The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (87 page)
Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
The only thing the Dreeghs actually do fear is the possible intervention of a vastly superior sort of human being, a “Great Galactic”
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with an IQ of 1200. Thus far, however, in the course of a million years, these exalted beings have never taken personal action against them.
Jeel and Merla make an appearance in William Leigh’s hotel bedroom—their spaceship somehow held coincident in space-time with what would otherwise be his bathroom—and turn the reporter into their helpless tool. Using his knowledge and resources, they identify Professor Garret Ungarn as the local Galactic Observer. Then they hypnotize Leigh into fancying himself in love with the professor’s daughter Patricia, and send him off to Jupiter to gain entry to the Ungarn meteorite and lower the defensive screens that protect it.
Leigh accomplishes exactly what they desire of him—but in the process something most peculiar happens. While he is aboard the meteorite base, there is a sequence of events that plays itself through again and again:
In the first version, Leigh is being taken to an interview with a highly suspicious Patricia Ungarn when he knocks out his escort and escapes. He runs to an elevator. This carries him to a room of utter blackness. Here he encounters a
something
that flashes and sparkles and then seems to penetrate his head.
Abruptly, Leigh finds himself back at the moment of his escape. He is bidden to enter Patricia Ungarn’s apartment, which he finds marvelous and magnificent.
In a state of some confusion, he tells her of the elevator and the blackness room, but she denies that either one exists. She even demonstrates to him that what he is certain is the elevator door is in fact the door to another corridor.
When Leigh declares his love for her, Patricia becomes convinced that he must have been hypnotized. She determines to put Leigh aboard a small spacecraft and send him off to take his chances with the Dreeghs outside.
Abruptly, however, Leigh once more finds himself returned to the moment of his initial escape. As he is bidden to enter Patricia Ungarn’s apartment, it seems to him that Jeel must be dissatisfied with the way that things have gone and is somehow forcing them to repeat until they come out the way he wants them to.
Leigh now begins to sense the presence of another mind within his head—and then suddenly he sees things with a strange new clarity. Patricia’s apartment, which had seemed so fine to him before, now seems marked by flaws and disharmonies. And when he studies Patricia herself, she appears very different to him than in the moment of his declaration of love:
On all Earth, no woman had ever been so piercingly examined. The structure of her body and her face, to Leigh so finely, proudly shaped, so gloriously patrician—found low grade now.
An excellent example of low-grade development in isolation.
That was the thought, not contemptuous, not derogatory, simply an impression by an appallingly direct mind that saw—overtones, realities behind realities, a thousand facts where one showed.
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This time, Leigh is able to effortlessly dominate the situation. He overpowers Patricia and her father, and then he cuts the power supporting the screens that protect this Galactic outpost.
Leigh has done exactly what he was bidden to do by the Dreeghs. And when he is back in their hands once more, an exultant Jeel binds him and turns him over to a rapacious Merla. The female Dreegh has been lusting after Leigh with a passion and greed that seem as much sexual as hunger for his life force.
Merla begs Leigh to cooperate with her kiss of death. However, when their lips meet, it is not
from
him but
to
him that energy flows. There is a searing flash of blue and Merla collapses.
As Jeel revives her with some of his own supply of life force, a terrified Merla confesses that she has been cheating. She has secretly killed dozens of men on Earth for their energy and now Leigh has it all!
We might remember that at the climax of
Slan,
Jommy’s bonds dropped away, thereby identifying him to Kier Gray as the son of Peter Cross. Now Leigh’s bonds fall away from him. The being who was William Leigh stands revealed as a Great Galactic!
It seems that the Dreegh discovery of Earth was anticipated. This Great Galactic has deliberately suppressed nine-tenths of his energy and mental power in order to take on the persona of an ordinary Earthman. Now his normal level of energy has been restored, and he is prepared to collect the two hundred and twenty-seven Dreegh ships gathered here to fall upon Earth.
This supremely confident and able being dismisses the now-docile Jeel and Merla, telling them, “ ‘Return to your normal existence. I have still to co-ordinate my two personalities completely, and that does not require your presence.’ ”
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To this point in “Asylum,” we have seen five different levels of intelligence portrayed: William Leigh, Earth reporter, IQ 112; Professor Ungarn and his daughter Patricia, Kluggs, with IQs around 240; the Dreeghs, Merla and Jeel, with IQs of 400; the beginning-to-awaken Leigh, who is able to perceive the flaws and disharmonies evident in Patricia and her apartment; and the re-energized Galactic being who is able to dismiss the likes of Jeel and Merla with no more than a word.
But another level now remains to be attained—the fully reintegrated Great Galactic with an IQ of 1200.
Whatever any such fabulous number as that might actually mean!
A.E. van Vogt, more than most, had reason to be aware that real intelligence was a far deeper and more complex matter than just the conscious, rational ability to juggle facts and figures. And so we shouldn’t make the literal-minded error of interpreting the various IQ numbers given in “Asylum” as some exact index of relative skill at checking off the proper boxes in a cosmic pencil-and-paper test. Instead, we would do better to take these numbers as a rough indication of the variety of effective levels possible in the integration of all the different aspects of which “intelligence” is comprised.
If this wasn’t specifically emphasized in “Asylum,” it would be in a long-delayed but closely connected sequel, a short novel entitled “The Proxy Intelligence” (
If,
Oct. 1968). Here, Professor Ungarn would comment that standard Earth IQ tests omit a number of relevant intelligence factors, including mechanical ability and perception of spatial relations. And Patricia Ungarn would look a Dreegh in the eye and say scathingly: “ ‘If altruism is an I.Q. factor, you Dreeghs probably come in below idiot.’ ”
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What an awesome challenge it was for van Vogt to attempt to imagine the likes of a fully integrated Great Galactic! As a gauge of how difficult it could be in 1941 to conceive of an encounter with a radically transcendent being, we might remember Slayton Ford returning a broken man from his interview with the gods of the Jockaira in Heinlein’s
Methuselah’s Children,
or the brief, unrecallable glimpse of a High One in Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps,” which demoralizes Bob Wilson/Diktor, turns his hair gray overnight, and leaves him feeling like a bewildered collie who can’t fathom how it is that dog food manages to get into cans.
But it wasn’t just a less traumatic meeting with radical superiority that van Vogt was proposing to imagine. What van Vogt aimed to show was nothing less than a normal Earthman—or something like one—being transmuted and melded and assumed into the highest state of awareness and responsibility that the writer was capable of conceiving.
Van Vogt says:
The problem was to describe how a being with an I.Q. of 1200 would operate—what he would see, feel and think. I couldn’t have him on the stage too long, because he’d become unreal. I slept on it for several nights and I finally got it. I think it was completely satisfactory; nonetheless, even the writing was kind of an anguished hurt.
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He also says, “That was the hardest scene I ever wrote.”
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Here are the concluding paragraphs of “Asylum” with the frightened and resistant subsystem that still imagines itself to be merely William Leigh, Earth reporter, IQ 112 and proud of it, facing its moment of integration into the Great Galactic:
Amazingly, then, he was staring into a mirror. Where it had come from, he had no memory. It was there in front of him, where, an instant before, had been a black porthole—and there was an image in the mirror, shapeless at first to his blurred vision.
Deliberately—he felt the enormous deliberateness—the vision was cleared for him. He
saw
—and then he didn’t.
His brain wouldn’t look. It twisted in a mad desperation, like a body buried alive, and briefly, horrendously conscious of its fate. Insanely, it fought away from the blazing thing in the mirror. So awful was the effort, so titanic the fear, that it began to gibber mentally, its consciousness to whirl dizzily, like a wheel spinning faster, faster—
The wheel shattered into ten thousand aching fragments. Darkness came, blacker than Galactic night. And there was—
Oneness!
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There is a holistic ending for you!
What a great distance we’ve traveled from those earlier days when a venturer from Earth who encountered what might be a higher being could only think to stomp it or shoot it. And, in fact, no other modern science fiction story would ever manage to take a greater leap than this into the arms of transcendent mystery!
But this novelet would signify more than just a successful act of identification with transcendent being. For those of us who have been following out the full life cycle of science fiction—the mythic representation of modern Western scientific materialism—the holistic pattern that stands revealed in the body of work which A.E. van Vogt contributed to
Astounding
from July 1939 to the beginning of 1943, and that is epitomized in this final scene in “Asylum,” must be taken as an intimation that our story is now nearly complete.
T
HE GOLDEN AGE OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION
that John Campbell fostered coincided almost exactly with the duration of World War II. This wonderful period of constant ongoing creativity and change began with the publication of A.E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” and Isaac Asimov’s “Trends” in the July 1939 issue of
Astounding,
just two months before Germany triggered the Second World War by marching into Poland. And it would come to an end more than six years later in the final months of 1945, after the Atomic Bomb had been dropped and Japan had surrendered, with the serialization in
Astounding
of novels by van Vogt and Asimov that had been written while the war was still in progress.
The Golden Age had two phases. Roughly speaking, we can say that the line dividing them was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the event which brought the United States into active participation in the war.
It was during the first phase of the Golden Age—the nearly two-and-a-half years that America spent hovering on the sidelines of this new and even greater Great War, waiting for the moment when it would prove necessary to take an active hand and tip the balance in this fight, too—that John Campbell directed a final assault upon the intractable Techno Age problem of fate. Under his banner of modern science fiction, and armed with his potent new weapons of consciousness, indeterminacy and universal operating principles, the writers he published in
Astounding
and
Unknown
ventured forth in imagination from what had formerly been Village Earth, aiming to establish control over everything they encountered and to place mankind in charge of the multiverse.
And all of this basic work by the likes of de Camp, Heinlein, van Vogt and Asimov was written—and almost all of it was published—prior to December 7, 1941.
In fact, it was at the beginning of August 1941 that Isaac Asimov brought John Campbell the basis for the last great conceptual conquest of the early Golden Age. This was the defeat of cyclical history in the vast arena of the galaxy and the establishment of human authority over the stars and the farther future.
Asimov had just earned his M.A. in chemistry at the tender age of 21. That summer, he was taking one intensive course at Columbia University in the subject of phase rule, working toward qualification for the Ph.D. program. He was following the latest turn in the war—the sudden invasion by Germany of its sometime ally, the Soviet Union—with the closest attention. He was, of course, still serving his usual hours behind the cash register in his family’s little neighborhood store in Brooklyn. And, in his spare time, he managed to write three SF stories.
The boundaries of Asimov’s tightly circumscribed personal world were beginning to expand that summer. In June, his parents persuaded him to leave home for a week’s vacation by himself at an inexpensive resort in the Catskills—a new experience for Isaac. For the first time, he had enough cash in his pocket to begin experimentally taking a variety of girls out on movie dates. In another year’s time, he would be a married man living in another city and employed in war work as a chemist.
At this moment—August the first, 1941—Asimov was also right in the middle of his sudden emergence as a science fiction writer of the first rank. “Reason” and “Liar,” his third and fourth stories for Campbell, had been published in the spring without making any overwhelming impression upon the readers of
Astounding.
However, other SF writers had taken note of them—Asimov’s law-abiding robots had been a subject of conversation at gatherings of the informal Mañana Literary Society at Robert Heinlein’s house in Los Angeles.
In just a few more weeks, the September issue of
Astounding
would see publication, with the youngster’s first lead story, “Nightfall,” illustrated on the cover with one of Hubert Rogers’ most effective paintings. From that point, Asimov’s presence as a science fiction writer would be impossible to ignore.
When his class in phase rule at Columbia was over on Friday, the first of August, Isaac caught the subway to go pay one of his regular visits to John Campbell at his office in the Street & Smith printing plant in lower Manhattan. He always liked to have an idea for a story ready for discussion when he went to visit Campbell, but this time he hadn’t been able to think of one so far.
Asimov recalls:
On the way down I racked my brain for a story idea. Failing, I tried a device I sometimes used. I opened a book at random and then tried free association beginning with what I first saw.
The book I had with me was a collection of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I opened it to Iolanthe—to the picture of the Fairy Queen throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis, the sentry. Thinking of sentries, I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire—of the Galactic Empire—aha! . . . Why shouldn’t I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and the return of feudalism, written from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire?
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How wonderfully expansive a chain of free association this was—to begin with a randomly chosen picture of a Fairy Queen from a Nineteenth Century light opera, and only a moment later to be lost in a vision of the fall of one Galactic Empire and the rise of another!
And yet it wasn’t entirely an accident that Asimov should have been tripped off into this particular line of speculation by some stimulus or other. From our later vantage, at least, the establishment of structure and control over the stars has the appearance of an idea just waiting to occur to someone, with Isaac Asimov as a highly likely candidate.
De Camp and Pratt had already carried scientific authority from one parallel universe to another. Robert Heinlein had structured time-to-come. The next big job on the agenda of modern science fiction surely had to be the application of universal operating principles to the wider stellar universe.
The person to establish this was not going to be de Camp. His strict scientific scruples didn’t permit him to imagine travel faster than the speed of light—which meant that he could not envision human beings traveling to any but the very nearest stars.
Heinlein wasn’t likely to accomplish it, either. In his novel,
Methuselah’s Children,
which was in serialization at this very moment, his characters were finding life among the stars so overwhelming and disconcerting that they would eventually have to scoot back to Earth to soothe their frazzled nerves with hot bowls of Dallas chili.
But Isaac Asimov wasn’t hampered by doubts and fears like these. The light of the stars shone in his eyes.
As a reader of the science fiction magazines of the late Twenties and the Thirties, Isaac had been a particular fan of epics of superscience and tales of alien exploration set amongst the stars. The stellar pioneers—E.E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson and the young John Campbell—were all among his favorite writers.
In fact, thinking back on it, Asimov would identify the absolute high point of his pleasure in reading the SF pulp magazines as the first installment of
Galactic Patrol
—the initial story in Doc Smith’s immense Lensman series—in the September 1937
Astounding.
He would say of it, “Never, I think, did I enjoy any piece of writing more, any piece of any kind.”
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To a degree unmatched by Campbell’s other new authors, Asimov yearned to write modern science fiction set in the wider stellar universe. So far, however, the editor had only allowed him to do so in highly limited ways.
Asimov’s first attempt at a story with a galactic setting—a novelet entitled “Pilgrimage”—had been submitted to Campbell as early as March 1939, following the sale of “Trends.” And when Campbell turned it down, Asimov had insisted on rewriting and bringing it back again, and then again, and even a fourth time before the editor firmly and finally decided against it. In the end, this would be the most worked-over story Asimov would ever write, revised seven times and rejected ten times before it finally saw publication in the Spring 1942 issue of
Planet Stories
under the editor-chosen title “Black Friar of the Flame.”
And we may remember that Asimov’s second sale to Campbell, “Homo Sol,” had been a story about a Galactic Federation of humanoid beings who welcome the first men from Earth to reach the stars. But the editor was only willing to accept this story after he had had Asimov place particular emphasis on galactic recognition of our kind as a special race of “ ‘mad geniuses.’ ”
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Then, when Asimov had proceeded to write a sequel of sorts to “Homo Sol,” a story called “The Imaginary” involving these same sentient galactic beings, but not Earth humans, Campbell had been prompt to turn that one down.
Most recently, with “Nightfall,” Asimov had written a story to order for Campbell that was set on a distant planet with six suns, located in the midst of a giant cluster of thirty thousand stars—but populated by beings who were physically, socially and psychologically just like us.
For Asimov to move from stories like these to thoughts of human stellar empire was not such a large step, especially since the concept of Galactic Empire was already a part of his science-fictional vocabulary. The idea had been introduced two-and-a-half years earlier in a Jack Williamson short novel, “After World’s End,” published in the February 1939
Marvel Science Stories.
This was an SF pulp that put out nine irregular issues between 1938 and 1941.
John Campbell had been given first look at this story, of course, but he’d turned it down. Although it had points of originality, taken as a whole it was too much in the old style for the new
Astounding
that Campbell was making.
Not the least of this was its structure. In form, “After World’s End” was one more Techno Age tale about someone who travels into the World Beyond the Hill, has adventures there, and then returns home.
The story’s narrator, Barry Horn, is a contemporary adventurer and pioneer rocketeer. During Horn’s attempt to be the first person to reach another world, his spaceship, the
Astronaut,
goes astray and misses its target, the planet Venus. He falls into a cold sleep in space and does not revive again for another twelve hundred thousand years.
The future he wakens to is one in which a powerful renegade robot named Malgarth has been striving to enslave, tyrannize and destroy mankind for a million years. It would seem that the creator of this colossal being was a descendant and namesake of the explorer, another man named Bari Horn, who was murdered by Malgarth as his initial act of rebellion against human authority.
It is the duty and destiny of the reawakened legendary figure, the original Barry Horn, to penetrate the hundred-foot-tall body of Malgarth within “ ‘his guarded temple on Black Mystoon,’ ”
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and kill him by tearing out a crucial fluid-tube at the center of his black brain. And the instant this is accomplished, Horn is hurled back across time to the moment of his original departure from Earth in October 1938. Here he writes down his tale, and then he dies.
There was no way that Campbell was going to buy an old-fashioned story like this one, all romantic postures and poetic diction. In 1938, the editor was doing his best to eliminate from the pages of
Astound
ing stuff like robots in revolt against their makers, affinities (ultimately soul-based) that o’erleap a million years, and journeys into other worlds that are followed by returns that last just long enough to produce a manuscript account of the adventure.
Yet it is also true that despite being unacceptable to John Campbell, within its own late-Techno-Age frame of reference, “After World’s End” did have at least one major new concept to offer to science fiction: Instead of being confined to the environs of Earth, or to our own Solar System, as stories of this type had previously been, the conflict between Malgarth and mankind was given as taking place against the backdrop of a human-occupied galaxy—a Galactic Empire.
Barry Horn is made aware of this during his long slumber through space and time. He finds himself able to eavesdrop mentally on the course of future human development (a capacity explained with a reference in passing to “Rhine’s famous experiments in ‘parapsychology’ ”).
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In this telepathic dream-state, Horn perceives the rise of human interstellar empire. He tells us:
Men multiplied and grew mighty. Commerce followed exploration, and commerce brought interstellar law. For a hundred thousand years—that seemed in that uncanny sleep no more than an hour—I watched the many-sided struggle between a score of interplanetary federations and the armada of space pirates that once menaced them all. . . .
Spreading from star to star, the rival federations drove the pirates at last to the fringes of the galaxy, and then turned back upon one another in ruthless galactic war. For ten thousand years ten million planets were drenched with blood. Democracies and communes crumbled before dictatorship. And one dictator, at last, was triumphant. The victorious League of Ledros became the Galactic Empire.
A universal peace and a new prosperity came to the world of stars. Enlightened Emperors restored democratic institutions. Ledros, the capital planet, became the heart of interstellar civilization.
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With this account, Jack Williamson was suggesting something wonderful and previously unheard-of—the possibility of a human political empire that was capable of reaching out and encompassing all the stars of our galaxy. Up until now, science fiction stories had always treated the farther future and the stars as realms of fierce evolutionary struggle, testing grounds of cosmic fitness to survive. But here, in a bold imaginative move, Williamson was elbowing all evolutionary rivals aside to lay claim to the galactic future as a playground for human historical development.
When he read “After World’s End,” Williamson’s young fan, Isaac Asimov, had to find this new line of speculation thrilling. Asimov was a history buff as well as a science fiction reader, and it was a revelation to him to see the stars and human history united this way under the name of Galactic Empire.