Tag: 1949

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) opens with Rand Conway dreaming that he is on Iskar, and his dead father is telling him, “I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of Gone Forever.” Conway then wakes, realises he is on his way there in a spaceship, and he thinks about the great wealth that he may find at the lake. Shortly afterwards, Rohan (a rich man who is connected to Esmond, the ethnologist fiancé of Conway’s daughter Marcia) comes to tell him that they are about to arrive.
After they land, the crew get the sledges out and they head for the nearest village: Conway, Rohan and Esmond travel, but Marcia is left behind with the ship. Several hours later, and after they continue on foot, they eventually come to the city:

It spread across the valley floor and up the slopes as though it grew from the frozen earth, a part of it, as enduring as the mountains. At Conway’s first glance, it seemed to be built all of ice, its turrets and crenellations glowing with a subtle luminescence in the dusky twilight, fantastically shaped, dusted here and there with snow. From the window openings came a glow of pearly light.
Beyond the city the twin ranges drew in and in until their flanks were parted only by a thin line of shadow, a narrow valley with walls of ice reaching up to the sky.
Conway’s heart contracted with a fiery pang.
A narrow valley—The valley.
For a moment everything vanished in a roaring darkness. Dream and reality rushed together—his father’s notes, his father’s dying cry, his own waking visions and fearful wanderings beyond the wall of sleep.
It lies beyond the city, in a narrow place between the mountains—The Lake of the Gone Forever. And I can never go back!
Conway said aloud to the wind and the snow and the crying horns, “But I have come back. I have come!”  p. 69

When they arrive at the city an armed group meet them before an old man arrives and identifies them as Earthmen. The old man, Krah, mentions someone called “Conna”, which Conway presumes is his father. Krah tells him and the other Earthmen to leave but, when Conway threatens war, Krah reluctantly orders the gates opened. Esmond and Rohan are not happy at Conway’s conduct, but he is determined to get to the lake.
The rest of the story unravels the reasons for Krah’s dislike and suspicion of the visitors—which are mostly connected with Conway’s father it seems—among the complications introduced by a native girl called Ciel, who causes trouble by trying to visit Conway, and Krah’s production of Conway’s daughter Marcia, who followed the group after they left and ran into trouble with the native women.
Ciel later shows Conway a way out of the city that leads to The Lake of Gone Forever and (spoiler), after Krah and his men pursue the pair there, the climactic scene sees Conway arrive at the lake, which is “semi-liquid” and contains valuable “transuranic elements”. He is told by Krah (who, like his men, has left his weapons outside the entrance to the lake) that their dead are put in the lake, and that it acts as a repository of the Ishtar people’s memories. Conway then sees a vision of his younger father together with his native wife and then, over the course of several visions, Conway sees his father consumed with greed at the thought of the wealth in the lake. Later there is an altercation when he tries to take a sample of the liquid, and he is stopped by his wife in the presence of Conway as a baby. During the struggle between Conway’s father and mother she falls into the lake and perishes. Conway’s father subsequently flees the planet.
Conway realises, after seeing the visions, that his mother was Krah’s daughter and so he must be Krah’s grandson. He gives up his dreams of wealth and asks Krah if he can stay on the planet. Krah agrees, and Ciel becomes Conway’s wife.
There is quite a lot going on at the end of this story after quite a protracted and unnecessary build-up (the story could probably start with Conway arriving at the city, and you could lose most of the other characters). Also, the idea of a radioactive (I presume) memory lake is poetic but doesn’t entirely convince. If you read this for the description and atmosphere it’s not bad, and I suppose it is a change, albeit a long-winded one, from the more prosaic delivery of the other stories of the period.
**+ (Average to Good). 13,400 words. Story link.

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) begins with an explosion on a spaceship which spills its crew into space “like a dozen wriggling silverfish”. The men move in different directions, some towards the sun, others out to Pluto. The main character, Hollis, ends up drifting towards Earth, and re-entry. They are all in radio contact, but there is no chance they will be rescued: some of the men say nothing at all, some let the veneer of civilization slip away, and one of them just screams endlessly (until Hollis grabs hold of him and smashes his faceplate).
During the various conversations that take place over the radio, Hollis becomes jealous of Lespere, who has been talking about his three wives on as many planets, how he once gambled away twenty thousand dollars when he was drunk, etc.:

“You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? While it was happening, yes, but now? Now is what counts. Is it any better, is it?”
“Yes, it’s better!”
“How!”
“Because I got my thoughts; I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water gushing through his head and his body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.  p. 132

This is more reflectively existential than you would expect from a twenty-nine year old writer appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and there is similar material earlier in the story, in a conversation Hollis has with Applegate:

“Are you angry, Hollis?”
“No.” And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.
“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. And I ruined it for you. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”
“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out. There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one, the film burned to a cinder, the screen was dark.  p. 131

Eventually (spoiler), Hollis achieves a painful self-awareness about his (“terrible and empty”) life, and realises the only good he can do now is for his ashes to be added to the land below. He wonders if anyone will see him burn on re-entry—and the story ends with a short paragraph where a small boy and his mother wish upon a falling star.
This is an uncharacteristically bleak and reflective story for the time, and it shows a distinct lack of the sentimentality that spoiled some of Bradbury’s later work.
**** (Very Good). 3,400 words. Story link.

Christmas Tree by John Christopher

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949) opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:

“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.

After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:

Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.

The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
*** (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.