Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  She was a tall woman with gray shingled hair, very fine English complexion, and very bad English legs. Her features were blunt, her expression acute. She nodded to Vandaleur, finished a letter, sealed it and looked up.

  “My name,” I said, “is Vanderbilt. James Vanderbilt.”

  “Quite.”

  “I’m an exchange student at London University.”

  “Quite.”

  “I’ve been researching on the killing android, and I think I’ve discovered something very interesting. I’d like your advice on it. What is your fee?”

  “What is your college at the University?”

  “Why?”

  “There is a discount for students.”

  “Merton College.”

  “That will be two pounds, please.”

  Vandaleur placed two pounds on the desk and added to the fee Blenheim’s notes. “There is a correlation,” he said, “between the crimes of the android and the weather. You will note that each crime was committed when the temperature rose above ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Is there a psychometric answer for this?”

  Nan Webb nodded, studied the notes for a moment, put down the sheets of paper, and said: “Synesthesia, obviously.”

  “What?”

  “Synesthesia,” she repeated. “When a sensation, Mr. Vanderbilt, is interpreted immediately in terms of a sensation from a different sense organ from the one stimulated, it is called synesthesia. For example: A sound stimulus gives rise to a simultaneous sensation of definite color. Or color gives rise to a sensation of taste. Or a light stimulus gives rise to a sensation of sound. There can be confusion or short circuiting of any sensation of taste, smell, pain, pressure, temperature, and so on. D’you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Your research has uncovered the fact that the android most probably reacts to temperature stimulus above the ninety-degree level synthetically. Most probably there is an endocrine response. Probably a temperature linkage with the android adrenal surrogate. High temperature brings about a response of fear, anger, excitement, and violent physical activity…all within the province of the adrenal gland.”

  “Yes. 1 see. Then if the android were to be kept in cold climates…”

  “There would be neither stimulus nor response. There would be no crimes. Quite,”

  “I see. What is projection?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Is there any danger of projection with regard to the owner of the android?”

  “Very interesting. Projection is a throwing forward. It is the process of throwing out upon another the ideas or impulses that belong to oneself. The paranoid, for example, projects upon others his conflicts and disturbances in order to externalize them. He accuses, directly or by implication, other men of having the very sicknesses with which he is struggling himself.”

  “And the danger of projection?”

  “It is the danger of believing what is implied. If you live with a psychotic who projects his sickness upon you, there is a danger of falling into his psychotic pattern and becoming virtually psychotic yourself. As, no doubt, is happening to you, Mr. Vandaleur.”

  Vandaleur leaped to his feet.

  “You are an ass,” Nan Webb went on crisply. She waved the sheets of notes. “This is no exchange student’s writing. It’s the unique cursive of the famous Blenheim. Every scholar in England knows this blind writing. There is no Merton College at London University. That was a miserable guess. Merton is one of the Oxford colleges. And you, Mr. Vandaleur, are so obviously infected by association with your deranged android…by projection, if you will…that I hesitate between calling the Metropolitan Police and the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

  I took out the gun and shot her.

  Reet!

  * * * *

  “Antares II, Alpha Aurigae, Acrux IV, Pollux IX, Rigel Centaurus,” Vandaleur said. “They’re all cold. Cold as a witch’s kiss. Mean temperatures of forty degrees Fahrenheit. Never gets hotter than seventy. We’re in business again. Watch that curve.”

  The multiple-aptitude android swung the wheel with its accomplished hands. The car took the curve sweetly and sped on through the northern marshes, the reeds stretching for miles, brown and dry, under the cold English sky. The sun was sinking swiftly. Overhead, a lone flight of bustards flapped clumsily eastward. High above the flight, a lone helicopter drifted toward home and warmth.

  “No more warmth for us,” I said. “No more heat. We’re safe when we’re cold. We’ll hole up in Scotland, make a little money, get across to Norway, build a bankroll, and then ship out. We’ll settle on Pollux. We’re safe. We’ve licked it. We can live again.”

  There was a startling bleep from overhead, and then a ragged roar: “ATTENTION, JAMES VANDALEUR AND ANDROID. ATTENTION, JAMES VANDALEUR AND ANDROID!”

  Vandaleur started and looked up. The lone helicopter was floating above them. From its belly came amplified commands: “YOU ARE SURROUNDED. THE ROAD IS BLOCKED. YOU ARE TO STOP YOUR CAR AT ONCE AND SUBMIT TO ARREST. STOP AT ONCE!”

  I looked at Vandaleur for orders.

  “Keep driving,” Vandaleur snapped.

  The helicopter dropped lower: “ATTENTION, ANDROID. YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF THE VEHICLE. YOU ARE TO STOP AT ONCE. THIS IS A STATE DIRECTIVE SUPERSEDING ALL PRIVATE COMMANDS.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shouted.

  “A state directive supersedes all private commands,” the android answered. “I must point out to you that—”

  “Get the hell away from the wheel,” Vandaleur ordered. I clubbed the android, yanked him sideways, and squirmed over him to the wheel. The car veered off the road in that moment and went churning through the frozen mud and dry reeds. Vandaleur regained control and continued westward through the marshes toward a parallel highway five miles distant.

  “We’ll beat their goddamned block,” he grunted. The car pounded and surged. The helicopter dropped even lower. A searchlight blazed from the belly of the plane.

  “ATTENTION, JAMES VANDALEUR AND ANDROID. SUBMIT TO ARREST. THIS IS A STATE DIRECTIVE SUPERSEDING ALL PRIVATE COMMANDS.”

  “He can’t submit,” Vandaleur shouted wildly. “There’s no one to submit to. He can’t and I won’t.”

  “Christ!” I muttered. “We’ll beat them yet. We’ll beat the block. We’ll beat the heat. We’ll—”

  “I must point out to you,” I said, “that I am required by my prime directive to obey state directives which supersede all private commands. I must submit to arrest.”

  “Who says it’s a state directive?” Vandaleur said. “Them? Up in that plane? They’ve got to show credentials. They’ve got to prove it’s state authority before you submit. How d’you know they’re not crooks trying to trick us?”

  Holding the wheel with one arm, he reached into his side pocket to make sure the gun was still in place. The car skidded. The tires squealed on frost and reeds. The wheel was wrenched from his grasp and the car yawed up a small hillock and overturned. The motor roared and the wheels screamed. Vandaleur crawled out and dragged the android with him. For the moment we were outside the circle of light boring down from the helicopter. We blundered off into the marsh, into the blackness, into concealment.…Vandaleur running with a pounding heart, hauling the android along.

  The helicopter circled and soared over the wrecked car, searchlight peering, loudspeaker braying. On the highway we had left, lights appeared as the pursuing and blocking parties gathered and followed radio directions from the plane. Vandaleur and the android continued deeper and deeper into the marsh, working their way toward the parallel road and safety. It was night by now. The sky was a black matte. Not a star showed. The temperature was dropping. A southeast night wind knifed us to the bone.

  Far behind there was a dull concussion. Vandaleur turned, gasping. The car’s fuel had exploded. A geyser of flame shot up like a lurid fountain. It subsided into a low crater of burning reeds. Whipped by the wind, the distant hem of flame fanned
up into a wall, ten feet high. The wall began marching down on us, cracking fiercely. Above it, a pall of oil smoke surged forward. Behind it, Vandaleur could make out the figures of men…a mass of beaters searching the marsh.

  “Christ!” I cried and searched desperately for safety. He ran, dragging me with him, until their feet crunched through the surface ice of a pool. He trampled the ice furiously, then flung himself down in the numbing water, pulling the android with us.

  The wall of flame approached. I could hear the crackle and feel the heat. He could see the searchers clearly. Vandaleur reached into his side pocket for the gun. The pocket was torn. The gun was gone. He groaned and shook with cold and terror. The light from the marsh fire was blinding. Overhead, the helicopter floated helplessly to one side, unable to fly through the smoke and flames and aid the searchers who were beating far to the right of us.

  “They’ll miss us,” Vandaleur whispered. “Keep quiet. That’s an order. They’ll miss us. We’ll beat them. We’ll beat the fire. We’ll—”

  Three distinct shots sounded less than a hundred feet from the fugitives. Blam! Blam! Blam! They came from the last three cartridges in my gun as the marsh fire reached it where it had dropped, and exploded the shells. The searchers turned toward the sound and began working directly toward us. Vandaleur cursed hysterically and tried to submerge even deeper to escape the intolerable heat of the fire. The android began to twitch.

  The wall of flame surged up to them. Vandaleur took a deep breath and prepared to submerge until the flame passed over them. The android shuddered and burst into an earsplitting scream.

  “All reet! All reet!” it shouted. “Be fleet be fleet!”

  “Damn you!” I shouted. I tried to drown it.

  “Damn you!” I cursed him. I smashed his face.

  The android battered Vandaleur, who fought it off until it exploded out of the mud and staggered upright. Before I could return to the attack, the live flames captured it hypnotically. It danced and capered in a lunatic rumba before the wall of fire. Its legs twisted. Its arms waved. The fingers writhed in a private rumba of their own. It shrieked and sang and ran in a crooked waltz before the embrace of the heat, a muddy monster silhouetted against the brilliant sparkling flare.

  The searchers shouted. There were shots. The android spun around twice and then continued its horrid dance before the face of the flames. There was a rising gust of wind. The fire swept around the capering figure and enveloped it for a roaring moment. Then the fire swept on, leaving behind it a sobbing mass of synthetic flesh oozing scarlet blood that would never coagulate.

  The thermometer would have registered 1200° wondrously Fahrenheit.

  * * * *

  Vandaleur didn’t die. I got away. They missed him while they watched the android caper and die. But I don’t know which of us he is these days. Projection, Wanda warned me. Projection, Nan Webb told him. If you live with a crazy man or a crazy machine long enough, I become crazy too. Reet!

  But we know one truth. We know they were wrong. The new robot and Vandaleur know that because the new robot’s started twitching too. Reet! Here on cold Pollux, the robot is twitching and singing. No heat, but my fingers writhe. No heat, but it’s taken the little Talley girl off for a solitary walk. A cheap labor robot. A servo-mechanism…all I could afford…but it’s twitching and humming and walking alone with the child somewhere and I can’t find them. Christ! Vandaleur can’t find me before it’s too late. Cool and discreet, honey, in the dancing frost while the thermometer registers 10° fondly Fahrenheit.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1954 by by Fantasy House, Inc.

  CYBORGS, by Kyle William Bishop

  Thanks to remarkable technological and biomedical innovations over the past century, the boundaries between humans, computers, and robots have become increasingly thin. Not surprisingly, science fiction authors and filmmakers have eagerly and repeatedly mined these liminal borders for inspiration, preying on the paranoia that humankind could one day very well find itself threatened on the evolutionary ladder by technological beings of its own creation. Read as a barometer of America’s cultural attitude toward and fears regarding modernity and unchecked advances in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cybernetic enhancements, the chief threats portrayed by these works of speculative fiction include computers, robots, and sinister hybrids that could eventually replace humans—silicon creations that potentially represent the next dominant life form on Earth. The progressive manifestation of this insecurity is best illustrated by the cyborg, a hybrid creature that personifies the root struggle between humankind and “thinking” machines.

  The term cyborg developed from the clever combination of the words cybernetic and organism, describing, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a person whose physical tolerances or capabilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by a machine or other external agency that modifies the body’s functioning.” The word was first introduced to the science community in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline who proposed the cyborg as “essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one” (“Cyborg”). These scientists were speculating on the best ways for human beings to survive space exploration, and, as a result, the first “real” cyborgs were developed as part of the Russian space program, integrating the biology of their cosmonauts with the technology of the SK-1 space suits. In other words, the cyborg was originally envisioned in a most optimistic and positive light—the logical, technological advancement of the human race.

  According to Norbert Wiener, the purpose of cybernetics is primarily to enhance our ability to process information (17); therefore, the cyborg can also be seen as simply a human being with an enhanced ability to access all kinds of information, including that of their physical environment. In our contemporary biotechnology world, then, cyborgs are people who have been enhanced with artificial organs or limbs, giving them the ability to interact more fully with the world around them. Such biomedical advances should be seen as good things for human progress; however, although a number of sci-fi texts do make heroic and even desirable use of cyborg characters, many more chose instead to profligate the cyborg as a monster. Why? Put simply, the loss of humanity. Ultimately, the cyborg, as it appears in most science fiction and horror narratives, represents technology’s decisive triumph over human will and independence. As a result, most depictions of the cyborg, especially those on the screen, show not a creature possessing the best of both the biological and the technological worlds, but rather a monstrosity in which the machine has overcome and replaced the human.

  Although a traditional sci-fi cyborg integrates human cells with silicon circuits, the historical antecedents of this creature belong to more pedestrian mythology. The ur-cyborg is the golem, a magical or mystical automaton brought to life to serve a specific function. The premier example is the legendary Golem of Prague, drawn from Jewish mythology, but the most famous one is certainly the reanimated corpse created by Mary Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein. Similar to the more traditional and modern cyborg, Frankenstein’s monster is cobbled together from various parts and brought back to life through decidedly scientific (although secret and ambiguous) means. Granted, once the creature returns to life, it ceases to be a thing of mere technology, embracing rather its lost organic features and characteristics, but without Frankenstein’s technological intervention, the creature would have remained little more than disparate pieces of dead flesh and rotting corpses. Later cinematic iterations of Frankenstein have more overtly embraced the cyborg trope in their depictions of the creature, but most golems remain foundationally animated life, not cybernetically enhanced organisms.

  Discounting golems, then, the first legitimate cybernetic organisms in literature appear as the victims/beneficiaries of prostheses. In 1839, the creator of so many now-popular SF subgenres,
Edgar Allan Poe, gave the world a disturbing Gothic tale of uncanny horror called “The Man That Was Used Up.” In this brief first-person account, readers are exposed to the remarkable Brevet Brigadier-General John A. B. C. Smith, a man of singular physical perfection and refined carriage. As a result of years of fighting colonized natives and falling victim to their violence and torture, almost nothing of Smith’s body remains organic and “alive”; instead, the man has prosthetically engineered legs, shoulders, arms, teeth, and even eyes. Another early cyborg can be found in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Published in 1900, Baum’s work features the sympathetic character of the Tin Woodman, a man who suffered repeated amputations due to an enchanted axe from the vindictive wicked Witch of the East. After each horrible act of dismemberment, the Woodman had a local tin-smith create a new limb from metal until, unfortunately, even his heart was replaced. Although the science is unclear in these two works of fantasy and whimsy, they clearly laid the groundwork for what would follow.

  Truly hybridized, cybernetic creatures and characters began to appear shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century in a variety of pulp fiction works and dime-store novels. The French author Jean de la Hire’s pioneered a number of advances in literary science fiction, including the invention of the proto-superhero Léo Sainte-Claire, also known as the Nyctalope. This cyborg crime fighter first appeared in the 1908 novel L’Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L’eau (The Man Who Can Live in the Water), but in later works, such as Le Mystère des XV (The Mystery Of The XV) (1911) and L’Assassinat du Nyctalope (The Assassination of the Nyctalope) (1933), we learn Sainte-Claire can not only see in the dark with his mysterious eyes, but also sports an artificial, mechanical heart. Other developmental cyborg characters soon followed, most notably the hybridized organic/mechanical space explorers featured in Edmond Hamilton’s 1928 novel The Comet Doom and C. L. Moore’s Deirdre, a dancer whose brain has been transplanted into a robotic body, from the 1944 short story “No Woman Born.” Each of these examples demonstrates important developments in the cyborg trope, but the authors generally limited the cybernetic fusion to individual body parts or small-scale integration.