One Step From Earth

ONE STEP FROM EARTH Harry Harrison

INTRODUCTION — The Matter Transmitter

THE HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION is the history of mankind. This may sound like too broad a statement, but it is certainly more accurate than the accepted history as measured by wars, rulers, and politics.

In the beginning there was walking, and mankind walked around the world. On foot, generation after generation, homo sapiens spread out from his homeland, usually considered to be in central Africa, and crossed the land bridges to the other continents. Later, after sailing craft had been perfected, isolated places like the Pacific islands were settled — but the foot came first. Nor was it — nor is it — an inferior form of transportation by any test. The Roman roads were used by chariots and carts, but were built primarily to enable the foot soldiers to reach their objectives quickly and easily, sometimes at the other end of the continent.

The parallels can be easily drawn. When only the tiny minority traveled, society was fixed at a simple agrarian level. The life of the seventeenth-century European peasant differed very little from the life of the eleventh-century European peasant. Stuck in the mud. Destined to be born and to live and die in the same place.

But not the seafarers. As soon as men could build ships to sail long distances — they did. The Myceneans visited England in the fifteenth century B.C. The Vikings went to North America in the eleventh century. A few hundred years later the Spanish pioneered regular routes to the Americas and the world was changed. For the worse, as far as the Amerinds were concerned, but certainly changed. Yet once the Europeans had covered the globe and grabbed what they could, things settled down rapidly to a condition pretty much like that which had gone before. Ships were improved, but they were essentially more of the same thing, and the world still dozed at home with little thought of the future. The industrial revolution was struggling to get started in England but was not making much progress. What is the use of having machines to make more products if the products just pile up in an empty lot next to the factory? They have to be moved away, and fast. Canals helped a bit and a lot were dug, but this was just a variant form of water transport and in essence added more ports to the world trade routes. People still walked or rode horseback or had the horses pull slow carts just as they had for a good number of centuries. What was needed was a radical change.

The railroads. In a few years everything was different. Raw materials streamed into the factories and manufactured materials spread out all over the world. Life would never be the same again. Everything changed. Apparently for the worse, if the slum-living factory workers were any judges. They must have felt like the Amerinds who saw the white-winged ships sail into the bay. And just about the time the world was beginning to settle down to the new way of life brought about by the railroads the automobile was invented.

Not only the buggywhip manufacturers went to the wall when the first cars chugged and backfired down the dirt roads. Entire cities were to be made unlivable within fifty years. Warm and happy Los Angles was turned into a poison-gas-filled, deteriorating community completely surrounded by concrete freeways and hurtling machines. Things were really moving faster by this time, and even while the cars were pushing out the trains and taking over the world, the airplanes were catching up and passing them by. New York City is now closer to London by plane than the rest of New York State is by car or train, closer than the state capital, Albany, is by ship, closer than its city limits are by foot.

That is where we stand now. Every facet of every part of our lives changed by the continuing transportation revolution of the past century. But what lies ahead? Rockets for one thing, and improved means of space travel that might be a little more practical and not quite as expensive. A good bit of modern science fiction has been involved with an investigation into the effects of space travel; nor is this well of speculation exhausted yet. Strange devices have been used to postulate space exploration across the light-year gaps between suns — space warps, subspace drives, and such — and distant, yet unknown worlds have become story material. Is this all?

Of course not. Time travel is really a form of transportation, and has its own literature. And then there is the matter transmitter.