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

by Alexei Panshin

  The two were drawn together by their commonalities of age, intelligence and ambition—but also by their extreme differences in background, temperament, education and experience. Pohl was a cool young fellow, a self-taught high school dropout who was already making his own way in the world by bluff and wit and luck. By 1940, he was a married man at a time when Asimov, the wiseacre immigrant kid become precocious chemistry grad student, was still living at home with his parents.

  But Pohl had respect for the self-discipline and diligence that permitted Asimov to work and to succeed within the tight parameters of his life situation, and he envied Asimov’s ability to sell stories to Astounding. And Asimov, for his part, admired Pohl’s ability to deal with his own more chancy path in life with self-reliance and nerve, and counted Pohl’s science fiction judgment second only to John Campbell’s among the people he knew.

  The two would exchange visits. When Pohl walked over to Brooklyn, he would hang around the candy store and be treated to free milk shakes by Asimov’s mother. But it was a different situation when Asimov went to see Pohl. Although Asimov was never made aware of it, Pohl’s then-wife was unfond of him and didn’t like having him around the apartment. Pohl’s solution was to take him for strolls around nearby Chinatown—which Asimov in his own way found a treat.

  On this occasion, they wound up walking out onto the Brooklyn Bridge. There they talked over this story of Asimov’s that had gotten stuck but absolutely had to be finished at the earliest possible moment. In later years, neither man would be able to recall the details of what they said to each other, but a grateful Asimov would swear that it was the suggestions Pohl made to him here that settled his case of nerves and freed up his imagination again.

  Asimov came off the Brooklyn Bridge knowing just where his tale needed to go next. “Bridle and Saddle” would prove to be the longest story he had yet written—half again longer than “Foundation”—but it would only take him another two weeks to see it finished.

  In “Bridle and Saddle,” the balance of power that has allowed Terminus to survive for the past thirty years is in the process of being overturned. Anacreon—which has never surrendered its ambitions to rule the Periphery and as much more of the universe as it can manage to bring within its grip—has stumbled upon a centuries-old Imperial Navy battle cruiser, an immense and powerful ship constructed back in the days when “ ‘they could build,’ ”753 drifting abandoned in space. And now Wienis, the Prince Regent of Anacreon, has presented a formal request that the Foundation use its knowledge to put the cruiser back in fighting condition, and then give the ship over to the Anacreonian Navy.

  It is plain that if the cruiser actually is repaired, it is the intention of Anacreon to turn the ship’s atom blasts against Terminus and against the three rival kingdoms. But if the Foundation should refuse to repair the cruiser, that, too, would be sufficient excuse for a suspicious and power-hungry Prince Regent to pick the fight he wants.

  Terminus is in a double bind. Whether it chooses to cooperate with Anacreon’s wishes or not, it seems that a war is going to come that the Foundation cannot win. And if Anacreon isn’t able to get the war started all on its own, the Actionist Party on Terminus seems committed to doing the job for it.

  Beyond this, Salvor Hardin, the one person who desires to avoid war, appears to be caught in the grip of a double bind all his own. However he elects to act, whatever he chooses to do, it would seem that either the Actionists or Wienis will succeed in finding reason and means to have him thrown out of office, and then oversee the ruination of the work of thirty years and more.

  When Salvor Hardin was young, he was not unwilling to take direct action—as he is frequently reminded. Now, however, in his maturity, he is content to wait and wait and wait. By agreeing to the repair of Anacreon’s battle cruiser, he is able to buy himself six months of time. Through this period, he works to stall and confuse the Actionists, all the while assuring them that the government is of the opinion that it knows what it is doing.

  It isn’t that Hardin has mislaid his ability to sense danger. But he remembers clearly that when Hari Seldon made his appearance in the time vault, he had said that at each crisis Terminus would be facing on the road to Second Empire, its freedom of action would become circumscribed to the point where only one course of action was possible. It is that moment of complete inevitability for which Hardin is waiting.

  When his associates urge him to act now while peril is identifiable but not yet imminent, Hardin answers, “ ‘Force the issue now? Before the crisis comes? It’s the one thing I mustn’t do. There’s Hari Seldon and the Plan, you know.’ ”754

  In this declaration, we can recognize a highly significant change in emphasis from “Foundation.” There, all that Hari Seldon had actually said to the people of this Scientific Refuge was: “ ‘You have no choice but to proceed on the infinitely more important project that was, and is, our real plan.’ ”755

  But here in “Bridle and Saddle,” this seemingly casual one-time use of the word “plan” has become an article of faith. It is now “the Plan.” And Salvor Hardin, the one remaining witness to the miraculous visitation of Hari Seldon in the time vault, is totally committed to acting in accordance with the necessary operation of the Plan.

  With the passage of time, events do fall together: The repair of the ship is completed. Young King Lepold of Anacreon is due to come of age. The Actionists are readying themselves to attempt a coup. And the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of the Foundation is almost at hand. This is the moment Hardin has been anticipating. He leaves word that a second appearance of Hari Seldon in the time vault is to be expected three weeks hence, and then departs to attend the coronation of Lepold on Anacreon.

  There, in the last hour before a haloed Lepold is scheduled to rise in the air on a levitating throne to receive the adulation of his people, Hardin is drawn aside by the Prince Regent. Wienis informs the Mayor that the spacefleet of Anacreon under the command of his son, Admiral Lefkin, and led by its mighty new flagship, the battle cruiser Wienis, has just departed to deliver a decisive strike against Terminus. Hardin is to consider himself a prisoner of war.

  Hardin’s answer is to reveal that he has prepared a counterstroke of his own which is due to take effect at midnight, the moment of Lepold’s accession. From that hour, Anacreon is placed under religious interdict. Hardin invites Wienis to witness what this means.

  And sure enough, at midnight the true command of the new religion of the Galactic Spirit is made manifest:

  The priest-technicians who tend the atomic power plants pull the plug on the power supply. The lights in the palace fail.

  Signs of religious favor are withdrawn from the new monarch. The halo surrounding Lepold is suddenly taken away and his flying throne thumps to the floor.

  There is only one building in the whole city not in darkness—the Argolid Temple of the Galactic Spirit. And very shortly, a priest-led mob of outraged worshipers is surrounding the palace, crying out against the attack on the Foundation and demanding the release of Salvor Hardin.

  The Prince Regent, himself an utter cynic and non-believer, is taken aback by the unanticipated demonstration of strength. But still he is able to exult over the fact that the attacking spacefleet is now beyond recall.

  He declares: “ ‘Let the mob howl and let the power die, but we’ll hold out. And when the news comes back that the Foundation has been taken, your precious mob will find out upon what vacuum their religion has been built, and they’ll desert your priests and turn against them.’ ”756

  Wienis is in error, however. The pre-arranged interdiction applies to the spacefleet as well as to Anacreon. And at the appointed hour, the head priest aboard the flagship, Theo Aporat, addresses the fighting men of the fleet and denounces the sacrilege of this attack upon the blessed Foundation. Aporat intones:

  “In the name of the Galactic Spirit and of his prophet, Hari Seldon, and of his interpreters, the holy men of the Foundation, I c
urse this ship. Let the televisors of this ship, which are its eyes, become blind. Let its grapples, which are its arms, be paralyzed. Let the atom blasts, which are its fists, lose their function. Let the motors, which are its heart, cease to beat. Let the communications, which are its voice, become dumb. Let its lights, which are its soul, shrivel into nothing. In the name of the Galactic Spirit, I so curse this ship.”757

  And instantly, this curse has results:

  With his last word, at the stroke of midnight, a hand, light-years distant in the Argolid Temple, opened an ultrawave relay, which at the instantaneous speed of the ultrawave, opened another on the flagship Wienis.

  And the ship died!

  For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat’s are really deadly.758

  When Admiral Lefkin is dragged before the ultrawave relay and is forced to announce that the Anacreonian spacefleet now stands with the Foundation, it is more than his beleaguered father can handle. Wienis orders his soldiers to shoot Hardin, who is now encompassed in a modest aura of his own, and when they refuse to obey, he snatches an atomic gun from a guard and turns it on the Mayor himself. But Hardin’s aura is the outward sign of a force field, and the beam from the gun can do him no harm.

  In one final act of desperation, the Prince Regent points the atom blast at his own head and pulls the trigger, leaving Hardin to tut-tut over his corpse: “ ‘A man of “direct action” to the end. The last refuge.’ ”759

  It appears that Hardin was right—there was never any need to resort to violence. The government of Terminus did know what it was doing, and its long-range strategy and quiet competence have been all that is necessary to deal with this second crisis.

  Salvor Hardin’s’ rightness is confirmed yet again when ancient Hari Seldon in his wheelchair shows up in the time vault at the predicted hour. What is more, even the founder himself is now speaking of “the Plan.”

  The image of Hari Seldon says: “ ‘My figures show a ninety-eight point four percent probability there is to be no significant deviation from the Plan in the first eighty years.’ ”760

  Wow! What a thoroughly impressive confirmation this is, not merely of Mayor Hardin and his choice of methods, but also of the anticipatory powers of psychohistory!

  Seldon is declaring that way back at the time his message was set down, he had known with a certitude of 98.4% that whoever would be in charge of Terminus would elect to employ a religio-technological strategy in attempting to deal with the threat posed by its wild neighbors, and that the effectiveness of this solution would be demonstrated exactly eighty years after the establishment of the Foundation.

  We can discern even more striking evidence of the exact predictive power of Seldon’s science in a central difference between his two messages from out of the past. We may remember that when Hari Seldon appealed in the time vault at the end of “Foundation,” he had been completely confident that the first crisis would already be in progress, but that the answer for it would not yet have been arrived at. Accordingly, he had held his tongue, alluding to an obvious solution, but not divulging it. On this second occasion, however, Seldon is just as certain that when he appears in the time vault, the crisis will already be over, and there will be no impediment to talking about the means by which it was resolved.

  Thus it is that Seldon is prepared to say quite openly:

  “According to our calculations, you have now reached domination of the barbarian kingdoms immediately surrounding the Foundation. Just as in the first crisis you held them off by the use of the Balance of Power, so in the second, you gained mastery by use of the Spiritual Power as against the Temporal.”761

  What a most remarkable suggestion this is to come upon in a science fiction story—that given the right crucial difficulty, Spiritual Power might prove to be the most appropriate solution, superior in effectiveness to mere worldly might!

  As we are aware, throughout the course of the modern Western adventure, there had been a continuing struggle between the representatives of the worldview of established religion and partisans of the worldview of emerging science and technology to settle the question of which of the two more nearly expressed the best knowledge and highest hopes of Western civilization. This struggle can be seen in key events like the silencing of Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633, the public debate over evolution between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, and the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. And for just as long as the issue remained unsettled, neither party—the religious nor the scientific—had any desire to be confused with the other.

  But here in Asimov’s “Bridle and Saddle,” we have a very different situation—one in which religion and science have somehow become intertwined and identified with each other as Spiritual Power, which is pitted against the lesser power of a would-be conqueror. Whatever are we to make of this turning?

  The first thing to be said is that Asimov derived the idea of Spiritual Power mastering Temporal Power from his reading of Edward Gibbon. In Decline and Fall, he found two different examples of this principle: first the ability of the Catholic Church to establish and maintain dominance over the fragments of the former Western Roman Empire during the Middle Ages; and second, the startling military success of early Islam against every army it encountered from Persia to Spain.

  But then we need to pause and ask if this is the same sort of power that we see at work in “Bridle and Saddle.” Does the religion of the Galactic Spirit function in the same way as actual historical religions like Christianity and Islam? Or is it only an artificial construct cobbled together to manipulate the sentiments of ignorant and gullible barbarians?

  If we find it necessary to ask questions like these, it is partly because on previous occasions during the early Golden Age when science and religion had gotten mixed together in story, the result had tended to be something more nearly akin to mind control than to Spiritual Power. The most striking examples of this are to be seen in Robert Heinlein’s first two serial novels.

  We may recall that in “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” the religion of the Prophets uses the fruits of science—mob psychology, mathematically calculated propaganda, and television special effects—to shape and direct the beliefs of the American people. And the spell of the Prophets is only broken when rebel forces demonstrate their superior skill at this kind of scientific manipulation of thought and perception.

  Then, again, in the first Anson MacDonald story, Sixth Column, American super-science is pitted against the military might of an Oriental invader. Because the defenders are few in number, they find it expedient to combine genuine scientific power with “flubdub and hokum”762 in a new religion of the Lord Mota (atom spelled backward), and to use this as a front to hide behind while they misdirect, unsettle and terrify the PanAsians with apparent miracles.

  Without a doubt, Asimov’s religion of the Galactic Spirit in “Bridle and Saddle” does share a willingness with the religions in Heinlein’s stories to play games of scientific miracle-fakery, impressing the simple citizens of the Four Kingdoms with flubdub and hokum like halos and levitating thrones. And within the story itself, more than one character is willing to stand up and accuse the religion of being a barefaced fraud.

  The leader of the Actionist Party, for instance, is distressed that genuine science should be presented to the barbarian kingdoms dressed up in phony religious trappings. He criticizes Hardin to his face, saying, “ ‘You were forced to surround these scientific gifts with the most outrageous mummery. You’ve made half religion, half balderdash out of it. You’ve erected a hierarchy of priests and complicated, meaningless ritual.’ ”763

  The religion also seems a sham to the Prince Regent. Speaking to Lepold about the religious pronouncements of the high priest of Anacreon, Wienis declares: “ ‘He believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don’t believe in it at all. How many times have you been told that all this talk is nonsense?’ ”76
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  There is even a moment in “Bridle and Saddle” that we have already witnessed when the hokum gets turned in our direction, and we as readers are actually asked to join the ignorant Anacreonians in applauding scientific game-playing just as though it were true religious power. At the moment that the flagship Wienis is floating silent and dark in space after the curse of the head priest, the narrator—completely contrary to his usual habit, which is to let events speak for themselves—intrudes to claim: “For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science, that it works, and that such curses as that of Aporat’s are really deadly.”

  This boast has to fall flat with us, and not just because it trips over its own grammar. The power in the ship doesn’t really fail because of the special deadliness of Theo Aporat’s curses. The ship goes dark because there is someone standing by in the Argolid Temple ready to throw open an ultrawave relay at the prearranged hour of midnight. And the ability of this stooge to wink the lights off and on from a distance doesn’t exactly make the case for a claim that the religion of science (is this the same as the religion of the Galactic Spirit?) is the religion set apart from all others by the fact that it works.

  Science speaking as science and not as would-be religion would say that when the Foundation is invited to renovate a powerful spaceship, it is capable of installing a secret control system for its own benefit, and that this technology, operating within its usual parameters, will then work as effectively and reliably as technology is expected to work. What’s more, science as science would expect the ultrawave relay system to work for Wienis, too, if he happened to discover its existence, even though he is no believer in the religion of science.