Introduction by Sylvia Engdahl
to "Tranquility"
This is the only true short story I ever had an idea for. I wrote it in the spring of 1957, but of course, by the time I was writing for publication its premise was outdated. It now belongs to the alternate history genre, but unfortunately for humankind, except for that one main premise its scenario has grown less “alternate” year by year. I have included it in the ebook edition of Anywhere, Anywhen not as evidence that my ideas in the 1950s were in some ways prophetic, but because I hope it will make readers think about what a society that has turned its back on space exploration might become.
I have not changed a single word of the way I originally wrote this story, half a year before Sputnik—and of course long before the Apollo program was conceived. Its outdated premise is that a spaceship once landed in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, but never came back, and that as a result space travel was given up. At the time I wrote it and long after, neither I nor anyone else could have imagined that if a ship landed there and did come back, travel to the moon and beyond would be given up anyway. Some of the other developments assumed by the story are by now so well established that young readers won’t realize that I was projecting them—that such trends were merely viewed with alarm in the fifties, not accepted as normal the way they are today. We are well on the way to the rest; in another half century, will they seem as predictive as my choice of a lunar landing site? I hope not!
Tranquility
by Sylvia Engdahl
What do you think about when you happen to glance up at the moon? How nice it looks, maybe, shining down through the trees—or how big and orange it was the night you and your best girl parked out by the Palisades? Well, that’s the sort of stuff most people think of, I guess—but me, I always remember my old Gramp Douglas and what he told me about the Ship. I don’t know why I remember; it wasn’t anything important and I never will understand it. I guess maybe because it’s all tied up in my mind with the day my vocation was assigned and the time I didn’t take any tranquies for three whole days.
I was just a kid, of course; I was fourteen that spring. You know the crazy notions kids get. Gramp Douglas was staying with us—he was trying to get his employment permit extended for another five years past retirement age, and claimed Dad had connections at the Bureau—so everything around home was upset. You’ve no idea how upset if you never met Gramp Douglas, but you can judge from the fact that Mom used up her whole ration of tranquies by Wednesday night and had to buy enough extra on the black market to last out the week. (If she’d known I wasn’t going to use all of mine she could have saved that eleven hundred credits to apply elsewhere; Dad’s “connections” were expensive ones!—but of course I never told her.) Anyhow, one hot night when we were all sitting out in the patio, Gramp looked at the moon rising over the top of the State Control Building and said, kind of sadly, “I sure get to wondering—what would’ve happened if the Ship had come back?”
“What ship?” I asked.
“George,” Gramp Douglas demanded, scowling at Dad. “You mean to say you never told the boy about the Ship?”
“The ship?” Dad looked blank for a couple of moments, then grinned. “Oh, I remember. The moonship—the one you always used to say ‘foundered in the Sea of Tranquility.’”
Gramp laughed. It was a loud laugh but it didn’t sound happy or amused. Gramp was a strange old guy; he’d been with us nearly a week now and I still couldn’t make him out. (He hadn’t ever visited us before; we lived in L.A. and it’s hard to get a travel permit for L.A.)
“Foundered in the Sea of Tranquility,” Gramp repeated. “Yes, it did. It sure did, George.”
Joan, my kid sister, put in, “What’s ‘Sea of Tranquility?’”
“It’s part of the moon, dear,” said Mom tiredly. “Mare Tranquillitatis, one of those dark patches.”
“You sure are dumb, Joan,” I told her. “A long time ago people used to think the moon had seas, didn’t you know that? So maybe they thought the seas had ships on them. People used to believe in a lot of crazy stuff.”
“Yeah, maybe they did,” said Gramp. “Maybe we all did.”
Joan was not going to shut up; she was at the Interested Age— you know, the age when kids make a real big deal out of everything. No matter how useless and trivial a thing is, they care. So Joan inquired brightly, “What does a Moon Ship look like?”
Gramp began, “It’s like any other rocket, only more—”
“Is it real?”
“Of course it’s real!” Gramp exploded. “It’s real enough; the only thing is, it needs real men to fly it. So there it sits, way off there in Mare Tranquillitatis, and nobody even knows about it anymore. My own grandchildren never heard of it—them that could be blasting from here to the moon and back a dozen times a month, and maybe out to Mars—”
“But why would we want to?” I interrupted. “The moon’s dead.”
“Even if we did want to,” Joan added, “I don’t think the Travel Bureau would let us. Susan Johnson’s family wanted to go to Seattle last year and they couldn’t even get a permit for that.”
“What’d Susan’s dad say?” Gramp wanted to know.
“Oh, he said that after all, the Bureau knew better than he did, and he could just as well stay home because the TV was paid up for the whole month anyhow.”
“In my day,” Gramp sighed, “A man did what he felt like doing, not what some damned Bureau thought he ought to feel like. So long as he wasn’t hurting some other guy, he made his own decisions.”
“Didn’t his ration card get suspended?” asked Joan.
“It did not!” Gramp retorted. “We didn’t have any ration cards except during the War. We bought whatever we could afford to buy.”
“You mean you could just walk in the drugstore and buy all the tranquies you wanted? Gosh!”
“Sure—if you wanted them.”
“In Gramp’s day,” Mom stated. “There was also a lot of anxiety.”
Joan persisted, “What’s that?”
“Anxiety,” Mom explained, “was a kind of sickness. Like how you feel when you forget to take your tranquies, only much, much worse.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If people could buy all the tranquies they needed—”
Dad broke in, “People are awfully stupid, kids. Why, I read once that not everybody started using tranquies when they were first invented.”
“You bet they didn’t,” snorted Gramp. “Tranquies were just for sick folks, in hospitals. Folks whose minds were sick. Then they started putting them in drugstores...”
“And some people didn’t even buy them.” Dad shook his head, mystified. “They gave them to cows and chickens, but not to babies.”
“Not to babies!” exclaimed Mom. “But a baby would cry if you didn’t. Even when it wasn’t wet or hungry it would cry, and disturb everybody.”
“Why didn’t the government do something?” I asked logically.
“Those were strange times,” Dad replied. “Some people didn’t want the government to take care of them. There weren’t as many laws as there are now to protect people from themselves.”
“You’re damned right there weren’t,” agreed Gramp. “This was a free country once. We were even willing to fight to keep it that way.”
I stared at Gramp. “You sound as if you liked fighting.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Well gosh, why should you do something you didn’t like? If there wasn’t any law to make you, I mean?”
“There was a law, but we would have fought anyway. Lots of us volunteered to fight.”
“Why?”
“Because we wanted to be free, that’s why!”
“What’s ‘free’?” inquired Joan. “You can get something for free, like on a giveaway show, but you can’t be free. That doesn’t make very much sense.”
“It makes more sense than the way things are now.”
Mom started, “Gramp, please—”
I went on, “If you thought you wanted something, and you didn’t have it, why didn’t you just take an extra tranquie and forget about it?”
Gramp began to laugh again. “We did, I guess. Yeah, that’s exactly what we did.”
I was confused. Gramp made it sound like that was something bad. Gosh, if your stomach hurts, do you just let it go on hurting? Don’t you take something for it, right off? So if you feel disturbed, or—or have anxiety, you must be pretty dumb if you don’t take more tranquies than usual.
“It was all those alerts,” Gramp continued ruefully. “They got to be so often, and every time folks thought there was going to be an H-bomb coming...”
“What’s an—”
“Never mind, Joan,” I said.
“So pretty soon lots of people couldn’t stand it, and the tranquie companies began doing real good business. They stopped talking about ‘amazing new tranquilizer drugs’ and started in on ‘the brand endorsed by more top stars’ and ‘Whatever Will Be, Will Be—So Why Worry?’ When they started mixing them into the baby food we were hooked.”
“Don’t you mean cured, Gramp?” Mom reproved. “After all those centuries of turmoil, science came up with a way to wipe out worry, unhappiness, mental illness...”
“Sure! No more unhappiness. No more frustration. No more freedom! The War ended, with our side on top—and during the next ten years we turned right around and voted in damned near every totalitarian practice we’d fought to save the world from, because we’d just stopped worrying.”
His voice wasn’t sad anymore; it was fierce. Emotional, like the actors on TV, who, it was rumored, drew phenomenal salaries because they had to lay off tranquies for hours before each show. I’d never seen an ordinary guy act that way.
“Joan, honey, run and get Gramp’s pills,” said Mom. Then, to Gramp, “You’d better be careful. Sure things were different in your time, but you’d better watch what you say around Georgie and Joan. To them it might sound disloyal.”
I don’t think he even heard her. “We just stopped caring, that’s what we did—Yankee gumption went out the window along with free enterprise and every other kind of enterprise! ‘Why worry, why get all riled up?—let the Government handle things its own way; what the computing machines decide is no concern of ours!’ So the Bureaus run the country and we’ve no more voice in it than a bunch of slaves—but that’s all right now; we’re tranquil slaves.”
Mom put a hand on Gramp’s shoulder. “But we don’t work as long hours as they used to,” she remarked soothingly.
“Didn’t you ever want liberty, Peg?” Gramp shouted. “Didn’t you ever want to choose your own job, pick your own place to live, make up your own mind how to spend your money—”
“We’ve got a good enough house,” said Mom. “I don’t see any reason to complain, do you, George?”
Dad laughed. “Why get so bothered?” he said to Gramp. “Ever since I was a kid you’ve had spells like this.”
“We should report Gramp to the Health Bureau,” proclaimed Joan righteously, holding out a glass of water and a small bottle marked with the ration board’s red stamp.
Gramp snatched the glass from her hand and threw it clear across the patio—yes, he really threw it. It knocked over one of Mom’s flowerpots as it fell, the water splashing and forming a dark blotch on the cement floor. I began to think that maybe Joan’s idea wasn’t so far off; obviously the old guy needed help.
“Dear me, that was my prize begonia,” Mom said evenly.
“Let’s go inside,” Dad suggested. “It’s time for the Hundred Million Credit Show.”
I got up to follow them but as soon as I heard Joan turn on the TV I opened the patio door and went back out. For some reason I was sort of curious about the Ship—how it had got to the moon in the first place, and what difference it would have made if it had come back. When I saw Gramp, though, I decided to wait until some other time to ask him; he was all hunched up in the chair end had his face buried in his arms.
The next day at school we got our vocations assigned.
It was the last day of spring term and, since we were ready for high school, we’d spent the past few weeks taking our aptitude tests. The results were back now and we were to receive our official cards from the Bureau, telling what our vocations would be between now and the time we reached retirement age. It had taken quite a while because after all there were a lot of tests to be run through the machines, and it took several operations to score them, interpret them, and integrate the national results so that the Bureau would be sure to assign the right number of people to each vocation.
We were excused early to pick up our cards. I found the table in the front hall marked “A to F” and got in line. While I was waiting I thought about how I hoped I’d get chosen for engineering; I’d always liked classes in math and science and stuff the best.
And I’d always wanted to go to college. But there was no point in worrying; perhaps if they decided I couldn’t be an engineer I’d be made a electrician or something.
My card read, “George N. Douglas, Jr.—Public Accountant.” Well, I’d be sent to college, anyway.
I noticed that I felt sort of disturbed, though, and on my way to clean out my locker I stopped by the drinking fountain and swallowed another tranquie. By the time I got home I was okay.
Gramp was in the kitchen, drinking coffee. “Hi,” I greeted him. “I’m going to be an accountant.”
“Is that what you wanted?” he demanded gruffly.
“Well, I don’t suppose I would have picked it myself—”
“The new American motto—‘It’s okay by me!’” He sounded awfully bitter. “I picked my job. My real job, I mean, before the Bureau decided I ought to work for the Department of Economic Stability. I was a reporter. Did you know that, George?”
“No,” I said. “Why did they change you?”
“Well, when the machines first began to integrate they discovered that there were too many reporters.”
“Oh. Say, Gramp, what’d you do when you were a reporter? Did you cover any big stories?”
“I sure did,” he stated proudly. “The biggest story that ever broke. The biggest thing that ever happened to the human race.”
“You mean the new constitution?”
“God, no! I mean the Ship.”
“The moonship—the one you were telling us about last night? What was big about that?
He looked hurt. “You don’t know, do you?”
Puzzled, I admitted, “No, I don’t. What’s the use of going to the moon?”
“People were real excited about it once.”
“Well, then—”
“Dammit, I forgot ‘excited’ is a dirty word nowadays. Let’s say they were happy. Yes, happy—the human race was getting somewhere.”
“To the moon? But it’s not worth anything; it’s just rock.”
“I guess you won’t ever understand it, George. There isn’t anybody left who can understand it.”
Poor old Gramp—I felt sorry for him. He couldn’t stop worrying. Maybe because he hadn’t had tranquies when he was a baby; they say the conditioning you get when you’re young is awfully important. “Why didn’t the Ship come back?” I asked.
“Because of the War. The War started a couple of days after it landed on the moon, you see, and the other ships—the ones that were supposed to follow—never took off. The lunar landing was tricky; the first Ship had depleted its own fuel reserve.”
“So it’s still there?”
“Still there. Right out in the middle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Once you’re down in that sea, boy, it takes some doing to get up again. Probably never make it.”
“Why does it matter, though?”
“I can’t tell you. If you could understand the answer you wouldn’t be asking.”
I had a sudden idea. “Gramp—do you have to be excited to understand?”
“Sure, George—I guess that’s one way of putting it.”
Well, you know how kids are. I don’t suppose you’ve ever deliberately gone without tranquies any more than you’ve ever stopped eating just to see what it would be like—but then you probably never met anybody like Gramp. I was curious, that’s all. I don’t know why, but I was. I guess I wasn’t too much beyond the Interested Age myself.
When I went to bed that night I left my red-stamped bottle in the pocket of my shirt and I didn’t touch it the next morning, either. It was Saturday, the last Saturday in June, and we went to the beach. I was half-expecting to be awfully sick, but you know, I wasn’t. I felt wonderful. I swam clear out to the breakwater, and when I got there I almost wished there was somewhere else to swim to. I didn’t think I was tired, but I must have been because when I got back to shore and Joan started pestering me I blew up and almost smacked her. Mom was horrified.
The next day I got the notion that I wanted to go someplace new and interesting, but I had no idea where, and Dad said why pick Sunday when all the good shows were that afternoon? So we stayed home and watched TV just as usual. Only I didn’t feel usual. After awhile I knew I was going to scream if I had to sit there and stare at that darn screen one minute longer.
Right then is when I should have given in and taken a pill, of course, but instead I went to my room and got out the remote-controlled model planes I’d been building and took them out in the yard. Their performance wasn’t very smooth and I kept getting madder and madder until finally I put them on a collision course and ended the whole deal in one grand, spectacular smash. What’s the use in going on with a hobby like that when you aren’t going to get any training to help with it?—accountants don’t study electronics.
Monday I was sick—oh, I didn’t have a fever or a stomach ache or anything like that, but I felt just awful. And there was a rain scheduled. Mom reminded us at breakfast, and Gramp said something about how not even the weather was allowed to do as it pleased, and I burst out with, “Damn the weather bureau, anyway!”
Joan choked on her corn flakes, and Mom murmured something about how maybe she’d better call the doctor and see if she couldn’t get my ration increased, since I’d been so irritable lately. And Dad said he’d try to hurry through that little business arrangement involving Gramp’s right-to-work permit—by which he meant that Gramp was a bad influence.
I hung around feeling utterly miserable all day. I don’t know why people used to have the idea that excitement’s pleasant; it’s not—it makes you feel like you want to go out and change things, like maybe telling the Bureau what you think of engineering versus being an accountant, or even saying that you don’t like the guys who’re making the laws and doing all the bossing! Or like doing something that they haven’t got around to planning yet, something that you thought up by yourself—you don’t know just what, exactly, but something big and—well, significant. Only of course you can’t, and if you could there wouldn’t be any point in it.
Late that evening, when I went outside for a breath of fresh air, I looked up at the moon through a rift in the clouds and thought about the Ship waiting in Mare Tranquillitatis all by itself, and I didn’t understand anything except that I wanted to cry for no reason at all. A Ship, way up there ... all that effort and expense, and it didn’t do anybody any good. I still couldn’t see what Gramp had meant by saying, in an old clipping he showed me, that the Ship had “heralded the dawn of man’s ultimate destiny” or by adding bitterly that it had turned out to be a false dawn. He’d called it “a monument rising out of the Sea of Tranquility”... sure, but a monument to what?
It was too deep for me. I went back into the house and gulped down two tranquies, saving the rest of what I’d hoarded as insurance against the black market.
But now every time I see the moon I think about the things Gramp said, and—here’s the strangest part—it’s as if I’m not remembering all of it. As if there were something else—something elusive but vital—that’s there in my subconscious, if only I could catch hold of it; something that I almost grasped, once. As I told you, I don’t suppose I ever will figure it out.
Gramp died the next winter. He never did get his right-to-work permit back, and I guess he kept on worrying. I hadn’t known him long enough to love him, but I was sorry. Gramp was peculiar, sure—but there was something kind of special in the way he looked at things; I never have been really convinced that he was just a crazy old man.
Copyright 1957, 2003 by Sylvia Engdahl
All rights reserved
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