Mind, Machines and Evolution Part 5

The fact that he'd been recruited in the first place exposed a flaw in our screening and selection procedures, but we think we've fixed that now. I don't know if he and Vicki are still together, but somehow I doubt it.

He still shows up from time to time. You may have come across the stuff he writes in crank science magazines, or those tabloids you see at the supermarket checkouts. Usually he's raving on about a monstrous government conspiracy to sabotage science that he says he has the "inside story" on; but most of the people who read those things only do so for laughs, and the ones who take them seriously are never taken seriously by anyone else. But apparently that's the only kind of market Marty can find. None of the reputable publishers will touch him. The word seems to have gotten round the industry somehow that he was let go by the government because of his tendency to instability and paranoid delusions, all stemming from his long-standing problems with drink and drug abuse.

It's tough, but that's the way life sometimes has to be. Eventually Marty ought to be able to figure out what he's up against, if only he'd stop and think about it. Then maybe he'd be able to save himself a lot of grief and go off and enjoy himself, instead of trying to beat the system in a situation where he's got no chance.

Because he's up against professionals.

Baloney is our business, after all.

GETTING HERE FROM.

THERE.

Like most science-fiction writers, I attend science-fiction conventions at least a few times a year. It helps us to get to know our readers, and the readers to get to know us. Apart from "How did you get started?" one of the most frequent questions I'm asked is "What are you working on currently?" For the past half year or so I've replied that one of the projects is a collection of short stories and essays. In response to this, a number of readers asked if I could include some autobiography, too. They grumbled that the blurb at the backs of the books is too short, and always says the same thing anyway. I put this to Lou Aronica of Bantam while we were having dinner one evening in New York, and Lou thought it was a good idea. So . . .

I grew up in the part of London known as North Kensington. My father was a devout Irish Catholic, and my mother, a German atheist. There was a war going on, which meant that it seemed normal for most adults to wear uniforms and the parks to be full of sandbagged antiaircraft gun and searchlight emplacements, and that on some days it should rain rain, and on others, bombs. On top of this, I had been born with deformities of both feet, which were to entail many years of surgery to rectify, and my parents were cautioned that the chances were remote that I would ever walk normally-a fear which fortunately proved groundless.

Because I had to wear specially made boots and leg-irons throughout childhood, I never got involved much in sports and athletics as most boys do, which is why I am conceivably the least sports-interested male in North America today. Partly as a consequence of this, I suspect, I never developed much of a team spirit. Also, because of being hospitalized for many months of most years, I was always having to catch up from being months behind at school. Since nothing that the teachers said made any sense, I tended to find things out for myself in my own way, and this has persisted as a habit through life.

The surgery was a great success, and when I was twelve or so, my father bought me my first pair of regular shoes. We went to the hospital just to give the surgeon his leg-irons back. That was one of the most memorable days ever. I refused to board a bus or subway train for months afterward, but insisted on walking everywhere so that everyone in the street could see those shoes. With friends I hitchhiked all over Britain discovering hills and mountains, and throughout my teens and twenties camping and rock-climbing remained favorite pastimes. Perhaps that has something to do with why I'm still attracted to mountains and live in the Californian Sierra Nevada region today.

At school I won a scholars.h.i.+p into the grammar school system, which for most people offered the main gateway to higher education (it did then, anyway). Our family was working cla.s.s, and this was my first exposure to the loftier side of British culture. The curriculum emphasized the cla.s.sics, and I formed the impression that it hadn't changed very much since the days of Wellington and Waterloo. History, for example, began with the Romans and finished with James I or thereabouts, so presumably some updating was overdue. (I didn't find out about the War of Independence until I moved to Ma.s.sachusetts over twenty years later.) Only half the cla.s.s took geography, while the other half took physics-a strange arrangement when viewed in retrospect, since both subjects, one would have thought, would be essential to anyone hoping to comprehend the twentieth-century world. The streaming into different subjects was rather arbitrary, and as things turned out I was a.s.signed to the geography group. Everybody, of course, was required to take Latin and ancient Greek.

The problem with the system, as I remember, was its preoccupation with instilling an acceptance of "how," instead of promoting an understanding of "why." It emphasized method without offering a purpose. This was true especially of mathematics and the limited amount of the sciences, princ.i.p.ally chemistry, which I encountered. At the end of the fifth year we were streamed again, this time into either the "Sixth Cla.s.sical" or the "Sixth Modern." The cla.s.sical group, predictably, concentrated on even more intensive Greek and the like, and much to my relief, I was consigned to the modern stream. Instead of ancient Greek, we were informed, we would be taking ancient history. That was what finally persuaded me that the time had arrived for the British educational system and I to go our separate ways.

Leaving school at sixteen was a momentous day, solemnized by the ceremonial burning of a five-year collection of Latin and Greek exercise books. I took a series of jobs which included being a messenger boy for a London newspaper, loading trucks, delivering groceries, and working a printing press, prior to my intended entry into the Royal Navy to train as an electronics engineering officer. Because of my medical history, however, Her Britannic Majesty declined my gracious offer to serve in her fleet-and it's interesting to note that the country has been going downhill ever since. I therefore informed everybody that I would become a writer. Someone asked me what, with the acc.u.mulated wisdom and experience of sixteen years, I imagined I had to write about that the world was breathlessly waiting to read. He had a point. What to do thereafter was far from obvious.

Mother found a newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nt placed by the Civil Service Commission of the British government, inviting applications for engineering and scientific research scholars.h.i.+ps at various government establishments in the U.K. Final selection (of around fifty in total per year) would be made on the basis of a three-day series of written examinations held annually in cities around the country, followed by interviews. I duly filled in and mailed the application forms, and then departed to spend the summer climbing in the Scottish Highlands with a bunch of pals. It didn't take long to forget all about Civil Service examinations.

The reminder came in the form of a large, official-looking envelope waiting for me when I got back to London. The letter enclosed informed me that I was scheduled to take the examinations at one of the London town halls in four weeks' time. It also advised that, to avoid wasting everyone's time, applicants should possess as a minimum requirement the school-leaving certificate level in a list of subjects that included physics. I had never taken any physics, let alone obtained a school-leaving certificate, which normally required a three-year course. This was the first time the habit I'd developed as a youngster came in useful. Through the next four weeks I self-taught the physics curriculum, beginning in the public library when it opened, and carrying on in the coffee shop next door until midnight. When the final results were published I found I was in the first ten out of twelve hundred or so entrants, and subsequently I was accepted as an engineering student at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough-Britain's leading R&D center for aviation and related matters.

Life at Farnborough was a new educational experience. The course provided a broad grounding in all aspects of engineering and related sciences, alternating three-month sessions in the RAE's own college with three-month spells in the various departments, machine shops, and laboratories of the Establishment itself. The college combined an informal teaching style with firm expectations for hard work. The lecturers were not educationalists, but engineers and scientists concerned with real problems that mattered: They not only described "how"; they explained also, why. Academic standards were high, and studies covered mechanical, electrical, electronic, thermodynamic, structural, and aeronautical engineering, along with supporting mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The aim was to attain members.h.i.+p of the British professional inst.i.tutions of electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineers. Practical training began in such places as the machine shops, forge, and foundry in the early years, and continued on through wind tunnels, instrumentation and photography labs, to working on missile systems and jet engines, and sometimes getting a chance to fly in RAF experimental aircraft. It was a good program for teaching independence and responsibility, as well as instilling a positive att.i.tude toward science and technology.

We lived in a former RAF officers' barracks on the edge of the airfield, two students to a room, we received a wage, and we paid for our keep.

Regrettably I was unable to complete the full course at Farnborough. The Irish impulsiveness in me (for want of a better excuse) led to romantic distractions with a happy-go-lucky Yorks.h.i.+re la.s.s called Iris. I married at an absurdly early age and by the time I was twenty found myself the proud father of twin daughters (Debbie and Jane, who today are twenty-six). Even with my spending the evenings was.h.i.+ng dishes, the economics of the situation simply didn't go with an RAE student's pay. I took a job as a junior engineer with a large electronics company, where I was allowed a day and a half off a week for college. This, along with evening cla.s.ses, enabled me to continue studying, and eventually I graduated as an electrical and electronics engineer.

On looking back over forty-six years, I have to admit, I suppose, to having spent a lot of time and energy stamping from one side of life's fields to another in futile pursuit of the gra.s.s that always looks greener. After all the effort of continuing with courses and bicycling ten miles each way three times a week to college to become a professional engineer, I was now far from sure that I wanted to be one.

Sitting in the same lab every day somehow wasn't so appealing any more. There was a big world outside. So I transferred into sales and moved on through a number of electronics companies that ended with ITT, first as an inside man backing up the field force, and later as an outside sales engineer and then sales manager, dealing mainly with digital instrumentation and custom-designed industrial control systems.

Life had become interesting again by opening up another new world-that of business and commerce, of which my ignorance was all but total-and the work involved a lot of travel around the U.K. Our third daughter was born in this period, too-Tina, who is now twenty-four.

Many of my customers were scientists, and dealing with them increased my fascination for the world of science and its method. Unlike the other isms and ologies that man had been concocting throughout history in his ongoing attempt to comprehend the universe and improve his condition, science worked. It delivered. It made predictions that were testable and produced results that were measurable. It asked what was wrong with its own beliefs, and in doing so, found and corrected its errors, and emerged stronger as a consequence. Despite the cynicism evident in some quarters, I believed, as I continue to believe, that the human race is capable of solving its collective problems just as the majority of people are capable of solving their individual problems-the important thing is having confidence in our powers of comprehension and reason; that's what education should be all about.

By contrast, I found the usually negative, always sensationalized, and often preposterous popular depictions of science and scientists exasperating. My friends got tired about my complaining about this and told me to write something better if I could. I said okay. They said it would never get published, and we made a bet. I had enjoyed the movie 2001 for its technical authenticity, but I had never understood what the ending was supposed to mean. However, the notion of a major scientific mystery turning up on the moon provided an inspiration for showing science as the wonderful, ongoing detective story that I had always felt it to be. So I bought a typewriter and began writing Inherit the Stars. Before it was finished, however, life interrupted with more urgent demands.

Special-purpose electronics systems at that time were incredible conglomerations of vacuum tubes and transistors packed into big steel cabinets, which consumed lots of power and produced lots of heat.

Modification was an expensive business that involved stripping-down and rebuilding, since all the logic was hardwired. When those wretched Americans began introducing small, inexpensive computers to perform the same functions-at about a fifth the price, a tenth the size, and reprogrammable by software-it was clear that the days of hardwired systems were numbered. After some reflection on the implications, I resolved to join the computer industry. The problem was, I didn't know anything about computers. Well, I'd taught myself about other things before . . . so I started reading about computer technology, then brushed up my credentials and began approaching computer companies.

The results-to begin with-were disastrous. The interviewers at one venerable pillar of British industrial tradition didn't seem especially interested in what I knew that might be relevant to selling their products; instead they wanted to know why I'd left school early, what my father did for a living, and why I rented a house instead of owning one. They were also curious to learn whether or not, if offered a job, I would be willing to part my hair on the left, as did everyone else (mine was combed back without a parting). I told them that I'd quit school because I wasn't interested in cla.s.sical languages, that my father tended the boilers in a factory, and that I didn't own a house because I couldn't afford the down payment. I forget what my reply was concerning my hair. Soon thereafter the conversation deteriorated, and it became evident that our disinterest was mutual.

Then I turned my attention to the American computer corporations that were operating in the U.K. Their att.i.tude turned out to be refres.h.i.+ngly different. They were interested in what I knew, what I had done, what I wanted to do and why, and all else was largely irrelevant. Honeywell made an attractive offer, and I joined their scientific/industrial mini-computer division as a sales engineer. (Since then, interestingly, the British computer industry has gone pretty much the same way as the Royal Navy.) For a couple of years I worked in the London area, and sometimes overseas in places like France and Italy. This was a high-commission market, business was good, and for the first time ever I found myself financially comfortable. In my travels I had developed a liking for the North Country of England and its people, and sometime around 1971 I transferred to Honeywell's Yorks.h.i.+re branch, moving with Iris and the family to a picturesque resort town called Ilkley, situated amid dales and moorlands between the city of Leeds and the Pennine Mountains. The children liked it, we made many friends, and I even took up climbing again. And yes, we bought a house-a s.p.a.cious, four-bedroom, brick-built one, five minutes walk to the town center from the front, and five minutes to open country with lakes and rocky cliffs from the back. It cost eight thousand dollars. I still get ill thinking about it, these days.

Iris and I had gotten along okay when life was a struggle. But the blessings of social respectability and conventional happiness proved too much and our marriage folded. I let her have the house, the contents, custody of the children; I continued paying the mortgage and moved into a flat in Leeds with my books and two suitcases as the total to show for thirteen years. I also decided I was tired of the computer business, and for good measure-since I was in the process of changing things anyway-I quit my job with Honeywell and went off selling life insurance. With generous salaries, commissions, company cars, paid expenses, and other benefits, computer salesmen lived comfortable lives. By contrast the terms now were: no salary, no car, no expenses, no benefits-just commission . . . but a lot of it if you produced.

The challenge was irresistible. It's amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. I topped the branch of twenty-odd salesmen in my first month. Apparently n.o.body in the company had done that before.

The job was stimulating at first because it involved learning something new again. There were no fixed hours, and for relaxation I took out the unfinished ma.n.u.script of Inherit the Stars and resumed working on it. The novelty of the insurance business wore off, however, and working on the book reawakened my interest in science. So I applied for a position with Digital Equipment Corporation, who as luck would have it were planning to open an office in Leeds, and I joined the company in 1975. Working with Americans and the visits to the U.S. that the job entailed made me an Americophile. I liked the pragmatic informality of American life, and the confident (although admittedly sometimes rather vociferously expressed) optimism of the people. It didn't seem surprising that this nation could send people to the moon, and that the whole world should buy its computers and fly its jets.

I had finished the book by now and began sending it to publishers and agents in London. The reactions, though generally complimentary, were negative: the market was tight; new writers were a risk; the costs couldn't be justified, and so on. So, I started asking around within DEC about people who might know something about the science-fiction market in the States, and the trail led eventually to a gentleman called Ashley Grayson, who was with a software support group in Ma.s.sachusetts. I contacted Ashley, and it turned out that we were both due to attend the same sales conference at Cape Cod. I took a copy of the ma.n.u.script with me on the trip, left it with Ashley, and forgot the matter after I returned to England.

But a couple of months later a long letter arrived from Judy-Lynn del Rey of Ballantine Books in New York (I had never heard of Ballantine Books, which shows how green I was). Judy liked the book, wanted to publish it, and, subject to my agreeing to some rework, offered a contract-what a contrast to the responses I'd had from London. (It's interesting to note that British publishers seem largely to have followed after the Royal Navy and the British computer industry.) Sadly, my father, who had taken an interest in my thoughts of writing, but without seriously believing that anything would come of it-things like that didn't happen in the Irish farming village he was from-died suddenly a week before the letter arrived.

By this time I had bought another house, in the center of Leeds. Debbie, one of my twin daughters, now in her mid-teens, had come to live with me, and in 1976 I married my second wife, Lyn. In bits and pieces, life was coming back together again. I was still selling mainly to scientists, several of whom had supplied helpful information for the book. Some of the physicists I knew said things like, "Oh, I used to read science fiction when I was younger, but I grew out of it. The science got to be too simplistic." I wanted to produce a book that people like these would find interesting. Accordingly, I began working on a second book, The Genesis Machine. I also wrote The Gentle Giants of Ganymede in parallel with it, pus.h.i.+ng one ma.n.u.script aside and picking up the other to avoid losing time through the turnaround of mail between Leeds and New York. Meanwhile, my friends and relatives were waiting eagerly to see Inherit the Stars in print. The first copy off the press of my first book arrived from Judy-Lynn ten days after Mother died unexpectedly from an infection following hip surgery.

DEC offered me a position with their sales training division at Maynard, teaching Americans to sell computers-an unusual job for an Englishman. I had no strong ties left with England, and the idea of living near New York was attractive. Lyn and Debbie liked the idea, so we sold the house and contents, and moved over from England in the fall of 1977. People were carrying away the furniture while I raced to finish The Genesis Machine, until there was just a chair and a desk left in the attic room I used as an office. I typed the last page while Lyn was packing our clothes in the bedroom, and we mailed the ma.n.u.script on our way to the airport. I thought it would appeal only to a specialized readers.h.i.+p, but have since been pleasantly surprised by the wide range of backgrounds of the people who say they enjoyed it.

The next two years were hectic. Besides contending with culture shock and holding down a fairly demanding job, I wrote two more books: The Two Faces of Tomorrow (every S.F. writer has to do an intelligent computer book), and Thrice Upon a Time (every S.F. writer has to do a time-travel book).

We became permanent residents of the U.S. and bought a huge, six-bedroom colonial house, built in the 1890's, in Acton, Ma.s.sachusetts-with oak-paneled dining room, hallways and stairs, big cellars, big attics, and a big barn, part of the downstairs of which we used as a double garage. I'd always wanted to restore a run-down, big, old house, you see. And this one sure was run-down! The roof leaked, the bas.e.m.e.nt flooded, everything needed rewiring, and the cellars were festooned with lace curtains of cobwebs. So, besides teaching computer-selling and writing, I also dug, sawed, drilled, hammered, shoveled, mixed, and fixed windows . . . and fixed windows, and fixed windows. They put a lot of windows in those old houses. (And still people asked me what I did in my spare time!) I got to know the owner of a local decorating company, who helped out by having his people do a lot of the work at cost to keep them on the payroll through winter, and in eighteen months we turned the place into a sparkling, fixed-up, redecorated showpiece of a home. At last I had gotten the house restoring bug out of my system. The only problem was that by this time Debbie had gone to live in Boston, Lyn had had enough and moved into her own apartment, and I was left sharing the place with a cat called Squawk.

So, I sold the house and furniture, split the proceeds with Lyn, and moved into an apartment in Framingham. Then, since I was in the process of changing things anyway, for good measure I decided to quit my regular job, leave Ma.s.sachusetts with its winters for the enjoyment of hardier souls, and just be a writer. I ended up with a car, two suitcases, and a typewriter again-this time heading for New York City. Strange, isn't it, how life has this repet.i.tive flavor about it.

Looking back, it's interesting to note how many of life's unexpected, right-angle turns have resulted from talking to the guy next to me at the bar. While engaged in an evening of alcohol-stimulated meditation on what to do next, I struck up a conversation with a character called Glen, an electronics engineer who had just moved North to take a job with Honeywell, which gave us something to talk about. We also talked about apartments. I described a nice but not exceptional two-bedroom place that I'd looked at on the Upper East Side, going at fifteen hundred dollars per month (plus 15 percent of a year's rent for the agent's fee). Glen said, "That's amazing! I just moved out of the same place in Orlando, Florida."

"Really? How much?"

"Two fifty. And that included the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the health club, the maintenance, the gardening, and the social club and bar."

"You're doing a super selling job," I told him. "What else?"

He shrugged. "No state income tax. No snow shoveling. No wood splitting. Shake the trees, and girls fall out. . . ."

It took me several months to get from New York to Orlando-strange things happen when you drive around in the U.S. I arrived with a first draft of a new book that had been typed in bits and pieces on a miniature j.a.panese portable in Howard Johnson's, Best Western, and Ramada Inn motel rooms, people's spare bedrooms, on kitchen tables, and in various other places down the East Coast and across the South. That was how Giants' Star was written-the last volume of the trilogy that began with Inherit the Stars.

The first thing to do was find somewhere to live. I checked into a downtown Holiday Inn, and after a shower and a change of clothes went down to the bar and started talking to the guy next to me. His name was Pat, and he turned out to be the regional manager for a life insurance company, which gave us something to talk about. We had a wild evening as far as I remember. Pat took the next day off work to drive me round the area looking at apartments, and I soon had a roof again. Everything Glen had said was true: there was no snow shoveling or wood splitting; the apartments had their own pool, tennis courts, health club, and bar; the management took care of all maintenance and gardening-wonderful for a writer after that house in Ma.s.sachusetts; there was no state income tax. Excitedly, I rushed outside and shook the nearest tree . . . and got buried in oranges.

Fortunately, that was no longer of much consequence, since a Californian lady whom I had met in Pensacola moved down to join me. Her name was Jackie-we'd been introduced in an Irish pub by a girlfriend of hers that I had gotten to know after walking in the wrong door of a restaurant and blundering into a private function of the Pensacola Press Club. Jackie was an extraordinary person who had studied things like philosophy, art, and electronics, spent four years in the Navy as a weapons instructor and then transferred to the Army to be a parachutist, and was now working in a bookstore. Like me she had been married twice. Jackie also seemed to have read everything in science fiction ever written, which was invaluable. So through the summer I retyped Giant's Star in the day while Jackie was at work, and we talked about it through the evenings and usually well into the early hours over endless pots of coffee at Perkins' twenty-four hour pancake restaurant across the street.

For the first time ever, I was able to work exclusively on things that I wanted to do, in my own time and at my own pace without distraction. I was getting to know better the colorful world of American fandom and science-fiction conventions, and there were TV and radio interviews, and guest-speaker invitations from universities and elsewhere to break the routine. I had kept in touch with my daughters and sent them plane tickets each summer to come and spend their vacation wherever I happened to be, and Jackie and I made lots of friends in central Florida. We started talking about buying a house there; in fact she was all set to manage a new store that Waldenbooks was about to open at Daytona. After all, it was obvious that we were going to be there for quite a while, wasn't it? n.o.body in their right minds would disturb a pleasant, comfortable, settled situation like that, would they? Of course not.

It happened like this.

I had always wanted to drive across the U.S. I'd flown to the West Coast several times on business, but sitting in an armchair up in the sky for a few hours wasn't the way to appreciate the immensity of this country. Well, while we were sitting around in Perkins' one night, trying to think of something new to talk about now that Giant's Star was finished, I suggested, "Let's go to California."

Part of Jackie's appeal has always been the iron hold that she keeps on her composure. "Right now, you want to go to California?"

"Sure, why not? I feel like a drive."

Thoughtful silence, then a shrug. "Okay."

So we paid the check, went home, tossed some things into a suitcase, and reached California four days later. We saw the mountains, Yosemite Valley, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and a lot of other places that I'd always wanted to visit. It was just a break-a couple of weeks of getting away before moving to Daytona, where Jackie would start her new job and I would begin the next book. Then we started talking to some people next to us in a bar. They said, "You ought to spend a day seeing Route Forty-nine while you're here," which turned out to be a scenic highway in the Sierra Nevada foothills, running through the towns of the gold-rush era. We drove into a town called Sonora, which was picturesque and quaint, with its small shopfronts, covered sidewalks, and people actually walking around on legs-unlike the spread-out automobile-scale towns you see everywhere, where all the places you want to go are separated by twenty-minute drives. It was a people-scale town. We got out and walked around.

Everyone was friendly. While I was browsing through the local paper in a coffee shop, I came across an ad for an apartment that sounded interesting. Jackie said, "Let's have a look at it, just for fun." So I called the number.

We took the apartment. Before we could move in, however, we had to drive back to Florida to tidy things up there, and then back once more to California-three times across the continent in a month, which got that bug out of my system. For the final trip we traded our cars in for a customized Chevy van, and I vividly remember spending the early hours of Christmas Day morning, 1980 changing a wheel in the middle of the Arizona desert.

People are always asking me how long it takes to write a book. Typing the words doesn't take all that long-with my way of working, anyway. That's just the final phase of a process that begins long before-usually years before. During a conversation that I'd had with some friends once in a pub back in England, someone had asked what I thought the solution was to the problem in Northern Ireland. I'd replied that there wasn't one; but then, after some reflection, I added, "Unless you can find a way to separate the children from the adults for one generation." Writers can't make a remark like that without it leading off into a new trail of thoughts. If children weren't to be raised by human adults, then what else would raise them? How about smart machines? Most people's immediate reaction to such a suggestion is concern and dismay at the cold, unemotional, somehow sinister relations.h.i.+p that they visualize would necessarily exist. But a lot of story ideas come from rejecting the obvious answers and thinking about the alternatives. Why should the relations.h.i.+p have to be cold and unemotional? As a visit to any school's sixth-grade computer club at ten in the evening will confirm, children love machines-closing the building is sometimes the only way to get them out. So why couldn't such a relations.h.i.+p be warm and friendly instead-even charming? What kind of a story might result from treating it that way? That was how Silver Shoes for a Princess came about. Later I extended the notion to cover a whole society descended from a machine-raised first generation, which became the basis for the next novel, Voyage from Yesteryear, published in 1982-at least six years after I began thinking about it. So that's my answer to how long it takes to write a book.

It seems that Jackie, who is now my third wife, and I are setting a tradition of doing something different to celebrate the occasion whenever we finish a new book. As soon as Voyage had been mailed off to New York, our first son, Alex, was born-at home in true mountain-country tradition, with no needles, bright lights, funny smells, or antiseptic people; instead, friends and family, beer and hamburgers, and smiling faces. It seems a much nicer way of welcoming new human beings into the world.

Thinking and talking about intelligent machines had made me want to write a story about a world with a naturally evolving machine biosphere, which eventually appeared in 1983 as Code of the Lifemaker.

Jackie and I bought a big, old, rambling house in the center of Sonora that had been empty for a year or so and needed a lot of fixing. So I found myself spending lots of time drilling, sawing, hammering, and digging, laying drains, pouring concrete . . . and, inevitably, fixing windows. Strange, isn't it, how life has this repet.i.tive flavor about it.

The next project was The Proteus Operation, eventually published by Bantam, which took a year and a half to research and write, and mixes science fiction with World War II history. It also features a procession of real people as guest characters, which made it a new and interesting experiment in writing.

While it was in progress, we had our second son, Michael. After that I wrote another book, Endgame Enigma, mixing science fiction with modern-day espionage and CIA-KGB antics this time-and to keep up the tradition, we had another son, Joe. (During both her previous marriages Jackie was told by various medical eminences that it was physically impossible for her to have children.) And so I find myself in a large house in a small, picturesque town near the mountains, with three young children. Strange, isn't it, how life has this . . .

Sometimes I claim that being an American is a state of mind and has nothing to do with where one comes from or how one speaks. As social evolution progresses, I believe that humanity as a whole will acquire and mix with its other attributes the confidence in itself and its abilities that I think of as characteristically American. The universe in which we live is limitless in every direction, and contains a greater abundance of energy and other resources, opportunity, and room to expand and grow than we could ever know what to do with. Nature imposes no limits on us as a species, either to what we can achieve or upon what we can become. The only limits that matter are those that people create in their minds. There are no finite resources, only finite thinking.

Although there will always be problems to be faced and risks to be taken, I feel optimistic about the future. Those are the sentiments that I try to project and share in the things I write. I hope I shall never find reason to feel otherwise.

Afterword, 1996 From the gist of the foregoing, it shouldn't really come as a surprise to learn that new things didn't suddenly stop happening and life become uneventful in 1988. It was readers who had asked for an autobiographical thread to be included in the first place, and from the reactions that I got it seems they weren't disappointed. So more anecdotes of right-angle turns and ensuing muddlings-through are contained in Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution. Among other things, it reveals how I personally toppled the Soviet empire and describes the restoration of large, old Irish houses as a sure cure for sanity.

THE PACIFIST.

Fifty meters below ground level in a secret, concrete-walled laboratory complex beneath the headquarters of the World Peace Foundation, the last hope for humanity and a sane, rational world stood on its steel supporting platform.

Its general form was a ten-foot-diameter torus, set horizontally and painted dull black to be inconspicuous at night. The outer ring contained the Tipler-field simulated ma.s.s circulators, Schwarzchild ring compensator, and boundary cut-off equalizers, and left just enough room in the center for the antimatter-fueled power generator and the cramped c.o.c.kpit enclosure containing the instrument panel and solitary operator's seat. After more than ten years of unrelenting effort and tenacity in the face of problems that many had thought insoluble, the time machine was complete. Flanked by the WPF scientists and technicians who had helped make it a reality, Professor Magnus Maximilian Magus, its conceiver and creator, stood gazing down at it from the gla.s.s-walled control room overlooking the floor.

Standing in the opened hatch above the c.o.c.kpit, his head held proudly erect, his eyes clear and s.h.i.+ning, and his jaw set solidly in resolve, the time commando listened as the final words of the professor's exhortation rang over the loudspeaker system.

". . . that after three worldwide conflicts of increasing destructiveness, mankind would have learned. The First World War took us from cavalry to the warplane and the tank; the Second, from the heavy bomber to nuclear weapons; and the Third, from the ICBM to the orbiting gamma-ray-laser bombardment platform. But nothing had been learned. And today, barely more than a generation after rebuilding its cities from the rubble of the last conflagration, our race stands divided yet again, but this time by a line that runs between worlds-we, of the Terran League, and the offworld alliance. This time the weapons have interplanetary range capability. If they are ever used, it will surely mean the end of our existence as a species."

Magus raised his hands in appeal behind the control room window. "It did not have to be this way. The spiral into ever greater depths of insanity was not inevitable. For by right, the 'War to End Wars' of 1914 should have been, and could have been, just that-a sweeping away of the old power structure and social order before the final triumph of Reason toward which Europe had been moving for centuries.

. . ." Magus paused ominously, and his voice fell. "But the promise was not fulfilled. Instead of welcoming the peaceful, scientifically planned society which we, the custodians of Reason stood ready to design"-the professor stretched out an arm to indicate the people around him-"the world turned its back on Reason, sacrificing itself to the vain ambitions and pretensions of lesser intellects." Magus's fists clenched, and his face took on a pinker hue. "Mediocrities! Ignoramuses! Uneducated charlatans and showmen posturing as thinkers! They abused the power that we had created for them, and they cheated us out of the-" He checked himself with a cough and regained his composure. "But now the day has arrived that will allow us to correct the error. In so doing, we will eradicate the tragedies that have followed, and we will create in their place the Golden Age of peace and enlightenment that should have been."

Magus pointed down at where the machine was standing. The time commando straightened to attention and thrust out his chin as the amplified voice boomed down over the floor, "And you, Elmer Theodosius Ulysses Kunz, have been selected to carry out this supreme mission, unique in the annals of all history, to travel back and recast destiny. Go now to your duty, knowing that our cause is righteous, and a.s.sured that every one of us will be there with you in spirit."

Time Commando Kunz extended his arm high in a final salute. "May universal peace, brotherhood, and reason come to prevail among all men. I go, to destroy the archprototype of tyrants. Time will be rewritten, with harmony and goodwill between the worlds, and an end to intolerance."

"Harmony between the worlds!" Magus led.

"Stamp out intolerance!" Kunz and the chorus chanted back in unison.

In a last dramatic gesture, Kunz pulled his heavy green cloak tight around himself with both hands before stepping down to disappear into the c.o.c.kpit. To avoid being conspicuous when he emerged, he was wearing the leather shorts and cross-braced suspenders, red stockings, loose white s.h.i.+rt, and feathered hat, which the limited research material available-few records had survived the Third Great War to End Wars-indicated had been the typical dress of central Europe in the early twentieth century. The mission planners had added the cloak because it would be winter there when he arrived. Also, it provided concealment for the high-power infantry a.s.sault laser; rapid-fire submachine cannon; .45 caliber solid-shot sidearm with silencer; close-range neurotoxin gas pistol; four fragmentation, two blast, and two incendiary grenades; dagger; garotte; and air-powered, cyanide-tipped dart gun, which the Peace Foundation's weapons experts had deemed minimum for the mission.

He checked that the larger items of equipment were in their places in the rack below the hatch, then squeezed himself down into the narrow seat. The panel lights indicated that all systems checks were completed and had registered positive. Then a whine came from just above his head as the hatch closed over the c.o.c.kpit, and a solid clunk signaled the latch engaging. The status summary light was showing orange, which meant that the executive computer had already synchronized its countdown to the control room, and the display next to it was showing less than a minute to zero. The system was now awaiting merely his confirmation to deactivate the final fail-safe override that would abort the launch command at the end of the sequence.

Kunz cast his eyes slowly around the tiny chamber and across the panel indicators one last time to impress upon himself the solemnity of the moment. Then, he licked his lips, drew in a long breath, and said into the stalk microphone projecting from one side of his seat, "Checking positive at zero minus fifty seconds. Request permission to disengage final abort interlock."

The supervisor's voice came through on a channel from the control room. "Positive status confirmed on all circuits. You may proceed."

Kunz felt the tension rising in his body. He unlocked the switch, closed his fingers around it, hesitated for one, maybe two, seconds, and then threw the switch from its Abort on Zero position to Launch. The status light changed to green, and more greens appeared lower down on the panel. Keeping his voice steady only with an effort, he reported, "Interlock disengaged, positive function." The countdown indicator was reading thirty-five seconds.

Then Magus's voice came through. "At this fateful moment, the turning point of history, we of the Peace Foundation salute you, Kunz. Remember as you go forth that all our hopes, our aspirations, the very future for which we have labored over these years-everything depends on you now."

"I shall remember. Have no fear, comrades. Your trust shall not prove misplaced," Kunz promised, his voice rising.

"Go, fearlessly and with honor, for peace!" Magus's voice thundered.

"Ten seconds," the supervisor's voice interjected.

"For peace!" Kunz cried.

A hum emanated from the ma.s.s recirculators, became louder, and rose to a shriek. The compensators started to whistle, and whoop. A red glow filled the s.p.a.ce surrounding the c.o.c.kpit, and patterns of lights flashed across the instrument panel, while in the center, the numerals of the countdown indicator read off the final seconds 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . 0!"

"Ayeiii! . . ."

Kunz's world exploded in a storm of color, sound, and chaotic tactile sensations as s.p.a.ce and time unraveled about him, and unfamiliar patterns of energy quanta overloaded all his sensory systems simultaneously. . . .

He was aware of the shapes surrounding him, but in an unreal kind of way, as if they were parts of a different world projecting out of other dimensions. They consisted only of iridescent outlines without substance-hollow-wire figures of light, s.h.i.+mmering in a void. His thoughts seemed to be running simultaneously in a thousand directions at once, yet at the same time to be frozen into immobility. He could see the entire networks of a.s.sociations, branching, repeating, reforming, and coalescing, but with all of the parts managing to coexist together without any impression of sequence. He was experiencing timelessness, he knew; but like an infant opening its eyes for the first time without any prior experience to interpret the sensations that his mind was registering.