A Pail of Air

"A Pail of Air" is a science fiction short story by Fritz Leiber which appeared in the December 1951 issue of Galaxy Magazine and was dramatized on the radio show X Minus One in March 1956.

Plot

The story is narrated by a ten-year-old boy living on Earth after it has become a rogue planet, having been torn away from the Sun by a passing "dark star". The loss of solar heating has caused the Earth's atmosphere to freeze into thick layers of "snow". The boy's father had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter, but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the others. He managed to construct a smaller, makeshift shelter called the "Nest" for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere by periodically retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire. They have survived in this way for a number of years.

At the end, they are found by a search party from a large group of survivors at Los Alamos, where they are using nuclear power to provide heat and have begun using rockets to search for other survivors (radio being ineffective at long range without an ionosphere). They reveal that other groups of humans have survived at Argonne, Brookhaven, and Harwell nuclear research facilities as well as in Tanna Tuva, and that plans are being made to establish uranium-mining colonies at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo region.

Minus One

"Minus One" is a short story by British author J. G. Ballard; it was first published in the June 1963 edition of Science Fantasy (Volume 20, Number 59), the 1967 collection The Disaster Area, and then later in the larger The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 anthology (2006).

Plot summary

"Minus One" is set in Green Hill Asylum, which has as its motto, 'There is a Green Hill Far, Far Away'. It provides a private prison where the rich can incarcerate "miscreant or unfortunate relatives whose presence would otherwise be a burden or embarrassment". Security rather than treatment comes first and the asylum boasted that no-one had ever escaped, that is until the disappearance of a patient called Hinton. Thorough searches are conducted and staff questioned but no trace of him can be found. Dr. Mellinger, the director of the asylum leads the investigation and it transpires that nobody can remember much about him at all. Dr Mellinger realises that the patients are not being treated as individuals and decides that from then on the regime of Green Hill will change to take more interest in the individual. Still the disappearance of Hinton remains unexplained; Dr. Mellinger looks at Hinton's file and realises that it is the only evidence of him ever having existed. Fortuitously the file is then 'lost' and the director announces that the disappearance was an administrative error and that Hinton had never really existed. All are happy until a visitor arrives at the hospital to see her husband. It is Mrs Hinton. As she is obviously suffering from delusions in need of treatment she is forcibly admitted.

Fritz Leiber

Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having in fact created the term. Moreover, he excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award-winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

Life

Leiber was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr., and Virginia Bronson Leiber and, for a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps. (Theater and actors are prominently featured in his fiction.) He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company before studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with honors (1928–32). In 1932, he studied at the Anglican-affiliated General Theological Seminary and worked for a time as a lay preacher. In 1934, he toured with his parents' acting company, Fritz Leiber & Co. Six short stories in the 2010 collection Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works carry 1934 and 1935 dates.

X Minus One

X Minus One was a half-hour science fiction radio drama series broadcast from April 24, 1955 to January 9, 1958 in various timeslots on NBC.

Overview

Initially a revival of NBC's Dimension X (1950–51), the first 15 episodes of X Minus One were new versions of Dimension X episodes, but the remainder were adaptations by NBC staff writers, including Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, of newly published science fiction stories by leading writers in the field, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon, along with some original scripts by Kinoy and Lefferts.

Included in the series were adaptations of Robert Sheckley's "Skulking Permit," Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven", Heinlein's "Universe" and "The Green Hills of Earth", " Pohl’s "The Tunnel under the World", J. T. McIntosh’s "Hallucination Orbit", Fritz Leiber’s "A Pail of Air", and George Lefferts' "The Parade".

The program opened with announcer Fred Collins delivering the countdown, leading into the following introduction (although later shows were partnered with Galaxy Science Fiction rather than Astounding Science Fiction):

Future tense

In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French aimera, meaning "will love", derived from the verb aimer ("love"). English does not have a future tense formed by verb inflection in this way, although it has a number of ways to express the future, particularly the construction with the auxiliary verb will or shall or is/am/are going to and grammarians differ in whether they describe such constructions as representing a future tense in English.

The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration. Future tense can be denoted by the glossing abbreviation FUT.

Expressions

The nature of the future, necessarily uncertain and at varying distances ahead, means that the speaker may refer to future events with the modality either of probability (what the speaker expects to happen) or intent (what the speaker plans to make happen). Whether future expression is realis or irrealis depends not so much on an objective ontological notion of future reality, but rather on the degree of the speaker's conviction that the event will in fact come about.