Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore: "Deadlock," "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," and "Endowment Policy"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading stories from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding.  We had three stories by Hal Clement, then three stories by Clifford D. Simak, then five stories by divers hands selected by Groff Conklin.  Today let's read three stories by married couple writing team Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore that debuted in issues of Astounding alongside the very stories we've been talking about.  I'll be reading all three in scans of the original World War II era magazines in which they debuted under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett.

"Deadlock" (1942)

This is a jokey story about what we today would call "A.I." with a surprise ending that, I suppose, a reader just might be able to predict.  Kuttner and Moore include a bunch of learned references (to Oscar Wilde--"Reading Gaol," the Old Testament--"Balaam's ass," and Max Planck) but these are just window dressing and have nothing to do with the actual plot.

It is the future of megacorporations that are as powerful or more powerful than governments.  Our main characters work at one of the corps, in a big complex which integrates both the factory floor and the skyscraper where the execs have their offices and which is defended by anti-aircraft weapons and attack helicopters--the other corps are not above sending bombers on missions over the protagonists' corporation.  The corp at the center of the story is in the early phases of developing robots, and still has a monopoly on them.  In this story robots are humanoid machines that are intelligent--they not only understand English but make independent decisions--that you operate by giving them a problem to solve.  The recent and current model robots are made of a practically indestructible alloy which no known weapon can penetrate; this is because the earliest models were all sabotaged by rival corps.  The indestructible nature of the current robots has proved a problem because all of them go insane after a few weeks or months and have to be disposed of by interring them in concrete.

The plot of "Deadlock" is set in motion by the latest robot to come on line, a robot which has gone the longest yet without going insane and has solved plenty of problems for the company.  The robot starts doing what looks like independent research, looking in file cabinets, collecting materials, busying itself in the lab.  There is an explosion, and when our protagonists rush to the site of the blast they find the robot has actually been destroyed!  Hovering over the wreckage is a "gadget"--Kuttner and Moore are very clear this thing does not count as a robot.

The gadget flies all over the factory and the office building, apparently at random, performing all sorts of incredible feats--temporarily making people's skin turn purple or disappear and reappear, nullifying the effect of gravity on objects so they float around, turning the milk in the commissary sour, etc.  This gadget has tremendous power--it can bore through steel and manipulate items on the molecular level and so forth--but it doesn't actually seriously harm any humans.  The protagonists run around, witnessing these astonishing behaviors or their results (which I guess are supposed to be funny to us readers.)  The protagonists come to realize the last robot must have created this superpowerful gadget to solve some problem, but what problem?  They figure a human brain can't follow the super logic of a robot brain, so they bring another robot of the same model on line and ask it to solve the problem of figuring out what the gadget was built for.  Eventually this robot is also destroyed, and we learn that all the robots made of the impenetrable alloy, on their own initiative, tried to figure out the solution to the problem of destroying their indestructible selves.  The robots now sealed in concrete went insane because they couldn't find a solution.  The latest robots were advanced enough to come up with a solution, the gadget.  The protagonists destroy the gadget and face the dismaying truth that it makes no sense to build more robots because they will also be suicidal.

I'm calling this one merely acceptable.  "Deadlock" feels like a bunch of bizarre events just strung together, not convincingly leading one to to another, like Kuttner and Moore came up with material they thought was funny but got the story printed before they had come up with good ways to integrate their gags into a sensical, logical plot in which gag A believably caused the appearance of gag B.  The robots don't just solve the problems posed to them, but are so eager to solve problems that they come up with problems to solve on their own?  The robots don't have any sense of self preservation?  Why does the gadget, after destroying the robot that created it, travel around the complex messing with everything?  Is it also insane?  Why?  And if it is insane, why is the gadget so careful to not kill anybody as it bores holes through walls and floors and alters the atomic structure of people and everything else?  "Deadlock" doesn't really hold together, but it is not boring or annoying, so I am not going to go so far as to say it is bad.

In 1953, "Deadlock" reappeared in the Kuttner collection Ahead of Time.  In the same year, Martin Greenberg, a different man from the anthologist Martin H. Greenberg who gets mentioned in so many of my blogposts, included "Deadlock" in his anthology The Robot and the Man.

I believe I have blogged about two stories that were reprinted in 
The Robot and the Man, Lester del Rey's "Though Dreamers Die" and
Robert Moore Williams' "Robot's Return"

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left" (1943) 

Here we have a story based on some psychological phenomena with which we are all familiar.  The way a tune or phrase can get stuck in the mind and become distracting or annoying.  (This is a fact of which I am reminded every time I am in a store, restaurant or office.)  And the way trying to avoid thinking about something or saying something, or being forbidden to think or say something, makes you more likely to think about it or say it.  (Nothing is more likely to make me laugh than being told by my mother or my wife, "If you laugh at me again I'll....")

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left" takes place during the Second World War, after the launching of Operation Barbarossa.  An American semanticist wishes he could join the war effort but is not medically fit to do so.  His teenage son is always singing some nonsense phrase, and it distracts the college professor from grading papers.  This gives him an idea.  Prof and his star pupil, who knows German and has an uncle who is a senator, compose a catchy jingle in German made up of phrases that are not quite nonsense, but pregnant with meaning and inviting interpretation.  They manage to get the jingle broadcast allover Europe, and, as a result, the entire German population gets the jingle stuck in their heads.  The rhythm, and an obsessive need to extrapolate the significance of the words (among which is the phrase that is the title of the story), distracts individual Germans so severely that it cripples the German war effort.  Men searching a Polish village for weapons fail to find heavy machine guns that are later used by partisans in a deadly ambush of German soldiers.  Luftwaffe crew are so distracted by the song that they are easy prey for RAF Hurricanes.  A German anti-aircraft gunner is so busy singing the song he lets British bombers pass overhead unmolested.  A German scientist working on secret weapons is so distracted he damages expensive lab equipment.  And on and on--Kuttner and Moore offer many examples.  The final example is Adolf Hitler himself flubbing a major speech.

This story is OK.  It is too long, lacks suspense and character, and is really just a bunch of related episodes rather than a narrative with a climax.  Of course, Astounding readers in 1943 probably relished hearing about Nazis getting humiliated by Yankee ingenuity and getting killed by Polish guerillas and British pilots and perhaps found the psychological bits interesting.  "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," as a piece of fiction written and published during the war that portrays Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels as characters, and refers to the RAF, the Luftwaffe, Josef Stalin, and the German invasion of Eastern Europe, is perhaps more valuable to cultural historians curious about the attitudes of ordinary Americans during World War II than to regular readers looking for entertainment.

"Nothing But Gingerbread Left," after its debut in Astounding, has reappeared in a bunch of Kuttner and Moore collections, but has not, it seems, ever been anthologized.

"Endowment Policy" (1943)

Of today's three stories, this one is the best plotted and the most serious, or at least the one I can take the most seriously, and also the most exciting and the one that actually has interesting human characters whose personalities drive the plot.  Thumbs up for "Endowment Policy!"  

Our protagonist is an uneducated and somewhat irresponsible young man in New York in 1943.  His latest job is as a taxi driver, and he doesn't take his job too seriously.  What this guy is really interested in is booze.

An old man with a strange accent offers to pay the taxi driver a thousand bucks to do him a big favor.  We readers pick up on clues that indicate this wrinkled old dude is a time traveler from the future!  We get detective fiction type chase and action scenes as the taxi driver helps this old geezer escape from those pursuing him, and then finally attempt a desperate raid on a Brooklyn house, home of a scientist.  This scientist, the old geez from the future and the time travelers hot on his trail know, is about to discover a superior--a revolutionary!--power source.  The Brooklyn brainiac is going to write down the formula for the power source, and moments later be killed in an accidental explosion resulting from his own error; his notes will be destroyed in the ensuing fire.  The old geez wants the taxi driver to save the notes, while old geez's pursuers want to make sure the notes are destroyed.  In the end, after fights that feature the time travelers' paralyzer guns and the brass knuckles which the taxi driver brings to the party, the old geez and taxi driver fail and the notes goes up in smoke.

In the denouement of "Endowment Policy" we get a little lecture on the old alternative-time-lines-that-branch-forth-from-critical-moments bit we see in so much SF.  The night of the Brooklyn explosion is just one such key moment when a new time line can be created--if the taxi driver had saved the notes he would have used them to become the evil dictator of the Earth.  The old geez was bored with his humdrum life at a routine job in 2016 and stole a time machine and went back in time to shift history to the cabbie-becomes-dictator timeline to spice his own life up.  The authorities of 2016 convict him of these crimes, and the old geez demands the death penalty.  But the future people sentence him to live out his boring career to its natural conclusion.  The ironic ending of the story is that the old geezer's desperate effort to liberate himself from boring work has instead liberated the 1943 taxi driver, a guy who hates boring routine work just like the time machine hijacker, by providing the man the thousand dollars the old geez stole from a museum.  Maybe we readers are supposed to wonder if putting so much moolah in the hands of an unscrupulous slacker is going to lead to a third, heretofore, unsuspected time line, or if the guy is just going to waste the money and end up where he started (as do so many irresponsible people who enjoy a sudden windfall.)

Besides various Kuttner and Moore collections, "Endowment Policy" has been reprinted in Groff Conklin's Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension.

**********

In my opinion, "Endowment Policy" is the most successful of today's selections by far, but, to be fair, all three stories have different objectives, and we might consider that all three achieve their goals.  "Endowment Policy" is a traditional adventure/crime story that seeks to entertain the reader with violence and suspense and characters whose goals are determined by their personalities and whose behavior is determined by these goals and the obstacles placed before them.  "Deadlock" is a joke story in which personality and a sensible plot take a back seat--the characters and events exist to set up opportunities for jokes.  In "Nothing But Gingerbread Left," character and plot are again subordinated, this time to exploring a psychological theory and to satisfying readers' desire to see their enemies in the current war diminished.  "Nothing But Gingerbread Left" is the most science-fictiony of the stories, its science speculations actually driving the plot, though "Deadlock" and "Endowment Policy" speculate on what the future will be like and use standard science fiction devices--robots in one, time travel and the idea of branching timelines in the other--as a foundation for jokes in the one case and car chases and fights in the case of the other.

More 1940s SF magazine stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!