The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (67 page)

In 1941, however, Heinlein had reached his sticking point. His Future History had carried him just as far as it could and then run him into a brick wall, or what looked like a brick wall. After one last Future History story—a relatively weak and unconvincing sequel to “Universe” entitled “Common Sense” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1941)—Heinlein was ready to put his whole connected future on the shelf.

And, in fact, at this moment the Future History was about as complete as it was ever going to be. After World War II, Heinlein might shuffle stories around, add some new stories to the near end of the chart, and rewrite and tidy the Future History for book publication. But he would never get around to writing any of the other “Stories-to-be-told” that were promised on the chart as it first saw publication in May 1941. And neither would he ever do anything to close the sixty-year gap remaining between “Logic of Empire” and “ ‘If This Goes On—.’ ” Eventually, Heinlein would simply declare, “I probably never will write the story of Nehemiah Scudder; I dislike him too thoroughly.”
⁵²²

Now, rather than filling in the Future History, Heinlein beat his head some more against the problem that
Methuselah’s Children
had raised but not resolved.

In the intricate time travel novelet “By His Bootstraps” (
Astounding,
Oct. 1941) by Anson MacDonald, a contemporary graduate student named Bob Wilson is hauled thirty thousand years into the future by a man of lined face and gray beard who calls himself Diktor. Diktor informs Wilson that the Palace they are in and the Time Gate through which he has come are the work of “the High Ones,”
⁵²³
superior beings who came, ruled humanity for twenty thousand years, and then departed, leaving mankind a pretty, placid, doggish species, like some cross between the Jockaira of
Methuselah’s Children
and the Eloi of Wells’s
The Time Machine.

Diktor horses Wilson around, tricking him into making loop upon loop through time to meet himself and argue with himself and even punch himself in the mouth. And the poor befuddled Wilson finds himself helpless to do anything more than compulsively repeat lines he has already heard himself say twice over.

This callous treatment only leaves him suspicious, resentful and rebellious. Eventually, Wilson dodges ten years into Diktor’s past—where Diktor proves not to be—and sets himself up in Diktor’s place as boss of the docile local folk.

In time, however, being top dog here grows to be a bore, and Wilson conceives a desire to know more of the High Ones. He uses the Time Gate to search for them, and at last he sees one.

We aren’t told what it looks like, only what Wilson does: He screams. He runs away. He gets a fit of the shakes. He reacts like Slayton Ford in the temple of Kreel.

We are told: “He felt he had learned all about the High Ones a man could learn and still endure.”
⁵²⁴

Wilson’s sleep is ruined—he has night sweats and bad dreams. His face becomes lined and his hair and beard turn gray.

It is years before he can bring himself to fool around with the Time Gate again. And when he does, it is only to find himself inadvertently snatching young Bob Wilson, the graduate student, into this future moment.

At last, then, the heretofore unrecognized truth dawns on Wilson: “He was Diktor. He was
the
Diktor. He was
the only
Diktor!”
⁵²⁵

By no means does he fully comprehend what has happened even yet: “He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans.”
⁵²⁶

At this point, all he can think to do is to go on with the foreordained game, secure in the bittersweet certainty that what
has
happened
must
happen. And so, with the supreme false assurance of a used car salesman who has a live one on the hook, he smiles on his younger self and says, “ ‘There is a great future in store for you and me, my boy—a great future!’ ”
⁵²⁷

And Heinlein-as-narrator echoes wryly: “A great future!”
⁵²⁸

Like so much of Heinlein’s fiction in this year since his declaration of artistic freedom, “By His Bootstraps” was a confidently brilliant work of science fiction. Nobody had ever written a time travel story of this order of complexity before, and readers were dazzled by its intricacy.

But as ordinary readers were less likely to notice, “By His Bootstraps”—like most of Heinlein’s stories of the past year—was filled with undertones of bitterness, resignation and defeat, accentuated by Wilson/Diktor’s disastrous encounter with the High One. This story was one more “solution unsatisfactory.”

The one reader who could not help but notice Heinlein’s inability to cope with superior beings was John Campbell. In August 1941, Heinlein sent him yet another such story, a novelet called “Goldfish Bowl” in which this Earth is suggested to be the home of atmospheric intelligences who are as far beyond humanity as men are beyond fish.

In this story, two American scientists attempt to investigate a strange phenomenon—two gigantic waterspouts that have appeared in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii and remained in place for months. Instead, however, they find themselves taken prisoner and kept in the mysterious somewhere at the top of the spouts. From the manner in which they are held, it is possible for them to deduce that their keepers are highly advanced beings.

In
Methuselah’s Children,
Slayton Ford encountered Kreel in his temple, even though he could remember nothing of it afterward. And in “By His Bootstraps,” Bob Wilson was able to see the High One through the Time Gate, though again it would be a blank to him later. But the scientists in “Goldfish Bowl” aren’t permitted even this much. They never meet their captors, they never see them, and they are never able to communicate with them. They are just
kept.

One of the men, “an oceanographer specializing in ecology”
⁵²⁹
named Bill Eisenberg, says in despair:

“We’ve had some dignity as a race. We’ve striven and accomplished things. Even when we failed, we had the tragic satisfaction of knowing that we were, nevertheless, superior and more able than the other animals. We’ve had faith in the race—we would accomplish great things yet. But if we are just one of the lower animals ourselves, what does our great work amount to? Me, I couldn’t go on pretending to be a ‘scientist’ if I thought I was just a fish, mucking around in the bottom of a pool. My work wouldn’t
signify
anything.”
⁵³⁰

And, after his older companion has died and his body has been removed, Eisenberg thinks to himself:

They were outclassed. The human race had reached its highest point—the point at which it began to be aware that it was not the highest race, and the knowledge was death to it, one way or the other—the mere knowledge alone, even as the knowledge was now destroying him, Bill Eisenberg, himself.
⁵³¹

Despite the fact that by his own reasoning this knowledge can do humanity no good, what it occurs to him to do is to painfully inscribe a cryptic message in scar tissue on his body:
“BEWARE—CREATION TOOK EIGHT DAYS.”
⁵³²
And then he waits to die and to have his body thrown out like a pet goldfish flushed down the toilet.

This was the Heinlein story that John Campbell would attempt to turn down, as though he hoped a timely rejection might serve as a shock to bring Heinlein to his senses and help him escape from the grip of this compulsive funk. “Goldfish Bowl” would see publication—after Heinlein went on his strike and Campbell backed down and took the story—in the March 1942
Astounding
as another work by Anson MacDonald.

But Heinlein may have had his batteries recharged by his short vacation. When he did return to storytelling, it was with his longest and most ambitious piece of fiction yet, Anson MacDonald’s
Beyond This Horizon
(
Astounding,
Apr.-May 1942), a novel that he would complete all in a rush on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of official U.S. participation in World War II.

Beyond This Horizon
would be many things at once, as though with his time for writing SF visibly running out, Heinlein aimed to say everything he had to say in the pages of one story:

This novel would be a late scientific utopia, a vision of a society-to-come attempting to make itself better by the deliberate selection and cultivation of its citizens’ soundest and most desirable genetic qualities. In this, it would be a deliberate retort to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian satire
Brave New World
(1932), which itself had first been conceived as an attempt to answer H.G. Wells’s
Men Like Gods
(1923).

Beyond This Horizon
would also be a modern science fiction story, Heinlein’s most masterful presentation of a future America that is radically altered and yet still recognizable. The strange kind of skew that Heinlein had put on the opening pages of “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” and the first few chapters of
Methuselah’s Children,
he would manage to sustain for the entire length of this novel.

In the world of
Beyond This Horizon,
men wear their names back-to-front, pass through doors that dilate, compare shades of nail polish, surprise their ortho-wives by visiting them two days in a row, and sleep on beds filled with water (something Heinlein had conceived and designed, but not built, during the time he was bedfast with TB). They have colonies and research stations throughout the Solar System, including Pluto, but they have not yet made the big jump to the stars.

This future is not like the society of the Covenant. There a man might be sent off to Coventry for the deviant act of punching someone in the nose and refusing therapy. In the urbane survival-of-the-fittest society of
Beyond This Horizon,
however, first class citizens carry sidearms and fight duels to the death when their manners are called into question—and should they survive, they go back again to their dinners and think no more about it.

The world Heinlein presents in this story is the product of an entirely different course of future development from the one he had evolved for his official Future History. If “Magic, Inc.” was the story in which Heinlein had first shown that he could construct an imaginary future society around any state of knowledge or belief,
Beyond This Horizon
was Heinlein’s proof that he could just as readily invent future histories to order, now that he knew the method.

Heinlein had made it clear in his guest-of-honor speech in Denver in July—a mere two months after the publication of his Future History chart—that he wasn’t attached to the particulars of his prototype. He had said, “I do not expect my so-called
History of the Future
to come to pass, not in anything like those terms. I think some of the trends in it may show up; but I do not think that my factual predictions as such are going to come to pass, even in their broad outlines.”
⁵³³

What was actually central to him was the process of “time-binding,” a Korzybskian term that meant the making of mental projections into time-to-come as an exercise of preparation for future change.

So it was, then, that in
Beyond This Horizon,
the future historical thread given is all different. Rather than the rolling roads, we are referred to the “Atomic War of 1970.”
⁵³⁴
And instead of being reminded of the overthrow of the Prophets, we are bidden to recall “the Empire of the Great Khans.”
⁵³⁵

In this variant line of development, it would seem that after the overwhelming horror of the Atomic War people were so shocked at what they had done that they deliberately did their best to breed aggressiveness out of the species. Some resisted this, however, and set themselves apart. Eventually there was a war between the new pacific strain of humanity and unaltered man—the First Genetic War. We are told:

“The outcome was . . . a necessity and the details are unimportant. The ‘wolves’ ate the ‘sheep’.”
⁵³⁶

The Second Genetic War, some three hundred years later, was fought against the Great Khans over the issue of human general adaptability vs. special adaptation. Like Wells’s non-human Selenites in
The First Men in the Moon
or Aldous Huxley’s society in
Brave New World,
the Great Khans were willing to bend the basic form of man to produce specialized creatures for specialized tasks:

They tailored human beings—if you could call them that—as casually as we construct buildings. At their height, just before the Second Genetic War, they bred over three thousand types including the hyper-brains (thirteen sorts), the almost brainless matrons, the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins, and the neuter “mules”.
⁵³⁷

In fighting mule soldiers directly, generalized men did not fare well. But in the end, they won the war:

The Empire had one vulnerable point, its co-ordinators, the Khan, his satraps and administrators. Biologically the Empire was a single organism and could be killed at the top, like a hive with a single queen bee. At the end, a few score assassinations accomplished a collapse which could not be achieved in battle.

No need to dwell on the terror that followed the collapse. Let it suffice that no representative of
homo proteus
is believed to be alive today. He joined the great dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed cats.

He lacked adaptability.
⁵³⁸

With this history, it is no wonder that the society of
Beyond This Horizon
should be genetically oriented and survival-minded. However, in its genetic selection it avoids the mistakes of the past. It rejects tampering with either human nature or the human form. Instead, it strives to eliminate heritable defects and to conserve and generalize positive qualities:

Infants born with the assistance of the neo-Ortega-Martin gene selection techniques are normal babies, stemming from normal gene plasm, born of normal women, in the usual fashion. They differ in one respect only from their racial predecessors: they are the
best
babies their parents can produce!
⁵³⁹