The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (58 page)

The writers responsible would be L. Sprague de Camp, fresh from the triumph of
Lest Darkness Fall,
and a collaborator, Fletcher Pratt. In a pair of comic short novels, “The Roaring Trumpet” (
Unknown,
May 1940) and “The Mathematics of Magic” (
Unknown,
Aug. 1940)—gathered in 1941 as a book entitled
The Incomplete Enchanter
—they imagined the power of universal operating principles as extending not just to the past and the fall of Rome, but as applying to every conceivable realm or dimension of being.

De Camp’s writing partner, Murray Fletcher Pratt, was a scholar, linguist, and gourmet born in 1897 on an Indian reservation in western New York State. In his youth, he was simultaneously a public librarian and a professional boxer. In later years, he chose to wear the loudest shirts he could find, raised marmosets in his apartment, and enjoyed reading sagas aloud in the original Norse. He would write more than fifty books of many different kinds, but at the time of his death in 1956, his chief reputation was as a Navy and Civil War historian.

Along with his many other interests, Pratt had an early and continuing involvement in SF. Back in the Twenties he had contributed a handful of collaborative scientifiction stories to
Amazing.
Then, in the Thirties, he translated novels from French and German for
Wonder Stories
—contriving to collect the money he was owed by Hugo Gernsback through the simple expedient of holding onto the final installment of a novel in serialization until he received his payment in full.

De Camp and Pratt were first thrown together by de Camp’s onetime college roommate, John D. Clark, the man who had introduced de Camp to magazine science fiction and also to John Campbell. At the time they joined forces, it was Pratt, ten years de Camp’s elder, who was much the better-known writer—at least outside the confines of
Astounding
and
Unknown.
What’s more, the initial notion of writing fantasies about modern characters in storybook settings was his, too.

As de Camp would eventually say: “With the appearance of Campbell’s
Unknown,
Pratt conceived the idea of a series of novels, in collaboration with me, about a hero who projects himself into the parallel worlds described on this plane in myths and legends.”
⁴³⁸

What Pratt had to offer de Camp was his broad and loving knowledge of European myth and legend, together with a more lively imagination than de Camp possessed. It would be he who picked the worlds they would have their modern characters travel to—first the realm of Norse myth, and then the world of Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic poem,
The Faerie Queene
(1589-1596).

What de Camp offered to Pratt was a keen sense of story logic, and a lightness of touch that Pratt’s own fiction tended to lack. De Camp also knew how to write for John Campbell, while Pratt did not.

The two made a very odd couple: Pratt was as conspicuously short as de Camp was conspicuously tall. He was as flamboyant as de Camp was self-contained. And he was as romantic as de Camp was humorously skeptical. But the collaboration of these two proved to be a very happy blending of their separate talents. De Camp himself says, “I thought that the combination of Pratt and de Camp produced a result visibly different from the work of either of us alone.”
⁴³⁹

If “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic,” their first two collaborative stories, appeared altogether marvelous and new—by a considerable margin the most wonderful stories yet to see print in
Unknown
—that would be due in some degree to the freshness of the settings selected by Pratt. Even more, however, it would be because of the originality and scope of de Camp’s arguments for the existence of a multiplicity of worlds, each defined by its own individual set of operating principles, with a master set of operating principles ruling over all.

Just as in
Lest Darkness Fall,
the theory that is to be illustrated by the events of the story is set forth at the outset of “The Roaring Trumpet,” this time in a conversation between senior psychologist Reed Chalmers and the members of his staff at the Garaden Institute in Ohio on the subject of “ ‘our new science of paraphysics.’ ”
⁴⁴⁰
Chalmers suggests:

“The world we live in is composed of impressions received through the senses. But there is an infinity of possible worlds, and if the senses can be attuned to receive a different series of impressions, we should infallibly find ourselves living in a different world.”
⁴⁴¹

To this, a young psychologist, the rash and romantic Harold Shea, responds:

“Do you mean that a complete shift would actually transfer a man’s body into one of these other worlds?”

“Very likely,” agreed Chalmers, “since the body records whatever sensations the mind permits. For complete demonstration it would be necessary to try it, and I don’t know that the risk would be worth it. The other world might have such different laws that it would be impossible to return.”

Shea asked: “You mean, if the world were that of classical mythology, for instance, the laws would be those of Greek magic instead of modern physics? . . . Then this new science of paraphysics is going to include the natural laws of all these different worlds, and what we call physics is just a special case of paraphysics—”

“Not so fast, young man,” replied Chalmers. “For the present, I think it wise to restrict the meaning of our term ‘paraphysics’ to the branch of knowledge that concerns the relationship of these multiple universes to each other, assuming that they actually exist.”
⁴⁴²

Here, in the crucial term “paraphysics,” we can perceive a clear measure of the change from traditional thought. In former times, the nature of being and the ultimate structure of the world were the subject of
metaphysics,
a branch of philosophy concerned with non-material spiritual reality. However, in the new order reflected in modern science fiction, these fundamental questions were now to be recognized as the subject of something quite different—
paraphysics,
which might be defined as the science of higher-order universal operating principles, or what might be called universal operating principles beyond universal operating principles.

And once again, just as in
Lest Darkness Fall,
in very short order in “The Roaring Trumpet” initial speculation is borne out by actual experience. Bored and brash young Harold Shea gathers those supplies that seem appropriate to him—including a .38 revolver, a box of matches, a 1926
Boy Scout Handbook,
and a sporty hat with a green feather—and makes an attempt to transport himself into the world of Irish legend by reciting a series of logical equations designed to attune him with the mental state of that alternate universe. However, Shea doesn’t fully have the hang of what he is attempting, and instead his “syllogismobile”
⁴⁴³
deposits him in the mud and snow of the realm of Norse myth, leaving him to try to cope with the likes of Odinn, Thor and Loki.

In this other universe, the science and technology of our world won’t operate at all. Shea’s watch doesn’t tick, his matches won’t light, his gun doesn’t shoot, and the
Boy Scout Handbook
turns into a meaningless blur before his eyes. Lost in this other reality, Harold Shea has none of the advantages of special knowledge that permitted Martin Padway to undo the fall of Rome.

Except for one, that is. Shea has a firm grip on the principle of universal operating principles. He thinks:

This world he was in—perhaps permanently—was governed by laws of its own. What were those laws? There was only one piece of equipment of which the transference had not robbed him; his modern mind, habituated to studying and analyzing the general rules guiding individual events. He ought to be able to reason out the rules governing this existence and to use them—something which the rustic Thjalfl would never think of doing. So far the only rules he had noticed were that the gods had unusual powers. But there must be general laws underlying even these—
⁴⁴⁴

In short, though magic may work in this realm and our familiar physics may not, at a stroke magic has been redefined and turned into something that looks very much like an alternate form of physics. Armed with this attitude, it isn’t long at all before Shea himself is successfully constructing spells.

On the eve of Ragnarök—the ultimate confrontation between the gods of Asgard and their enemies whose outcome no one can foretell—Shea and the god Heimdall find themselves prisoners of the fire giants of Muspellheim. But Shea proves able to perform a successful job of magical plastic surgery on a troll guard who is sensitive about the size of his nose, and thereby to win his cooperation in contriving their escape.

Shea reflects:

He couldn’t get used to the idea that he, of all people, could work magic. It was contrary to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. But then, where he was the laws of physics, chemistry and biology had been repealed. He was under the laws of magic. His spell had conformed exactly to those laws, as explained by Dr. Chalmers. This was a world in which those laws were basic. The trick was that he happened to know one of those laws, while the general run of mortals—and trolls and gods, too—didn’t know them. . . . If he had only provided himself with a more elaborate knowledge of those laws instead of the useless flashlights, matches and guns—
⁴⁴⁵

What a complete reordering this is of everything we ever thought we knew! And what marvelous promises of new possibility are made here!

The most notable previous stories of cross-dimensional travel in
Unknown
had been several 1939 short novels by L. Ron Hubbard in which contemporary guys found themselves transferred into otherworlds out of the pages of
The Arabian Nights.
In the first of these, “The Ultimate Adventure” (Apr. 1939), the hero manages to prevail in a strange magical country on the strength of a revolver and a box of matches. In the second, “Slaves of Sleep” (July 1939), the edge the hero enjoys is his cunning and his ability to take advantage of opportunity.

But “The Roaring Trumpet” went far beyond anything in Hubbard’s stories in its explicit imposition of contemporary authority over the worlds of the imagination. In the first place, Pratt and de Camp did not just invoke one specific otherworld or another. Rather, they suggested the existence of an infinity of different worlds, and then created paraphysics, a whole new branch of science, just to deal with them.

Moreover, in this story transference between dimensions was not just some half-accidental reseat of running afoul of an ancient talisman or a whacked-out scientist with a potent drug, as in Hubbard’s stories. Instead Pratt and de Camp offered us the syllogismobile, a deliberate scientific means of travel that, rightly operated, could rotate us out of the limits ordinarily set for us and thrust us into a thousand different universes.

Most important of all, however, was the fundamental assertion in “The Roaring Trumpet” that there must be one set of operating principles or another at work in every last nook and cranny of the multiverse, with ultimate operating principles to regulate the interactions of the whole. It was this new ordering of existence that permitted conceptions like paraphysics and the syllogismobile to be thought of at all—in much the same way that H.G. Wells’s vision of vast sweeps of post-utopian future time necessarily preceded and made possible his conception of a time machine to explore them.

Just like an L. Ron Hubbard hero abroad in another dimension, Harold Shea has the advantage of a flexible, questioning modern mind. But the real edge he enjoys is his confident certainty that even though he may happen to find himself in some place where he doesn’t know the local rules, nonetheless rules will exist and he will be able to work them out for himself.

His success in casting simple spells is a heady indication of potential success for the Western scientific mode of approach—but it is all the farther that Shea is able to go in this initial story. When he and Heimdall join Odinn before the gates of Hell to warn him that Ragnarök has arrived, the demonic old hag Odinn has come to consult hurls a clot of snow at Shea and bids him begone to the misbegotten place from which he came. And, forthwith, back to Ohio he travels, startling Dr. Chalmers and his colleagues with the suddenness of his arrival, the wildness of his appearance, and the size of his appetite.

It might be fair to say that unlike Martin Padway in Sixth Century Rome, Harold Shea is not yet sufficiently knowledgeable or powerful to tip the balance of the situation he has been faced with. With him departed, Ragnarök will still go on to its uncertain conclusion.

But then it is only appropriate that Shea should not be there, since he never wanted to have anything to do with Ragnarök in the first place. At the outset of his adventure, when he first learns from Heimdall that the final battle is near, his immediate impulse is to ask, “ ‘What can I do to keep from getting caught in the gears? . . . I mean, if the world’s going to bust up, how can I keep out of the smash?’ ”
⁴⁴⁶

That is what Shea asks for, and that, ultimately, is what he gets.

However, in the second Harold Shea comic adventure, the significantly titled “The Mathematics of Magic,” matters are carried a vital step or two further.

This story followed almost immediately on the heels of “The Roaring Trumpet”: For the readers of
Unknown
in 1940, the second Shea short novel saw publication in August, just three months after the first. For Harold Shea himself, his new story begins even before he has put a period to the previous adventure with three steaks and a whole apple pie.

The check hasn’t been paid before he and Dr. Chalmers are laying plans for a second trip into another world—this time with Chalmers as a participant. Shea once again proposes Cuchulinn’s Ireland as their destination, but Chalmers quickly turns this down as too rough and barbaric. Then Shea suggests the world of Edmund Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
—a chivalric epic telling of struggle between the knights of Queen Gloriana and various enchanters that was left half-finished at the poet’s death in 1599.