Hal Clement: "Impediment," "Technical Error" and "Assumption Unjustified"

It's time to put the science back in science fiction!  On November 8, as I reported on X, I spotted a copy of the Hal Clement collection Natives of Space at the Seneca Cannery Antique Mall in Havre de Grace, Maryland.  I passed on buying the book, instead spending my money on the filthy old HO scale electric locomotives I have spent the last week refurbishing and a ray-pistol-packing female astronaut.  But Clement has been on my mind; after all, I read his story "A Question of Guilt" just a few days ago and "Proof" just a week before that, and Clement wrote the intro to the Jack Williamson collection from which we just read The Green Girl.  So today let's read the three longish stories that were reprinted in Natives of Space, all three of which debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding in the 1940s.  After being reprinted in Natives in Space in 1965 with a Richard Powers cover and in 1970 with a Dean Ellis cover, these three tales appeared in print yet again in the 1979 collection The Best of Hal Clement.  I'll be reading them in a scan of that 1979 collection, in chronological order.

"Impediment" (1942)

"Impediment" debuted alongside Robert Heinlein's "Waldo" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Deadlock," both of which were credited to pseudonyms, and Ross Rocklynne's "Jackdaw."  There's also an article by Willy Ley about various types of bombs and bombing techniques.  Kaboom!

Writing about "A Question of Guilt" in 2020, the great tarbandu told us he thinks Hal Clement "one of science fiction’s more boring authors" and "Impediment" is undeniably long and slow, its pace is very deliberate, its subject matter largely lacking the violence and totally lacking the sex that adds thrills to so much of our science fiction reading.  Williamson in his The Green Girl includes a long sequence in which a guy, all on his lonesome, out in a jungle, painstakingly takes months to devise a bomb from locally-sourced all-natural materials, but that story was also about a love affair and a war against monsters and zombies in which thousands of people were killed.  Clement here in "Impediment" spends page after page describing how telepathic aliens with no spoken language spend months trying to learn how to communicate with a human being and then try to persuade him to provide them the poison gas they need to kill other aliens; Clement's project is to dramatize not only the language barriers but also the cultural barriers that lie between alien societies, and "Impediment" consists essentially of people thinking and talking.

Skinny insectoid aliens land their star ship in Alaska and find Earth's gravity, four times the gravity back home, causes them terrible health issues.  But they can't just leave--they have landed in search of what they consider essential supplies, and their communications officer is given the task of negotiating with the only human within miles, a 20-year-old academic, to get the supplies.  As the story progresses we gradually learn that these moth-people have a totally selfish society lacking in empathy and sympathy in which the polities are like a bunch of squabbling feudal barons.  The captain of the ship has mutinied against his monarch and taken up a career as a renegade pirate, so every hand in the galaxy is turned against them; we are led to believe this is a normal situation in the bug people's civilization, that their race has no moral qualms over murdering people for money and does not hold loyalty in very high regard.  This revelation is the dramatic, literary component of the story--at first the human is eager to help the aliens, who seem friendly, but when he realizes they are murderous pirates he struggles with the question of whether it would be just to offer them aid.

The sciency component of "Impediment" is the long descriptions of how the alien communications expert figures out how to communicate with the human.  This all seems totally legit, Clement apparently having thought long and hard about such a challenge and how one might try to solve it.  Clement also puts effort into developing--successfully--a believable alien society and individual and class relations within it, giving his two lead aliens personalities that determine their behavior.

The twist ending is that, unlike the insect people whose brains all run along the same channels, every human's brain is unique, like our fingerprints, and so the months the aliens have spent learning to communicate with one guy provide almost no help in communicating with another.  That 20-something student does not have the knowledge to identify the poison they need, and because the active duty list is rapidly being reduced by casualties from exposure to Earth's gravity, the moth men will have to leave the Earth before they can learn to talk to anybody who can provide them the poison.  No humans will be complicit in the space pirates' crimes.  

"Impediment" is a story that is easy to admire and respect, the author having achieved his ambitious goals, but it lacks gusto or real excitement and doesn't really engage the reader's emotions.  Mild recommendation. 

"Technical Error" (1944)   

"Technical Error" is the cover story of the January '44 ish of Astounding.  This issue also includes A. E. van Vogt's "Far Centaurus," which I have read multiple times and wrote about in 2016, a rare Frank Belknap Long story, "Alias the Living," which I read in 2022, and P. Schuyler Miller's "As Never Was," which I read in 2018.  There's also a story by Clifford Simak, "Ogre," which maybe I should read soon.

"Technical Error" is all about technology, with Clement coming up with ideas about alternative ways to lock doors and seal pieces of machinery together and then depicting men unfamiliar with these novel techniques trying to figure them out in order to preserve their lives in a race against time.  This story has more tension and is a little quicker paced than "Impediment," but "Impediment" has personalities and depicts relationships which are important to the plot while "Technical Error"'s human elements are pretty mechanical--each of the characters is much like the others and their relationships have no bearing on the story.

A space crew's ship makes an emergency landing on an asteroid of our solar system and bails out to watch their ship melt from engine overheating.  They have only a few days of oxygen left.  Luckily, they find an abandoned ship, one that must have been made by aliens heretofore unknown to mankind, maybe many thousands of years ago.  The astronauts explore the ship and try to figure out if they can use it or its components to escape or signal for help.  Clement's focus is on the alien technology and the human spacemen's process of exploring the ship and manipulating doohickeys and we get detailed descriptions of guys walking down this corridor, opening that door, walking down a different corridor, opening another door, discussing how magnets might be used to distort metal to make a superior lock, etc.  We readers also are presented clues as to why the aliens abandoned the ship so long ago--Clement does not come out and say it, but it seems like the civilized alien space crew captured a monster, the monster severed its bonds and got out of its cell, the aliens welded shut the section of the ship the monster was in, but then it managed to escape out a rocket motor exhaust tube, in the process rendering the rocket unable to operate safely.  

Clement's story comes full circle, or you might say ends with a rhyme--the Terran spacemen cause the engine of this alien ship to overheat and they watch this ship melt.  Thankfully, another ship sees the bright light from the alien rocket firing and rescues our guys before they run out of O2.

"Technical Error" is a success, and being tighter than "Impediment" is probably more enjoyable on a page for page basis.  I personally enjoy stories in which people are in spacesuits exploring old wrecks, so this one struck more of a chord with me on a surface level than did "Impediment," though I recognize "Impediment," with its moral dilemmas and creation of an alien society, is more ambitious and perhaps more sophisticated.   

Both "Impediment" and "Technical Error" were reprinted in Volume 2 of The Essential Hal Clement, Music of Many Spheres.

"Assumption Unjustified" (1946)

"Assumption Unjustified" first saw print in an issue of Astounding alongside the first of two installments of van Vogt's serial "The Chronicler," another production of the Canadian mad man which I have read multiple times and recall with fondness.  Groff Conklin in 1953 reprinted "Assumption Unjustified" in Crossroads in Time, which reappeared in Spanish in 1968.

Thrykar the chemist and Tes the musician are a married couple on their honeymoon.  Members of a race of dark serpentine creatures with many little legs, long thin tentacles, big fins and big eyes (take a gander at Thrykar on the cover of The Best of Hal Clement) they have landed their space ship on Earth for a "refreshing."  We observe as Thrykar sneaks around the woods and a quarry near a small town, investigating the possibility of hiding their space ship in a pit that has fallen out of use.

It is a little while before Clement reveals to us what this "refreshing" is all about, and when he does we realize that, as in his "A Question of Guilt," published decades later, is a vampire story, one of those SF stories that seeks to provide a rational explanation for some bit of mythology or folklore.  (C. L. Moore's "Shambleu" did this for Medusa the Gorgon, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End did this for the Devil, Star Trek did this for the Greek gods, etc.)  A bunch of schoolboys take a swim in one of the flooded quarry pits and after the rest have left there is a lone straggler and Thrykar knocks the kid out with an elaborate sleep gas gun, the operation of which Clement describes in some detail, the way he describes every person's every move in each and every one of today's three stories.  Thrykar then uses a hypodermic needle to steal ten cubic centimeters of blood from the child.  A few minutes later, the boy wakes up, none the worse for wear, and Thrykar and Tes are in their hidden space ship in the lab and we get the expository dialogue that explains why these serpents from the stars are stealing some human kid's blood.  It seems T and T's snake people figured out a way to supercharge their white blood cells so they will never get ill and enjoy something close to immortality, but this has a dangerous side effect that periodically has to be rectified by injections of blood from somebody with a different blood type.  Tes has the same blood type as Thrykar so he can't just use her blood.  (Doh!)  It is implied that these serpent people have been stopping on Earth to steal blood for decades or centuries when en route to some other star system and these aliens are the source of the vampire legend.

(Fiction is replete with explanations and justifications, sometimes elaborate like this one, that allow  characters to do the sorts of things we all want to do but we all know we aren't supposed to do, like killing people, blowing stuff up, stealing, cheating on our spouses, insulting people right to their faces, etc.)

Thrykar steals blood from a second boy the next day, but for various reasons this kid doesn't just get back up and walk off, so the kindly snake people take the human kid to their space ship to try to help him.  But they can't, so they return him to the town, where Thrykar is briefly spotted, leading the person who spotted him to think vampires are on the loose.

The sense of wonder ending of "Assumption Unjustified" is that Thrykar decides that the Earth is now advanced enough to join galactic society and he will advise the authorities to end the policy of hiding the existence of galactic civilization from humans--soon the human race will be in contact with a dizzying array of intelligent alien life forms.

In some ways, "Assumption Unjustified" is better than "Impediment" and "Technical Error"--Thrykar and Tes, and the human boys, are more likable and fun than the space pirates and college kid of "Impediment" and the flat personality-deprived astronauts in "Technical Error"--but the 1948 story's plot and science ideas are less dramatic and compelling.  The ending of "Assumption Unjustified" disappointed me--I thought the aliens were going to donate blood to the human kid and the kid was going to become super strong, or the kid was going to be taken aboard to see the galaxy or something cool like that.  I don't find the standard SF gag in which myths and legends are explained as garbled accounts of encounters with aliens very engaging.  And the story seemed uneconomical--we have to hear all this rigamarole about bringing the second victim to the space ship and examining him, and then they just take him back out of the space ship?  As for the science, the reason the aliens have to steal blood felt more contrived and less plausible than the science in the earlier two stories.

"Assumption Unjustified" is not a bad story, and for like half or two-thirds of its length I liked it more than "Impediment" and maybe even "Technical Error," but the ending puts it into third place.  We'll call "Assumption Unjustified" high on the acceptable spectrum, on the border line of mildly recommendable.  

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These are stories full of science that, besides promoting technology and the scientific method, dramatize efforts of educated and intelligent people to understand alien races while under time pressure. I like them, but I can't say I love them. Certainly worth my time, though.

More stories from 1940s issues of Astounding in our next episode.