The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (100 page)

Martha Westerfield returns home from her trip to find her husband blank-faced and dazed. When she understands what has been happening and attempts to attack the radio-phonograph with a hatchet, it makes note of her hostile intent and zaps her with a beam of light, and she vanishes. Kerry rouses himself sufficiently to pick up the hatchet, and it zaps him too.

The Twonky says: “ ‘Subject basically unsuitable. . . . Elimination has been necessary.’
Click!
‘Preparation for next subject completed.’ ”
⁸⁰⁵

As the story concludes, a young couple is being shown through the Westerfields’ empty house by a rental agent. And, in the living room, the Twonky is switching itself on,
click
, ready to do its job once more. We are left anticipating that this new couple will be treated just as roughly and unforgivingly as Kerry and Martha Westerfield have been.

Padgett was effective in presenting mysterious intrusions into ordinary reality in “Deadlock” and “The Twonky,” but as yet his characters didn’t have a clue how to cope with this wildness. In the next Lewis Padgett story to deal with a glitch in reality, however, this would begin to change.

“Time Locker” (
Astounding,
Jan. 1943) would resemble “The Twonky” in beginning with humor and ending with horror. It would also be a morality play like “Deadlock,” but a far more explicit one. However, its most innovative aspect would be its presentation of a character whose response to irrational transcendence was to be irrational, too.

The comic opening of “Time Locker” is a description of this man, a drunken near-future inventor named Galloway, and his bizarre laboratory:

There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers, and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, “Monstro,” and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of “Bubbles.” Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Galloway alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for Hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.
⁸⁰⁶

The crowning feature of Galloway’s laboratory is his liquor organ:

He could recline on a comfortably padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction.
⁸⁰⁷

This is standard operating procedure for Galloway. He’ll get drunk and then invent some marvelous gadget, but when he is sober again he can’t necessarily remember how he did the trick or even what the gadget is for. As he says, “ ‘I think my subconscious mind must have a high I.Q.’ ”
⁸⁰⁸

Galloway’s most recent invention is a standing metal locker that has been treated in such a fashion that the objects placed inside it shrink and change in appearance. A smock placed within turns into a tiny, pale-green spherical blob. A bench larger than the locker, fed into it a little at a time, becomes a four-inch-long “spiky sort of scalene pyramid, deep purple in hue.”
⁸⁰⁹

The best explanation that Galloway can come up with to account for this phenomenon is, “ ‘I suppose the inside of the locker isn’t in this space-time continuum at all.’ ”
⁸¹⁰

The locker is purchased from the inventor by an unscrupulous lawyer, Horace Vanning, who makes his living by advising and aiding criminals. Then, when a suitcase of stolen bonds is brought to Vanning, he places the valise inside the other-dimensional locker, where it takes on “the shape of an elongated egg, the color of a copper cent piece.”
⁸¹¹

But even as Vanning watches, he sees that something is moving within the locker: “A grotesque little creature less than four inches tall was visible. It was a shocking object, all cubes and angles, a bright-green in tint, and it was obviously alive.”
⁸¹²

The creature is attempting to pick up the copper-colored egg and carry it away. So Vanning reaches into the locker and crushes it with his hand. Later, however, when Vanning looks into the locker once more, both the creature and the suitcase containing the bonds are gone.

Vanning is suspected by the police of complicity in the theft of the bonds. And the man who stole them is anxious and doubtful. He wants Vanning to hand the suitcase back, and is ready to hurt him if he doesn’t.

Attempting to avoid these people one week after the disappearance of the bonds, Vanning ducks inside his office—and there is the missing valise. With policemen treading close on his heels, Vanning has to get the stolen bonds out of sight as quickly as he possibly can. But when he picks up the suitcase, a gigantic hand reaches out of mid-air and squashes him to death.

The one person who has any idea at all of what has actually happened is Galloway the inventor. He now knows why it was that a bench briefly materialized in his laboratory. The strange locker doesn’t give access to some other dimension of being after all. Rather, it opens into our own time and space one week hence.

Talking to his dynamo, Monstro, Galloway says, “ ‘I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.’ ”
⁸¹³

In all of these early Lewis Padgett stories—“Deadlock,” “The Twonky” and “Time Locker”—the weirdness that breaks loose in the Village, the intrusions from elsewhere that coerce and manipulate us, and the holes that we manage to pry open in the fabric of reality are all seen as dangerous, incomprehensible and other. They threaten not only greedy and dishonest people like Vanning, but also normal, ordinary, contemporary folk like Kerry and Martha Westerfield. The one exception to this is the drunken inventor Galloway, who seems to have made his peace with strangeness.

There would be gestures in the direction of this same kind of fear and horror in the next Lewis Padgett story, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” published in the same February 1943 issue of
Astounding
as the first installment of A.E. van Vogt’s
The Weapon Makers.
Starting with the title taken from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” with its intimations of lurking jaws that bite and claws that catch, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” would be full of hints and forebodings which indicated that at least one of its authors intended it to be read as another horror story like “The Twonky.”

But that isn’t the way the story would be taken by the readers of
Astounding.
They would pick up on counterhints—possibly the work of the other author—and instead of being horrified by the outcome of “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” they would be enthralled. Even divided against itself, this would be one of the most popular stories ever to be published in the magazine.

To see exactly what happened, let’s look first at the aspect of the story which was expected to strike the reader as horrifying:

In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” a contemporary little boy, Scott Paradine, is playing hooky from grammar school one day when a box full of marvelous toys and gadgets pops out of nothingness nearby. Scott takes the toys home and shares them with his baby sister Emma, who proves to understand them better than he does.

One of the marvels from the box is a crystal cube. When Scott peers into it, he sees tiny mechanical people building a house. He wishes there could be a fire so that he could see it put out. And that is exactly what happens:

“Flames licked up from the half-completed structure. The automatons, with a great deal of odd apparatus, extinguished the blaze.”
⁸¹⁴

Yet when Scott’s philosophy professor father looks into the cube, he can see nothing coherent there, only “a maze of meaningless colored designs.”
⁸¹⁵

Another gadget, a tangle of wires and beads, is said to resemble “a tesseract,”
⁸¹⁶
or four-dimensional supercube, when it is unfolded. To Scott’s father, this device simply looks
wrong
. The angles at which the wires join appear shocking and illogical to him. And the beads, which slide along the wires, have a disconcerting ability to pass right through the points of juncture.

The gadget exasperates grown-ups, but the children persist in playing with it, even though the beads sting their fingers when they choose the wrong one or slide one in the wrong direction. And very shortly, Scott is crowing in triumph: “ ‘I did it, Dad! . . . I made it disappear. . . . That blue bead. It’s gone now.’ ”
⁸¹⁷

The disquiet the Paradine parents feel intensifies when they discover that Scott has lied in telling them that the toys were given to him by a family friend, and even more when they find that toys such as these are not available in any store. They consult a child psychologist who feeds their fears by talking in terms of madness and of conditioning to a fundamentally other mode of thought. The psychologist says:

“Let’s suppose there are two kinds of geometry; we’ll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, we’ll call it
x
.
X
hasn’t much relationship to Euclid. It’s based on different theorems. Two and two needn’t equal four in it; they could equal
y2
, or they might not even
equal.
A baby’s mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment.”
⁸¹⁸

The psychologist suggests that the toys may be training the children’s minds to think in terms of
x
logic. So the toys are taken away from the children, and all seems well again, except that baby Emma makes earnest scrawls on paper which Scott is apparently able to interpret, but which no one else can make anything of. And Scott has moments when he may say disconcerting things like, “ ‘This is only—part of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?’ ”
⁸¹⁹

As the end of the story approaches, Emma has made annotations all over the first verse of the poem “Jabberwocky,” and Scott, in response, has built an apparatus of some kind out of vaseline-covered pebbles, candle ends and other junk. Their father, standing outside the door to Scott’s room, witnesses their transference elsewhere:

The children were vanishing.

They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.
⁸²⁰

From the point of view of a parent left behind, this could certainly be horrifying. And Padgett plays it that way in the concluding paragraphs of his story, using words like “ghastly,” “crazy,” “senseless,” “defeated,” “insane,” “lunacy,” “crumpled,” “horror,” and “dead.”
⁸²¹

And yet, despite these strong intimations of a negative outcome, the readers of
Astounding
would simply refuse to be frightened. Instead of taking “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” as a mere horror story, they elected to read it as a vision of glorious science fictional possibility. And there would be material within the story that would provide a basis for this alternate positive reading.

To begin with, the readers found those marvelous toys and gadgets just too delightful and too intriguing to be fearsome. Rather than interpreting what was happening to the children as negative psychological conditioning, they chose to take it as education of a special and wonderful sort. And when Scott and Emma moved off hand in hand into a new dimension of being beyond the ken of their parents, with no fear at all of what they might find, the imagination of the audience was ready to travel with them, rather than remaining behind with the limited perceptions and apprehensions of Mr. and Mrs. Paradine.

By way of contrast, if “The Twonky” was an effective horror story, it was because we are given no clear idea of what kind of world it is that Joe comes from. We don’t know the true purposes of the Twonky he builds. And we don’t know what ultimately happens to Martha and Kerry Westerfield when the Twonky turns its beam of light on them and they disappear.

It is our strong suspicion, however, that Joe comes from a narrow and rigid society, that the Twonky is some kind of mind control device, and that the Westerfields are dead as dead can be. We fear what we don’t know, and we imagine the worst.

But in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” we have too much positive information available to us to be frightened. In the same way that we were allowed to know more about the planet Lagash than the natives do as we were reading Asimov’s “Nightfall,” and therefore felt no temptation to join them in hysteria and freakout, so here do we know a number of vital things that Mr. and Mrs. Paradine do not.

We know, for instance, where the wonderful toys came from. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” does not begin when the box of toys plops down on the muddy creek bank near Scott Paradine, but rather with an account of where the box and the toys originated and what their purposes are.

The story starts:

There’s no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn’t on Earth, technically speaking. He was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was preparing to test his time machine.
⁸²²

For all of our inability to grasp the complete actuality of Unthahorsten, we are allowed to know that he is enthusiastic, impulsive, and more than a bit of a kid at heart. As objects to send back to the past in his time machine, he uses “some of the discarded toys of his son Snowen, which the boy had brought with him after he had passed over from Earth, after mastering the necessary technique.”
⁸²³
Unthahorsten sends two batches of toys to the past, but neither comes back, and so he drops the project.

Not a lot to be frightened of there—in inventors, children, toys, and another dimension of human existence.