Hindsight

by Jack Williamson
first published in the pages of Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1940
short story

A brilliant inventor helps a space pirate wage war on the inventor’s college buddies as the last stop before conquering Earth. But overclocking one’s prediction-oriented battle computer may have unforeseen repercussions.

Second-ever SFWA Grand Master Jack Williamson makes his first appearance on Rocket Shorts with a story about, well, hindsight. Schlock Value reviewed his novel The Legion of Space a couple years back. Check out that amazing cover.

This story is that of an Earthman who was educated on Mars before joining up with a space “superpirate” on Ceres. This pirate, codenamed Astrarch, offered our protagonist, William Webster, an apparently extravagant sum of money (“twenty thousand eagles a year”) to do R&D for the Astrarchy, which is what this guy calls his band of space pirates. His capitol complex on Ceres is called the Astrophon, and I choose to believe that is what those bright spots in the crater Occator are.

What Webster (who changes his name to the spacier “Brek Veronar”) builds for the Astrarch is a computer brain for his warships that is able to predict enemy ship motion based on their past positions. It relies on the achronic force, which is explicitly described as in no way electromagnetic.

It’s likely a completely new fundamental physical force, but it has an interesting property (as hinted at by the name): it doesn’t give a damn about time. As such, machines which can transmit and receive achronic beams can communicate truly instantaneously, which is how the pirate fleet stays organized when they’re spread throughout both the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s trojans.

Now, the trouble with any FTL technology is that it opens every can of worms, and a few cans of baby snakes someone mistook for worms. For an in-depth look at the problems breaking the light barrier can introduce to your story, I direct you to Atomic Rockets’s page on the matter.

Anyway, Williamson realized that instantaneous anything would screw with causality in a major way, even if he didn’t have such a clear idea of exactly how. So we have a story about a character who has a realization that leads to a change of heart that leads to changing the flippin’ past.

What I didn’t understand about this was how Brek Veronar went from flashing through glimpses of the past that were all relevant to his predicament (handy!) to actually changing the past. It was hinted that enormous amounts of power in the present may be required to alter as little as a few neurons firing years ago, but the process by which this was accomplished was simply attributed to “the [ship’s] converters.”

I did chuckle as I read the story at the weapons with which these pirate ships were equipped. Rifles! Twenty-inch rifles. One assumes they’re an analog to modern (sea)ship-mounted heavy artillery guns, but in this story they were consistently referred to only as “rifles.” Apparently torpedo technology was in the research stages.

I hope I don’t need to explain how silly it is to rely on ballistic projectiles during space combat. The distances and speeds involved… About the only advantage they’d provide (other than cost per round) is being hard to detect during their long flights across the void. This is another topic discussed better and at greater length on Atomic Rockets; scroll back up for the link if you want to.

I’m not sure I can recommend this short. It had a few problems beyond the leap from “we can see the past and future with this prediction machine” to “we can change the past with this machine that up until now was only used to gather data and perform calculations.” The flashback-based exposition up front was clunky and dull. Every conversation in the story (and there weren’t a whole lot) felt unnatural, like they existed only to allow the author to present the next idea leading up to altering history.

I did enjoy the descriptions of the battle fleets maneuvering, converging, and descending upon Earth. But the thing that tickled me most in this story was also the least touched-upon detail: a passing bit of dialog mentioned the powers of “Earth, Mars, and the Jovian Federation.” I love it.