The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  In a state of considerable disquiet, Lazarus mentally reviews the situation of the Howard Families:

  The hegira of the Families had been a mistake. It would have been a more human, a more mature and manly thing, to have stayed and fought for their rights, even if they had died insisting on them. Instead they had fled across half a universe (Lazarus was reckless about his magnitudes) looking for a place to light. They had found one, a good one—but already occupied by beings so superior as to make them intolerable for men . . . yet so supremely indifferent in their superiority to men that they had not even bothered to wipe them out, but had whisked them away to this—this overmanicured country club.

  And that in itself was the unbearable humiliation. The New Frontiers was the culmination of five hundred years of human scientific research, the best that men could do—but it had been flicked across the deeps of space as casually as a man might restore a baby bird to its nest.

  The Little People did not seem to want to kick them out, but the Little People, in their own way, were as demoralizing to men as were the gods of the Jockaira. One at a time they might be morons but taken as groups each rapport group was a genius that threw the best minds that men could offer into the shade. Even Andy. Human beings could not hope to compete with that type of organization any more than a backroom shop could compete with an automated cybernated factory. Yet to form any such group identities, even if they could, which he doubted, would be, Lazarus felt very sure, to give up whatever it was that made them men.512

  And almost immediately, the question of what makes a man is put to the test. One of the oldest humans, fearing death, chooses to swap her individuality for a permanent continuing existence as an element in a Little People rapport group. And a human child is born that has been modified and improved by the Little People:

  It lacked even the button nose of a baby, nor were there evident external ears. There were organs in the usual locations of each but flush with the skull and protected with bony ridges. Its hands had too many fingers and there was an extra large one near each wrist which ended in a cluster of pink worms. There was something odd about the torso of the infant which Lazarus could not define. But two other gross facts were evident: the legs ended not in human feet but in horny, toeless pediments—hoofs. And the creature was hermaphroditic—not in deformity but in healthy development, an androgyne.513

  At this point, only a very few of the long-lifers wish to continue exploring among the stars. A larger handful is content to remain with the Little People. But the vast majority, Lazarus chief amongst them, wants to go home.

  So homeward they go. When they arrive, they find that seventy-four years have passed on Earth. They aren’t received as outlaws and fugitives as they had feared, but rather as heroic stellar explorers. Nobody is mad or jealous anymore. Thanks to positive thinking and radioactive vitamins everyone is a long-lifer now, and everything is just swell.

  The story concludes with Lazarus whistling “California here I come! Right back where I started from!”514 and hoping that his favorite Dallas chili house from way back when is still in business.

  What an unsatisfactory ending this is! Here we have Robert Heinlein—the man who assured us that any custom, technique, institution, belief, or social structure must change—concluding a novel about a stellar voyage longer than the entire reign of the Prophets with the earnest hope that nothing has changed on Earth and that things will still be the same as when the Families left.

  More than that. The early chapters of Methuselah’s Children were Heinlein’s most futuristic work yet, filled with casually fantastic detailing like this: “When Lazarus went to bed he stepped out of his kilt and chucked it toward a wardrobe . . . which snagged it, shook it out, and hung it up neatly. ‘Nice catch,’ he commented. . . .”515

  But it isn’t even this world that Lazarus seems to expect to find upon his return. What he actually has in his head, at least, are the songs and cuisine of his boyhood, way, way back in the Twentieth Century. Seemingly Lazarus has encountered more than he can handle among the stars and it has shocked him out of 275 years or so of growth.

  A fundamental Techno Age problem is presented for solution in Methuselah’s Children—the problem of evolutionary superiority. It is set forth no fewer than five times: by the Howard Families; by the gods of the Jockaira; by the Little People; by a human choosing to join a Little People rapport group; and by the human baby that the Little People redesign and improve.

  The first of these cases, the longevity of the Howard Families, proves in time not to be a true example of evolutionary difference after all. Mere longer life doesn’t make the long-lifers any wiser or more competent or more successful as human beings. As Lazarus is frank to say in criticism of one Family member: “ ‘Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should ‘a’ bred for brains instead of age.’ ”516

  In fact, it is precisely because this difference is only a superficial one that ordinary humanity can catch up to the Howard Families so quickly and that the long-lifers can be welcomed back to Earth at the end of the story.

  But the other examples are far more serious challenges. They represent the prospect of fundamental change in human form and human mentation, of encounter with beings who can out-compete us on our own terms, and, most trying of all, of discovery of the existence of beings of another and higher order than our own.

  The Howard Families and Lazarus Long simply are unequipped to cope with any one of these possibilities. Instead, they are left feeling bullied and baffled, horrified and demoralized. Like kids who have dared to cross the street to the next block and discovered more than they can deal with there, they must turn tail and scoot for home to climb into the safety and comfort of a nice hot bowl of chili.

  But as hard as Lazarus and the others might try to pretend that nothing at all really happened on the voyage of the New Frontiers, we, who were along for the ride, certainly know better. We can remember Administrator Slayton Ford—a man of such “superior ability and unmatched experience”517 that he was able to take over executive direction of the Howard Families even though not a long-lifer himself—as he ran weeping and distraught from the temple of Kreel, gazed on Lazarus with “horror-stricken eyes”518 and then clutched him desperately for security.

  With his ideal of an elite of human competence, Robert Heinlein was easily able to imagine coming to terms with a future of social and psychological change. But evolutionary change was another matter. Could even the most competent of men cope with creatures like Kreel? Maybe not. Probably not. As one character says ruefully to Lazarus: “ ‘Those creatures the Jockaira worshiped—it does not seem possible that any amount of living could raise us up to that level.’ ”519

  We should note that Heinlein would not always feel this way. In 1958, a moment when faith in the efficacy of universal operating principles had reached its maximum, Heinlein would publish the revised and expanded book version of Methuselah’s Children. There he would drop out this line that we have just quoted, and he would add a concluding conversation between Lazarus and Andy Libby in which Lazarus expresses renewed zest for interstellar exploration and a determination to grow up enough someday to take on the gods of the Jockaira.

  Libby says: “ ‘They weren’t gods, Lazarus. You shouldn’t call them that.’ ”520

  And Lazarus answers:

  “Of course they weren’t—I think. My guess is that they are creatures who have had enough time to do a little hard thinking. Some day, about a thousand years from now, I intend to march straight into the temple of Kreel, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Howdy, bub—what do you know that I don’t know?’ ”521

  With these changes, Heinlein would reduce the gap between Kreel and Lazarus from an evolutionary difference that can’t possibly be surmounted to a mere difference in state of knowledge. In the same way that the ordinary people left behind on Earth managed to scuffle and scramble and catch up to the Howard Families, so may Lazarus aspire to catch up to Kreel in another
thousand years or so.

  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 deliber
ate 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.