Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time
Page 1
Beyond the Barriers of Space and time
edited by
Judith Merril
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the authors and to the holders of copyright for permission to use the following material:
“Wolf Pack,” copyright, 1953, by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. Reprinted from Fantastic.
“No One Believed Me,” copyright, 1948, by the Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted from The Saturday Evening Post.
“Perforce to Dream,” copyright, 1954, by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted from Beyond.
“The Laocoön Complex,” copyright, 1937, by Esquire, Inc. Reprinted from Esquire.
“Crazy Joey,” copyright, 1953, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction.
“The Golden Man,” copyright, 1954, by Quinn Publishing Co. Reprinted from If.
“Malice Aforethought,” copyright, 1952, by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted from Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The Last Seance,” copyright, 1926, by Agatha Christie. Reprinted from Ghost Stories.
“Medicine Dancer,” copyright, 1953, by Future Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Fantasy Fiction.
“Belief,” copyright, 1953, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction.
“The Veldt,” copyright, 1950, by the Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted from The Saturday Evening Post.
“Mr. Kinkaid’s Pasts,” copyright, 1953, by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted from Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The Warning,” copyright, 1953, by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted from Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“The Ghost of Me,” copyright, 1942, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Unknown Worlds.
“The Wall Around the World,” copyright, 1953, by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted from Beyond.
“Operating Instructions,” copyright, 1953, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction.
“Interpretation of a Dream,” copyright, 1951, by John Collier. Reprinted from The New Yorker.
“Defense Mechanism,” copyright, 1949, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction.
Contents
Introduction
by Theodore Sturgeon
Editor’s Preface
by Judith Merril
Wolf Pack
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
No One Believed Me
by Will Thompson
Perforce to Dream
by John Wyndham
The Laocoön Complex
by J. C. Furnas
Crazy Joey
by Mark Clifton and Alex Apostolides
The Golden Man
by Philip K. Dick
Malice Aforethought
by David Grinnell
The Last Séance
by Agatha Christie
Medicine Dancer
by Bill Brown
Behold It Was a Dream
by Rhoda Broughton
Belief
by Isaac Asimov
The Veldt
by Ray Bradbury
Mr. Kinkaid’s Pasts
by J. J. Coupling
The Warning
by Peter Phillips
The Ghost of Me
by Anthony Boucher
The Wall Around the World
by Theodore R. Cogswell
Operating Instructions
by Robert Sheckley
Interpretation of a Dream
by John Collier
Defense Mechanism
by Katherine MacLean
Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon
A man I know (a regular hero he is) was walking down the street one day when he suddenly roared like an animal, jumped on the back of a little old lady he didn’t know, knocked her down, rolled her into the gutter, and started slapping her head.
There’s someone else (whose veracity I wouldn’t dare question) who claims to be able to know exactly what a man is thinking five thousand miles away at the moment he thinks it, who can describe shops and gardens and people in cities he’s never visited as accurately as if he were walking there, and who can hear the voices of the dead.
Given my faithful assurance that the acts of the first man and the claims of the second are exactly and truthfully reported, you will conclude that the first is a scoundrel and the second a liar.
Please don’t.
That first one, now, walking along the street, looked up just in time to see a heavy piece of machinery break loose and slide down a loading ramp and across a warehouse platform, where it struck a drum of gasoline, which ignited. Some of the foaming liquid splashed on the old lady’s coat. With great presence of mind, and at considerable personal sacrifice, my friend knocked her off her feet, rolled her into a convenient puddle to wet the coat, and beat out the flames on her hahushka with his hands.
As to the second one, the one with the remarkable ability to see and hear around the world and beyond the grave, the fellow who claims to have conquered the barriers of space and time (and who is of unquestioned credibility), why it’s you, friend, looking at your TV set, phoning long distance, or listening to a Caruso record.
You see, my first two paragraphs were, statement by statement, absolutely true. Their truth, however, was incomplete, therefore inadequate and misleading.
Here’s another true story. About a hundred and seventy years ago some peasants in the south of France saw a monstrous meteorite smash down out of the overcast and bury itself amongst the truffles at the edge of a wood. So insistent were these good people that they had seen a stone fall from the sky that the word spread until it reached Paris.
In the interests of enlightenment, a couple of savants from the Sorbonne journeyed to the scene and surveyed it carefully. Courteously concealing their amusement, they then explained to the peasants that the latter were obviously mistaken, as anyone might be in the face of a great flash of lightning. Stones, they said, could not conceivably fall from the sky because, there being nothing to hold them up, they most certainly would all have fallen long ago, if there had ever been any, which, of course, there had not.
“But do not feel too badly,” they concluded, “for we who understand the phenomenon of electricity, and its identity with lightning, can assure you that it has a great affinity for metals; and—observe!—here in the very place where this indubitable lightning struck the ground is a deposit of nickel-iron, the only such metal in this area, and the obvious target for Monsieur Franklin’s heavenly fire.” Whereupon the peasants, who had seen the object fall with their own excellent eyes, recanted, admitted their error, and thanked the wise men for adding to their understanding.
Apparently, even when we have all the available facts, we may still have an incomplete sum of truth. Tangible evidence, plus established authority, plus unshakeable and self-evident theorizing, can add up to nonsense.
Most people, in most eras, seem to be convinced that in their time the end of knowledge is at hand. We, of course, suffer from no such malaise. We have seen, in our own lifetimes, how little it mattered to the automobile that once the blacksmith laughed. What, in the long run, did the electric motor care that the shuffling walking-beam engine once called itself the power plant?
Some of us today may be so bemused by nuclear energy that we cannot imagine how primitive, how laughable, it may seem one day soon. But most of us have come to regard a state of flux, at least in the physical sciences, as a new kind of status quo. Last year’s machine retooling, the plant manager knows, will be obsolete next fall. Five years ago, we rushed to be among the firs
t owners of television sets; now we hesitate before buying, thinking, “It might be best to wait for color.”
Science fantasy and this new frame of mind go together. In part, the early science fiction of twenty and thirty years ago, with its dramatically stimulating effect on the imaginations of its adolescent readers, has been responsible for our new tolerance toward the idea of continual change. Now, in turn, the open-minded “modern” attitude is providing a new adult readership for the more mature science-fantasy fiction of today.
Now, as then, imaginative literature is a vehicle for those who cannot help being curious about the next turn in the road, for curious people who are convinced that we have yet to learn all about anything. The twenty-one writers of the stories in this book, and others like them, are not content to reaffirm the obvious and evident truths already clear to us; it is their purpose instead to postulate new possibilities for enlarging our concept of what the truth may be.
You might think of the writers of these stories as so many present-day Davids, slinging pebbles of wonder and speculation from elastic imaginations at the giant unknown that always looms against the horizon.
For there is a new giant stirring now within our species. He’s still a child, but he’s growing fast. He is to be seen in the conflict which is beginning to overshadow that of machine against machine, of materialism against materialism. Like all children, he expresses himself in contradictory and divergent ways.
He is driving more and more of us to church. He is driving us increasingly to psychology and psychiatry. He causes overflow attendance at philosophy courses for adults; he finds ways to wash our brains, and he will find a shield against brainwashing.
He tries to divert and divide us with floods of words and twisted concepts; he lies, he worships, he bewilders, he instructs. And like steam and electricity, electronics and nuclear power, he is a natural force—which is to say, a devil, a god, and above all a blabbermouth, eager to tell his secrets to anyone with the ears to hear and the mind to listen.
He is Mind, that odd faculty we have which has been denied the other animals on earth, and he constitutes the new direction and the greater goal of our race.
As electricity begat electronics which begat atomic fission, so this newcomer may express himself through what has preceded him, and men may first communicate from mind to mind through some sort of manufactured transmitter, detector and amplifier. Or he might come to us through the discovery of a science as far beyond us now as atomics was beyond the savants of France when they studied the meteor. Or he may arrive self-equipped like the Messiah, when enough of us have the faith and the sense of brotherhood to support him.
When he does come, by whatever road, he will no longer be a giant (though there will then be a new giant on a new horizon, an unknown quantity to question and worry at). What we know and comprehend cannot overawe us. It is what we do not know that frightens us. Today we have cast just enough light on the nature of Mind so that we can judge the extent of our ignorance; and in our apprehension of the unknown, we magnify its shadow to the proportions of a Goliath.
Here in this book are nineteen views of Mind and its possible manifestations. To my mind, no other kind of fiction can offer the same excitement to be found here. Miss Merril’s extraordinary taste and erudition assure us beforehand of a notable helping of sheer entertainment; any book with her name on it, whether as author or editor, is guaranteed good reading. Add to this the ever present prospect that any one of the stories here may contain the sharp-edged insight that will start the job of whittling the giant of Mind down to size—and I believe you will agree that the only thing wrong with it is that it is far too short.
Editor’s Preface by Judith Merril
I have just had a most unusual experience…
Fine traditional words, these, in a collection of stories dealing with the curious and controversial phenomena known as the “psi powers.” I’m afraid, though, that the traditional approach in this book begins and ends with that familiar line. Our object here is neither to horrify with the Unknown, nor to enlighten concerning the Esoteric—but rather to entertain, as best we can, with a varied program of sentiment, spoofing and speculation, provided by nineteen talented writers of unusual stories.
We—the writers and the editor—offer you here neither the revelations of the stance room nor the statistics of the psychological laboratory. And what we ask of you is neither open-mouthed credulity nor tight-eyed cynicism, but only a free hand on the reins of (our) imagination.
As for my own personal experience, I must confess it was in no way supradimensional, extrasensory, parapsychological or otherworldly; it consisted simply and entirely of the fascinating job of putting this book together.
Psi is the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet; it is used for the sound ps, as in saps, hopes and epsom salts. It is also used, today, to name a field of little knowledge and much emotional conviction, covering a multitude of myths, uncertainties and possible great discoveries.
It is not within the scope of this book (and certainly not of its editor) to attempt to evaluate the work of those scientists and other investigators who have undertaken the Augean task of uncovering whatever shreds of honest evidence may be buried in the welter of magic and miracle, superstition, fear and forthright fraud with which the field of psi has been inundated. The writer is concerned, as is the scientist, with the search for truth, but our methods and our definitions are both different. Instead of exposing falsehood (as fraud), we may be accused of deliberately disseminating it (as fantasy). Yet the means is quite suitable to the end, for the realities we seek are not so much “solid facts,” best studied in the strongest light, but rather a more elusive kind of knowledge that is most clearly seen in the reflection of (and on) human behavior.
John Keats is out of style today, and most of us are a little uncomfortable with such a phrase as “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” So we say instead, every bit as accurately, that whatever the psychological motivations of the writer may be, the primary and proper purpose of his story is entertainment.
Not the smallest part of my personal pleasure in collecting these stories was in my correspondence with the authors, and with other writers whose work is not actually reprinted here, either because of limitations of space or of too frequent previous publication elsewhere. I had hoped to be able to include most of these vigorous and interesting expressions of attitude here—but the letters have piled up till they would make almost a separate volume of their own.
The opinions on the validity of psi as such ranged from an emphatic, “I wouldn’t believe it even if it were true,” to an equally assertive, “Why I am so sure this trait exists is puzzling to me, and consists of no stronger proof than just ‘knowing.’ ” Most of the statements, however, were more cautious: “It seems to me this is a situation that calls for a willing suspension of both belief and disbelief…” “I’m willing to believe, but only after I see the evidence (and I mean evidence, not ‘reports’)…” “I think a full-bodied psi-science is more probable than time travel, and maybe a little more probable than faster-than-light flight, but I won’t go much further.”
Even more interesting to me, however, were the discussions of psi—and telepathy in particular—not as a real or hypothetical fact, but as a literary device.
“It seems to me the subject of psi was picked up by science fiction to nourish the neurotic adolescent fears common in thoughtful people in these times,” wrote one author. “The psi-individual is used as a psychological symbol to represent ‘superior man’ in the Nietzschean sense… that psi as a subject is a new bottle in which the old elite-fascistic-leader-aristocracy wine has been poured…”
And on the other side of the fence: “Telepathy is the shape of a human yearning… The yearning to communicate fully and completely with other human beings is perhaps the most universally compelling desire of mankind… This basic and profound human concern with expression, communication, understanding, is often projected in
science fiction into a telepathy framework, as an idealized form of perfect direct communication.”
I was also especially intrigued by the variety and scope of the reading matter referred to in these letters, in answer to my request for titles that might be included in the bibliography at the back of the book. To all the writers who contributed their time and effort to these suggestions and statements, I should like now to express my thanks—and in particular to James Blish, Alfred Bester and Dr. J. A. Winter, whose stories are not included in this collection.
My grateful acknowledgment, also, to editors Anthony Boucher, Horace and Evelyn Gold, and Sam Mines, for their suggestions and assistance in obtaining stories; to Groff Conklin, whose generosity in opening his library and files to me went far beyond the call of duty to a “rival” anthologist; to Stephen’s Book Service, for assistance with the bibliography; and for their interest, encouragement, and assistance-in-general, to Jean Potts, Katherine MacLean, Herman W. Mudgett, and most particularly, to Milton Amgott.
Walt Miller started writing during an enforced vacation, following an automobile accident, during his last year of G. I. college. He subsequently took his degree in electrical engineering, then settled down to a full-time writing career of magazine fiction and video drama, all of it characterized by a unique personal blend of mystic-poetic intensity and hard-headed practicality. His much reprinted story of a frightened woman’s furious rejection of telepathy, “Command Performance,” is considered by many readers a classic science-fictional treatment of the subject.
“Wolf Pack” is pure fantasy. No rationale is provided for the occurrences set forth; you may decide for yourself whether “La” is a clairvoyant image or a psychoneurotic symptom. Either way, “Wolf Pack” is, typically, a story of tenderness and sensitivity, set against a backdrop of violence and brutality.
Wolf Pack by Walter M. Miller, Jr.