Tag: 1967

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt (If, July 1967) opens with its narrator, the director of an insurance company, noting that older people are dying sooner and in greater numbers than usual. Eventually the authorities discover that each birth is balanced by one death, and this leads to an international agreement to limit the number of births in the world. However, when old people continue to die at an accelerated rate, further investigations reveal that the Chinese are “breeding like crazy”. The United States and Russia then declare war on the Chinese and launch a nuclear strike on the country.
The story ends with the narrator trotting out a reincarnation theory, and the observation that “at the beginning” there can only have been five billion “life-forces” or “souls” created.
A dumb idea in a story that is told in a rambling, bloated, and at times, near stream of consciousness style (it is very hard to believe that the narrator is the director in an insurance company given his juvenile commentary):

I think we’re at five billion, give or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It’s up to you. Sure, there’ll be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you’re going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually.  p. 191 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

– (Awful). 6,200 words.

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny (Galaxy, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her “flickering wings of light” disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him:

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it!—with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.  p. 169 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Auden then presses a button under his armpit and comes alive again, and the Faoili, called Sythia, can now see him. They talk, and then the pair go through the Canyon of the Dead and the Valley of Bones to where Auden lives. They eat, and then become lovers.
During the following month a robot ship arrives with the bodies of some of the few people who are still mortal. But Auden knows that he isn’t, and that he is deceiving her.
Eventually their time comes to an end. He tells her that he is already dead, and explains the control switch that stops him living and allows an “electro-chemical system” to take over the operation of his body. Sythia touches the button and he disappears from her view.
This is a stylishly written story and is a pleasant enough read if you don’t think about what is going on. But it makes little sense; we never find out explicitly why Auden is “dead” (or more accurately not alive in the human sense); we don’t know why Sythia can’t see him when he is “dead”; and we don’t know what the Faioli are, or why they do what they do. It all rather reads like some sort of unintelligible SF myth, and this isn’t helped by the writer adding this penultimate line: “the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.”
Pleasant filler.
** (Average). 2,850 words.

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:

“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.”  p. 163 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words.

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg (Galaxy, August 1967) opens with Barrett, the “king” of Hawksbill Station surveying his empire, the late-Cambrian landscape. We learn that he is in his sixties and, although previously a physically imposing figure, an accident to his left foot (crushed in a rock fall) has left him a cripple. Then a man called Charley rushes over with the news that a prisoner is being sent back to them from the future.
As the pair go over to the dome to await the arrival of the new man, and discuss possible bunking arrangements for him, we learn that (a) Hawksbill Station is a penal colony for revolutionaries a billion years in the past and (b) several of the men at the station are psychologically unstable, a result of the one-way trip there (one of the men is trying to build a woman out of chemicals and dirt after a “homosexual phase”).
When the new prisoner arrives Barrett is surprised by how young he is, and they subsequently take the man, Hahn, to their doctor to deal with his temporal shock. En route, Barrett makes him look out the door of the building:

Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.
“A late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is the Appalachian Geosyncline. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we’ve got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there’s the Cordilleran Geosyncline, that’s going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don’t hold your breath. I hope you like seafood.”
Hahn stared, and Barrett standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.  p. 121 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Eventually Hahn recovers and they learn he is an economist. Barrett takes him to his new quarters and bunk mate, an old-timer called Latimer (who is trying to develop psi powers to get back to the future but is otherwise of sound mind).
That evening Hahn joins the rest of the prisoners for dinner, and they quiz him about the future (the prisoners refer to it as “Up Front”) and about himself. His answers are very vague however, and this makes Barrett suspicious—a plot thread that slowly develops over the course of the rest of the story. This eventually comes to a head (spoiler) when, after Latimer has confided his suspicions to Barrett about Hahn’s constant note taking, he is put under surveillance. Later Hahn is seen near the time machine and, after he initially can’t be found, is caught arriving back from the future. After Hahn is questioned it materialises that there has been a change of government in the future and they are looking to close the penal colony and rehabilitate the men; Hahn is there doing psychological assessments.
While this routine plot plays out there is much else that makes the story a good read. Apart from the character study of Barrett himself, the most senior of the prisoners (fifty earlier arrivals have died), we learn about (a) the future that has sent these men back in time, (b) the rough lives they live (partially as a result of the slightly random time shots early on in the project), (c) what the world is like in this era (there are evocative descriptions of a protean Earth), and (d) the toll on the men sent there (their psychological state is as bleak as the landscape).
All this is well done, and the tale’s only weakness is the slightly flat ending, which has Barrett fearing the thought of going back to the future—he offers to stay and and run the science station that it will become.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 18,100 words.

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov (If, March 1967) begins with the narrator describing two chalk-and-cheese scientists: Priss, who is slow-thinking but (two Nobel Prizes) brilliant, and Bloom, whose genius is the practical inventions he creates from Priss’s theories. When Priss then publishes his Two Field Theory (an alternative to a Unified Field Theory) the narrator interviews him and we learn that (a) Priss is jealous of Bloom’s money, (b) their intense rivalry can be seen in their regular billiard games, and (c) Priss’s Two Field Theory suggests that anti-gravity is possible (we get an extended lecture from Priss to the narrator about gravity/mass in the universe being analogous to depressions in a rubber sheet). The interview ends with Priss disparaging Bloom’s chances of creating an anti-gravity machine.
The next part of the story sees the narrator interview Bloom, who seems to be struggling to exploit Priss’s theory. Bloom seems particularly irritated by his failure after Priss’s comments.
The story then concludes a year later, when Priss is invited, along with the Press, to a demonstration of Bloom’s anti-gravity device:

One thing was new, however, and it staggered everybody, drawing much more attention than anything else in the room. It was a billiard table, resting under one pole of the magnet. Beneath it was the companion pole. A round hole about a foot across was stamped out of the very center of the table; and it was obvious that the zero-gravity field, if it was to be produced, would be produced through that hole in the center of the billiard table.
It was as though the whole demonstration had been designed, surrealist-fashion, to point up the victory of Bloom over Priss. This was to be another version of their everlasting billiards competition, and Bloom was going to win.
I don’t know if the other newsmen took matters in that fashion, but I think Priss did. I turned to look at him and saw that he was still holding the drink that had been forced into his hand. He rarely drank, I knew, but now he lifted the glass to his lips and emptied it in two swallows. He stared at that billiard ball, and I needed no gift of ESP to realize that he took it as a deliberate snap of fingers under his nose.  p. 105 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After an introduction where Bloom gently mocks Priss, the device is turned on (an ultraviolet column of light appears above the hole), and Bloom invites Priss to pot a ball to demonstrate the device. Priss does so, and the ball shoots through Bloom at high speed, killing him.
The remainder of the story describes the theoretical explanation of what happened (massless objects travel at the speed of light), and the narrator concludes by suggesting that, for once, Priss quickly realised how the device worked and deliberately used its effect to kill Bloom.
The main problem with this story is that, given the made-up science and the contrived events, the reader is just along for the ride. Apart from that failing it’s an engaging enough story about academic rivalry.
** (Average). 4240 words. 7,500 words.

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:

Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning.  pp. 80-81 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.

The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1967) opens with Mihai Lado, telling Raymond Runkis that he is happy to make one his lies come true:

“There’s a thousand to choose from,” Runkis said. “I could make you produce that educated calf you brag about.”
“Is that the one you pick? I’ll whistle him up in a minute.”
“No. Or I could call you on the cow that gives beer, ale, porter and stout each from a separate teat.”
“You want her? Nothing easier. But it’s only fair to warn you that the porter might be a little too heavy for your taste.”
“I could make you bring that horse you have that reads Homer.”
“Runkis, you’re the liar now. I never said he read Homer; I said he recited him. I don’t know where that pinto picked it up.”
“You said once you could send a man over the edge, make him disappear completely. I pick that one. Do it!”  pp. 85-86 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

After some hesitation Lado agrees to make Jessie Pidd, who is sitting at the end of the bar, disappear and, over the next few days, Pidd eventually does so, becoming progressively more transparent. When Lado says he can’t bring him back (Pidd was apparently an illusion Lado created) the town has a hearing in front of the town sheriff and a state commissioner. During this, Lado (who identifies as a “new man”) reiterates that Pidd never existed and challenges those listening to find any documentary evidence of Pidd’s life.
When nothing can be found the officials tell Lado that they’ll eventually find Pidd’s body, and then he will hang. The townsfolk, who don’t believe Lado’s claims to be an illusionist, eventually lynch him. The story ends with odd comments from the townfolks about “future types” waiting for them in the times to come.
For the most part this is a pleasantly quirky story but it gets a little dark at the end, and the last passage feels at odds with the rest of the story—unless this is meant to be, perhaps, some sort of allegory about change or the future. Whatever, it didn’t entirely work for me.
** (Average). 3,400 words.

Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany (If, June 1967) opens with its thirty-ish narrator, Cal Svenson, meeting a young woman called Ariel while beach-combing. During their conversation, she asks him what he is looking for:

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral.
When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”  p. 48 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

During this encounter1 we learn that both of them are modified to live in the ocean (gills, webbed feet and hands, etc.). Ariel also asks Svenson about the underwater accident he had twenty years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and living on the land.
The next part of the story sees Svenson visit a friend, a widower called Juao, whose children Svenson has encouraged to join the Aquatic Corp. They talk about a man called Tork, who is planning to lay cable through an volcanic region of the sea floor called the Slash (where Svenson had his accident). Then, that evening, Ariel vists Svenson at his house and takes him down to a beach party where he meets Tork. Tork quizzes Svenson about the Slash, and tells him they are going to lay a power cable there tomorrow. Later on the aqua men and the boat-bourne villagers go out to sea to hunt marlin.
The final section (spoiler) sees Svenson saying goodbye to Juao’s kids as they get onto the bus to go to Aquatic college. While he is doing this he sees a commotion down at the quayside, and it turns out that several aquamen have been killed in an underwater eruption, including Tork. Svenson goes to the beach to find Ariel.
This is an evocatively written piece (the description and characters are much better than that of other 1960s SF) but it isn’t much more than a slice of life piece with an artificial climax grafted onto the end (and not a particularly convincing one either—it’s a silly idea to lay power cable in a known volcanic zone, and too convenient to have an explosion while Tork is there). Notwithstanding this the story is a good read for those that want something with more depth than usual.
*** (Good). 6,750 words.

1. One of the other members of my group read pointed out (it went over my head, or I just forgot) that the driftglass may be a metaphor for how life shapes people. If that is the case, it’s a pity that the story didn’t end more organically with Tork succeeding, and the observation that some material is polished (Tork), and some is left broken and jagged (Svenson).

See Me Not by Richard Wilson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:

He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand.  p. 9 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
* (Mediocre). 13,850 words.

Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fiddler’s Green by Richard McKenna (Orbit #2, 1967) is the second of three posthumous stories that were published by Damon Knight in his Orbit anthology series and, off the back of McKenna’s story in the first volume, The Secret Place, I thought I’d have a look—it gets off to a cracking start with a group of men in a lifeboat dying of thirst and contemplating cannibalism:

On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.
All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959.
Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.
Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the others and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.
Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give.  p. 37-38

We then get an account of the men’s recent conversations, which include such topics as whether human flesh boiled in seawater absorbs salt or not, and who they should eat. As they quarrel further, the youngest of them, Whelan, thinks he sees green fields in the distance, steps off the boat, and drowns.
After this the tension increases, and they eventually draw lots to see who they are going to kill. The viewpoint character, Kinross, picks the losing coin but, as they are discussing cutting his throat over a bucket to avoid losing any of his blood (“Damn you, Fay, I’m still alive,” Kinross says) one of the other men, Kruger, tells them of another way to get as much fresh water as they want.
Kruger goes on to explain how their reality, which he essentially describes as a consensual hallucination called the “public world,” can be left behind, and that they can go to a place of their own creation, giving the example of a patrol of soldiers lost in the Tibesti highlands of Africa who slipped from one world to another and later returned. Kruger gives other examples of this phenomenon, and his remarks cause much discussion and disbelief. But Kruger persists, saying that they can break through to this other world because, as he puts it, “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east” (their position).
Eventually, he manages to convince the men to make an attempt, and they lie down and relax and listen to Kruger’s hypnotic voice. Then they make the transition.
All of this takes up the first fifth or so of the story, and it’s an impressive beginning. The next section, where the men investigate the strange world they have arrived in is also quite interesting. Initially it appears that this world is not quite fully formed, and one of their number, Silva, concentrates and tries to make the tree they pick fruit from more “detailed.” Then a grey mist appears and Kruger’s disembodied voice (he is lying unconscious elsewhere) warns Silva to stop. When Silva doesn’t do so he is struck blind. Later, Kinross and Garcia realise that all directions of travel lead back to the (unconscious) Kruger and the stream, and they also realise that they have lost all sense of time, and day or night.
So far, so Unknown Worlds, and this continues when Kruger (whose unconscious body is now in a cave) summons Kinross and tells him he cannot quench his thirst, and that he needs to share Kinross’s body in order to do so. Kruger also says that incorporating Kinross’s worldview will make their reality more stable and detailed.
When Kinross refuses an argument ensues, during which Kruger confesses to setting the bomb on the boat so he would have a chance to break through to this reality. Kinross tells Kruger that he may have made this world but that he isn’t going to help him get all the way into it. Kinross leaves, despite Kruger’s attempt to make him to stay.
The story runs along in this general direction for a bit longer before Kinross and Garcia follow the stream to a pit, where they end up rescuing an Australian woman called Mary who has wandered into their world through another rift. At this point the story becomes very strange, and we start to see various (aboriginal or Dreamtime?) spirits—black dwarves and pearly-gray women—hiding in the undergrowth. Later, a Peruvian wanders into camp and, when Kinross later discusses this with Kruger, they realise that their world is rotating over the Earth, gathering up other susceptible travellers. Kinross also asks Kruger about the spirits:

“I have other questions. What are the black dwarfs and pearly-gray women?”
“Nature spirits, I suppose you could call them. I stripped them from Mary and Bo Bo, husked them off by the millions until only a bare core of nothingness was left. What those two are now I couldn’t describe to you. But the world is partially self-operating and my load is eased.”  p. 78

The rest of the story sees more arrivals, including a climber called Lankenau who, when told what has happened to him, doesn’t want to go back to the real world. The narrative then becomes even more esoteric and mystifying: there is talk of magic rather than the Second Law of Thermodynamics operating in this world, and discussion that the spirits shed by people are unlived experiences or regrets. Later, Kinross stops placing daily sacrifices of fruit on Kruger’s altar, which causes a widespread frost and cold. Then there is a baffling exchange between Kinross and a Spanish-speaking woman which causes Garcia to warn Kinross not to come to the village. Finally, Kinross goes to Kruger’s altar, where he sees headless pigeons and blood, and smashes his fruit offering down hard enough to burst while saying it is “for Mary.” Then all sorts of (possibly magic realist) madness breaks free, which I won’t bother describing because—as it made no sense to me—it may not be pertinent information (although, at one point, a “red-capped mushroom” emerges from the Earth, so maybe that provides a clue, as may the fact that Kinross eventually ends up in our world with a blood-thirst).
This has a great start, interesting middle, and utterly baffling ending,1 but I’m not sure I’d bother with it unless you are a fan of puzzle stories that require multiple readings. And probably a friendly English professor.
* (Mediocre). 22,800 words.

1. There are perhaps some clues about what is going on in the story at this site, but the most useful one—a letter from David Tell at the bottom of the page with an explanation for the ending—has been partially deleted by a helpful webmaster (a village is obviously missing their idiot).