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

by Alexei Panshin

  In the introduction to his first collection of SF stories, Brown would say:

  Science-fiction stories are the least painful of all stories for me to write and when I have put THE END on the final page of one, I feel greater satisfaction than with any other kind of story. . . . The important reason is that science-fiction, by giving greater scope to the imagination and by imposing fewer rules and limitations, comes closer than any other type of fiction to being honest writing.835

  Whatever rules and limitations science fiction did have would certainly be tested by “Paradox Lost,” the second story by Brown to be published in Astounding. As its title would suggest, it was an exercise in playfulness, full of humor, puns, paradox and uncertainty.

  In this story, a paleontology student named Shorty McCabe is seated in the back row of a logic class in 1943, wondering what he is doing there. He has more interest in watching the erratic flight of a blue bottle fly than in listening to the professor.

  As he is watching, the fly passes through a hole in reality and disappears. McCabe puts his hand into this space. When he brings it back, he can still feel with the hand, but he can no longer see it.

  After determining the size and shape of the hole with a series of tossed paper clips, McCabe decides to follow his hand into the other space. He stands up in the aisle and finds himself elsewhere.

  It is dark here, but a sneeze reveals that someone else is present. For this person, it apparently isn’t dark. Not only can he see McCabe, but he is also aware of what is going on back in the classroom—but in 1948. He is having a hoot listening to a professor tell a class that the dinosaurs died out because they got too large to keep themselves fed and starved to death. As far as the observer is concerned, that isn’t at all the way it happened.

  The speaker identifies himself as a crazy man locked in a padded cell in a local mental institution and McCabe as a normal person. He says, “ ‘I’m an inventor, what they call a nut inventor. I think I invent time machines, for one thing. This is one of them.’ ”836

  He says that McCabe has stumbled into his time machine through a warp. He invites McCabe to reach out into the classroom where he was formerly sitting, and when McCabe does he feels something which jerks out of his grasp:

  “ ‘Yow !’ said the voice beside him. ‘That was funny!’ ”837 And the voice explains that a knockout of a red-haired girl was sitting in the same seat that McCabe had occupied five years before, and that she had jumped and let out a yip when he pulled her hair. But it was okay because the professor looked like he had his eye out for her and was using this incident as an excuse to have her stay after class.

  The voice then declares that he is bored and invites McCabe to go hunting:

  “We always hunt with slingshots. It’s more sporting.”

  “Hunt what?”

  “Dinosaurs. They’re the most fun.”838

  And indeed, when they step out of the darkness, it is to find themselves in the bright sunshine of an archaic landscape. The voice turns out to be a man even smaller than Shorty. He is armed with a slingshot.

  The “time machine” is nowhere to be seen, and Shorty asks where it is:

  “Huh? Oh, right here.” The little man reached out a hand to his left and it disappeared up to the elbow.

  “Oh,” said Shorty. “I wondered what it looked like.”

  “Looked like?” said the little man. “How could it look like anything? I told you that there isn’t any such thing as a time machine. There couldn’t be; it would be a complete paradox. Time is a fixed dimension. And when I proved that to myself, that’s what drove me crazy.”839

  He has done better at inventing time machines as a crazy person, since he is no longer bound by the laws of logic. As far as he is concerned, he is at once in his padded cell and here in the Jurassic with a McCabe who has wandered into his conceptual time machine by accident.

  Shorty asks:

  “Is this world we’re sitting in, the Jurassic, part of your . . . uh . . . concept, or is it real? It looks real, and it looks authentic.”

  “This is real, but it never really existed. That’s obvious. If matter is a concept of mind, and the saurians hadn’t any minds, then how could they have had a world to live in, except that we thought it up for them afterward?”840

  Feeling in a giddy mood after hearing this assertion, McCabe suggests that if it is sporting to hunt dinosaurs with slingshots, why not use flyswatters? The little man lights up at this, and for a moment—until Shorty insists he is only kidding—he is even ready to consider the possibility that McCabe might be eligible to be another non-logical person.

  In a little while, a dinosaur comes along. It proves to be a lizardlike creature a foot and a half high. The little man plinks it between the eyes with a stone from his slingshot and it falls dead.

  As a student of paleontology, McCabe recognizes the creature:

  “A struthiomimus!” he said. “Golly. But what if a big one comes along? A brontosaurus, say, or a tyrannosaurus rex?”

  “They’re all gone. We killed them off. There’s only the little ones left, but it’s better than hunting rabbits, isn’t it?”841

  The two then return in the invisible time machine to 1948, where that professor is still carrying on with his lame ideas about what happened to the dinosaurs. McCabe asks the little man how the big dinosaurs were disposed of, and gets the answer that it took bigger slingshots. Shorty then receives a push that leaves him sprawling in the aisle back in his philosophy class in 1943.

  Where has he been? It takes him a day to convince himself that this was just a particularly vivid dream. And five years later, he has completely forgotten that he ever had such a dream. McCabe is now an associate professor of paleontology lecturing to a class on the extinction of the dinosaurs—it seems they starved to death—and wondering how to approach the pretty red-haired graduate student in the last row for a date.

  Just then a blue bottle fly starts droning around the room. And the girl in the last row lets out a sudden yip.

  “He looked at her—severely, because the eyes of the class were upon him. But this was just the chance he’d been waiting and hoping for. He said, ‘Miss Willis, will you please remain after class?’ ”842

  And so the pattern completes itself. This story is typical of Fredric Brown—light and breezy and harmless on the surface, but, if thought about seriously, utterly subversive of our conventional notions of reality, logic and sanity.

  About all we can say for certain in regard to “Paradox Lost,” this story in which we may be adrift in the hopeful dreams of a student having a snooze in philosophy class, or be off on a trip to the Jurassic in an invisible time machine to hunt dinosaurs with a slingshot, or be sharing the delusions of a mad inventor locked up in the local loony bin—or all three at once!—is that the crazy little man seems far more at home amidst this multiplicity and flux than does Shorty McCabe. He has a much wider range of possible thought and action.

  Do crazy people know something that normal rational citizens of the Twentieth Century do not? That wouldn’t be an altogether inapt question to raise at a time when the purportedly normal and rational people of the world were engaged in a furious global struggle for power and control.

  This line of speculation would be taken a step further in a story by Fritz Leiber entitled “Sanity” (Astounding, Apr. 1944). Leiber, who considered himself a pacifist, was another of those writers for Unknown who had been more influenced by H.P. Lovecraft than by E.E. Smith, and was now crossing over to write reality-challenging modern science fiction for Astounding.

  “Sanity” would follow the example of Robert Heinlein and show a strange yet still recognizable future society which is based upon its own unique history, assumptions and order of value. In this case, the crucial formative event-cluster from which all else has followed was a moment that saw the founding of a world state, the abolishment of war, and a universal amnesty for deviant thought of all kinds.

  In the society that ha
s resulted, everyone is at least a little bit insane if judged by the standards of the Twentieth Century. But one man named Carrsbury, who has read the literature of the past and considers himself “ ‘a throwback to a time when human mentality was far sounder,’ ”843 is able to muster the objectivity necessary to see the true facts of the situation. His assessment is that just as with an unstable person who is able to hold himself together as long as he is striving for a goal but who falls apart with success, the achievement of a world state has allowed mankind so much slack that it has cracked up in all of the ways described in the old medical texts he has studied.

  It is apparent to Carrsbury that the people who presently staff the World Management Service display disturbing signs of catatonia, manic depression and other disorders. The one we see at closest range is his nearest working associate, Phy, the general secretary of the world, a man Carrsbury looks upon with a mixture of liking and pity. There is no doubt that Phy seems a crippled personality, vacuous, childish and weak.

  Carrsbury’s solution to this problem is to assume control of the world and see to it that humanity starts behaving in a rational manner once again. Through connivance, he has made himself World manager and instituted reforms designed to calm society down and restore some of the old-time sense of human direction and discipline. He has re-instituted the eight-hour working day. He has legislated against wasteful and irrational acts like the contemporary fad for incomplete staircases and roads to nowhere. He has passed decrees prohibiting the reading of over-stimulating literature. And he has forbidden people to indulge in unusual or indecent impulses, with a long list of specific examples.

  But even his present degree of control seems insufficient to him. If things are ever to work properly again, Carrsbury will have to sweep out all the aberrants in positions of power and replace them with sounder people. Toward this end, he has been engaged in a personal Ten Year Plan—“ ‘the training, in comparative isolation, first in small numbers, then in larger, as those instructed could in turn become instructors, of a group of prospective leaders carefully selected on the basis of their relative freedom from neurotic tendencies.’ ”844

  Today is the day of Carrsbury’s coup, and he is on his way to the conference chamber on the one hundredth floor—the top floor—of the World Managerial Center to meet with his new staff. On the elevator with him is Phy, the former general secretary.

  Phy is aware of the coup, but somehow he won’t concede that Carrsbury has assumed control. In fact, he suggests that things in general have actually been somewhat different than Carrsbury has imagined them to be.

  Carrsbury has been sitting in his office for ten full years receiving information and turning out edicts. But the information hasn’t all been strictly accurate, and the edicts haven’t all been obeyed:

  “For instance, your prohibition, regarding reading tapes, of all exciting literature . . . oh, we tried a little of the soothing stuff you suggested at first. Everyone got a great kick out of it. They laughed and laughed. But afterwards, well, as I said, it kind of got changed—in this case to a prohibition of all unexciting literature.”845

  And as for that ban against yielding to unusual or indecent impulses—“ ‘it went into effect all right, but with a little rider attached: “unless you really want to.”846 That seemed absolutely necessary, you know.’ ”

  As corroboration of what he is saying, Phy asks Carrsbury how many floors there are in this building. Carrsbury has no problem answering an elementary question like that:

  “ ‘One hundred,’ he replied promptly.

  “ ‘Then,’ asked Phy, ‘just where are we?’ ”847

  And, indeed, the numbers on the elevator board are blinking higher and higher. The one hundred and twenties . . . The one hundred and forties . . .

  “ ‘As if you were rising through consciousness into an unsuspected realm of mentality lying above,’ ”848 Phy says to Carrsbury.

  And when they have stopped on the one hundred and fiftieth floor and emerged to find themselves standing on apparent nothingness far above the visible building—one more example of this society’s taste for non-rational construction projects—Phy adds:

  “For ten years now you’ve been spending most of your life in that building below. Every day you’ve used this elevator. But not once have you dreamed of those fifty extra stories. Don’t you think that something of the same sort may be true of your observations of other aspects of contemporary social life?”849

  Sanity, it seems, is a relative and not an absolute measure. It is the ability to conform to the norms of a particular society. And by the standards of this society, Carrsbury is actually less sane and less able than most people—however normal he might have looked in the context of the Twentieth Century.

  So why was he ever allowed to be World manager at all? Phy answers that for Carrsbury:

  “You interested us, don’t you see? In fact, you were practically unique. As you know, it’s our cardinal principle to let every individual express himself as he wants to. In your case, that involved letting you become World manager. Taken all in all it worked out very well. Everyone had a good time, a number of constructive regulations were promulgated, we learned a lot—oh, we didn’t get everything we hoped for, but one never does. Unfortunately, in the end, we were forced to discontinue the experiment.”850

  Now it is time for Carrsbury to depart. An aircraft lands on the invisible 150th story to carry him away. Where he is going, he will have comfortable quarters, adequate facilities for exercise, and a complete library of Twentieth Century literature to while away his time.

  “Sanity” would be an effective answer to the question of whether our familiar Twentieth Century habits of mind are final and sufficient—and also to the larger question of whether non-rational modes of thought should be considered sane. After this story, states of mind other than logic and reason would have to be given the benefit of the doubt and allowed a fair chance to demonstrate their value.

  At about the time that “Sanity” was being published in the spring of 1944, the girlfriend whom Lester del Rey had been trailing after was transferred in her job from St. Louis to New York City, and del Rey was replaced in his aircraft-building job by a machine that anyone could run. So del Rey moved to New York, too, and returned to serious science fiction writing.

  In the first story that he sold to Campbell after getting to the city—“Kindness” (Astounding, Oct. 1944)—he would take up the same device that Fritz Leiber had used of comparing a throwback to our own mental state with a new human mental order. But the gap between the two that was imagined by del Rey wouldn’t be due to a mere change in society and its standards of belief and behavior, but rather to a fundamental change in the nature of the species.

  We might remember that del Rey’s third story, “The Day Is Done,” had been about the last Neanderthal man dying from feelings of overwhelming inferiority in the face of new-style Cro-Magnon man.

  Now, in “Kindness,” del Rey had an analogous story to tell about the last surviving Homo sapiens in the new world of Homo intelligens.

  In the case of every species distinction known to the science of taxonomy, it has always been some difference in outward form which has been reckoned to separate one species from another. But not so here. In del Rey’s story, what divides the new species of man from the old is an internal difference:

  Outwardly, Jack Thorpe’s body might have been the twin of Danny’s own well-muscled one, and the smiling face above it bore no distinguishing characteristics. The mutation that changed man to superman had been within, a quicker, more complex relation of brain cell to brain cell that had no outward sign.851

  Danny—del Rey’s ordinary human character—is a sweet kid, but he simply isn’t able to keep up with new-style people like Thorpe. Even their children are able to outstrip him:

  Homo intelligens had a new way of thinking, above reason, where all the long, painful steps of logic could be jumped instantly. They could arrive at a corre
ct picture of the whole from little scattered bits of information. Just as man had once invented logic to replace the trial-and-error thinking that most animals have, so homo intelligens had learned to use intuition. They could look at the first page of an old-time book and immediately know the whole of it, since the little tricks of the author would connect in their intuitive minds and at once build up the missing links. They didn’t even have to try—they just looked, and knew. It was like Newton looking at an apple falling and immediately seeing why the planets circled the sun, and realizing the laws of gravitation; but these men did it all the time, not just at those rare intervals as it had worked for homo sapiens once.852

  Thorpe and the other supermen do what they can to ease poor Danny’s situation, eventually setting him up to steal an old-time human spaceship and make his way to a paradisiac planetoid they have prepared for him. To them, it seems a small enough favor to do for the last member of a predecessor race to whom they feet they owe a considerable debt.

  The story ends with one of the supermen musing: “ ‘I wonder . . . what kindness Neanderthaler found when the last one came to die. Or whether the race that will follow us when the darkness falls on us will have something better than such kindness.’ ”853