Tag: 1951

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn (Galaxy, June 19511) opens with an exchange of letters between the FBI and local police about the death of a Dr Bannerman—and which also discusses his diary, an unsettling (or possibly crazed) account of the days and months before his death: this opens with a brief mention of a possible flying saucer sighting before reporting on the annual nesting activities of Bannerman’s favourite hen, Camilla:

This year she stole a nest successfully in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window—she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout she was sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was nothing of hers. It was a deep blue and transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla’s own. There was an embryo, but I could make nothing of it. I returned the egg to Camilla’s bare and fevered breastbone and went back to the house for a long, cool drink.

Later the egg hatches to reveal an “angel”, a tiny female humanoid covered in down and with wing stubs on her shoulders. Bannerman brings the angel inside that evening and, over the next few days, Bannerman discovers that it can communicate mentally with him while they are touching (when he holds her in his hands, etc.). To begin with this is takes the form of vague feelings, but she is soon sending him images of her home world and then, days later, more complex information:

It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind: my clumsy brain really suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across. I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner—“recruiting,” “collecting,” “saving.” The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle.
I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world.

Later (in amongst material that provides more background information about her people, how they travelled through space, their biology, and much more), she reveals that there are others like her on Earth (including her dying father). We eventually learn (in an oblique narrative) that they are here on Earth to help steer mankind away from self-destruction.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees the angel’s father die and, when Bannerman asks what she is going to do next, she presents two choices: she can stay with Bannerman, and teach and counsel him (and, when the angels learn more about human biology, possibly greatly improve his health—Bannerman has a spinal deformity2). Or he can have his life memories recorded and stored by her, and used by the angels to better understand and help humankind:

It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any unresisting living subject whose brain is capable of memory at all can experience a total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past that psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes; but you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail that has ever registered on the subject’s brain; and the end result is very different. The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it: quite the opposite. The end result is death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it and record any or all of it if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls it, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true “remembering” but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulfment of a flood time, until finally the waters close over.

Bannerman chooses to have his life “saved” (a term puzzlingly used by the angel to describe Camilla the hen when she dies earlier in the story), and the last part of the story see his memories stripped away over a three week period (during which Bannerman’s old dog Judy is also “saved”):

For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect (she, without condescension, calls us very advanced) because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning!—hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes. I am merely wondering how much of my life (if I choose this way) will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” that I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.

In Bannerman’s last moments the other angels visit and let him “see” (a vivid memory of the father if I recall correctly) the two moon night on their planet; then Bannerman gives up his final memories and dies.
Overall, this is a noteworthy piece, but the first half of this story has its problems: the angel material is, at times, a little on the fey side (occasionally the angel seems more like a fantasy fairy) or it is just plain clunky (we get a lot of genre detail about the angel’s world and biology—space travel while encysted, etc.—than we really need) and, around the midway point, it starts becoming dull. That said, it picks up again when the angel’s father dies and Bannerman is presented with the two choices, and the ending is very strong—a long and reflective section, profound even, on the shortcomings of humans individually and as a society.
I’d note that, even given all the genre elements in the piece, this feels like more of a mainstream piece (it is quite descriptive and introspective), certainly when compared with other SF stories of the period. I’d also note that there is also a noticeable religious subtext to the story (angels, sacrifice, saviours, the flood, etc.).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 15,300 words. Story link.
 
1. Damon Knight made these comments about the first publication of the story in his essay, Knight Piece, in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss:

Gold had an incurable habit of overediting stories: as Lester once said, he turned mediocre stories into good ones, and excellent stories into good ones. He bought Edgar Pangborn’s beautiful ‘Angel’s Egg’ and showed it to several writers in manuscript, then rewrote some of its best phrases. He changed the description of the ‘angel’ (a visitor from another planet) riding on the back of a hawk ‘with her speaking hands on his terrible head’ to ‘with her telepathic hands on his predatory head’. According to Ted Sturgeon, when the issue came out and the story was read in the printed version, three pairs of heels hit the floor at that point and three people tried to phone Gold to curse him for a meddler. Sturgeon got in the habit of marking out certain phrases in his manuscripts and writing them in again above the line in ink. Gold asked him why he did that, pointing out that it made it difficult for him to write in corrections. ‘That’s why I do it,’ Sturgeon replied.  p. 132

I read what looks like the non-Gold version in The Arbor House Modern Treasury of Science Fiction.

2. I wonder if Bannerman—which can also mean “standard bearer”—is a metaphor for humanity, and whether his twisted nature (the spinal deformity) is a metaphor for the human condition.

The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson (The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951) opens with a spaceship landing on a planet to celebrate Christmas; two of the crew are later sent to a nearby village to greet the humans that settled there previously and invite them to the ship.
En-route the pair are met by the natives, who proffer gifts, and a voice from the sleigh tells them to destroy the gifts and hand over their pistols. After some reluctance the two crew members do so, whereupon the natives break the pistols into pieces. Then they discover that the man who spoke is a recent arrival called Reynolds, who they subsequently take back with them.
The rest of the story consists (apart from another bookend to finish the story) of Reynolds telling of how he came to be on the planet, which starts with him arriving after he damaged his spaceship tubes. While he was trying to repair his ship the natives arrived, and he was drawn into their strange gift giving custom (which is later explained by a friendly female tribe member called Ruth):

She thought for a minute, trying to find a way to phrase it. “We use our coppers and furs in duels,” she said slowly. “Perhaps one chief will give a feast for another and present him with many coppers and blankets. Unless the other chief destroys the gifts and gives a feast in return, at which he presents the first chief with even greater gifts, he loses honor.”
He was beginning to see, Reynolds thought. The custom of conspicuous waste, to show how wealthy the possessor was. Enemies dueled with property, instead of with pistols, and the duel would obviously go back and forth until one or the other of its participants was bankrupt—or unwilling to risk more goods. A rather appropriate custom for a planet as lush as this.
“What if one of the chiefs goes broke,” he said, explaining the term.
“If the winning chief demands it, the other can be put to death. He is forced to drink the Last Cup, a poison which turns his bones to jelly. The days go by and he gets weaker and softer until finally he is nothing but a—ball.” She described this with a good deal of hand waving and facial animation, which Reynolds found singularly attractive in spite of the gruesomeness of the topic.

This unlikely gimmick works through a few gift-exchange plot loops until (spoiler) Reynolds runs out of potential gifts, and also realises that Ruth is also going to be poisoned for helping him. He avoids this unpleasant end by giving the impression that he is going to destroy the planet with fire (I think) after they destroy his rocket. The chief concedes before the oil fire Reynolds previously set burns out.
There is another twist revealed at the end (when Reynolds is once again on the visiting ship): Reynolds married Ruth and became the wealthiest man on the planet because they had 15 children, each of which attracted ever-increasing dowries.
This story revolves around an unconvincing and contrived gimmick, the ending is a fudge, and the last twist just adds even more nonsense to what has come before (and seems to be the only reason the sections that book-end the piece are there). Why Bleiler and Dikty (the editors of the ‘Best of the Year’ anthology where this first appeared) thought it a good idea to use this original story beats me (and I can only assume Terry Carr reprinted it1 for Towering Inferno2 name recognition).
* (Mediocre). 8,500 words.

1. Terry Carr used this story in his Christmas SF anthology, To Follow a Star (1977).

2. The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson (1974) was made into a big-budget disaster film called The Towering Inferno (1974), more here.

A Christmas Tale by Sarban

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Christmas Tale by Sarban (Ringstones and Other Curious Tales, 1951) opens with the narrator’s description of a group of ex-pats in Jeddah donning fancy dress before they go out carol singing on Christmas Eve. After several recitations they eventually end up in the house of Alexander Andreievitch, a displaced (Imperial) Russian who now runs the Saudi Air Force.
There, after the group have sung their carols, the narrator and the Russian start drinking their way through a bottle of Zubrovka. When the narrator notices that there is a drawing of a bison on the label of the bottle, he asks the Russian if he has ever seen one, perhaps in the wilder parts of his home country. Andreievitch says no, but adds that he once saw something even rarer.
So begins a story which takes us from the sticky heat of a Saudi evening to the cold beyond the Arctic Circle, where Andreievitch was once the observer of a two-man crew tasked to fly a seaplane from a navy ship to a distant settlement. After the pair got there and dropped their message, they turned for home—only to be caught out by worsening weather. Just before they ran out of fuel, the pilot force-landed in the marshes. The pair then struggled on their own for a number of days, before they came upon a small group of Samoyed hunters.
The natives feed the two starving men, but the meat makes them both sick—and the next day they discover that it half rotten and is covered with unfamiliar red wool or hair. The pair angrily quiz the natives about the source of the meat and, when they cannot understand the Samoyed’s replies, demand that are taken to the nearest settlement. Later, however, when the weather closes in, they find themselves taking shelter at what would appear to be the partially uncovered (but still frozen) burial grounds of an unknown creature—the source of the meat which provided their meal.
The story concludes (spoiler) with the group sheltering from the deteriorating weather under an overhanging bank, when they hear a noise in the distance:

Igor Palyashkin and I, we too shrank down against the earth; what we could hear then stilled us like an intenser frost, and I felt cold to the middle of my heart. Through the dead and awful silence of that pause before the snow we heard something coming across the blind waste towards us. All day in that dead world nothing had moved but ourselves; now, out there where the shadows advanced and retreated and the pallid gloom baffled our sight, something was coming with oh! such labour and such pain, foundering and fighting onwards through the half-solid marsh. In that absolute stillness of the frozen air we heard it when it was far away; it came so slowly and it took so long, and we dare not do anything but listen and strain our eyes into the darkening mist. In what shape of living beast could such purpose and such terrible strength be embodied? A creature mightier than any God has made to be seen by man was dragging itself through the morass. We heard the crunch of the surface ice, then the whining strain of frozen mud as the enormous bulk we could not picture bore slowly down on it; then a deep gasping sound as the marsh yielded beneath a weight its frostbonds could not bear. Then plungings of such violence and such a sound of agonised straining and moaning as constricted my heart; and, after that awful struggle, a long sucking and loud explosion of release as the beast prevailed and the marsh gave up its hold. Battle after battle, each more desperate than the last, that dreadful fight went on; we listened with such intentness that we suffered the agony of every yard of the creature’s struggle towards our little bank of earth. But as it drew nearer the pauses between its down-sinkings and its tremendous efforts to burst free grew longer, as if that inconceivable strength and tenacity of purpose were failing. In those pauses we heard the most dreadful sound of all: the beast crying with pain and the terror of death. Dear Lord God! I think no Christian men but we, Igor Palyashkin and I, have ever heard a voice like that. I know that no voice on all this earth could have answered that brute soul moaning in the mist of the lonely taiga that evening before the snow.
That beast was alone in all the world.  p. 15-16

The creature never gets close to them, seemingly disappearing into the marsh or the gloom.
The final section sees the narrator’s carol-singing acquaintances get up to leave, whereupon the Russian tells him of the brief glimpse he caught of the creature: the great head, the long red-brown wool, the long curling teeth.
I liked this story—it’s an atmospheric piece with a lot of evocative descriptions (a result of its old-school literary writing). Even if the climax of the story does involve a creature that remains largely (and correctly) offstage, it is nevertheless an effective piece.
Worth reading.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6550 words. Amazon UK Look Inside. Amazon US Look Inside.