Donald Wandrei: "The Man Who Never Lived," "The Atom Smasher," and "The Blinding Shadows"

In our last blog post we read 1930s stories by Donald Wandrei about a hitman, a counterfeiter, and a robber who has a monkey as an accomplice.  Let's spend some more quality time with Donald, but switch to stories from 1934 issues of Astounding featuring college professors and scientists who risk their lives trying to expand man's knowledge of and power over the universe.  (Place your bets now on how many of these brainiacs are going to survive their explorations into the unknown.) 

"The Man Who Never Lived"

The March 1934 issue of Astounding has already fallen under our steely gaze; no doubt you recall our experience of Jack Williamson's story "Born of the Sun," in which we learned that the Earth was a giant egg and it was about to hatch and kill us all!  Let's see if Wandrei's tale from the issue is equally apocalyptic.

At the center of "The Man Who Never Lived" is the relationship between two college professors--try to contain your excitement!  Our narrator, a young academic, has made friends with an older faculty member, a philosopher also expert in math and physics, a man of undisclosed origin who looks like a prophet or mystic, with long hair and gnarled hands.  This dude has a theory that "all matter and life can be understood in the conception of one mind of which the universe and all its works, past, present and future, are only parts."  Today he tells the narrator that he has figured out after many years of study how to cast his mortal mind from his body and get in touch with this universal mind and know the entire universe--he will be able to predict the future!  

He asks the narrator to join him in his house and take notes of what he says while his mind is out there exploring the cosmos.  The older scholar lays on a "pallet" the narrator says is like "an altar," next to which is "an Easter Island sculpture" and sort of goes into a trance.  He decides to explore the past before he explores the future, but he finds that, once he has headed back in time, he cannot reverse course, but must keep traveling back in time until he has reached the very beginning of the universe.  Most of the story consists of the short declaratory sentences uttered by this mystic as he witnesses wars and then cavemen and then dinosaurs and then the moon leaving the Earth and then the planets leaving the sun, all in reverse.  When he gets to the beginning of time, before matter has coalesced, his body fades out of existence.

This is a silly filler story, mostly a catalog of historical, geological, and astronomical events presented in reverse.  Gotta give this one a marginal thumbs down for being a waste of time.  If you've got some time to spare, you can find "The Man Who Never Lived" in the 1965 Wandrei collection Strange Harvest and the 1997 collection Don't Dream.  

"The Atom Smasher"  

Here's another selection included in Strange Harvest, and what I would consider another filler story, though at least it is not silly.  "The Atom Smasher" is surprisingly similar to the Donald Wandrei story in the April 1935 issue of Astounding, "Life Current," though not as good as that later treatment of the scientist-slain-by-his-own-creation theme.

Our narrator is attending the demonstration of a machine that can achieve the "wireless transmission of matter."  The scientist who built the machine explains how it operates, neutron bombardments and electro-magnetic fields and all that.  It sounds like the transmitter disassembles the particles of the object to be transmitted, but the receiver does not reassemble them with exact fidelity to the way they were, but instead just sort of pours them into a sort of mold or template made of electro-magnetic fields.  The object to be transmitted for the demonstration is a large hunk of cork--the scientist points out all the little indentations in the surface of the piece of cork, and says that, when the cork is reassembled at the receiver thirty feet away, it will be perfectly smooth, perfectly symmetrical, because the particles will be packed into and formed in the shape of the electro-magnetic field at the receiving end. 

The demonstration begins, and the inventor trips and falls inside the transmitter.  He vanishes, and in the receiver appears a dark oozing pudding.

"Life Current" is a major improvement on this story because it included human emotion and psychology--the scientist who got killed died because he made bad decisions, and the story also depicted his relationship with his wife.  The scientist in "The Atom Smasher" gets killed because of bad luck, and the people who see him die have no emotional ties to him, making it far less compelling.  "The Atom Smasher" is well written and the science explanations of how the teleporter works are interesting, though, so I'm calling this one acceptable filler.

"The Atom Smasher," less than two pages long here in Astounding, would appear alongside "Life Current" in both Strange Harvest and 1989's Wandrei collection Colossus.

"The Blinding Shadows" 

This Astounding cover story is one of those SF stories that is like an excerpt from a history book written in the future.  That future is the year 1980, and the excerpt from the book describes a disaster that occurred in 1970, and also serves as a biography of a genius, G. M. Dowdson, a man who "was professor of mathematics, and also held degrees qualifying him as a doctor of optics and of philosophy."  "The Blinding Shadows" is also one of those SF stories in which the author tells you what the disaster is up front (in this case, New York City is inaccessible and surrounded by a government-built and guarded wall) and then explains how the disaster occurred. 

The world depicted in this story has seen a lot of trouble.  Between 1955 and 1958 raged a second World War, in which the British-American-Soviet alliance defeated the Asia-Africa alliance thanks to 30-something scientist Dowdson's development of a means of surveilling any spot in the world, giving the Anglo-Commie forces the ability to see everything going on behind enemy lines.  After the war, we are told, the scientists are rulers of the world.  Good grief!

In 1969 Dowdson presented a paper theorizing that coexistent with our universe another, one in which there are four dimensions, a universe we cannot see.  He cites the idea that matter is not solid, but consists of particles with large spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars of the galaxy--couldn't a piece of matter in another universe (Object X) occupy the same space as a piece of matter in this universe (Object Y) if its particles slid into the spaces between the particles that make up Object Y?  Dowdson also suggests that since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, maybe a four-dimensional object casts a three-dimensional shadow, and maybe if he can craft the appropriate lens or mirror, he can figure out a way to see these shadows cast by objects in that, to us, invisible universe.

Dowdson spends the rest of 1969 travelling the world, making astronomical observations and studying the inscriptions at ancient ruins.  Then in 1970 he and a colleague (the colleague's memoir is an extensively quoted primary source for the excerpt), in a secret lab in an Upper Manhattan industrial district, after many false starts, build a mirror out of hundreds of little prisms cut from the newly discovered 95th element, rhillium.  When an electric current is passed through a piece of rhillium 50% of the energy mysteriously disappears, and we readers of course assume it is being sent to that other universe of four dimensions Dowdson is always talking about.  When the scientists pass 500,000 volts through the rhillium mirror geometric and abstract shapes that glow more brightly than the sun appear in the lab; they hang still in the air; some hanging half in and half out of furniture or apparatus.  The scientists can walk through the glowing shadows without effect.

After some hours, however, the glowing forms, presumably the 3D shadows of 4D inhabitants of another universe, begin moving, pouncing on people and absorbing them, including Dowdson.  The monsters are totally unstoppable, and more and more appear until there are hundreds, and, before the Big Apple can be evacuated, tens of thousands of New Yorkers are seized and, one assumes, spirited off to another universe to suffer some mind-bogglingly horrific fate.  For whatever reason, the aliens cannot travel beyond a certain distance from the mirror, about ten miles, so humanity endures, but is life worth living if you are forever barred from Earth's greatest city by the blinding shadows that haunt it?

This is a fun story, Wandrei handling the outré science concepts and the horror elements deftly.  Thumbs up!  "The Blinding Shadows" has reappeared in Wandrei collections and anthologies edited by August Derleth.

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If you bet that the mad scientists would go zero for three today you are the winner.  "The Blinding Shadows" is the other winner today, at least by my lights--I own a copy of the paperback edition of Beachheads in Space, and a previous owner recorded ratings on the contents page, and I don't think he (or she) appreciated it.