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

by Alexei Panshin

  This is highly upsetting. North American Power-Air, the great energy conglomerate which supplies more than half of the energy of the continent, is understandably anxious to resolve this problem quickly, whatever its nature may be. Their fear is that power to the cities may soon begin to fail, too—and, in fact, it does.

  The most troubled of the NAPA executives is Dr. Rambeau, head of research. In this day, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has been overturned and overturned again, and physics is once more considered an exact science. But Rambeau can’t find anything wrong with those malfunctioning deKalbs. And yet they still refuse to work properly.

  This is contrary to everything that Rambeau knows and believes. His religious faith in modern science is being severely shaken, and he doesn’t know what to do.

  In the face of this disintegrating situation, North American Power-Air’s Chairman of the Board and its Chief Engineer, who are more practical and less theoretical men than Rambeau, have no hesitation in soliciting the special problem-solving talents of Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones. This self-taught genius is a grossly fat invalid, rich, nasty, greedy and selfish, who lives with his two pets, a mastiff and a canary, in a space station parked twenty-five thousand miles above the Earth.

  Waldo deals impersonally with his fellow human beings. He communicates with them either by means of a TV-phone or through a full-size dummy replica of himself that sits in an outer room of the space station. The things that are around him, and things below on Earth, Waldo manipulates with the aid of power-multiplying remote-control mechanical hands of his own devising, known as “waldoes” after him.

  The basis for this character had been with Heinlein for a long time. He would explain:

  Back in 1918 I read an article in Popular Mechanics about a poor fellow afflicted with myasthenia gravis, pathological muscular weakness so great that even handling a knife and fork is too much effort. In this condition the brain and the control system are okay, the muscles almost incapable. This man—I don’t even know his name; the article is lost in the dim corridors of time—this genius did not let myasthenia gravis defeat him. He devised complicated lever arrangements to enable him to use what little strength he had and he became an inventor and industrial engineer, specializing in how to get maximum result for least effort. He turned his affliction into an asset.582

  Beyond this obvious model, however, in Waldo’s cool, unsympathetic intelligence, his rotundity, and his helplessness in Earth’s gravity, we can catch a strong afterwhiff of Big Brain. Waldo and his situation also express something of the original Cartesian aspiration to be a remote disembodied mind riding high above all material things and studying them from afar.

  At the outset, Waldo will have nothing to do with North American Power-Air. He bears the company a grudge over a patent dispute. But eventually, having been made aware of his dependence on a functioning civilization down below, Waldo agrees to tackle NAPA’s unsolvable problem.

  Waldo is a man of universal operating principles. It’s his belief that he can make the cosmos do what he wants it to do. If no answer to a problem presently exists, he believes that he can always invent one. Moreover, he sees his confidence that he can wring answers out of a reluctant universe as something that distinguishes him from Rambeau, who is a more old-fashioned man of natural law:

  “To Rambeau the universe was an inexorably ordered cosmos, ruled by unvarying law. To Waldo the universe was the enemy, which he strove to force to submit to his will. They might have been speaking of the same thing, but their approaches were different.”583

  In the event, however, Waldo proves no more able than Rambeau to get the dead deKalbs to work again.

  But there is one man who can. This is Gramps Schneider, an ancient Pennsylvania hex doctor. As a personal favor for a local boy, he has fixed the malfunctioning deKalbs of the assistant to NAPA’s Chief Engineer. The catch is that the deKalbs now work in a way they never did before. The rigid antennae that draw broadcast radiation from the air now behave like so many wriggling worms.

  Dr. Rambeau is the first to examine the altered machine. He even manages to learn how to duplicate the anomalous effect, but only at the cost of his sanity. He calls Waldo up on the viewphone to tell him what he is able to do:

  “I’ve learned how to do it,” he said tensely.

  “How to do what?”584

  “Make the deKalbs work. The dear, dear deKalbs.” He suddenly thrust his hands at Waldo, while clutching frantically with his fingers. “They go like this: Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle! . . .

  “Listen carefully: Nothing is certain. . . . Hens will crow and cocks will lay. You are here and I am there. Or maybe not. Nothing is certain. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING is certain! Around and around the little ball goes, and where it stops nobody knows. Only I’ve learned how to do it.”

  “How to do what?”

  “How to make the little ball stop where I want it to.”

  It is clear that Rambeau has flipped his wig completely. And very shortly, NAPA officials have him strapped to a confining stretcher and carried off to the hospital. Somewhere en route, however, Rambeau manages to escape from his restraint, leaving the straps of his stretcher still buckled in place, and disappears into thin air.

  Waldo is left with the squirming, writhing deKalb receptors. But they are every bit as baffling to him as the deKalbs that ought to work but don’t:

  Waldo was forced to conclude that he was faced with new phenomena, phenomena for which he did not know the rules. If there were rules. . . . For he was honest with himself. If he saw what he thought he saw, then rules were being broken by the new phenomena, rules which he had considered valid, rules to which he had never previously encountered exceptions.585

  At last, all he can think to do is go visit Gramps Schneider, who not only declines to own modern machinery but won’t even communicate with Waldo by viewphone. The consequence is that it is necessary for Waldo to venture down into the overwhelming gravitational field of Earth for the first time in seventeen years.

  However, when he arrives, he finds Gramps Schneider as sweet and helpful as he can be. The old hex doctor feeds Waldo coffee and cake and tells him everything he desires to know, and more. Not only does he show him how to fix the ailing deKalbs, but also how to repair his own woefully inadequate muscles.

  Schneider tells him:

  “One of the ancients said that everything either is, or is not. That is less than true, for a thing can both be and not be. With practice one can see it both ways. Sometimes a thing which is for this world is a thing which is not for the Other World. Which is important, since we live in the Other World. . . . The mind—not the brain, but the mind—is in the Other World, and reaches this world through the body. That is one true way of looking at it, though there are others.”586

  Schneider goes on to suggest to Waldo that it is because of the doubt and fatigue of their pilots that the air cars have been failing. It is belief in modern science that has kept them up in the sky, and when that lapses, down they fall. To fix the deKalbs—and to heal Waldo’s ineffective muscles—it is necessary to draw on the power of the Other World.

  This is not only a lot for Waldo to absorb, but it is contrary to everything he ever thought he knew, and it takes him a while to come to terms with what he has been told. But he is a pre-eminently practical man, and by the time he can produce the Schneider effect in the deKalb receptors himself, Waldo has altered much of his previous thinking.

  For one thing, he has begun to give magic credence as a mode of thought with its own measure of validity—which in some cases has been confirmed by modern science, but in other cases may have been too hastily dismissed by science and its reductionist either-or logic.

  Waldo goes on from this to convince himself that the Other World of which Schneider speaks really does exist, and that this is the source of power that the altered deKalbs are drawing upon. He tries to picture the alternate realm in his mind, knowing as he does so that the image is probably inadequate,
but still finding it convenient: “ ‘I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from here to the farthest star.’ ”587

  From conceding that there might be something to magic after all, and further postulating that there really might be an alternate realm of being with the power to affect this world, Waldo somewhat reluctantly abandons the safety and security of natural law to experiment with a mentalistic point of view:

  Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb receptors should work, work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable—it could not be lived with.

  Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind!

  The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountain. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A mind-created animism dominated the world then.

  More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, worked the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them.

  Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.588

  This is a most remarkable sequence of speculation. There is nothing that matches it elsewhere in the Golden Age Astounding or Unknown.

  In the first place, it is a direct philosophical statement of the great insight that is expressed again and again by Heinlein’s early futuristic stories: Over the course of time, thought patterns accepted at any one moment as normal, self-evident and completely sufficient can change and do change.

  “Waldo” may further be seen as a prescient attempt to recognize and come to terms with the very same succession of mental orientations in Western society that has been of concern to us throughout this account of the story of science fiction—the transition from spiritual belief to materialism, and the further shift from materialism to emergent post-materialism.

  Finally, in Waldo’s own modes of thinking we can glimpse the spectrum of thought typical of Campbell’s Golden Age, from his initial pragmatic belief in his ability to force answers out of an uncooperative universe, to his brief moment here on the heady heights of mentalism and probabilism.

  But, as story titles like “Fear” and Darker Than You Think should indicate to us, at this early hour the new transcendence could still seem so intense, untamed and perverse as to be well-nigh intolerable. Consciousness and uncertainty were almost as frightening to the new Atomic Age as wild science had been to the Romantics or as the enigmatical immensities of time and space had appeared to the Age of Technology.

  So it is for only a very brief moment that Waldo can tolerate this much transcendent possibility. As we have just overheard him thinking, he isn’t at all sure that it is possible to live without predictability. And the new uncertain, indeterminate reality in which “ ‘a thing can both be, not be, and be anything’ ”589 looks like Chaos to him.

  In Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think, Will Barbee is able to accept a new personal state where he can be, not be, or be anything—even though he might have to be goaded and enticed into it by April Bell. But Waldo isn’t able to cope with this degree of freedom. He has to hastily back away and re-establish control.

  Waldo’s clampdown comes immediately. He thinks:

  The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability!

  He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos! . . . He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space.590

  In sum, offered infinite possibility, the possibility that Waldo opts for is to have things continue much as they have been. He never really was Big Brain at all. In fact, he isn’t even as adventurous as mad Dr. Rambeau. When you come down to it, he’s just another guy with a hunger to be liked.

  So it is that for his own need, Waldo will draw on enough of the Power of the Other World to heal his bodily weakness and turn himself into a dancer, brain surgeon and popular personality. And, for society’s sake, he will keep the window to the Other World open a crack, just enough to make it the new source of technological power replacing the old debilitating radiation.

  Society is maintained, and Waldo receives the adulation he has been craving. And that is enough to satisfy Waldo. But any more of the freedom allowed by the Other World would be Chaos, and that would be insupportable. He won’t allow it.

  But Waldo is only fooling himself. He hasn’t really imposed his point of view on the cosmos at all. Only on his society, and only for a time.

  Before the end of the story, Gramps Schneider does what he can to remind Waldo of this. The old hex doctor is no more enamored of clocks that run evenly and the technological civilization they regulate than he ever was, and he sends Waldo a note politely refusing his offer to take part in the Other World power project. Gramps goes on to say:

  “ ‘As for the news of your new strength I am happy, but not surprised. The power of the Other World is his who would claim it.’ ”591

  That is, the power of the Other World belongs to anyone with the breadth of vision to venture beyond the limits of current social belief, and the courage to be, not be, or be anything—even if it is, like Waldo, only for the briefest moment.

  The new post-materialistic transcendent power of consciousness and reality was there to be claimed by any of the SF writers of Campbell’s Golden Age. But there was only one among them who was consistently able to avail himself of it and to exercise it without fear or retreat. This was A.E. van Vogt.

  16: A New Moral Order

  IN THE MOST CENTRAL STORIES of the early Campbellian Golden Age, two fundamental tenets were affirmed and reaffirmed. One of these was that change and difference are always possible. The other was that men armed with a knowledge of universal operating principles can always find a way to cope with any difficulty that change and difference may present.

  These tenets were asserted in one important story after another by L. Sprague de Camp, Campbell’s first ally, and Isaac Asimov, his most able student. And yet, brilliant as these stories were, nonetheless there was something about them that was distinctly limited—something of the special case, something untested.

  The various novels that de Camp published in Unknown were only humorous fantasies, games of what if. They didn’t make any claim to be serious. If Lest Darkness Fall invoked the historical past, before the end of the story this was indicated to no longer be our own past, but rather some brand-new branch sprouting from the tree of time. And, at best, the Harold Shea stories, with their extension of scientific control to storybook worlds, might be taken as a
kind of theoretical exercise in the application of universal operating principles, but no more than that.

  Asimov’s stories were more serious-minded science fiction, published in Astounding. But “Nightfall” was the most special of special cases, a laboratory experiment in cyclical history set off in some remote place in space and time with no direct connection to men of Earth and their history. And even though his series of robot stories was the most explicit presentation of universal operating principles to be found anywhere in Campbell’s magazines, it was also true that the sphere of control that they established was only over a handful of man-created machines during the next fifty years or so.

  Of all Campbell’s writers, it was Robert Heinlein who applied the new beliefs where they were of greatest relevance—to the course of humanity’s own future development, from the present moment to the human attainment of the stars. But even as he was doing this, Heinlein ran into a problem that he couldn’t get past.

  The difficulty didn’t lie with the initial Golden Age tenet, the principle of change and difference. To Heinlein, it seemed clear that change not only might happen, but that it does happen, and that it will continue to happen. In his various futuristic stories written between 1939 and 1942, he imagined time-to-come as a kaleidoscopic whirl of permutation and combination, of change upon change upon change.