The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (45 page)

This pivotal story was specifically directed to the question of whether men must fear the difference of the unearthly, or whether they might make the regularity and reliability of the universe their particular tool and ally.

In “Who Goes There?” an American polar expedition has discovered a spaceship and an alien being that have been frozen in the ice of Antarctica for twenty million years. The spaceship has been accidentally destroyed, but the scientists have carried the alien back to camp in a block of ice with the intention of examining it.

The very appearance of the alien is upsetting. It is a hideous Lovecraftian being, blue-skinned, red-eyed and obviously malevolent. Strong men retch and retreat at the sight of it, even entombed in a chunk of ice:

Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow.
³⁴⁰

And its behavior is even more frightening. This nightmare-inducing creature does not merely thaw out and then begin to decay in the normal manner. Instead, after twenty million years in cold storage, it comes back to life! What is more, it proves to be a shape-changing, telepathic monster that can take over the protoplasm of any living creature—be it a dog, a cow, a bird or a man—and convert it into its own kind while still retaining the capabilities and appearance of the original.

In short, here, just as in Campbell’s earlier story, “The Brain Stealers of Mars” (
Thrilling Wonder,
Dec. 1936), human beings are confronted by the prospect of shape-shifting mind readers. But, what in the earlier story was only a half-comic question of distinguishing a pair of human originals from a host of Martian imitators, in “Who Goes There?” becomes the wholly urgent need to prevent a monstrous alien from escaping the Antarctic and taking over the world.

What a completely horrifying prospect!

And yet, the emphasis in “Who Goes There?” is not upon horror or excitement, as it is in the two Hollywood movies that would be made from Campbell’s story—
The Thing
(1951) and
The Thing
(1982). If thrills had been Campbell’s object, then almost certainly he would have chosen to start his story at an earlier moment than he does. Say—as a bronze ice ax chips into something and breaks off, and an American scientist suddenly finds himself staring into the three glowing red eyes of a frozen snake-haired alien. Or as a magnesium spaceship suddenly catches fire, and sparks and burns away to nothing beneath the polar ice.

But action and emotion are not the heart of “Who Goes There?” Horror and excitement in sufficient measure may be used to carry the story along, but they aren’t what Campbell is after. In fact, in a very real sense, it is horror and excitement that the characters of the story are called upon to overcome if they are to perceive their situation clearly and deal with it effectively.

And so it is that “Who Goes There?” does not open with the high thrills of the discovery of the creature and the destruction of the alien spaceship. Rather, it opens back at base camp with all the members of the expedition gathering to hear a chalk talk summary of what has been found.

Indeed, the very first thing the story offers is a bracing whiff of the atmosphere of the camp:

“The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-bound cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber.”
³⁴¹

This is just the beginning. On the litany of reeks and stenches continues: liniment, wet furs, burnt cooking fat, dogs, machine oil, harness dressing—and the queer, neck-ruffling taint of thawing alien. (There it is in the background, underneath a tarp, dripping away.)

No place described in earlier science fiction ever stank like this! But it is precisely this overwhelming atmosphere of pervasive, inescapable specificity—of smelly feet and seal blubber—that establishes a context in which naked fact and universal principle may plausibly rule.

The true emphasis in “Who Goes There?”—like much of Campbellian science fiction—is on the definition and solution of a problem. And the problem set forth in this initial story of modern science fiction is a fundamental one:

The creature from another world is strange, terrifying, and immensely powerful. But is it different in essence from what we know, or is it only different in kind?

Here is the very significant reaction of the expedition’s doctor when he is first told that the monster has come back to life and escaped:

“Copper stared blankly. ‘It wasn’t—Earthly,’ he sighed suddenly. ‘I—I guess Earthly laws don’t apply.’ ”
³⁴²

With this response, Campbell precisely catches the basic elements of the “literature of cosmic fear”
³⁴³
described by H.P. Lovecraft in his classic 1927 essay,
Supernatural Horror in Literature:

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
³⁴⁴

This is the Techno Age attitude toward the wider universe at its most timorous—laid down as an aesthetic requirement!

But in “Who Goes There?” John Campbell has raised his demon of unplumbed space not to confirm us in our habitual cosmic fear, but rather with the intention of resolving the problem of this alien monster using the new general principles of relationship and operation. Not mere Earthly law—which perhaps might not apply to demonic creatures from another star—but Universal Law, which surely does.

As Blair, the biologist of the expedition, says, very shortly before he goes mad and has to be placed in isolation:

“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.”
³⁴⁵

What a radical new idea this was—that the biology and behavior of even an alien might be governed by laws as simple and manipulable as those of classical physics! And yet, this becomes the premise that the members of the expedition proceed upon. They set out to test scientifically who is a monster and who is not.

What is more, in “Who Goes There?” it is assumed that all true human beings will naturally accept the appropriateness and efficacy of scientific testing. Indeed, the members of the human expedition are completely confident that those monsters masquerading as men will raise no objections to the principle of testing because anything less than complete assent to the power of science would be a dead giveaway of their non-humanity.

However, the first test that the American scientists devise is not a success. Like the tests in “The Brain Stealers of Mars”—which were the presumed inability of the Martians either to copy human muscles well enough to sneeze, or to duplicate an acquired human immunity to tetanus—it is an Earth-minded test. The scientists immunize one of their sled dogs with the blood from two men. Their expectation is that the blood from any monster pretending to be human will be revealed as something other-than-human under laboratory examination.

But the monster proves to have outmaneuvered them. The dog reacts to human blood—but also to monster blood. Not only is the test hopelessly compromised, but also it is certain that one of the two apparent humans who originally contributed blood must actually be an alien.

In this traumatic moment, some of the members of the party are driven over the edge into madness, religious hysteria and murder. But others keep their balance. They devise a new and more effective test—this time not a test of human genuineness, but rather a direct test of alien difference. It employs a universal principle—the law of self-preservation—in such a way as to make the monster’s own superiority give it away:

Does each part of the monster have independent life and crave to preserve it? Then take a sample of blood from each man and touch it with a hot wire. If it screams and tries to escape, it must be monster blood.

This scientific trial-by-fire proves just the thing, and one by one, fifteen human-imitating monsters are duly identified and eliminated. And the last of these is Blair, the “mad” biologist. When he is discovered, it is with two homemade inventions—anti-gravity and atomic power.

If he had survived for only a few more minutes, the world would have been his for the taking. As it is, human beings have been left with a couple of neat bonuses.

There are a number of unexamined ambiguities within this pivotal story. Not the least of these is that Dr. Copper, who could only stare blankly and suggest the Lovecraftian otherness of the creature, is one of those who proves to be a genuine human being, while Blair the biologist, who first proposed that the alien must be a natural being subject to the same laws as any other manifestation of life, turns out to be a monster. How very odd it is that the creature should be the one to propose the basis for its own destruction!

In fact, the respect that the monsters volunteer for the new rule of scientific testing of universal principle is nothing short of remarkable. Despite their large numbers, common nature, and telepathic powers, the false humans completely eschew the possibility of joint resistance. They docilely take their turn in line to be tested and then electrocuted or ripped to shreds. We may be forgiven for concluding that if these malevolent monsters tamely bow down and worship the new vision of universal principle, it is because it is their vision, too.

“Who Goes There?” would prove to be the most influential SF story since Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey.” In effect, it was a highly visible public demonstration, a sign to all who could see, that John Campbell was out to turn science fiction into something new.

But this electrifying story would be almost the last piece of fiction John Campbell would write. In the coming months, he would publish two more stories as John W. Campbell, Jr., and two as Don A. Stuart, but after the middle of 1939, when he wrote a Stuart short novel to fill a hole in
Unknown,
he would cease to produce fiction.

The explanation usually given for this is that Campbell was called in by his superiors at Street & Smith and flatly told to stop writing fiction and stick to his editing—and that Campbell valued his paycheck enough to obey.

But while there may be a degree of truth to this story, it doesn’t sound very much like John Campbell, a man who was rarely one to do anything he didn’t wish to do. If Campbell was prepared to give up his science fiction writing, it just may have been because he had finally figured out how to be an
editor
and get other people to do the writing for him. At least, Isaac Asimov tells us:

I once asked him, years ago (with all the puzzlement of a compulsive writer who can imagine no other way of life), how he could possibly have borne to leave his writing career and become an editor. I had almost said
merely
an editor. He smiled (he knew me) and said, “Isaac, when I write, I write only my own stories. As editor, I write the stories that a hundred people write.”
³⁴⁶

The problem in creating modern science fiction would be to find a hundred writers with some sense of the new vision, or a willingness and ability to pick it up, and to get rid of the rest. Along with the changes he made in the magazine, Campbell cleaned house at
Astounding
through 1938 and 1939. He swept out the debris of the Technological Age. He got rid of stories of mushy occultism, unfounded fancy and cosmic fear. He picked and chose among the established writers of science fiction, discarding all those who could not play by the new rules.

E.E. Smith, of course, was one established writer acceptable to Campbell. His first Lensman novel,
Galactic Patrol,
had just begun serialization as Campbell became editor of
Astounding.
This was the most grandly scaled science fiction story yet, the climax of all Smith’s efforts since
The Skylark of Space,
and its very presence in the pages of
Astounding
gave Campbell’s editorial career the strongest possible initial boost.

Even though Doc Smith would never exactly be a writer of modern science fiction, Campbell would continue to publish Lensman novels through the next ten years. Once more, Smith would be something like Jules Verne—a founding father who continued to work on into an era that was not his own.

But even so, there would be good reasons aplenty for Campbell to give Smith’s great epic houseroom in the pages of
Astounding.
There was a moral confidence and an imaginative breadth to the Lensman stories that modern science fiction—for all its many special qualities and virtues—would simply never be able to equal. And indeed, even though during the Forties the Lensman series might sometimes seem a side issue, a relic, a leftover from an earlier era of SF, it would eventually prove to be the conceptual foundation upon which the latter-day Campbellian science fiction of the Fifties and Sixties would come to be erected.

But Campbell’s other early inspiration, Edmond Hamilton, would not fare so well with him. Hamilton would appear in the Campbell
Astounding
just once at the end of 1938, and then never again.

It happened this way: Campbell and Hamilton had been fellow members of a New York area SF writers circle. After he became editor, Campbell asked most of the writers he knew, including Hamilton, to contribute stories to his magazine. And Hamilton was glad to dash one off for him.

But then Campbell did the Campbellish thing. He pointed out flaws in the story and asked for a rewrite. Ed Hamilton was an old pro accustomed to turning out first-draft copy, to repeating his plots, and to selling everything he wrote. So he was quite taken aback by this request. He fixed the story, but he didn’t send any more to Campbell.