The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (76 page)

Van Vogt was immediately hooked by the mood and the flavor of what he was reading. And so he bought the magazine and hurried on home to finish the story he’d started—to savor it, to linger over it, and to think about it.

What struck van Vogt most forcibly about “Who Goes There?” wasn’t exactly the same thing that would catch the attention of those readers who were still staunch scientific materialists. All that they would see was the morally neutral message that even a shape-shifting otherworldly monster might be subject to the universal power of human scientific knowledge. We might recall, for instance, that Isaac Asimov, responding to this very same story, would write his first attempt at modern science fiction—“Stowaway,” or “The Callistan Menace”—about another threatening alien creature that human beings come to understand scientifically.

But what van Vogt took from his reading of “Who Goes There?” was something quite a bit different from this. What intrigued him about this story was its intimation of a cooperative ethic—a new ordering of value appropriate to the post-materialistic universe he had been turning over and over in his mind since he first read Whitehead.

That is, van Vogt noticed that those human beings in the Antarctic party of “Who Goes There?” who retained their sanity were able to work together to overcome a creature who on an individual basis was far more powerful than any of them. And conversely, he saw that the horrific alien, even though it might be both telepathic and originally one being, was not able to join its various parts together to take concerted action. Indeed, its selfishness and egoism were so complete as to affect even samples of its blood, so that at the threat of a hot wire these would scream and strive to escape, and thereby betray their non-human nature.

And this all had a rightness for van Vogt. It seemed to him that in an organic, interconnected universe, cooperation would be a fundamental value, a reflection of the purposes of the whole. And selfishness would be a fatal ethical defect no matter how outwardly powerful the entity might appear to be.

“Who Goes There?” altered van Vogt’s life. Just as surely as if someone had seized him by the shoulders and physically realigned him, reading this story turned van Vogt around and pointed him in a new direction.

In the science fiction stories that he would come to write during the next half-dozen years, van Vogt would work out the answers to a cluster of questions that were first aroused by his reading of “Who Goes There?”

In an organic universe, wherein does true superiority lie?

Does might in and of itself make right?

What connection exists between evolution and altruism?

And—his most persistent line of inquiry—how would a genuinely superior creature behave? What would it do? How would it act? And how would it be perceived by lesser beings?

For us to say all this, however, is not only to anticipate the direction in which A.E. van Vogt would travel, but to state with some clarity what was not necessarily at all clear to him in the summer of 1938 when he put aside the August
Astounding
to reach for a sheet of letter paper and an envelope. It is perfectly possible, perhaps even probable, that he had no explicit memory of
Science and the Modern World,
or thoughts of post-materialism, or formed convictions about the moral nature of transcendent being in his mind at all. In the immediate moment, all that he may have known for certain was that he had an urgent idea for an SF story.

In complete unawareness that Don A. Stuart, the nominal author of “Who Goes There?,” and the editor of the magazine he’d been reading were one and the same, van Vogt drafted a letter of inquiry. As an indication of his serious intent, he summarized his past experience as a writer. Then, in a paragraph, he outlined his idea. Would
Astounding
be interested in taking a look at a story like this?

He mailed the letter off to New York, and then waited for some sort of answer to come. One moment he was rarin’ to go—ready to take over the whole universe and transform it with his imagination. He knew how to tell a story, after all. And from his teenage reading of
Amazing,
he knew his way around science fiction. So why shouldn’t he write SF and do it well? In the next instant, however, he would start to feel all unsure of himself, like a shy kid new to the neighborhood who has to have an invitation before he can bring himself to come outside and play.

But if encouragement was what he had to have in order to begin writing SF, John Campbell did not let him down. Van Vogt would say later:

I feel pretty sure that if he hadn’t answered, that would have been the end of my science fiction career. I didn’t know it at the time, but he answered all such letters.

When he replied, he said, “In writing this story, be sure to concentrate on the mood and atmosphere. Don’t just make it an action story.”
⁶⁰⁶

This was precisely the right thing to say to van Vogt. It had been that splendidly atmospheric opening sentence—“The place stank”—which had first hooked him into reading “Who Goes There?” And the creation of story mood was the very thing van Vogt felt he knew how to do best.

So, feeling under some real obligation to follow through now that he had received this go-ahead from Campbell, he set to work on his story. He called upon the familiar methods he’d derived from the Palmer Institute, John Gallishaw and Thomas Uzzell: particular words and sounds used strangely for effect; sentences of constant suspense, imagery and emotion; one purposeful scene after another; all aiming toward a final unified impact.

The eventual title of the story would be “Vault of the Beast.” It began:

The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with each jerky movement, it crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A gray blob of disintegrating stuff, it crept and cascaded, it rolled, flowed and dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape. Any shape!
⁶⁰⁷

This creature bears an immediately apparent resemblance to the menace of “Who Goes There?” It, too, is a telepathic shapeshifter capable of assuming the form of any human it encounters. But it also has its differences from Campbell’s monster. It isn’t able to proliferate and take over other beings, and it isn’t autonomous.

In fact, this half-hysterical, half-terrified, yet casually murderous thing—which van Vogt called both a “robot”
⁶⁰⁸
and an “android”
⁶⁰⁹
and described both as organic and as a machine—is a construct that has been made by “great and evil minds”
⁶¹⁰
from another and slower dimension than ours. It has been dispatched to Earth to find a mathematician capable of freeing one of their kind who millions of years ago fell into our space and while helpless was imprisoned in a vault by the Martians of that day, who sensed its underlying ill intent.

If this mighty prisoner should become free, it can show its fellows the way to transfer from one dimension to another. And that is what they yearn for. As they admit at the moment they think their designs have finally been achieved: “ ‘Our purpose is to control all spaces, all worlds—particularly those which are inhabited. We intend to be absolute rulers of the entire Universe.’ ”
⁶¹¹

The malevolent aliens use their shape-changing robot creature to manipulate, delude and sweet-talk an Earthman into divining how the vault might be opened. But when this has been accomplished, they give their true nature away. They propose to use the android as the key to the lock, and take evident pleasure in the pain it suffers as they wrench it out of the human form it has assumed and twist it into the requisite shape.

Brender, the Earthman, cannot avoid the recognition that he has been tricked. At exactly the same moment, however, he also comes to the sudden realization that the act of opening the ancient sand-buried Martian prison is going to cause the destruction of its occupant and ruin the aliens’ schemes for conquest.

The poor screaming robot can still read Brender’s mind. It knows what he knows. Even yet it might warn its makers and possibly save its own life—but it elects not to. It permits itself to be sacrificed. The vault is opened, and the evil alien within perishes—and with it its knowledge of how to travel from one dimension to another.

As the now-dying robot struggles in vain to return to human form, it explains to Brender:

“ ‘I didn’t tell them . . . I caught your thought . . . and kept it . . . from them. . . . Because they were hurting me. They were going to destroy me. Because . . . I liked . . . being human. I was . . . somebody!’ ”
⁶¹²
The aliens, it seems, have been undone by their own remoteness, deviousness and casual cruelty. And while Brender looks on in pity, the android dissolves into a puddle of gray, which then crumbles away into dust.

When he had finished this story, van Vogt mailed it off to
Astounding.
And just as van Vogt had managed to recognize “Who Goes There?” when he needed to, so John Campbell was able to reciprocate and to perceive from the outset that in this new Canadian storyteller he had discovered someone most unusual.

The very first thing that he noticed in reading “Vault of the Beast” was just how immediate and raw-nerved and intense it was. It didn’t sit still for one minute, but moved ahead with the inexorable pace of a fevered dream. Writing as relentless as this had never been seen in the SF pulp magazines.

The story was also boldly, even extravagantly science-fictional. We may recall that only five years earlier, the venerable H.G. Wells had suggested that to include more than a single wonder in any SF story was to step over the line into irresponsible silliness. He had declared, somewhat testily, “Nothing remains interesting, where anything can happen.”

But here was a rank beginner who seemed to have no compunctions at all against throwing a profusion of marvels into one brief novelet: a protean monster/robot/android; space travel; telepathy; malevolent higher aliens; a multiplicity of dimensions operating at different time rates; inter-dimensional transference; a long-vanished Martian civilization; antigravity; the “ ‘ultimate prime number’ ”
⁶¹³
; no less than two different kinds of “ ‘ultimate metal’ ”
⁶¹⁴
; and an irresistible universal force. What’s more, van Vogt came very close to making this superabundance of wonders add up to a real and meaningful story.

But the most original and impressive aspect of “Vault of the Beast” was that a considerable portion of the story was told from the point of view of a whimpering, blobby, shape-altering
thing
. Not only this, but van Vogt even asked the reader to empathize with the creature and to regret its passing. This was completely unheard of. Nobody had ever dared before to write from inside the psyche of so different and monstrous a being.

As powerful, imaginative and unusual as van Vogt’s story recognizably was, however, Campbell couldn’t help feeling that it wasn’t yet as sound and effective as it might be.

To begin with, it wasn’t altogether plausible. If the headlong pace of the narrative should be interrupted for even an instant and exact questions be asked, there was much in this story that would not hold up under examination.

This would, in fact, always be van Vogt’s weakest point. Like his mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, he would be muddled and fruitful, rather than limited but clear.

In later times, van Vogt would say of the writers of the Golden Age: “In a sense we were all One Great Big Author.”
⁶¹⁵
And there would be considerable aptness to this observation. However, to the extent that the body of Campbellian modern science fiction did amount to a whole—the synergetic product of many separate and partial individual contributions—it would be writers other than A.E. van Vogt who would supply it with its detailed plausible arguments. Without the comparatively restrained and careful work of de Camp, Heinlein, Asimov and the others, van Vogt’s flights of dreamlike imagination might very easily have seemed completely unfounded—just as without his work, many of their stories might have seemed lacking in mystery.

There was a further difficulty with “Vault of the Beast” beyond its imperfect plausibility. Despite the sound advice of Thomas Uzzell, it wasn’t unified in its effect.

The central questions raised by the story appeared to be how the android creature was to contrive to win the freedom of the long-imprisoned alien, and what this evil being and its kind might do if it were allowed to escape from the Martian vault. At the climax of the story, however, all this possibility and danger prove to be nothing more than illusion. At any time that the vault should be opened, it appears, the alien inside must inevitably perish.

So the main story problem was not a problem at all—and never had been. At this point, the emotional weight of “Vault of the Beast” shifted over to the death of the shape-changing robot, and the flattering taste this wretched creature has acquired for the assumption of human form.

This alteration of emphasis did not work perfectly. At the very least, it appeared to Campbell that if the reader was to be hooked into identifying with this monster and looking upon it with pity, then more emphasis would have to be placed upon the emotions of the creature early in the story.

So Campbell returned the manuscript to van Vogt. He praised it highly, but suggested that it still needed some fine-tuning. The Earthman, Jim Brender, could use additional motivation. And the monster should be made more pitiable from the outset. Would van Vogt have a try at that?

Instead, however, his new would-be contributor overleaped Campbell’s expectations entirely. By the time he heard from the editor, van Vogt was already at work on a second SF story that incorporated all he had learned in writing the first one. And it was going so well that he didn’t want to set it aside.

It would be a good while before van Vogt got back to “Vault of the Beast” to rewrite it. In this form, arguably stronger, yet still not wholly satisfactory because of the central non-problem of the imprisoned alien, it would appear in the August 1940 issue of
Astounding
as his fifth published SF story. And this one extended delay for revision would be as close as he would ever come to having a story rejected by John Campbell until after the end of World War II.