The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (34 page)

But in Richard Seaton, something new is added to the mix. Seaton is also a brilliant scientist. Indeed, he might be described as a John Carter equipped with the skills and background of E.E. Smith. Like Smith, Seaton hails from the mountains of northern Idaho. And like Smith, Seaton is a chemist employed in a government lab in Washington, D.C.

Seaton is a casual but immensely able young fellow. He wears flowered Hawaiian shirts and rides his motorcycle through the streets of Washington. On the strength of his superior ability on the tennis court, he has an egalitarian friendship with a young millionaire, Martin Crane. And he is engaged to a beautiful Chevy Chase socialite, Dorothy Vaneman.

When the copper steam-bath goes flying out of his laboratory window, powered by a few droplets of X, the unknown metal, Seaton realizes immediately what he has accidentally discovered—a spaceship drive. He says to himself:

“That bath is on its way to the moon right now, and there’s no reason I can’t follow it. Martin’s such a fanatic on exploration, he’ll fall all over himself to build us any kind of a craft we’ll need—we’ll explore the whole solar system. Great Cat, what a chance! A fool for luck is right!”
²³⁹

When we recall that Smith’s myth-attempting contemporary, Olaf Stapledon, had to imagine seventeen future forms of man in order to accomplish the exploration of the solar system, we may begin to understand why ordinary pulp magazine editors in the Twenties could have found Richard Seaton’s offhandedly impetuous enthusiasm for space travel a trifle intimidating. Too far-out for them.

The story moves on at a headlong pace. In almost no time, Seaton and Crane have constructed a spaceship, which Dorothy Vaneman names
The Skylark.
Soon the two men take the ship out for a first after-dinner spin. This proves to be an instant recapitulation of Jules Verne, as Seaton makes evident to his fiancée and her father when the ship touches down again.

“She flies!” he cried exultantly. “She flies, dearest, like a ray of light for speed and like a bit of thistledown for lightness. We’ve been around the moon!”

“Around the moon!” cried the two amazed visitors. “So soon?” asked Vaneman. “When did you start?”

“Almost an hour ago,” replied Crane readily. . . .
²⁴⁰

But Richard Seaton has an antagonist. He is Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne, a fellow scientist at the Bureau of Chemistry who is Seaton’s physical and mental dark twin. As another co-worker says to DuQuesne early in the story: “ ‘A fellow has to see your faces to tell you two apart.’ ”
²⁴¹
Seaton and DuQuesne are both examples of the new scientific man, but there are significant differences between the two.

Seaton recognizes his own fundamental connection to the human race. For him, science is an extension of his humanity. It is a complement to his superior tennis game and his skills as an amateur magician. His personal relationships—particularly with Dorothy Vaneman, his fiancée, and Martin Crane, his friend and partner—are of the greatest importance to him. Crane touches upon the essence of the matter in Doc Smith’s second novel,
Skylark Three,
serialized in
Amazing Stories
in 1930, when he remarks to Seaton: “ ‘You are still the flashing genius and I am still your balance wheel.’ ”
²⁴²

“Blackie” DuQuesne, on the other hand, is the scientist as pure rationalizing intellect. He has neither friends nor a balance wheel. Humanity and human relationships are of no importance to him whatsoever. He cares about three things only—which may ultimately be one. DuQuesne values science, power, and truth to himself.

Very early in the game, DuQuesne figures out what Seaton and Crane are up to, and in an attempt to thwart them and gain control of Seaton’s discovery, he forges a black compact with the equally unscrupulous World Steel Corporation. This alliance of power-seekers—like the relationship between Seaton and Crane—is one more measure of the radical newness of
The Skylark of Space.
In former times, the mad scientists who experimented with science-beyond-science were gifted amateurs fooling around in private. Never previously were they imagined as professional chemists departing government service for greater opportunity as a consultant with the steel trust or an entrepreneurial partnership with an independent millionaire.

In their mad pursuit of power, DuQuesne and his allies will stop at nothing. They offhandedly commit burglary and murder. They steal some of the precious supply of X, the mysterious catalytic metal, and build a ship of their own. And they attempt to sabotage the construction of the
Skylark.

But then the time comes when they overreach themselves. The day following Seaton and Crane’s circumnavigation of the moon, DuQuesne swoops down in his spaceship. He leaps out, clad all in leather, and wearing an aviator’s helmet with earflaps and amber goggles, and snatches up Dorothy Vaneman.

But Dorothy is a plucky girl. She kicks DuQuesne’s henchman in the solar plexus and knocks him unconscious. The thug staggers against the control board, and the ship screams away toward the stars. Seaton and Crane set one of Seaton’s inventions—“the object-compass”
²⁴³
—on DuQuesne’s ship, and follow in the
Skylark.

Thus it is, through crime, an accident, and hot pursuit, that we arrive at the true business of
The Skylark of Space.
Not the exploration of the local solar system—but the exploration of the stars!

And we also have an answer to H.G. Wells’s inability to imagine what an ordinary man might find to do out there amongst the enigmatical immensities.
The Skylark of Space
suggests that even if we had no other reason to travel to the stars, our own human conflicts, attitudes and aspirations might be enough in themselves to provide motive to go and reason to act once we arrived.

When Seaton and Crane finally catch up with DuQuesne’s runaway ship, they find it in the gravitational grip of a dark star hundreds of light years from home and unable to free itself. The
Skylark
rescues DuQuesne, Dorothy Vaneman, and Margaret Spencer, another girl that World Steel had found inconvenient and intended to hide away on Mars.

Just how new and previously unimagined the territory is to which E.E. Smith has carried us is demonstrated by two of the major devices of the rescue. When the Skylark communicates with DuQuesne’s ship, the means must be machine gun bullets fired against the side of the ship in Morse code for lack of a better method. And when DuQuesne and the two women transfer themselves from one ship to the other, the spacesuits they wear are made of fur.

By the time that Blackie DuQuesne has pledged his word to act as a member of the party and the
Skylark
has won free of the grip of the dark star, Seaton and his companions are fully five thousand light years from Earth. They lack the copper fuel to return home. And so they are almost obliged to explore the first planets they can locate.

If we were not previously convinced that the immense stellar universe that has been entered with the aid of super-science was a guise of the World Beyond the Hill, the first landing of the
Skylark
would end all doubt. The humans enter the system of a white sun and set down on one of its planets, touching down on an outcropping of rock that is guarded by a strange tree: “At one end of the ledge rose a giant tree, wonderfully symmetrical, but of a peculiar form, its branches being longer at the top than at the bottom and having broad, dark-green leaves, long thorns, and odd, flexible, shoot-like tendrils.”
²⁴⁴

And,
mirabile dictu,
it seems that X has carried them home to X. The ledge they have landed upon is pure unknown metal.

But this is only the beginning. Hardly have they begun to explore when they are attacked by a giant carnivore, which DuQuesne shoots. This is the signal for an utterly bizarre explosion of violence:

The scene, so quiet a few moments before, was horribly changed. The air seemed filled with hideous monsters. Winged lizards of prodigious size hurtled through the air to crash against the
Skylark’s
armored hull. Flying monstrosities, with the fangs of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the quartz with venom. As it fell to the ground a spider—if an eight-legged creature with spines instead of hair, faceted eyes, and a bloated globular body weighing hundreds of pounds may be called a spider—leaped upon it; and mighty mandibles against terrible sting, a furious battle raged. Twelve-foot cockroaches climbed nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously on the carcass of the creature DuQuesne had killed. They were promptly driven away by another animal, a living nightmare of that reptilian age which apparently combined the nature and disposition of
tyrannosaurus rex
with a physical shape approximating that of the saber-tooth tiger. This newcomer towered fifteen feet high at the shoulders and had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size; a mouth armed with sharp fangs three feet in length. He had barely begun his meal, however, when he was challenged by another nightmare, a thing shaped more or less like a crocodile.
²⁴⁵

But then, with a decisive and unexpected act by the great guardian tree of the ledge, this superfluity of brute struggles concludes as abruptly as it began:

Suddenly the great tree bent over and lashed out against both animals. It transfixed them with its thorns, which the watchers now saw were both needle-pointed and barbed. It ripped at them with its long branches, which were in fact highly lethal spears. The broad leaves, equipped with sucking disks, wrapped themselves around the hopelessly impaled victims. The long, slender twigs or tendrils, each of which now had an eye at its extremity, waved about at a safe distance.

After absorbing all of the two gladiators that was absorbable, the tree resumed its former position, motionless in all its strange, outlandish beauty.
²⁴⁶

The second planetary stopover that the Skylark makes is also highly fantastic. Here they encounter a disembodied intelligence who appears in the likeness of first one and then another of the party.

This being sneers at their feebleness, calls them “nothings,”
²⁴⁷
and attempts to dematerialize them. But it is thwarted at last by the combined mental resistance of the five humans. The intelligence gives the most credit for its defeat to DuQuesne:

“Keep on going as you have been going, my potential kinsman; keep on studying under those eastern masters as you have been studying, and it is within the realm of possibility that, even in your short lifetime, you may become capable of withstanding the stresses concomitant with induction into our ranks.”
²⁴⁸

And it withdraws. DuQuesne is left to say that he isn’t sure which of the esoteric philosophies he has studied is the relevant one, but that he will try to find out because being a sexless, deathless, disembodied intelligence would be his idea of heaven.

On their third stop, Seaton and his companions discover a copper-bearing planet inhabited by humanlike aliens. This planet, Osnome—which may very well be a reference to the early Twentieth Century children’s fantasies of the land of Oz by the American writer L. Frank Baum—is caught in the grip of a 6000-year war between the opposing nations of Mardonale and Kondal. When they discover that the Mardonalians are a treacherous lot, completely lacking in any sense of honor or conscience, Seaton and Crane place their power at the service of Kondal and bring the war to a conclusion.

Richard Seaton and his Dorothy, Martin Crane and Margaret, are married in a double ceremony on Osnome. The
Skylark
then follows its object-compass back home to Earth, where DuQuesne escapes. The story ends with a happy homecoming for the Seatons and the Cranes.

Three crucial points separate
The Skylark of Space
from earlier SF. All three of these points are confirmed and underlined in the story’s immediate sequel,
Skylark Three
(
Amazing,
Aug.-Oct. 1930).

The first significant difference is that Seaton and his friends are neither daunted nor driven mad by the vast reaches of interstellar space they have entered. Indeed, just before the first planetary landing of the
Skylark,
Seaton speaks to his fiancée:

“ ‘A strange world, Dorothy,’ he said gravely. ‘You are not afraid?’ ”

And she replies: “ ‘I am only thrilled with wonder.’ ”
²⁴⁹

Seaton and his companions are natural citizens of the World Beyond the Hill, willing to accept whatever they find. In
The Skylark of Space,
the new interstellar realm of wonder presents them with an array of challenges: the power of dead matter in the form of the dark star; the brute animal struggle for survival on the planet of the ledge; the danger offered by a being of immensely superior intelligence; and finally the great inexorable force of history on the planet Osnome. And again and again, the party of humans manages to measure up.

Their fundamental reorientation from Village Earth to the greater world of space is given explicit expression early in
Skylark Three
when the Seatons and Cranes have taken off in their ship and left Earth behind.

Well clear of the Earth’s influence, Seaton assured himself that everything was functioning properly, then stretched to his full height, writhed his arms over his head and heaved a deep sigh of relief.

“Folks,” he declared, “this is the first time I’ve felt right since we got out of this old bottle. Why, I feel so good a cat could walk up to me and scratch me right in the eye, and I wouldn’t even scratch back. Yowp! I’m a wild Siberian catamount, and this is my night to howl. Whee-ee-yerow!”
²⁵⁰

Near the end of
Skylark Three,
Seaton and his friends pass entirely outside of our home galaxy and look back upon it, one dim patch of light among many. Dorothy declares that she is scared pea-green and seeks comfort. And even Seaton admits, “ ‘I’m scared purple myself.’ ”
²⁵¹
But by the third story in the series,
Skylark of Valeron
(
Astounding,
Aug. 1934-Feb. 1935), Seaton and his companions are able to leap lightly from one galaxy to another without a qualm. There is nowhere they cannot go and no challenge they cannot meet.