Let the freak show continue! At MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Dark Tides, a collection of stories by Eric Frank Russell advertized as being all about assorted freaks. We've already read six stories (three here, and three here) from the book, and today we've got three more. Today's capers are pretty brief, collectively only taking up fifteen pages of my copy of Dark Tides.
"Wisel" (1942)
This story first appeared as "Mr. Wisel's Secret" in
Amazing Stories, and is an acceptable filler story that would be translated into Italian after its appearance in
Dark Tides.
A bunch of people are riding in one of those old train cars in which the seats face each other. An additional person boards the car; this guy carries an odd piece of luggage with a weird sticker on it--the sticker bears the image of a building none of the other passengers can recognize, as well as equally mysterious writing. When somebody eventually builds up the nerve to ask the man about the sticker he suggests he has been to Mars. Is he joking? The narrator gets off at the same stop as the man and witnesses behavior that seems to indicate he has astonishing powers--maybe he really has been to Mars, maybe he is a Martian himself!
This story is a little like Frank M. Robinson's 1951 "Two Weeks in August," which is also about a guy who claims to have been to Mars and has some documentary evidence to back up his claim.
"The Ponderer" (1948)
"The Ponderer" made its debut in an issue of
Weird Tales that is full of the work of weird icons like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Carl Jacobi, and Lee Brown Coye and has a cover story by SF titan Theodore Sturgeon. "The Ponderer" would be translated into Dutch.
This is another acceptable filler story; set in rural Mexico, and meant to be amusing, it trucks in stereotypes of Mexicans as lazy and uneducated and so forth.
A man (a "peon") who is well-known among the locals for being dimwitted has a farm between a jungle and the base of a cliff; nobody else wants this land because they are unnerved by the cliff. Jutting out of the cliff face is a rock formation that resembles a giant deep in thought, his elbow on his knee, his fist under his chin. Our hero is too scared to look up at the "face" of the giant, and is nervous whenever he has to walk through the towering formation's shadow in the course of tilling his field.
One day the alien giant wakes up and snatches up the poor farmer. The alien explains that it loves to think out complex problems, that it
lives to think out such problems. What could be better than deep thought? The creature has only emerged from its thousands-years-long period of immobility because it has finally solved the mathematical problem posed by the orbits of the nine planets of a binary star system. In the same way I would like to have a new Frank Frazetta 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, having just
finished my Vampirella puzzle, the alien wants a new puzzle to solve. It proposes to crush the farmer, and those who come to investigate his disappearance, which will provide it the challenge of solving the problem of surviving the human race's inevitable efforts to destroy it.
But it offers the farmer a chance; if he can pose the alien a sufficiently stimulating problem, it will allow the peon to live. Recalling a conversation he had with a priest, the farmer asks "When God said, 'Let there be light?', who was he talking to?" The alien finds this puzzle satisfactory, and sets down the farmer and returns to his slumber on the cliff face.
"Sole Solution" (1956)
This two-page story works with the same themes that we saw ten seconds ago in "The Ponderer." The greatest of scientists finds himself in a situation of absolute and total sensory deprivation. Such a life is a problem, and the scientist sets his immense intellect to finding a solution. He resolves to use his prodigious imagination to design a universe down to every last detail, and then inhabit that universe himself, but in the form of millions of independent entities of severely limited power and knowledge. What has been obvious from the start is made crystal clear in the last lines--the scientist is God about to create us in his image!
Acceptable filler.
"Sole Solution" first saw print in
Fantastic Universe in an issue with a story by Frank Belknap Long as well as one of L. Sprague de Camp's revisions of a Robert E. Howard story. Brian Aldiss selected "Sole Solution" for his oft-reprinted Penguin anthology.
Three filler stories with somewhat silly twist endings--not so great. Hopefully the final three stories of Dark Tides will be better.
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