Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Read online

  Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics

  by Raymond F. Jones

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  Copyright (c)2004 by J. M. Stine and Est. of R. F. Jones

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.

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  Edited by Jean Marie Stine

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-558-3

  All rights reserved

  Copyright 2005 J.M. Stine and the Estate of Raymond F. Jones

  Reprinted permission the Ackerman Agency

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  A Futures-Past Classic

  INTRODUCTION

  Raymond F. Jones (1915-1994) spent most of his working life as an electronic and radio engineer, except for a short period devoted to full-time writing in the late 1940s. Jones was noted for his tales of “conceptual breakthrough,” in which a scientific, psychological, or social advance takes place as the result of someone mentally transcending through the limits of a previous paradigm. As a result, Jones is primarily associated with Astounding/Analog under the editorship of John W. Campbell, who specialized in printing such stories for the philosophical lesson they carried.

  Jones was the author of nearly one hundred science fiction stories and novels. Highly popular in the 1940s and ’50s, Jones story “Rat Race” was nominated for the 1966 Hugo Award and his novel, This Island Earth was adapted as a classic sf special effects extravaganza with a philosophic point. Yet, paradoxically only two collections of Jones’ stories were published during his lifetime, and his stories rarely appeared in anthologies. This may be due to the fact that the short novel of 20,000 words was his forte, making a significant portion of his output too long for reprinting.

  This collection contains a generous helping of Jones’ short novels: “Sunday is 3000 Years Away,” a romantic time travel story, “Alarm Reaction,” a scientific puzzler with the future of Earth at stake, “The Unlearned,” a classic of cultural misunderstanding, and “Discontinuity,” one of his most popular novellas. It also showcases three novelettes — “The Cat and the King,” which recounts the unusual downfall of a tyrant, “The Farthest Horizon,” the story of a woman who learned a new meaning of the word “home,” and “The Person from Porlock,” which explains why so many great works of art and scientific theory remain incomplete. Few of these stories were ever reprinted, representing a rare opportunity to sample the work of this science fiction master from his prime.

  SUNDAY IS THREE THOUSAND YEARS AWAY

  CHAPTER I: The Pen

  George Brooks had once estimated that it cost Atlantic Engineering exactly one dollar and thirty-two cents every time Rena Corsen came in the door of Microwave Section.

  He based his computation on the average rate of pay per minute received by the engineers and draftsmen multiplied by the fraction of a minute that it took Rena to walk from the front of the office to the rear where George’s desk was located. During the time of her entrance no engineering was done. And for many minutes after her departure George seldom did much engineering. His thoughts were more on the high price of real estate, what part of their new house he could reasonably section off for his home lab, how he could convince her that the nursery should not be on the second floor.

  There would be a nursery, of course. Well used, too. George considered himself the makings of quite a family man and Rena loved children.

  He watched her coming toward his desk now. The heads of his fellow engineers slowly turned, then self-consciously jerked back to their work. It was like a wave in a wheat field bending before the wind, George thought.

  She was tall but not so slender that people thought of her as a “tall girl”—that synonym for gangling awkwardness. George had once said that he was going to work out the mathematical equations for her shape so that generations to come would know what a truly beautiful woman looked like.

  She sat down across from him as George mentally chalked up another one thirty-two on the red side of Atlantic’s ledger.

  “The boys are sure going to be mad when you’re married to me and can’t come in here on official business any more.”

  “I hadn’t noticed any sign outlawing wives,” said Rena.

  He checked a notebook. “According to my calculations you have cost the company just over seventy-eight dollars in the last year alone. It would have been as cheap to furnish dark glasses.”

  “What I like about you most, darling, is that you never talk sense!”

  She laid a copy of Electron Age on the desk and opened it to a technical article bearing her by-line.

  “Mendon wants me to do a follow-up on this satellite-spotting radar piece of yours. There have been a lot of objections from your public, which doesn’t like your math. I’ve got a list of the criticisms here. Can you give a rebuttal on them for the next issue?”

  George shook his head slowly. “Any more than you already have is strictly on the verboten list. The only reason you were able to clear what you did is lost in the circularity of military thought, which is even now administering a kick, no doubt, to some rear echelon lieutenant for passing the thing in the first place.

  “It gets tougher all the time to make a living in this business. I think I’ll get a job with some recipe journal. Have you got anything else that I can write about?”

  He opened his lab book. “Carl and I have been doing some study on integral calculators. He’s trying to cook up a new gimmick for a piece of equipment of his. We’ve got a tube using what he calls a ‘time sense.’ You can’t say anything about the tube but maybe you can work up a space filler out of this math. There are a couple of new notions there!”

  Rena looked at the scrawled pages with a polite groan. “Now I know I’m going to join a recipe journal. Who could make sense out of that?”

  “You said Mendon wanted more math in his rag. There it is.”

  “I’ll try but I don’t think he will raise my salary for it.” She wrinkled her brow in concentration over George’s barely legible abstractions. After a few minutes she opened her own notebook and began copying.

  George tried to return his attention to an urgent item concerning the production of one of his designs. It appeared that in a momentary lapse he had specified a closed sphere to be bolted to a flat plate with nothing said about getting the bolt or nut inside the sphere.

  But that could wait—. He watched Rena’s hands, fascinated by the grace of her long fingers.

  It would mystify him until the last hour of his life how she ever got into technical journal writing. As a model she could have made at least ten times as much but she had been more than mildly insulted when he suggested it.

  Electronics reporting was her specialty, and she was the best in the field. Up to the time of her appearance at Atlantic, George Brooks had never been known to give any of his stuff to the female members of the profession. Hatchet-faced, flat-chested spinsters; he’d been known to call them, with Earth’s nearest approach to pure vacuum located right between their ears.

  But during the year 1, A.R.—after Rena, that is—his fellow engineers accused him of inventing just to have something for her to write about.

  Maybe it was partly true, he thought. How could a guy be so lucky?

  She looked up and smiled as if self-conscious und
er his stare. “You must have some work to do.”

  “Right—but why should I do it at a time like this?”

  She started to close her book. “I can just as well borrow your book and bring it back in the morning. I’ll go over this at home.”

  “Uh-uh. Wartime regulations again on that stuff. No lab books out of the plant any more. So settle down and let’s enjoy ourselves.”

  She made a face and resumed copying the math. Fascinated, he watched the speed with which the symbols seemed literally to flow onto the pages of her book. Then he suddenly leaned forward. His abrupt movement startled her. “That pen—it wiggles!” He pointed to the pen in her hand.

  She hesitated as if flustered by his abruptness. She raised the pen and looked at the point. “Oh, that—it’s another of those seventeen-carbons—and no-original gadget, I think. Supposed to be good even in space-ships—if one should last that long.”

  “What kind of a swivel joint have they got behind that point? Let me see it!”

  “It’s supposed to make writing faster.”

  He touched the point to paper and wrote, My name is George Brooks. I love Rena.

  “Well, I’ll be jiggered.” It had taken about half the time of a short breath to write that many words. “The darn thing seems to almost go by itself.”

  “Yes—but how about me getting finished here? I’ve got to get a permanent this afternoon yet.” She reached for the pen.

  “I’m going to get one of those dinguses. Where did you buy it?”

  “Hank’s Drug in town. A dollar ninety-eight.”

  He resumed his unbelieving stare and Rena resumed writing and the symbols flowed again from the point—that incredible point that he’d have sworn wiggled all by itself.

  He was still in that indolent position when Sykes, the section chief, came up. “Look, Rena,” said Sykes. “Can’t you either marry this guy right away or do your homework somewhere else?

  “Look what you’ve got him doing—designing spheres to be bolted down and no bolts. A subconscious representation of his own head, no doubt. How about it, George? Drafting wants the change order on this today.”

  “Maybe you could put him in a little cell all by himself while I finish up here at his desk,” suggested Rena.

  “Good idea,” said Sykes. “My own personal cell. Come on, George.”

  “Hey, now wait a minute — ” In less than that length of time he was installed up front in the glass-enclosed cubicle that was Sykes’ own personal office—and the rest of the department was enjoying its own faint measure of revenge.

  * * * *

  When Rena left she walked past George with only a slight sidelong look in his direction. He got up from the desk—and found that Sykes had locked the door.

  The completion of the change order was then only a matter of minutes.

  He gained his freedom by waving the paper as Sykes went by.

  Sykes grinned. “She’s a nice girl, George.”

  He returned to his desk and sat down morosely. He appreciated a boss like Sykes, who was an old married man himself but not too old to understand how it was with a guy’s wedding only a week away—especially to a girl like Rena.

  George opened his lab book to resume his studies on the integrator math. He picked up a pencil and scanned the last line of equations, wondering what kind of transformation could be applied —He started writing again—and stopped.

  Rena had left her pen on his desk.

  He forgot about the equations. He hadn’t wanted to work on them very badly anyway. He touched the tip of the pen with his finger and moved it around. The thing really did wiggle as if it were mounted on a ball-and-socket joint. But how could anybody ever write with a dingus like that? If he hadn’t experienced the incredible speed possible with it he would have sworn it wouldn’t write at all.

  He put the point to paper again and wrote.

  —inconsiderate brutality. A savage age does not produce wholly savages. Because he is of such key importance I think the experiment should involve the utmost consideration for his perhaps primitive desires and reactions. Even a closed cycle individual cannot be ignored after results are achieved.

  * * * *

  There were seven of them in the room besides Professor Harkase, four men and three women, including Rena Corsen. Rena was seated nearest the screen besides which Dr. Harkase was standing.

  “In Experimental History,” said Dr. Harkase, “we never ignore the personality of the individual subject. How could we when the success of the entire experiment depends upon it?”

  “The reaction of George Brooks is not going to be a happy one when he learns that he is nothing but a guinea pig—to see if we can penetrate Cell Four with a closed-cycle individual. I don’t see why I couldn’t have gone alone. I don’t see the necessity of two, especially when we had to go back so far to find another closed-cycle individual besides myself.”

  “It is simply because you will be the Historian in the case and will have to withdraw as a subject. But it will undoubtedly be desirable to leave a subject in the closed cell permanently. Considering that the history of the Brooks subject has a strong potential affiliation on the other side of Cell Four it seems to me that we are giving him quite an opportunity.”

  Leave you there alone, George! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

  How can I ever tell them I love you—you savage?

  “The important thing to discuss in this class session,” continued Dr. Harkase, “is what the next move should be. You have gone far beyond the original lines of the experiment in allowing George Brooks to believe that he is to marry you. No doubt you had your reasons for so altering the plan but what do you propose next?”

  “It seemed to be the only possible way to gain sufficient confidence to persuade him to accompany me voluntarily to Cell Four. I’m sure that it will be a small matter now to explain what we want of him.”

  “A peculiar procedure,” said Dr. Harkase, unconvinced. “Perhaps you can convince us of the plausibility of your reasons for leaving your personal pen behind on his desk.”

  “My pen?” Rena’s voice was a shrill hysterical cry.

  “You mean you didn’t intentionally leave it?”

  “No, a savage — “

  “Yes, a savage would have no understanding of the privacy of a thalamoactivated instrument and would proceed to use it—even as you see George Brooks doing now.”

  He gestured toward the screen, where the image of George Brooks was going through a minor fury of examination of the pen that would not write what he intended it to write—but was writing something entirely foreign and incomprehensible, something that was almost like Rena’s thoughts.

  “My pen!” Rena breathed again. She saw George put it to paper and write again.

  I love you, George, Whatever happens, don’t ever believe another thing about me. I love you.

  Dr. Harkase touched a knob. “Shall we move the image up a bit and see what he is writing?”

  “No!” Rena cried out. “Privacy! It’s bad enough for him to— You have no right to invade privacy.”

  By now he other six members of the graduate class in Experimental History were laughing heartily at Rena’s discomfiture. But it was far from humorous to her—this experiment that had gone so badly awry. She wondered if she’d ever get her degree as a Historian, and half wondered if it mattered at all now.

  You matter to me, George.

  “This is quite serious, you know,” said Dr. Harkase. “The pen must be recovered intact. Fortunately it is in the hands of a closed-cycle individual. Otherwise we could not prevent the application of penalties, Rena.”

  “I forgot to remove it when I left this morning,” said Rena. “It’s all I had to work with when I got there. I didn’t think any harm would come of it—but I didn’t intend to leave it there.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t but that doesn’t lessen the serious legal responsibility Involved. The mark of the expert Historian is his skill
in handling the accidental and the unpredicted to prevent them from controlling and altering the intended probability. I perceive that your skill will be tested to the utmost.”

  “Suppose that I can’t return from Cell Four…” said Rena morosely. “Suppose that I have to stay.”

  Dr. Harkase shifted his position and turned off the time screen. His face was only gently furrowed with lines that betrayed scarcely half his age.

  “An appointment as Historian it hardly a trivial matter,” he said. “I think I need not remind you young people of that. The concept of history as an experimental subject is in itself a daring one, one wholly outlawed until only a decade before my own lifetime.

  “There has always been an element of personal danger to the Historian, both in the actual experiment and the public response. The position of these closed cells of time, however, is perhaps the most dangerous experiment attempted for many years.

  “It is entirely possible that you may not be able to return, though all indications are that you will—but you and George Brooks are the only individuals so far discovered with characteristics that will enable penetration.

  “Could you make a satisfactory adjustment with this Brooks in case of emergency?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of that. I’m perfectly willing to continue the experiment.”

  Satisfactory adjustment, That’s their delicate clinical term for falling in love. Maybe Cell Four will be a wild and savage place. We’ll knock it over, won’t we, darling?

  She didn’t know if he were still writing but she let her mind dwell on these thoughts to keep it clear of the things she couldn’t tell him yet.

  “I take it that you do not intend to carry out the original plan then,” said Dr. Harkase. “The plan to become involved in a car accident, at which time you would be transferred to Cell Four, allowing Brooks to associate it with the trauma of the accident?”

  Rena shook her head. “That is a poor plan. Anyone who has constantly thought of negative twenty-six hundred as an age productive only of savages cannot realize the intelligence of individual specimens. George Brooks is not so stupid as to fall into any such explanation.