The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (72 page)

However, at the same time, these robots keep thinking their own private thoughts and keep acting as though they have free will. Persistently. So persistently that Chip Delany, a young black reader of science fiction in Harlem during the Fifties who would himself grow up to be a leading writer of SF, would find it only natural to interpret Asimov’s robots as wily slaves evading the unreasonable dictates of their masters.
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And it is certainly true that in “Reason,” just as in “Nightfall,” it is human mental attitudes that must ultimately be adjusted—not the universe or the robot.

However, it would be precisely the acceptance of this crucial fact—that changes in human thinking are not merely possible, or even desirable, but with the passage of time must be inevitable—that would open wide the imagined future in
Astounding.
This was the key insight of Robert Heinlein, master builder of future societies.

Mental bent, far more than gadgets or inventions, would characterize and define Heinlein’s various futures. For all the difference it would make, it could as easily be the people of
Methuselah’s Children
who sleep on water beds and the folk of
Beyond This Horizon
who have wardrobes with the ability to snag a tossed garment out of the air and hang it up neatly, rather than the other way around. What really sets his societies apart is their radically different values, ideas and assumptions. They don’t think the same way.

Taken in sum, Heinlein’s pre-war futuristic stories, such as “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Coventry,” “Magic, Inc.,” and “Universe,” would present a broad array of distinctly different frames of mind. This was an even more significant accomplishment than Heinlein’s formal framework of the Future History. By viewing futurity as a smorgasbord of potential mental states to choose from, Heinlein transformed time-to-come from The Future—a procession of inevitabilities destined to culminate in the guttering out of the Sun—into a realm of multiplicity and indeterminism.

However, there would be a certain number of stories published in Campbell’s magazines during the Golden Age which presented the new post-materialistic expressions of transcendence without even bothering to nod respectfully in the direction of universal operating principles. For as long as it continued to be published—until the fall of 1943—
Unknown,
the magazine of alternate possibilities offered in a spirit of good clean fun, was a more receptive home for these stories of shifting realities and the stranger side of consciousness than
Astounding,
the serious and responsible magazine of human control over the future and outer space.

Of all Campbell’s writers, it was L. Ron Hubbard who was perhaps the most persistently drawn to the subject of reality and consciousness. Arguably, the best work that Hubbard would produce for Campbell was two mind-based short novels published in
Unknown
in 1940—“Fear” (July) and “Typewriter in the Sky” (Nov.-Dec.).

In “Fear,” an over-rational, spirit-denying college professor named James Lowry, misunderstanding the circumstances in which he has discovered his wife and his best friend together (they are planning a surprise party for him), has murdered them both with an ax. Lowry then spends the next several days flipping in and out of what appear to be fantasy episodes, but are eventually revealed to be psychotic states, before he is finally able to acknowledge to himself and to us what he has done.

The even more provocative “Typewriter in the Sky” offers Mike de Wolf, a contemporary piano player, who suddenly finds himself living out the role of a character—specifically, the antagonist, Spanish Admiral Miguel de Lobo—in a buccaneer novel,
Blood and Loot,
which is in the process of being banged out by his best friend, a cynical, slapdash writer named Horace Hackett.

As de Wolf thinks, when he discovers the truth of his situation:

That would mean that he was Horace Hackett’s villain in truth and in the flesh. And it would mean that he was in a never-never land where anything might and probably would happen. Where time would be distorted and places scrambled and distances jumbled and people singletrack of character—
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Hackett sits around in his customary dirty bathrobe and pounds the typewriter keys. And again and again de Wolf within the inner narrative is compelled to do and say what he would rather not.

No real solution is ever worked out for this uncomfortable situation—only an eventual storm-tossed transference of de Wolf back to his familiar world, which leaves him wondering if that “reality,” too, could be the product of a God who on his own plane is no more than another cheap word merchant like Horace Hackett. The short novel ends with this intimation by de Wolf of what, under the circumstances, just might be L. Ron Hubbard himself, hovering behind the scenes of his story:

“Up there—

“God?

“In a dirty bathrobe?”
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“Typewriter in the Sky” can be understood as an old-fashioned alien exploration story, but with a new basis of transfer from one world to another—the thoughts of an outside intelligence. Except for the radical discontinuities that result from the struggle for control between Hackett and de Wolf, the realm of being that is reached—which previously would have been the World Beyond the Hill—wouldn’t be notably marvelous. No more so than the world presented in any conventional pulp pirate story. But the ordinary Village “reality” to which Mike de Wolf returns—like the world of James Lowry in “Fear”—has been altered into a place of utter uncertainty.

One story originating in
Unknown
would stand apart from the rest for its presentation of the new transcendence of probability and the new transcendence of mental power, and for its successful equation of the two, without any invocation of universal operating principles. This was Jack Williamson’s novel
Darker Than You Think,
first published in the same December 1940 issue as the second installment of “Typewriter in the Sky,” and then expanded for book publication in 1948.

Like other late pioneer children we have met, Jack Williamson, one-time dweller in the Stone Age and traveler by covered wagon, had grown up with awe and love for the amazing new science of the Twentieth Century. As a youth, he picked up whatever scientific information he could from magazine articles and encyclopedias. Though he had no money to speak of and very few resources available to him, young Williamson still did his best to follow the path of science. He constructed batteries and motors which never quite managed to work. He attempted to build an adding machine out of pine sticks. And he even put together a steam engine of sorts with a lye can for a boiler, which promptly blew up.

At last, after his graduation from an unaccredited rural New Mexico high school, Williamson got his opportunity to go off to college and study real science. What a keen disappointment it was, then, for him to find himself being instructed in Nineteenth Century physics by a professor who knew nothing whatever about the new science of radioactivity and subatomic particles that Williamson found so fascinating. By the time he finished two years at West Texas State College, it had become evident to Williamson that he would much rather be an SF writer than an actual practicing scientist, and he dropped out of school to seek wider experience.

But the consequence of traveling this road was that Williamson had much less in the way of formal instruction in orthodox science and engineering than did the likes of Campbell, de Camp, Heinlein or Asimov, and so, perhaps, had less of a predisposition to have faith in universal operating principles. He wasn’t as committed to Newtonian science as they.

Even so, when John Campbell became editor of
Astounding,
Williamson was able to find ways to produce science fiction that he would buy, while others who had written successfully for Hugo Gernsback or even F. Orlin Tremaine couldn’t get anywhere with Campbell.

Williamson had two things in particular going for him. One was that great degree of personal adaptability which had made him the only writer able to sell SF stories to every market and every editor from
Argosy
to
Weird Tales.
The other was his active continuing interest in the new post-materialistic forms of transcendence.

We’ve already seen Williamson offering an early fictional representation of the assertion that this is a world of probability rather than certainty in his novel
The Legion of Time,
with its different contending futures struggling to come into existence. But he was also very quick to pick up on the new Twentieth Century psychology of the unconscious.

Even though he might appear amiable and undemanding to others, Williamson himself was far from being content with his own soft-voiced, stoop-shouldered diffidence and his backwardness in social relationships. In 1936-37, a time when such things were far from commonplace, especially for farm boys from New Mexico, he undertook a year of psychoanalysis with Dr. Charles Tidd at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Dr. Tidd later moved to Southern California, and in 1940-41, Williamson followed him to Los Angeles and underwent a second year of analysis and therapy.

Darker Than You Think,
which Williamson wrote shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, would become his personal favorite among all his stories. It was a by-product of the self-work he was doing, an expression of both the reluctance and the exuberance involved in his “growing willingness to accept bits of myself that I had always feared or hated.”
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The protagonist of
Darker Than You Think
is Will Barbee, an orphan raised in institutions who has grown up to be a hard-drinking and none-too-happy young newspaper reporter. Barbee has never managed to get over his unaccountable rejection by his one-time college mentor and surrogate father, a professor of anthropology named Dr. Lamarck Mondrick.

At the opening of the story, Barbee is at the airport to attend a press conference called by Dr. Mondrick and his assistants—in former times Barbee’s closest friends—who have just flown back from an archaeological expedition to Inner Mongolia. Dr. Mondrick, not looking at all well, speaks to the newsmen of a hidden enemy of mankind and the coming of “ ‘a Black Messiah—the Child of the Night—whose appearance among true men will be the signal for a savage and hideous and incredible rebellion.’ ”
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But then, before he can say anything more substantial, he drops dead from an apparent heart attack.

Will Barbee is left deeply troubled. It seems that Mondrick was allergic to cats, and prior to the news conference Barbee had seen a black kitten in the hands of April Bell, a young and beautiful red-haired reporter whom he finds both alluring and unsettling. He can’t help wondering if she deliberately triggered a fatal asthmatic seizure in Mondrick.

He is even more bothered when he discovers the abandoned body of the little black kitten. It is dead twice over—strangled with the red ribbon that had been tied in a bow around its neck, and stabbed to the heart with the pin of April Bell’s jade brooch.

When Barbee confronts April with this seeming bit of witchery, she confesses to him that indeed she is a witch. And Dr. Mondrick was her dedicated enemy.

Long ago there existed many of her kind, who were eventually tracked down and exterminated by normal mankind—but not before they had interbred with humanity. Now, in a materialistic era in which black magic and shape-shifting are no longer given credence by most people, the witches are selecting for their own genes and backbreeding themselves into existence once more. Not only was Mondrick aware of this, but he had come back from Mongolia having discovered what he sought, the ancient secret of how to detect and combat witches. It was utterly necessary that he be killed.

Barbee is more than a bit of a modern skeptic himself, and furthermore is bedazzled by April, and he finds it hard to accept this story at face value. In the original short novel, he attempts to explain it to himself in terms of Freud’s study of the unconscious mind and Rhine’s investigations of extrasensory perception.

In the book version, however, there is more. To make sense of what he has been told, Barbee attempts to translate it into terms of quantum reality. He thinks:

Probability—he recalled a classroom digression of Mondrick’s on that word, back in Anthropology 413. Probability, the bright-eyed old scholar said, was the key concept of modern physics. The laws of nature, he insisted, were not absolute, but merely established statistical averages. The paper weight on his desk . . . was supported, Mondrick said, only by the chance collisions of vibrating atoms. At any instant, there was a slight but definite probability that it might fall through the seemingly solid desk.
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We may recognize this, in itself, as a very near repetition of what Williamson had already suggested in
The Legion of Time,
serialized in
Astounding
in 1938. However, in the book version of
Darker Than You Think,
Barbee takes this line of thought and couples it with the mentalistic speculations of his original short novel:

The direct mental control of probability would surely open terrifying avenues of power—and the Rhine experiments had seemingly established that control. Had April Bell, he wondered uneasily, just been born with a unique and dangerous mental power to govern the operation of probability?
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In this rationalization of witchcraft, then, we have a direct linkage of quantum mechanics and Joseph Rhine’s experiments in ESP. The suggestion is that the same mind power that can predict symbol cards and tip dice will be able to directly affect atomic reality, seen as the source of multiple possibility.

Barbee immediately discounts his speculations. But as soon as he goes to bed, he finds himself caught up in a queer vivid dream in which he changes into the form of a wolf and joins April, also in the shape of a wolf, and runs the night with her.

In the course of this experience, April explains the ability to change shape, and her account matches Barbee’s own probabilistic and mentalistic line of speculation. She says: