"The Death Dust" by Frank Harvey
"The Death Dust" is a straightforward and effective classic-type science fiction story full of science that celebrates the bravery of the men who expand the borders of knowledge. It reads like an Arthur C. Clarke story, in my opinion. Maybe a little routine, but short and economical and pretty well written, so thumbs up.
Our narrator is a veteran fighter pilot who fought the Reds in Korea. He is now the captain of the first rocket to the moon. Sharing this historic ride with him are a guy who makes jokes--this guy is a "jet-bombardment expert" and a fellow former jet fighter pilot, so I guess co-pilot and engineer--and a medical man. So we will be affected when something bad happens to them, we learn a little about the guys' families. Harvey makes a good job of describing the experience of blast off and heading to the moon and all that.
The narrator mentions that Werner van Braun wrote a science-fiction story in which astronauts found the moon to be free of dust--I guess this refers to a portion or portions of Braun's 1960 book First Men to the Moon that appeared in The Week in 1958 and 1959. This is ironic foreshadowing, because the men find that the moon is covered in a thick layer of dust. On Luna, the jokester breaks the rules and puts a hole in his suit, and the three-man crew soon learns that the dust of the moon contains a bacteria or virus that kills a man very quickly. The doctor also dies while trying to treat the comedian. The skipper knows he can't bring the rocket back to Earth because the germs will spread over the world, killing everything in short order. So he accelerates into the Earth's atmosphere at such velocity that the ship and everything in it, including himself, will be burned to nothing.
"And a Little Child..." takes up fewer than 16 pages (41 lines per page, much fewer than the 1920s magazines I was estimating the page density of a few days ago) of an issue of F&SF that we've already read stories from, Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea," Charles G. Finney's "The Gilashrikes," and the 1959 version of Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man," which is radically different from later versions. "And a Little Child..." has been reprinted in several European magazines and in the 1965 Henderson collection The Anything Box and the 2020 Henderson collection Believing. People like Henderson--The Anything Box has been reprinted again and again. Will I be joining the legions of Henderson fans today after I read the magazine version available at this link?
Our narrator, a grandmother, on page one talks about how children have "Eyes that see everything new, everything fresh, everything wonderful, before custom can stale or life has twisted awry...." and how some kids have a capital "S" "Seeing eyes" and can see into other dimensions. Then comes the story of Grandma's relationship with a little girl with big eyes whom she meets while camping, the granddaughter of friends. Grandma loves camping, and comes to the same camp grounds year after year, and over the course of this story we get our fill of the wonders of camping, and of cutesy dialogue and interactions between Grandma and the girl with Seeing eyes.
...something about the stillness of the night crowded the noise back into my throat, so I took after her, glad of a good excuse to run, fleet-footed and free, through the crispness of the silver night. A little farther, a little faster, a little lighter and I wouldn’t even have had to touch the ground.
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"I like you. Gramma,” she said. "You’re warm.”"You’re warm, too,” I said, feeling heat radiating from the wiry little body.
Little Big-Eyes senses a danger near the women's toilet, and doesn't want to go there. Dad forces her, and an invisible monster almost devours her--Dad and Grandma pull her out of the monster's maw. This isn't the climax of the story--this is on the fifth page. Dad and Grandma don't decide camping this year is a bad idea and decide a better vacation could be had in New York at the art museums--even though they saw Little Big-Eyes almost get sucked into another dimension, they figure they'll stick to the plan of camping in this monster-infested wilderness for two weeks. A week or so later, Grandma acts like she doesn't believe in what she saw, and Dad leaves his daughter in Grandma's care while he returns home. Really?
Big-Eyes can apparently communicate with some of the invisible extra-dimensional monsters, and becomes friends with them, and worries they will freeze to death in winter, and on a cold rainy night leaves the camp to help them return to their dimension. The thing that tried to eat her at the start of the trip was not really a monster but instead a doorway (I guess) that the friendly monsters need to use to go home but have somehow forgotten the location of, so the little girl has to lead them to it. Nosy Grandma of course is there to see it all, and finds that she can see the monsters now, who are like hills. Somehow the little girl's arm gets stuck in the doorway to the other dimension when it closes as the last hill monster passes through. For like an hour Grandma holds Little Big-Eyes, comforting her. Then some creature in the other dimension puts in her hand an item that allows her to escape and temporarily leaves glittering magical dust on her hand. The little girl soon comes to believe this whole adventure was just a dream.
"And a Little Child..." is competently written, but I am just not in the market for stories about feisty nosy grandmas and adorable little children; longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may recall my saying that I am not crazy about stories that romanticize childhood and attribute special powers to children when I blogged about Kuttner and Moore's 1936 "Call Him Demon" back in 2016.) I daresay "And a Little Child..." is a story that might appeal to women, what with all those scenes about holding a little girl who has had a bad dream and helping her unzip her pants so she can use the toilet and all that mothery stuff; maybe people who love camping and have had shivery otherworldly feelings when alone in the woods will also like it. I'm just going to call "And a Little Child..." "acceptable"--it does an OK job of what it is trying to do, but I'm not the audience for it, and some of the actions of the characters and other elements of the plot are not all that credible. Perhaps "And a Little Child..." is a good example of science fiction (or fantasy) penned by a woman in which the female characters behave in the way girls and women typically do in real life--seeking out opportunities to perform the role of mother--instead of trying to inhabit traditional male roles like shooting people and fighting monsters and leading armies and that kind of thing. Lots of female characters in SF are like Tarzan or Conan in drag and we are sometimes enjoined to see them as women fighting the patriarchy by emulating the patriarchy and proving women are as good as men by just doing the same stuff that men (in fiction, at least) do. Henderson's nosy old woman and six-year-old who can see into other dimensions are a lot more convincing than those ass-kicking girl bosses.
It is the future of air-taxis, of restaurants where the half-nude dancing girls might by holograms and you might order your food with a dial at your table instead of talking to a waiter. Our story is set in a densely populated city where two factions fight a secret twilight war, assassinating each other in night clubs and similar locales. Initially, High is kind of vague about the identity of the two groups and why they are fighting, giving hints and fragments and then in the final third of the story spelling it out. Our protagonists are the intelligence and security apparatus of the world government, the last reliable public institution in the world. Things are so bad the good guys can't just arrest the villains or attack them with the army because half the outwardly legitimate judges, politicians and military units are corrupted by highly placed enemy agents--the World security force is reduced to extrajudicial assassinations, to acting just like the bad guys! The mass of ordinary people ("neutrals"), including honest and loyal colonels in the World Army, have no idea such a guerilla war is going on, that the whole of the government is corrupted, because the media is under the total control of the enemy. One of the last things we learn is that the enemy, who are intent on achieving total dictatorial control of society, are not ideologues but just an organized crime syndicate.
The slow and gradual revelation of what is going on is a significant component of "Pseudopath"'s appeal. The conventional plot of High's story follows the appearance on the "battlefield" of a new World Security agent after seven years of training. The loyalist spooks are losing the war to organized crime because the enemy is able to identify them but our guys are unable to distinguish enemy agents from neutrals. The new guy can, somehow, identify the enemy agents; how is not made clear until the penultimate page. The hope of World Security HQ is that this new guy will shake the enemy's morale by tricking the leader of the criminals into thinking the new guy is a telepath, which he is not, and get the villain to expose himself to some kind of unconventional attack.
Among all the chatty scenes of planning and exposition we get two scenes in which the new guy uses his skills to kill baddies in public, and then he uses them across the video phone in a conversation with the leader of organized crime, the man who is almost dictator of the world. This interview provides the protagonists info that gives the World Security service a chance to roll a tank right up to the crime boss' mansion and blow it up while he and his closest cronies are inside. At the end of the story we learn that the new guy's special ability is to figure out every last thing about a person's character from his body language, enough to identify if he is a criminal or a neutral.
The stingy way High shares information with us readers, the secret war behind the scenes, and the emphasis on mental powers and psychology, make "Pseudopath" remind us of the work of MPorcius fave A. E. van Vogt, which we haven't read much of lately. Like van Vogt's typical work, High's story can be a little frustrating and difficult--lots of stuff happens that the reader initially finds hard to believe, and the explanations for why he should accept them are presented in a way that is understated. However, the material is interesting and ultimately I think the story holds together, that things do make internal sense if you think about them. I can mildly recommend "Pseudopath." Maybe I should read more of High's work.
"Pseudopath" debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and reappeared in America in the short-lived U.S. edition of New Worlds. In the 1980s the story was resuscitated for inclusion in the Isaac Asimov branded anthology Supermen.
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I can't question Merril's choices here; all three stories are competent and sit firmly within traditional SF forms, with Henderson's focus on female characters and concerns putting a twist on the formula that makes her story distinctive.
Merril didn't see fit to recommend any 1959 stories by "I" authors, so next time we advance this project we'll be working with "J" and "K" authors. See you then, mid-century SF fans!
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