The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (85 page)

The first rule in science fiction as Campbell knew it—and in pulp fiction in general—was that things must happen. There must be visible action.

In the stories that the young Campbell had made his initial reputation with, for instance, there had been clashes between cosmic antagonists contending for dominance, climaxed as like as not by a titanic space battle with rays of various colors shooting off and whole planets exploding like rotten tomatoes. Now there was visible action for you!

And even in the more thoughtful modern science fiction that the editor was pioneering in
Astounding,
there would typically be some well-defined public problem—a strike on the rolling roads, or a robot who can read human minds, or a disaster in an atomic plant—which would then be resolved through a timely application of the proper universal operating principle.

But van Vogt’s fiction wasn’t like that. Despite all the powerful forces, the overwhelming personalities, and the levels and levels of possible becoming that were represented in his stories, in most of them very little overtly happened.

Van Vogt’s stories were dreamlike—made up as he went along, deliberately written in such a way as to elude the reader’s conscious grasp, altering with each new intuitional flash, changing direction completely every ten pages. And, like dreams, they didn’t seem to observe ordinary daylight standards of cause and effect. Instead, the reader would find himself in the midst of some ongoingness, and then, after an abrupt transition, find himself dealing with some other given state—and then another, and then another. In a van Vogt story things didn’t seem to
happen
so much as they just
were.

In van Vogt’s work there was also very little in the way of public problem-solving, and almost no direct physical conflict. A typical van Vogt story would be far more likely to climax with a conversation than with a fight.

Even when we look for outright physical contention where we might most expect to see it, in van Vogt’s earliest human vs. monster stories, we simply don’t find it. Rather, those powerful, hostile creatures would ultimately fall victim to their own flawed natures, or panic and commit suicide, or turn tail and flee whimpering into the intergalactic darkness.

The true plane of action in van Vogt’s fiction would not be physical, but mental and moral. The classic van Vogt story would start with the presentation of some limited attitude or level of understanding and, after all the changes were done, conclude with another that was more sane and inclusive—which might well be the complete opposite of the original point of view.

At the outset of
Slan,
for instance, Kier Gray is taken to be the principal persecutor of the tendrilled slans, the archenemy whom Jommy must someday seek out and kill. But at the climax of the story—which is not the scene of violent contention we have been led to expect, but rather a moment of recognition—Jommy sees Kier Gray in a new light, as a caretaker of mankind in all forms with whom he must henceforth ally himself.

In similar fashion, the powerful yet still less than self-sufficient ezwal in “Co-operate—or Else!” learns from the harsh reality of the jungle planet that it is necessary for him to alter his attitudes, surrender his prejudices, and learn to cooperate with whoever is there to be cooperated with. He must give up being a special partisan of his own kind and become a citizen of a galactic federation of unlike beings.

And in “The Weapon Shop,” Fara Clark must cease to be a slavish idolizer of the empress—and a helpless victim of her exploitations—and become a self-responsible member of an alternate society of free and just men. At the conclusion of the story, Clark marvels that his sleepy native village can look so unchanged to his outward eye—the ordering of the universe within his mind is now so utterly different.

It was just this kind of rearrangement that van Vogt aimed to bring about in the minds of his readers. If at the outset they presumed, in conventional mid-Twentieth Century fashion, that the nature of the universe must be inherently amoral, accidental, competitive and fragmented, van Vogt would cast doubt on these assumptions with his sudden unveilings of the new organic reality, and perhaps even succeed in transforming them completely with the impact of his brilliant revelatory flashes.

Again and again, the bold ringing lines that concluded so many of van Vogt’s stories would zap home a startling new apprehension of the way things are. In a single lightning phrase like “Poor, unsuspecting superman!” or “He would not witness, but he would cause, the formation of the planets,” the order of the universe would be wholly remade.

When John Campbell suggested that “The Weapon Shop” was a nice little park path walk, good without any detectable reason for being interesting, there was no rational answer that van Vogt could conceivably make to this left-handed compliment. He couldn’t explain to the editor what he was actually up to; it was all that he could do to
do
it. The only effective response available to him was to write a story, “The Search,” that was more of the same, send it to Campbell, and see what happened.

And, no doubt, John Campbell did find “The Search” another strangely fashioned piece of work. Like “The Weapon Shop,” this new novelet was an access-of-knowledge story. But, if anything, it had even less action to offer—not even the implicit potential for purely defensive violence inherent in a weapon shop gun seated in a holster on the hip of a Fara Clark. In “The Search,” everything was accomplished with a glance, a word, at most a touch.

In true van Vogtian style, the story began with a state of ignorance and limitation. It shifted abruptly from one queer set of circumstances to another. It climaxed with a conversation. And it concluded with a striking final line in which the conventional ordering of the universe was stood on its head. Along the way, it displayed haunting dream imagery and introduced a powerful new science fiction concept.

“The Search” was one of van Vogt’s more effective stories, and John Campbell was the first to recognize it. Whatever the puzzlement and disquiet he might feel where van Vogt’s fiction was concerned, he would buy this novelet with his usual promptness and publish it the month following “The Weapon Shop,” in the January 1943 issue of
Astounding.

As “The Search” begins, Ralph Drake, the protagonist, is lying in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia. This acute state of personal ignorance was a device that van Vogt would come to employ on a number of occasions in his fiction.

It seems that Drake was found in a ditch with papers identifying him as a salesman for a writing supply company. But the most recent events he can remember happened two weeks previously. He had just been rejected by his draft board for an odd but harmless reason—the location of his internal organs is reversed from the normal. And as his next move, he had decided to apply for this job as a traveling salesman.

There in the hospital, he is told that the territory he had been assigned to cover includes the area of farms and small towns around Piffer’s Road—the little community where he was born and spent his boyhood. Drake determines that he will go back to the beginning of his route and retrace his steps in hopes of discovering the events he cannot remember.

Along the way, he falls in with another traveling salesman, who informs him that the two of them had been sitting together on his previous trip when a girl, Selanie Johns, boarded their train at a local stop with her basket of souvenirs. The girl’s father is a buyer of old metal who makes a number of strange and wonderful gadgets—among them fountain pens that offer a choice of different colored inks and never need refilling, and cups that provide a variety of refreshing liquids to drink. Young Selanie sells these, one to a customer, for only a dollar.

When the salesman had showed him the pen that he had bought from her, Drake had been astounded by it. His company simply couldn’t match its quality or value, let alone its marvelous nature. But while Drake was examining the pen, a fine-looking old man seated across the aisle asked to see it, and when it was passed to him somehow it snapped in two.

Selanie was told of this accident as she passed through the train with her basket. Looking at the old man, she had gotten back such a powerful stare that she’d fled the train at the very next stop—Piffer’s Road. Drake had followed after. And that was the last the salesman had seen of either of them until now.

Drake pursues the trail of his lost memory to Piffer’s Road. He hopes to find the Johnses there, but the trailer they live in has been moved somewhere else. And when he makes inquiries at the house of a woman neighbor, he hears another strange story:

Two weeks earlier, the neighbor’s son had seen Drake come from the train and enter the Johnses’ trailer. And he’d spied on him as Drake found even more super-gadgets there—glasses that serve as anything from a microscope to a telescope, and cameras that deliver developed pictures instantly.

But when Selanie and her father had come to the trailer in a state of agitation, the boy had anticipated trouble and run away. When he looked back, the trailer was gone—not driven away, but suddenly vanished—with Drake still aboard.

Furthermore, it seems that very shortly after this, a fine-looking old gentleman had come around asking people about the gadgets they had bought from Mr. Johns. And two days later, every one of these items was missing, with a dollar left behind as payment.

Drake goes back to his hotel wondering what to make of all this, and there he sees a splendid-looking old man who has just broken another man’s pen and is offering him a dollar in compensation. Drake confronts him on the sidewalk outside the hotel. But the old man suddenly seizes Drake’s wrist with a grip impossible to resist and hustles him into a car, and there he loses consciousness.

When Drake opens his eyes again, he is lying on his back under a high domed ceiling in some immense building. A great marble corridor stretches farther than his eye can see in either direction.

He follows the main corridor, ignoring all the many doors and side corridors and branch corridors he passes, until it seems to him that the building must be fully ten miles long. At last he comes to a great final door that opens onto clouds of fog. He descends a course of one hundred steps, and there he discovers that the building hangs unsupported in the mist.

Back inside the building, he enters an office. It contains journals, ledgers and reports concerning the affairs of “Possessor Kingston Craig.”
⁷⁰⁰
This man is apparently capable of traveling nine hundred years into the future—or twenty-five thousand—in order to right wrongs, avert murders, or convince ruthless rulers to behave themselves, even though to do so means the creation of new “probability worlds.”
⁷⁰¹
On one occasion, Craig spent months quietly working to establish “the time of demarcation between the ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth centuries.”
⁷⁰²
And whenever he has completed a job, this Possessor returns to “the Palace of Immortality.”
⁷⁰³

It would seem that we are privileged to have a peek into the intimate file cabinets of an organization that has undertaken a truly vast responsibility—the care and direction of mankind through future time. We may recall that the weapon shops only dedicated themselves to the righting of individual wrongs; they didn’t presume to interfere with the main stream of human existence. But these Possessors from the Palace of Immortality apparently have no such reservations. They have both the ability and the moral confidence necessary to range ahead through time, altering, shaping and guiding the future development of man.

When Drake is through examining the papers of Kingston Craig, he discovers a magnificently furnished apartment at the head of a flight of stairs off a side corridor. He eats there and then goes to sleep.

He wakes to find a handsome woman beside him in the bed and she speaks to him as though they know each other well. And when he goes outside the apartment, he finds that the previously deserted building is now busy with people.

A man approaches Drake, calling him by name. And shortly they are joined by the handsome woman, who is introduced as Drake’s wife—the former Selanie Johns.

It is explained that this place is the Palace of Immortality. It was built in the only known reverse time eddy, so that whoever lives here grows younger instead of older.

There are three thousand Possessors—people gifted with the innate ability to travel through time. All were born during a five hundred year period beginning in the Twentieth Century in the area around an infinitesimal rural American community called Piffer’s Road. These Possessors share a common physical characteristic—the location of their internal organs is reversed from that of an ordinary person.

Selanie’s father, it seems, is a Possessor who does not believe that the work the Possessors are doing is right. Through the influence of the gadgets he sells and the removal of metal from the area around Piffer’s Road, he means to alter the conditions that originally caused the Possessors to be born.

If Mr. Johns succeeds, he will bring into being a probability world in which the Palace of Immortality stands silent and empty—just as Drake saw it yesterday. The only way in which he can be thwarted is for an untrained Possessor—specifically, Ralph Drake—to approach him and seize him by the shoulder with a special glove. Will Drake agree to do this?

As an influence on Drake’s decision, Selanie then recounts her memory of what was said and done while Drake was hiding in the trailer that disappeared from Piffer’s Road:

Her father was mightily upset by the appearance of the pen-breaking old man on the train. As their trailer moved off through time to evade this Possessor, Mr. Johns exclaimed: “ ‘When I think of the almighty sacrilege of that outfit, acting like God, daring to use their powers to change the natural course of existence instead of, as I suggested, making it a means of historical research—’ ”
⁷⁰⁴

And that was the moment in which Drake stepped forth from hiding, seized Mr. Johns by the shoulder with a gloved hand, and destroyed forever his power to pass through time.