The Chalice of Death: Three Novels of Mystery in Space
Robert Silverberg
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ROBERT SILVERBERG
“Where Silverberg goes today, Science Fiction will follow tomorrow.”
—Isaac Asimov, author of Foundation
“[He] seems capable of amazements beyond those of mere mortals.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A master of his craft and imagination.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“One of the great storytellers of the century.”
—Roger Zelazny, author of the Chronicles of Amber series
“Silverberg is a master writer in any genre.”
—John Shirley, author of Demons
“Robert Silverberg’s versatile, skeptical intelligence controls a lavish and splendid imagination.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Left-Hand of Darkness
“Robert Silverberg is a master storyteller.”
—SF Signal
“A major force in science fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review
The Chalice of Death
Three Novels of Mystery in Space
Robert Silverberg
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE CHALICE OF DEATH
Thirty thousand years ago, Earth reigned as the supreme force for law and order in the galaxy. Now her mighty star empire lies vanquished and long forgotten, and Earthman Hallam Navarre must seek out and recover his ancestors’ secret weapon—or be doomed to suffer the fate of the lost homeworld he’s never seen.
STARHAVEN
Interplanetary fugitive Johnny Mantell flees authorities to the artificial pirate world of Starhaven, sanctuary for the criminals and misfits of space. There he hopes to find a new home for himself—if only he’s willing to submit to the space station’s iron-fisted dictator and his potentially mind-shattering psychprobe.
SHADOW ON THE STARS
Deep-space colonist Baird Ewing travels to Earth for the first time in the thousand years since his ancestors last departed, seeking aid against the aliens who have set out to destroy his colony. But the weapon he finds upon the ancient Earth can save only one planet, and Ewing must decide which homeworld will live and which will be utterly annihilated.
A Biography of Robert Silverberg
Introduction
This is the second of two omnibus volumes collecting the science-fiction novels that I wrote for the Ace Double Novels series back in the early years of my career, more than fifty years ago. The other omnibus is called The Planet Killers: Three Novels of the Spaceways; and before I discuss the three books in this one, I want to recapitulate part of the introduction to the other collection, byway of setting the historical context for Ace Books and my involvement with their Double Novels program.
I was a college sophomore in the fall of 1953, hoping in a rather desperate way to become a professional science-fiction writer some day, when the first Ace Double Book appeared. In those days it was possible to buy all the science fiction that was published, even on a college sophomore’s budget, because there really wasn’t very much of it—four or five magazines a month, and one or two paperbacks at most—and so I snapped it up.
It was an unusual-looking book. For 35 cents—five or six dollars in today’s purchasing power—you got a short, thick paperback containing A. E. van Vogt’s novel The World of Null-A. But if you turned the book over, flipping it from top to bottom in the process, you discovered a second van Vogt novel on the back—The Universe Maker. Two for the price of one—182 pages of small type for Null-A, and 138 more for Universe Maker! And, though the greatly ballyhooed World of Null-A was plainly the main event here, one could not actually consider one book to be the lead novel and the other its backup, because each was printed upside down in relation to the other, so that the volume had neither “front” nor “back,” just two novels in one binding, each with its own cover and each inverted vis-à-vis its companion.
As I examined it I don’t think I allowed myself the fantasy of having some book of mine published in the Ace Double series just yet. It would have been much too far-fetched. I still hadn’t managed to sell even one short story, though just a couple of months earlier I had had an article on science-fiction fandom accepted by one of the professional s-f magazines. That sale had brought me $30, but to me an article was a somewhat lesser thing than a story, and I would not think of myself as a real science-fiction writer until I had sold a story or two. Selling novels, perhaps, would come later, but I tried to keep my adolescent fantasies as plausible as I could.
So I bought the van Vogt Ace Double Book more as an avid collector of science fiction than as a potential author of Ace Doubles. Indeed there was no other reason then for me to have bought the book, for I had read World of Null-A three or four years before, in almost complete bewilderment, in its original magazine version, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I had already read The Universe Maker too. (It had previously been published under a different title in a 1950 issue of the pulp magazine Startling Stories.) But there was no indication of that in the double volume, since the title of the shorter novel was unfamiliar and the book gave a copyright date of 1953 for it. Ace Books, I was to learn, was never very fastidious about copyright information or book titles. But, as I’ve said, I had bought the book mainly as a collector’s item, for the novelty of its back-to-back format.
A month later came a second Ace Double: Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon bound with Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror. I bought that too. I realized that these odd little Ace Doubles were something I wanted to collect as a series.
Once again, I had read the two books before. The famous Robert Howard novel was plainly labeled as a reprint. The Brackett was palmed off as an original novel, copyright 1953, but the text looked familiar, and for good reason: I had read a slightly shorter version of it, under the title of “Sea-Kings of Mars,” in the June, 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories.
The months went by, and nearly every one brought a new Ace Double: more van Vogt, an Eric Frank Russell novel, works by L. Sprague de Camp, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak. I had learned by now that the editor of the series was Donald A. Wollheim, a veteran figure whose experience in science fiction went back almost to its earliest days. The authors, that first year, were all long-established writers of the field, no newcomers among them, and the books were either reprints of hardcover novels or else reissues of recent magazine serials, disguised by new titles and copyright dates. Ace did not seem to be a market for previously unpublished fiction, not even from well-known pros.
I had by now sold a couple of stories to the lesser s-f magazines and was in the process of selling a young-adult novel to a hardcover firm, but at that early date I saw no likelihood of ever having a book of my own in the Ace series. Things changed. In the summer of 1955 one of the Ace Doubles included a novel that had never been published before, by a relatively new young writer named Philip K. Dick who had broken into the field just a couple of years earlier with a lot of short, clever stories for the pulp magazines. Then came a novel by another recent arrival on the scene, Gordon R. Dickson, and a second one by Dick. The Ace Doubles series was starting to turn into a market for new work by younger writers.
In the summer of 1955, too, though I was still in college, I broke into professional writing in a big way, with stories sold to Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic
, and three or four other magazines. Even though these stories rarely rose above the level of minimal professional competence, there were a lot of them, a lot, and my productivity alone was earning me a great deal of attention, just as theirs had done for Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley a couple of years before. And at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York in September, 1956, my prolific output won me recognition with a Hugo Award as Best New Writer of the Year.
That evening, after the award ceremony, Don Wollheim came up to me and said, “Do you think you’d be interested in writing novels for us at Ace?”
Ah, it was a wondrous thing to be 21 years old, three months out of college, standing there with a shiny new Hugo in my arms, and having Donald A. Wollheim inviting me to write for him, only three years after I had bought that first van Vogt/van Vogt Ace Double!
A week or so later I was having lunch with Wollheim at Steuben’s Tavern, a German restaurant down the block from his midtown Manhattan office. He suggested that I send him an outline and the first three chapters of a book. That afternoon I spent an hour or so staring at the Dick and Dickson books, and one by Charles L. Harness, and a couple of Leinsters, as if merely by studying the close-packed typeface of those books I would form a Platonic-ideal notion of what an Ace Double Book ought to be. I did, in fact, have some idea of that already: just about all of them that had been published thus far were books of 40,000–50,000 words, fast-paced, heavy on color and action, rich in science-fictional wonderment. Brackett, van Vogt, Leinster, Williamson—these, I thought, correctly, were the prototypical Ace authors whose work I should emulate. One could have chosen worse role models than those.
I began to sketch an outline for a book that I called Years of the Freeze. I gave the outline to Wollheim the following week and he bought it right away and I wrote it that fall in one breathless rush, using a flimsy bridge table as my desk in my still mostly unfurnished new post-college apartment. He called it The Thirteenth Immortal when he published it in the Ace Double series in May of 1957. (Wollheim almost always changed my titles. He did it to almost everybody else, too.) It was printed back-to-back with James Gunn’s This Fortress World, a reprint of a novel I had read and admired when it was first published in 1955. I had spent quite some time talking with Gunn at the 1955 World Science Fiction Convention, telling him of my aspirations as a writer.
So there I was, an author of Ace Doubles. And sharing a volume with James E. Gunn. Decades later, the Science Fiction Writers of America would name us both as Grand Masters, but I had no fantasies of such exalted future status back then. I was more than content just to have sold a book to Ace.
By the time The Thirteenth Immortal came out, I had already written and sold Wollheim a second book, published a few months later in 1957 as—his title again—Master of Life and Death. (My original title was the feeble Gatewag to Utopia.) My back-to-back companion this time was the Anglo-Irish writer James White, with The Secret Visitors. When I met White that month at the London science-fiction convention, we posed for photos back-to-back, though we weren’t able to manage the reciprocally inverted configuration of an Ace Double.
Then came Invaders from Earth in the spring of 1958 (for once Wollheim kept my original title; the book was paired with Across Time by “David Grinnell,” a pseudonym for Wollheim himself) and Lest We Forget Thee, Earth just a month later (the companion was People Minus X by Raymond Z. Gallun, a writer who had been famous in the field before I was born), and Stepsons of Terra (my title: Shadow on the Stars) still later the same year, bound with Lan Wright’s A Man Called Destiny. In the spring of 1959 came Starhaven, under the pseudonym of “Ivar Jorgenson,” this one a reprint of a previously published hardcover book. It was doubled with The Sun Smasher by Edmond Hamilton, another of my early literary heroes. Like Philip K. Dick and Poul Anderson and Murray Leinster and A. E. van Vogt, I had become one of the Ace regulars.
All three of my 1958–59 Ace books had their origins in work I did for Larry T. Shaw’s magazine Science Fiction Adventures. Shaw, an old-time s-f fan, might have had a splendid career as an editor if he had ever found a major publisher to back him, for his taste was superb and he had the useful knack of coaxing writers to do their best work without seeming actually to be nagging them; but it was his fate always to work for marginal companies in low-budget ventures. Infinity was his special pride, a low-budget magazine that ran high-budget-type stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, and Algis Budrys. It even published Harlan Ellison’s first science-fiction story. I was a regular contributor to Infinity and many of my best short stories appeared there. The companion magazine, Science Fiction Adventures, was a blood-and-thunder operation done strictly for fun by everybody involved, featuring space-opera novellas of interstellar intrigue and blazing ray-guns in the mode of the beloved old 1940s pulp, Planet Stories. I was a regular contributor to SFA, too: in fact, I practically wrote the whole magazine. As I look through my file copies, I see a long story or two by me (often under some pseudonym) in virtually every issue. I loved writing these melodramas of the spaceways, and the readers evidently enjoyed them too, for my stories (under whatever pseudonym) were usually the most popular offerings in each issue, according to the reader letters that Shaw received.
The original format of SFA provided “Three Complete Action Novels” (actually, novelets of 15,000 to 20,000 words in length) in each issue, plus a few short stories and features. In the fall of 1956, when the magazine was just a couple of issues old and I was already established as its main writer, editor Shaw had the idea of running a series of related novellas, since the series story had long been a favorite of s-f readers. (E. E. Smith’s “Lensman” novels, Clifford Simak’s “City,” Robert A. Heinlein’s “future history” series, Henry Kuttner’s mutant stories, etc., etc.) I was invited to dream up a three-part series for the magazine, and swiftly obliged.
The first of the three, “Chalice of Death,” which I wrote in December, 1956, ran in the fourth issue, dated June, 1957. I worked off the tried-and-true theme of a galaxy so widely settled by humanity that the location of Earth itself had been forgotten, and ended the story with the rediscovery of decadent old Earth and the prospect of a revival of its ancient galactic hegemony. Shaw ran it under a pseudonym I had already been using elsewhere, “Calvin M. Knox,” since there had been novellas under my own name in the previous two issues. After taking time out to do a couple of unrelated pieces for SFA, I wrote the sequel to “Chalice,” called “Earth Shall Live Again!”, in March, 1957, and Shaw published it in the December, 1957 SFA. (Which also contained the lead novella, “Valley Beyond Time,” under my own name, so that I was responsible for about three-quarters of that issue’s fiction content.) I finished the trilogy in June, 1957 with a novella that bore the gloriously pulpy title of “Vengeance of the Space Armadas,” which ran in the March, 1958 issue and saw Earth properly restored to its preeminent place in galactic affairs.
By no coincidence at all, the three novellas added up exactly to the right length for an Ace Double Novel, and in October, 1957 I gathered up a set of carbon copies and sold it to Don Wollheim, my fourth Ace sale, right on the heels of my sale to him of Invaders from Earth. He published Invaders in April, 1958 under the Silverberg byline and brought out the “Chalice” stories just a month later as by “Calvin M. Knox.” I had called the book The Chalice of Death, but Wollheim did his customary title-changing thing and released it under the title, Lest We Forget Thee, Earth, a name which I never admired and which I have replaced, for this new edition, with my original one.
By then, steaming right along in my wildly prolific ways, I had helped Larry Shaw with a couple of further experiments in editorial policy at Science Fiction Adventures. He wanted to vary the three-novella format that he had been using since the beginning, and asked me to write an extra-long work that he could hype as a “Book-Length Novel,” to be backed up by a few shorter stories. In May, 1957, I obliged with “Thunder Over S
tarhaven,” a 28,000-worder that Shaw ran in the October, 1957 issue. Because both Silverberg and “Knox” were appearing all over the place in the magazine, Shaw rang in yet a third pseudonym for me and put out “Starhaven” under the name of “Ivar Jorgenson.”
A word or two about that “Jorgenson” byline is necessary here. My use of it wasn’t entirely kosher. “Ivar Jorgensen”—note the spelling—had made his debut in 1951 in a pulp magazine called Fantastic Adventures with a rather nice Viking fantasy called “Whom the Gods Would Slay.” Other “Jorgensen” stories followed, and gradually word leaked out that they were the work, not of a swaggering Scandinavian bard, as claimed, but of Paul W. Fairman, a mild-mannered staff writer for Fantastic Adventures and its companion magazine, Amazing Stories. When Fairman moved along to become the first editor of a magazine called If, he took “Jorgensen” along with him, and still later, in 1955, he wrote still more “Jorgensen” stories for William L. Hamling’s Imagination.
The bibliographical problems began in 1957 when Hamling decided that “Jorgensen” was a house pseudonym that could be applied to the work of any of his authors. I had become part of Hamling’s writing staff by then, along with my collaborator of the time, Randall Garrett, and Hamling hung the name on some stories that Garrett and I turned in. Which of them I wrote and which Garrett did and which we did together is something I no longer can tell, but it is certain, at any rate, that those stories, eight or nine of them, weren’t written by Paul Fairman!
The next move came when Larry Shaw of Science Fiction Adventures chose to capitalize on what he imagined to be the popularity of the Jorgensen name by having me write three long stories for him under that name. The first was “This World Must Die!”, which became The Planet Killers. I followed it two months later with Thunder Over Starhaven, which took up almost an entire issue and shortly thereafter appeared in book form as Starhaven. The third, “Hunt the Space-Witch!”, came out in his other magazine, Infinity, a couple of months after that.
