Donald Wandrei: "The Destroying Horde," "Infinity Zero," and "Black Fog"

Let's sample the wares of Donald Wandrei, brother of Howard and co-founder of Arkham House, presented to the public in three different magazines in the period 1935-7.

"The Destroying Horde" (1935)

It is a beautiful spring day and police officer Bert Williams is patrolling a university "situated near the geographical center of two adjacent cities" and past which flows the Mississippi (remember that the Wandreis are from St. Paul, Minnesota.)  He hears a terrible scream, and sees a spheroid blob monster "the size of a bushel basket" roll out of the animal biology building!  The bullets from Bert's service pistol have no effect on the creature, and it attacks a young woman, absorbing her flesh and leaving behind only her white skeleton!  As if that wasn't bad enough, after eating the co-ed, the monster splits into two monsters that roll off to cause further death and destruction!

We get fight scenes between the cops and the rapidly multiplying monsters--the boys in blue suffer many casualties, but enjoy some success by ripping the blobs into tiny pieces with submachine guns and grenades.  (I don't think Wandrei describes the use of grenades very realistically--the cops don't take cover when throwing them and the blast radius of their explosions only seems to be a few yards.)  Eventually Williams heads to the hospital to get the inside scoop on these monsters from the man who created them, the chairman of the animal biology department whose lower legs were eaten off by the first monster and who has--just barely--survived the amputation of the rest of his lower limbs.

As he lies there in his hospital bed, the scientist gives Williams a lecture about protoplasm and cosmic rays and so forth, and describes how he manufactured a one-celled "ameba" of tremendous size and then it got away from him.  He calculates how fast the amoebas multiply and tells Bert how long until the blobs take over the world, unless they are stopped.  This brainiac also knows the secret of how to stop the amoebas, but right before he can divulge it to Williams he faints from pain and exhaustion and a nurse tranquilizes him!  Two hours later he dies, but not before achieving just enough consciousness to utter his last words--fire can kill the amoebas!  Did it really require a Ph.D. to figure this out?  Fire kills everything!

Williams spreads the word, and for two days the Twin Cities are the site of ferocious warfare between man and blob, but in the end all our unwelcome single-celled neighbors have been blown up or burned up.

"The Destroying Horde" is a somewhat childish mad scientist story consisting of descriptions of ghastly injuries and horrible death capped off with a science lecture, but it is still fun.   

After debuting in Weird Tales, the tale of Bert vs the blobs was reprinted in 1965 in Strange Harvest and in 1995 in Don't Dream.  

"Infinity Zero" (1936)

"Infinity Zero" was first published in Astounding, and would reappear in Strange Harvest as well as August Derleth's 1951 anthology Far Boundaries and the 1989 collection Colossus.

"Infinity Zero" envisages a future world at war, a British-American-Soviet alliance and a German-Italian-Japanese alliance bombing the hell out of each other's cities with robot planes and long range rockets.  Conway the newspaper photog is in New Jersey (greatest state in the Union!), looking across the river at the towers of Manhattan as our story begins.  His editor sends him out to get pictures and write a story about a huge chemical lab thirty miles inland that is on fire after being hit by a bomb.

Four days later the editor sends Conway back to the site of the lab after receiving strange reports of what is going on there.  Conway finds a hole a mile across and half a mile deep, and above it, up in the sky, is a giant thing that looks kind of like a flame and kind of like a rotating inverted cone.  The pit or crater is mathematically perfect, its edges perfectly round and smooth, and it is expanding, the rock and dirt vanishing as it grows!

Conway returns to HQ to write another story, then joins two scientists, a physicist and a mathematician, on a third visit to the site.  After taking some measurements and unleashing some hard data on us readers, the physicist proceeds to get too close to the hole and get himself killed when its expansion reaches his head, making his crown disappear.  The dead body collapses and is soon swallowed by the advancing sphere of nothingness.  Then the mathematician delivers to Conway (and us readers) a lecture on some scientific controversies: is the universe infinite or finite?  is it expanding or static?  should we think of time as a fourth dimension or as a separate attribute of matter?  The math man concludes that another universe, a realm of space without matter that he calls ultraspace, was created by the explosion at the chemical lab.  He theorizes that since the huge lab had samples of every element in our universe it was like a mini-version of the universe, and its destruction by the bomb started a chain reaction that is causing our entire universe to cease to exist--every atom of matter will eventually vanish and be replaced by nothingness.  This sounds so incredible that it is possible that I misunderstood what Wandrei was getting at here.  The mathematician calculates the speed at which the sphere of nothingness is expanding, and tells everybody that in just a few weeks the entire Earth and all evidence of the human race will be eliminated--eventually the entire universe will cease to exist.     

"Infinity Zero" is an anti-war story--the material directly about the war focuses on its hopelessness and the horror of civilians getting blown to bits instead of on glory or the wonders of technology or the bravery of soldiers or the evil of foreign dictators; this is a story to keep in mind if you hear somebody saying SF before such and such a date or prior to the scribblings of this or that movement was all about glorifying imperialism or romanticizing power or something--SF has always been a diverse field in which a variety of viewpoints is expressed. 

"Infinity Zero" is also a story about a scientific theory.  While the anti-war stuff has an emotional salience, the science lecture and theory are boring and the incident that connects the war with the theory doesn't hold much water and isn't securely connected to the anti-war theme, making for a contrived and disjointed story that feels like two different stories just jammed together.  I think I have to give "Infinity Zero" a marginal thumbs down. 

"Black Fog" (1937)

Here we have our third story of world-threatening disaster and science lectures from Donald Wandrei.  But where "The Destroying Horde" was the heroic story of a cop and the tragic story of a scientist, and "Infinty Zero" was the story of how mankind's hubris and bellicosity destroyed the universe (with some human characters tossed in to serve as witnesses to the cataclysm), "Black Fog" has no characters and dispenses altogether with human agency--it is like a history article in a popular magazine that rigorously eschews the "great man theory of history" and describes a series of random misfortunes for which humankind bears no responsibility and to which it has no viable response.  (All we are is dust in the wind!)

In the future--May of 1960--the solar system passes through some cloud of gas or something from another dimension or universe or wherever; this stuff absorbs all light, so for eleven minutes there is no light on Earth, we all live in total darkness (only light is absorbed, not heat, so we don't all freeze to death.)  The long term effect of passing through this cloud or whatever is that almost all life forms more advanced than an "ameba" or a fungus are rendered sterile.  No more babies are conceived, so after nine or ten months no more people are born.  Animals with short life spans, like some rodents and bugs, quickly go extinct.  Fruits and vegetables don't reproduce either, and a food shortage leads to mass starvation in poor countries that don't have big stockpiles.  

Wandrei includes one joke in his story, the kind of joke that would ruin his career if he wrote it today and which even worse doesn't make any sense.  The last live human birth is a pair of twins in Senegal.  The narrator tells us that they became world famous and received huge monetary gifts and the best of medical care.  The first beat of the joke is the irony that they received so much love and attention from the world, because they were "ugly little creatures."  The second beat of the joke, and the part of the joke that makes no sense, is that their mother "went off one afternoon upon an errand of her own and for reasons she didn't divulge," and while the twins were alone they were devoured by army ants.  Wait, I thought these world-famous twins were receiving the best of medical care--how did they get left alone outside where ants could get them?  

Anyway, human life descends into total chaos as the population ages and diminishes, the economy collapses, people with no hope for the future have orgies and commit crimes, etc.  In 2020 an alien space ship crashes on Earth--its crew is dead, but they have brought seeds and scientists plant them and Earth is soon covered in weird, but edible, alien plants.  (One of these plants, we are told, is a white aromatic tuber "which exceeded the size of a bushel basket."  I guess "bushel basket" was a standard unit of measure in the Wandrei household.)  So the last humans won't starve, but die of old age.

In the final paragraphs of the story we learn that in remote areas of the world strange hybrids that have somehow escaped sterilization are developing intelligence; there are "panther-apes" taking over Africa who can swim and use tools and are even developing speech, while in South America there are creatures that look much like the god Pan from Greek mythology who are similarly developing language.  Perhaps these creatures will build a civilization as did soon-to-be-extinct mankind before them. 

We sometimes hear people complain that a lot of science fiction stories are just westerns with space ships and ray guns instead of horses and revolvers.  Science fiction should be about science, should be about new ideas, should impart a sense of wonder!  Well, Wandrei here certainly delivers the science lectures and the cosmic-scale speculations on what amazing stuff might lie in the future, without offering readers any of the fun characters or cheap thrills you might expect from a space opera or planetary romance.  I'm struggling over whether to pass a negative judgement on "Black Fog" because of all the problems it has and because it lacks ordinary literary and entertainment value, or to judge it acceptable because it is so "out there" that if actually is sort of interesting and diverting.  Maybe the fact that it doesn't waste your time by introducing you to characters who end up doing nothing (like the journalists and scientists in "Infinity Zero") is a virtue?

"Black Fog" would be reprinted in Arkham House's Wandrei collection The Eye and the Finger in 1944, as well as 1989's Colossus. 

**********

Three stories about the end of the world written and published many years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with a very different attitude towards human agency: in "The Destroying Horde" human meddling with the natural world unleashes the threat, but mankind figures out how to quell it; in "Infinity Zero" our warlike nature and drive to master the natural world are to blame for destroying the entire universe and we have no way to undo the trouble we have caused; and in "Black Fog" the human race is at the mercy of immutable forces over which we have no influence.   

More Wandrei and more 1930s speculative fiction await us in the future, here at this very blog.  In the meantime, you can check out these links for more MPorcius Fiction Log Donald Wandrei content:

 "The Tree-Men of M'bwa," "The Lives of Alfred Kramer," and "Spawn of the Sea"   

"The Painted Mirror"

"Raiders of the Universes," "The Fire Vampires" and "Colossus"

"Something From Above"

"The Red Brain"