"The Avenger" (1944) by Damon Knight and "Between the Dark and the Daylight" (1958) by Algis Budrys

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, a 1963 Berkley Medallion collection of some of his 1950s stories, Algis Budrys tells us that one of his favorite stories in the book is "Between the Dark and the Daylight," and that the story was inspired by Damon Knight's 1944 tale "The Avenger."  Budrys feels that "Between the Dark and the Daylight" is so heavily indebted to Knight that he thinks of Knight as a co-author of the piece.  So today, as a first step in our exploration of Budrys' Inferno, which I recently purchased down in South Carolina, let's read Knight's "The Avenger" and then the Budrys tale it inspired.

"The Avenger" by Damon Knight (as by Stuart Fleming) (1944)

It looks like "The Avenger" only ever appeared in the Spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories, where it was illustrated by Graham Ingels of EC Comics fame. (You may recognize the cover, also by Ingels, because we've already read that issue's lead story, Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas.")  I'm reading the scan of the issue available at that indispensable resource for the vintage pulp fan, the internet archive.

"The Avenger" begins with a half-page prologue in italics, a first-person narrative from the point of view of some being that is having a psychological breakthrough--it never had emotions before, but cries for the first time upon seeing the bloody corpse of Peter Karson.  When the main text starts we find it is a flashback, a third-person narrative all about Peter Karson when he was still alive!

Karson is an engineer and scientist working in his office in a skyscraper in the "Science City of Manhattan."  He is just putting the finishing touches on the "blackprints" of his latest invention, Earth's first space ship, when space aliens who can fly, pass through walls, and employ telekinesis appear on the Earth and cause all manner of mayhem.  These E.T.s have absolute contempt for us, treating us not like people with a civilization but the way human scientists treat insects and rodents!  Multitudes die because the world government is powerless to stop the invaders from using their mental powers to conduct such fascinating experiments as dissecting John Q. Public while he is still alive!

One of the aliens makes mental contact with Karson, putting Karson into a coma for nine months.  When he wakes up, the human race has resorted to digging underground cities in which to hide, but this is a fruitless measure: the number crunchers have calculated that, due to the continuing depredations of the aliens, the human race will be extinct in fifty years!

Karson's "blackprints" hold the key to humankind's only hope.  In an underground bunker the world's first spacecraft is quickly constructed; Karson is going to travel to space to expose a cargo of embryos (and himself!) to cosmic rays in hopes of creating a mutant superhuman race that will be as superior to the aliens as they are to us!  Karson's girlfriend, another genius inventor, wants to come with him into space, but he denies her request to board, saying that being mutated by cosmic rays would ruin her looks!

(Is now the time to recall how fifteen years later Knight lost a job by complaining that Judith Merril's 1960 novel The Tomorrow People was full of bad science and was way too girly?)

The last page of "The Avenger" returns us to the first person-narrative that began the tale.  The narrator is one of the embryos, now grown to adulthood, a superhuman with no emotions who could liberate Earth from the invaders.  But this first specimen of homo superior identifies with the cold-hearted alien invaders more than with the human race!  Karson implores him to go to Earth and save humanity, but the narrator refuses and euthanizes Karson by crushing his skull in his bare hands!

This story is alright.  It reminds me a little of those 1930s Edmond Hamilton stories about radiation and evolution I read when this blog was in its infancy.

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" by Algis Budrys (1958)

Budrys's tale begins under a dome on an alien planet, where squabble the mutated descendants of Earth people; these products of centuries of rapid, artificially-directed evolution have tremendous strength, a coat of fur, "sagittal crests" and "sharp canine tusks."  Their ancestors crashed on this inhospitable planet generations ago, and ever since the native fauna have been trying to break into the ship, while the colonists inside have been genetically engineering their offspring to have the superabilities needed to tame this inveterately hostile world from which there is no escape.  Tomorrow is the big day, the day when the nursery gates will be opened to the outside and the new generation of humanity will be released onto the planet surface, but for years the captain (he's also chief "biotechnician and pedagogical specialist") has kept the rest of the colonists in the dark about exactly what he has been doing to their children, and they are not happy about it!

This is a pretty good story.  Not only is the scenario and the images it gives rise to (a dome full of genetically modified humans under siege by an army of hideous alien monsters) striking, but Budrys does a good job of transmitting to the reader the crushing tension endured by the besieged humans, for example, in dialogue between the captain and his wife.

"You don't care for one living soul besides yourself, and the only voice you'll listen to is that power-chant in your head.  You married me because I was good breeding stock.  You married me because, if you can't lead us outside, at least your son will be the biggest and best of his generation."  

I like the Ahab-like determination of the captain, and the way Budrys in this story examines the common theme of his body of work, the question of what truly constitutes a man.  Are the people in the dome, the product of centuries of eugenic breeding and genetic modification, people who couldn't breathe the air of Earth and are so big and strong that furniture made on Earth is too fragile for them to use, still human?  Should we see the captain, who dominates his fellows and is emotionally distant from his family, as a real man (a mensch, as the Jewish colonist who celebrates Hanukkah on the day before the nursery is opened might put it) for his single-minded devotion to the mission his ancestors set him on, or as a selfish and obsessive tyrant?  These questions are tied up with the theme of Knight's 1944 story: when the captain opens the nursery and unleashes the children he has designed to thrive on this hostile world, will they have any reason to identify with their parents, whom they have not seen for years and who cannot even breathe the same air they do? 

"Between the Dark and the Daylight" was first published in Infinity and would go on to appear in two anthologies, including one I own, 1983's Changes, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson.  It is a good enough story that I am looking forward to the rest of the pieces in Budrys' Inferno, which we will examine in our next two blog posts.