The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (59 page)

Chalmers says:

“Certainly a brilliant and interesting world, and one in which I personally might have some place. But I am afraid we should find it uncomfortable if we landed in the latter half of the story, where Queen Gloriana’s knights are having a harder and harder time, as though Spenser were growing discouraged, or the narrative for some reason were escaping his hands, taking on a life of its own. I’m not sure we could exercise the degree of selectivity needed to get into the story at the right point.”
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Chalmers’ objection is that this is another deteriorating situation with an uncertain outcome, not unlike the Ragnarök of Shea’s first adventure. And therefore they would be well-advised to give it the go-by.

But so great has Shea’s confidence become as a result of his first foray into the unknown that he now perceives danger and impending disaster not as threats but rather as a challenge. This time he doesn’t desire to avoid an hour of overwhelming crisis.

Instead, he says eagerly, “ ‘Listen: why shouldn’t we jump right into that last part of the
Faerie Queene
and help Gloriana’s knights straighten things out? You said you had worked out some new angles. We ought to be better than anyone else in the place.’ ”
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By this, of course, he doesn’t mean better men. He means more adept operators of magic.

Shea’s proposal is that they should take themselves and their modern magic to this world, oppose its antagonists, and alter its fate. Like Martin Padway in Rome, it is his hope to avert a fall of darkness. And Chalmers—seeing this as the chance to make a mark that has been denied him in this world—agrees.

What incredible confidence is displayed here! To imagine that one could transfer into another world entirely and immediately have a better grasp of its inner workings than its most accomplished natives! But that is the modern science fiction attitude.

And this time, as token of their increased power of command, their syllogismobile takes them just where they want to go, to exactly the right point in Spenser’s
Faerie Queene.
Here is real confirmation both of their theory of multiple worlds and of the syllogismobile as a precise and reliable means of travel.

Very shortly, Dr. Chalmers is successfully attempting spells. Too successfully, in fact. When he attempts to change water into wine, instead he gets Scotch whiskey. And when he attempts to conjure up a dragon, he gets a hundred, fortunately all harmless vegetarians.

Shea asks about the problems Chalmers is having, and Chalmers answers:

“A property of the mathematics of magic. Since it’s based on the calculus of classes, it is primarily qualitative, not quantitative. Hence the quantitative effects are indeterminate. You can’t—at least, with my present skill I can’t—locate the decimal point. Here the decimal point was too far rightward, and I got a hundred dragons instead of one. It might have been a thousand. . . . Apparently the professionals learn by experience just how much force to put into their incantations. It’s an art rather than a science. If I could solve the quantitative problem, I could put magic on a scientific basis.”
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For a time it appears that Chalmers may be allowing his new love for the study of magic to get the better of him to the point of forgetting the purpose for which they came. When speaking to the bow-and-arrow-toting woods girl, Belphebe, he can assert that magic is neither black nor white in itself, but merely another morally neutral branch of knowledge that then may be applied to ends that current governing authority happens to approve or happens to disapprove.

And indeed, when the opportunity presents itself, Chalmers seems only too happy to be elected as a qualified member by the local Enchanters’ Chapter—the bad guys—and to learn whatever he can from them. When he emerges from a series of lectures on magic, including one entitled “A neue use for ye Bloud of unbaptized infants,”
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he is even capable of looking pleased with himself and remarking, “ ‘A trifle harrowing that session, but gratifyingly informative.’ ”
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Shea, who has fallen in love with Belphebe, is horrified that the enchanters plan to capture her and rip her toenails out. But Chalmers is ready to wave aside these impulses to excess as nothing to get upset about, and to say, “ ‘In a few months I shall be in a position to effect an industrial revolution in magic—’ ”
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In this leaning toward amoral, fact-minded pragmatics, Chalmers is a true representative of modern science fiction. At his best, the new Atomic Age man would be a confident, competent manipulator of the inner workings of the universe, but at his worst he would merely be a scientific operator looking for the next button to push.

It’s somewhere along this axis that Reed Chalmers’ character could be said to fall. For better or for worse, he’s an example of the mid-century scientific barbarian, his attention so tightly fixed on what
works
that he is all but completely oblivious to other values.

For that matter, despite his leftover impulses toward the romantic, Harold Shea is basically this type of man, too—as we can tell from his concern with “tricks” and “angles.” It is precisely their narrowly focused, result-oriented cast of mind that permits Shea and Chalmers to seek out other worlds with the intention of tinkering with them and making adjustments in the first place.

Fortunately, however, at the climactic moment of “The Mathematics of Magic,” when Harold Shea leads a party into the enchanters’ castle to rescue Belphebe, Chalmers is able to rouse himself from his single-minded program of scientific investigation long enough to recall which side he is really on. He casts a crucial spell, sending pairs of hands swooping through the air to strangle nearly half of the enchanters. And when the battle is finally won, he can announce cheerfully, “ ‘The really important fact about this evening’s work is that I’ve discovered the secret of quantitative control.’ ”
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Shea succeeds in saving Belphebe from the clutches of the last of the enchanters by using a spell that Chalmers has had the foresight to prep him with—a highly significant “spell against magicians.”
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But the result of the use of this spell—precisely as Chalmers has warned him—is a magicostatic discharge that sends Shea zipping back to Ohio.

However, Shea doesn’t really mind this second abrupt return from an otherworld adventure. His decision to use this spell was, in fact, his decision to go home. The enchanters have now been whipped—and with him he has the true ultimate object of his venturings, Belphebe, his dream-girl. That is quite enough to satisfy him.

Chalmers, however, remains behind. He has found a girlfriend of his own, he has his decimal point rightly located at last, and his eyes are all agleam with dreams of the science of magic. What at the outset of “The Roaring Trumpet” had seemed a completely unacceptable risk to him—the possibility of never being able to return to our world—by the end of “The Mathematics of Magic” has become his own deliberate choice.

Chalmers never will go back to Ohio. He prefers to remain permanently abroad in the meta-universe as an itinerant master of paraphysics.

It was no accident that these two pivotal fantasy stories by de Camp and Pratt should have been broadly humorous. There was a very real sense in which they were nothing more than affectionate travesties, games of “let’s pretend” played to comic effect with favorite works of old high literature. They weren’t really meant to be taken seriously—and said so by being funny.

At the same time, of course, there was also a sense in which de Camp and Pratt were undeniably serious. The Harold Shea stories said very plainly:
Such is the ubiquity and centrality of universal operating principles that if the realms described in the high literature of the past really did exist and it was possible to travel to these worlds of magic, scientifically trained modern men could move right in on them, take over their controls, and operate them with effectiveness.

Back in the comparably humorous
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,
Mark Twain had imagined a man of the present seizing hold of the historico-legendary past and imposing guns and railroad trains and electricity upon it—for a time, at least. But ultimately not altering it permanently. Twain was aware that the story of King Arthur didn’t go that way, and neither did Sixth Century history, and in the end thought it necessary to respect both.

De Camp, however, had just finished rearranging Sixth Century history in
Lest Darkness Fall
—without backing off from what he had done. Now in “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic,” he proved himself ready to rewrite myth and legend as well, and to leave those changes in place, too.

These changes wouldn’t be anything as crude or as radical as Twain’s imposition of Nineteenth Century technology on a world where it just didn’t belong. De Camp and his collaborator Pratt wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing. They allowed that alternate worlds might have their own integrity—their own special and distinct ways of working—which could very well exclude modern paraphernalia such as guns or matches or the 1926
Boy Scout Handbook.

They were merely ready to suggest—all in a spirit of good clean fun, mind you—that a modern man with an awareness of the scientific method might enter any of these alternate universes, discover how things work there, and then change the world permanently from within
according to its own system of rules.

That’s all.

As presented by implication in de Camp’s
Lest Darkness Fall
and then more and more strongly stated in “The Roaring Trumpet” and “The Mathematics of Magic,” however, this little “that’s all” offered a considerable challenge to serious modern science fiction. All the more so when taken in conjunction with de Camp’s two-part article “The Science of Whithering,” which suggested that cyclical history must give way before the power of modern science.

Effectively, these frivolous “fantasy” stories in
Unknown
were model examples of the very sort of work that the writers of serious modern science fiction should properly be attending to in their own sphere. If de Camp was capable of imagining able and confident modern men employing universal operating principles to reverse the fall of Rome or to alter the outcome of events in the world of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene,
then shouldn’t the writers of
Astounding
be able to imagine men of the new kind successfully using universal operating principles to take command of the future and outer space, the mainstream of real human possibility?

Well, yes, they should. And John Campbell was expecting nothing less of them.

But there were problems to be overcome. By no means the least of these was the sheer entrenched weight of the orthodox Techno Age conception of what the future was going to be like.

This conception had been given definitive expression by Olaf Stapledon in
Last and First Men.
Here are to be found great sweeps of time, movement from planet to planet of the Solar System, and one form of future man succeeding another. But in the two billion years covered in this book, only one story is ever told—over and over, the cyclical rise and fall of civilization. Up the civilizations go, and down they come again, until the final fatal fall of Eighteenth Man on Neptune.

As we know, this view hadn’t gone completely without challenge. E.E. Smith and John Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov had all written stories that suggested the grip of cyclical history on mankind’s future might not be absolute. But even so, in 1939 and 1940, it was still a herculean task to imagine the shape of a future that wasn’t centered around the rise and fall of civilizations. If cyclical history wasn’t to be the story of our future, then what was?

Without invading aliens to combat or red suns to wring one’s hands over, what was the future for? If people of the future weren’t to be utopians or decadents, what were they to do with themselves? And if the pattern of the future wasn’t necessarily bound to be up and down, up and down, round and round, but essentially going nowhere, until the machinery of the universe at last came wheezing and grinding to a halt, what was its shape to be?

Seemingly, an alternative would have to be significantly different—but different in what ways? How was the differentness of a different future to be expressed?

It was all an imaginative blank spot.

In 1940, the best counterexample to the orthodox Techno Age conception of the future was the Lensman series of E.E. Smith—still recognized as the leading writer of American science fiction, just as he had been since 1928. In this series, which was the culmination of all the expansive epics of super-science of the late Twenties and Thirties, Smith envisioned not only far planets, but distant times, and a genuinely superior man to look after them and run them right. Rather than bogging down in Earth-centered cyclical history,
Galactic Patrol
and
Gray Lensman
offered an ongoing cosmic war between the forces of good and the forces of evil in which man-beyond-man was destined to play a central role.

Inspiring as the Lensman stories might be, however, they weren’t exactly what John Campbell was looking for. They had too many remnant Techno Age elements, and they did not recognize the revised cosmos of universal operating principles.

The power at the center of things in these stories is the Lens, the special badge of distinction of Smith’s elite Galactic Patrolmen, which is described as “a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance.”
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The Lens is a telepathy device and amplifier of psychic powers. It is individually tailored to its owner and glows only as long as he wears it. After his death, it ceases to glow and soon disintegrates.

We are told in
Galactic Patrol
that the Lens is “ ‘not essentially scientific in nature. It is almost entirely philosophical, and was developed for us by the Arisians.’ ”
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