(For the curious, I'll put links to the earlier installments of this series at the bottom of this post.)
"The Pliable" by Daniel Galouye
In his intro, Boucher likens "The Pliable" to Agatha Christie's famous Ten Little Don't Use That Word, and it is also reminiscent of those 1930s classics by (respectively) John W. Campbell and A. E van Vogt, "Who Goes There?" and "Black Destroyer" in that it is about a small isolated group who introduce an alien into their company and must resolve the deadly challenge it unexpectedly poses.
The space ship in "The Pliable" has a multi-species crew made up of humans, a Centauran and a Vegan, and they have by chance discovered a primitive life form, a kind of blob or giant amoeba (like a foot across when a sphere) that responds to their brain transmissions--the members of the space crew can sculpt it like clay with their minds, and make it move around like a puppet with their thoughts. This discovery will make them all rich if they can stake a claim to it and then market the beasts across the galaxy.
The Vegan fashions a biped out of the blob, puts a knife in its hand, and makes it perform a traditional Vegan saber dance. The little marionette stabs another crew member in the chest, slaying him, and the crew and we readers strive to figure out which crewman directed the blob to commit the foul deed, or consider the alternative explanation that the blob has more intelligence than they bargained for and killed the spaceman of its own free will. More murders follow and the dwindling number of survivors try all kinds of logical schemes and indulge in all manner of prejudices in their frantic efforts to stop the killings and figure out who is responsible. The twist ending is that the monster isn't susceptible only to conscious control, but can also be influenced by the subconscious! A spaceman who subconsciously is animated by greed or fear could be unknowingly directing the blob to destroy his shipmates even if he isn't really so unscrupulous as too intentionally seek his comrades' deaths.
This story is pretty entertaining--I even found the dream sequence compelling and appropriate, which is noteworthy because usually I find dream sequences irritating and gratuitous--and it does raise questions of moral culpability, so I enjoyed it. At the same time, it is a little annoying that we were all expected to strain our brains keeping track of clues and following all the Rube Goldberg logic puzzles when they all turned out to be moot because the killer wasn't consciously committing his crimes.
"Stroke of Genius" by Randall Garrett
Waldos figure in this story, and editor Larry T. Shaw includes a note that reminds us that Robert Heinlein conceived of and named the waldo in his 1942 story of that name. I get the impression it is fashionable nowadays to claim science fiction never predicts anything, but if you read old magazines you find actual science fiction writers and editors are aways going on about how science fiction is predictive, and Shaw in his note says the waldo "proves yet again that science fiction can make accurate predictions." If you learn about the past from secondary sources you are likely to get a very different picture of what was going on and what people thought than if you learn about the past from primary sources.
Like Galouye's "The Pliable," "Stroke of Genius" is something of a murder mystery. Our tale is set in the space-faring future; Earth has founded colonies on quite a few extrasolar planets, but can only check in on them every five years or so, and a bunch of them in one area have been found to have failed. The fact that the failures are clustered geographically (spatially?) suggests that hostile aliens are at work, that the human race is in an interstellar war! The Space Force quickly develops a new energy weapon with which to arm their space warships, and sends Major Stratford over to a high tech manufacturer to talk about having them mass produce this ordnance, and Stratford unwittingly steps into the middle of a tense human drama!
You see, this engineer Crayley is in his thirties and is the number two executive at the manufacturer. He had hopes of soon taking over from the boss, famous genius Klythe, when the sixty-year-old retired. But Klythe is so valuable that the government authorized him to undergo The Big Gamble, a rejuvenation treatment that might wreck your body but also has a significant chance of restoring your corpus to its condition when you were twenty-five! The rarely-administered treatment worked like a charm on the K-man, and now Crayley will likely never succeed Klythe to become head of the factory because Klythe is effectively younger than Crayley while having thirty years more experience under his belt than our boy Craycray!
After all the introductions and the scene setting and the lecture on waldos, the plot kicks into gear as Crayley plots to murder Klythe. Garrett does a good job of making the working of the factory and the waldos interesting, and of giving us insight into both Klythe and Crayley's psychology--the psychologies of the two engineers is firmly integrated into the commission of the crime and its detection by the authorities. Crayley sabotages the production of the first of the new weapons, causing an explosion that kills five people, including Klythe. Crayley is immediately anointed Acting Director. Will the government investigation team discover his atrocious crime?
An entertaining crime story. Thumbs up! "Stroke of Genius" debuted in an issue of Infinity with another fun Emsh cover and stories by Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison I will probably read some day, plus Knight's laudatory reviews of novels by Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gordon R. Dickson. Merril and I both enjoyed "Stroke of Genius," but it doesn't look like it ever reappeared in an anthology or collection.
"Suite Mentale" by Randall Garrett
Well, having read it, I can see why "Suite Mentale" never spread beyond the pages of Robert W. Lowndes' Future; it is sort of boring, its structure lacking a build up and climax, its characters and their actions lacking in drama, personality, and excitement. One of the problems is that we don't witness the protagonist as he performs the actions that make up the bulk of the story's plot, nor do we hear him narrate the plot--instead we learn the story in out of chronological order fragments through the dialogue of other characters. This limits immediacy and undercuts any possible suspense and also impedes the reader's ability to identify with or care about the protagonist. Another problem is the way the speculative lectures about psychology and time travel with which Garrett lards his tale weigh it down.
Even though I am considering the structure of Garret's story a failure, Garrett seems to have organized his tale with care and deliberation--each of the five chapters of this twelve-page story is named after one of the components (I guess educated people call these "movements") of a long piece of classical music like a symphony or suite--the first chapter is "Overture--Adagio Mistirioso" and another is "Scherzo--Presto," to provide some examples. "Suite Mentale" is an ambitious story, it seems, but I'm an uncultured slob who knows almost nothing about classical music so this is all lost on me.
The plot concerns a guy, Paul Wendell, who has developed telepathic powers. We all have latent psychic powers, Wendell realizes, and he is confident that he can teach most anybody how to unlock their own psychic abilities. He teaches eight men how to read minds and the like, and gets a meeting with the President of the United States and lets the big guy know all about his work.
The Prez is not thrilled by the news Wendell brings him. On a philosophical, long term level, he fears that if everybody can read everybody else's mind that society will collapse, and uses a game-playing metaphor to express his worry. Today we are all playing poker--we all keep a lot about ourselves and our thoughts secret from other people. If we all are aware of what everybody else is thinking, enjoy access to each other's memories, we will all be playing chess, which the President thinks is a disaster for some reason; I'm not sure the President/Garrett employed this metaphor or explained the Prez's worries particularly well. On a short term, practical, level, the President is worried that the nine psykers must have all sorts of knowledge that would compromise the security of the United States if our enemies were to capture any one of them and beat the info out of him. So the President strives to keep an eye on these nine telepaths and come up with some excuse to lock them up.
The President is relieved when the eight disciples all go insane and one of them, in his insanity, shoots Wendell in the head. Now they can all be locked away--for their own good even!--in various medical institutions. Surgery preserves Wendell's life, but to those around him the genius appears to be little more than a vegetable--he can't move much, or talk, and is only barely capable of swallowing the food nurses hand feed him. (I think maybe intravenous feeding hadn't been introduced yet when the story was written.) The reality is that Wendell is fully alive in his brain, but is suffering total sensory deprivation and can only maintain his sanity by replaying all of his memories over and over again and intricately studying every moment of his past life. He does this for many years.
The plot is resolved when Wendell dies after figuring out why his disciples went insane and telepathically curing them and injecting into their brains all his own memories, so that, in a sense, he is still alive as a copy in the brains of eight other dudes. Released from the funny farm, one of these eight goes to visit the President, who is now retired. He convinces the President, whom Wendell considers a great man, to join the group of psykers and use his status and ability as an elder statesman to help engineer a smooth transition to the now inevitable psychic civilization.
I want to like this story because it is ambitious and unconventional and has big ideas, but it just isn't well told and lacks entertainment value. Thumbs down, I'm afraid.
"Bodyguard" by "Christopher Grimm" (H. L. Gold, probably)
It is the spacefaring future: extraterrestrials are a common sight on Earth, there are rejuvenation treatments so most people look and feel young, and people fly around in aircars. But there is one technology that hasn't really panned out--plastic surgery. So, people who were born good-looking still have an advantage over those of us who are plain and those of us who are ugly.
Gabriel Lockard is one of best-looking men on Earth. He is also a fool and a jerk: we witness him hitting his wife when she is annoying, starting a ruckus in a bar by getting in some innocent guy's face, as well as flying an aircar while drunk. When Gabe's recklessness gets into a dangerous jam, a guy suddenly appears to save him; the rescuer looks totally different each time, but Gabe's wife realizes that its the same man pulling her careless brute of a hubby's fat out of the firer each time, he is just inhabiting a different body each time!
The Earth Gold is depicting in this noirish story is old and worn out, its culture decadent, the vital industrious adventurous types all having moved to frontier planets. Those who remain pursue relief from their boredom in extreme, dangerous, addictive pastimes. One such thrilling recreation is administered by some aliens with psychic powers; these E.T.s operate a technically illegal "game" which consists of players swapping bodies, often with random strangers; participants go to sleep and wake up in a different body, running a very real risk of finding themselves in a body that is sick or otherwise deficient.
"Bodyguard" is like 38 pages long, and a quarter of the way in we are told that the guy who keeps saving Gabriel from harm is the original occupant of that gorgeous Gabriel Lockard body, which he lost to the jerk when said jerk, who was ugly, tricked him into one of those body swapping games. Original Gabriel is endeavoring to keep his beautiful birth body intact in the hope he will figure out a way to get back into it; the current occupant of the Gabe body is always trying to put distance between himself and this delectable frame's original owner, so the original Gabe keeps switching to a new body so he can continue sneaking up on the body thief.
There follows a pretty good suspense/crime story as the thief tries to escape and then tries to murder his pursuer. Additional characters are added to the drama: the thief blackmails a sleazy lawyer into acting as a go-between so he can hire a hitman to kill the real Gabe; equally significant is the thief's wife, who can always spot the real Gabe no matter what body he is in, and who becomes the female corner of a love triangle involving her evil husband and the original owner of her husband's breathtakingly hot bod. Everybody tries to double cross everybody else, and when the assassin changes his body as a means of eluding the authorities--wouldn't you know it--the original Gabe ends up in the professional killer's body! The legal system doesn't recognize all this body switching business, so in the view of the law whoever is in the body of a criminal is culpable for the body's crimes, so Gabe now runs the risk of being shot down by the apparently less than conscientious cops of this decadent future Earth!
I like this caper--thumbs up! One fun skein wound into Gold's tapestry is all the future slang and catchphrases he introduces and which the characters use quite a bit. This is a typical thing SF writers do, but Gold's neologisms felt more authentic than usual. I will warn 21st-century readers that "Bodyguard" seems to push ideas that we are nowadays expected to abjure--that one's moral character is reflected in one's looks (I just had to sit through a multi-hour performance of Shrek: The Musical put on by ten-year-olds so this at "top of mind," as we say) and that women will fall in love with a guy just because of his looks and his money.
After its debut in Galaxy, "Bodyguard" has only ever been reprinted on paper in the foreign editions of Galaxy and in the aforementioned anthology edited by Gold himself, who apparently had no compunctions about selling his own work in such a morally suspect manner.
"Witches Must Burn" by James Gunn
It is the future--the 1970s--and America is a surveillance state; there are bugs everywhere, the phones are tapped, if you check into a hotel you have to write your political party affiliation on the form. Everything seems old and rundown, and there are lots of high tech devices but many of them seem to be on the fritz. Among the common people there is widespread resentment over technological advances that are alleged to have put people out of jobs and end up being unreliable anyway. People's ire focuses on the scientists who are responsible for all this problematic technology, and they have representatives in the federal legislature egging them on and willing to protect them if they mete out a little mob justice!
Our protagonist is Wilson, a physicist who specialized in electronics and then changed course in mid-career to become a psychologist. As the story begins he is returning to his Midwestern university, where he was close to completing a major project, one with potentially world-changing applications, to find an anti-egghead mob is burning down the entire campus and massacring the faculty and their families! We then get reasonably entertaining sequences depicting Wilson as a hunted man, using various strategies and compromising his morals in order to survive--we also get a glimpse of how other members of the educated classes similarly do morally questionable things to survive in anti-intellectual America.
Gunn provides a longish passage that describes history from the point of view of Wilson: science has made life vastly better by making Man master of the natural world, but instead of embracing this miracle, in the middle of the 20th century the populace has been seized by a mass psychosis and became hostile to science and technology. Wilson's expertise put him in the forefront of those seeking to solve this problem by developing a technological means to read and control people's minds. All Wilson's work--just when he was on the brink of success!--was destroyed in the fire that opened the story, but while on the run he does manage to build a crude miniature version of the device that can detect theta waves and help him intuit the attitudes of those around him.
Europe and the Soviet Union are apparently even more oppressive and anti-technology than the USA, so Wilson heads for Latin America--Brazil, Venezuela and Peru may be authoritarian countries, but their governments welcome scientists who can provide aid in their quest to exploit South America's natural resources and achieve economic growth. Wilson hooks up with a Brazilian government egghead-recruiter, but right before he can get on a Brazilian nuclear sub, he is captured by the American government!
And then swiftly rescued by the pro-science underground, the most prominent representative of which in the text is a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. This babe explains the common man's skepticism of rapid technological change, even excuses it a little bit, whipping out a metaphor--the scientists are like the driver of the automobile of civilization, but lately they have been putting the pedal to the metal, speeding recklessly, and they don't even know where the road is headed! The common man is like a passenger who gets so scared he wants to grab the wheel from the driver, but of course that will likely introduce even greater danger. Blondie's solution to the problem is not for the eggheads to wield ever greater power over the lowbrows, but for the scientists to leave their ivory towers and reintegrate into society--she and her comrades blame the scientists for the burnings of universities and the massacres of intellectuals, arguing that the cognitive elite made such a backlash inevitable by divorcing themselves from society and getting up on their high horses. The massacre of the smarty smarts is the first step in a regression of society to a sort of medieval level that will be good in the long run because the cognitive elite will again be joined with the people and work alongside them instead of above them. The story ends when Wilson comes to accept this painful truth.
One of the elements of the story which I sort of rolled my eyes at but is perhaps interesting is the use of the witch as a metaphor. Gunn of course employs the very common use of "witch hunt" as a metaphor for unfair persecution, but that hot blonde and her comrades also suggest that in the new society that scientists should play the role performed (so they say) by witches in the past, that of "the wise man of the village who wields mysterious control over the forces of nature--for the benefit of the village."
Acceptable. It looks like John Wilson would return in two stories published in 1969, and "Witches Must Burn" appears with these sequels in the collection The Burning.
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Another step in our 1956 journey lies behind us. This leg of the trek was long but not that painful, with three good stories, and only one poor one, so, props to Merril. I don't always see eye to eye with Merril, as you'll perhaps remember if you've been accompanying me on this exploration; if you haven't, you can check out our travel diary at the links below:
I reviewed the entire The Burning fix-up many many years ago. Gunn was definitely one of those authors who turned a ton of his short stories into novels.
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