Read Online Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson - Free Book Online Page A

name from some fine stories in Analog, but I’m glad I gave it a chance. The planet of Ymrek, see, is at a crisis point in its cultural development. The civilized types in the city of Yngmer are threatened by the barbarian Ketaxil, and have for defense only crude cannon which they don’t know how to aim vely well. A pair of human xenologists reluctantly decide to interfere by giving the Yngmerians technological aid in the form of “quasimatter,” a wondrous stuff they hope to pass off as “nothing more than simple magic.” Unfortunately, at the same time a native genius named Terek has singlehandedly duplicated the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, deducing laws of motion with which he hopes to save the day by inventing ballistics, to aim the cannon better. The local shaman reacts little better than did Galileo’s inquisitors, and just as Terek has begun to convince him that perhaps il se nsuovo after all, in come the xenologists-with quasimatter trinkets that don’t obey Newton’s Laws! Poor Terek is ceremonially proclaimed a Dunce, and the rest of the book deals with the attempts of the meddling but well-intentioned xenologists to set things right. It’s a dandy, and I’m proud of Stanley for his refusal to yield to temptation and pull rabbits out of a hat for an ending.
    My only complaint is his failure to explain quasimatter rather than simply describe it-but as a man with a trunkfull of letters saying, “your last story was okay-but it’s not science fiction,” possibly I should shut up. Tasty stuff, Stan.
     
    Cliff Simak’s new book, Enchanted Pilgrimage (Putnam-Berkley) is another one of those that gave me mixed feelings. If there’s a sequel planned, I withdraw most of my objections, but as it stands it raises more questions than it answers.
    To say that it’s well told would be more unnecessarily redundant than is absolutely called for-it is, after all, a Simak. The characters are well-drawn, the menaces chilling, the succession of events compelling. But the book frustrates me, dammit. The first half reads like alternate universe sword-and-sorcery-a little strange for Cliff, but what the hell. In this alternate universe men have never really left the Middle Ages, and gobblins, trolls, elves and unicorns festoon the countryside. A quest is undertaken (incidentally, quests involving a chalice or grail are a separate subgenre called cup-and-sorcery) by a band of good joes. Fine.
    Then: halfway through the book, a modern-day human appears from our time-stream, complete with firestick and a Honda dragon, and one not unnaturally assumes that some of the strange goings-on are going to get mundane explanations. Only some do, and some don’t, and one of the most impressive menaces turns out for no apparent reason to be an alien, which dies in giving birth to a robot (!) that seems to do nothing to advance the plot. We learn that there are three alternate universes, (why only three?) and that the third of these is a “humanist” world in which all the problems of
    man have been solved-but all we ever get to see of it is two characters who appear only by rumor. Nor do we ever learn how travel between the universes is managed, nor why only one not-especially-bright inhabitant of our own time-stream (named Jones, forsooth) pulled it off. Worst, the quest turns out to have been a wild-goose chase for all but one of its members.
    Oh hell-Cliff is just too good a craftsman to leave such gaping holes in the foundations: there has to be a sequel. But I wish there’d been words to that effect somewhere in the galleys.
     
    The missing man in Katherine MacLean’s book of the same name (Putnam-Berkley) seems to be the protagonist-the one we are given just doesn’t seem real to me. No, amend that: he seems real for the first chapter (which, if my memory serves, appeared somewhere or other as a novelette-and a damned good one* and then vanishes, leaving behind a cardboard simulacrum. There’s just no