The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (73 page)

“I don’t know physics enough to explain all the technical ramifications, but my friend made the main point seem simple enough. The link between mind and matter, he says, is probability. . . .

“Living things are more than matter alone. . . . The mind is an independent something—an energy-complex, he called it—created by the vibrating atoms and electrons of the body, and yet controlling their vibrations through the linkage of atomic probability—my friend used more technical language, but that’s the idea of it.

“The web of living energy is fed by the body; it’s part of the body—usually. My friend is a pretty conservative scientist, and he wouldn’t say whether he thinks it’s really a soul, able to survive long after the body is dead. He says you can’t prove anything about that. . . .

“But that vital pattern in us, is stronger than in true men—his experiments did prove that. More fluid and less dependent on the material body. In the free state, he says, we simply separate that living web from the body and use the probability link to attach it to other atoms, wherever we please. . . .”
⁵⁸⁰

In these speculations and explanations, three post-materialistic ideas are proposed that later SF would find useful and return to again and again. One is that mind and matter are not separate, but linked. Another is that mind is an energy-complex or pattern. And the third is that natural laws are not absolute, but rather constitute a range of possible outcomes whose average has been mistaken for hard-and-fast “law.”

In
Darker Than You Think,
the strange dreams continue. Barbee assumes one new shape after another and, with April to goad him on, commits crime after crime against his former friends. As a sabretoothed tiger, he kills one buddy by slashing his throat and forcing his car off the road. As a giant snake, he crushes another and throws his body out of a ninth-floor window.

And when Barbee is awake again, he discovers that indeed his friends are dead from causes as superficially plausible as Dr. Mondrick’s heart attack. One was driving a car with bad brakes much too fast down a notoriously dangerous hill. The car crashed and the windshield broke and cut his throat. The other was a sleepwalker who accidentally tumbled out a high window to his death.

The conscious rational Barbee is in a state of turmoil. He drinks too much and ties himself into knots of jealousy over April. He would like to be a support to his friends and to oppose evil. He also wants to doubt all that is happening, even to the point of undertaking psychoanalysis. And in the meantime, the shape-shifting nighttime Barbee keeps running wild with April.

It is only gradually that Barbee comes to recognize and admit his own true nature: He is not the person he always took himself to be. He, too, is a witch. More than that, he is the awaited one, the Child of the Night, his powers all the greater for being slow to waken. It is his task to seize probability and lead the witch-people to final victory over a disbelieving mankind.

At last, however, Barbee does assent to his destiny. After another auto accident on that dangerous hill, he takes leave of his familiar material body for good and begins to exist as a mental pattern capable of weaving any form he wishes out of convenient atoms. The story ends with him once more assuming the shape of a wolf and following April’s exciting scent off into the shadows.

A fascinating mixture of psychology, morality and emotion is presented in this novel. The unconscious is perceived as a source of free will—but also of possibly evil behavior. The ambivalence and highly charged feelings associated with separation from the nuclear family and initiation into sex are powerfully set forth. Ultimately, however, the central issue of
Darker Than You Think
becomes the willingness to accept a protean personal nature—represented by Will Barbee’s ability to cloak himself in any form he desires.

We may understand this more flexible individuality as the consequence toward which all of the rejection of received religion, of traditional cultural roles, and of historical determinism that we have been witnessing in the course of our story had been tending, made visible and explicit at last. That is, the long-term result of the modern Western adventure into materialism and out the other side was the development of a new kind of man, not predefined by society and its expectations, but flexible enough to respond appropriately to whatever circumstances he might encounter.

Jack Williamson himself was an early example of this new type of man. This is the explanation for his slow maturation and his highly individual life path. It accounts for his singular ability to write successfully for every SF market when no one else could do this. And it also explains his somewhat uncomfortable fit within a society that taken as a whole had not yet gone as far as he had in shaking off the constraints of tradition.

But no matter how badly adjusted to conventional mid-Twentieth Century American life Williamson may sometimes have felt, the psychic twinges he suffered were growing pains rather than signs of illness. The fact of the matter was that Williamson was an existential child whose experience of life stretched from covered wagons on the American frontier to the streets of modern-day New York and Los Angeles, and from a Stone Age existence to the exploration of the stars—and there simply was no familiar social pigeonhole offered by Western society that was capacious enough to contain him. Except, of course, to eke out a living as a science fiction writer.

Darker Than You Think
was the expression of Williamson’s own recognition and acceptance of his unfixed nature. And even so—as with every new imaginative step into the unknown taken by SF during the course of its development—there was in this story a central element of uncertainty, disquiet and fear.

Indeed, whenever the new forms of transcendence were not presumed to be under the control of universal operating principles, they could arouse feelings of wariness, apprehension and self-protectiveness in the science fiction writers of the Golden Age. This is perhaps most precisely illustrated by “Waldo” (
Astounding,
Aug. 1942), Robert Heinlein’s final bow as Campbell’s resident iconoclast, Anson MacDonald. This short novel was Heinlein’s next-to-last pre-war story, written between
Beyond This Horizon
and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” during the months after Pearl Harbor when Heinlein was making arrangements for the wartime job he would hold as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Here, as in “Magic, Inc.”—with which “Waldo” would eventually be paired in a hardcover volume—Heinlein once again deliberately mixed futuristic science fiction and outright fantasy, but this time with the weight of appearance more toward the science-fictional side. And even so, “Waldo” was overtly metaphysical enough to be upsetting to certain of the more determinedly materialistic readers of
Astounding
who would write letters wondering about the legitimacy of such a story in their science-based magazine.

In the next-century world presented in “Waldo,” people fly air cars and live in underground dwellings. Their power is supplied not through wires but by broadcast radiation. Now, however, the power receptors—“the deKalbs”
⁵⁸¹
—are beginning to fail and the air cars are starting to drop out of the sky.

This is highly upsetting. North American Power-Air, the great energy conglomerate which supplies more than half of the energy of the continent, is understandably anxious to resolve this problem quickly, whatever its nature may be. Their fear is that power to the cities may soon begin to fail, too—and, in fact, it does.

The most troubled of the NAPA executives is Dr. Rambeau, head of research. In this day, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has been overturned and overturned again, and physics is once more considered an exact science. But Rambeau can’t find anything wrong with those malfunctioning deKalbs. And yet they still refuse to work properly.

This is contrary to everything that Rambeau knows and believes. His religious faith in modern science is being severely shaken, and he doesn’t know what to do.

In the face of this disintegrating situation, North American Power-Air’s Chairman of the Board and its Chief Engineer, who are more practical and less theoretical men than Rambeau, have no hesitation in soliciting the special problem-solving talents of Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones. This self-taught genius is a grossly fat invalid, rich, nasty, greedy and selfish, who lives with his two pets, a mastiff and a canary, in a space station parked twenty-five thousand miles above the Earth.

Waldo deals impersonally with his fellow human beings. He communicates with them either by means of a TV-phone or through a full-size dummy replica of himself that sits in an outer room of the space station. The things that are around him, and things below on Earth, Waldo manipulates with the aid of power-multiplying remote-control mechanical hands of his own devising, known as “waldoes” after him.

The basis for this character had been with Heinlein for a long time. He would explain:

Back in 1918 I read an article in
Popular Mechanics
about a poor fellow afflicted with
myasthenia gravis,
pathological muscular weakness so great that even handling a knife and fork is too much effort. In this condition the brain and the control system are okay, the muscles almost incapable. This man—I don’t even know his name; the article is lost in the dim corridors of time—this genius did not let
myasthenia gravis
defeat him. He devised complicated lever arrangements to enable him to use what little strength he had and he became an inventor and industrial engineer, specializing in how to get maximum result for least effort. He turned his affliction into an asset.
⁵⁸²

Beyond this obvious model, however, in Waldo’s cool, unsympathetic intelligence, his rotundity, and his helplessness in Earth’s gravity, we can catch a strong afterwhiff of Big Brain. Waldo and his situation also express something of the original Cartesian aspiration to be a remote disembodied mind riding high above all material things and studying them from afar.

At the outset, Waldo will have nothing to do with North American Power-Air. He bears the company a grudge over a patent dispute. But eventually, having been made aware of his dependence on a functioning civilization down below, Waldo agrees to tackle NAPA’s unsolvable problem.

Waldo is a man of universal operating principles. It’s his belief that he can make the cosmos do what he wants it to do. If no answer to a problem presently exists, he believes that he can always invent one. Moreover, he sees his confidence that he can wring answers out of a reluctant universe as something that distinguishes him from Rambeau, who is a more old-fashioned man of natural law:

“To Rambeau the universe was an inexorably ordered cosmos, ruled by unvarying law. To Waldo the universe was the enemy, which he strove to force to submit to his will. They might have been speaking of the same thing, but their approaches were different.”
⁵⁸³

In the event, however, Waldo proves no more able than Rambeau to get the dead deKalbs to work again.

But there is one man who can. This is Gramps Schneider, an ancient Pennsylvania hex doctor. As a personal favor for a local boy, he has fixed the malfunctioning deKalbs of the assistant to NAPA’s Chief Engineer. The catch is that the deKalbs now work in a way they never did before. The rigid antennae that draw broadcast radiation from the air now behave like so many wriggling worms.

Dr. Rambeau is the first to examine the altered machine. He even manages to learn how to duplicate the anomalous effect, but only at the cost of his sanity. He calls Waldo up on the viewphone to tell him what he is able to do:

“I’ve learned how to do it,” he said tensely.

“How to do what?”
⁵⁸⁴

“Make the deKalbs work. The dear, dear deKalbs.” He suddenly thrust his hands at Waldo, while clutching frantically with his fingers. “They go like this:
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!
 . . .

“Listen carefully: Nothing is certain. . . . Hens will crow and cocks will lay. You are here and I am there. Or maybe not. Nothing is certain. Nothing,
nothing,
NOTHING
is certain! Around and around the little ball goes, and where it stops nobody knows. Only I’ve learned how to do it.”

“How to do what?”

“How to make the little ball stop where I want it to.”

It is clear that Rambeau has flipped his wig completely. And very shortly, NAPA officials have him strapped to a confining stretcher and carried off to the hospital. Somewhere en route, however, Rambeau manages to escape from his restraint, leaving the straps of his stretcher still buckled in place, and disappears into thin air.

Waldo is left with the squirming, writhing deKalb receptors. But they are every bit as baffling to him as the deKalbs that ought to work but don’t:

Waldo was forced to conclude that he was faced with new phenomena, phenomena for which he did not know the rules. If there were rules. . . . For he was honest with himself. If he saw what he thought he saw, then rules were being broken by the new phenomena, rules which he had considered valid, rules to which he had never previously encountered exceptions.
⁵⁸⁵

At last, all he can think to do is go visit Gramps Schneider, who not only declines to own modern machinery but won’t even communicate with Waldo by viewphone. The consequence is that it is necessary for Waldo to venture down into the overwhelming gravitational field of Earth for the first time in seventeen years.

However, when he arrives, he finds Gramps Schneider as sweet and helpful as he can be. The old hex doctor feeds Waldo coffee and cake and tells him everything he desires to know, and more. Not only does he show him how to fix the ailing deKalbs, but also how to repair his own woefully inadequate muscles.

Schneider tells him:

“One of the ancients said that everything either
is,
or
is not.
That is less than true, for a thing can both
be
and
not be.
With practice one can see it both ways. Sometimes a thing which
is
for this world is a thing which
is not
for the Other World. Which is important, since we live in the Other World. . . . The mind—not the brain, but the mind—is in the Other World, and reaches this world through the body. That is one true way of looking at it, though there are others.”
⁵⁸⁶