"The machine, as we know it, exists for the most part underground."

"How do you mean, 'exists'?" Djeela-Lal said curiously.

"What probably happens is that it seeks natural crevices and interstices in the rock and spreads through them. This is all speculative, you understand."

"Current size?" Djeela-Lal asked.

"We know it operates its own robot circuits. One theory has it that it grows its own crystals down below. But no one knows for sure.

Djeela-Lal said: "With no way to stop it until this entire planet becomes an orbiting ball of brain rattling around the sun?"

"Wow! Oh boy! Hoo! Have you got some imagination" The Funco File 1969 by Burt Cole.

Who believes this sort of escapism anymore? Rather, who does not? What else fills the same unconscious needs with such a broad arsenal of devices and monsters. How else would we know what is going to happen to the Earth in five billion years? How else could we encounter the blob or see whole galaxies destroyed? Does it not also fulfill a higher need-to find a myth of the twentieth century? Yet despite the myth-making 2001, we currently languish in a Science Fiction recession. The recession has become so widespread as to paralyze our space program.

We must place part of the blame on the fact that landing on the moon was much duller than any story could have been. The astronauts found no subterranean insect monsters (H. G. Wells), prehistoric monoliths (Arthur C. Clark), deadly, suffocating moondust (Howard Fast). We are all bored. Even the staff at Cape Kennedy is quitting without having been brainwashed by the Spiderman from Mercury. The scientists themselves are more concerned about the marital problems their involvement with machines has caused. And they no longer speak with a German accent left over from a great world war. No more will the great von Braun shout, "This whole space program is based on the theory that three pregnant women can have one baby in three months!" The program is stillborn.

Yet there are still more severe side effects of the Nixon years. The golden days of UFO scares in little California towns are gone. Occasionally a local newspaper will print one housewife's account of how she met the flaming creatures from the sun, but our fears have been relocated. Perhaps the massive 800 page Condon report dealt the death blow to the boom. At any rate, we gaze into the night sky with unaccustomed security these days. The cities hold more dangers in store for the timid.

Where is the bravery that sustained the nation through the rigors of the space race? Before historical revisionists set in, the fifties were known as a time of postwar boom. (and Nixon was only Vice-President.) Then America's hopes, indeed, the free world's, depended on a frail rocket named Vanguard. But the shiny object could fly only a yard before collapsing inward. The army developed the Jupiter rocket with the spinning Explorer satellite as its payload. The booster was as American as Werner von Braun, but it did not explode and the race to the moon was on. The Russians became nasty and secretive. They sent up a dog which died in space. The Americans sent up a monkey which lived. Yuri Gagarin (now dead) circled the world. Gus Grissom (now dead) let his capsule sink in the Atlantic. The fair-haired boy, John Glenn, was such a good astronaut that he went into politics and slipped in a bathtub.

It was unusual mentality indeed which led the United States into the space race, a mentality closely allied to Science Fiction's aspiration towards myth. The race had no political purpose outside the vague notion of propaganda value. But it did fulfill a widespread public need to make life more endurable. The story had its deaths and triumphs, and may yet have its Frankenstein. It can rival 2001 in its epic sweep and pointed vagueness.

Like some ancient Greek town, the United States combed the countryside for a Magnificent Seven to do battle against the dark forces of Space and the Russians. Their training program was a scries of twelve labors to perform on the road to heroism. They went to Africa to broil in the sun. They lived beneath the sea, whirled in Centrifuges, flew X-15's. There must have been reasons for these exploits, but the true motivation was to make heroes of these astronauts. There was Gus, Deke, Wally, and Scott. They were good men, and true, not the old wrecks the Russians sent into space from Dark Siberian plains. Neither were they for that matter the bible punching sissies who reached the moon last summer. These Seven drank and loved. Here was excitement. America needed heroes and made them in her own image. Certainly people talked of international cooperation, but we wanted to beat the Russians on our own. If they could send a satellite around the moon, we could send one around the sun and call it Pioneer or Ranger and make it send back bleeps and photographs and even the recorded voice of Dwight Eisenhower.

Yet as the goal drew nearer, it seemed less important. Gone was the romance of seven heroes and their weapons named Atlas. Mercury, rockets which blew up on the pad or went haywire and threatened to devastate peaceful Florida towns unless destroyed by Mission Control. The space program grew at a tremendous rate, overtaking the Russians and overtaking itself to the point where three men died in a dreadful fire during a ground test. Space became business for corporations and convenience for the housewife. After political interferences, the men in the program had changed as well. They could not manage to get their pre-rehearsed first words from the moon straight. No one dared anymore to put a sign in the capsule window reading, "Deke Slayton is a turtle." The entire enterprise seemed fanciful and wasteful.

The ravages of political assassination and poverty changed the climate which had given birth to these exploits. And that was when the Science Fiction recession set in. Public fear and fantasy was redirected towards its own dissident elements. The space race became a purely technological experience. Although the public has turned to healing itself before conquering other worlds, its Science Fiction rhapsody lives on in literature and film although no longer fills the public's need for fantasy so completely as to be financed by government spending. But Science Fiction can reveal something about what sent America on those bizarre exploits.