Seekers of Tomorrow (30 page)

"Games Machine," which selects the most advanced intellects on earth to be sent to Venus for Null A training, is scrapped early in the story. Though fast-paced, the novel is carelessly and choppily written with an alternate-chapter scene-transition technique lifted shamelessly out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Letters of plaintive puzzlement began to pour in. Readers didn't understand what the story was all about. Campbell advised them to wait a few days; it took that long, he suggested, for the implications to sink in. The days turned into months but clarification never came. Lured by the little quotes from
Science and
Sanity
which led off various chap-ters in
World of A,
readers began to investigate semantics and Korzybski. Sales of
Science and Sanity
soared. This book, which then retailed at $9 a copy and had seen only two small editions since 1933, prepared its first large printing. A reading of
Science and Sanity
was enough to absolve van Vogt of deliberately aiming to confuse. His work was every bit as clear as its inspiration. Nevertheless,
World of A
created such a furore that the term "Null-A Man," like "slan," became another synonym for superman with science-fiction and fan publications adopting it. General Semantics failed to supply all the answers for van Vogt. Suffering from extreme myopia, he decided to try the Bates' system of eye exercises, endorsed by Aldous Huxley among others. To many, among them van Vogt, the system offered the promise of disposing of glasses through a sys-tem of visual exercise and mental orientation.

"I took off my glasses, and started the long uphill fight of training my eyes back to the normal," A. E. van Vogt told an assembly at the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention in 1946. "This had a profound affect on my brain," he contin-ued. "I could no longer write easily. In fact I could no longer write salable material. I determined to fight it through re-gardless of the cost. I reasoned that I had affected my vision centers, and that I must develop a new flow. I decided that it was a good time to take up other trainings. For thirteen years I had typed with two fingers, another bad habit."

He taught himself to type well with the touch system, "but my writing didn't improve. During the next seven months I did not produce a story that was worth anything as it stood. ... Just before Christmas of 1945 I began to feel a differ-ence. I sat down and wrote—in the shortest time in which I had ever turned out a story—
A Son Is Born.
Since then I have written approximately 160,000 words in spite of much sickness in the family."

A Son Is Born
appeared in the May, 1946, astounding science-fiction and was the first of a series based on a civilization of the future whose religion was worship of the atom with the scientists established as

"priests." These stories were eventually published as a book,
Empire of the Atom,
by Shasta in 1956. The Empire parallels ancient Rome with a backdrop of interplanetary travel. The central character is a radiation-caused mutant of exceptional intelligence. Individ-ually the stories were mediocre, but collectively they made an entertaining book, distinguished by truly superior characteri-zation. A two-part short novel which involved the use of the Bates system of eye exercises appeared as
The
Chronicler
in astounding science-fiction, October, 1946. This novel, woven about a man who had a third eye, is the most deliber-ately allegorical of all of van Vogt's works, with passages like: "I have got rid of all the astigmatism in my right or left eye, yet my center eye persists in being astigmatic, sometimes to the point of blindness." This followed the Bates theory, since discredited, that eyestrain is due to "an abnormal condition of the mind."

New stories from van Vogt continued to appear with some regularity through 1950. Whereas before they had been pub-lished predominantly in astounding science-fiction, they now began to show up in other magazines. The quality of some, particularly the short stories, was exceptional.
The Monster,
published in astounding science-fiction, August, 1948, and
Enchanted Village,
in other worlds, July, 1950, are regarded as among his very best. The first deals with beings who come to earth after all human life has ceased and resurrect four men of different eras, reconstructing them from the skeletal remains. The latter involves a space ex-plorer stranded on Mars who survives by physically turning into a Martian. Both of these were no more than fairy tales with scientific trimmings. The teacher who took the book of fairy tales from the hands of a twelve-year-old van Vogt never removed them from his heart and mind. In maturity, aided by a storyteller's sense of situation and drama and a clear, pleas-ing, stylistic talent, he escaped again and again into a dream-world of his own making. They could take the book of fairy tales from him, but not his ability to create more.

The 1947 Beowulf Poll conducted by Gerry de la Ree saw van Vogt edge out such formidable competitors as A. Mer-ritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A. Heinlein, and Henry Kuttner as science fiction's most popular author. When science fiction moved into its greatest boom at the end of 1949, van Vogt was still the leader and stood to profit the most. He might have, except for the appearance of an article which dramati-cally changed the course of his life.

That article was
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Men-tal Healing
by L. Ron Hubbard, which appeared in the May, 1950, issue of astounding science fiction. Dianetics was a system of do-it-yourself psychoanalysis. All you needed was a copy of the book, which conveniently appeared one month after the article and swiftly rose to the top of the national best-seller list. Dianetics grew from Hubbard's personal ex-perimental hypnotic treatment of psychosomatic illnesses. It offered the same hope as General Semantics: a means of rationalizing one's self to complete "sanity." A person who accomplished this feat was called a "clear." On the way to being a "clear" a person could be cured, according to Hub-bard, of ailments ranging from cancer to dementia praecox.

Within the science-fiction field this "science" found early adherents and, inevitably, A. E. van Vogt was among them. John W. Campbell, Jr., as treasurer of the Dianetics Research Foundation, enthusiastically encouraged such interest.

Hubbard had claimed that the first "clear" was his third wife, 25-year-old Sara Northrup Hubbard, who was therefore the only true sane person on earth. Feature-article writers attributed the breakup of Dianetics to a disagreement in the ranks of the foundation, but it actually was shattered on April 24, 1951, when the United Press reported that Sara Northrup Hubbard, by her husband's admission the only "clear" and completely sane woman on the face of the earth, was asking for a divorce on the grounds that "competent medical advisers" had found her 40-year-old husband "hopelessly insane" and in need of "psychiatric observa-tion."

This did not discourage van Vogt. He exuberantly set up a Los Angeles headquarters for Dianetics. Practically all of his writing ceased except for revisions of some of his earlier short works which he cobbled together for hardcover publi-cation. In the years that have followed, van Vogt unflagging-ly has dedicated all his energies to the teaching and promotion of a "science" that has been exposed as without foundation in a dozen or more periodicals, and which even Hubbard, its originator, has deserted for a more "advanced concept" he terms "Scientology."

Why this search?

Perhaps the answer rests in the fact that A. E. van Vogt is a deeply religious man in the fullest sense of the phrase. As a child he sallied forth to protect his brother from an unfair beating by a bully and was himself beaten. The major reli-gions of the world have taught that "right makes might" Right was on his side but might had triumphed. He could not, therefore, in all conscience accept orthodox religion, for did not this incident obviously prove that one of its basic tenets was false?

Yet, here is a man, fundamentally good, whose sincere belief holds that man has within himself Godlike powers if he will only work to discover and release them. His own life has been a dedicated striving for self-improvement. General Se-mantics represented a means of cleansing himself of mental conflict through orderly thinking. The Bates system of eye exercises pointed to correction of a physical defect with the hope of concurrently clearing up negative thinking. With Dianetics he moved on to a promise of higher intelligence, elimination of mental conflict and freedom from disease.

In van Vogt's fiction, his characters follow the same course. They travel in a world of confusion sustained only by the knowledge that within them are undreamed-of powers they will eventually master. Jommy Cross, the mutation of
Slan,
struggles for survival in a world where all hands are turned against him, knowing that as he matures his mental and physical powers will give him the tools to attain suprem-acy; Gilbert Gosseyn, hero of
World of A,
undergoes incred-ible ordeals aimed at ultimately revealing to him that he is a superman with a double brain; Clane Linn, mutant of
Empire of the Atom,
who is almost condemned to death at birth, lives to discover and utilize the near-mystical powers within him; Drake, an amnesiac in
The Search
(astounding science-fiction, January, 1943), solves the amazing riddle of his background after the baffling series of incidents which add up to the fact that he is a man from the future whose purpose is to alter history so that unjust fates will not over-take the worthy. Though van Vogt honestly adheres to his role as a story-teller, he writes in religious symbols. Jommy Cross, Gilbert Gosseyn, Clane Linn, and many others are Christ images with Christlike motives. His characters undergo symbolic crucifixion and resurrection so frequently as to make it possible clearly to discern a pattern. Gilbert Gosseyn in
World of A
twice is killed and comes to life in other bodies. Throughout the novel Gosseyn is aware that there is an Unknown Chessplayer involved in his destiny, and the destiny of all men. Eventually Gosseyn learns that he and the Unknown Chessplayer are one and the same; theosophically interpreted, he equates himself with "The Son of God."
The Monster,
which, when anthologized in August Der-leth's
The Other Side of the Moon,
was even retitled
Resur-rection,
finds four earthmen brought back from the dead, each possessed of greater powers, until the last is able to revive long-extinct human life on the planet and preserve earthmen immortal forever. It is in the book version of
Empire of the Atom
that we find a near-final religious coalescence of van Vogt's thinking. Religion in that novel is based on the worship of the atom and the scientists fill the role of priests. Clane Linn, the mutant born into royalty, becomes a figure of Christlike morality. Here van Vogt finally resolves the mysteries that confound him. A tiny floating ball appears at the end of the story which

"contains the entire sidereal universe... it looked small but that was an illusion of man's senses." Van Vogt had reduced the entire universe to a tiny, glowing, floating sphere. It was now something small enough to grasp. It also consciously or unconsciously suggested Spinoza's philosophy that the entire universe is God and everything that makes it up is part of Him. The story ends with the question: "Did this mean that... man controlled the universe, or that the universe controlled man?" All his life van Vogt has sought for the positive in man and the good in himself. Bewildered and bemused though he has been, his stories usually speak affirmatively: man can attain anything if he really tries. His search for the powers within himself have led van Vogt on many false paths, and may have lost him the great power he always had: power he demonstrated every time he wrote a story like
Slan, The Weapon
Makers, The Monster
or
Enchanted Village.

Dianetics became the "religion" that van Vogt so urgently needed, one in which he could be a high priest and personally dispense knowledge for the betterment of mankind while providing a haven for himself. To a great extent, in so doing he sustained a nameless god of a formless belief at the sacrifice of his literary creativity, for nothing new came from his typewriter for almost the entire decade of the 1950's. Then, in 1962, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy released
The Violent Man,
a novel of Communist China. The brain washing which had influenced so many young American prisoners of the Korean War to declare themselves for communism provided the inspiration of this work. Twenty-two mature adults of the West are captured by the Red Chinese, with the objective of determining whether they can be readily influ-enced to embrace the Marxist-Leninist philosophy and if the findings of this experiment can be employed against the free world. But one of the members of the group finds a flaw in the psychology of his instructor and turns the tables. The primary value of the book rests in its dialogues, which present the communist and western viewpoints. These have been exhaustively researched and lucidly presented. The creative stasis appeared to have been broken.

A year later the first new van Vogt science-fiction short story in fourteen years,
The Expendables,
a duel between a starship and an alien civilization to discover which is further advanced, appeared in if for September, 1963, followed in the same magazine in 1964 by
The Silkie
and in 1965 by
The Replicators.
All three of the stories were to a degree a melange of elements van Vogt had used in his more success-ful stories as far as twenty-five years back. They showed a certain hesitancy in style and unsureness in plotting, but older readers hoped that the closing line of
The Replicators
would prove prophetic: "... the real
That
stirred, awakened and sat up."

It walked in the woods.

It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and in darkness and decay there is growth. It grew, but it was not alive. It walked unbreathing through the woods, and thought and saw and was hideous and strong, and it was not born and it did not live. It grew and moved about without living.