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

by Alexei Panshin

  The creature is attempting to pick up the copper-colored egg and carry it away. So Vanning reaches into the locker and crushes it with his hand. Later, however, when Vanning looks into the locker once more, both the creature and the suitcase containing the bonds are gone.

  Vanning is suspected by the police of complicity in the theft of the bonds. And the man who stole them is anxious and doubtful. He wants Vanning to hand the suitcase back, and is ready to hurt him if he doesn’t.

  Attempting to avoid these people one week after the disappearance of the bonds, Vanning ducks inside his office—and there is the missing valise. With policemen treading close on his heels, Vanning has to get the stolen bonds out of sight as quickly as he possibly can. But when he picks up the suitcase, a gigantic hand reaches out of mid-air and squashes him to death.

  The one person who has any idea at all of what has actually happened is Galloway the inventor. He now knows why it was that a bench briefly materialized in his laboratory. The strange locker doesn’t give access to some other dimension of being after all. Rather, it opens into our own time and space one week hence.

  Talking to his dynamo, Monstro, Galloway says, “ ‘I guess Vanning must have been the only guy who ever reached into the middle of next week and killed himself! I think I’ll get tight.’ ”813

  In all of these early Lewis Padgett stories—“Deadlock,” “The Twonky” and “Time Locker”—the weirdness that breaks loose in the Village, the intrusions from elsewhere that coerce and manipulate us, and the holes that we manage to pry open in the fabric of reality are all seen as dangerous, incomprehensible and other. They threaten not only greedy and dishonest people like Vanning, but also normal, ordinary, contemporary folk like Kerry and Martha Westerfield. The one exception to this is the drunken inventor Galloway, who seems to have made his peace with strangeness.

  There would be gestures in the direction of this same kind of fear and horror in the next Lewis Padgett story, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” published in the same February 1943 issue of Astounding as the first installment of A.E. van Vogt’s The Weapon Makers. Starting with the title taken from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” with its intimations of lurking jaws that bite and claws that catch, “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” would be full of hints and forebodings which indicated that at least one of its authors intended it to be read as another horror story like “The Twonky.”

  But that isn’t the way the story would be taken by the readers of Astounding. They would pick up on counterhints—possibly the work of the other author—and instead of being horrified by the outcome of “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” they would be enthralled. Even divided against itself, this would be one of the most popular stories ever to be published in the magazine.

  To see exactly what happened, let’s look first at the aspect of the story which was expected to strike the reader as horrifying:

  In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” a contemporary little boy, Scott Paradine, is playing hooky from grammar school one day when a box full of marvelous toys and gadgets pops out of nothingness nearby. Scott takes the toys home and shares them with his baby sister Emma, who proves to understand them better than he does.

  One of the marvels from the box is a crystal cube. When Scott peers into it, he sees tiny mechanical people building a house. He wishes there could be a fire so that he could see it put out. And that is exactly what happens:

  “Flames licked up from the half-completed structure. The automatons, with a great deal of odd apparatus, extinguished the blaze.”814

  Yet when Scott’s philosophy professor father looks into the cube, he can see nothing coherent there, only “a maze of meaningless colored designs.”815

  Another gadget, a tangle of wires and beads, is said to resemble “a tesseract,”816 or four-dimensional supercube, when it is unfolded. To Scott’s father, this device simply looks wrong. The angles at which the wires join appear shocking and illogical to him. And the beads, which slide along the wires, have a disconcerting ability to pass right through the points of juncture.

  The gadget exasperates grown-ups, but the children persist in playing with it, even though the beads sting their fingers when they choose the wrong one or slide one in the wrong direction. And very shortly, Scott is crowing in triumph: “ ‘I did it, Dad! . . . I made it disappear. . . . That blue bead. It’s gone now.’ ”817

  The disquiet the Paradine parents feel intensifies when they discover that Scott has lied in telling them that the toys were given to him by a family friend, and even more when they find that toys such as these are not available in any store. They consult a child psychologist who feeds their fears by talking in terms of madness and of conditioning to a fundamentally other mode of thought. The psychologist says:

  “Let’s suppose there are two kinds of geometry; we’ll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, we’ll call it x. X hasn’t much relationship to Euclid. It’s based on different theorems. Two and two needn’t equal four in it; they could equal y2, or they might not even equal. A baby’s mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment.”818

  The psychologist suggests that the toys may be training the children’s minds to think in terms of x logic. So the toys are taken away from the children, and all seems well again, except that baby Emma makes earnest scrawls on paper which Scott is apparently able to interpret, but which no one else can make anything of. And Scott has moments when he may say disconcerting things like, “ ‘This is only—part of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?’ ”819

  As the end of the story approaches, Emma has made annotations all over the first verse of the poem “Jabberwocky,” and Scott, in response, has built an apparatus of some kind out of vaseline-covered pebbles, candle ends and other junk. Their father, standing outside the door to Scott’s room, witnesses their transference elsewhere:

  The children were vanishing.

  They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.820

  From the point of view of a parent left behind, this could certainly be horrifying. And Padgett plays it that way in the concluding paragraphs of his story, using words like “ghastly,” “crazy,” “senseless,” “defeated,” “insane,” “lunacy,” “crumpled,” “horror,” and “dead.”821

  And yet, despite these strong intimations of a negative outcome, the readers of Astounding would simply refuse to be frightened. Instead of taking “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” as a mere horror story, they elected to read it as a vision of glorious science fictional possibility. And there would be material within the story that would provide a basis for this alternate positive reading.

  To begin with, the readers found those marvelous toys and gadgets just too delightful and too intriguing to be fearsome. Rather than interpreting what was happening to the children as negative psychological conditioning, they chose to take it as education of a special and wonderful sort. And when Scott and Emma moved off hand in hand into a new dimension of being beyond the ken of their parents, with no fear at all of what they might find, the imagination of the audience was ready to travel with them, rather than remaining behind with the limited perceptions and apprehensions of Mr. and Mrs. Paradine.

  By way of contrast, if “The Twonky” was an effective horror story, it was because we are given no clear idea of what kind of world it is that Joe comes from. We don’t know the true purposes of the Twonky he builds. And we don’t know what ultimately happens to Martha and Kerry Westerfield when the Twonky turns its beam of light on them and they disappear.

  It is our strong suspicion, however, that Joe comes from a narrow and rigid society, that the Twonky is some kind of mind control device, and that the Westerfields are dead as dead can be. We fear what we don’t know
, and we imagine the worst.

  But in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” we have too much positive information available to us to be frightened. In the same way that we were allowed to know more about the planet Lagash than the natives do as we were reading Asimov’s “Nightfall,” and therefore felt no temptation to join them in hysteria and freakout, so here do we know a number of vital things that Mr. and Mrs. Paradine do not.

  We know, for instance, where the wonderful toys came from. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” does not begin when the box of toys plops down on the muddy creek bank near Scott Paradine, but rather with an account of where the box and the toys originated and what their purposes are.

  The story starts:

  There’s no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn’t on Earth, technically speaking. He was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was preparing to test his time machine.822

  For all of our inability to grasp the complete actuality of Unthahorsten, we are allowed to know that he is enthusiastic, impulsive, and more than a bit of a kid at heart. As objects to send back to the past in his time machine, he uses “some of the discarded toys of his son Snowen, which the boy had brought with him after he had passed over from Earth, after mastering the necessary technique.”823 Unthahorsten sends two batches of toys to the past, but neither comes back, and so he drops the project.

  Not a lot to be frightened of there—in inventors, children, toys, and another dimension of human existence.

  It is also revealed to the reader that the second set of toys fell into the hands of a Nineteenth Century English girl named Alice. From them, she learned a queer little verse which she sang for her courtesy uncle Charles—whom we may take to be Charles Dodgson, the man behind the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

  We are told:

  “The song meant a great deal. It was the way. Presently she would do what it said, and then . . .

  “But she was already too old. She never found the way.”824

  As presented, this would seem to be more of an occasion for sadness than for relief at the narrow escape she has had.

  With these two scenes, which the Paradine parents aren’t privy to, the reader is given a basis for an alternative, non-horrific interpretation of “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” With our knowledge of Unthahorsten’s son Snowen and poor English Alice, we can’t help but have confidence in Scott Paradine, with his certainty that the true path of human maturation lies in travel to a greater realm of being which is imperceptible to ordinary contemporary adults, and in his little sister Emma, with her recognition that the first verse of “Jabberwocky” is the map they need in order to go there.

  It was only natural for the readers of Astounding to take the story this way. They were predisposed to do so.

  Ever since “Who Goes There?”, the modern science fiction to which they were committed had declared over and over again that the unknown, however horrifying it might appear, could be dealt with by human beings if only they kept their heads and put themselves in tune with the way the universe really works. And these SF readers had all encountered “Jabberwocky” as children and shared the tantalizing feeling that somehow it made sense of a sort they could almost but not quite grasp.

  Most of all, however, if they were prepared to identify with Scott and Emma Paradine, it was because they perceived themselves as trapped in a mid Twentieth Century that was brutal, limited and unworthy when compared to the visions of wider and higher human possibility that they were finding in science fiction. Many would have liked nothing better than to chuck World War II America and travel with the children to “the big place,” wherever and whatever that might prove to be.

  “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” would seem to mark some sort of transition in the perception of transcendent non-rational consciousness. As recently as the summer of 1942, in stories like van Vogt’s “Secret Unattainable” and Heinlein’s “Waldo,” the new transcendence had been seen as something that contemporary humans were not yet ready for, or as something to be constrained and circumscribed as completely as possible with bonds of rationality. Non-rational transcendence was dangerous and unpredictable. As Padgett had it, it might play pranks on you, stripping you of your pants or clutching your heartstrings and causing you to glow purple, like the robot-constructed machine in “Deadlock.” Or it could zap you into nothingness, like the false radio-phonograph in “The Twonky.”

  Now, however, in early 1943, this was starting to change. To Padgett and van Vogt, it had begun to seem that the new irrational transcendence—even though it might appear strange and mysterious—did not necessarily have to be feared, evaded and struggled against.

  Human beings might get along a lot better with the new transcendence if they would only learn non-logical modes of mentation more in tune with the actual nature of reality. Padgett’s drunken inventor, Galloway, in “Time Locker,” does very well with weirdness by being whacky himself. The Paradine children in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” seem able to rise to a higher state of humanness through their special training in x thinking. And, with all his education in intuitive thought, the No-man, Edward Gonish, in van Vogt’s The Weapon Makers, has apparently learned how to take bizarre occurrences and random happenings and perceive them as aspects of meaningful higher patterns.

  The one science-fictional character who would most effectively exemplify this revised attitude toward the irrational would be Padgett’s inventor, Galloway. Renamed Gallegher, and given ample room to be himself, he would be featured in three novelets published in Astounding during 1943—“The World Is Mine” in June, “The Proud Robot” in October, and “Gallegher Plus” in November.

  Galloway had only been a comic sideshow in “Time Locker,” which was basically a horror story. But Gallegher would be the focal character in the three later novelets of 1943, all of which were out-and-out comedies.

  Gallegher isn’t exactly a super-scientist in the old-fashioned Techno Age sense. He is no discoverer of new laws of science. He is more of a transcendent tinkerer, a casual genius who plays at science by ear and produces wonders through new arrangements of known things: “Sometimes he’d start with a twist of wire, a few batteries, and a button hook, and before he finished, he might contrive a new type of refrigeration unit.”825

  All of Gallegher’s marvels of invention are achieved through the processes of his subconscious mind: “It did the most extraordinary things. It worked on inflexible principles of logic, but that logic was completely alien to Gallegher’s conscious mind. The results, though, we’re often surprisingly good, and always surprising.”826

  On the level of conscious understanding, it would seem that Gallegher has had only a limited education. He may toss off literary and philosophical references, but he seems to have no formal grasp of science. At one point, for instance, a robot of his own invention—who is sometimes known as Joe and sometimes as Narcissus—says to him:

  “A positron is—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Gallegher pleaded. “I’ll only have semantic difficulties. I know what a positron is, all right, only I don’t identify it with that name. All I know is the intensional meaning. Which can’t be expressed in words, anyhow.”

  “The extensional meaning can, though,” Narcissus pointed out.

  “Not with me. As Humpty Dumpty said, the question is, which is to be master. And with me it’s the word. The damn things scare me. I simply don’t get their extensional meanings.”

  “That’s silly,” said the robot. “Positron has a perfectly clear denotation.”

  “To you. All it means to me is a gang of little boys with fishtails and green whiskers. That’s why I never can figure out what my subconscious has been up to.”827

  In the terms of a later era, it would appear that Gallegher is weak in the logical, rational faculties associated with the left hemisphere of the brain, and is much stronger in the non-
verbal, non-linear processes attributed to the right hemisphere. We might view him as an artist whose materials are the objects and interactions usually assumed to be the exclusive property of rational scientific study.

  Gallegher’s standard method of procedure is to give control over to his right brain by disrupting the 1-2-3-4 thinking of the left brain with copious amounts of alcohol. The trouble is that come the following morning, his conscious self isn’t likely to have much memory, knowledge or understanding of what his subconscious self has been doing.

  In fact, the pattern in all three comic novelets is that Gallegher has taken on some problem while in a state of drunkenness and solved it before the story begins. The conscious, rational Gallegher is then challenged to remember just what that problem was and to recognize the solution in whatever bit of unlikeliness the other Gallegher has most recently constructed.

  Two things are particularly worth noting about Gallegher and his operations. One is his lack of fear of the unknown. And the other is the multifaceted nature of the things he invents.

  Gallegher isn’t afraid of his subconscious—though he does find it a bit awesome. Basically, he looks on it as his stronger, more knowledgeable, more able side. When the crunch is on, it is his subconscious that Gallegher relies upon to bring him through.

  This is made clear in “The Proud Robot.” In this story, Gallegher is caught in the middle of an entertainment industry struggle. A beautiful blonde television star, also in the middle, asks Gallegher’s advice. If she knows what is good for her, which side of the fence should she contrive to land on? Should she stick with Brock, her employer, or should she go along with the apparent power of his thuggish competitors, who are stealing Brock’s pay TV programs and running them in illegal theaters?