The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (98 page)

The culmination of this sequence of visions of potential human responsibility came with the serialization of van Vogt’s second novel,
The Weapon Makers,
from February to April 1943, the last three issues of the bedsheet
Astounding.
Here van Vogt attempted to give a definitive answer to the question he had raised two years earlier in “Repetition”: What quality in man would render him fit to attain the stars and to rule the galaxy?

The structure of
The Weapon Makers
was quite unusual, and perhaps not altogether successful, with frequent inversions of time sequence and with separate narrative lines that never quite managed to meet. It was perfectly possible that a reader might find this story frustrating, fragmented and incoherent—even for A.E. van Vogt.

However, if we look at
The Weapon Makers
from just the proper angle with just the proper squint, it is possible for us to see it as having less of the nature of a conventional novel of any kind we are familiar with, and more of the form and approach of an out-of-time Greek play in science fiction clothing. Here, even before the story begins, a central happening of cosmic importance has taken place. In the story proper, human beings of varying role and stature must react to that event, and, as they contend, they reveal something of the essential quality of being human. Finally, at the conclusion of the story, a cathartic assessment of the situation is rendered by a non-human higher observer.

The offstage universe-altering event that underlies
The Weapon Makers
is the invention of the “infinity drive”
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and the human attainment of interstellar travel.

A brilliant scientist and his assistants have made the first flight between the stars, only to be marooned by a greedy subordinate on a desert planet hurtling in a figure-eight orbit around the twin suns of Alpha Centauri. That underling has now returned to an Earth society marked on every level by immorality and amorality, where he has entered into secret negotiations with the Empress Innelda Isher to sell her the interstellar drive, which she intends to suppress.

The Empress is the living embodiment of the conservative aspect of human nature, even though she is “ ‘restless and adventure-minded’ ”
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and surrounds herself with a personal retinue of young hotbloods. It is her fear that public knowledge of the interstellar drive will send human beings hurtling off in all directions and mean the end of the 5000-year history of the Isher Empire.

The continuing counterforce to the Empire is, of course, the Weapon Shops—“an independent, outlawed, indestructible, altruistic opposition to tyranny.”
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Here, too, paradox is involved, since even though this organization represents the rebellious, individualistic, questing element of human nature, the men of the Weapon Shops Council seem a personally restrained and cautious lot who must act in concert if they are to act at all. However, when the most farseeing of the Weapon Makers, Edward Gonish—a “No-man”
⁷⁸²
or trained intuitionist who only has to know ten percent of the facts of any situation in order to grasp the entirety—understands in a flash that there is such a thing as the interstellar drive and that the Empress aims to keep it a secret, there is no question but that the Weapon Shops will do whatever they can to see it made public.

The Weapon Makers
has two different protagonists. One is an ordinary man, an asteroid miner named Dan Neelan. His twin brother, Gil, with whom he has an extraordinary degree of rapport, was one of the assistants of the scientist who invented the infinity drive. Neelan, having lost his lifelong sense of contact with his brother and believing that this must mean he is dead, has returned to Earth to discover what happened to him.

This is certainly one selfless and single-minded man. After he has discovered that his brother has been marooned among the stars, and then is able to gain control of the interstellar drive, Neelan falls into the hands of the Empress. But neither desire for the riches she has to offer, nor fear of the torture she threatens him with and then subjects him to, can cause him to divulge the secret he is holding. His only concern is to follow his brother to the stars and help him in any way he can.

The other protagonist, Robert Hedrock, is a personage of greater size and broader aims. He is described to us as someone of “striking appearance, mental brilliance and strong personality.”
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Even though he is an acknowledged agent of the Weapon Shops, a member of their Council, he has presented himself at Innelda Isher’s palace, the one man bold enough to seek her hand in marriage, and has been made a Captain in her Guard.

In fact, as we will come to be told, “he is Earth’s only immortal man, with private long-range purposes of his own, transcending any temporary commitment he might make.”
⁷⁸⁴
Robert Hedrock is only his latest name. This man has had many different identities.

Long ago, he was the first Isher Emperor.

He was also Walter S. de Lany, the founder of the Weapon Shops.

At various moments since, when balance and reinvigoration have been called for, he has served as the husband of an Isher Empress. On other occasions, he has been a leader of the Weapon Shops. At still other times, he has pursued the mystery of his own immortality and sought to make it a universal condition of man.

What these different persons and forces—the Empress, Dan Neelan, Robert Hedrock, and the Weapon Shops—have in common is the quality of altruism:

It is a given that the Weapon Makers are altruistic, as even Innelda Isher is ready to admit at those moments when she isn’t doing her best to annihilate them. In one unusually candid moment, she describes them as “ ‘a stabilizing influence’ ”
⁷⁸⁵
in the current societal atmosphere of pervasive selfishness and corruption. And she even goes on to say, “ ‘I am counting particularly upon a new method of mind training recently released by the Weapon Shops, which strengthens moral functions as well as performing everything that other methods are noted for.’ ”
⁷⁸⁶

The mysterious Robert Hedrock is an idealist and an altruist beyond even the ability of the Weapon Makers to comprehend. They are made so nervous by his unfathomable nature and motives that they are prepared to execute him just to have life once again be something they think they understand.

Even Edward Gonish, the No-man, cannot get his head around the whole of Hedrock. However, enough of Hedrock’s pattern is visible to him that Gonish feels able to say, “ ‘Everything the man has ever said or done shows an immense and passionate interest in the welfare of the race.’ ”
⁷⁸⁷

Next to Hedrock, Dan Neelan is an ephemeral being. But within his more limited frame of reference, he, too, is an altruist, caring far more for his brother’s welfare than his own. And as soon as he has escaped from the control of the Empress, Neelan heads straight for the stars in search of his lost twin.

While he is in the depths of space, he is encountered by an immense ship full of spider-like higher aliens. These are cool, remote, thoughty beings whose lives have been conducted in accordance with the old Techno Age rule of the survival of the fittest. As they eventually describe themselves to Neelan: “ ‘All of us here present are immortal, the winners in the struggle for supremacy and existence on our planet. Each and every one of us is supreme in some one field by virtue of having destroyed all competition.’ ”
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The immediate judgment the spiders make of Neelan is that he is not very bright—“ ‘Intelligence type nine hundred minus. . . .’ ”
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But gradually these emotionless Big Brains become intrigued by his devotion to his brother, and by the rapport that exists between the two. Such a bond is unique in their experience and deserving of special study.

Even the Empress Innelda Isher—who can be selfish, willful and cruel—is capable of behaving altruistically. We know that she fears what the interstellar drive will do to the secure eternal Isherness of things. We are also aware that she is afraid of death, and that she has been told by her doctors that if she should ever have a child, it will be at the cost of her life.

But yet, as soon as she gains even an inkling of Robert Hedrock’s special role in human affairs, she is ready to offer knowledge of the infinity drive to the Weapon Shops in exchange for his life. What is more, despite the fact that she is unable to tolerate the fact of his immortality or the personal relationships he has had with past Isher empresses, she will marry Hedrock in order to have his child and continue the Isher line—even though she knows that to do so means her death.

The spiderish alien observers—whose assessment of themselves is that they have taken the wrong path and are ultimately not to be reckoned one of Nature’s successes—are puzzled and awed by Innelda Isher’s readiness to sacrifice herself, just as they were previously impressed by the unselfish behavior of Dan Neelan.

The last line of
The Weapon Makers
is their final judgment of mankind:

“ ‘This much we have learned; here is the race that shall rule the sevagram.’ ”
⁷⁹⁰

What an epitomally thunderous van Vogtian exit line! And what a marvelously exotic and resonant word to introduce without any explanation at the very end of a story!

As it is used here, “sevagram” seems clearly intended to stir images in the reader’s mind of the broadest conceivable vistas. It would appear to mean at least this galaxy, maybe other galaxies, perhaps even the entire multiverse.

At the same time, however, while this word might be obscure to van Vogt’s American readers, it was in contemporary use. Sevagram was the name of the ashram recently established by Mahatma Gandhi in India. In Hindi, this word meant “village of service.”
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The wider universe perceived as a mere village . . . The ruler whose true obligation is recognized as service to others . . . Above all, the identification of altruistic behavior as the essence of mankind’s higher potential, uniting the aspect of humanity which remembers and maintains man’s restless questing spirit, his ephemeral individual nature, and his mysterious immortality . . . Wonderful ideas indeed to find expressed in a sometimes clumsy and disorganized pulp science fiction serial in the middle of World War II!

But A.E. van Vogt, though he might labor valiantly all of the day and into the night to produce stories for John Campbell, couldn’t fill the pages of
Astounding
all by himself. Campbell had to have other regular writers to keep the magazine going. The place where he looked for them was
Unknown.

Back in 1939 and 1940, the weight of editorial pressure had all been in the other direction, with Campbell doing his best to convince science fiction writers like van Vogt, Heinlein and Williamson to produce stories for his new fantasy magazine. Now, however, with
Unknown Worlds
on a bimonthly schedule and only half the market it had formerly been, and with
Astounding
losing all of its most dependable contributors, it made sense to Campbell to drop a line to one after another of his fantasy authors and suggest that
Astounding
would welcome submissions if they cared to have a try at writing science fiction.

Cleve Cartmill, the author of “Deadline,” was one of these. Another was William Anthony Parker White, a writer of mysteries under the name H.H. Holmes (including the 1942 novel
Rocket to the Morgue,
set in Heinlein’s Mañana Literary Society of happy memory), who in recent times had become an occasional writer for
Unknown
under the pseudonym Anthony Boucher. Yet another was Fritz Leiber, Jr., who had just finished an experimental stint as a teacher at Occidental College and delivered a fantasy novel to Campbell about witchcraft in academe based on his experience. The editor was pressing him to have a try at a science fiction novel next.

But the one writer whom Campbell singled out from
Unknown
to write for
Astounding
on a full-time basis was Henry Kuttner. On past record, this was a most unlikely choice.

Henry Kuttner was born in Los Angeles on April 7, 1914.
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His father, a bookseller, died when he was only five. Kuttner’s mother then took him and his older brothers to San Francisco, where, for a time at least, she ran a boardinghouse.

Beyond this, what happened to him as a child isn’t clear, except that it was traumatic. Kuttner wasn’t a person who was much given to talking about himself. After his death in 1958, however, John Campbell would speak in a letter to Isaac Asimov about the “rotten start”
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Kuttner had had in life and “the terrible psychic wounds he’d been given,”
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without elaborating on the subject.

The effect of his injuries is somewhat easier to see. Kuttner grew up a reader and a loner, with an acute sense of having been excluded from the world of literature and intellect that was his birthright. He started drinking at an early age, and often drank too much, and when he did he would flip-flop between feelings of bitterness and rage and feelings of total personal worthlessness.

Kuttner the man was a shy, bright-eyed mouse with a wry, deadpan sense of humor, a tendency to quote someone he’d been reading rather than offering an opinion of his own, and an infinite ability to say no by saying nothing at all. If you wanted to pick up on his wit, you had to lean in his direction and overhear him.

His wife, C.L. Moore, tells us that expressed over and over again in his work was a fundamental theme: “Hank’s basic statement was something like, ‘Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it.’ ”
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(Her own essential fictional statement, she says, was “ ‘The most treacherous thing in life is love’ ”
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—though a possibly more accurate rephrasing might be: “The most threatening thing in life is overwhelming sexual passion.”)

Kuttner’s first published story, “The Graveyard Rats” (
Weird Tales,
Mar. 1936), was written in imitation of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft, who was then very near the end of his life, was an assiduous correspondent with the other writers of
Weird Tales,
and it was he who first put Kuttner and Moore in touch with each other.