardwood Pile," and (written in collabora-tion with Fletcher Pratt) the famous "Harold Shea" stories that would later be collected as The Compleat Enchanter. In science fiction, he is the author of Lest Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds novels ever written, as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly crafted short fiction such as "Judgment Day." "Divide and Rule," and "A Gun for Dinosaur."

  "Aristotle and the Gun," published in 1956, would prove to be de Camp's last science-fiction short story for more than a decade. After this,

  he would devote his energies to turning out a long sequence of critically acclaimed historical novels (includ-ing The Bronze God of Rhodes and An Elephant for Aristotle, two of my favorite historical novels) and, like Isaac Asimov (and at about the same time), a number of non-fiction books on scientific and technical topics. He would not return to writing fantasy and SF

  to any significant degree until the mid-'70s, and, although his presence enriched several other fields, it was sorely missed in ours. Still, if de Camp had to stop writing SF for a time, this was a good story to go out with--de Camp at the height of his powers, writing in his usual vivid, erudite, and slyly witty way about some of the subjects--and the historical personages--that interested him the most.

  De Camp's other books include The Glory That Was, The Search for Zei, The Tower of Zanid, The Great Fetish, and, with Fletcher Pratt, The Land of Unreason. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, A Gun for Dinosaur, and The Purple Pterodactyls. His most recent book is The Honorable Barbarian. He lives in Texas with his wife, writer Catherine Crook de Camp.

  Aristotle and the Gun

  From:

  Sherman Weaver, Librarian The Palace Paumanok, Sewanhaki Sachimate of Lenape Flower Moon 3,

  To:

  Messire Markos Koukidas Consulate of the Balkan Commonwealth Kataapa, Muskhogian Federation

  My dear Consul:

  You have no doubt heard of our glorious victory at Ptaksit, when our noble Sachim destroyed the armored chivalry of the Mengwe by the brilliant use of pikemen and archery. (I suggested it to him years ago but never mind.) Sagoyewatha and most of his Senecas fell, and the Oneidas broke before our countercharge. The envoys from the Grand Council of the Long House arrive tomorrow for a peace-pauwau. The roads to the South are open again, so I send you my long-promised account of the events that brought me from my own world into this one.

  If you could have stayed longer on your last visit, I think I could have made the matter clear, despite the language difficulty and my hardness of hearing. But perhaps, if I give you a simple narrative, in the order in which things happened to me, truth will transpire.

  Know, then, that I was born into a world that looks like this on the map, but is very different as regards human affairs. I tried to tell you of some of the triumphs of our natural philosophers, of our machines and discoveries.

  No doubt you thought me a first-class liar, though you were too polite to say so.

  Nonetheless, my tale is true, though for reasons that will appear I cannot prove it. I was one of those natural philosophers. I commanded a group of younger philosophers, engaged in a task called a project, at a center of learning named Brookhaven, on the south shore of Sewanhaki twenty parasangs east of Paumanok. Paumanok itself was known as Brooklyn, and formed part of an even larger city called New York.

  My project had to do with the study of space-time. (Never mind what that means but read on.) At this center we had learned to get vast amounts of power from sea water by what we called a fusion process. By this process we could concentrate so much power in a small space that we could warp the entity called space-time and cause things to travel in time as our other machines traveled in space.

  When our calculations showed that we could theoretically hurl an object back in time, we began to build a machine for testing this hypothesis.

  First we built a small pilot model. In this we sent small objects back in time for short periods.

  We began with inanimate objects. Then we found that a rabbit or rat could also be projected without harm. The time-translation would not be permanent; rather, it acted like one of these rubber balls the Hesperians play games with. The object would stay in the desired time for a period determined by the power used to project it and its own mass, and would then return spontaneously to the time and place from which it started.

  We had reported our progress regularly, but my chief had other matters on his mind and did not read our reports for many months. When he got a report saying that we were completing a machine to hurl human beings back in time, however, he awoke to what was going on, read our previous reports, and called me in.

  "Sherm," he said, "I've been discussing this project with Washington, and I'm afraid they take a dim view of it."

  "Why?" said I, astonished.

  "Two reasons. For one thing, they think you've gone off the reservation. They're much more interested in the Antarctic Reclamation Project and want to concentrate all our appropriations and brain power on it.

  "For another, they're frankly scared of this time machine of yours.

  Suppose you went back, say, to the time of Alexander the Great and shot Alexander before he got started? That would change all later history, and we'd go out like candles."

  "Ridiculous," I said.

  "What, what would happen?"

  "Our equations are not conclusive, but there are several possibilities.

  As you will see if you read Report No. 9, it depends on whether space-time has a positive or negative curvature. If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent-history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.

  "Now, as I showed in this report, the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of a positive curvature. However, we intend to take every precaution and make our first tests for
short periods, with a minimum--"

  "That's enough," said my superior, holding up a hand. "It's very interesting, but the decision has already been made."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean Project A-257 is to be closed down and a final report written at once. The machines are to be dismantled, and the group will be put to work on another project."

  "What?" I shouted. "But you can't stop us just when we're on the verge--"

  "I'm sorry, Sherm, but I can. That's what the AEC decided at yesterday's meeting. It hasn't been officially announced, but they gave me positive orders to kill the project as soon as I got back here."

  "Of all the lousy, arbitrary, benighted--"

  "I know how you feel, but I have no choice."

  I lost my temper and defied him, threatening to go ahead with the project anyway. It was ridiculous, because he could easily dismiss me for insubordination. However, I knew he valued my ability and counted on his wanting to keep me for that reason. But he was clever enough to have his cake and eat it.

  "If that's how you feel," he said, "the section is abolished here and now. Your group will be broken up and assigned to other projects. You'll be kept on at your present rating with the title of consultant. Then when you're willing to talk sense, perhaps we can find you a suitable job."

  I stamped out of his office and went home to brood. I ought now to tell you something of myself. I am old enough to be objective, I hope. And, as I have but a few years left, there is no point in pretence.

  I have always been a solitary, misanthropic man. I had little interest in or liking of my fellow man, who naturally paid me back in the same coin. I was awkward and ill at ease in company. I had a genius for saying the wrong thing and making a fool of myself.

  I never understood people. Even when I watched and planned my own actions with the greatest care, I never could tell how others would react to them. To me men were and are an unpredictable, irrational, and dangerous species of hairless ape. While I could avoid some of my worst gaffes by keeping my own counsel and watching my every word, they did not like that either. They considered me a cold, stiff, unfriendly sort of person when I was only trying to be polite and avoid offending them.

  I never married. At the time of which I speak, I was verging on middle age without a single close friend and no more acquaintances than my professional work required.

  My only interest, outside my work was a hobby of the history of science. Unlike most of my fellow philosophers, I was historically minded, with a good smattering of a classical education. I belonged to the History of Science Society and wrote papers on the history of science for its periodical Isis.

  I went back to my little rented house, feeling like Galileo. He was a scientist persecuted for his astronomical theories by the religious authorities of my world several centuries before my time, as Georg Schwartzhorn was a few years ago in this world's Europe.

  I felt I had been born too soon. If only the world were scientifically more advanced, my genius would be appreci-ated and my personal difficulties solved.

  Well, I thought, why is the world not scientifically more advanced? I reviewed the early growth of science. Why had not your fellow countrymen, when they made a start towards a scientific age two thousand to twenty-five hundred years ago, kept at it until they made science the self-supporting, self-accelerating thing it at last became--in my world, that is?

  I knew the answers that historians of science had worked out. One was the effect of slavery, which made work disgraceful to a free man and therefore made experiment and invention unattractive because they looked like work. Another was the primitive state of the mechanical arts: things like making clear glass and accurate measuring devices. Another was the Hellenes' fondness for spinning cosmic theories without enough facts to go on, the result of which was that most of their theories were wildly wrong.

  Well, thought I, could a man go back to this period and, by applying a stimulus at the right time and place, give the necessary push to set the whole trend rolling off in the right direction?

  People had written fantastic stories about a man's going back in time and overawing the natives by a display of the discoveries of his own later era. More often than not, such a time-traveling hero came to a bad end. The people of the earlier time killed him as a witch, or he met with an accident, or something happened to keep him from changing history. But, knowing these dangers, I could forestall them by careful planning.

  It would do little or no good to take back some major invention, like a printing press or an automobile, and turn it over to the ancients in the hope of grafting it on their culture. I could not teach them to work it in a reasonable time; and, if it broke down or ran out of supplies, there would be no way lo get it running again.

  What I had to do was to find a key mind and implant in it an appreciation of sound scientific method. He would have to be somebody who would have been important in any event, or I could not count on his influence's spreading far and wide.

  After study of Sarton and other historians of science, I picked Aristotle. You have heard of him, have you not? He existed in your world just as he did in mine. In fact, up to Aristotle's time our worlds were one and the same.

  Aristotle was one of the greatest minds of all time. In my world, he was the first encyclopedist; the first man who tried to know everything, write down everything, and explain everything. He did much good original scientific work, too, mostly in biology.

  However, Aristotle tried to cover so much ground, and accepted so many fables as facts that he did much harm to science as well as good.

  For, when a man of such colossal intellect goes wrong, he carries with him whole generations of weaker minds who cite him as an infallible authority.

  Like his colleagues, Aristotle never appreciated the need for constant verification. Thus, though he was married twice, he said that men have more teeth than women. He never thought to ask either of his wives to open her mouth for a count. He never grasped the need for invention and experi-ment.

  Now, if I could catch Aristotle at the right period of his career, perhaps I could give him a push in the right direction.

  When would that be? Normally, one would take him as a young man.

  But Aristotle's entire youth, from seventeen to thirty-seven, was spent in Athens listening to Plato's lectures. I did not wish to compete with Plato, an overpowering personality who could argue rings round everybody. His viewpoint was mystical and anti-scientific, the very thing I wanted to steer Aristotle away from. Many of Aristotle's intellectual vices can be traced back to Plato's influence.

  I did not think it wise to present myself in Athens either during Aristotle's early period, when he was a student under Plato, or later, when he headed his own school. I could not pass myself off as a Hellene, and the Hellenes of that time had a contempt for all non-Hellenes, whom they called "barbarians." Aristotle was one of the worst offenders in this respect.

  Of course this is a universal human failing, but it was particularly virulent among Athenian intellectuals. In his later Athenian period, too, Aristotle's ideas would probably be too set with age to change.

  I concluded that my best chance would be to catch Aristotle while he was tutoring young Alexander the Great at the court of Philip the Second of Macedon. He would have regarded Macedon as a backward country, even though the court spoke Attic Greek. Perhaps he would be bored with bluff Macedonian stag-hunting squires and lonesome for intellectual company.

  As he would regard the Macedonians as the next thing to barbaroi, another barbarian would not appear at such a disadvantage there as at Athens.

  Of course, whatever I accomplished with Aristotle, the results would depend on the curvature of space-time. I had not been wholly frank with my superior. While the equations tended to favor the hypothesis of a positive curvature, the probability was not overwhelming as I claimed. Perhaps my efforts would have little effect on history, or perhaps the effect would grow and widen like ripples in a pool. In t
he latter case the existing world would, as my superior said, be snuffed out.

  Well, at that moment I hated the existing world and would not give a snap of my fingers for its destruction. I was going to create a much better one and come back from ancient times to enjoy it.

  Our previous experiments showed that I could project myself back to ancient Macedon with an accuracy of about two months temporally and a half-parasang spatially. The machine included controls for positioning the time traveler anywhere on the globe, and safety devices for locating him above the surface of the earth, not in a place already occupied by a solid object. The equations showed that I should stay in Macedon about nine weeks before being snapped back to the present.

  Once I had made up my mind, I worked as fast as I could. I telephoned my superior (you remember what a telephone is?) and made my peace. I said: