The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (86 page)

Mr. Johns was completely downcast by this abrupt termination of all his efforts, but Selanie remembers her younger self being relieved and glad. At last she was free to admit her true feelings about the Possessors to her father and to herself.

She declared to him: “ ‘
They’re
in the right;
you’re
wrong. They’re trying to do something about the terrible mistakes of Man and Nature. They’ve made a marvelous science of their great gifts, and they use it like beneficent gods.’ ”
⁷⁰⁵

When he has heard her account, Drake’s mind is made up—whether it be by the mutually consistent stories he has been told about himself by one witness or another, or by the fascinating prospect of marriage to this magnificent woman, or by the attraction and challenge of becoming a trained Possessor capable of roaming at will through time-to-come, using power like a beneficent god and never growing old. He smiles at Selanie and he says that he doesn’t think he will muff what he has to do.

As the novelet comes to an end, Drake is walking down the great steps into the mist, toward Earth and the fulfillment of his destiny. The concluding lines of the story are:

“His memory search was over. He was about to live the events he thought he’d forgotten.”
⁷⁰⁶

What a reversal of perspective! What a powerful and alluring dream of human possibility! What an Olympian park path walk!

“The Search” was the first science fiction story to imagine that a continuing organization of human beings might stand apart from the flow of history and then dip back in wherever it seemed appropriate to positively affect the direction of human affairs. Van Vogt’s Possessors, ranging forth from their Palace of Immortality to play beneficent god with history and then returning to file reports on the subject, would stimulate the imaginations of many SF writers. During the Forties and Fifties, there would be stories aplenty about Eternals and Time Patrols and Paratime Police and Change Wars, all of which would reflect the influence of this novelet.

More immediately and specifically, however, “The Search” offered a heady promise of new possibility to the egalitarian children of the Atomic Age. This story said that anyone at all might prove to be super. The most apparently ordinary of contemporary guys—even, say, a farm boy from Nowheresville, USA, a draft reject turned traveling salesman—might discover a truer nature as a meta-man, a supra-man, a person capable of ignoring the normal constraints of society and time and matter, and of assuming a responsibility for the guidance and direction of humanity’s future.

What’s more, this was a story that had a basis in truth. “The Search” was nothing less than A.E. van Vogt’s own life story cast in the form of science fiction:

Van Vogt was an essentially ordinary guy who was born and raised in rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan in places even more unheard-of than Piffer’s Road. He had lived in boardinghouses, and hopped freight trains, and been turned down by his draft board for physical reasons. And he’d worked at totally commonplace jobs like driving a truck, clerking for the government, writing true confession stories, and selling advertising space in the pages of
Stationers Magazine
and
Canadian Paint and Varnish.

But van Vogt had managed to step out of this background of ordinariness and obscurity and assume a new calling as a science fiction visionary. He had discovered that he had the ability to disengage his imagination from the ongoingness of the present moment and allow it to wander freely through the time and space distances of the universe in search of wondrous glimpses of what humanity could aspire to become. And it was his belief that the visions he put down on paper would have their influence on the future direction that mankind would elect to take.

As van Vogt would say in regard to his intentions: “Science fiction, as I personally try to write it, glorifies man and his future.”
⁷⁰⁷

In this aim, we can see the answer to the riddle of how it was that John Campbell could manage to love van Vogt and even pay bonuses for his work despite everything his professional judgment had to tell him about the formal inadequacy of van Vogt’s stories. If Campbell had no other reason for putting aside all he thought he knew about the way that stories should be constructed in order to buy every single bit of fiction that A.E. van Vogt could produce, this purpose of van Vogt’s would certainly have been reason enough.

It was, after all, Campbell’s passionate wish for modern Western man to overcome his paralyzing fears of the vast material universe, and of older, more powerful beings, and of the inevitable decline and fall guaranteed by cyclical history, and reach out to grasp the stars. Toward the accomplishment of this end, he had armed the writers of
Astounding
with the power of universal operating principles, and filled them with faith in the ability of man to learn whatever he needed to know, and then he’d sent them forth to clear away every obstacle standing between humanity and its higher destiny.

There is no doubt that Campbell’s authors had labored diligently and often brilliantly at this task. Yet none of them, not even the omni-competent Robert Heinlein, had been brave enough to take the crucial imaginative leap and portray human beings who actually possessed the necessary confidence and moral authority to successfully establish control over the wider universe.

None of them, that is, but not quite plausible, not quite rational, not quite technically sound A.E. van Vogt, with his dream-visions of a glorious human future.

As early as his first published SF story, van Vogt had suggested that one day the human race might be capable of ruling the entire galaxy. And, as we have seen, when considered as a whole, the overall body of fiction that he had published in
Astounding
from “Black Destroyer” to “The Search” may be understood as a multi-faceted meditation on the subject of how man would have to alter and what he would have to become if human beings were ever to assume responsibility for themselves, for their fellows, for other beings, for time and for space, and for the entirety of existence.

There was no way that John Campbell could possibly turn away from that. It was too close to his own heart’s dream. And yet, there would be fundamental aspects of van Vogt’s thinking that would continue to baffle and elude the editor.

Campbell was a materialist, pragmatist and holist—a person with an engineer’s appreciation for things which work. What was important to him was establishing human control over the universe, and anything that served to bring this about was good enough for him. We could fairly say of him that he still saw the nature of the universe in Twenties’ terms, as a great machine—but modified by his advanced Thirties’ recognition of the synergetic power of whole systems. It was Campbell’s belief that if human beings could only get hold of the handbook of rules by which the great cosmic machine-system was run, they could take command of its operation and direct existence as they wished.

If van Vogt was also a holist, it was of a more subtle kind. He was not just a materialist and a pragmatist. To him the universe wasn’t merely an assemblage of dead parts, a motiveless hunk of machinery that men could take over and operate in any way they pleased. Rather he saw existence as an integrated, living Whole that must be dealt with carefully and respectfully—according to its own terms, and not ours.

It was a new moral order that van Vogt was offering in his stories, crucially different from the traditional moral order whose threatened collapse had been such a central issue in the great Technological Age contention between the embattled defenders of soul and spirit and the barbaric partisans of visible materiality. The difference was that the inherited cosmic and social order had been based upon degrees of descent from God and spirit, but van Vogt’s new morality was based upon the relative ability of beings to incorporate and exemplify the essential qualities of higher Wholeness.

John Campbell was about as innocent of morality as a Twentieth Century scientific barbarian could be. But he was able to travel a certain distance in company with van Vogt by electing to treat his new moral order as though it were a variant form of Campbell’s own doctrine of universal operating principles. That is, if the way in which the universe actually
does
function is what you mean by the word “right,” then right behavior and effective use of universal operating principles would be one and the same thing. Campbell could go along with that.

Of course, this highly selective interpretation of van Vogt would be something like the old woman of fable who had never encountered a hawk, and when she did was unable to rest content until she had clipped its wings and beak and turned it into a proper bird. Similarly, Campbell’s reasoning would deprive van Vogt of nothing that was of any real importance—merely his sense of the essential connection between matter and life, and his imperative conviction of the cosmic necessity of moral behavior.

The truth was that if John Campbell was sometimes willing to do the right thing, it wasn’t because he recognized it as the moral thing to do, but because it seemed the thing most likely to get the job done on a particular occasion. Other times, other expedients. But for van Vogt, doing the right thing was not just a means or an option. It was the only thing. It was mankind’s road upward.

The result of this underlying disparity in perception and aim was that Campbell could willingly accept van Vogt’s stories with their potent images of human beings ruling the stars, defeating monsters, traveling between galaxies, creating the planets, besting supermen, standing off the power of empire, and policing time-to-come. But the means by which van Vogt was able to arrive at these wonderful possibilities would always escape him.

With our advantages of perspective, however, we can see that, taken as a whole, the first eight stories that van Vogt produced after he left the Canadian Department of National Defence to become a full-time SF writer were an outline of a program for human conduct and human advancement within a moral, purposeful, interconnected and organic universe. These stories said that in such a cosmos the way for mankind to move forward was through responsibility, cooperation and altruistic behavior. They said that one level of becoming after another was possible, each of which was defined by its own relative degree of integration. And they said that a natural imperative attendant upon human progress from one level to the next must be for those who had managed to advance to reach back and lend assistance to those lagging behind and aid them in overcoming oppression and limitation, in widening their horizons, and in learning how to participate in higher patterns and systems of being.

Of these eight stories, the one that indicated the farthest range of potential human integration and action, and the one that van Vogt himself considered his best piece of early fiction, was an extended novelet entitled “Asylum.” This story was published following “Recruiting Station” and “Co-operate—or Else!” in the May 1942 issue of
Astounding.

In “Asylum,” the human form is given as the standard for all intelligent life throughout the galaxy. But within the framework of this basic form, it seems that many different levels of organization are possible. We see six in this story, identified in terms of IQ scores.

At the bottom of the scale comes ordinary Earth humanity, represented by a young reporter named William Leigh. He is a normal guy with a slightly-above-average IQ of 112.

In his future world, psychology machines invented by Professor Garret Ungarn, a noble but reclusive scientist who lives with his daughter in a “meteorite”
⁷⁰⁸
home near Jupiter, had been thought to have eliminated all war and crime. But Leigh is now covering a story about several bizarre and brutal murders—“the first murders on the North American continent in twenty-seven years”
⁷⁰⁹
—which left the victims drained of blood and of static electricity, and with burnt and bruised lips.

These killings are in fact the work of two space vampires called Dreeghs, a male named Jeel and a female named Merla. This unsettling couple has super-swift reflexes, overwhelming psychological presence, and IQs of 400. But if they are to sustain themselves, they must have constant supplies of blood and “life force”
⁷¹⁰
drained from other human beings.

As Merla eventually explains to William Leigh, a million years ago, the Dreeghs were a party of interstellar holidayers who were caught in the grip of a deadly sun:

“Its rays, immensely dangerous to human life, infected us all. It was discovered that only continuous blood transfusions, and the life force of other human beings, could save us. For a while we received donations; then the government decided to have us destroyed as hopeless incurables.

“We were all young, terribly young and in love with life; some hundreds of us had been expecting the sentence, and we still had friends in the beginning. We escaped, and we’ve been fighting ever since to stay alive.”
⁷¹¹

Jeel and Merla have come stumbling upon Earth while suffering an agony of need for blood and life force. Beyond the borders of our solar system, their spaceship encountered an “
ultra
”
⁷¹²
information beacon which signaled to them that Earth is a Galactic colony just seven thousand years old: “ ‘It is now in the third degree of development, having attained a limited form of space travel little more than a hundred years ago.’ ”
⁷¹³
The beacon tells them that at such an early stage in its development, this culture isn’t yet ready to cope with knowledge of the existence of the older, wider, ongoing Galactic world. Galactic ships are warned to stay clear.

Merla and Jeel are elated to hear this. To them, an ignorant, isolated third degree planet like this represents a rich and easy source of blood and life energy for themselves and for the other members of the Dreegh tribe.

The one obstacle between them and what they crave is the resident Galactic Observer in this solar system. But Jeel and Merla do not anticipate any problem in identifying and then eliminating this man. The job of being Galactic Observer in a primitive backwater like this is the kind of menial work assigned to Kluggs, a human type with an average IQ of just 240 or so—and no match at all for the likes of a Dreegh.