Eric Frank Russell.

The Great Explosion.

Dedicated to all those who believe that there is a happy land far, far away.

PROLOGUE.

When an explosion takes place lots of bits and pieces fly all over the scenery. The greater the wallop the larger the lumps and the farther they travel. These are fundamental facts known to every schoolchild old enough to have some sneaky suspicions about the birds and the bees. They were not known or perhaps they were not fully realized by Johannes Pretorius van der Camp Blieder despite the fact that he was fated to create the biggest bang in human history.

Johannes Etc. Blieder was a lunatic of the same order as Unk (who first made fire), Wunk (who designed the wheel), Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright Brothers and many others who have outraged orthodoxy by achieving the impossible. He was a shrimp of a man with a partly bald head, a ragged goatee beard and weak, watery eyes hugely magnified by pebble-lensed spectacles. He shuffled around on splayed feet with the gait of a pregnant duck, who had been making glutinous sniffs since birth and never knew where to put his hand on a handkerchief.

Of academic qualifications he had none whatever. A spaceship bound for the Moon or Venus could thunder overhead as such ships had done for a thousand years and he would peer at it myopically without the vaguest notion of what pushed it along. What's more, he wasn't the least bit interested in finding out. Four hours per day, four days per week, he sat at an office desk. The rest of his time was devoted wholly and with appalling single-mindedness to the task of levitating a penny. Wealth or power or shapely women had no appeal to him. Except when hunting a handkerchief his entire life was dedicated to what he deemed the ultimate triumph, namely, that of being able to exhibit a coin floating in mid-air.

A psychologist might explain this obsession in terms of an experience that Blieder had suffered while resting in his mother's womb. An alienist might define it as the pathological desire of a sniffy-nosed little man to rise high in the world and look big. If he had been capable of self-analysis-which he was not-Blieder may have confessed the thwarted ambition to become an accomplished vaudeville artist. Though he knew nothing and cared less about the wonders of science he did nurse a mighty admiration for professional magicians and illusionists. To him, the greatest glory would be to hold the stage and dumbfound an audience with a series of clever stunts that were not faked, but real.

The actual truth, perhaps, was that bountiful Providence had chosen him to get somewhere in much the same way that other creative imbeciles have been chosen. Therefore he was animated by a form of precognition, a subconscious knowledge that success was sure if he kept after it long enough. So for fifty years he strove to levitate a penny by methods mental, mechanical or just plain loopy.

Upon his seventy-second birthday he succeeded. The coin positioned itself three-eighths of an inch above a pure cobalt disc that represented the output stage of a piece of apparatus bearing no relation to anything that made sense. He did not rush outdoors, yell the news all over town, get blind drunk and paw a few elderly virgins. Instead he blinked incredulously at the penny, sniffed a couple of times, sought in vain for a handkerchief. Then he stacked a dozen more pennies on top of the floater. It made no difference. The column remained poised with a three-eighths gap between the bottom coin and the cobalt disc.

Removing the coins, he substituted a heavy paperweight. The gap did not decrease by a hairbreadth. So he took away the weight and the penny, wondered whether a different metal would produce a different effect, tried it with his gold watch. That also sat three-eighths of an inch above the disc. He fiddled around with his apparatus, making minor alterations here and there in the hope of widening the gap. At one stage the watch vibrated but did not rise or fall. He concentrated on that point, adjusting and readjusting, until he was rewarded with a sound like a sharp spit. The watch vanished, leaving a small hole in the ceiling and a matching hole in the roof.

For the next fourteen months Johannes Pretorius van der Camp Blieder struggled to master his brain-child. Knowing nothing of scientific methods his efforts were determined by guess and by God. In the end he had made every portable item in the house, metallic or non-metallic, float at an altitude of three-eighths of an inch or take off heavenward so fast that it could not be seen to go.

The time had come, he decided, to seek the aid of another and more agile brain. Characteristically, it did not occur to him to appeal to the department of physics of the nearest university. Instead he wrote to The Magnificent Mendelsohn, a topflight illusionist. This was fortunate; a scientist would have dismissed him as just another crazy inventor whereas Mr. Mendelsohn, as a professional deceiver, was only too willing to take a look at any new swindle in the hope that he could improve upon it and confiscate it for his very own.

In due time Mr. Mendelsohn arrived wearing a theatrical black cloak and a cynical smile. He spent three exasperating days trying to determine exactly how the trick was done. Blieder was no help; he hung around snuffling continually and protesting that he had worked a miracle without being able to explain it. Using his prestige, which was world-wide, Mendelsohn called in two scientists to get to the bottom of the matter and, if possible, turn the apparatus into something more exploitable upon the vaudeville stage.

The scientists came with open minds, looked and saw, tested and retested, checked and rechecked, summoned six other specialists. A slight atmosphere of hysteria developed in the Blieder home as yet more experts were brought in. Finally Blieder himself, frightened and exhausted by the general hullabaloo, handed over his apparatus in return for a guarantee of five percent of whatever profit could be made out of it plus a solemn promise-on which he was most insistent-that the new principle he'd discovered would bear his name forevermore.

Ten months later Blieder died without giving himself time to receive a rake-off. Eleven years afterward the first ship went up powered with what was dutifully called the Blieder-drive. It made hay of astronomical distances and astronautical-principles, put an end once and for all to the theory that nothing could exceed the velocity of light.

The entire galaxy shrank several times faster than Earth had shrunk when the airplane was invented. Solar systems once hopelessly out of reach now came within easy grasping distance. An immense concourse of worlds presented themselves for the mere taking and fired the imaginations of swarming humanity. Overcrowded Terra found itself offered the cosmos on a platter and was swift to seize the opportunity.

A veritable spray of Blieder-driven ships shot outward as every family, cult, group or clique that imagined it could do better someplace else took to the star-trails. The restless, the ambitious, the malcontents, the martyrs, the eccentrics, the antisocial, the fidgety and the just plain curious, away they fled by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

In less than a century fifty percent of the human race left aged and autocratic Terra and blew itself all over the star-field, settling wherever they could give free vent to their ideas and establish their prejudices. This was the end-product of the obsession of a penny-levitator. It was written down in history as The Great Explosion.

It weakened Terra for four hundred years. Then came the time to pick up the bits and pieces...

Chapter 1.

In the days when spaceships had been squirted along by vaporized boron sludge or by cesium-ion jets their size had been restricted by the limits of power available. The relation of payload to exhaust velocity was something no designer dared ignore. Blieder put an end to all that.

Ships rapidly gained a tremendous boost in size and carrying capacity. Planners and builders made it a point of honor that each new vessel must be larger than any of its predecessors. The result was the construction of a succession of monsters graduated nearer and nearer to the popular idea of the super-colossal.

The ship now taking a load aboard for its maiden flight from Terra was the very latest and therefore the largest. Its enormous shell of chrome-titanium alloy was eight hundred feet in diameter, one and a half miles in length. Mass like that takes up room and makes a dent. The great under-belly rested in a rut twelve feet deep.

News-channel commentators, lost for suitable superlatives, had repeatedly described the vessel as "one to make the senses boggle." Always willing to do some fervent boggling, the public had turned up in its thousands. A solid mass of people stood behind the barriers and studied the ship with the bovine stares of good, obedient, uncomplaining taxpayers. It did not occur to any of them that somebody had paid for this gigantic vision or that they had been stung good and hard in their individual and collective wallets.

People were momentarily incapable of deep thoughts about cost. The flag had been raised, the bands were playing and this was a patriotic occasion. It is conventional that one does not think vulgar thoughts of money on a patriotic occasion; the individual who chooses such a time to count his cash is by definition a traitor or a no-good bum.

So the ship lay there while the tribal totem fluttered in the breeze and the bands produced tribal noises and a careful selection of tribal braves filed aboard. Those mounting the gangways numbered more than two thousands. They were divisible into three distinct types. The tall, lean, crinkly-eyed ones were the crew. The crop-haired, heavy-jowled ones were the troops. The expressionless, balding and myopic ones were the bureaucrats.

The first of these types bore themselves with the professional casualness of people to whom a journey is just another trip in a lifetime of meanderings. Lugging loads of kit up the gangways, the troops showed the tough resignation of those who have delivered themselves into the hands of loudmouthed idiots one of whom stood at the base of the steps and bellowed abuse at every fifth man. The bureaucrats wore the pained expressions of those suffering something that shouldn't be done to a dog. They had been dragged from their desks and that is the Last Straw.

An hour after the last man, box, case and package had been loaded the V.I.P. arrived. This was the Imperial Ambassador, a florid-faced character with small eyes and a huge belly. Mounting the rostrum he gazed importantly at the audience, bestowed a condescending nod upon the video cameras, cleared his throat and gave forth.

"With this wonderful ship, the forerunner of many more to come, we are about to establish authority over our faraway kith and kin in their interest as well as in ours. While the opportunity exists and before it is too late we are going to create a cosmic empire of enormous strength and vast magnitude." Cheers. "There is no knowing what formidable antagonists our own lifeform may be called upon to meet at any time in the future and before that happens Earth must reclaim its own so that we can present a common front to the foe. The galaxy contains a multitude of hidden secrets some of which may prove perilous in the extreme when revealed. Together we shall face them and defeat them as Terrans always have done." Cheer. "United we stand, divided we fall. Now is the time to bring our distant parts into unity with the mother world."

He continued in this strain for half an hour, yakitty-yak, yakitty-yak, punctuated by applause. Typically he overdid it to the point of trying to convince himself of the righteousness of his cause. He was full of sherry and in a garrulous mood. The members of the audience grew restless, their cheers became strangled by boredom. They had come solely to witness the ship's departure and this gabby fat man was delaying the ship's departure and this gabby fat man was delaying the event.

Eventually he finished with a gracious word of praise for God, waved to the audience, bowed to the cameras, tramped up the last open gangway and entered the ship. The airlock closed. A minute later a siren sounded. Without a sound or any visible output of power the ship went up, slowly at first, then faster, faster. It vanished through the clouds.

On board Tenth Engineer Harrison said to Sixth Engineer Fuller, "You heard that speech. What if these kinfolk among the stars don't want to be loved by the mother world?"

"Any reason why they shouldn't?" Fuller countered.

"Not that I can think of right now."

"Then why dig up imaginary worries? Haven't you got enough of your own?"

"Yes, I've got one," Harrison admitted. He was a small monkeyish man with protruding ears. "My bike-I'd better tend to it."

"Your what?" exclaimed Fuller, gaping at him.

"My bike," said Harrison, evenly. "I brought it with me. I always bring my bike with me."

The first planet showed up like a pink ball on the visiscreens but the effect was a fluorescent distortion; as seen with the naked eye its real color was gray-green. Fourth of a family of nine planets, it circled a Sol-type sun and the whole system lay in a sort of cosmic gap with no near neighbors.

In the chartroom Captain Grayder said to the Ambassador, "According to ancient records this world is the only inhabitable one in the bunch. About a million people were dumped upon it before communication ceased."

"They'll get an awful shock when they find that Terra has caught up with them again," opined the Ambassador. "Which crowd of crackpots picked this place?"

"This," informed Grayder, "is the only world not chosen by its original settlers."

"Not chosen? What d'you mean?"

"They were sent here whether they liked it or not. They were criminals. If any fellow's room was preferred to his company Terra got rid of him by deporting him to where he could share his way of We with his own kind. Let dog eat dog, they said."

"Now that you come to mention it I recall reading something about it when at college," said the Ambassador. "I remember that the history books treated it as an interesting experiment that should solve once and for all the question of whether criminal traits are hereditary or environmental."

"That is why I've been ordered to come here first. Some of our theorists want to know the answer." Grayder looked thoughtful. "Maybe Terra has another army of no-good bums ready for shipment."

"If so, it's taken long enough to collect them. Four hundred years."

"After a complete clean-up," Grayder pointed out, "it might require several generations for the criminal strain to reappear."

"If it is hereditary," agreed the Ambassador. "But if it is environmental the cleanup should have had little or no effect."

"I'm no expert myself but I think it's neither," Grayder offered.

"That so? What's your idea about it?"

"When you're born you take pot luck. You are born physically perfect or physically imperfect and in the latter case you're a weakling or a cripple. You're born mentally perfect or mentally deformed and in the latter case you're an idiot or a criminal. I suspect that the majority of criminals could be cured once and for all by brain-surgery if only we knew the proper technique. But we don't."

"You may be right," the Ambassador conceded.

"The great question is that of whether mental deformity gets passed down," Grayder went on. "Whether the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even unto the third or fourth generation."

"They'll be somewhere around their twentieth generation by now."

"I was merely quoting," said Grayder. He eyed the screen which the glowing ball now half-filled. "We'll know soon."

The Ambassador was silent and vaguely uneasy.

"From our viewpoint," Grayder continued, "the Great Explosion rid our world of a horde of nonconformist nuisances. But, as you can now appreciate, things look mighty different from a ship plunging into space. The home world is far away, lost in the mist of stars. On any new world a Terran is a Terran even though long out of touch and a raving lunatic. He's of the same shape and form as ourselves and that's what counts. He's not of some other and completely outlandish shape."

"All the same, he must be considerably different from us," ruled the Ambassador judicially, "else he wouldn't be squatting in the middle of the starfield. A misfit remains a misfit no matter what his shape." He patted his big belly in unconscious parody of his words. "While I have no resentment against those who deserted the world of their birth neither am I prejudiced in their favor. Let us take them as we find them and judge them solely on their merits-if any."

"Yes, Your Excellency," said Grayder, disinclined to argue. There were, he thought, going to be quite a lot of opinions about what does or does not constitute merit.

Close inspection of the surface provided a surprise as the ship raced around the planet with two thousand pairs of eyes gazing from its ports. Everyone had expected clearly visible signs of human spread and development. Instead, the planet showed evidence of being very sparsely settled.

There were no cities, towns or villages. They caught an occasional glimpse of a ramshackle mass of buildings resembling an old and dilapidated monastery. Almost invariably these were sited upon a hilltop or within the neck of land where a river formed a loop.

No arterial roads could be seen and they were bulleting at too great an altitude to identify footpaths. Several times they swept over great areas of forest and prairie devoid of any sign of habitation. Once they crossed a huge gray desert broken by circular formations of rocky outcrop inside one of which appeared to be an encampment of twenty tents.

The Ambassador sniffed in disgust. "Hardly worth claiming. By the looks of it they couldn't raise six regiments of space-troops much less an effective army. Either they've been decimated by disease or they've found a way to go someplace else."

"I can make a guess why they're fewer than expected," ventured Grayder after some thought.

"Why?"

"History says we shipped a million criminals. I don't recall ever reading how many of them were female."

"Neither do I."

"Seems to me highly likely that women didn't number ten percent of the whole," Grayder added. "Probably the men were in a majority of at least nine to one."

"Not for long," guessed the Ambassador, using his imagination. "In a situation like that a bunch of thugs would slaughter each other wholesale."

"You may be right." Grayder shrugged indifferently. "Let dog eat dog." He peered through the fore observation-port. "We can't go round and round until we're dizzy. Neither can we land just anywhere. A vessel this size needs a long, flat surface and solid bedrock."

"Choose your own place," advised the Ambassador, "but try to pick it within easy reach of an inhabitation, if possible. We've got to make contact somewhere."

Grayder nodded. "I'll do my best." He picked up the intercom phone and held it in one hand while he continued to watch through the port. After quite a time he said, "This is as good as anywhere," and started barking orders into the phone.

Majestically the monster vessel swung into a long, shallow curve to starboard, losing velocity as it went. Two thousand men bowed, leaned or rolled the opposite way. In the trooper's quarters kit fell out of starboard bunks and dived to port to the accompaniment of general invective. Sergeant Major Bid-worthy roared for silence and followed it up with a string of threats. Nobody took any notice.

Completing its curve, the ship drifted to a stop, hung momentarily in mid-air, then began to sink. Its enormous tonnage went down gently and under perfect control in a way that the log-dead Blieder would have considered miraculous. Indeed, even those thoroughly accustomed to such ships never quite got over their sense of wonder at floating down to land, never completely rid themselves of the uneasy feeling that for once something might go wrong and result in one hell of a crash. No Blieder-drive ship had done a dead fall to date-but there always has to be a first time.

So the crew went down with grossly exaggerated sangfroid while the troops and bureaucrats descended with queasy stomachs. At fifty feet from the ground Grayder boosted the ship a little forward to position it exactly as he wanted. This caught all but the crew napping. Bureaucrats slid on their official backsides across metal floors, troopers rolled rearward over each other in a mad tangle of bodies, arms and equipment and amid a torrent of oaths. Clinging to a bulkhead, Bidworthy recited the names of those to be shot at dawn. Apparently he was contemplating a massacre.

The ship touched, settled, sank twelve feet deep into hard soil. Crunching, cracking sounds came through the keel as buried boulders split and powdered under great pressure. Power cut off. The bureaucrats picked themselves up with injured dignity, dusted themselves and polished their glasses. The troops sorted themselves out and started surlily restacking their kit while Bidworthy raved at them.

A bell rang in the power-room, the signal to open the port midway airlock. Chief Engineer McKechnie switched on the motor operating the release-gear while Tenth Engineer Harrison went to check that the lock was working properly. He was joined there by Sergeant Gleed, a leather-faced trooper eager to set eyes upon solid earth.

The airlock's outer plug wound inward, swung aside to reveal a pastoral scene that Gleed drank in like a thirsty camel. Lush grassland led from the ship to a broad, sharply curving river on the opposite side of which a large building-or a tightly packed conglomeration of small ones-stood on the neck of land. Something that looked remarkably like a sailing ship's mainmast complete with crow's-nest arose high from the middle of this assembly. In the center of the river one man in a canoe was paddling fast toward the other side.

The lock's phone shrilled, Gleed answered it and Grayder's voice asked, "Who's that?"

"Sergeant Gleed, sir."

"Good I Get down to the river-bank as quickly as you can, Sergeant. There's a fellow in mid-stream making for the other side. See if you can persuade him to come back. We'd like to have a talk with him."

"Shall I take my gun, sir?"

There was a short silence at the other end before Grayder answered, "I don't think

you need bother. It would create a bad impression. And in any case you will be well covered by the ship's armament." "Very well, sir." Gleed hung up the phone, pulled a face, said to Harrison, "Drop the ladder. I'm going out."

"And who gave you permission to do so?" asked a cold voice.

Gleed turned, found himself facing Colonel Shelton who had just entered the

airlock. He stiffened, heels together, hands held rigidly at his sides.