Venture, March 1958: R Silverberg, A Budrys, & D Berry

Recently we read a 1958 story by Don Berry, "Man Alone," about the first man to travel in a FTL vessel, and how seeing hyperspace drove him insane.  A reader commented that another 1958 Berry story, "The Intruder" had a similar premise, which piqued my interest.  When I saw that "The Intruder" appeared in an issue of Venture featuring stories by Robert Silverberg and Algis Budrys which I haven't read yet, I decided to fire up the internet archive, world's greatest website, and crack open that issue of Venture.  This is an issue that includes two stories we have already looked at, Poul Anderson's Flandry adventure "The Game of Glory" and Budrys' "The Edge of the Sea" (Budrys has two stories in the issue; the one we will read today appears under a pseudonym.)

This issue of Venture also offers readers an essay by Theodore Sturgeon in which he takes to task Time magazine--and mainstream publications in general--for their hostility to SF and in particular for subjecting to criticism Judith Merril.  (Merril has many vociferous supporters, and I guess Ted is one of them.)  Ol' Ted is also a pioneer recycler; he fills up half a page quoting from Bob Leman's fanzine, and another quarter page restating and discussing his famous "Revelation" that "Ninety percent of everything is crud."  Gotta meet those word counts, gotta fill those column inches.

"Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" by Robert Silverberg

This is a story about sex that goes against everything current elite culture tells us to think about sex roles and sex differences.  The first person narrator says stuff like "They talk about the soothing touch of the female, and it's all true" to us readers and, to a woman, "'you're the only member of the crew whose job can't be done by someone else.'"  Wow!  Well, I guess in science fiction we can imagine any kind of  world, even one in which men can't get pregnant and women don't have penises!

It is the year 2240, and the space destroyer of which our narrator, 40-something Lieutenant Harper, is Psych Officer is about to ship out to the new war between the Terran and Sirian space empires.  Harper tells us the war is the result of the inability of the two empires to agree on "who was to sell what to which planets of the galaxy" and, further, that "A trade collision is a common cause of wars.  It probably destroyed ancient Troy."  Is this really true?  

Anyway, getting to Sirius system will take the Donnybrook many months and require over a hundred carefully calibrated jumps into and out of hyperspace.  A ship on such a stressful voyage, which even the slightest error caused by fatigue or anxiety can bring to total disaster, is required by law to include a "Crew Girl" to serve as "mother, wife and mistress" to the men, to relieve their stress and allow them to focus.  It is generally the job of the Psych Officer to hire the Crew Girl, so Harper interviews a few dozen women and selects Eve Tyler, who is bright and pretty and has never served as a Crew Girl before.

A few days into the eight-month trip it is clear that Tyler is a absolutely unsuitable as a Crew Girl.  She refuses to have sex with the men, and is so sweet and cute that they are all falling in love with her.  Instead of relieving tension she is causing it, and the astrogators are starting to make mistakes, putting the ship's mission and its very survival at grave risk.  When the officers confront Tyler she admits she is a virgin who never intended to have sex with the men and hired a forger to prepare her papers--her fiancé is in the Sirius system and she got herself mustered into the crew fraudulently in order to join him and marry him out in the battle zone, and she is determined that he will be her first lover.

The solution to the problem faced by Harper and the Donnybrook is pretty monstrous, turning Silverberg's story into a sort of horror tale or fetishistic soft core porn.  Tyler is drugged so that she has the mentality of a baby or imbecile.  She can't feed herself or dress herself, much less read a book or talk.  The point of this is that she can't refuse sexual advances.  On the long voyage to Sirius, every single one of the twenty-three crewmembers of the Donnybrook uses her sexually multiple times, and this keeps their morale on an even keel.  To think that twenty-three educated men could all enjoy sex with a woman who can't consent or offer any kind of emotional or intellectual response is pretty disturbing--is Silverberg offering a brutal critique of men's attitude towards women here or depicting a dystopian future?  

(We might also consider the similarity of Silverberg's story to Tom Godwin's famous "Cold Equations," a 1954 story the plot of which is largely the product of Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.; "Cold Equations" is another story in which a woman puts many lives at risk by stowing away on a ship and who thereby renders null her basic rights.)    

When the destroyer arrives in the war zone, Harper hypnotizes Tyler so she will think the trip was uneventful and nobody had sex with her.  She is left at a base to get some kind of desk job or something.  The twist ending of the story is that Tyler's fiancé turns out to be Harper's son from a long dissolved marriage--as the story ends Harper is about to attend his son's wedding to a woman who thinks she is a virgin but whom Harper knows has been sexually violated by himself and twenty-two of his colleagues.

"Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" is a pretty wild story, and even if you think it is full of bogus psychology, physics, and history and find the behavior it depicts appalling it is compelling and thought-provoking.  Silverberg creates an alien world and we see it through the eyes of an insider, and his writing style is smooth, ensuring the story is an easy read and rendering the wild stuff that takes place all the more jarring.  (And perhaps reminding us of H. P. Lovecraft's suggestion in a letter printed in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales that horror stories should be written from the point of view of the villain.)

Quite effective--thumbs up!  "Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" would see print again in a number of European publications, and the 1969 Silverberg collection Dimension Thirteen.    

"There Ain't No Other Roads" by Algis Budrys (as by Robert Marner)

This is something of a rare Budrys, only reappearing (as far as isfdb knows) in the British edition of Venture and the French version of F&SF (Venture, which produced only 16 issues, was put out by the same people who produced the more successful F&SF.) 

Latin American migrant Ernesto Garcia, our narrator, got off a ship in Florida and is hitchhiking up Route 1 to meet his folks in New York.  In some Southern state, three country boys, one with greenish teeth and the other two with rat-faces, beat him up, but before they can inflict permanent damage they are driven off by another drifter.  This guy was waylaid by miscreants himself a few days ago, and has a head wound; apparently he was saved from death by a metal plate installed in his skull, presumably after a war injury.  This Good Samaritan suffers amnesia and doesn't even recall his own name.  

These two hitchhikers become companions, and continue the march north.  They have a strange series of interactions with people that I won't try to describe here and which Budrys keeps pretty mysterious, expecting the reader to figure them out based on clues or to just accept them as bewildering.  (In several ways, "There Ain't No Other Roads" reminds me of the work of Gene Wolfe.)  To put it briefly, it seems that the Good Samaritan is a robot from a Galactic Federation and has as its duty to wander the Earth, chasing down aliens who come down here to exploit or just toy with us humans; these aliens disguise themselves as humans or take over human bodies or something like that.  A bunch of these alien criminals are trying to destroy the robot, whom they call "a cop;" it was they who inflicted that head wound, and our narrator witnesses the robot's outwitting of their efforts to spring a complicated trap on him.

Budrys aims to imbue his story with pathos.  The robot has a consciousness, though either through design or because of battle damage it sometimes forgets it is a robot.  Even when forgetful, automatic systems set it on the right path to continue its mission.  When it remembers its true nature it is sad, because it has no real family, history or people.  It seems to feel some sort of kinship with one of the criminals, the ringleader, because they are both from beyond Earth and because this ringleader, in his efforts to figure out how to destroy the almost invincible robot, is the only person to really try to understand the robot, how it thinks and feels.

The theme of much of Budrys' work is the question of "what makes a man?", and we see it here in "There Ain't No Other Roads."  The robot is alien to Earth, and at least in part inorganic, but he has the attributes we associate with a good man--he is strong and a good fighter, but respectful of others, using his strength to help others rather than to abuse them.  Part of the trap laid by the villains is to leave an inoperative ray pistol in a second hand shop with a sign on it reading "THIS BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO CAN USE IT," an allusion to the Arthurian story of the sword in the stone.

Garcia is portrayed as intelligent and educated, and Budrys uses the narrator's references to history and high culture to foreshadow events later in the story and give us clues as to what is going on.  Garcia comments that the people of this Southern state are obsessed with their ancestry, and derisively suggests they can trace their ancestors back to Newgate and Tyburn, foreshadowing the importance of family and history to the robot and that the story will be about law enforcement.

Budrys gives us reason to think of the robot as an angel come to Earth to guard people and mete out justice.  When Garcia looks in a record shop window his eyes linger on "the Angel L. P. of Verdi's Requiem Mass."  At the end of the story the alien cop tells Garcia that "There is justice in this world, and everywhere else."  (These Christian overtones are of course another thing that reminds me of Gene Wolfe.)

"There Ain't No Other Roads" is a somewhat tricky and challenging story full of allusions and mysteries; we are giving it a thumbs up here at MPorcius Fiction Log, but it is easy to see why it hasn't been reprinted much--it isn't a smooth read and its rewards are perhaps elusive.  Budrys' style, narrative techniques and themes make his story something of an interesting contrast with Silverberg's easy-to-read, in-your-face-shocking, modern-in-style and modern-in-theme (sex and clinical psychology) contribution to this issue of Venture.

"Intruder" by Don Berry

Alright kids, it is time to make the jump to hyperspace and read the story that brought us here!  "Intruder" was only ever reprinted in the British edition of Venture, but let's not count it out until we have read it ourselves.

Oy, "Intruder," 18 pages, starts with a dream sequence more than a page long that is conveyed via a multitude of poetic devices: one-word paragraphs ("Fury."), run-on sentences, repetition ("Red, red, red."), ellipses, neologisms ("talldom.")  A boy is faced by his naked father, who wears an opera hat and questions and scolds sonny, and the boy has trouble speaking because his throat is filled with fire.  

The dreamer is David Saar, the lone astronaut on what he has been told is the first ever FTL flight.  Saar's ship is equipped with the new hyperdrive, and takes millisecond long trips through hyperspace, each jump hurling the ship hundreds of light years through real space.  It is apparently during these split-second jumps that he has his dreams of being berated and interrogated by his naked father.  Via hyperspace radio Saar can communicate with Earth as easily as you talk to your Mom on the phone.  The radio operator back on Earth receives all of the various data Saar collects, and keeps asking questions about how Saar feels, and if Saar has any dreams.  Saar denies he has any dreams.

The truth kept from Saar is that the radio operator is a shrink, and Saar is the third man to travel through hyperspace; the astronauts on the first two missions went insane--apparently they ceased to believe in their own existence!--and later died.   

The PsychOfficer, some military men, and the team of Chinese mathematicians who came up with the theory that made the hyperdrive possible spend the story carefully observing Saar and trying to figure out what hyperspace is all about.  Saar appears to be gradually losing touch with reality, in unguarded moments talking as if his father is out there in space with him, I guess subconsciously, but not consciously, remembering those dreams,

The plot of "Intruder" is not bad, but there are way too many long and tedious and repetitive dream sequences in which Saar is on fire and his father asks him official-sounding questions like "Name and occupation?" and "Place of residence?"  Are there people who enjoy this sort of text?  These sequences could have been severely shortened and still served their narrative purpose.  

Anyway, the shrink and the Chinese math guys theorize that hyperspace is home to or actually consists of an alien intelligence that is trying to communicate with the humans who pop into its realm, and Saar's psyche is responding to these communications by anthropomorphizing the alien entity, an effort of the subconscious to maintain Saar's sanity by translating inexplicable sense impressions into something familiar; because the alien is so superior it is only natural that Saar's subconscious represents it as his father, and Saar himself as a child.  We who are privy to the dreams realize the alien considers human appearances in its realm an intrusion and is demanding the use of the hyperdrive be suspended permanently.  The cosmic horror ending of Berry's story is the suggestion that the alien entity is going to colonize Saar and, when Saar gets back to Earth, kill us all.

I want to like "Intruder," and I think I would if the dream sequences were each a paragraph long instead of a page long--I'll call it acceptable.

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Three serious and ambitious stories which pursue a variety of goals and employ diverse strategies in pursuit of those goals.  This is a good issue of Venture!  Kudos to editor Robert P. Mills and everybody else involved.

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more explorations of SF of days gone by.