The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (84 page)

Here in “Secret Unattainable” is an assertion of the moral responsiveness of the universe in the most immediate and relevant terms that van Vogt could imagine. The Nazis, his story declared, must inevitably lose World War II because of the deficiencies inherent in their fundamentally short-sighted, hostile, greedy, barbaric and paranoid mode of thought.

When Professor Kenrube tells Hitler and his henchmen that their thinking fails to conform to the “ ‘reality of the relationship between matter and life,’ ”
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we might well be reminded that in
Science and the Modern World
Alfred North Whitehead had suggested that any being which by its influence deteriorates its environment commits suicide. And that those organisms are successful which modify their environment so as to assist each other.

We should remember, too, that in his 1940 story “Repetition,” van Vogt had specifically declared that if our species was ever to leave the Solar System and reach the stars, both individual men and human governments would have to learn to actively work together. Now, no less than three times over in his stories of 1942, van Vogt would assert the positive value of mutual assistance between mankind and alien beings. The first of these stories would even bear the explicit title, “Co-operate—or Else!”

In this short novelet published in the April 1942
Astounding,
humans have managed to attain the stars. There they have encountered a wide variety of sentient creatures. And through their conviction of the essential desirability of cooperation, men have managed to unite no fewer than 4874 non-human races in one common alliance.

“Co-operate—or Else!,” which concerns human relations with two lately encountered alien races, might be taken as a specific demonstration of how this was accomplished.

One race, the ezwals, are huge, three-eyed telepathic creatures native to Carson’s Planet, which men have recently colonized. The ezwals, who live a life in nature, have no use for the artifice and constraints of human civilization. They are doing their best to drive men from their world by violent attacks—without giving away the fact that they are actually an intelligent species.

The other race, the wormlike Rull, are advanced and able enough to have spread among the stars. However, unlike humanity, they are so implacably vicious, intolerant and bellicose that they will not allow any other thinking beings to survive within their sphere of control. Just as soon as they become aware of man’s existence, they launch an interstellar war against him.

One human, Trevor Jamieson, has discovered that the ezwals are sentient, which nobody else suspects. He is in the process of taking one to Earth to demonstrate his case when a Rull attack on his spaceship causes him and the ezwal to crash-land on a primitive planet. In order for the two of them to survive both the blind, unthinking hostility of the jungle world and the threat of the Rull, Jamieson must and does convince the ezwal that cooperation is a necessity.

In a minor related short story, “The Second Solution” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1942), a young ezwal gets loose in the wilds of northern Canada and is hunted as a dangerous animal. If it isn’t to be executed, it must demonstrate the ability to overcome its immaturity, discipline its prejudices, and develop trust in a human being, an assistant of Trevor Jamieson who has also figured out the truth about ezwals.

At the same time, the man who has striven the hardest to kill the ezwal—doubting its intelligence and fearing the savage physical power that has led to the death of thirty million humans on Carson’s Planet—must likewise learn to revise his own thinking and behavior. And, indeed, it is he who will ultimately prove to be the narrator of this story.

“Co-operate—or Else!” and “The Second Solution,” together with a radically revised “Repetition,” would eventually be included in a van Vogt “ ‘fix-up’ novel” on the subject of cooperation—
The War Against the Rull,
published in 1959.

Also forming part of the material of this book would be another novelet, “The Rull” (
Astounding,
May 1948). In this story van Vogt would bring on stage one of the Rull—who in the two 1942 stories are no more than an incentive for man and ezwal to make common cause—and show that if they were only banged on the head hard enough to get their attention, they, too, might alter their behavior and be brought within the circle of cooperation.

The third van Vogt story in 1942 on the theme of mutual assistance between unlike beings would be “Not Only Dead Men,” published in the November issue of
Astounding.
In this short story, however, instead of mankind being the style-setter, teaching other races the value of cooperation, it would be humans who would be moral pupils learning from more advanced beings.

In “Not Only Dead Men,” a spaceship directed by reptilian aliens from a galaxy-wide civilization is attacked by a Blal, a fierce and mindless space-dwelling monster, while in the course of passing through our solar system. The creature is wounded, but the spaceship is severely damaged, and both fall to Earth on the Alaskan coast. There the scaly aliens manipulate an American whaling vessel into having no choice but to aid them in destroying the space creature.

It is a firm galactic rule that low-level beings such as we are not to be allowed to know of the existence of interstellar civilization. And we have been led to believe that when the usefulness of the whalers is past, they will be casually destroyed to keep the disturbing knowledge of galactic civilization from humanity in general.

Instead, however, the aliens consider it a moral necessity to pay their debts, while still protecting Earth from an order of knowledge it isn’t yet prepared to handle. In consequence, as the story ends, the decision has been made to lift the crew of the whaling ship from our planet and transport them through space to the green and wonderful world from which Earth was originally colonized at some moment long past.

In this reward for services rendered, and also in the rules that protect vulnerable and immature beings from premature awareness of the existence of galactic civilization, it is possible for us to catch a glimpse of van Vogt’s most profound and original new theme—the obligation of superior beings to look out for the welfare of those less advanced.

The first half-indication of this emergent insight came in Kier Gray’s dual leadership of the tendrilled slans and ordinary mankind in
Slan.
And there would be a further hint of it in the first story van Vogt wrote after he resigned from his clerical job in the Department of National Defence, the highly provocative but overly complex short novel “Recruiting Station” (
Astounding,
Mar. 1942).

In this story, the Glorious, an arrogant Earth-centered future race of man, is shanghaiing contemporary men and turning them into automatons to fight in a war between Earth and the planets that mankind has settled. But the very existence of the universe has become imperiled by their careless manipulations of time. A race of the farther future, who will be the heirs and successors of the Planetarians—that is, if they manage to win the war—has become aware of the danger, but so tenuous has their past become that they are unable to travel back through time to correct the situation.

However, with their assistance, Norma Matheson, a young woman of the present day whom we have understood to be completely under the control of the ruthless Dr. Lell of the Glorious, develops superpowers far beyond his, and with her serving as a focal point, space and time can be manipulated to minimize damage to existence. At the conclusion of “Recruiting Station,” Norma has been returned to the moment in 1941 when we first met her, where she will work to cancel all of Dr. Lell’s efforts in our era.

The story ends with another of van Vogt’s striking last lines: “Poor, unsuspecting superman!”
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“Recruiting Station” would be notable for its presentation of a future containing not just change upon change, but level upon level of possible human becoming. And beyond any doubts superior humans do lend a hand to comparatively backward Twentieth Century people in a moment in which they are being victimized. The single point about which we might have question, however, is whether these highly developed human beings are acting out of a sense of altruism or out of a desire for self-preservation.

But there would be no doubt of this kind in three other van Vogt novelets—“The Weapon Shop,” “The Search,” and “Asylum”—that would easily be his best work of the year. In each case, the altruism of those more gifted or insightful or intelligent would not only be established beyond any doubt, but in fact would be a central point of the story.

“The Weapon Shop” (
Astounding,
Dec. 1942) would be set against the same future background first glimpsed in “The Seesaw,” with one (possibly careless) difference: the time, which in the earlier story was given as five thousand years in our future, is here said to be seven thousand years from now.

In this story, the central character, Fara Clark, is a very ordinary person, a motor repairman and totally loyal supporter of the empress—“the glorious, the divine, the serenely gracious and lovely Innelda Isher, one thousand one hundred eightieth of her line.”
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When a weapon shop appears in his village, he is the local citizen who is most adamantly opposed to it.

However, very shortly thereafter, an interplanetary bank and a giant corporation conspire to swindle him out of his life savings and force him out of business. And there is no one who will give Clark any help. Even his own family turns against him.

With his life in ruins, and driven to the depths of despair, Clark enters the weapon shop with the intention of purchasing a gun and killing himself. Instead, he finds himself transferred somewhere to a place called “ ‘Information Center.’ ”
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Here, inside an immense building that is also a machine, the weapon shops keep constantly amended census data for all the settled planets of the Solar System—and individual files on every living person.

Fara Clark is directed to a particular room, and there, in a most mysterious and summary fashion, his case is reviewed. He is informed that both the bank and the corporation that took advantage of him are among the many enterprises secretly owned by the empress. And somehow fines are instantly levied and collected against the offending businesses, with Clark getting back all he has lost and a good deal more.

He is also told a little about the history and nature of the weapon shops. It seems that some four thousand years past, “ ‘the brilliant genius Walter S. DeLany invented the vibration process that made the weapon shops possible, and laid down the first principles of weapon shop political philosophy. . . .’ ”
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This philosophy is moral and idealistic:

“It is important to understand that
we do not interfere in the main stream of human existence.
We right wrongs; we act as a barrier between the people and their more ruthless exploiters. . . . As always we shall remain an incorruptible core—and I mean that literally; we have a psychological machine that never lies about a man’s character—I repeat, an incorruptible core of human idealism, devoted to relieving the ills that arise inevitably under any form of government.”
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The practical instrument of this philosophy of protection and justice for the common man is the man himself—armed with the guns that the weapon shops sell. A weapon shop gun is attuned to its owner, and whenever it is needed it will leap instantly to his hand. Not only does the gun present a complete defensive shield against energy weapons of the kind carried by the soldiers of the empress, but there is no material object that its beam cannot penetrate or destroy. However, a weapon shop gun absolutely may not be used—and perhaps cannot be used—for either aggression or murder.

Here is a weapon whose nature is not so much scientific as moral. A gun of justice! With a sidearm like this, it would seem that any oppressed man could look tyranny in the eye and never need to blink.

And, indeed, back home in his village with a weapon shop gun on his hip and a new outlook on life, Fara Clark is able to stand up for his rights, re-establish his family, and regain his repair shop—and in the process discover that others besides himself are in actuality supporters of the weapon makers.

When van Vogt finished “The Weapon Shop” and sent it to John Campbell, the story proved to have a very strange effect on the editor. As he was reading this novelet, he recognized that he was enjoying it thoroughly. But when he attempted to analyze the story intellectually, he just couldn’t see why it should be so effective.

Campbell’s head assured him that nothing of any real consequence happened in “The Weapon Shop.” A simple motor repairman loses his business, is given justice, and then gets his shop back again. Was that the stuff out of which a proper science fiction story should be made? The editor just couldn’t think so.

And yet, at the same time, Campbell was aware that whatever his head might be telling him, in his heart he liked this novelet so much that he intended to pay van Vogt a bonus for it and use it for a cover story.

It was a highly intriguing puzzle—all the more so since it seemed to Campbell that it was the business of any proper editor to know exactly why a given story did or didn’t work. He was even willing to share his perplexity with the author himself. Along with the check for the story, he sent van Vogt a letter in which he said quite frankly:

“Weapon Shop” was, like much of your material, good without any detectable reason for being interesting. Technically it doesn’t have plot, it starts nowhere in particular, wanders about, and comes out in another completely indeterminate place. But, like a park path, it’s a nice little walk. I liked it, as you may have gathered from the 25% extra.
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To understand the problem that Campbell had in coming to terms with his affection for the Canadian’s unorthodox but curiously effective science fiction, it is necessary to look at van Vogt’s stories with the eyes of an early Forties pulp editor, a man expected to put a magazine on the newsstand each month that would grab a browser’s attention and make him eager to buy and read.