Frank Belknap Long: "Bridgehead," "Filch," and "The Trap"

The adventure continues!  Spurred by Long's comments in a 1970s interview, we are reading the stories Frank Belknap Long sold to John W. Campbell, Jr. for publication in Unknown and Astounding in the 1940s.  We have already devoted three blogposts to this endeavor, and I believe this will be the penultimate, covering three stories from issues of Astounding published in the mid-Forties.

"Bridgehead" (1944)

The August 1944 issue of Astounding includes articles full of technical data about television ("The light spot must be able to go from zero intensity to maximum in 1/7,500,000th of a second...") and optics ("Strangely enough, no use is made of the bright yellow mercury doublet at 5770 and 5791") and a story by A. E. van Vogt I don't think I have ever read.  Page after page of brain-busters!  But for today's purposes, what matters is Frank Belknap Long's novelette "Bridgehead."  "Bridgehead" would be included in some editions of the collection The Hounds of Tindalos and super-editor Donald Wollheim included it in an anthology that makes up half of an Ace Double--for that anthology Long's story was retitled "The Temporal Transgressor."

We spend the first section of "Bridgehead" with an apparatchik of some militaristic tyranny half a million years in the future.  He is interrogating one of his hulking subordinates, a kind of time travelling trailblazer and commando.  Through their dialogue we learn all about the capital "P" Plan to open up tunnels between this time and many other times, and then through them launch a surprise attack on all those different time periods.  His subordinate committed a blunder on a recent mission, leaving a valuable piece of equipment behind in the 20th century, and so the apparatchik sadistically slays him with a ray gun, mutilating his corpse with the weapon for good measure.

The narrative shifts to the 20th century, where we meet newlyweds Eddie and Betty-Jane.  Eddie is a writer whose finances swing from flush to indebtedness with great rapidity and frequency, based on whether or not he has recently sold a "gag."  Eddie is also a science fiction fan and science nerd who knows all about the space-time continuum and paleobiology; "Bridgehead" has recursive elements, our main characters referring (in general ways) to SF stories multiple times over the course of the tale.  (Eddie also has a chance to show off his knowledge of the different species of saber-toothed cats.)

Betty-Jane is trying to convince Eddie to start a new career with a more reliable income when he drives their car into a ditch.  Looking for a stone to put under one of the tires, Eddie finds the shoulder-fired energy projector that the future commando accidentally left behind.  The device has a hypnotic effect on the couple, and Betty-Jane feels compelled to fire it off, creating a tunnel through time which the couple passes through.  Long subjects us to a long series of paragraphs full of confusing metaphors in his effort to describe the newlyweds' psychedelic experience of travelling hither and yon through time, bopping from one era to another, fleeing or fighting dinosaurs, a saber-toothed tiger, a band of flint spear-flinging pre-human hominids, and the like.

The two island universes which had collided inside Eddie's head took their time in going their separate ways in silence.  They left a trail of blazing super-novae, and dizzily spinning giant and dwarf stars, hot, cold, red, blue and yellow--all in the plane of a super-ecliptic superimposed on the lobes of Eddie's bruised brain, and the little pools of white hot lava which studded his spinal column. 

Long also disgorges some vague commentary on psychological theory at us, invoking the names of Freud, Jung and Watson.  Not content to just tell us what he is trying to say about Freudian theory and the competing school of behaviorism, Long insists on obfuscatory metaphors, like saying that Freud and Jung built a house but it was creaky, blah blah blah.  The point of a metaphor or analogy is to make a concept easier to understand, but all too often writers inflict upon readers metaphors and analogies that they think sound poetic or learned, but which make their points harder to grasp.  (If they have a point--obviously, poor writers acting in bad faith use such devices to make themselves look smarter than they are, to disguise the vapidity of their work, or just to get a few ticks closer to some word count target.)   

The villains who are trying to put the Plan in operation send an agent after the couple, but fail to stop them for reasons I didn't quite understand--E and B-J go quite far back in time, further than can the Planners, who are suffering some kind of psychological block or post-hypnotic inhibition.  Eddie and Betty-Jane remain in the distant past, and begin to forget their 20th-century life.  It is implied that Eddie and Betty-Jane have somehow not only foiled Plan, but set things up so that the story of human civilization will be a peaceful one and not the chronicle of war and crime which you and I and our ancestors have all lived through.

Poor in every way, a series of lame events with no climax (Eddie and Betty-Ann never learn about the Plan or interact with the Planners), badly written and full of digressions only thinly connected to the thin plot.  Thumbs down for "Bridgehead."  Campbell and Wollheim had heroically successful careers as editors, and you have to wonder what they were thinking presenting this mess to the SF-reading public.      

The cover of the Panther edition of The Hounds of Tindalos on the right
is by Bruce Pennington--kudos to Pennington, as you rarely see a cover
which so effectively conveys speed, energy and motion

"Filch" (1945)

Long immediately raised my hackles by starting "Filch" off with something stupid that was totally incidental and unnecessary.  Our story takes place on one of the planets orbiting Rigel, and we are told the planet's atmosphere is very humid in some areas but very arid in others.  Seems OK.  But then it becomes clear that the planet's climate is a checker board, with each square only a few yards across, dripping wet sections right next to dusty dry sections.  This is ridiculous, and it has no bearing on the plot of the story.

The actual plot in outline isn't too bad.  There are two Terrans on this Rigelian world, employees of a private trading firm, a man, proctor Jim Griscom, and a woman, redhead Joan Mallory.  Their job is to make friends with the primitive natives and figure out what they might have to sell that could be marketed on other planets, but the pair have made little progress and are very stressed out and physically worn, Griscom in particular.  As the story begins a new guy, young Dick Bosworth, has arrived to join the team and perhaps replace as proctor the fatigued Griscom, who is eager to leave.  Bosworth thinks he can develop a good relationship with the natives and achieve success where Griscom and Mallory have failed.

When Bosworth sits down with the natives we get some clues as to how creepy and alien they really are, and then we get a scene in which Griscom and Mallory discuss their theories about what is going on on the planet.  Griscom, it turns out, had a complete grasp of what was up before Bosworth arrived, but was afraid to report the terrible, perhaps in credible, truth about the Rigel system and the reason for his failure without a corroborating report from an additional proctor-level employee.

The Rigelians are humanoid, but skeletally thin, so thin you can actually see their organs in operation.  We learn via observing them alongside Bosworth and then listening to Griscom's conversation with Mallory that these freaks are psychic vampires; they have crystals, and look into the crystals and go into some sort of trance and feed off the psychic energies of others who are some distance away, whom they can see in the crystal.  Griscom and Mallory are so thin and worn out because the natives are draining their life forces!  Even more creepy, with their telepathy the diabolical natives can awaken within a human our own latent and suppressed ability to perform this psychic vampirism, and when Bosworth sits down to eat with these aliens they nudge him into feeding off poor Mallory.  The crystals are not magical--their utility is that their shininess serves to focus the mind and facilitate the trance.  Shortly after Bosworth's eerie meeting with the aliens the three humans head back to Terra, and aboard the ship, alone in his cabin, a corrupted Bosworth goes into a trance after looking at a shiny glass and starts sucking the energy out of Mallory again--just like the vampires of fiction, the Rigelians can turn innocent people into vicious predators.

I think I'll call this one acceptable.  I like the actual plot, but Long's writing is confusing and full of odd phrases and distracting digressions, and the dialogue feels totally unnatural.

"Filch" was included in the Long collection Rim of the Unknown, which was translated into Italian over 20 years after it appeared in English.

"The Trap" (1945)         

"The Trap," like "Bridgehead," has a bunch of biology and psychology in it, but this material is better integrated into the story here and much of it constitutes interesting speculation rather than boring reiteration of something you might find in a science book or pointless nonsense.  "The Trap" also flatters writers, artists, and creative types, suggesting they are better than their mundane fellows.  The plot of the story is like something out of Weird Tales, and isn't burdened by a load of pointless phantasmagoria and metaphor.  All told, I think this is a pretty good story!

Two men are serving a tour of five years on a remote starship refueling station, all alone.  Hanley is a serious straightforward by-the-book kind of guy, and Gregg is a creative type whose singing and saxophone playing get on Hanley's nerves, and whose poetry writing and painting Hanley finds inexplicable.  Worse, Gregg is lazy, spending lots of time avoiding work and procrastinating--he won't attack a job until a deadline is right on top of him, though Hanley has to admit that, once Gregg gests down to work, he does a good job.  Gregg, of course, is a picture of how artists, writers, and the kind of people who read SF magazines think of themselves--smarter and more sensitive than others, oppressed by the schedules and deadlines and rules and regulations imposed on them by society, reluctant to do mundane work but, of course, just as good at mundane work as anybody, or better, should they deign to do it.  Gregg compares himself to a transitional life form between fishes and land animals, superior to the fish but too indolent, too addicted to relaxing in the sunlight in the shallows, to take the revolutionary step of conquering dry land.  Another of his flights of fancy is that he thinks of himself as a distinct species of humanity, homo indolensis.

A mysterious spaceship, one which lands without following all the various protocols and which does not transmit any messages to the base as required by regulation, arrives.  As a defense against pirates, standard operating procedure is to contain ships that act in such a fashion in a forcefield, and of course not refuel them.  The ship just sits there, and Hanley, despite the rules, feels compelled to go to the mysterious vessel and explore it.  Inside he falls into a trap; the ship is inhabited by intelligent telepathic life forms that are not flesh and blood, but in some inexplicable way a mere design or pattern.  The patterns are engraved upon the walls of the interior rooms of the ship, and above all else they desire to be appreciated.  Like several people before him, whose corpses sit in chairs, Hanley is hypnotized by such a pattern and sits down to stare at it, forgetting all about the need to drink and eat.

Gregg, proving himself the superior man, rescues Hanley, and, then it is revealed to the reader that Gregg is no mere dilettante and slacker, but a writer famous galaxy-wide working at the fueling station incognito!  Following this adventure, he adds a section on the pattern creatures to the new edition of his magisterial history of the human race's expansion throughout the galaxy.  

Like "Filch," this story can be found in Rim of the Unknown.  

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Three more Frank Belknap long stories from Campbell magazines behind us, stories that ran the gamut from bad to good, and three more ahead of us!  Can we dream that all three of those stories will be good?  We'll find out if Long and Campbell can make our dreams come true next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log!