The Reefs of Space: Adam, the red-nosed spaceling

The Reefs of Space by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson

The experience of collaborating on a trilogy must have been a pleasant one for future sci-fi Grand Masters Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, as just five years later, the pair would embark together on another series of books. THE UNDERSEA TRILOGY – Undersea Quest (1954), Undersea Fleet (1956) and Undersea City (1958) – had been targeted at a younger audience, but the new series, which would later be dubbed THE STARCHILD TRILOGY, was undoubtedly intended for their more-sophisticated, adult readers. During the five-year interim, Pohl had kept very busy, indeed, coming out with the novels Drunkard’s Walk (1960) and A Plague of Pythons (1962), as well as five short-story collections. Williamson, on the other hand, only released two short stories in all that time, but this fallow period can perhaps be understood when one remembers that in 1960, he became a faculty member at the Eastern New Mexico University, at which institution he remained active for the remainder of his long life. THE STARCHILD TRILOGY is made up of the novels The Reefs of Space (1963), Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star (1969); for the sake of convenience, I will be discussing the books individually here, starting, of course, with The Reefs of Space.

The Reefs of Space was originally released as a three-part serial in the July, September and November ’63 issues of the 40-cent, digest-sized magazine If. The authors probably had little trouble placing their novel at If, seeing that Frederik Pohl had been the managing editor there since January ’62 (he’d remain there till mid-’69), at the same time editing the more-prestigious Galaxy magazine, as well. The novel would become a Ballantine paperback in ’64 and ’73 (both with stunning covers by one Jacques Wyrs); internationally, it would see editions in the U.K. (’65), Portugal (’70), Holland (’72), France (’78), Germany (’81) and Italy (2001). For the savvy shopper who might desire to purchase the entire trilogy in one deluxe hardcover or paperback today, please know that such editions are indeed out there, from Doubleday (’77, and the hardcover that I was fortunate enough to nab, with dust jacket), Pocket Books (also ’77), Penguin (’80) and Baen (’86). The bottom line is that this particular novel should pose no especial difficulty for prospective buyers to track down in one form or another.

Astute readers will discern that The Reefs of Space is set several hundred years from the present day. The soil of Earth has been farmed to the point of nonproductivity, and to care for the planet’s teeming 13 billion people, a vast underground computer system, the Planning Machine, runs what is known as the Plan of Man. Every individual’s lot is dictated by the all-knowing Machine, and those who don’t measure up are consigned to the Body Banks: idyllic resorts whose inmates have their various limbs and organs removed, piece by piece, over the course of weeks or years, to be used as spare parts for the greater good. Against this semidystopian backdrop the reader meets the brilliant mathematician Steve Ryeland, who, when we first encounter him, has just traveled by subtrain, hundreds of miles beneath the surface, from his maximum-security prison in the Arctic Circle to Iceland. Once arrived in Reykjavik, Steve and his companion – the idiot-savant/numbers-genius Oporto – are directed by the Machine to board another train … the private travel train of the Planner himself, the highest-ranking human on the planet, in charge of carrying out the Machine’s dictates. The Planner tells Steve that he has been chosen by the Machine to work with a team of scientists, at an undisclosed location. Their mission: to come up with a new kind of space drive; a reactionless drive that will be in defiance of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Ryeland, of course, has no choice but to accept. Arrested three years earlier for the crime of having “unplanned interests,” Ryeland had been subsequently pumped for information at that Arctic prison, especially regarding what he might know about the space explorers Ron Donderevo and Daniel Horrock, as well as the mystifying words “fusorian,” “pyropod,” “spaceling” and “Reefs of Space.” But Ryeland had been able to tell them all nothing, pieces of his past life having been somehow erased. Now, he wears an explosive metal collar around his neck; a collar that could be made to go off by any security officer’s radar helmet or radar gun; one that will go blooey at any sign of tampering, and that must be reset by the authorities once a year. Thus, having no choice in the matter, Ryeland and the similarly encumbered Oporto are compelled to agree.

At the mission complex, Steve is vouchsafed some information by one of his team. The Reefs of Space, it seems, are small planetoids, beyond the orbit of Pluto, that are composed of the minute fusorians that are actually able to fuse hydrogen and create matter and life. On these Reefs live the pyropods, monstrous creations indeed. And Steve is shown a captive spaceling, as well; a golden-furred, seallike animal (with a Rudolph-like, glowing, red nose!) whose ability to levitate, cruise through space, and create an air bubble around itself might hold the key to the reactionless drive that the team is searching for. The spaceling has been named Chiquita by the Planner’s beautiful teenage daughter Donna Creery, who Steve had briefly met while aboard that subtrain earlier. Despite the brutal treatment meted out to Chiquita by one of the team’s sadistic members, Steve begins to make real progress in his task … until, that is, disaster strikes. Following the calamitous collapse of a helical field in one of the subtrain tunnels – a field that Ryeland had invented before his incarceration – the Machine decides that the mathematician’s usefulness has come to an end. Thus, Steve is sent to the Body Bank known as Heaven, on the island of Cuba, where it is felt he might be more … useful. But despite tremendous odds, he will somehow make an escape, and even live to set foot on one of the smaller Reefs, before all is said and done…

The Reefs of Space is a curious amalgam of hard sci-fi (with discussions of the steady-state theory, Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and how a reactionless space drive might possibly be achieved) with scenes that almost border on fantasy (in particular, the one in which Ryeland and his allies sail through space inside an air bubble formed by Chiquita and her mate, Adam). Strangely enough, the authors here seem to be in defense of English astronomer Fred Hoyle’s steady-state theory (which posits that the universe has always existed and that hydrogen is constantly being created) as opposed to the more widely accepted theory, which Hoyle termed “the Big Bang.” Still, the authors’ novel is one of unrestrained imagination and speculative thought, replete with some stunning images. Just check out this description of the Reefs, by one man who’d been there:

…An unearthly place. We came down in a brittle forest of things like coral branches. Thickets of shining crystal thorns snagged at our spacesuits when we went out exploring. We blundered through metal jungles that tripped and snared us with living wires and stabbed at us with sharp blades. And there were stranger things still! There were enormous lovely flowers that shone with uncanny colors – and gave off deadly gamma rays. There was a kind of golden vine that struck back with a high-voltage kick when you touched it. There were innocent little pods that squirted jets of radioactive isotopes. It was a nightmare!…

And yet, this is a book that author J.G. Ballard once accused of being “devoid of a single original image.” Go figure!

Pohl & Williamson’s novel is filled with interesting, futuristic touches (such as that subtrain that zips along frictionlessly in tunnels protected by those helical fields, and the “asepsis lamps” that are seen in the Body Bank’s operating theater, and the metallic “Peace Doves” that continually flutter about the Planner’s daughter and act as her bodyguards). Their tale subverts the reader’s expectations of the Machine and its Plan of Man being wholly undesirable, and even Ryeland has mixed opinions regarding them (although he keeps insisting on his loyalty to the Plan, he later avers that it is guilty of enslaving mankind). Ultimately, both the Planner and the Machine are revealed to be … well, not as completely bad as we had initially thought, let’s just say. And the authors ply their readers with any number of well-done sequences. Among them: Steve’s first encounter with the maimed Chiquita; the entire stay at the Body Bank in Cuba … a harrowing section that comprises almost ¼ of the book; Steve flying through a hurricane and into space on Chiquita’s back; an exploration of one of the many Reefs; and Steve’s unequal fight with a scaled, metal-clawed pyropod. The novel is fairly devoid of humor, but what little there is comes in that Body Bank sequence, strangely enough, dark as that humor might be. Thus, when one of the inmates sees another being wheeled out of surgery and asks “What did you lose this time?,” the patient replies “Just the other kidney, I think.” “You’ve got plenty left,” returns the first. But oh, that Body Bank sequence … probably the most suspenseful and nerve racking in the entire novel! Thus, we see Steve get called into the operating room, only to learn that he’s just there to give blood; go on a hunger strike and water fast, to avoid the tranquilizers that the inmates are constantly being fed; and attempt an escape by hiding in a heap of body parts. It is a segment assuredly not for the squeamish!

The Reefs of Space also offers up a raft of interesting secondary characters, such as the idiot-savant Oporto (I love when he tries to recall a woman’s name and says “You know, 837552 – I forget her name”), Donna Creery and Angela Zwick, a woman who’d once worked for Steve and is now a literal basket case (no arms, no legs) at the Body Bank. As was the case with the UNDERSEA books, this one features cliff-hanger chapters that carry the reader irresistibly along. The novel surprisingly manages to answer all of our questions by the time things conclude (I was growing concerned around seven pages from the denouement), and it ends in a way that could have made the book a perfectly self-contained entity, had the authors chosen to not write two more books on the subject. This Book #1 can be a bit challenging to follow at times, and is decidedly adult fare, as opposed to the earlier trilogy. But Ryeland is a wonderful lead character, who I do hope reappears in the following books. (I have a feeling that he will not, however.)

I have but a single complaint to levy against Pohl & Williamson’s pretty impressive work here, and it’s that the background of the Quintano Quiveras character (Who’s that? I’ll let you discover the answer for yourself!) could have been made a little more explicit. But that is a mere quibble. By the end of The Reefs of Space, the Machine is still very much in charge and has suddenly given the green light for the Reefs to be explored via the newfound reactionless drive. What could possibly happen next? Guess I’ll have to dive into Book #2, Starchild, to find out. Stay tuned…