"Explorers into Infinity" by Ray Cummings

The April 1927 issue of Weird Tales has a cover which depicts an ogre about to grind an attractive young woman into paste with a tree.  Total evil!  This bit of devilry illustrates a serialized novella by Ray Cummings, and that work is the topic of our discussion today. 

We've read things by Mr. Cummings before, as well as Fred Pohl's choice words about the fellow.  An actual man of science who worked with Thomas Edison, Cummings penned space adventures and Edgar Rice Burroughs-type planetary romances but also some pretty terrible exploitation stories.  "Explorers into Infinity" and with its sequel "The Giant World" (also serialized in Weird Tales) were combined to form a hardcover science fiction novel in 1956 under the title Explorers into Infinity, so, despite the woman-in-peril cover of the magazine, I expect this novella won't be too exploitative.  I'm reading this caper at the internet archive, in the April, May and June issues of Weird Tales--you can join me by clicking the links in this sentence.

Cummings begins his tale with a preface, in which he suggests "Explorers into Infinity" is a companion to his "Girl in the Golden Atom;" that story was about "infinite smallness," this tale is about the opposite. 

It is the future of aircars, correspondence with Mars and a pneumatic tube system that serves as an international railway system, each passenger in his own individual little sleeper car.  Our narrator is Frank, a man of 25.  His friends the Gryces call him up and he goes to visit them in their mansion.  His closest pal is 28-year-old Brett Gryce, whose 80-year-old father is a wealthy inventor.  Dr. Gryce also has 17-year-old twins, beautiful blonde Francine and her brother Martynn.

Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on how size is relative, not absolute, how within the tiny atomic particles of our universe there are no doubt an infinite number of itty bitty universes, and how our universe is doubtlessly a teeny tiny component of astoundingly larger universes.  Everybody eats breakfast, Frank ogles Frannie, and then comes a lecture on the relationships of Space, Time, Motion and Matter.  Finally we get down to practical matters.  Dr. Gryce a few years ago developed a device, the myrdoscope, that can generate images from myrdal rays, rays that come from the other, larger, universes, rays that move much faster than light, so you can see what is going on a million light years away right now.  Working with the myrdoscope one day, Brett tuned in to a forested world in which an impossibly beautiful brunette is menaced by a huge man with an uprooted tree--like on the cover of the magazine!  It was, apparently, a still image, not one in motion.  A year later, when the Earth is in a similar position vis a vis the sun, he discovered a similar image--the giant's tree is a little closer to the gorgeous woman!  These are motion pictures he is seeing, but each year here on Earth is a fraction of a second up in the larger universe, so to him everything looks static.  So, the Gryces have done the obvious thing and invented a vehicle that, besides flying through space faster than light, can change its size and its time vibration and enter other larger universes, so they can rescue this brunette, with whom Brett has fallen in love.  TheGryces have four models left after constructing six and conducting tests on two of them that sent them to smaller universes (I think.)

We get some incomprehensible lectures that explain how the vehicle works ("...there is no real substance existing. It is all vibration. Motion, in other words. Of what? That we do not know....") and a scene in which the comic relief twins accidentally start making one of the cubic vehicles too big while here on Earth, big enough to knock over trees and almost demolish the Gryce mansion, and then finally Brett and Martynn take off in one of the cubes (it doesn't have rockets, but moves by selectively intensifying or neutralizing or reversing the gravity of nearby heavenly bodies.)  So ends the first serialized portion of "Explorers into Infinity."

The May installment of the serial has Frank, Dr. Gryce, and Frannie anxiously waiting for Brett and Martynn to return.  I have to admit I wondered why Cummings didn't have our narrator go on the trip, why we were going to get this adventure second hand, and I even assumed for a while that Frank and Frannie were going to jump in one of the spare vehicles and go after them.  Anyway, Brett and his little brother eventually return and Cummings spends some time talking about the wacky clothes they now wear and the air of seriousness, of maturity, they have acquired.  I have to say, Cummings puts more time and energy into the least interesting aspects of his story than he does into the potentially compelling aspects.

Brett and Martynn narrate their voyage to the edge of the solar system, including lots of numbers--velocities, distance from this planet or asteroid at this specific time, etc.  Beyond the orbits of the planets, they began to increase their size, and Brett describes at length this novel experience, and then Dr. Gryce gives a lecture on the effect on time and velocity of increasing your size.  It all seemed like nonsense to me.  As the cube grew larger, eventually as large as a star, its velocity increased, and soon it had left the galaxy, then left all stars behind.  As the May installment ends, the boys are describing how they feared they were lost in space and time.  

As the June installment, the final episode, begins, Brett and Martynn make a declaration that will elicit groans from all the hardcore science kids reading.  B & M tried to tune the myrdoscope to the world of the woman under attack by the ogre, but couldn't receive an image, and realized it was because, considering their position in space and time and the rate time was passing for them and for the woman, that they could not see her because they must be with her at the time they were trying to view, and God has forbidden that we see our own individual futures.

By manipulating their own size and the rate of time they are experiencing, the boys land the cube in the forest near the woman being assaulted by the ogre.  They adjust their size so they are even bigger than the ogre.  The ogre flees by shrinking to the size of an insect, using drugs.  This encounter, which I expected to be climactic, is a big letdown.  Brett and Martynn made friends with the beautiful young woman, Leela, and her father, a musician.  These people live in what amounts to paradise, a decadent civilization in which little happens and life is easy, full of music and pageants.  B & M spent almost a year there (that felt like just two weeks to Frank and Frannie on Earth) and learned about the trouble that was afflicting paradise.  People from another, larger, universe are coming to attack them--that giant B & M drove off was their leader.

Having returned Martynn to Earth, Brett the next day heads back to Leela's universe to try to help her people.  He promises to return within a month, but as the story ends, Frank tells us that it has been over two years since he left.  Cummings plays up the pathos of Frank missing his friend and Dr. Gryce missing his son, but the reader just wonders why none of them just get in another vehicle and go after Brett if they are so worried about him.

This story is not good.  It lacks a climax and resolution,  Cummings exciting expectations that he does not satisfy--there is no awesome battle with the giant, and there is no romance between Frank and Frannie after one was foreshadowed.  Cummings misallocates his resources--Frannie gets a personality, so we expect her to play a role in the plot, presumably becoming Brett's fiancé or wife or something, but the woman who actually has an affair of the heart, Leela, has no personality.  Way too much ink is expended on the science lectures when these lectures are neither credible nor interesting.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' means of getting John Carter to Mars is similarly incredible, but Burroughs doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it, he spends his time on what he is good at, the adventure on Mars.  Half the text or more of "Explorers into Infinity" is about how Brett gets to Leela's world, and, once Brett is there, the adventure is totally lame.  We learn more about the clothes on her planet than anything else, and Cummings puts that material at the start of the story instead of while Brett is describing the place.

Maybe the book version of this material, which includes the sequel, "The Giant World," which appeared in serial form in the January, February and March issues of WT in 1928, and presumably includes the resolution of the war with the giants and of the Frank-Frannie love story, is a better read.  But on its own, I have to give this serialized version of "Explorers into Infinity" a thumbs down.  We will still be reading "The Giant World" when we get to the 1928 leg of our journey through the history of Weird Tales, however.