PROBLEM PLANET
By Russ Winterbotham
A spacewreck presents many complications
not in the rule book. Take survival—it's quite
a basic instinct—but to some, so is politics!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
June 1955
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Quibblers may shove dictionaries in my face till the end of the universe and I will always maintain that almost anything you can name is a matter of good luck or bad. Every great man owes his success to luck of some sort. What made him great is what he did with his luck after he got it.
Had I been born eleven years before Senator Clive Littlebrook, I might have been brilliant to the point of stupidity, as he was. Nobody planned that I should be 24 when he was 35, and a space pilot instead of a senator. He had eleven years to get smarter than me. But all of his brilliance and all of my youthful innocence couldn't have prevented our being spacewrecked on a lonely, uninhabited planet. We knew it was lonely and thought it was uninhabited, as it almost was. It was the second planet of an unimportant sun, Yuga 16, which lay unexpectedly in our path through hyperspace while I drove him to an important committee meeting on Arcturus III. As a result I had to dump our fuel to alter our mass in order to avoid a direct collision. And naturally there was nothing else to do but land on II Yuga 16.
So we were marooned and even if our radio had been powerful enough to send out an S O S it would take years for our message to get anywhere.
Clive was philosophical about it. After cussing me for three hours, he decided that we'd better make the best of our situation. We could fight when we had less important things to do.
"I have always maintained," he said, "that even in its smallest detail, a human settlement must be political. And I've also believed that politics must be designed to fit environment."