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Bring Back Yesterday / The Trouble With Tycho (Classic Ace Double, D-517)

de A. Bertram Chandler, Clifford D. Simak

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review of
Clifford Simac's / A. Bertram Chandler's The Trouble with Tycho / Bring Back Yesterday
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 19-20, 2018

Go here for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1080222-tycho-yesterday

I finished reading this bk less than a mnth ago & I've already almost completely forgotten it. It's a good thing I take review notes. Typically, these Ace Doubles pair a writer I'm interested in w/ one I'm less interested in. I always read the one I'm less interested in 1st. As far as I can tell, I've only read one other Simak novel, Mastodonia, my review of wch is here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1436437.Mastodonia . That review doesn't amt to much but I conclude it w/: "Simak's yet-another SF writer I'm glad to've finally read. Along w/ a few tens of thousands of other bks, I hope to read more by him. I'd better get to work." Indeed. It took me 5.5 yrs to get around to him again & I had a similar reaction of not expecting much & getting more than that. In other words, I liked this.

The Author's bio at the beginning states that: "CLIFFORD SIMAK has been writing science-fiction for thirty years." (p 2) Given that the bk is copyrighted 1961 that wd make his starting date 1931. That's earlier than I wd've expected.

""You ever hear of the Third Lunar Expedition?"

"I nodded. Everyone had heard of it. Two ships and eleven men swallowed by the Moon—just dropping out of sight. Thirty years ago and they had never been found.

""I know where it is," she said.

""Tycho?'

"She nodded.

""So what?"

""So there are papers there."

""Papers . . ."

"Then it hit me. "You mean museum stuff!"

""You can imagine what it's worth."

""And the story rights. 'I Found the Lost Lunar Expedition.' "

"She nodded. "They'd make a book of it, and a movie, and it would be on television."" - p 13

There you have it. Just reading it play out was fine w/ me. The "hound dogs" are introduced. They're energy beings or some such who attach themselves as 'pets' of sorts to specific explorers on the moon. "Susie" is the name of the one that hangs around the main character.

""Well, I have a funny feeling. Two funny feelings, really. The first of them is that sometimes Susie tries to talk to me."

""Nothing funny about that," said Doc. "We don't know a thing about her or any of her tribe. She could be intelligent. I would make a guess she was. She seems to be pure energy, although no one knows for sure. There is nothing that says that to be intelligent you've got to be made of hide and bone and muscle."

""And there are other times," I said, "when it seems to me she might be studying me. Not me alone, you understand, but the human race. Maybe, I tell myself, that's why she picked me up—so she could study me."" - pp 25-26

Ok, you pretty much know what's going to happen. The Lost Lunar Expedition gets found, the hound dogs are important. I can quote the following w/o really spoiling it:

"Then I saw that we were in what might have been another crater, although the surrounding walls seemed to be too straight for it to be a crater. There was no slope at all, just the walls, rising stark and perpendicular from a floor almost as smooth as a living room. And rising from the smoothness of the floor, the strange typical moon formation—the crazy, jagged peaklets that looked like a melted candle, the tiny craterlets, the obscene-looking mounds, and the crisscross of tiny canvasses. The walls ran in a semicircle, backed against the natural crater wall itself, towering far above the straighter walls, but sloped instead of straight. And I knew, looking at it, that this was the southern slope of Tycho, that we had come all the way across the crater.

"But that wasn't all.

"There, in the center of the area, sat two spaceships—red bodies with gray domes, spraddling on four landing gears. And scattered all about them were moon rigs, gleaming in the glare of sun." - p 56

Simak seems to be one of those SF writers who tries to be realistic based on whatever data was available to him at the time. We're not talking Méliès's fanciful film "Le Voyage dans la Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon") (1902) wch I dearly love. Simak is of an era that makes an attempt to be scientific at the same time that he tells a good adventure yarn:

"Now the Moon was cold. The sun had been gone for hours and the heat, except for the little trapped within the piles of dust accumulated at the bottoms of steep slopes, had fled into outer space. The heaters in our suits were unable to hold off the cold entirely. It was all right as long as one was walking, for then the increased body heat, held in by the suit, became a warming factor. But it would have been suicide to stop and rest without the added insulation and the trapped heat of the dust." - p 74

Thank goodness for SF writers. I enjoyed this. It made me want to create friction w/ a woman SF enthusiast in order to stave off the cold temperatures here on the Moon's satellite. These are my people.

************************************************

Bring Back Yesterday was different from other Chandlers I've read. Most of them are inter-related.

"I awoke with a start, with the frightening conviction that something was terribly wrong. It was, I decided, the silence. The thin, high keening of the interstellar drive is so much part of a spaceman's life that its abrupt cessation is more shocking than the sudden cacophony of alarm bells and sirens. But why hadn't the alarm bell been sounded? Not only was the drive silent but so were the sobbing pumps, the whining fans." - p 5

The protagonist awakens disoriented. This disorientation, as will be shown, increases throughout the novel. The astronaut realizes that a sexual encounter enhanced by drug use has contributed to his missing his spaceship:

"She started to laugh again, then thought better of it. "Go through to the bathroom," she told me. "You'll find a bottle in the cabinet—anti-euphorine. Bring it through, with a glass."

"I did as she told me, finding the bottle without difficulty. When I got back into the bedroom she was up, standing naked before the big window, letting the sunlight play over her slim body. She turned, smiling, murmuring, "The sun is my only true lover . . ."

"I kept my eyes on her face, said, "Here's the bottle."

"She sighed, "Must I?"

"I began to wish that the effects of the drug had persisted in my case. I asked, "What do I do with this?"

"She smiled impishly, replying, "Unluckily, I'm too much of a lady to give the correct answer." Then: "If you really must, pour just three drops into that glass."

"I did so, handed her the goblet. She raised it to her lips and drained it, shuddering slightly. She let the glass fall, walked rapidly to where her robe was hanging over a chair, shrugged herself into it. The heavy black material covered her from neck to ankle, from shoulder to wrist. Over it her face was white and hard.

"She said, "Get something on. Then you'd better get out of here."" - p 9

Ah.. where are the hedonists that aren't dependent on drugs when you need them?!

ANYWAY, our spaceman hero misses his spaceship's departure leaving him stranded & w/o the support of his no-longer-drugged one-nite-stand.

""And my back pay?"

"The metallic eyebrows lifted.

""Mr. Petersen, surely you are not so naive as to believe that you have any further claims upon Trans-Galactic Clippers? I am well aware that some shipmasters are so weak as to make financial provision for deserters—Captain Gruen, in fact, wished to do so in your case. But I can assure you that this will never be allowed in any port over which I exercise jurisdiction.["]" - p 18

I'm reminded of B. Traven's excellent Death Ship. My review of that is from my early days as a reviewer before I wrote much other than capsule reviews. As such, rather than provide the link, I'll just quote its single paragraph:

"This was the 1st Traven bk I read. He's most known for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" wch was made into a film by John Houston starring Humphrey Bogart. "The Death Ship" starts out humorously enuf as a comedy-of-errors: sailor gets separated from ship, doesn't have papers, etc. However, the real content of the bk is a critique of a world full of borders & capitalist corruption. There aren't any spoilers in this little review. I'll just say that the situation goes from bad to worse until the comedy has turned into clear-cut tragedy. Traven's one of the best political novelists I've ever read." - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/17258793

Upgrading this plot to a science fiction context makes it much more fun for me but much less of a political commentary on 20th century times. Still, the references to 20th century crime fiction (& its recontextualization here) show where Chandler's heart is:

"["]I always look at people's bookshelves. Very often I get a fair idea of what they're like from their reading matter."

""I always do the same, John," he told me. "Now, as you have already observed, I own a fine collection of detective fiction, none of it modern, all of it from the vintage period. You'll find all the Twentieth Century masters here: Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie . . ."" - p 35

"I turned to the books for company. They were fascinating stuff, some of them better than others. In some of them the private eye solved his cases by intensive brainwork while the police stood around in admiration; in others the private eye blundered around like a bull in a china shop, guzzling whiskey and seducing blondes, getting beaten up between times by both cops and crooks, and still solved his cases. What it was all supposed to prove I didn't know, but I read on." - p 48

""Readable, Steve, very readable. And they do, in a rather warped sort of way, give a picture of those times, although it's hard to realize that while those quite impossible characters were boozing, wenching and beating each other up, the Space Age was just beginning." - p 51

""The message, if you can call it that, seems to be this. The message seems to be that the machinery of organized crime-prevention and -detection is too cumbersome. The message seems to be that one resourceful man can achieve more than a big and well-equipped police force. And there's another angle. Very often this one, resourceful man—or not so resourceful—having blundered into the middle of some sort of mess acts as a catalyst, so that whole lot blows up, very often right in his face."

""Good. In other words, the private operator, without apparatus, often does better than the police, with apparatus.["]" - p 52

Hence goes the justification for the way the stranded spaceman gets repurposed as the resourceful detective. One of his 1st acts is to try to spy on the one-night-stand who gave him the boot:

"I still feel ashamed of what I did as soon as I was alone, and yet I am sure that most men in my circumstances would have done the same. The temptation was strong, and I was not strong enough to resist the temptation.

"The controls of the spy beam were simple." - p 40

""After a few minutes of futile manipulations of the controls I stood up. "A blocker," I said.

"Yes, a blocker, Perhaps it's just as well for your peace of mind that there is one."

""But, she's not a criminal."" - p 41

Spy Beams & Carlotti Beacons: I don't remember running across the Spy Beam in any other Chandler bk (altho I wdn't 100% vouch for that) but I do recall the Carlotti Beacon as a regular feature:

""The Carlotti Beacons? Aren't they those weird affairs like Mobius Strips coiled around attenuated Klein Flasks out at the spaceport?"

""That's as good a description as any. Well, as you know, interstellar travel is time travel of a sort. We have a faster-than-light drive, but we get it by cheating. Putting it very crudely, an interstellar ship goes ahead in space and astern in time."

""Then there is time travel."

""No. There are limitations. If there were no limitations we should have instantaneous transit between the stars, and the intergalactic drive would be more than a science-fictioneer's dream."

""But these Carlotti Beacons—as I understand it, there is no time lag between the transmission and reception of a signal from and to anywhere in the galaxy."

""But that does not involve the transmission of matter."" - p 55

I haven't quite perfected my own Carlotti Beacon but, look!, I can collapse the 1961 of Bring Back Yesterday w/ the 1975 of Chandler's The Big Black Mark in seconds:

""Grimes, you'll pay for this. This is a big black mark in your Service record that'll never be erased!"

"This was so, Grimes knew. It would be extremely unwise for him to return to Lindisfarne to face court-martial. He would resign, here and now, by Carlottigram. After that? The Imperial Navy, if they'd have him? With his record, probably not." - p 224, The Big Black Mark

It's always a special moment when novelists bring the reader to the why of the title of the bk:

"After he'd had a few drinks he'd start comparing himself with Dr. Faustus. I thought at first that this Faustus was a scientist, then that he was some sort of religious leader. Then, one day, I had to take the dustsled into Pilsen for stores, and I spent an hour or so in the library.

"Q. Go on.

"A. It seems that this Dr. Faustus was an alchemist, back on the Home Planet, thousands of years ago. He was old, and he wanted his youth back, and he made some sort of bargain with the Devil. The Devil came to collect his dues and Faustus tried to change sides at the last moment, and cried, "Oh, Lord, put back Thy Universe, and give me back my yesterday . . ." and when I read that, I remembered that Fergus, when he was drunk, would always say that, or something like it. "Bring back yesterday."" - p 61

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

""Then what's Wenceslaus like?" I asked dutifuly, rather reluctant to shunt her train of thought on to unromantic tracks.

""Just a big ball of dust. Fine dust, almost fluid. You could sink right down in it if you weren't wearing dustshoes. And you'd drown in it if you weren't wearing a spacesuit."" - p 80

Hhmm.. how can I transition to this next part?

"The dust blows forward and dust blows back
And the wind blows black through the sky
And the smokestack blows up in the sun's eye
What am I gonna die?
A white flake riverboat just blew by
Bubbles popped big
And a lipstick Kleenex hug on a pointed forked twig
Reminds me of the bobby girls
Never was my hobby girls
Hand full o'worms and a pole fishin'
Cork bobbin' like a hot red bulb
And a bluejay squeaks, his beak open an inch above a creek
Gone fishin' for a week
Well, I put down my bush
And I took off my pants and felt free"

- "The Dust Blows Forward 'n' the Dust Blows Back" - Captain Beefheart

"The buttons of her shirt were all undone now, and the garment was falling from her slim shoulders, her pointed, pink-nippled breasts. As I buried my face between them her hands were busy with the fastenings of my clothing, and my own free hand had found the press-seam of her shorts. I was lost in the urgency of it all, and so was she, and neither of us noticed when the bunk lurched beneath us, the lights flickered.

"Then, with a crash, the table overturned as the lights went out, and with the sudden darkness came the strident clangour of alarm bells." - p 81

Been there. No space butterflies involved tho.

"She was dressed before I was. While she was waiting for me she did her best to clean up the mess with a soft towel. I was glad that she did. My own space butterfly hunting days began and ended while I was still a first-trip cadet." - p 84

Space butterflies in & of themselves aren't so bad — but when a space butterfly farts watch yr ass.

""What happened? What's the situation on board?"

""Explosion," I said. "Control room wrecked. Captain, chief, and second officers, chief engineer—all dead."

""Who is that speaking?"

""John Petersen. Passenger."

""Who brought her in?"

""I did."" - p 100

What's worse is the heartbreak of learning from a Carlotti cablegram that a space butterfly has departed.

""I thought that a cable parted," I said.

""A cable did part," he told me. "But this is the point, skipper. I made sure that all cables were in the fairleads, that there was no chafe. But the story is that one cable was chafing on a sharp edge." He grunted. "It could have been, too—if somebody shifted it."

""Who'd do a thing like that?" I asked.

""You're the detective," he said." - pp 106-107

Sure, blame it on the communistic bumblebees. As if the space butterflies weren't enuf.

""First a scrambler," he grumbled. "Now this."

""It's all in a day's work," I told him.

""Not often it isn't," he grunted. "The last time was when we had the Shaara Ambassadress staying here. As though anybody would be interested in the sex life of a bunch of communistic bumblebees."" - p 113

How these detectives ever survive is beyond me, thre are so many ways to die. What'll it be next? Moon maggots?

"Suddenly the coach lurched, a woman screamed.

"My eyes snapped open and I saw, directly ahead of us, a pillar of dust, a ragged column that slowly tumbled about itself. We slowed to a halt just short of it, slowed and stopped. We watched in silence, the sliding, settling, flattening mound.

""The bloody fools!" swore the driver. "The bloody, bloody fools!"

"The face he turned to us was whiter than the desert outside.

""What was it?" asked Kravik.

""Those copulating postmen, that's what it was. Those copulating postmen and one of their copulating rockets."" - p 123

This is getting to be just like a horror movie: 1st, our hero tries to fuck & everybody else on board dies; 2nd, the fucking postmen shoot off a load & everybody else on board almost dies. Can't Chandler let the Ant Man Bee?

"But it was not the animals that first caught my attention. To one side of the place was a machine that I had always feared. There, whining disturbingly, was the gelaming complexity of a Mannschenn Drive unit, the smoothly spinning, ever-presessing gyroscopes, the shining wheels that tumbled. Tumbled, drawing eye and thought into a weirdly distorted continuum that seemed always on the point of vanishing into that less-than-nothingness—or greater-than-infinity?—and that somehow never did. I looked away from it hastily, but not before I had seen that mounted on the time-twisting device was an oddly convoluted column, a Mobius Strip in three dimensions—or four?—a Carlotti Beacon antenna. It was a fantastic rig that didn't, that couldn't make sense. Or did it make the wrong kind of sense?

""Don't look at it," warned Fergus." - p 144

Go here for the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1080222-tycho-yesterday ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
One of the better ACE Doubles published in the 1961. As usual there are two SF novellas.

The Trouble with Tycho by Clifford Simak.

This one is quite a good story and shows that Simak will be a good SF contributor in the years to come. This short adventure on the Moon is worth 4 Stars.

Bring back Yesterday by A. Bertrum Chandler

This is typical Chandler with a good story and a little romance. If you like his work then this is a fine example. Chandler stories will always require a trip in space. 3 Stars ( )
  ikeman100 | Oct 7, 2021 |
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Chandler, A. Bertramautor principaltodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Simak, Clifford D.autor principaltodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Schoenherr, JohnArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Valigursky, EdArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
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This Ace Double contains both Bring Back Yesterday by A. Bertram Chandler and The Trouble with Tycho by Clifford D. Simak. It should not be combined with either individual work.
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