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

by Alexei Panshin

  Along with the expanded circle of consciousness presented in these leading edge stories of the later Golden Age, there was a corresponding increase in tolerance of beings with other standards of behavior and modes of thought than our own—as though to understand more was to be more accepting of difference. We can see this new trend at work in “Kindness” and in “Sanity,” as well as in Padgett’s “The World Is Mine” and “The Proud Robot.”

  The old concept of a single evolutionary ladder which all creatures must climb offered humans no option but to compete with other beings for the privilege of survival within a basically hostile universe. It was all or nothing. Either we would prevail or we would perish. There was no middle ground.

  But the new holistic view of existence left room for everyone to be himself without necessarily posing a threat to anyone else. There could be different paths and different kinds of being without inevitable war to the death.

  A formal test of the new live-and-let-live attitude would come in Murray Leinster’s novelet “First Contact” (Astounding, May 1945). In this story, a spaceship from Earth on a scientific expedition to explore the Crab Nebula encounters the first ship of another spacefaring race that humanity has ever met.

  The two sides establish communication. The captains are hesitant to fight, but both fear that a fight is inevitable. It is clear that if either ship should be trailed back to its home planet, its people would find themselves at an intolerable disadvantage.

  Within the story, the state of affairs is phrased like this:

  The first contact of humanity with an alien race was a situation which had been foreseen in many fashions, but never one quite so hopeless of solution as this. A solitary Earth-ship and a solitary alien, meeting in a nebula which must be remote from the home planet of each. They might wish peace, but the line of conduct which best prepared a treacherous attack was just the seeming of friendliness. Failure to be suspicious might doom the human race—and a peaceful exchange of the fruits of civilization would be the greatest benefit imaginable. Any mistake would be irreparable, but a failure to be on guard would be fatal.854

  This is a classic war game problem set forth in the form of a science fiction story. But the real question is actually one of attitude and perception. Are human and alien inevitably bound to see each other in old-fashioned Techno Age terms as hostile competitors, or are they capable of finding some way of tolerating each other’s existence in the emerging style of the Atomic Age?

  “First Contact” is a story about the shift from one attitude to the other. The solution to the problem of these two isolated ships which don’t want to fight but are afraid not to is finally found when each side determines to threaten the other into accepting the same peaceful settlement or be blown to pieces!

  Both ships are to be fixed so that they can do no trailing of each other. Their weapons are to be dismantled and their maps and records removed. Then the humans and the aliens will swap ships and take them back home to their respective home planets.

  This will provide maximum information to both sides at a minimum of risk to either. Then, if the two parties decide they wish to meet again, they can do so here in the neutrality of the Crab Nebula at an agreed-upon time.

  Not surprisingly, the more that is known of the aliens, the less alien they seem. At the conclusion of the story, it seems likely to at least one member of the human crew that despite their great physical differences, the two races are going to be able to get along together psychologically, and he reports as much to his captain:

  “There was the one I called Buck, sir, because he hasn’t any name that goes into sound waves,” said Tommy. “We got along very well. I’d really call him my friend, sir. And we were together for a couple of hours just before the two ships separated and we’d nothing in particular to do. So I became convinced that humans and aliens are bound to be good friends if they have only half a chance. You see, sir, we spent those two hours telling dirty jokes.”855

  Dismaying though we may find it to see these two males of different species discovering their commonality through a mutual humorous bashing of the sex left at home, we have to recognize that it may be easier to accept difference when it is at a distance, and rather more difficult to accept it at close range. First things first . . . and we must be content that these two ships full of aggressive and competitive males are able to agree that the universe is large enough to contain them both without their having to fight to the death. It would have been otherwise in earlier times when every explorer from Earth packed a .45 automatic on his hip and was ready to use it on anything that looked at him the wrong way.

  A.E. van Vogt would bring the question of tolerance of difference a good deal closer in a series of three stories in Astounding—“Concealment” (Sept. 1943), “The Storm” (Oct. 1943), and “The Mixed Men” (Jan. 1945).

  In the first of these stories, a battleship from Earth under command of a woman, Lady Gloria Laurr, is on an expedition to survey the stars of our satellite galaxy, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud,856 when it comes upon an interstellar weather station manned by a solitary human being. But when this man is interrogated, his resistance proves to be five times greater than his IQ would indicate him to be capable of. Rather than answering the questions he is asked, he launches a desperate physical attack on Grand Captain Laurr and has to be killed.

  Only after he is dead is his true nature identified. He is one of the Dellians, who are described both as supermen and as perfect robots invented by an Earthman named Joseph M. Dell some fifteen thousand years ago. (The word “robot” is used here by van Vogt not in its more familiar sense of a mechanical construct, but in its original meaning of an artificial organic being, as in Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R.) Ultimately, the Dellians were hunted down and wiped out by ordinary humans.

  But not all of them were killed, apparently. In the second story, we learn that when this massacre took place, a number of Dellian and non-Dellian robots fled from the main galaxy to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and established their own civilization there, which now encompasses fifty suns.

  The Dellians are the stronger and more resilient of the two types of robots, while the non-Dellians are the more creative. These two get along harmoniously, but there is also a third kind of robot, the Mixed Men, lately crossbred from the other two by a method involving “ ‘cold and pressure.’ ”857 The Mixed Men have two brains—one inherited from each of the two parent stocks—and consider themselves superior to the other types. After a failed attempt to seize power, they have had to go into hiding.

  The great problem here for all parties, and particularly for the Earth humans to whom “robot” is a dirty word, is the overcoming of xenophobia and the acceptance of all types of man on a basis of equality. As the chief psychologist aboard the human battleship—another woman—puts it to Grand Captain Laurr:

  “Excellency, we come from a long list of ancestors who, in their time, have felt superior to others because of some slight variation in the pigmentation of the skin. It is even recorded that the color of the eyes has influenced the egoistic in historical decisions. We have sailed into very deep waters, and it will be the crowning achievement of our life if we sail out in satisfactory fashion.”858

  A basis for reassurance comes in the third story, when research demonstrates that the so-called “non-Dellian robots” are actually human beings who long ago aided the Dellians to escape from the main galaxy and who have lived with them ever since without prejudice. Indeed, they have been willing to take on the one-time odious label of “robot” themselves.

  The great conciliator who discovers this fact and mediates a settlement acceptable to all sides—one Captain Peter Maltby—is himself the living exemplar of the necessary solution to this situation. He is the hereditary leader of the Mixed Men. He was captured as a child by the forces of the Fifty Suns and has grown up to be a sworn military officer who has proven himself in test after test. He is also a man of such character and ability that he is able to win the h
eart and hand of Grand Captain Gloria Laurr of Imperial Earth. By caring about the welfare of all parties, Maltby cannot be untrue to the real interests of any one of them.

  However, the greatest challenge to the sufficiency of human parochialism presented in the digest-sized Astounding would be neither the problem of learning how to be friends with alien competitors nor the difficulty of acknowledging “robots” and robot-human crossbreeds as our brothers. On several occasions during 1944, readers of the magazine would be asked to imagine the transformation of human beings into new forms, and to perceive these metamorphoses not as monstrous and awful, but as something to be accepted and even desired.

  The person to whom this prospect presented the biggest psychological hurdle may have been John W. Campbell. The editor had a large psychic investment in the idea of mankind taking charge of the universe without losing its essential nature—which he identified with the outward human form.

  Several years earlier, in a story entitled “Sunken Universe” published in the May 1942 Super Science Stories under the pseudonym Arthur Merlyn, biology student James Blish had imagined miniaturized human beings who have been adapted to life among the microorganisms of a freshwater pond on a planet of the star Tau Ceti. This was the first of a number of stories that Blish would eventually write on the subject of “pantropy,”859 his name for the reshaping of men to fit the conditions found on particular planets.

  But none of Blish’s pantropic stories would be published in Astounding. John Campbell would vastly prefer Jack Williamson’s alternate notion of “terraforming,” or the reshaping of planets to fit mankind.

  However, whether because of an urgent need to fill a hole in the magazine or out of wartime recklessness, the editor would publish a pantropic short story by Clifford D. Simak entitled “Desertion” in the November 1944 Astounding. Simak had produced science fiction for a dozen years, but it was only with the new expanded humanism of the wartime Astounding that he would begin to come into his own as an SF writer.

  In “Desertion,” human beings have managed to establish themselves on the planet Jupiter, but only within the protection of special quartz-coated domes.

  They are restricted in their direct contact with the surface of the planet by the difficult conditions here—the tremendous atmospheric pressure, the overwhelming gravity, and the wild corrosive ammonia rainstorms.

  The only way that men can explore the surface of Jupiter is to change themselves into the dominant life-form of the planet, which they have dubbed “Lopers.”860 But none of the seven men who have been put through the conversion machine and sent out into the living hell of Jupiter have managed to make their way back to the dome, and it begins to look as though the planet’s extremes have defeated man.

  In one last desperate attempt to fulfill his mission, the dome commander, Kent Fowler, has himself and his old dog Towser converted into Loper form and put outside the dome. They are only to go a short distance into the maelstrom and then return.

  But man and dog, who can now communicate directly in “thought symbols that had shades of meaning words could never have,”861 find everything changed in this new form. Two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds now seem gentle breezes. There are wonderful odors and waterfalls of ammonia that sound like music.

  We are told:

  He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth.

  But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of Earth had not yet imagined.862

  Strange, complex thoughts swirl through the minds of man and dog in their new Loper form:

  “It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”

  And, a few moments later, he adds (speaking as though both he and Towser were of the same kind):

  “We’re still mostly Earth. . . . We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”863

  As the person in charge of this outpost, Fowler recognizes that they ought to return to the dome—but it is more than he can quite bear to resume his former condition, which now seems muddled, ignorant and squalid to him. His pal Towser helps him put the matter into perspective:

  “I can’t go back,” said Towser.

  “Nor I,” said Fowler.

  “They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.

  “And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”864

  The other, and perhaps even more provocative, story of human mental and physical metamorphosis was “Environment” by Chester S. Geier, published in the May 1944 issue of Astounding. It seems very unlikely that John Campbell would have considered printing such a story as this at any other moment.

  In “Environment,” a spaceship from Earth lands in a great deserted city on a planet of a distant sun. The two men aboard the ship, Jon Gaynor and Wade Harlan, are seeking to discover what happened to a party of religious traditionalists who came to this place one hundred and twenty years ago under the leadership of an ancestor of Gaynor’s.

  From bas-reliefs around a fountain, they conclude that the builders of the city were a humanoid race. But the only life forms they encounter are strange aerial creatures:

  They were great, faceted crystals whose interiors flamed with glorious color—exquisite shades that pulsed and changed with the throb of life. Like a carillon of crystal bells, their chimings and tinklings rang out so infinitely sweet and clear and plaintive that it was both a pain and a pleasure to hear.865

  The two men explore apartments within the deserted city. And in each room they enter, the walls are covered with murals whose meaning escapes them. Also in each room is a niche containing a jewel, and when one of them concentrates his attention on one of these jewels, things that might be furniture or machines half-materialize: “Watching, Gaynor saw the ghostly outlines for the first time—misty suggestions of angles and curves, hints of forms whose purpose he could not guess.”866

  They fly over the city on antigravity units and discover first one spaceship and then another—including the Ark of old Mark Gaynor and his band of Purists. Each of the ships they come across was apparently built by a different humanoid race. And every one of them is deserted, with no clue as to what happened to those aboard.

  Eventually, Harlan and Gaynor conclude that the city bears a certain resemblance to a book. There is an order to the rooms and the wall pictures, and if they are to have any hope of understanding what is going on here, it is necessary for them to begin at the beginning. And so they locate the right end of town and begin to study the meaning of the city.

  At the outset, the surroundings adapt themselves to the humans. In these first apartments they find furniture that is recognizable to them and familiar music, food and drink. The wall paintings offer instruction in what they are to do at each step. And as they move on from room to room and from building to building, they encounter one machine after another which they are challenged to master:

  The machines grew larger, more intricate, ever more difficult of solution. Each was a new test upon the growing knowledge of Gaynor and Harlan. And each test was harder than the last, for the wall paintings no longer pointed out the way, but merely hinted now.867

  After the machines have gotten huge, they begin to get smaller and more subtle, u
ntil at last there are no more of them. The two men have reached the rooms with the form-producing jewels which baffled them so when they first came to the city. But now they are at a higher level of understanding and know what must be done here. Gazing at the wall paintings, Gaynor says:

  “The Third Stage. The tasks will be very difficult, Wade—but interesting. We’ll be putting our knowledge into practice—actually creating. This means we’ll have to deal directly with the powers of the various soldani and varoo. As these are extradimensional, control will be solely by cholthening at the sixth level, through means of the taadron. We’ll have to be careful, though—any slightest relaxation of the sorran will have a garreling effect—”868

  On and on they proceed through the city—rising through the Third Stage and into the Fourth. They become telepathic, and then pass beyond that. They no longer require food, but materialize nourishment out of subatomic energies. They learn to fly without the aid of any device. And their bodies begin to seem “impedimenta of their childhood”869 to them.

  At last, they vogelar to the very last tower of the city and narleen its paintings. With this ultimate knowledge, they pass into crystalline form themselves. Flashing different colors and chiming musically, they join the others of their kind high in the sky.