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

by Alexei Panshin

  As the months that followed high school wore on, it became clear that there was a limit to the length of time that young Alfred could go on burying himself in his books and insisting to everyone that he was a writer even though he had never written anything. Early in 1931, van Vogt took a Civil Service examination, was offered a temporary government job, and accepted it. He traveled east to Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, where he would spend ten highly formative months as a clerk tabulating the Canadian census.

  Van Vogt’s imagination was captured by the holistic quality of the census, with its populations of information to be examined first from this angle and then from that. One result of this fascination would be that in years to come, when a Doc Smith was still describing the thinking machine of tomorrow as no more than a gigantic card sorter, and a Robert Heinlein had gotten no further than to conceive of a ponderous and unreliable “ballistic calculator”604 used for the single specialized purpose of working out spaceship rocket burn requirements, A.E. van Vogt would be envisioning the computer of the future as an information machine capable of containing a quadrillion facts all cross-referenced by names, dates and key words, and available to an inquirer at the touch of a button.

  Another thing that would stick in van Vogt’s imagination from his sojourn in Ottawa—and eventually find expression in his SF stories—would be a powerful secret that he was let in on by his boardinghouse roommate, a young man who had recently been brought over to Canada from Scotland. He informed Alfred that his flag-waving neighbors back in Morden, Manitoba had had it all wrong: the English didn’t rule the British Empire at all; they only thought they did. The actual covert masters of empire were the Scotch, taking their revenge for the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden. And just as soon as the roommate had earned his college degree, he expected to assume the place that was being held for him behind the scenes in the Canadian government.

  Since van Vogt enjoyed no comparable secret support from well-placed Dutch-Canadian cabalists, he had no alternative but to catch a freight train back to Winnipeg when the work of compiling the 1931 census was over. But during his time in Ottawa, he’d made a serious start toward learning how to become the writer he was already claiming to be. From the Palmer Institute of Authorship, he took a correspondence course in “English and Self-Expression.” The long-term consequence of this course would be to set him thinking about the possible subliminal effects of particular sounds and unorthodox word selections.

  Then, back home in Winnipeg, he took out of the library Thomas Uzzell’s Narrative Technique and two highly useful books by John Gallishaw, The Only Two Ways to Write a Story and Twenty Problems of the Short-Story Writer—precisely the manuals of instruction that a young Jack Williamson, newly dropped out of college to become a full-time writer, was choosing to study at about this same time. From Gallishaw, van Vogt learned the necessity of writing sentences that conveyed either emotion, imagery or suspense, and how to break a story down into a series of short scenes, each with its own distinct purpose. From Uzzell, he took the idea that a story should make a unified impact upon the reader.

  At last, after all this study, the 20-year-old van Vogt felt ready to try writing a story of his own. But what kind of story should it be?

  He didn’t read confession magazines himself, but van Vogt had noticed that True Story, the top such magazine, had a prize contest in every issue. So he decided to be audacious and take a shot at that. He went off to the library, and with Uzzell and Gallishaw backing him at either elbow, he managed to write the first scene of a story.

  What he was attempting seemed chancy to van Vogt. All the time he was working, he kept waking in the night and going round and round about what was to come next. But after turning out one scene each day for nine days, he managed to finish a story which he called “I Live in the Streets.” This was about a girl who had run into hard times in the Depression and been thrown out of her rooming house. It didn’t win any prizes, but True Story did buy and publish it.

  During the next three years, from 1932 to 1935, van Vogt had regular success selling simple, emotional, anonymous little stories to the confession magazines, and even won a thousand dollar prize with one. But then—as though his inner being had come to the sudden conclusion that if practice was what he had been after in writing these stories, he had had practice enough—in the middle of another true confession he felt disgusted with himself, threw down his pen, and wrote no more of them.

  But if it was not sufficient to write whatever was easiest to sell, then what was his writing for? Van Vogt wasn’t altogether sure. In the middle Thirties, he would write trade newspaper interviews, short radio plays, and an occasional short story for a newspaper supplement or a pulp magazine. He learned from this work, but none of it was completely satisfying. At the same time, he had been told that he had the ability to write for the slick magazines, but he felt a strong aversion to attempting this which he couldn’t altogether explain.

  Because he was a reader, a writer, and a thinker, van Vogt regarded himself as an intellectual. But if he was an intellectual, it was not of the usual sort. He wasn’t silver-tongued or swift-witted. He had very little ability to remember a precise fact or an exact niggle, and no talent at all for linear thought and logical analysis. He was not a conventional man of reason.

  Rather, van Vogt’s usual method was to fix on some question or subject in a highly single-minded way—to surround it and dwell upon it and absorb it. He might get nowhere with a problem for the longest time, but then at last the penny would drop and some insight would pop into his mind.

  When van Vogt had enough insights accumulated on a topic, they would assemble themselves into what he would come to think of as a system—a methodology or mode of approach that had its own consistency, if only in the manner in which it was applied by him. In later days, van Vogt would even take pride in describing himself as “Mr. System.”605

  The insight that he might write science fiction, and that he should write science fiction, dawned on him in the summer of 1938. It came with typical suddenness and indirection. After eight years in which he had not read any science fiction, one day when he was in McKnight’s Drug Store in Winnipeg, van Vogt casually picked up the latest issue of Astounding, a magazine he had never paid any attention to before. He flipped on through to the middle pages, and began to read a story.

  But not just any story: Amazingly . . . coincidentally . . . significantly . . . perhaps even inevitably . . . the story that he singled out in this apparently completely random fashion was “Who Goes There?” by Don A. Stuart—the prototypical example of modern science fiction.

  Van Vogt was immediately hooked by the mood and the flavor of what he was reading. And so he bought the magazine and hurried on home to finish the story he’d started—to savor it, to linger over it, and to think about it.

  What struck van Vogt most forcibly about “Who Goes There?” wasn’t exactly the same thing that would catch the attention of those readers who were still staunch scientific materialists. All that they would see was the morally neutral message that even a shape-shifting otherworldly monster might be subject to the universal power of human scientific knowledge. We might recall, for instance, that Isaac Asimov, responding to this very same story, would write his first attempt at modern science fiction—“Stowaway,” or “The Callistan Menace”—about another threatening alien creature that human beings come to understand scientifically.

  But what van Vogt took from his reading of “Who Goes There?” was something quite a bit different from this. What intrigued him about this story was its intimation of a cooperative ethic—a new ordering of value appropriate to the post-materialistic universe he had been turning over and over in his mind since he first read Whitehead.

  That is, van Vogt noticed that those human beings in the Antarctic party of “Who Goes There?” who retained their sanity were able to work together to overcome a creature who on an individual basis was far more powerful than any of them. And
conversely, he saw that the horrific alien, even though it might be both telepathic and originally one being, was not able to join its various parts together to take concerted action. Indeed, its selfishness and egoism were so complete as to affect even samples of its blood, so that at the threat of a hot wire these would scream and strive to escape, and thereby betray their non-human nature.

  And this all had a rightness for van Vogt. It seemed to him that in an organic, interconnected universe, cooperation would be a fundamental value, a reflection of the purposes of the whole. And selfishness would be a fatal ethical defect no matter how outwardly powerful the entity might appear to be.

  “Who Goes There?” altered van Vogt’s life. Just as surely as if someone had seized him by the shoulders and physically realigned him, reading this story turned van Vogt around and pointed him in a new direction.

  In the science fiction stories that he would come to write during the next half-dozen years, van Vogt would work out the answers to a cluster of questions that were first aroused by his reading of “Who Goes There?”

  In an organic universe, wherein does true superiority lie?

  Does might in and of itself make right?

  What connection exists between evolution and altruism?

  And—his most persistent line of inquiry—how would a genuinely superior creature behave? What would it do? How would it act? And how would it be perceived by lesser beings?

  For us to say all this, however, is not only to anticipate the direction in which A.E. van Vogt would travel, but to state with some clarity what was not necessarily at all clear to him in the summer of 1938 when he put aside the August Astounding to reach for a sheet of letter paper and an envelope. It is perfectly possible, perhaps even probable, that he had no explicit memory of Science and the Modern World, or thoughts of post-materialism, or formed convictions about the moral nature of transcendent being in his mind at all. In the immediate moment, all that he may have known for certain was that he had an urgent idea for an SF story.

  In complete unawareness that Don A. Stuart, the nominal author of “Who Goes There?,” and the editor of the magazine he’d been reading were one and the same, van Vogt drafted a letter of inquiry. As an indication of his serious intent, he summarized his past experience as a writer. Then, in a paragraph, he outlined his idea. Would Astounding be interested in taking a look at a story like this?

  He mailed the letter off to New York, and then waited for some sort of answer to come. One moment he was rarin’ to go—ready to take over the whole universe and transform it with his imagination. He knew how to tell a story, after all. And from his teenage reading of Amazing, he knew his way around science fiction. So why shouldn’t he write SF and do it well? In the next instant, however, he would start to feel all unsure of himself, like a shy kid new to the neighborhood who has to have an invitation before he can bring himself to come outside and play.

  But if encouragement was what he had to have in order to begin writing SF, John Campbell did not let him down. Van Vogt would say later:

  I feel pretty sure that if he hadn’t answered, that would have been the end of my science fiction career. I didn’t know it at the time, but he answered all such letters.

  When he replied, he said, “In writing this story, be sure to concentrate on the mood and atmosphere. Don’t just make it an action story.”606

  This was precisely the right thing to say to van Vogt. It had been that splendidly atmospheric opening sentence—“The place stank”—which had first hooked him into reading “Who Goes There?” And the creation of story mood was the very thing van Vogt felt he knew how to do best.

  So, feeling under some real obligation to follow through now that he had received this go-ahead from Campbell, he set to work on his story. He called upon the familiar methods he’d derived from the Palmer Institute, John Gallishaw and Thomas Uzzell: particular words and sounds used strangely for effect; sentences of constant suspense, imagery and emotion; one purposeful scene after another; all aiming toward a final unified impact.

  The eventual title of the story would be “Vault of the Beast.” It began:

  The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with each jerky movement, it crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A gray blob of disintegrating stuff, it crept and cascaded, it rolled, flowed and dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape. Any shape!607

  This creature bears an immediately apparent resemblance to the menace of “Who Goes There?” It, too, is a telepathic shapeshifter capable of assuming the form of any human it encounters. But it also has its differences from Campbell’s monster. It isn’t able to proliferate and take over other beings, and it isn’t autonomous.

  In fact, this half-hysterical, half-terrified, yet casually murderous thing—which van Vogt called both a “robot”608 and an “android”609 and described both as organic and as a machine—is a construct that has been made by “great and evil minds”610 from another and slower dimension than ours. It has been dispatched to Earth to find a mathematician capable of freeing one of their kind who millions of years ago fell into our space and while helpless was imprisoned in a vault by the Martians of that day, who sensed its underlying ill intent.

  If this mighty prisoner should become free, it can show its fellows the way to transfer from one dimension to another. And that is what they yearn for. As they admit at the moment they think their designs have finally been achieved: “ ‘Our purpose is to control all spaces, all worlds—particularly those which are inhabited. We intend to be absolute rulers of the entire Universe.’ ”611

  The malevolent aliens use their shape-changing robot creature to manipulate, delude and sweet-talk an Earthman into divining how the vault might be opened. But when this has been accomplished, they give their true nature away. They propose to use the android as the key to the lock, and take evident pleasure in the pain it suffers as they wrench it out of the human form it has assumed and twist it into the requisite shape.

  Brender, the Earthman, cannot avoid the recognition that he has been tricked. At exactly the same moment, however, he also comes to the sudden realization that the act of opening the ancient sand-buried Martian prison is going to cause the destruction of its occupant and ruin the aliens’ schemes for conquest.

  The poor screaming robot can still read Brender’s mind. It knows what he knows. Even yet it might warn its makers and possibly save its own life—but it elects not to. It permits itself to be sacrificed. The vault is opened, and the evil alien within perishes—and with it its knowledge of how to travel from one dimension to another.

  As the now-dying robot struggles in vain to return to human form, it explains to Brender:

  “ ‘I didn’t tell them . . . I caught your thought . . . and kept it . . . from them. . . . Because they were hurting me. They were going to destroy me. Because . . . I liked . . . being human. I was . . . somebody!’ ”612 The aliens, it seems, have been undone by their own remoteness, deviousness and casual cruelty. And while Brender looks on in pity, the android dissolves into a puddle of gray, which then crumbles away into dust.

  When he had finished this story, van Vogt mailed it off to Astounding. And just as van Vogt had managed to recognize “Who Goes There?” when he needed to, so John Campbell was able to reciprocate and to perceive from the outset that in this new Canadian storyteller he had discovered someone most unusual.

  The very first thing that he noticed in reading “Vault of the Beast” was just how immediate and raw-nerved and intense it was. It didn’t sit still for one minute, but moved ahead with the inexorable pace of a fevered dream. Writing as relentless as this had never been seen in the SF pulp magazines.

  The story was also boldly, even extravagantly science-fictional. We may recall that only five years earlier, the venerable H.G. Wells had suggested
that to include more than a single wonder in any SF story was to step over the line into irresponsible silliness. He had declared, somewhat testily, “Nothing remains interesting, where anything can happen.”

  But here was a rank beginner who seemed to have no compunctions at all against throwing a profusion of marvels into one brief novelet: a protean monster/robot/android; space travel; telepathy; malevolent higher aliens; a multiplicity of dimensions operating at different time rates; inter-dimensional transference; a long-vanished Martian civilization; antigravity; the “ ‘ultimate prime number’ ”613; no less than two different kinds of “ ‘ultimate metal’ ”614; and an irresistible universal force. What’s more, van Vogt came very close to making this superabundance of wonders add up to a real and meaningful story.

  But the most original and impressive aspect of “Vault of the Beast” was that a considerable portion of the story was told from the point of view of a whimpering, blobby, shape-altering thing. Not only this, but van Vogt even asked the reader to empathize with the creature and to regret its passing. This was completely unheard of. Nobody had ever dared before to write from inside the psyche of so different and monstrous a being.

  As powerful, imaginative and unusual as van Vogt’s story recognizably was, however, Campbell couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t yet as sound and effective as it might be.

  To begin with, it wasn’t altogether plausible. If the headlong pace of the narrative should be interrupted for even an instant and exact questions be asked, there was much in this story that would not hold up under examination.