Frederik Pohl The Worlds of George O

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advising their science fiction at the time.
So far, that was fine. But we ran into a snag. It had occurred to me that the
electromechanical educator provided a Rapid education, and I wrote the story under
title The Fourth R, and it was printed that way, and both were mistakes. For, unknow
us or those of us who were interested, there was an after-midnight television show goi
by the same name, but the show s fourth
R meant Religion. It did not sell like hotcakes. It
fell like Humpty Dumpty.
I got the final check from Ballantine on Good Friday 1958. Do�a and I celebrated
rather late, and on Saturday morning, I was a very sick man. Everyone called it a hango
but as it went on for hours, it made a bit of sense to see a doctor. It turned out to be a
coronary. And that s where I was when Meddler s Moon went on the air.
To end this, I went through convalescence, eating nitroglycerine pills in a program
that started about one per hour at first, and slowly tapered off until late in 1958.
Then in the February of 1959 Robert Ferrar, then the Director of Laboratory
Operations for the ITT Complex in Nlutley, New Jersey, and an old-time reader of scie
fiction, decided that their technical documentation might be less obscure if they had
someone there who had experience in both technical engineering and writing.
So if someone really wants to know why I didn t turn up much in the period from
to a fairly recent date, let me point out that eight hours a day removing state-of-the-art
clich�s and off-the-shelf redundancies created by those who have to
utilize something
instead of using it, gets a writer a bit tired of writing. Besides, it is much more fun to ge
the boat and take a ride when one has free time.
So as I was saying earlier, in the midst of this, during one of the winter weeks wh
boating isn t much indicated, it occurred to me that John was a dog lover, and that he h
liked History Repeats, which centers around the intelligent dog, Beauregarde.
It came to mind that if the evil surgeon in Edgar Rice Burroughs
Mastermind of
Mars had put a man s brain into the skull of a dog, the man-dog might communicate by
pointing his nose or a foot at letters painted on the wall, possibly quite well at such a
scheme, but he could not talk. The entire noise-making operation of the dog is wholly
un-adapted to forming words. The dog can make understandable sounds, and a few d
have been taught to make noises that sound like words, but these are simple and can
made without the agile tongue and lips of the speaking human.
So I wrote Understanding, and sent it off to John. Now, there was a three-way
understanding between John, my agent, Mr. Lurton Blassingame, and I that we d save
postage if I sent my stuff right to John, but when there was a reply, yes or no, it went b
my agent.
John did not like the ending. He sent (returned) the story to Mr. Blassingame with
brief note of objection but he took off on one of his nine-page letters to me. The gist
letter was that the villains of the piece were clever conspirators, high in the ranks of the
Galactic Empire of Xanabar, who would fight to the death to preserve the superiority o
empire over its neighbors. He might like it if I were to finish the piece with the same cle
conspiratorial tone and do the evil villains in by cleverness.
Meanwhile, Mr. Blassingame, having a rejected manuscript on his hands, sent it t
Galaxy, where Fred Pohl was editor.
Great minds run in the same channel. Fred bought the story, but wrote me that h
didn t like the ending, and would I please
Sure, I would. I re-wrote the ending, but it got lost inGalaxy, at
the filesand the
story was published with the old ending
Understanding
I
Scholar s Cluster is a globular aggregation of about a quarter of a million stars, so youn
cluster that it has no visible sign of dispersion. Its stars are heavy with the metals creat
earlier novae, and the stellar population is high with the middle-sequence suns centerin
around Types F, G, and K.
More important, Scholar s Cluster got its name from its own mysterious environm
Studying there will not make a scholar of a dolt, nor a genius of a straight-A student, bu
studying there will guarantee that each will be educated to his maximum ability to abso
knowledge. Once this end is reached, there is no point in remaining for exactly the sa
reason that one stops pouring when the gallon measure has taken on four quarts. Scho
Cluster was a going operation when Earth attained the stars and took her place among
galactic cultures; and Earth, like the myriad of other galactic cultures, sends her brighte
her educational colony on one of the pleasanter planets that revolves about a G-3 star
much different than Sol.
While this is not an account of Scholar s Cluster, Scholar s Cluster is important to
adventures of young Terence Lincoln, for Scholar s Cluster lies toward the center of th
galaxy, a few thousand light-years to the inward side of the sprawling empire of Xanab
It is the existence of Scholar s Cluster that placed young Terence Lincoln on the
in Xanabar. Otherwise, he would hardly have been so far from home....
* * * *
Terry Lincoln skylarked through the streets of Coleban, one of the capital cities of Xan
with a babble of his classmates.
They were stopping over in Xanabar on their way home to Mother Earth. They all
fine grades from primary school and were all looking forward to the three-month vacati
before returning to enter secondary school: neither success, nor freedom, nor the city
Coleban itself did anything to dampen their exuberance.
Lincoln and his classmates bracketed age fifteen. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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