The _Warlock_ spun around the planet. The members of its crew
withdrew into themselves. In even two months of routine tedious
voyaging to this planet there had been the beginnings of irritation
with the mannerisms of other men. Now there would be years of it.
Within two days of its establishment in orbit, the _Warlock_ was
manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate, with the psychology
of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but
ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist-fight. A
bitter one.
Fist-fights are not healthy symptoms in a space-ship which cannot hope
to make port for a matter of years.
* * * * *
Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivial
part of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races because
they were different, and they tended to be different because they
were enemies, so there was enmity.... The big problem of interstellar
flight was that nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing
could travel faster than light because mass increased with speed, and
mass increased with speed--obviously!--because ships remained in the
same time slot, and ships remained in the same time slot long after a
one-second shift was possible because nobody realized that it meant
traveling faster than light. And even before there was interstellar
travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it
took so much fuel to take off and land. It took more fuel to carry
the fuel to take off and land, and more still to carry the fuel for
that, until somebody used power on the ground for heave-off instead of
take-off, and again on the ground for landing. And then interplanetary
ships carried cargos. On Xosa II there was an emergency because a
sandstorm had buried the almost-completed landing-grid under some
megatons of sand, and it couldn't be completed because there was only
storage power because it wasn't completed, because there was only
storage power because--
It took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimately simple
thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem, but he
hadn't seen its true circularity. It was actually--like all circular
problems--inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began to fall
apart simply because he saw that mere refrigeration would break its
solidity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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