Tag: 2.5*

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp

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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 Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells

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The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells (The Idler, May 1896) opens with an old man called Elvesham offering a young medical student called Eden the chance to become his heir. After several medical examinations demanded by Elvesham, and (unusual) discussions about Eden assuming Elvesham’s identity after the latter dies, there is a celebratory dinner one evening. During this, the old man sprinkles a pinkish powder on their after dinner liqueurs.
When Eden later walks home he feels quite odd, and experiences phantom memories when he looks at the shops that line the street. That evening he takes another powder given to him by Elvesham before retiring. Later he awakes from a strange dream and feels even more disoriented, eventually realising that, not only is he in a strange room, but (spoiler) he is in Elvesham’s body!
The rest of the story limns Eden’s horror at this turn of events and his subsequent attempts to extricate himself from his predicament. This involves, among other things, a search of the rooms and desks at the property in the hope that he can find a way to contact Elvesham (via his solicitor, etc.). Eden doesn’t find anything of use, although he does find volumes of notes about the psychology of memory along with pages of ciphers and symbols. Then, after he flies into a rage and is put under permanent restraint by Elvesham’s staff and doctors, he finds a bottle of poison. After writing an account of what has happened to him, Eden takes his own life.
There is a final postscript which describes the finding of “Elvesham’s” manuscript, and the fact that “Eden” never survived to inherit Elvesham’s fortune (he is knocked down by a cab, presumably to comply with Victorian morality).
This is an okay if dated piece, and it briefly comes alive in the section where the young man is trapped in the old man’s body (a piece of body horror that will resonate with many older readers who think this is what has happened to them):

I tottered to the glass and saw—Elvesham’s face! It was none the less horrible because I had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel nightdress that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You who are mind and body together at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young, and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body. . . .  p. 136-137 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

**+ (Average to Good). 6,850 words.