The Van Rijn Method: The Technic Civilization Saga #1 (Technic Civilization Series)

322 Pages·2009·1.17 MB·English

by  Poul Anderson

The Van Rijn Method
Poul Anderson

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
"Introduction" copyright © by Hank Davis; "A Chronology of Technic Civilization" by Sandra Miesel,

copyright 2008 by Sandra Miesel.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN 10: 1-4165-5569-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5569-8
Cover art by David Seeley
First Baen printing, September 2008
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Poul, 1926-2001.
The Van Rijn method / by Poul Anderson.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5569-8 (hc)
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5569-2 (hc)
1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Human-alien
encounters—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3551.N378V36 2008
813'.54—dc22
2008020726
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
"The Saturn Game," first published in Analog, February, 1981. Copyright 1981 by Davis Publications,
Inc.
Introduction to "Wings of Victory," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley Putnam,
1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
"Wings of Victory," first published in Analog, April 1972. Copyright 1972 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Introduction to "The Problem of Pain," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley Putnam,
1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
"The Problem of Pain," first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February, 1973;
copyright 1973 by Mercury Press, Inc.
Introduction to "Margin of Profit," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley Putnam,
1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
"Margin of Profit," first published in a different form in Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1956.
Copyright 1956 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Revised version copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson.
Introduction to "How to be Ethnic in One Easy Lesson," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate,
Berkley Putnam, 1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
"How to be Ethnic in One Easy Lesson," first published as "How to be Ethnic" in Future Quest, ed.
Roger Elwood, Avon, 1974. Copyright 1974 by Roger Elwood.
Introduction to "The Three-Cornered Wheel," first published in The Trouble Twisters, Doubleday, 1966.
Copyright 1966 by Poul Anderson.
"The Three-Cornered Wheel," first published in Analog, October, 1963. Copyright 1963 by Condé Nast
Publications, Inc.
Introduction to "A Sun Invisible," first published in The Trouble Twisters, Doubleday, 1966. Copyright
1966 by Poul Anderson.
"A Sun Invisible," first published in Analog, April, 1966. Copyright 1966 by Condé Nast Publications,
Inc.
Introduction to "The Season of Forgiveness," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley
Putnam, 1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
"The Season of Forgiveness," first published in Boy's Life, December, 1973. Copyright 1973 by The
Boy Scouts of America.
Introduction to The Man Who Counts, first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley Putnam,
1978; copyright 1978 by Poul Anderson
The Man Who Counts, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February, March and April 1958;
copyright 1958 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. A shorter version was published by Ace Books as
War of the Wing-Men, copyright 1958 by Ace Books.
Afterword to "The Man Who Counts," first published in The Man Who Counts, Ace, 1978; copyright
1978 by Poul Anderson.
Introduction to "Esau," first published in The Earth Book of Stormgate, Berkley Putnam, 1978; copyright
1978 by Poul Anderson
"Esau," first published as "Birthright" in Analog, February, 1970. Copyright 1970 by Condé Nast
Publications, Inc.
Introduction to "Hiding Place," first published in Trader to the Stars, Doubleday, 1966.
Copyright 1964 by Poul Anderson.
"Hiding Place," first published in Analog, March, 1961. Copyright 1961 by Condé Nast Publications,
Inc.
"A Chronology of Technic Civilization" by Sandra Miesel, copyright 2008 by Sandra Miesel.
"Margin of Profit" (original version), first published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1956,
copyright 1956 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc.
"The Man Who Counts and The Technic Civilization Series" by Sandra Miesel, copyright 2008 by
Sandra Miesel.
BAEN BOOKS BY POUL ANDERSON
The Van Rijn Method
David Falkayn: Star Trader (forthcoming)

To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories

Time Patrol

Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! (with Gordon R. Dickson)
Hokas Pokas (with Gordon R. Dickson)
PLANETS AND PROFITS:
Introducing Nicholas Van Rijn
And The Polesotechnic League . . .
. . . and also introducing one of the grandest sagas in science fiction: the Technic Civilization series. It
begins in the not-distant future, with humans still locked in the Solar System and recovering from a
hinted-at time of chaos (which might be our own present day), voyaging outward to explore the moons of
Saturn. It ends over five thousand years later, with human civilization, now sprawling across a vast span
of the galaxy, recovering from another, much longer time of chaos—the Long Night which followed the
fall of the Terran Empire.
The writing of the saga and its appearances in print spanned a time far shorter, but still unusually long in
the field, beginning with the novelet "Tiger by the Tail," published in the January 1951 issue of that grand
old pulp Planet Stories, and ending with the novel The Game of Empire, published in 1985. However,
those two yarns do not mark the end points of the series, the stories comprising which were written very
much out of sequence. Both fall late in the timeline, being episodes in the flamboyant career of Captain
Sir Dominic Flandry, who'll make his swashbuckling appearance in volume four of the Technic
Civilization series. (Be patient, please—after all, Flandry won't be born until about 570 years after the
last story in this first volume.)
If this book's title doesn't make it obvious, the main player in the book you're holding in your hands is the
blustering, vulgar and bigger than life (both literally and figuratively) human volcano named Nicholas van
Rijn (rhymes with "fine"), a merchant prince in the star-spanning Poulsotechnic, pardon me, Polesotechnic
League, a loose-knit organization of interstellar traders. That authoritative expert on Poul Anderson's
writings, Sandra Miesel, writes that the word "Polesotechnic" was coined by Poul's wife Karen Anderson
from the Greek for "selling skills." By that meaning, van Rijn is beyond doubt the most polesotechnical of
the polesotechnicians.
On van Rijn, Poul Anderson wrote, "While some readers couldn't stand this burly, beery, uninhibited
merchant prince, on the whole he was probably the most popular character I ever hit upon, and the
stories about him enjoyed a long and lusty run." Van Rijn's first appearance in the saga (and in this book)
was the novelet "Margin of Profit," published in the September 1956 issue of Astounding Science
Fiction, though the version of "Margin of Profit" in these pages is the one which Anderson rewrote for
the 1978 collection, The Earth Book of Stormgate, to give Nick more of his inimitable mannerisms than
he had displayed in his debut appearance, and also to eliminate a few discrepancies with the Technic
Civilization universe as it later developed. (More about that later.)
"Two meters in height and more than broad enough to match," van Rijn is described on his first
appearance, and he may remind the reader of Falstaff, but Nick's no mere braggart, no empty suit—he
makes good on his brags and delivers the goods. Poul Anderson once mentioned Long John Silver as
another influence on his creation of van Rijn, and that charismatic scoundrel was certainly no empty suit
(ahrrrr!). Van Rijn unravels mysteries and solves problems as well as any sf hero of old, without benefit
of the heretofore obligatory square jaw, steely gaze and laconic dialogue of the classic pulp hero. Still
there's muscle under the fat, augmented by quick reflexes, as enemies (and occasionally, his employees)
have been chagrined to learn. He's a capitalist hero, too, always thinking of making a buck (or a credit),
even in desperate situations, who'd rather sell things to his enemies than fight them. He started out dirt
poor and built his Solar Spice & Liquors Company up from a shoestring. Move over, John Galt.
He's no ascetic either, and never misses a chance to enjoy good food, good booze, and a good smoke,
usually with Mozart playing in the background. He appreciates the ladies, too, and while financial
considerations are often involved, this is not always the case. He also appreciates art and classic
literature, though the latter doesn't seem to have helped his malaprop-prone speech, full of twisted turns
of phrase. Someday, somebody might imitate Heinlein's The Notebooks of Lazarus Long and do a
short book of classic van Rijnisms, such as:
"I have no fine university degrees,
I learned in the school of hard knockers."
"I make no skeletons about it . . ."
"Put that in your pipe and stick it!"
"This is the times that fry men's souls."
And there's more where those came from . . .
Van Rijn's ongoing war with the King's Anglic notwithstanding, he did play the silver-tongued orator on
one memorable occasion, in the full-length novel included in this volume, The Man Who Counts, when
he had to convince squabbling factions of the winged Diomedeans to unite against the common enemy. A
lesser writer than Poul Anderson would have attempted to compose a stirring speech for his hero and
brought forth a clunker that's dead both on the page and on arrival. A good, but less ingenious writer
would have composed a stirring speech that was actually stirring. Poul Anderson, being both very good
and very ingenious, did something entirely different. And I won't spoil anyone's first encounter with that
part of the novel by giving it away here.
Also on stage is one of van Rijn's employees, David Falkayn, first seen as an ambitious young man trying
to make his mark, and not sure he'll succeed, or even survive. You may think that I'm not giving him his
due in this introduction, but the scales will be balanced in the next volume, where he plays a larger role
(as indicated by the title of the second Technic Civilization book, David Falkayn: Star Trader; reserve
your copy now). Further, Falkayn is going to become part of a trader team, one member of which, Adzel
the dragonlike Buddhist, you'll encounter briefly in one of the stories herein, but you'll have to wait for
volume two to meet Chee Lan, the third member of the team. And this team is very much more than the
sum of its parts.
I'll also mention that Falkayn's influence on the course of human history arguably is even greater than that
of van Rijn (more on that in future volumes). In any case, it's obvious that Falkayn, like his creator, is a
fan of Leslie Charteris, and how could I slight a fellow acolyte of the Saintly chronicles?
And now, the master chef . . . Poul Anderson was one of the most prolific writers in science fiction and
fantasy, and possibly the most prolific. His bibliography has something like seventy sf or fantasy novels
and over forty story collections published, drawn from his hundreds of sf and fantasy short stories. While
he wrote in many fields—historical fiction, mysteries, horror fiction, nonfiction books and essays, and
poetry—the realms of science fiction and fantasy were his true home, and there he was one of the best. I
doubt that any sf writer who might come close to matching him for quantity could show such a
consistently high quality of work.
He was also a writer who got the science right, which was no surprise since he had a degree in physics,
and had a lifelong passion for all the hard sciences. Before he set a story on a planet, he would do
research and calculations to come up with a world that wasn't just a cardboard backdrop—Diomedes in
The Man Who Counts is a prime example, and he gave a solid scientific explanation how the winged
natives can fly there, when they would be too heavy to fly on Earth. He got more than science right, too.
The brief introduction to "The Three-Cornered Wheel" quotes Sturgeon's Revelation ("ninety percent of
everything is crud"). It happens that Sturgeon's Revelation is usually and wrongly named as Sturgeon's
Law, but when Sturgeon formulated it in his book review column for Venture in the late 1950s, he called
it Sturgeon's Revelation. And Anderson gets the name right, to my appreciative applause. (If you'll
pardon a digression, Sturgeon himself complained about people miscalling his Revelation as his Law, and
noted that he already had a Sturgeon's Law, first stated in the story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956
Galaxy, usually rendered as "nothing is always absolutely so.")
But Anderson's getting the science right didn't preclude having prose that is always fluent and often sings,
perhaps emulating the Scandinavian sagas which he knew by heart. For example, in "Esau":
. . . a range of ice mountains flashed blindingly; Suleiman's twelve-hour day was drawing to a close and
Osman's rays struck level through a break in roiling ruddy cloud cover. Elsewhere a storm lifted like a
dark wall on which lightning scribbled. The dense air brought its thunder-noise to Dalmady as a high
drumroll.
Larry Niven once described Anderson as "a poet who happens to write science fiction." Just so, though
critics have rarely included Anderson with other notable stylists such as Sturgeon or Bradbury.
It's not surprising that Anderson won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards ("The Saturn
Game," the first story in this book, took home one of each), as well as a Gandalf Grand Master award, a
John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and four Prometheus Awards (including the Lifetime Achievement
Prometheus Award). Speaking of lifetime achievement, he also received the Grand Master Award for
that very thing from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Nor was it remarkable that
when Locus in the 1970s did a poll of its readers for Best All-Time SF Writer, he nailed the fifth spot
from the top. If anything, it's surprising that he didn't have a much longer shelf full of honors and rank
even higher in that poll. Likely, Anderson wrote too much, too well, and made it look far too easy to
stand out among the flashier scribes.
Eric Flint, comparing Anderson to Joe DiMaggio, "who," as he put it, "never did anything in baseball
better than anyone else, but always did everything superbly well," thought that Anderson was less
appreciated than, for example, Robert A. Heinlein for that reason. Still, master storytellers are not easy to
come by, and now that, for the first time, his monumental Technic Civilization series will be published in
internal chronological order in these volumes, the arbiters of science fiction as literature may give him his
due. His grateful readers gave him his rightful due long ago, of course, and still do.

* * *
A word about the introductions to the stories and novel: all were written by Poul Anderson and
accompanied the stories when they appeared in such collections as Trader to the Stars, The Trouble
Twisters, and The Earth Book of Stormgate. The Stormgate introductions were written as if by a
Ythrian historian. (You'll meet the Ythrians in the second and third stories in this book.) In the case of
The Man Who Counts, there was an embarrassment of riches: an introduction "by" Hloch the Ythrian
plus a second introduction which Poul Anderson wrote for another publication of the novel. I've placed
the latter as an afterword. The only introduction to "The Saturn Game" of which I'm aware didn't give
much information about the story, so I haven't included it here. (It appeared in his collection Going for
Infinity, Tor, 2002, a book I highly recommend.)
And many, many thanks to Sandra Miesel, Poul Anderson expert extraordinaire, both for compiling her
definitive Chronology of the Technic Civilization stories (without which, publishing the stories in the right
order would have been a lot more difficult) and for permitting its inclusion in this book; and also for her
essays on Poul Anderson, which have greatly influenced and improved this introduction (but please to call
it research), though she should be held blameless for any of my usual stupidities which are doubtless
lurking like demented gremlins behind the exclamation marks and semicolons.
Finally, I mentioned earlier that Poul Anderson rewrote van Rijn's debut story, "Margin of Profit," and
that the rewritten version is the one between these covers. I would have liked to include the earlier
version as well, but space wouldn't permit. However, cyberspace permits much more than Euclidean
space, and the earlier version has been included as an appendix to the online version of The Van Rijn
Method. As another bonus, Sandra Miesel's lucid and informative essay on The Man Who Counts is
also included. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you. And there are lots more online goodies at
www.baen.com.
—Hank Davis, 2008

THE SATURN GAME
I

If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we would avoid repeated and worse tragedies in
the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For
who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we
appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they
knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether
different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it crossed a
threshold of human experience.
—Francis L. Minamoto, Death
Under Saturn: A Dissenting View
(Apollo University Communications,
Leyburg, Luna, 2057)

"The City of Ice is now on my horizon," Kendrick says. Its towers gleam blue. "My griffin spreads his
wings to glide." Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions. His cloak blows
back from his shoulders; the air strikes through his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. "I lean over
and peer after you." The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. Its head flickers palely with the
moonlight that Wayland Smith hammered into the steel.
"Yes, I see the griffin," Ricia tells him, "high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out
from under the portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my sleeve, but I tear the
spider-silk apart and dash forth into the open." The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were
turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, "Is it in truth you, my darling?"
"Hold, there!" warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away. "I send your
mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles, he will raise a dragon against
him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back, Princess of Maranoa. Pretend you decide
that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words."
"I stay far aloft," Kendrick says. "Save he use a scrying stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast
has a rider. From here I'll spy out city and castle." And then—? He knows not. He knows simply that
he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she
lie in the King's embrace?
"I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus," Mark Danzig interrupted.
His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin
Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before
which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the
universe.
To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows at instruments. The sunward ports were
lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness
which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside
pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, nightside wanly ashimmer with starlight and
moonlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.
Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field.
It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left
bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness
dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses,
caverns brimmed with blue.
"I'm sorry," Jean Broberg whispered. "It's too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and . . . almost like the
place where our game had brought us—Took us by surprise—"
"Huh!" Mark Danzig said. "You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play
go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don't tell me any different. I've watched these acts for
eight years."
Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight. His
movement sent him through the air, across the crowded cabin, until he checked himself by a handhold
just short of the chemist. "Are you calling Jean a liar?" he growled.
Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing.
He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and
the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.
"Please!" Broberg exclaimed. "Not a quarrel, Colin."
The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite
longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white,
and lines were engraved around large gray eyes. "Mark is right," she sighed. "We're here to do science,
not daydream." She reached forth to touch Scobie's arm, smiled shyly. "You're still full of your Kendrick
persona, aren't you? Gallant, protective—" She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint
of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She
forced a laugh. "But I'm just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy."
Her glance went Saturnward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too,
as a star that moved among stars, by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision
could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.
Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot's chair: "What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell' arte?"
His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. "We won't be landin' for a while yet, and everything's on automatic till
then." He was small, swart, deft, still in his twenties.
Danzig twisted the leather of his countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks to his habits as well as to
longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In
this hour, he set humor aside.
"Do you mean you don't know what's the matter?" His beak of a nose pecked at a scanner screen which
magnified the moonscope. "Almighty God! That's a new world we're about to touch down on—tiny, but
a world, and strange in ways we can't guess. Nothing's been here before us except one unmanned flyby
and one unmanned lander that soon quit sending. We can't rely on meters and cameras alone. We've got
to use our eyes and brains." He addressed Scobie. "You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if
nobody else aboard does. You've worked on Luna as well as Earth. In spite of all the settlements, in
spite of all the study that's been done, did you never hit any nasty surprises?"
The burly man had recovered his temper. Into his own voice came a softness that recalled the serenity of
the Idaho mountains whence he hailed. "True," he admitted. "There's no such thing as having too much
information when you're off Earth, or enough information, for that matter." He paused. "Nevertheless,
timidity can be as dangerous as rashness—not that you're timid, Mark," he added in haste. "Why, you
and Rachel could've been in a nice O'Neill on a nice pension—"
Danzig relaxed and smiled. "This was a challenge, if I may sound pompous. Just the same, we want to get
home when we're finished here. We should be in time for the Bar Mitzvah of a great-grandson or two.
Which requires staying alive."
"My point is, if you let yourself get buffaloed, you may end up in a worse bind than—Oh, never mind.
You're probably right, and we should not have begun fantasizing. The spectacle sort of grabbed us. It
won't happen again."
Yet when Scobie's eyes looked anew on the glacier, they had not quite the dispassion of a scientist in
them. Nor did Broberg's or Garcilaso's. Danzig slammed fist into palm. "The game, the damned childish
game," he muttered, too low for his companions to hear. "Was nothing saner possible for them?"

II
Was nothing saner possible for them? Perhaps not.
If we are to answer the question, we should first review some history. When early industrial operations in
space offered the hope of rescuing civilization, and Earth, from ruin, then greater knowledge of sister
planets, prior to their development, became a clear necessity. The effort must start with Mars, the least
hostile. No natural law forbade sending small manned spacecraft yonder. What did was the absurdity of
as much fuel, time, and effort as were required, in order that three or four persons might spend a few
days in a single locality.
Construction of the J. Peter Vajk took longer and cost more, but paid off when it, virtually a colony,
spread its immense solar sail and took a thousand people to their goal in half a year and in comparative