The Project Gutenberg EBook of It's a Small Solar System, by Allan Howard

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Title: It's a Small Solar System

Author: Allan Howard

Release Date: March 29, 2009 [EBook #28437]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Frederik Pohl wrote recently about the time, when he was young,
when he spent more time in Barsoom than in Brooklyn. Allan Howard,
Director of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, takes
us back to those nostalgic days in this vignette of man's first
hours on Mars._

it's
a
small
solar
system

_by ALLAN HOWARD_

Soon the three representatives of Earth were walking
shoulder to shoulder, the Captain first to touch soil.

Know him?

Well you might say I practically grew up with him. He was my hero in
those days. I thought few wiser or greater men ever lived. In my eyes he
was greater than Babe Ruth, Lindy, or the President.

Of course, time, and my growing up caused me to bring him into a
perspective that I felt to be more consonant with his true position in
his field of endeavor. When he died his friends mourned for fond
remembrance of things past, but privately many of them felt that he had
outlived his best days. Now with this glorious vindication, I wonder how
many of them are still alive to feel the twinge of conscience....

Oh, we're delighted of course, but it seems incredible even today to us
elated oldsters. Although we were always his staunchest admirers, in
retrospect we can see now that no one believed more than we that he did
it strictly for the dollar. It is likely there was always a small corps
of starry-eyed adolescents who found the whole improbable saga entirely
believable, or at least half believed it might be partly true. The
attitude of the rest of us ranged from a patronizing disparagement that
we thought was expected of us, through grudging admiration, to
out-and-out enthusiasm.

Certainly if anybody had taken the trouble to consider it--and why
sho