Tag: Thrilling Wonder Stories

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jerry is a Man by Robert A. Heinlein (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) starts with a wealthy businessman called Bronson Van Vogel deciding that he needs to one-up an acquaintance:

Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus.
He had mentioned it at breakfast.
“Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”
“Not especially. Why?”
“I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”
“A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”
He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Hartmann was around the club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund—must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha—me landing on the Club ’copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”
She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband. She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear.  pp. 46-47

The next part of the story takes place at the ranch, where the couple see a variety of bio-engineered animals. However, after a long lecture from one of the company’s scientists about how a flying horse is an impossibility without massively changing its shape and metabolism, Van Vogel settles for one something that will look like a Pegasus, but will not fly (although this is only settled on after the scientist consults with a Martian alien called B’Na Kreeth). Meantime, Van Vogel’s wife Martha buys Napoleon, a midget elephant that can write with its trunk. Then, as the couple leave the complex, they pass through the breeding laboratories that produces the “apes”, anthropoid workers that are used for labouring.
Towards the end of their visit the couple pass an enclosure of old apes, and some of them crowd the wire and beg for cigarettes. The supervisor apologises, but Martha goes over to one of the apes and gives it a cigarette anyway. The ape thanks her and tells her it is called Jerry. Then, when Martha asks it why he looks sad, Jerry replies that it has no work, and therefore can’t get any cigarettes. Subsequently, Martha learns that the apes in this enclosure are either old, senile, or have medical conditions (Jerry has cataracts) and, when she asks the manager why other work can’t be found for them, her husband, irritated by her concern, tells her that old apes don’t retire—they are liquidated and then used as dog food.
At this point the story pivots in a couple of ways. First, the focus of the story completely switches from Van Vogel to Martha and, second, we find out that (as hinted at the end of the quoted passage above) she is the one with the money. Further to this latter fact, when the manager of the facility doesn’t agree to her request to give her Jerry and to stop the killings, she calls her business managers and begins a hostile takeover of the company.
Martha’s attempt to buy the breeding ranch eventually proves abortive (by making the call in front of the manager she has tipped her hand and others have bought up stock) and Martha ends up having to employee a “Shyster” called McCoy. He decides, after seeing Jerry sing (and lie to Napoleon), that their best bet is for Jerry to bring a lawsuit against Workers Inc. (During all this, Martha also discovers that her husband is working against her, and unceremoniously dumps him.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees Jerry in court. At the end of the trial he is declared a man because (among other reasons) the Martian who appeared earlier in the story is also considered a man due to an Earth-Mars treaty. The story concludes:

“We are exploring the meaning of this strange thing called ‘manhood.’ We have seen that it is not a matter of shape, nor race, nor planet of birth, nor of acuteness of mind. Truly, it cannot be defined, yet it may be experienced. It can reach from heart to heart, from spirit to spirit.” He turned to Jerry. “Jerry—will you sing your new song for the judge?”
“Sure [Mike].” Jerry looked uneasily up at the whirring cameras, the mikes, and the
ikes, then cleared his throat:
“Way down upon de Suwannee Ribber Far, far away; Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber—”
The applause scared him out of his wits; the banging of the gavel frightened him still
more—but it mattered not; the issue was no longer in doubt. Jerry was a man.  p. 60

This is an entertaining piece, if not the most convincing one, this latter perhaps partly caused by its kitchen sink quality (apart from uplifted animals used in a labour economy, we also have Martians, and some sort of dodgy legal system that requires the use of “Shysters”, etc.), and partly due to its rationale for Jerry’s humanity (he can sing, lie, and appears less monstrous than the Martian who testifies).
I’m also not sure what to make of Jerry’s song at the end of the story: I assume this, and the fact that Jerry calls everyone “Boss”, is a reference to pre-Civil War slaves and their lack of civil liberties—or was Heinlein thinking about the situation of minorities at the time he wrote the piece?
Finally, I note that this story has a powerful and rich female character at its centre, which is unusual for SF of this period (and I suppose that the reason that Heinlein started with the husband as the main character and then switched was to wrong-foot his readers).
*** (Good). 9,150 words. Story link.

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.

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Exit the Professor by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1947) is one of “Hogben” series,1 a handful of tales about a mutant hillbilly family in Kentucky. Saunk is the narrator (and Gallagher-like inventor2 of extraordinary devices), and his relations are Paw (who is invisible), Maw, Uncle Les (who can fly), Little Sam (a baby who has two heads and lives in a tank), and Grandpa (a monstrosity who lives upstairs). They have a wide range of paranormal powers.
In this story we see the family pestered by a Professor Thomas Galbraith, a biogeneticist who has heard rumours about the family after the Hogben’s recent altercation with the Hayley boys ended up in the news (the brothers said Little Sam had three heads, so Saunk rigged up a shotgun gadget that “punched holes in Rafe as neat as anything”—the coroner’s verdict was that the Hayley boys died “real sudden”).
Although Saunk tries to get rid of Galbraith, the professor becomes insistent after (a) Little Sam’s sub-sonic crying knocks him out, (b) he sees Uncle Les fly away, and (c) he examines the shotgun-gadget. Saunk reluctantly agrees to go to New York with Galbraith if he will keep the family’s secret.
The night before Saunk is to meet Galbraith in town, the family get together:

That night we chewed the rag. Paw being invisible, Maw kept thinking he was getting
more’n his share of the corn, but pretty soon she mellowed and let him have a demijohn. Everybody told me to mind my p’s and q’s.
“This here perfesser’s awful smart,” Maw said. “All perfessers are. Don’t go bothering him any. You be a good boy or you’ll ketch heck from me.”
“I’ll be good, Maw,” I said. Paw whaled me alongside the haid, which wasn’t fair, on account of I couldn’t see him.
“That’s so you won’t fergit,” he said.
“We’re plain folks,” Uncle Les was growling. “No good never came of trying to get above yourself.”
“Honest, I ain’t trying to do that,” I said. “I only figgered—”
“You stay outa trouble!” Maw said, and just then we heard Grandpaw moving in the attic. Sometimes Grandpaw don’t stir for a month at a time, but tonight he seemed right frisky.
So, natcherally, we went upstairs to see what he wanted.  p. 85

The next passage is hugely entertaining, and hints at the family’s extraordinary backstory:

He was talking about the perfesser. “A stranger, eh?” he said. “Out upon the stinking knave. A set of rare fools I’ve gathered about me for my dotage! Only Saunk shows any shrewdness, and, dang my eyes, he’s the worst fool of all.”
I just shuffled and muttered something, on account of I never like to look at Grandpaw direct. But he wasn’t paying me no mind. He raved on.
“So you’d go to this New York? ’Sblood, and hast thou forgot the way we shunned London and Amsterdam—and Nieuw Amsterdam—for fear of questioning? Wouldst thou be put in a freak show? Nor is that the worst danger.”
Grandpaw’s the oldest one of us all and he gets kinda mixed up in his language sometimes. I guess the lingo you learned when you’re young sorta sticks with you. One thing, he can cuss better than anybody I’ve ever heard.
“Shucks,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Thou puling brat,” Grandpaw said. “ ’Tis thy fault and thy dam’s. For building that device, I mean, that slew the Haley tribe. Hadst thou not, this scientist would never have come here.”
“He’s a perfesser,” I said. “Name of Thomas Galbraith.”
“I know. I read his thoughts through Little Sam’s mind. A dangerous man. I never knew a sage who wasn’t. Except perhaps Roger Bacon, and I had to bribe him to—but Roger was an exceptional man. Hearken.
“None of you may go to this New York. The moment we leave this haven, the moment we are investigated, we are lost. The pack would tear and rend us. Nor could all thy addle-pated flights skyward save thee, Lester—dost thou hear?”
“But what are we to do?” Maw said.
“Aw, heck,” Paw said. “I’ll just fix this perfesser. I’ll drop him down the cistern.”
“An’ spoil the water?” Maw screeched.
“You try it!”
“What foul brood is this that has sprung from my seed?” Grandpaw said, real mad.
“Have ye not promised the sheriff that there will be no more killings—for a while at least? Is the word of a Hogben naught? Two things have we kept sacred through the centuries—our secret from the world, and the Hogben honor! Kill this man Galbraith and ye’ll answer to me for it!”  p. 85-86

This initial setup is the best of the story, and the rest is more formulaic fare that sees Saunk alter the shotgun-gadget (which Galbraith has taken away with him) before the professor test fires the device. When he does, everyone in town who has a gold filling gets a toothache. Galbraith gets arrested. The now-invisible Saunk modifies the gun again, and on the next firing the sheriff’s toothache disappears. Saunk modifies the gun once again, and then, when all the townpeople are assembled in the town hall to have their toothache cured, their fillings disappear—along with everything else non-natural in and on their bodies, including their clothes.
The story ends with Uncle Les rescuing Galbraith from the mob. In return he agrees to leave the family alone—but Grandpa reads his mind and sees he is lying, so Paw puts Galbraith in a small bottle which he never leaves.
A weak end to a story that has a highly entertaining first half.
**+ (Average to Good). 5,550 words. Story link.

1. There are five stories in the Hogben series but the first appears to be a mainstream piece only loosely related to the others. See ISFDB for more details.

2. See ISFDB for details of Kuttner’s solo series of stories about Gallagher, an inventor who often can’t remember the purpose or operation of the creations he makes while drunk.

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 on Mars by William Morrison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas on Mars by William Morrison (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1941) is an early piece1 by the author of the reasonably well-known Country Doctor (Star Science Fiction Stories, 1953).2 This one perhaps gets off to a more realistic and gritty start than other works of the period with Kel, the leader of a group of four ragged youths, sharpening his knife for an impending robbery:

“I ain’t gonna cut nobody up,” Kel grunted. “Not if they come across, I ain’t. But if they’re wise guys”—his arm flashed out suddenly and the jovite blade glittered in the air—“I’ll slash ’em to pieces. That’s what I’ll do. That’s what my old man would have done.”
They were silent, impressed by the mention of Kel’s father. Buck Henry was the first to recover.
“Hey, fellows,” he piped, “you know what night this is? Just before Christmas. It’s a holiday.”
Monk, proud of his changing voice, growled: “You’re nuts. Christmas comes in winter. This is right in the middle of summer.”
“Are you a dope!” Skinny put in. “Everybody knows the seasons on Earth ain’t the same as here. It’s winter on Earth, or at least on one hemisphere—eastern or western, I forget which. That’s what counts.”
“They say a big, fat guy called Santa Claus,” Buck Henry offered uncertainly, “gets all dressed up in a red suit and comes around handing out presents.”  p. 84

After Kel ridicules Buck for offering up this children’s tale, the group prepare to rob the next passerby—but that turns out to be the local cop, who suggests they go to the Martin Rescue Home for a free meal, but that they should move along in any event. Later, they hear the sound of whistling, and the four leap out to rob the man they have heard—who quickly disarms and restrains them, and reveals himself to be Michael Diston of the Interplanetary Police. He tells them that he sees no point in handing them over to the local police, but that he can’t set them free to rob someone else—so he asks the group if they would like to go for a meal and to see Santa Claus:

“Save that stuff,” Kel growled. “We ain’t babies.”
“Yeah,” said Skinny. “A guy gets dressed up in red, puts a pillow next to his stomach and makes believe he came down a chimbley. You can’t kid us.”
“I wouldn’t dream of trying,” the man drawled, “but it’ll be some swell dinner.”
He couldn’t lose them after that.  p. 87

Dilston takes them back to his mother’s house where, after they get cleaned up, they wolf down Christmas dinner. During the meal we learn about the kids’ troubled domestic situations—mostly parental sickness, addiction or absence, but we also get confirmation of earlier comments that Kel’s father is the Black Pirate. Afterwards, the kids are invited to go through to the living room, where they find a Xmas tree that wasn’t there previously. Then they see it is snowing outside (impossible on Mars) and someone starts coming down the chimney. Santa appears, and gives each of the four kids a present that particularly suits them. Then, exhausted, they go to bed.
Afterwards (spoiler) Dilston tells his mother that Santa was really the unused robot butler he got for her some time previously, the snow was from a machine on the roof that he installed last year and, finally, the presents were originally intended for the neighbourhood kids, but he discovered what would suit each of the four as he listened to them over dinner. Dilston then asks his mother to sort out the kids and their dysfunctional families (Dilston has to return to work the next day).
The story finishes with Dilston listening to a news report where he is mentioned as the one who has just finished hunting down the remanants of the Black Pirate’s gang, and who also killed the Black Pirate—Kel’s father—in hand-to-hand combat several years earlier.
This is better than a lot of stories from the period—gritty start, sentimental Xmas section, and a bittersweet ending which offsets what has come before. I thought it much better than the recent Asimov Christmas story I recently read.
*** (Good). 6,200 words. Story link.

1. This was the author’s seventh SF story from his first year of publishing.

2. I reviewed Country Doctor here.