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

by Alexei Panshin

  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.

  It was the novelet “Black Destroyer,” his second science fiction story, which convinced Campbell that this “Alfred Vogt”616—as he would address him at the outset—wasn’t just another highly promising beginner who required tutoring and guidance. On the basis of this singular story, it became evident to the editor that this 26-year-old from Winnipeg—just two years younger than Campbell himself—had already arrived as a wild imaginative talent unmatched in science fiction.

  Van Vogt demonstrated in “Black Destroyer” that the apparent virtues of his first effort had been neither an illusion nor a fluke. His new story had the very same strengths: Once again, he started his story with a dynamic and gripping first line—“On and on Coeurl prowled!”617—and then hurtled along from there. Once again, he asked the reader to identify with the drives and purposes of a powerful alien creature. And once again, he offhandedly mixed together a multiplicity of SF concepts, any one of which another writer might have thought more than sufficient to serve as the basis for a story.

  But this time his plot was more integrated. Better than that—unlike “Vault of the Beast” and its model, “Who Goes There?”, which still retained overtones of the conventional Techno Age alien invasion story—“Black Destroyer” had a situation that was completely new and different.

  And still better yet was that this novelet was a brilliant anticipation of science fiction as John Campbell thought it ought to be and wished it to become.

  The direction in which the great editor desired to move science fiction was toward human dominion over the future and outer space. And in “Black Destroyer” van Vogt imagined an exploration vessel from a future human civilization which spans the galaxy landing on a planet of a red sun that is separated from its nearest neighbor by nine hundred light years.

  What a premise this was! An interstellar survey team from an Earth-derived human civilization that is as broad as the galaxy! Some fifteen years later, in the mid-Fifties, a story background of this kind would be commonplace in Astounding. But in 1939, nothing quite like it had ever been imagined before.

  It was John Campbell’s conviction that if it was going to be possible someday for men to travel to the planets and the stars and establish control over the wider universe, the necessary job for science fiction had to be to identify every possible problem or hindrance to this, and then imagine how each one might be dealt with. The real flaw in “Vault of the Beast” from the editor’s point of view was that it didn’t actually pose any problem of responsibility and control for men to resolve.

  But “Black Destroyer” did.

  In this story, the human scientists exploring the isolated world they have discovered set their spherical ship down near the remains of a long-destroyed city. And here they encounter the bizarre and powerful Coeurl, a catlike creature with fangs and massive forepaws, tentacles that grow from his shoulders, and tendrilled ears, whom they will eventually identify as a degenerate survivor of this ruined civilization.

  As the Techno Age would reckon matters, Coeurl is a clearly superior being, more than a match for any one man. Not only is he immensely long-lived, but he is quick, strong and deadly. He is able to breathe chlorine or oxygen indifferently. Through his ear tendrils, he can hear sounds, pick up the vibrations given off by the precious life-substance id, and also detect, broadcast and control electromagnetic phenomena. And with his prehensile tentacles, he can instantly operate sophisticated machinery he has never encountered before, including the great globular human spaceship itself.

  Coeurl is a living example of cosmic hostility. He is a ruthless and practiced killer. He and his kind have leveled their civilization, fought amongst themselves, and devoured all other living things in this world in a desperate death struggle to obtain “the all-necessary id”618—eventually identified by a human scientist as the element phosphorus.

  Before the humans manage to recognize Coeurl’s true nature and power, this utterly rapacious being has ripped one man to pieces to obtain his id, and then murdered another twelve men as they sleep. When he is found out at last—his carnage discovered—Coeurl escapes to the spaceship engine room, barricades himself there, and then launches himself and the human party into interstellar space.

  However, if Coeurl is a representative of unrelenting Techno Age cosmic hostility, it is as perceived through revisionist Atomic Age eyes. And the Atomic Age would not only doubt that there can be such a thing as total difference or absolute superiority, but would boldly assert that men may scientifically investigate anything and everything that exists in search of the most convenient handle to grab it by.

  We might think back to the members of the Antarctic party in Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”. Though confronted by a shapeshifting alien monster, they are able to calmly say, “ ‘This isn’t wildly beyond what we already know. It’s just a modification we haven’t seen before. It’s as natural, as logical, as any other manifestation of life. It obeys exactly the same laws.’ ”

  In highly similar fashion, even though
the human scientists of “Black Destroyer” may find themselves up to their knees in corpses and gore as their spaceship screams toward the stars under the guidance of an id-crazed cat-creature endowed with powers like none they have ever encountered before, Commander Morton, the leader of the expedition, is able to overcome any impulses he might be feeling toward fear and panic and deal coolly with the situation. He declares: “ ‘We’re going to find out right now if we’re dealing with unlimited science, or a creature limited like the rest of us. I’ll bet on the second possibility.’ ”619

  And that’s a pretty good bet. Capable and dangerous Coeurl may be, but he is by no means either all-powerful or invulnerable. He has a number of weaknesses and limitations—crippling defects of ability, knowledge, mentation and perspective.

  Foremost among these is Coeurl’s animalism. Ever since H.G. Wells’s invading Martians, alien beings had displayed a taste for human blood and proved their own superiority by looking upon men as cattle. For van Vogt, however, Coeurl’s insatiable appetite for id identifies him, and not his human victims, as the animal.

  Coeurl is driven by lusts and hungers and lacks self-control. It doesn’t take a lot to unbalance his psyche.

  He can be thrown by his greed for phosphorus: “The sense of id was so overwhelming that his brain drifted to the ultimate verge of chaos.”620

  Unexpectedness—even so little as the closing of a door and the movement of an elevator—can unsettle him: “He whirled with a savage snarl, his reason whirling into chaos. With one leap, he pounced at the door. The metal bent under his plunge, and the desperate pain maddened him. Now, he was all trapped animal.”621

  And mayhem can make him manic and cause him to forget his purposes: “It was the seventh taste of murder that brought a sudden return of lust, a pure, unbounded desire to kill, return of a millennium-old habit of destroying everything containing the precious id.”622

  Over and over, Coeurl gives himself away by these descents into animality. They cause him to act prematurely, to betray his intentions, and to reveal his awesome but combatable powers.

  Moreover, when Coeurl isn’t acting like a heedless beast, he is a blind egotist. All that he can see in the human scientific expedition is new inferiors to serve as a fresh supply of essential id. And beyond that, an opportunity for himself and the others of his kind who still survive to leap to the stars and seize even more id:

  For just a moment he felt contempt, a glow of superiority, as he thought of the stupid creatures who dared to match their wit against a coeurl. And in that moment, he suddenly thought of other coeurls. A queer, exultant sense of race pounded through his being; the driving hate of centuries of ruthless competition yielded reluctantly before pride of kinship with the future rulers of all space.623

  At every turn Coeurl believes himself to be more powerful and able and in control than he actually is, and he automatically dismisses the human opposition he faces without ever pausing to think very deeply about its true nature.

  But, in fact, there is a profound difference between the humans and him. Their galactic civilization has solved the problem of cyclical history, while Coeurl and his kind have not, so they know a great deal about him while he knows nothing about them.

  The men can look at his historical context and his behavior and gauge Coeurl accurately as a degenerate and a criminal. As the archaeologist Korita observes: “ ‘In fact, his whole record is one of the low cunning of the primitive, egotistical mind which has little or no conception of the vast organization with which it is confronted.’ ”624

  It is wholly typical of Coeurl that he should take over the engine room of the spherical spaceship under the apparent assumption that being where the power is located will be sufficient to make him master of the situation—and also typical that he should be mistaken. In fact, it is the humans who occupy the ship’s control room who actually direct the ship and its machines.

  What’s more, they possess science that Coeurl does not, and dares not face. He may be able to blank out remote pictures of himself, to take a shot in the head from a vibration gun without suffering harm, to disrupt electric locks, and to harden the door to the engine room by increasing “ ‘the electronic tensions of the door to their ultimate.’ ”625 But he cannot redirect, ward off, or absorb atomic power. Consequently, once the humans do manage to break into the engine room, they have an effective weapon with which to attack him.

  Coeurl must escape from this threat. So able is he, within his limits, that he can throw together an individual spaceship right then and there in the machine shop of the great ship. And in this little ship, he attempts to flee back to his own planet to gather his kind.

  But alone in space is just where the humans would like to see Coeurl. They have vast experience there, while he has none. As Korita says: “ ‘We have, then, a primitive, and that primitive is now far out in space, completely outside of his natural habitat.’ ”626

  And, indeed, Coeurl does find space disconcerting. Given his tendency to lose his head, it isn’t surprising that he should be thrown into confusion when all his usual expectations begin to be overturned. First, the human ship suddenly disappears from view. Then it seems that he is going backward, away from his planet, rather than toward it, as he should. And finally, the human ship—which by Coeurl’s reckoning should be far behind—suddenly proves to be waiting in front of him.

  It is all too much for Coeurl, and he becomes overwhelmed by panic. Fearing the flames of men wielding atomic disintegrators, he wills his own death:

  They found him lying dead in a little pool of phosphorus.

  “Poor pussy,” said Morton. “I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Knowing nothing of anti-accelerators, he couldn’t know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours to decelerate; and in the meantime he’d be drawing farther and farther away from where he wanted to go. He couldn’t know that by stopping, we flashed past him at millions of miles a second. Of course, he didn’t have a chance once he left our ship. The whole world must have seemed topsy-turvy.”627

  And, in fact, with this brilliant novelet, van Vogt would turn all Techno Age perception upside-down. In previous science fiction, it had always been invading aliens who had the universe on their side and men who had to overcome a limited Earth-bound perspective. But in “Black Destroyer,” these values were reversed. Despite their power as individuals, it is Coeurl and his kind who are the limited offspring of a small and isolated planet, and it is human beings who have the knowledge and resources of the galaxy behind them.

  What a promise! When he saw this, John Campbell’s heart had to leap.

  The editor wrote to van Vogt, saying, “You’ve done a perfectly beautiful job on this yarn about the Black Destroyer.”628 And he would place this new writer’s first published SF story on the cover of the July 1939 Astounding, the issue which marked the beginning of the Golden Age.

  In his letter accepting “Black Destroyer,” Campbell described Unknown, a fantasy magazine he was starting, at some length, and asked van Vogt to consider it a wide-open market. Campbell thought that writing fantasy would come naturally to van Vogt, with his gift for evoking mood and horror. The editor declared, “If this ‘Black Destroyer’ had not been interplanetary, had not involved atomic power, mechanism, etc., it would have been grand for the new magazine.”629

  And van Vogt did his best to oblige Campbell by giving him what he was asking for. More or less immediately, he wrote a story about a Polynesian shark-god—“The Sea Thing” (Unknown, Jan. 1940)—that was his attempt to do something like “Black Destroyer” in fantasy dress. And in 1942-43, he would contribute three more stories to the magazine, including a novel, The Book of Ptah (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1943), in the very last issue.

  But even though van Vogt might not be a man for facts and exactitude, and had a certain talent for evoking moods, writing rational fantasy just wasn’t his thing. Ultimately, sto
ries like that hinged on providing material explanations for bits and pieces of remnant spiritualism, and playing that game wasn’t what van Vogt had returned to SF to do. Consequently, he wrote stories he thought of as fantasy only with the utmost difficulty, and his work for Unknown was no match for his science fiction in either originality or effectiveness.

  Van Vogt only caught fire when he was writing what he believed in, and his true beliefs were post-materialistic. His great aim in writing SF was to look deep into the time and space distances of an organic, interconnected, evolving universe and imagine man transcending himself.

  Between the sale of “Black Destroyer” and its publication, van Vogt married Edna Hull, a woman seven years older than he. She was a former executive secretary, a freelance writer of newspaper features and short-short stories for church magazines whom he had met at the Winnipeg Writers Club. After their marriage, Mrs. van Vogt would transcribe her husband’s handwritten drafts on the typewriter and in the process become sufficiently intrigued by SF that she would eventually write a dozen stories of her own for Astounding and Unknown under the name E. Mayne Hull.

  The first story van Vogt completed after his marriage was a direct sequel to “Black Destroyer” entitled “Discord in Scarlet” (Astounding, Dec. 1939). Here the same human survey ship, this time traveling from our own galaxy to another, comes upon Xtl, a red six-limbed alien being even older, more powerful and more frightening than Coeurl, floating there in the void where a cosmic explosion had hurled him eons ago.

  Once he has been permitted inside the barriers that protect the human ship, Xtl proves to be able to rearrange his atomic structure so as to pass through floors and walls at will. Then he begins playing an elaborate game of hide-and-go-seek in which he suddenly appears out of nowhere, seizes and paralyzes a man, preferably a nice fat one, and carries him away to deposit one of his eggs in.