Stainless Steel Visions

I find bits and pieces of my life in this collection. My years of slavery as a comic-book artist are reflected in "Portrait of the Artist. " Soon after the end of the Second World War I met a member of the Indian Communist Party. Who suggested that I could make money and be a national savior if I exported condoms to his country. This was the first time I had my attention drawn to the growing evils of overpopulation and the need for stringent birth control. Many years later, after a good deal of research, I wrote Make Room! Make Room! the first nontechnical book — fiction or nonfiction — that addressed itself to this problem. The story "Roommates" also grew out of this.

Out of mutual interest, the anthropologist Leon E. Stover and I developed a realistic theory that explains why Stone-henge was built, which became the basis for our novel Stone-henge: Where Atlantis Died. Spin-off from this work was the story "The Secret of Stonehenge. "

I am happy with these stories. I have carefully gone through them all and taken out all the typographical errors and infelicities that have crept into them through the years. I discovered — with great shock — that some editor, unbeknownst to me, had changed the name of the lead character in "The Streets of Ashkelon" and had bowdlerized the religious discussions. If I ever discover who did this I will tear his, her or its heart out.

But I am satisfied. These stories work. They entertain, occasionally amuse, are didactic at times but never, I firmly believe, boring. I enjoyed writing them and hope that you will have pleasure as well in reading them.

Harry Harrison

Dublin, Ireland

THE STREETS OF ASHKELON

Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of Wesker's World, a muffled thunder rumbled and grew. Trader Garth stopped suddenly when he heard it, his boots sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his good ear to catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick atmosphere, growing louder.

"That noise is the same as the noise of your sky-ship," Itin said, with stolid Wesker logicality, slowly pulverizing the idea in his mind and turning over the bits one by one for closer examination. "But your ship is still sitting where you landed it. It must be, even though we cannot see it, because you are the only one who can operate it. And even if anyone else could operate it we would have heard it rising into the sky. Since we did not, and if this sound is a sky-ship sound, then it must mean… "

"Yes, another ship," Garth said, too absorbed in his own thoughts to wait for the laborious Weskerian chains of logic to clank their way through to the end. Of course it was another spacer, it had been only a matter of time before one appeared, and undoubtedly this one was homing on the S. S. radar reflector as he had done. His own ship would show up clearly on

the newcomer's screen, and they would probably set down as close to it as they could.

"You better go ahead, Itin," he said. "Use the water so you can get to the village quickly. Tell everyone to get back into the swamps, well clear of the hard ground. That ship is landing on instruments and anyone underneath at touchdown is going to be cooked."

This immediate threat was clear enough to the little Wesker amphibian. Before Garth had finished speaking, Itin's ribbed ears had folded like a bat's wings as he slipped silently into the nearby canal. Garth squelched on through the mud, making as good time as he could over the clinging surface. He had just reached the fringes of the village clearing when the rumbling grew to a head-splitting roar and the spacer broke through the low-hanging layer of clouds above. Garth shielded his eyes from the down-reaching tongue of flame and examined the growing form of the gray-black ship with mixed feelings.

After almost a standard year on Wesker's World he had to fight down a longing for human companionship of any kind. While this buried fragment of herd-spirit chattered for the rest of the monkey tribe, his trader's mind was busily drawing a line under a column of figures and adding up the total. This could very well be another trader's ship, and if it was his monopoly of the Wesker trade was at an end. Then again, this might not be a trader at all. Which was the reason he stayed in the shelter of the giant fern and loosened his gun in its holster. The ship baked dry a hundred square meters of mud, the roaring blast died, and the landing feet crunched down through the crackling crust. Metal creaked and settled into place while the cloud of smoke and steam slowly drifted lower in the humid air.