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• 1 2016-05-18T12:43:06-07:00 "Situation Thirty" 1 plain 2016-05-18T12:43:06-07:00 Frank M. Robinson’s “Situation Thirty” published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1951, tells the story of a combat encounter between a human and an alien space ship and the clever strategies the human captain employs to assure victory. The story starts with a large human fleet being ambushed by an unknown enemy. Aboard the one surviving human ship, a Psychology Officer of the ship comes up with a last idea to prevent defeat. This Officer, named Rossow, realizes that the species they are facing off against must have had some sort of imagination in order to warrant an ambush without prior contact. He figures the aliens must have feared something about the human fleet, and therefore would not risk waiting to find out if they were hostile.
  
  At this point, the humans decide to send a small cube through space over to the alien ship. The aliens receive the cube and try to examine it, but unbeknownst to them, it is just a piece of metal. It is simply a hollow stainless steel container shielded with a layer of lead to thwart x-rays and scanners. The alien crew, scared the cube might be bomb or a biological weapon, find themselves stuck in a strange situation. For various reasons, neither blowing up the cube, nor opening it, nor sending it back makes logical sense. So as the humans wait, they start to realize the aliens had no clue what to do. But just as they start to celebrate, the humans receive a small metal sphere from the aliens. Rossow has the sphere cut open and proceeds to tell the alien ship to surrender immediately. His reasoning was that the aliens must be just as desperate as the humans, and their sphere was the same ploy as his cube. Having no further courses of action, the aliens were at the mercy of the humans.
   
  “Situation Thirty” is a curious tale that bears a clear resemblance to that of the Trojan horse, with the exception that in this version the horse is completely empty, but still just as dangerous. The story, thus, reflects on the role of the imagination in both a combat setting and in a first contact scenario, asking ultimately how the imagination can be used for survival and how it can also be taken advantage of.  While “Situation Thirty,” on the one hand, shows the importance of imagination in future situations when dealing with complete unknowns, it also displays the process by which the imagination turns nothing into something for the worse.