He could hear Sam muttering. "May day!" Sam echoed into his dead radio. "May day! We're lost."

Bruce cradled the delirious boy in his arm and repeated again, "M'aidez! Get a bearing on us." He paused, then echoed, "May day! May day!"

After a while he readjusted the valves, then went back to repeating endlessly, "May day! Get a bearing on us."

He did not feel it when a hand clasped his shoulder. He was still muttering "May day!" when they dumped him into the air lock of the desert car.

Mr. Andrews visited him in the infirmary at Base Camp. "How are you, Bruce?"

"Me? I'm all right, sir. I wish they'd let me get up."

"My instructions. So I'll know where you are." The Scoutmaster smiled; Bruce blushed.

"How's Sam?" he asked.

"He'll get by. Cold burns and a knee that will bother him a while. That's all."

"Gee, I'm glad."

"The troop is leaving. I'm turning you over to Troop Three, Mr. Harkness. Sam will go back with the grub car.

"Uh, I think I could travel with the Troop, sir."

"Perhaps so, but I want you to stay with Troop Three. You need field experience."

"Uh - " Bruce hesitated, wondering how to say it. "Mr. Andrews?"

"Yes?"

"I might as well go back. I've learned something. You were right. A fellow can't get to be an old Moon hand in three weeks. Uh ... I guess I was just conceited."

"Is that all?"

"Well - yes, sir."

"Very well, listen to me. I've talked with Sam and with Mr. Harkness. Mr. Harkness will put you through a course of sprouts; Sam and I will take over when you get back. You plan on being ready for the Court of Honor two weeks from Wednesday." The Scoutmaster added, "Well?"

Bruce gulped and found his voice. "Yes, sir!"

PANDORA'S BOX

Once opened, the box could never be closed. But after the myriad swarming Troubles came Hope.

Science fiction is not prophecy. It often reads as if it were prophecy; indeed the practitioners of this odd genre (pun intentional - I won't do it again) of fiction usually strive hard to make their stories sound as if they were true pictures of the future. Prophecies.

Prophesying is what the weatherman does, the race track tipster, the stock market adviser, the fortuneteller who reads palms or gazes into a crystal. Each one is predicting the future - sometimes exactly, sometimes in vague, veiled, or ambiguous language, sometimes simply with a claim of statistical probability, but always with a claim seriously made of disclosing some piece of the future.

This is not at all what a science fiction author does. Science fiction is almost always laid in the future - or at least in a fictional possible - future - and is almost invariably deeply concerned with the shape of that future. But the method is not prediction; it is usually extrapolation and/or speculation. Indeed the author is not required to (and usually does not) regard the fictional "future" he has chosen to write about as being the events most likely to come to pass; his purpose may have nothing to do with the probability that these storied events may happen.

"Extrapolation" means much the same in fiction writing as it does in mathematics: exploring a trend. It means continuing a curve, a path, a trend into the future, by extending its present direction and continuing the shape it has displayed in its past performance - i.e., if it is a sine curve in the past, you extrapolate it as a sine curve in the future, not as an hyperbola, nor a Witch of Agnesi, and most certainly not as a tangent straight line.

"Speculation" has far more elbowroom than extrapolation; it starts with a "What if?" - and the new factor thrown in by the what - if may be both wildly improbable and so revolutionary in effect as to throw a sine - curve trend (or a yeast - growth trend, or any trend) into something unrecognizably different. What if little green men land on the White House lawn and invite us to join a Galactic union? - or big green men land and enslave us and eat us? What if we solve the problem of immortality? What if New York City really does go dry? And not just the present fiddlin' shortage tackled by fiddlin' quarter - measures - can you imagine a man being lynched for wasting an ice cube? Living, as I do, in a state (Colorado - 1965) which has just two sorts of water, too little and too much - we just finished seven years of drought with seven inches of rain in two hours, and one was about as disastrous as the other - I find a horrid fascination in Frank Herbert's Dune World, in Charles Einstein's The Day New York Went Dry, and in stories about Bible - type floods such as S. Fowler Wright's Deluge.

Most science fiction stories use both extrapolation and speculation. Consider "Blowups Happen," elsewhere in this volume. It was written in 1939, updated very slightly for book publication just after World War II by inserting some words such as "Manhattan Project" and "Hiroshima," but not rewritten, and is one of a group of stories published under the pretentious collective title of The History of the Future (!) (an editor's title, not mine!) - which certainly sounds like prophecy.

I disclaim any intention of prophesying; I wrote that story for the sole purpose of making money to pay off a mortgage and with the single intention of entertaining the reader. As prophecy the story falls flat on its silly face - any tenderfoot Scout can pick it to pieces - but I think it is still entertaining as a story, else it would not be here; I have a business reputation to protect and wish to continue making money. Nor am I ashamed of this motivation. Very little of the great literature of our heritage arose solely from a wish to "create art"; most writing, both great and not - so great, has as its proximate cause a need for money combined with an aversion to, or an inability to perform, hard "honest labor." Fiction writing offers a legal and reasonably honest way out of this dilemma.

A science fiction author may have, and often does have, other motivations in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create "art for art's sake," he may want to warn the world against a course he feels to be disastrous (Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World - but please note that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy's Looking Backwards, Wells' Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, or uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer - any fiction writer - must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose ... or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton sack.

If he succeeds in this purpose, his story is likely to remain gripping entertainment long years after it has turned out to be false "prophecy." H. G. Wells is perhaps the greatest science fiction author of all time - and his greatest science fiction stories were written around sixty years ago (i.e., about 1895)... under the whip. Bedfast with consumption, unable to hold a job, flat broke, paying alimony - he had to make money somehow, and writing was the heaviest work he could manage. He was clearly aware (see his autobiography) that to stay alive he must be entertaining. The result was a flood of some of the most brilliant speculative stories about the future ever written. As prophecy they are all hopelessly dated ... which matters not at all; they are as spellbinding now as they were in the Gay 'Nineties and the Mauve Decade.

Try to lay hands on his The Sleeper Awakes. The gadgetry in it is ingenious - and all wrong. The projected future in it is brilliant - and did not happen. All of which does not sully the story; it is a great story of love and sacrifice and blood - chilling adventure set in a matrix of mind - stretching speculation about the nature of Man and his Destiny. I read it first in 1923, and at least a dozen times since ... and still reread it whenever I get to feeling uncertain about just how one does go about the unlikely process of writing fiction for entertainment of strangers - and again finding myself caught up in the sheer excitement of Wells' story.