Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  Wright closed his suitcase with a businesslike snap, bowed, and left the room. Four men sat staring at the little red cube.

  “Do you think he can do all he says?” asked the president.

  The three nodded mutely. The president reached for his phone.

  There was an eavesdropper to all of the foregoing. Conant, squatting behind his great desk in the vault, where he had his sanctum sanctorum, knew nothing of it. But beside him was the compact bulk of Kidder’s radiophone. His presence switched it on, and Kidder, on his island, blessed the day he had thought of the device. He had been meaning to call Conant all morning, but was very hesitant. His meeting with the young engineer Johansen had impressed him strongly. The man was such a thorough scientist, possessed of such complete delight in the work he did, that for the first time in his life Kidder found himself actually wanting to see someone again. But he feared for Johansen’s life if he brought him to the laboratory, for Johansen’s work was done on the island, and Conant would most certainly have the engineer killed if he heard of his visit, fearing that Kidder would influence him to sabotage the great transmitter. And if Kidder went to the power plant he would probably be shot on sight.

  All one day Kidder wrangled with himself, and finally determined to call Conant. Fortunately he gave no signal, but turned up the volume on the receiver when the little red light told him that Conant’s transmitter was functioning. Curious, he heard everything that occurred in the president’s chamber three thousand miles away. Horrified, he realized what Conant’s engineers had done. Built into tiny containers were tens of thousands of power receivers. They had no power of their own, but, by remote control, could draw on any or all of the billions of horsepower the huge plant on the island was broadcasting.

  Kidder stood in front of his receiver, speechless. There was nothing he could do. If he devised some means of destroying the power plant, the government would certainly step in and take over the island, and then what would happen to him and his precious Neoterics?

  Another sound grated out of the receiver—a commercial radio program. A few bars of music, a man’s voice advertising stratoline fares on the installment plan, a short silence, then:

  “Station RPRS, voice of the nation’s Capital, District of South Colorado.”

  The three-second pause was interminable.

  “The time is exactly…er…agreed. The time is exactly seven P.M., Mountain Standard Time.” Then came a half-insane chuckle. Kidder had difficulty believing it was Conant. A phone clicked. The banker’s voice:

  “Bill? All set. Get out there with your squadron and bomb up the island. Keep away from the plant, but cut the rest of it to ribbons. Do it quick and get out of there.”

  Almost hysterical with fear, Kidder rushed about the room and then shot out the door and across the compound. There were five hundred innocent workmen in barracks a quarter mile from the plant. Conant didn’t need them now, and he didn’t need Kidder. The only safety for anyone was in the plant itself, and Kidder wouldn’t leave his Neoterics to be bombed. He flung himself up the stairs and to the nearest teletype. He banged out, “Get me a defense. I want an impenetrable shield. Urgent!”

  The words ripped out from under his fingers in the functional script of the Neoterics. Kidder didn’t think of what he wrote, didn’t really visualize the thing he ordered. But he had done what he could. He’d have to leave them now, get to the barracks; warn those men. He ran up the path toward the plant, flung himself over the white line that marked death to those who crossed it.

  A squadron of nine clip-winged, mosquito-nosed planes rose out of a cover on the mainland. There was no sound from the engines, for there were no engines. Each plane was powered with a tiny receiver and drew its unmarked, light-absorbent wings through the air with power from the island. In a matter of minutes they raised the island. The squadron leader spoke briskly into a microphone.

  “Take the barracks first. Clean ’em up. Then work south.”

  Johansen was alone on a small hill near the center of the island. He carried a camera, and though he knew pretty well that his chances of ever getting ashore again were practically nonexistent, he liked angle shots of his tower, and took innumerable pictures. The first he knew of the planes was when he heard their whining dive over the barracks. He stood transfixed, saw a shower of bombs hurtle down and turn the barracks into a smashed ruin of broken wood, metal and bodies. The picture of Kidder’s earnest face flashed into his mind. Poor little guy—if they ever bombed his end of the island he would—But his tower! Were they going to bomb the plant?

  He watched, utterly appalled, as the planes flew out to sea, cut back and dove again. They seemed to be working south. At the third dive he was sure of it. Not knowing what he could do, he nevertheless turned and ran toward Kidder’s place. He rounded a turn in the trail and collided violently with the little biochemist. Kidder’s face was scarlet with exertion, and he was the most terrified-looking object Johansen had ever seen.

  Kidder waved a hand northward. “Conant!” he screamed over the uproar. “It’s Conant! He’s going to kill us all!”

  “The plant?” said Johansen, turning pale.

  “It’s safe. He won’t touch that! But…my place…what about all those men?”

  “Too late!” shouted Johansen.

  “Maybe I can—Come on!” called Kidder, and was off down the trail, heading south.

  Johansen pounded after him. Kidder’s little short legs became a blur as the squadron swooped overhead, laying its eggs in the spot where they had met.

  As they burst out of the woods, Johansen put on a spurt, caught up with the scientist and knocked him sprawling not six feet from the white line.

  “Wh…wh—”

  “Don’t go any farther, you fool! Your own damned force field—it’ll kill you!”

  “Force field? But—I came through it on the way up— Here. Wait. If I can—” Kidder began hunting furiously about in the grass. In a few seconds he ran up to the line, clutching a large grasshopper in his hand. He tossed if over. It lay still.

  “See?” said Johansen. “It—”

  “Look! It jumped. Come on! I don’t know what went wrong, unless the Neoterics shut if off. They generated that field—I didn’t.”

  “Neo—huh?”

  “Never mind,” snapped the biochemist, and ran.

  They pounded gasping up the steps and into the Neoterics’ control room. Kidder clapped his eyes to a telescope and shrieked in glee. “They’ve done it! They’ve done it!”

  “Who’s—”

  “My little people! The Neoterics! They’ve made the impenetrable shield! Don’t you see—it cut through the lines of force that start up the field out there. Their generator is still throwing it up, but the vibrations can’t get out! They’re safe! They’re safe!” And the overwrought hermit began to cry. Johansen looked at him pityingly and shook his head.

  “Sure, your little men are all right. But we aren’t,” he added as the floor shook to the detonation of a bomb.

  * * * *

  Johansen closed his eyes, got a grip on himself and let his curiosity overcome his fear. He stepped to the binocular telescope, gazed down it. There was nothing there but a curved sheet of gray material. He had never seen a gray quite like that. It was absolutely neutral. It didn’t seem soft and it didn’t seem hard, and to look at it made his brain reel. He looked up.

  Kidder was pounding the keys of a teletype, watching the blank yellow tape anxiously.

  “I’m not getting through to them,” he whimpered. “I don’t know. What’s the mat—Oh, of course!”

  “What?”

  “The shield is absolutely impenetrable! The teletype impulses can’t get through or I could get them to extend the screen over the building—over the whole island! There’s nothing those people can’t do!”

  “He’s crazy,” Johansen muttered. “Poor little—”

  The teletype began clicking sharply. Kidder dove at it, practically embraced it. H
e read off the tape as it came out. Johansen saw the characters, but they meant nothing to him.

  “Almighty,” Kidder read falteringly, “pray have mercy on us and be forbearing until we have said our say. Without orders we have lowered the screen you ordered us to raise. We are lost, O great one. Our screen is truly impenetrable, and so cut off your words on the word machine. We have never, in the memory of any Neoteric, been without your word before. Forgive us our action. We will eagerly await your answer.”

  Kidder’s fingers danced over the keys. “You can look now,” he gasped. “Go on—the telescope!”

  Johansen, trying to ignore the whine of sure death from above, looked.

  He saw what looked like land—fantastic fields under cultivation, a settlement of some sort, factories, and—beings. Everything moved with incredible rapidity. He couldn’t see one of the inhabitants except as darting pinky-white streaks. Fascinated, he stared for a long minute. A sound behind him made him whirl. It was Kidder, rubbing his hands together briskly. There was a broad smile on his face.

  “They did it,” he said happily. “You see?”

  Johansen didn’t see until he began to realize that there was a dead silence outside. He ran to a window. It was night outside—the blackest night—when it should have been dusk. “What happened?”

  “The Neoterics,” said Kidder, and laughed like a child. “My friends downstairs there. They threw up the impenetrable shield over the whole island. We can’t be touched now!”

  And at Johansen’s amazed questions, he launched into a description of the race of beings below them.

  * * * *

  Outside the shell, things happened. Nine airplanes suddenly went dead-stick. Nine pilots glided downward, powerless, and some fell into the sea, and some struck the miraculous gray shell that loomed in place of an island; slid off and sank.

  And ashore, a man named Wright sat in a car, half dead with fear, while government men surrounded him, approached cautiously, daring instant death from a non-dead source.

  In a room deep in the White House, a high-ranking army officer shrieked, “I can’t stand it any more! I can’t!” and leaped up, snatched a red cube off the president’s desk, ground it to ineffectual litter under his shining boots.

  And in a few days they took a broken old man away from the bank and put him in an asylum, where he died within a week.

  The shield, you see, was truly impenetrable. The power plant was untouched and sent out its beams; but the beams could not get out, and anything powered from the plant went dead. The story never became public, although for some years there was heightened naval activity off the New England coast. The navy, so the story went, had a new target range out there—a great hemi-ovoid of gray material. They bombed it and shelled it and rayed it and blasted all around it, but never even dented its smooth surface.

  Kidder and Johansen let it stay there. They were happy enough with their researches and their Neoterics. They did not hear or feel the shelling, for, the shield was truly impenetrable. They synthesized their food and their light and air from materials at hand, and they simply didn’t care. They were the only survivors of the bombing, with the exception of three poor maimed devils who died soon afterward.

  All this happened many years ago, and Kidder and Johansen may be alive today, and they may be dead. But that doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is that the great gray shell will bear watching. Men die, but races live. Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth. When I think of that I feel frightened.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1941 by Street & Smith Publication, Inc.

  A. E. VAN VOGT

  (1912-2000)

  One of the first Canadian science fiction writers, Alfred Elton van Vogt showed few early indications that he would become one of the most prominent “Golden Age” writers, alongside Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. He spoke no English as a young boy; his family spoke a dialect of Dutch in their Saskatchewan household. He almost didn’t make it to speaking at all: As a two-year-old van Vogt fell two stories onto a wooden sidewalk and remained in a coma for days. He had to repeat the tenth grade, and didn’t write his first story until he was twenty years old.

  Van Vogt sold that story (a “confessional” tale about a girl in trouble) to True Story magazine, and followed it with more confessional stories: While he would move on to more sophisticated work, his ability to write simple, emotionally evocative tales about complex subjects would endure. By the mid-1930s he was writing interviews and radio plays as well as short fiction while working for the Canadian Department of National Defense. In 1939 he sold his first science fiction story, “Black Destroyer,” to Astounding.

  Two years later van Vogt was writing full time, and by 1944 he’d moved to Hollywood. He had a striking talent for adventure stories with a vast galactic scope. Like Heinlein he frequently explored libertarian themes (and literally superhuman characters in books like Slan). He coined the term “fix-up” to describe a novel made up largely of previously published stories, and was successful with fix-ups like Voyage of the Space Beagle and The Weapon Shops of Isher.

  That came to an end in 1950, when van Vogt and his wife became involved with fellow author L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics movement and largely stopped writng. He would resume writing in the mid-1960s after leaving Scientology, though his writing had lost much of its edginess in the midst of the New Wave. (Stories featuring enlightened dictatorships played less well in the Watergate years.) By the early 1970s, van Vogt dropped largely out of sight of fandom. Later in life he suffered from Alzheimers; I remember being stunned by news of his death because I thought he’d died years before. He was named a SFWA Grand Master in 1995, and given a special award at the World Science Fiction Convention the following year.

  BLACK DESTROYER, by A. E. Van Vogt

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939

  On and on Coeurl prowled! The black, moonless, almost-starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. A vague, dull light it was, that gave no sense of approaching warmth, no comfort, nothing but a cold, diffuse lightness, slowly revealing a nightmare landscape.

  Black, jagged rock and black, unliving plain took form around him, as a pale-red sun peered at last above the grotesque horizon. It was then Coeurl recognized suddenly that he was on familiar ground.

  He stopped short. Tenseness flamed along his nerves. His muscles pressed with sudden, unrelenting strength against his bones. His great forelegs—twice as long as his hindlegs—twitched with a shuddering movement that arched every razor-sharp claw. The thick tentacles that sprouted from his shoulders ceased their weaving undulation, and grew taut with anxious alertness.

  Utterly appalled, he twisted his great cat head from side to side, while the little hairlike tendrils that formed each ear vibrated frantically, testing every vagrant breeze, every throb in the ether.

  But there was no response, no swift tingling along his intricate nervous system, not the faintest suggestion anywhere of the presence of the all-necessary id. Hopelessly, Coeurl crouched, an enormous catlike figure silhouetted against the dim reddish skyline, like a distorted etching of a black tiger resting on a black rock in a shadow world.

  He had known this day would come. Through all the centuries of restless search, this day had loomed ever nearer, blacker, more frightening—this inevitable hour when he must return to the point where he began his systematic hunt in a world almost depleted of id-creatures.

  The truth struck in waves like an endless, rhythmic ache at the seat of his ego. When he had started, there had been a few id-creatures in every hundred square miles, to be mercilessly rooted out. Only too well Coeurl knew in this ultimate hour that he had missed none. There were no id-creatures left to eat. In all the hundreds of thousands of square miles that he had made his own by right of ruthless conquest—until no neighboring coeurl dared to question
his sovereignty—there was no id to feed the otherwise immortal engine that was his body.

  Square foot by square foot he had gone over it. And now—he recognized the knoll of rock just ahead, and the black rock bridge that formed a queer, curling tunnel to his right. It was in that tunnel he had lain for days, waiting for the simple-minded, snakelike id-creature to come forth from its hole in the rock to bask in the sun—his first kill after he had realized the absolute necessity of organized extermination.

  He licked his lips in brief gloating memory of the moment his slavering jaws tore the victim into precious toothsome bits. But the dark fear of an idless universe swept the sweet remembrance from his consciousness, leaving only certainty of death.

  He snarled audibly, a defiant, devilish sound that quavered on the air, echoed and re-echoed among the rocks, and shuddered back along his nerves—instinctive and hellish expression of his will to live.

  And then—abruptly—it came.

  * * * *

  He saw it emerge out of the distance on a long downward slant, a tiny glowing spot that grew enormously into a metal ball. The great shining globe hissed by above Coeurl, slowing visibly in quick deceleration. It sped over a black line of hills to the right, hovered almost motionless for a second, then sank down out of sight.

  Coeurl exploded from his startled immobility. With tiger speed, he flowed down among the rocks. His round, black eyes burned with the horrible desire that was an agony within him. His ear tendrils vibrated a message of id in such tremendous quantities that his body felt sick with the pangs of his abnormal hunger.