The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

ROCKETS TO WHERE? by Judith Merril

“In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything. . . . We need to cherish man’s curiosity, his understanding, his love, so that he may indeed learn what is new and hard and deep. . . .”

“Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself.”

The first quotation is from an interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer in Look magazine last year. The second is from the “Three Fundamental Laws of Astronautics,” as set forth in a publication of the American Rocket Society by Krafft A. Ehricke (theorist-designer for the General Dynamics Corporation, and the man responsible for much of the planning that has gone into our ICBM’s, as well as the solving of the re-entry problem and the new plans for a manned orbital vehicle).

Taken together with the words of the late Albert Einstein at the close of the preceding article, these excerpts comprise a potent statement of the essential philosophy of the scientist, a philosophy which has perhaps become essential to all thinking citizens in the “Age of Space.”

The sense of wonder, the desire to know; the will to work at finding out; freedom to learn—but even more vitally the inward freedom implicit in the conviction that man’s capacity for curiosity and for endeavor is the only measure of his potential growth: these are the tenets of world sanity and human survival now. (As ever—but now more than ever.)

To the extent that we can cherish curiosity (learn to question the obvious, rather than accept unthinkingly), cherish understanding (the why? and wherefore? . . . not just the who-what-where-when-how) and cherish love (learn that we need each other more than we need fear each other)—to the extent, in short, that “scientific man” can become thoughtful man—to this extent only can we hope to outlast our own powers of destruction.

I understand that a new model Detroit automobile takes eighteen months or more from the drawing board to the dealer’s display room. It is eighteen months, as I write this, since the launching of Sputnik I. In that brief time, we have witnessed so many further “breakthroughs” on so many scientific fronts (not necessarily connected with space flight at all) that to attempt even to summarize them here would be absurd. (The headline in my morning paper said today: PIONEER IV NEARS MOON ON WAY TO DATE WITH SUN!) The record of physical accomplishment, here and abroad, has been so steadily spectacular that I think most of us have lost the faculty for amazement —at engineering feats. But there is still cause for wonder (and lots of it) in another sphere—and that is in the unmeasured, and as yet barely recognizable capacity of the human being for intellectual, spiritual, and emotional attainment.

“The readjustment of attitudes toward the universe” made necessary by the immediate prospect of space flight was compared to “the beginning of the readjustment of man to a round instead of a flat earth,” by The New York Times’ science writer, Richard Witkin, just last year.

I do not think he overstated. And what he asked for was not far short of a miracle—considering that the four hundred years since Copernicus has been inadequate to sell mankind in general on the existence of the solar system.

Not even that comparatively small segment of humanity that we call “Western Culture” was entirely convinced. At least, one generation back, in Arkansas, a teacher could— and did—lose his position for instructing his pupils in contradiction of Solomon’s clearly stated biblical precept that “the earth is flat, has four corners, and is the center of the universe.” (I quote from the decision of the presiding Justice of the Peace. Whether the Copernican heresy is countenanced today in the same small community just south of Little Rock, I do not know.)

We needed a miracle, and it seemed we were little likely to be given one. (Modern miracles have been moved from the Handout Department to Do-It-Yourself.) The truly amazing and heartening thing is that we are showing signs of producing it—eventually.

The prevailing pre-Sputnik attitude toward space ran a gamut from tolerance to hilarity.

“Before Sputnik, it was considered bad taste for the military to mention space,” Wernher von Braun said in a Life interview.

“The long-time dream of little children has come true,” one Boston paper started its feature piece on the first satellite. Most of the press preferred to say “science-fiction dream.”

A rather self-consciously courageous editorial in Newsweek (for Oct. 21, 1957) proclaimed our entry into the Age of Space . . . “whether we like it or not.” And plenty of people did not—especially if, as seemed inevitable, there would be Russians up in heaven too.

But even in those first few weeks, the job of psychological retooling had begun. The same issue of Newsweek, for instance, carried a full-page advertisement headed, “Instrumentation—stepping stone to the stars”; and under a science-fictiony illustration, in dignified text, came a pitch for the long-range investment policies of the First National City Bank of New York! The New Yorker (dated two days earlier) had an ad with a starmap, a spacesuit, and a map of Florida, saying, “The earth has now launched its first man-made satellite . . . when the rockets take off for outer space ... [it will be] . . . only natural to stop at your nearest ‘moon’ and ask the man for a free Rand-McNally space chart.”

It took the nation’s publishers practically no time at all to get onto the same good thing (whether they liked it or not). The newspapers poured out a deluge of I.G.Y. and Vanguard promotional pieces—some rewritten, some pulled fresh from the files of the past two years. Hot on their heels, the weekly news magazines beat the bushes of industry, government, and universities for fugitive eggheads to “expertize” for the “news analysts.” (I wonder if anyone has calculated whether the total energy expended by physicists in interviews during October-November, 1957, would have been sufficient to lift a lunar probe?)

By now, of course, there is hardly a publication in the country that has not featured some sort of something about space. And a whole new category of publishing has been born, ranging from comic books and True Space Secrets (one issue of which contains a revealing article entitled “Sex in Space”) to the Washington Space Letter (subscription, $25 quarterly, $75 the year, as advertised in the Times financial section, for manufacturers who want “space contracts”) and the Space Journal published in Huntsville, Ala., by the Rocket City Astronomical Association (and featuring such sensational articles as “The Purpose of Man in the Universe”).

From a standing (if not sitting-down, or sound-asleep) start eighteen months ago, we have covered a truly fantastic stretch of psychological ground. The staggering fact is that today the American public as a whole has come to accept the imminence of space flight as a reality no less tangible than, say, the likelihood of another World Series next year —and hardly less exciting, either, if probably not quite so enjoyable. (I wonder, though, what might happen if someone were to start some office pools on the next series of Florida vs. California rocket launchings?)

I wonder, too, whether sound asleep was not after all the best way to speak of the national state of mind two years ago? Asleep, and dreaming? Whether you thought of it as childish or inspired, science-fictional, scientific, ennobling or illusory, the “dream” was there—as far back as man’s memory goes. Our language, folklore, and religion are all full of it. Ambitious, we “hitch our wagon to a star.” Demanding, we “want the moon on a platter.” Happy, we sit “on top of the world.” Prayerful, we seek eternal paradise —in heaven.

Perhaps this new reality is easier to accept than some others because it has the quality of awakening from a dream? Let us hope so: once fully awakened, we cannot but perceive, and accept, the equal reality of global brotherhood—and thus end forever the nightmare of global war.