The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (105 page)

Strange, complex thoughts swirl through the minds of man and dog in their new Loper form:

“It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”

And, a few moments later, he adds (speaking as though both he and Towser were of the same kind):

“We’re still mostly Earth. . . . We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”
⁸⁶³

As the person in charge of this outpost, Fowler recognizes that they ought to return to the dome—but it is more than he can quite bear to resume his former condition, which now seems muddled, ignorant and squalid to him. His pal Towser helps him put the matter into perspective:

“I can’t go back,” said Towser.

“Nor I,” said Fowler.

“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.

“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”
⁸⁶⁴

The other, and perhaps even more provocative, story of human mental and physical metamorphosis was “Environment” by Chester S. Geier, published in the May 1944 issue of
Astounding.
It seems very unlikely that John Campbell would have considered printing such a story as this at any other moment.

In “Environment,” a spaceship from Earth lands in a great deserted city on a planet of a distant sun. The two men aboard the ship, Jon Gaynor and Wade Harlan, are seeking to discover what happened to a party of religious traditionalists who came to this place one hundred and twenty years ago under the leadership of an ancestor of Gaynor’s.

From bas-reliefs around a fountain, they conclude that the builders of the city were a humanoid race. But the only life forms they encounter are strange aerial creatures:

They were great, faceted crystals whose interiors flamed with glorious color—exquisite shades that pulsed and changed with the throb of life. Like a carillon of crystal bells, their chimings and tinklings rang out so infinitely sweet and clear and plaintive that it was both a pain and a pleasure to hear.
⁸⁶⁵

The two men explore apartments within the deserted city. And in each room they enter, the walls are covered with murals whose meaning escapes them. Also in each room is a niche containing a jewel, and when one of them concentrates his attention on one of these jewels, things that might be furniture or machines half-materialize: “Watching, Gaynor saw the ghostly outlines for the first time—misty suggestions of angles and curves, hints of forms whose purpose he could not guess.”
⁸⁶⁶

They fly over the city on antigravity units and discover first one spaceship and then another—including the
Ark
of old Mark Gaynor and his band of Purists. Each of the ships they come across was apparently built by a different humanoid race. And every one of them is deserted, with no clue as to what happened to those aboard.

Eventually, Harlan and Gaynor conclude that the city bears a certain resemblance to a book. There is an order to the rooms and the wall pictures, and if they are to have any hope of understanding what is going on here, it is necessary for them to begin at the beginning. And so they locate the right end of town and begin to study the meaning of the city.

At the outset, the surroundings adapt themselves to the humans. In these first apartments they find furniture that is recognizable to them and familiar music, food and drink. The wall paintings offer instruction in what they are to do at each step. And as they move on from room to room and from building to building, they encounter one machine after another which they are challenged to master:

The machines grew larger, more intricate, ever more difficult of solution. Each was a new test upon the growing knowledge of Gaynor and Harlan. And each test was harder than the last, for the wall paintings no longer pointed out the way, but merely hinted now.
⁸⁶⁷

After the machines have gotten huge, they begin to get smaller and more subtle, until at last there are no more of them. The two men have reached the rooms with the form-producing jewels which baffled them so when they first came to the city. But now they are at a higher level of understanding and know what must be done here. Gazing at the wall paintings, Gaynor says:

“The Third Stage. The tasks will be very difficult, Wade—but interesting. We’ll be putting our knowledge into practice—actually creating. This means we’ll have to deal directly with the powers of the various soldani and varoo. As these are extradimensional, control will be solely by cholthening at the sixth level, through means of the taadron. We’ll have to be careful, though—any slightest relaxation of the sorran will have a garreling effect—”
⁸⁶⁸

On and on they proceed through the city—rising through the Third Stage and into the Fourth. They become telepathic, and then pass beyond that. They no longer require food, but materialize nourishment out of subatomic energies. They learn to fly without the aid of any device. And their bodies begin to seem “impedimenta of their childhood”
⁸⁶⁹
to them.

At last, they vogelar to the very last tower of the city and narleen its paintings. With this ultimate knowledge, they pass into crystalline form themselves. Flashing different colors and chiming musically, they join the others of their kind high in the sky.

And the city, that unique educational device, then returns to waiting for the next set of inquisitive humanoids to come along and receive instruction.

In the new consciousness-based universe, it would seem, how you think and what you are capable of learning would be much more important than where you happen to come from or what you might look like. Starting from very different initial conditions, we might all become Lopers together, or crystalline beings tinkling in the air, or some further state even more exalted.

Of all the writers of the wartime
Astounding,
it was A.E. van Vogt who was most insistent that in a universe of holistic consciousness the human way forward lay in higher education.

Back in 1940, in his first novel,
Slan,
van Vogt had imagined that it would be necessary to have an evolutionary mutation and a whole new breed of man to replace man-as-he-presently-is before humanity could begin to think holistically. But implicit in
Slan
were hints of Techno Age elitism, racism and genocide that van Vogt couldn’t be completely comfortable with. Ultimately, those were the very issues that World War II was being fought to settle.

During the involuntary hiatus in his SF writing which followed
Slan,
van Vogt was given a space of time in which to think carefully about the question of human mental and moral advancement. And while he didn’t manage to resolve all problems at once, he did begin to view mutation as a less-than-fully-satisfactory answer to the question and to look for alternatives.

This may be seen in “Recruiting Station,” his first published story after his return. Here, van Vogt had pitted a genetic superman against an ordinary Twentieth Century woman, and made the superman and his kind a danger to all existence and the woman humanity’s savior.

In this story, van Vogt envisioned one kind of superior man after another, as though to say that no one fixed form of man could ever be final and sufficient. But the superman we are shown at closest range is immortal, telepathic Dr. Lell of the Glorious, an arrogant, exploitative race who are prepared to sacrifice the entire universe if they are not allowed to have things their own way.

Set in opposition to him is Norma Matheson, whose first name may be taken as an indication of her normal human nature. Through mental contact with post-humans of the remote future and specific training by them, she has her latent powers of mind awakened to the point where she is easily able to fool, manipulate and forestall that poor, unsuspecting superman, Dr. Lell.

The same relative order of value, in which education is seen as superior to mutation, would be presented in van Vogt’s second novel,
The Weapon Makers,
at the beginning of 1943, in the two friends, Edward Gonish and Robert Hedrock. Gonish, the No-man, is not a mutant, but he has been enabled by special Weapon Shop training to become a master of holistic perception. Hedrock, the immortal man, is a unique sport of nature, but for all his advantages of longevity and his concern for the welfare of the entirety of mankind, he also has distinct limitations of mind.

Hedrock thinks about this just prior to his arrival at a crucial meeting with the Weapon Shop Council:

Despite all his years of experience, these Weapon Shop supermen with their specialized training had inexorably forged ahead of him in a dozen fields.

He could not even plan for his own protection because the techniques of education that had molded their brains from childhood were useless applied to his mind, which had been cluttered with confused, unplanned integrations ages before the techniques now so dangerous to him were invented.
⁸⁷⁰

If our minds weren’t already cluttered with prejudices, with errors of perception and understanding, with outmoded and inadequate information, and with confused, unplanned integrations, could any of us and every one of us learn to be a superman like the members of the Weapon Shop Council?

If a natural man-beyond-man like Hedrock were deprived of all special education, would he ever be able to put his superior qualities to use?

Is it possible that appropriate mental training could produce a whole society of superior men who were more sane, more adaptable, and more able than that random accident, the untutored genetic superman?

Van Vogt would give questions like these considerable thought. And writing in a later day, he would have these speculations to offer about the relationship between human potential, society and education:

—God made man in his own image (meaning perfect).

(Man loused it up.)

—A complex computer, even when it’s a neural one—the human brain—has the capacity to reason perfectly.

Early training and conditioning loused it up.

—Under hypnosis, it has been established that the human memory has stored
everything
seen, heard, felt, touched and tasted, since at least early childhood.

Also loused up.

Of course, in this middle period of history, lousing up doesn’t take long in any single individual’s life, because of the haphazard way the person is brought up, which all too quickly turns him into the average type we see around.

We are entitled to speculate that every human being is at some bottom of his being endowed with total memory, total creativity, total intelligence; in short, down in there somewhere is a perfect brain.

We have beautiful glimpses of what is potential. One person has an open line to writing poetry. Another can draw with marvelous accuracy. A third has musical ability. Others masterfully design carpets, build cabinets, conceive vast architectural marvels; and so on, through all the arts, and sciences, and crafts, that the world, and the individual, has produced.

But the time for the brain to be handled correctly by schools and parents, and to operate freely, is not yet.
⁸⁷¹

In his third serial novel,
The World of Null-A
(
Astounding,
Aug.-Oct. 1945), van Vogt would try to envision that better time. He would present a future society whose first priority is to educate men and women to be more able and clear-thinking than they are today. And, by way of contrast, he would also imagine an immortal superman with a second brain, like the Mixed Men, who for lack of self-knowledge and training is hopelessly bewildered and ineffective.

The mental training presented in
The World of Null-A
would differ from that offered in van Vogt’s previous stories in having a plausible contemporary referent—Alfred Korzybski’s psycholinguistic system, General Semantics.

Count Alfred Korzybski was another of the pioneer holists of the Thirties. Born in Poland in 1879, he was trained as an engineer, and later taught physics, mathematics and foreign languages in Warsaw. During World War I, Korzybski was a member of a Russian military mission to America. When the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 and Russia withdrew from the war, he took up permanent residence in the United States.

The aim behind Korzybski’s original work was to engineer a closer fit between human thought and behavior and the actual facts of the surrounding environment. He wanted to make human thinking both more exact and more flexible.

Korzybski’s central statement was a 1933 book entitled
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
In his analysis, our modern problems in thinking could all be traced back to the logic of Aristotle, with its either-or, black-white, this-and-therefore-not-that approach to the world. The effect of the radical science of the Twentieth Century was to reveal the inadequacy of such over-simple methods. The times demanded new, more effective, multivalued, non-Aristotelian (or null-A) systems of thought.

General Semantics was an example of such a system. In linguistics, semantics is the study of the relationship between symbols and the things they refer to. General Semantics was an extension of this—a study of the relationship between the limited ways in which human beings ordinarily think and the real world in which they must act.

Again and again, Korzybski pointed out that the map is not the territory. One moment in time is not the same as another. And if events are to be understood, it is necessary for them to be interpreted within a total context.

Korzybski’s work had first been used as background in science fiction in 1940 when Robert Heinlein had made it the plausible basis for the persuasive psychology at the heart of his short novel, “ ‘If This Goes On—.’ ” But it took three years after that before van Vogt was able to catch up with a copy of
Science and Sanity
and read Korzybski for himself.