Expanded Universe

AFTERWORD

In 1931 I was serving in LEXINGTON (CV - 2). In March the Fleet held a war game off the coast of Peru and Ecuador; for this exercise I was assigned as radio compass officer. My principal duty was to keep in touch with the plane guards, amphibians (OL8 - A), guarding squadrons we had in the air - i.e., the squadrons were carrier based land planes; if one was forced to ditch, an amphibian was to land on the water and rescue the pilot.

No radar in those days and primitive radio - the pilots of the plane guards were the only ones I could talk to via the radio compass. The fighters had dot - dash gear; the radio compass did not. To get a feeling for the limitations of those days, only 28 years after the Wright brothers' first flight, see my "The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail" in Time Enough For Love.

A radio compass depends on the directional qualities of a loop antenna. To talk you rotate the antenna for maximum signal; turn it 90° and you get a minimum signal that marks the direction of the other radio - or 180° from it but you are assumed to know whether your beacon is ahead or behind you - and you do in almost every case where it matters, such as going up a channel in a fog. That minimum will tell you direction within a degree or two if the other radio is close enough, loud enough.

If it's too far away, the signal can fade to zero before you reach the bearing you need to read, and stay zero until well past it. No use turning it back 90° to try to locate it by the maximum signal; that curve is much too flat.

Late afternoon the second day of the exercise we were in trouble; the other squadrons were landing but VF - 2 squadron was lost - all too easy with one - man fighter planes before the days of radar. The captain of the squadron, a lieutenant commander, held one opinion; the pilot of the amphibian held another - but his opinion did not count; he was a j.g. and not part of the squadron. The juniors in the squadron hardly had opinions; they were young, green, and depending on their Skipper - they probably had fouled up their dead reckoning early in the flight.

The squadron captain vectored for rendezvous with the carrier, by his reckoning. No carrier. Just lots and lots of ocean. (I was in the air once, off Hawaii, when this happened. It's a lonely feeling.)

No sign of the U.S. Fleet. No SARATOGA (CV - 3), no battleships, no cruisers. Not even a destroyer scouting a flank. Just water.

At this point I found myself in exactly the situation described in SEARCHLIGHT; I could talk to the plane guard pilot quite easily - but swing the loop 90° and zero signal was spread through such a wide arc that it meant nothing... and, worse, the foul-up in navigation was such that there was no rational choice between the two lobes 180° apart.

And I had a personal interest not as strong as that of Betsy Barnes' father but strong. First, it was my duty and my responsibility to give that squadron a homing vector - and I couldn't do it; the equipment wasn't up to it. Had I kept track of vectors on that squadron all day - But that was impossible; Not only had I had four squadrons in the air all day and only one loop but also (and damning) there was war - game radio silence until the squadron commander in trouble was forced to break it.

But, second, the pilot of the plane guard was my closest friend in that ship - from my home town, at the Academy with me, shipmates before then in USS UTAH, shore leave drinking companion, only other officer in the ship who believed in rocketry and space flight and read 'those crazy magazines." My number - one pa/And I was forced to tell him: "Bud, you're either somewhere northeast of us, give or take twenty or thirty degrees, or somewhere southwest, same wide range of error, and signal strength shows that you must be at least fifty miles over the horizon, probably more; I've got no way to scale the reception."

Bud chuckled. "That's a lot of ocean."

"How much gas do you have?"

"Maybe forty minutes. Most of the fighters don't have as much. Hold the phone; the skipper's calling me."

So I tried again for a minimum - no luck - swung back. "Lex loop to Victor Fox Two guard."

"Gotcha, boy. Skipper says we all ditch before the sun goes down. First I land, then they ditch as close to me as possible. I'll have hitchhikers clinging to the float a/l night long - be lucky if they don't swamp me."

"What sea?"

"Beaufort three, crowding four."

"Cripes. No white water here at all. Just long swells."

"She'll take it, she's tough. But I'm glad not to have to dead - stick a galloping goose. Gotta sign off, skipper wants me, it's time. Been nice knowing you."

So at last I knew - too late - which lobe they were in, as it was already dark with the suddenness of the tropics where I was, whereas the sun was still to set where they were. That eliminated perhaps five hundred square miles. But it placed them still farther away... which added at least a thousand square miles.

Suddenly out of the darkness endless searchlights shot straight up; the Fleet C - in - C had canceled war - condition darken - ship rather than let Victor Fox Two ditch - which was pretty nice of him because all those battleship admirals were veterans of World War One, not one of them had wings, and (with no exceptions worth noting) they hated airplanes, did not believe that planes were good for anything but scouting (if that), and despised pilots, especially those who had not attended the Academy (i.e., most of them).

I was still listening on Bud's frequency and heard some most prayerful profanity. At once Bud had a bearing on the battle line; our navigator had our bearing and distance to the battle line; my talker to the bridge gave me the course and distance VF - 2 needed to home on, and I passed it to Bud. End of crisis -

- but not quite the end of tension. The squadron just barely had enough gas to get home, and more than half of those pilots had never checked out on night carrier landings.. . with no margin of fuel to let the landing officer wave a man off for poor approach if there was any possible chance that his tail hook could catch a wire. I am happy to report that every pilot got down safely although one did sort of bend his prop around the crash barrier.

Bud did almost have to make a dead - stick landing with a galloping goose. As he was the only one who could land on water if necessary, he had to come in last.. . and his engine coughed and died just as his tail hook caught the wire.

In one of Jack Williamson's stories a character goes back in time and makes a very slight change in order to effect a major change in later history.

Bud is Albert Buddy Scoles, then a lieutenant (junior grade), now a retired rear admiral, and is the officer who in 1942 gathered me, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp into his R&D labs at Mustin Field, Philadelphia, later solicited help from all technically trained SF writers and, still later, just after World War Two, set up the Navy's first guided missile range at Point Mugu.

I do not assume that history would have changed appreciably had VF - 2 been forced to ditch.

But let's assume a change in Buddy Scoles' career just sufficient that he would not have been in charge of those labs on 7 December 1941. It would not have to be his death - although he was in far greater danger than his cheerful attitude admitted. An amphibian of that era did not necessarily make a safe landing on the high seas, and the galloping goose was an awkward beast at best - hard to see out of it in landing. Assume a minor injury in landing, or several days' exposure to tropical sun - that's a big ocean; they would not necessarily have been picked up the next day or even that week.

Assume any one change that would have affected the pattern of Buddy Scoles' career enough top/ace him elsewhere than at Mustin Field December 1941:

Now let's take it in small, not in terms of history:

I would not have been at Mustin Field. I can't venture to guess where I would have been; the Navy Bureau of Medicine was being stuffy over my past medical history. I would not have met my wife; therefore I would have died at least ten years ago... and I would not be writing this book. (All high probabilities. Among the low probabilities is winning the Irish Sweepstakes and moving to Monaco.)

Sprague de Camp would not have been at Mustin Field. He was already headed for a Naval commission but at my suggestion Scoles grabbed him. Perhaps he would have died gloriously in battle... or he might have sat out the war in a swivel chair in the Navy Department.

But now I reach the important one. I practically kidnapped Isaac Asimov from Columbia University, where he was a graduate student bucking for his doctorate.

You can write endless scenarios from there. The Manhattan District is recruiting exceptionally bright graduate students in chemistry and physics; Isaac is grabbed and the A - bomb is thereby finished a year sooner. Or he stays on at Columbia, finishes his doctorate, and his draft board never does pick him up because he is already signed as an assistant professor at N.Y. U. the day he is invested. Etc., etc.

Here comes the rabbit - The first two books of the Foundation series (Foundation, Bridle and Saddle, The Big and the Little, The Wedge, Dead Hand, The Mule) were written while Isaac was a chemist in the labs at Mustin Field.

What would the Good Doctor have written during those years had I not fiddled with his karma? Exactly the same stories? Very similar stories? Entirely different stories? (Any scenario is plausible except one in which Dr. Asimov does no writing at all.)

All I feel sure of is that there is an extremely high probability that an almost - too - late decision by a battle - ship admiral in 1931 not only saved the lives of some fighter pilots whose names I do not know.. . but also almost certainly changed the lives of Admiral Scoles, myself, L. Sprague de Camp, Dr. Asimov and, by direct concatenation, the lives of wives, sweethearts, and offspring - and quite a major chunk of modern science fiction. (Had Scoles not called me back to Philadelphia I think I would have wound up in a Southern California aircraft factory, and possibly stayed with it instead of going back to writing... and helped build Apollo - Saturn. Maybe.)

If you think SEARCHLIGHT derives from an incident off Ecuador, you may be right. Possibly I dredged it out of my subconscious and did not spot it until later.

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The Afternoon of June 5th, 1834 Nothing of Any Importance Happened