Star Bridge (31 page)

“I wonder,” Sair said, his eyes distant. “I wonder which it will be.”

“Who knows?” Horn repeated. “Wu might have,” he added suddenly.

“That's a strange thing to say.” Sair looked at Horn with narrowed eyes.

Horn nodded. “I guess it was. I got to thinking about what you said, the possibility that Wu helped the human race. He had many eyes and a long time to grow wise. He could have been a great force for good. To the blind, historical forces he could have been eyes and a purpose. Sure, when something moves, somebody has pushed, but that isn't good or bad in itself. It depends on the situation and the pusher.”

“You're learning wisdom,” Sair said. “Only the circumstances determine good and evil. And only the future can say what the circumstances actually were.”

“Then there is no firm basis for acting at all,” Wendre objected. “What you do for the best of motives may be the worst thing to do.”

“Exactly,” Sair said dryly. “It is a commonplace that more harm is done by well-intentioned fools than by the most unscrupulous villains. A wise man learns not to judge. He may set himself certain standards, but he recognizes that they are only a personal pattern to guide his own conduct and that other standards have the same validity. Some men are interested only in means; some work for immediate goals like freedom; a few are concerned with results far in the future.”

“But that would take a wisdom beyond humanity,” Horn said seriously.

“Perhaps.” Sair nodded, smiling. “Only the future can judge. You'd better go now; you'll miss the ship.”

They turned and started for the ship that would take them to the Cluster where the future would be shaped. There, events were moving toward decision.

 

THE HISTORY

Challenge.…

Six months after the fall of the Eron Empire, it arrived. It came from the far edge of the Cluster, from the world nearest the Silent Stars. It was a scream, a cry, a plea.

Its coming was predictable.

The Quarnon Wars had built a magnificent, deadly armada of fighting ships and trained a generation of fighting men to use them. But the decaying culture of Eron had to be destroyed; it would have collapsed before the first assault.

Only a people in the first vigor of a new culture could rise to meet that challenge.

On ten thousand worlds, man looked up into the night sky with sober eyes and laid aside his tools and picked up his weapons. The long battle of man's survival had already begun.

An enemy was coming. And this time it was not human.

Response: hopeful.…

 

 

EPILOGUE

The Historian sighed and put down his brush. He rubbed his hand down through the snowy hair and over the face of Peter Sair. The hair darkened. The face rippled and began to flow. It dripped to the table, and it was a parrot. Lil stared up at the Historian with one fierce eye.

“Sometimes,” the parrot said, “I wish I had left you in the catacombs of Eron with a hole through your black heart.”

“I wish you had,” Wu said slowly.

A millennium and a half. Personal desires were dead; even the instinct to survive was gone. But a man cannot die while the survival of his race depends on him.

“I don't see the necessity of this mummery—”

“Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”

He picked up the top sheet of manuscript. The ancient Chinese characters marched in columns across the page from right to left. He read the last sentence once more, picked up the brush, and added a final character.

The end. But it was only the end of a long, long chapter. Another had already begun.

 

AFTERWORD

Some creations take on a life of their own. That's the way it was with
Star Bridge
.

Gerald Jonas reviewed a reprint edition of
Star Bridge
in 1977, twenty-two years after the first publication as a Gnome Press hardcover followed by an Ace Books paperback. Jonas wrote: “The book is not a recognized ‘classic' of that period.… It stirred no controversy, won no awards, added nothing to the reputation of its authors. Not only had I never read it before, I had not even heard of it. I mention these facts only to help the reader understand my astonishment at discovering that this obscure collaboration between Williamson and Gunn reads more like a collaboration between Heinlein and Asimov. The concept is pure, classic science fiction. A vast empire spans the galaxy, controlled from the planet Eron which alone holds the secret to faster-than-light travel.”

Neither Jack Williamson nor I had any idea we were up to anything like that. It was an accident it happened at all. I was working as an editor for Western Printing & Lithographing Company (which selected, edited, and printed Dell's paperback books) in Racine, Wisconsin, and talked the editor-in-chief into sending me to Chicago to attend my very first Science Fiction World Convention in late August of 1952. I'd been writing SF stories for four years and having them published for three, but it was my first encounter with other writers and editors and agents. I met some of my heroes, including John Campbell, Tony Boucher, Bob Bloch, Clifford Simak, and many others, including Fred Pohl (my agent at that time), who told me he'd sold four stories that I didn't know about and on the strength of that I went back and told my boss that I was resigning to go back to full-time writing.

But the biggest event was standing in line at registration and turning to find behind me a face I recognized from the backs of some of my favorite novels. “You're Jack Williamson,” I said, and he admitted that he was. It was the beginning of a long friendship that ended only with his death at the age of ninety-eight. We met again in early 1953 when Jack and his wife, Blanche, visited Kansas City, where her sister lived, and at that time Jack mentioned that he'd had writer's block for the past decade and would I be interested in working on a novel he'd started and couldn't continue. I was writing my first novel,
This Fortress World,
but I would finish that soon and I agreed to look at his manuscript.

Jack sent me the first fifty pages (the opening chapter as I rewrote it) and 150 pages of notes about the background and the characters. I developed an outline that Jack approved and then wrote the novel (and rewrote it once) in three months, and Jack approved that. Our mutual agent (Fred again) sold it to Marty Greenberg of Gnome Press, a small specialty press that was publishing more science fiction than anyone. Gnome published
Star Bridge
and
This Fortress World
in 1955. He paid us a $500 advance for each book, but since I shared the royalties for
Star Bridge
with Jack, that amounted to a total of $750 for six months' writing. Even in the early 1950s when my wife and I were living in my parents' home rent free (they had moved in with my physician brother a couple of miles away, and I was using a basement room as an office) and my brother was providing free health care, that wasn't a living wage. I decided to give up space epics and collaborations, and focus on near-future issues, and to break up future novels into novelettes or novellas publishable individually in magazines. That's when I derived my later motto “Sell it twice.” Most of my later novels were written that way.

Marty Greenberg was a good publisher but not so good at paying his authors. Jack and I never got any share of the paperback royalties, and it was only some years later, when Gnome Press went out of business and
Star Bridge
and
This Fortress World
and my other novels began to be reprinted in the United States and overseas, that we got some financial return. Actually, the three years I spent as a freelance writer selling almost everything I wrote but never earning more than $3,000 a year provided the basis for a literary career and financial return as reprints continued.
Star Bridge
has been in print, somewhere in the world, almost continuously.

But I had no idea that
Star Bridge
had any claims to classic status until writer Ed Bryant showed up in Missoula, Montana, where the Science Fiction Research Association met in 1976. Ed had just attended a convention in Washington and he told an audience that a novel named
Star Bridge
had turned him into a science fiction writer, and he added, turning to Jack and me in the audience, “I'm not sure I thanked you.”

A month later I was having breakfast in New York City with John Brunner and Samuel R. Delany, and I mentioned the incident. Delany said, “The same thing happened to me.” And we put Delany's comment on the cover of the Berkeley reprint that Jonas reviewed.

Since then Bryant wrote, in an introduction to volume #4 of
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson
: “I think I was about twelve, probably in the sixth grade, when the TAB Book Club delivered a paperback of
Star Bridge
by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn. To this day, I refuse to understand why this novel is not accorded the same classic status as
The Stars My Destination
or
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
.”

I don't know that I can really take any credit for it. Oh, I wrote it. I know that because it has my name on the cover, along with Jack's. But that was more than fifty years ago, and I read it now as if they were someone else's words. No doubt Jack's vision had a lot to do with it. He was always young in spirit and his imagination soared.

A number of years ago I was having lunch with David Hartwell in New York City, when he was editor of Timescape Books, and he said that he wanted to reprint
Star Bridge
. “I seem to reprint it whenever I move to another publisher,” he said. “It has the ideal combination of Jack's experience and your youthful energy.”

“You've got it wrong,” I said. “It was my experience and Jack's youthful energy!”

James Gunn

 

TOR BOOKS BY JACK WILLIAMSON AND JAMES GUNN

Star Bridge

TOR BOOKS BY JACK WILLIAMSON

Beachhead

Darker Than You Think

Demon Moon

Firechild

Terraforming Earth

The Black Sun

The Humanoids

The Silicon Dagger

The Stonehenge Gate

TOR BOOKS BY JAMES GUNN

Crisis!

Reading Science Fiction

The Toy Collector

Transcendental

 

PRAISE FOR
STAR BRIDGE

“A fast-moving blood-and-thunder novel.”

—The New York Times

PRAISE FOR JACK WILLIAMSON

“I have no hesitation in placing Jack Williamson on a plane with two other American giants, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.”

—Arthur C. Clarke

“A pair of science fiction classics, as fresh and apposite today as they were nearly half a century ago.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
on
The Humanoids

PRAISE FOR JAMES GUNN

“
Transcendental
shows exactly why Gunn attained Grandmaster status in the first place.”

—Paul Di Filippo

“One of the very best portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written.”

—Carl Sagan on
The Listeners

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

J
ACK
W
ILLIAMSON
(1908–2006) was born in Arizona and sold his first story at the age of twenty. He was the second author to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA and is often credited with inventing the terms “terraforming” and “genetic engineering.”

J
AMES
G
UNN
is the Hugo Award–winning science fiction author of
The Joy Makers, The Immortals,
and
The Listeners
. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.

 

STAR BRIDGE

 

Copyright © 1955 by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn

 

All rights reserved.

 

Cover art by Gregory Manchess

 

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