Lester del Rey: "Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," "My Name is Legion"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a scan of Early del Rey, a 1975 collection of del Rey stories and autobiographical material about del Rey's career in SF and relationships with other SF figures.  We've already read the first eight stories in the book (see my blog posts here, here and here) and today we grapple with three more tales by del Rey, all three printed by John W. Campbell in his iconic magazines in the early 1940s.

"Carillon of Skulls" (with James Beard) (1941)

According to del Rey, Beard came up with the plot outline for this piece, and then del Rey actually wrote it, revising it under the supervision of Campbell, who sent him comments about each iteration until Campbell thought it good enough to print in Unknown, where it appeared under the pseudonym "Philip James."  "Carillon of Skulls" would reappear in 1960 in an anthology edited by TV horror host Zacherly, and is illustrated on the cover of the first volume of the paperback version of Early del Rey.

"Carillon of Skulls" is a would-be tragic story of the supernatural, at times dream-like, told in such a way that everything is mysterious and even confusing in the beginning, but everything is cleared up by the end.

Lefferts Park, decades ago, was a center of entertainment for the city, with a skating rink and a theater, the Apollo, staging vaudeville shows.  But for years the park has been a tangle, the Apollo a ruin, the haunt of homeless bums.  The last few weeks the police (all Irishmen in this story, aye beggorah) have been finding headless bodies in the park.

Our main character is a young woman whose memory is totally messed up--she is hanging around the park, knowing she is following commands, but not sure whose commands they might be nor what the commands are.  An old woman, Madame Olga, approaches her and gives her some items.  To make a long story short, I'll tell you that our heroine is in thrall to some monstrous clown guy, a ghost or demon, who is using her to attract men into the ruins of the Apollo, where he beheads them and uses their skulls in place of bells on the percussion instrument of the title.  (The authors refer to the demonic clown creature as a "nis," something I never heard of before, and typing "nis" into search engines is not getting me anywhere, either.)  She lures these guys to their doom and then forgets she did it.  Tonight's intended victim is a journalist who has entered the park to investigate the murders, whom she finds sitting at a fire.  The reporter and the young woman fall in love, and this love strengthens our female lead to the point that, after a dream-like sequence in which the young couple thinks the Apollo is still in business and they attend a performance of the villain playing his sinister song on his evil instrument, she uses the stuff Olga gave her to kill the clown and save her beloved.  Alas, our heroine was born fifty years ago and the clown's curse has maintained her looks of twenty-five years ago; knowing a love affair with a man half her age is impossible (I guess she never heard of Emmanuel Macron) our heroine flees.

This story is OK...I guess I'm finding it a little too convoluted, vague and abstract.  We spend so much time trying to figure out what is going on and so little with the characters that we end up not caring who lives, who dies and whether the leads' love blossoms or fizzles; the love of the two characters isn't put over very convincingly, and the monster's motivations and personality are little examined.  The problem of motivation extends to every character; I felt that the police and the journalist don't act like such people do in real life--"Carillon of Skulls" would probably be more believable set in a fantasy land or in medieval or ancient times, where it would make more sense for the government to sort of ignore the murders and a lone hero to investigate them, instead of in a modern American city.

"Done Without Eagles" (1940)

Del Rey had two stories in the August 1940 issue of Astounding; we've already read one of them, "The Stars Looked Down," and here is the second, which appeared under the pen name Philip St. John.

Campbell apparently considered this story "a standard tearjerker" and it is a competent filler piece meant to pull the old heartstrings.  

It is the near future, when Man has a colony on Mars and there are regular flights between this big blue marble and the red planet, but there are still only a small number of ships and space crew.  Our narrator is co-pilot on the Kickapoo.  The Kickapoo is sort of a famous ship, as the most famous of all space pilots, Court Perry, captained her for years, achieving many firsts and accomplishing many feats.  In those days the ship had clear windows and not enough shielding against radiation--today Kickapoo has no windows and she is flown entirely by instruments.

Court, when he got old, started getting a little sloppy in his landings and was grounded.  For years he has been out of the public eye.  But today he is a passenger on the Kickapoo!  And he has brought his son Stan with him.  The radiation the elder Court was exposed to on his many space flights messed up his genes and so Stan is a mutant superman with four arms, six fingers per hand, psychic powers, and a knack for electronics and mechanisms.  In mere minutes Stan builds his own radio with which to communicate with Earth from the Kickapoo so his father can talk to people back home without going through the ship's official radio.  

Court and Stan insist on inspecting the ship and pointing out every little problem and the drawbacks of all the innovations and reforms instituted since Court was last in charge.  Then a disaster that Court predicted occurs, and Court has to take over the controls and guide the ship by feel, seeing as there are no windows and all the instruments are busted.  Near the end of the story we learn that Court is blind; Stan has been guiding him with his telepathy.  Also, Court has a bad heart and is not expected to live much longer--he wanted one last trip on the Kickapoo before going to Mars to live his final days.  Court safely lands the ship he devoted his life to, and immediately upon accomplishing this final spectacular feat of spacemanship his overstressed heart gives out.

Somewhat over the top, but acceptable.  "Done Without Eagles" has not been anthologized, bur has appeared in various del Rey collections.

"My Name is Legion" (1942)

Here in Early del Rey, between "Done Without Eagles" and "My Name is Legion," del Rey talks about his friendship with Campbell, how they would exchange long letters about their shared hobby of photography and when del Rey came to New York the two would sit around arguing about some topic in the news while assistant editor Catherine Tarrant listened appreciatively.  Campbell was a harsh critic, but del Rey accepted his criticism good-naturedly as constructive and del Rey credits Campbell with greatly improving his writing.

"My Name is Legion" is a time travel/mad scientist/vengeance on Hitler story.  It starts with a perhaps superfluous opening section in which we accompany British mechanized troops as they warily advance into the town of Bresseldorf, eyes peeled for an ambush.  The Allies have conquered Germany but haven't found Hitler yet, who is somewhere in hiding, and the British officers are following up rumors Hitler is in Bresseldorf.  They meet a scientist who has a corpse that looks like Hitler, but a Hitler who looks like he's in his seventies instead of in his fifties.  Then we flash back a few days to the main story.

The scientist, Meyers, contacts Hitler and brings the Fuhrer out of hiding with promises of a duplicating machine.  Del Rey unleashes a lot of mumbo jumbo on us about the machine and how it operates and the idiosyncratic rules of it that make del Rey's plot operable, both as Meyers describes it to Hitler and at the end.  Essentially, the machine reaches into the future, snatches the future version of the item under its focus, and brings it back to our time, so you end up with two of the thing, one older.  Meyers can set the machine to grab a duplicate from tomorrow, from the day after tomorrow, the day after that, etc., in the space of moments, and demonstrates by duplicating a coin repeatedly and thus generating a pile of coins in mere seconds.  Meyer's scheme--or so he tells Hitler--is to duplicate Hitler himself thousands of times by snatching tomorrow's Hitler, the next day's Hitler, etc., every day until Hitler's death twenty years hence.  This will create a Nazi legion that can form the nucleus of a new world-conquering Axis army.

Meyers explains to Hitler that if he has a certain thought in his mind when he is duplicated, this thought will be uppermost in the mind of the duplicates and even serve as a kind of compulsion.  So, to make sure the 7000 Hitlers about to appear will obey Hitler No. 1 and not all fight each other to start their own Reichs, Meyers tells Hitler to fill his mind with the thought that all orders from Hitler No. 1 and from Meyers must be obeyed and HN1 and M must not be harmed and, yeah, also, no speaking unless spoken to.

The 7000 closelipped and obedient Hitlers appear and Hitler sets in motion his plans to acquire tanks and tank crewmen to be duplicated from a secret depot he thinks the British will likely not have found yet.  But the next day it becomes clear that the British have already cleared up that depot, so no tanks are forthcoming.  And then Meyers reveals that he has tricked Hitler in order to wreak a terrible revenge!  You see, years ago, Meyers married a Jewish woman and they had two kids but all three were murdered by the Nazis and then Meyers himself was put in a concentration camp.  In the camp, in his mind, Meyers devised his time machine, and built it when he got out of the camp.

The oldest of the 7000 Hitlers goes insane, which allows him to escape the compulsion and threaten to kill Hitler No. 1.  Hitler No. 1 is faster on the draw than his older self and kills him--Meyers has set up a condition in which Hitler kills himself!  Then, 24 hours after the duplication process was initiated, all of the living Hitlers, including Hitler No. 1, vanish.  You see, the "duplicates" summoned by the machine are not really duplicates at all, but the same object from different times.  The 7000 Hitlers are all the same man.  Hitler is doomed to live another twenty years, every day disappearing and reappearing in the ranks of the legion of 7000, remembering his earlier days in Besseldorf and shooting his older self but unable to speak or do anything but obey his young self, until the last day of his life when he will go insane and inspire his young self to shoot him dead.  So, when the British arrive, the 7,000 Hitlers are not there, just the oldest Hitler who went insane and was shot by the original Hitler.

This story feels long, partly because of the British Army scene, partly because of the mumbo jumbo, partly because Hitler gives a speech to his legion of duplicates and del Rey prints it twice, first when Hitler delivers it and again when the first "duplicate," the youngest member of the legion, hears it.  Another issue is that I often find it hard to wrap my head around these time travel stories.  However,  del Rey's style is not bad, so it is not a chore reading the story, and after some reflection I think I "get" the time travel aspects.  So, I'm not loving "My Name is Legion," but it is certainly acceptable.

"My Name is Legion" would go on to be reprinted in 1978 in Fred Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the 40's and in 1990 in Frank McSherry's Fantastic World War II.

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These stories are just alright, no big deal.  "Carillon of Skulls" is the worst, being sort of confusing and vague while lacking challenging, crazy ideas and human feeling.  "Done Without Eagles" is straightforward and obvious, has some wild ideas and tries to present human relationships and human drama, so reading it is smooth sailing; its problem is that it goes overboard into childish comic book territory with its superman who has every conceivable power and its melodramatic climax.  "My Name is Legion" is another somewhat confusing read, and too long, but its time travel gimmick actually is internally consistent if you are clever enough to understand it right off or make an effort to grasp it like I did (with the exception of the whole compulsion bit, which is just a mechanism required by the plot.)  We might argue "Done Without Eagles" is the best because it is pure entertainment full of classic SF stuff like rockets and homo superior, or that "My Name is Legion" is the best because of its ambitious time travel mechanics.

More Lester del Rey and more World War II era fiction awaits us in future installments of MPorcius Fiction Log.