The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (104 page)

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.
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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 correct 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.
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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.’ ”
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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.
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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.”
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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,
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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.’ ”
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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.”
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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 heart 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,”
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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.”
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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,”
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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.
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