The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 5

  “Why don’t you drink them black, for once, without sugar?” I heard myself saying, before it came to me that I was taking for granted an impossible kind of occurrence. How could he possibly be talking still about revising stories on a plane where even the drinking of coffee would have been the wildest kind of absurdity?

  Let it go for the moment, I told myself. This is the first testing out of a new, incredible kind of communicator. There could be some kind of time distortion involved, a blending of the past and the present that would be no more them momentary. With a little patience I might still receive an astral realm visit from HPL that would be entirely in conformity with what I could visualize as a 1985 look, with an astral-plane spectral aspect, of course, that would seem in accord with almost any year of the past half-century, since details of attire et cetera would be replaced by a kind of luminous nebulosity. Not necessarily, of course, but specters in general, as often as not, failed to wear the costumes of some particular historical period. In HPL’s case, of course, it might even have been that of the eighteenth century.

  He had fallen silent for a moment, but when he spoke again it was almost as if he’d anticipated what I’d “phoned” to suggest. “If you won’t be going out this afternoon,” he said, “I’ll drop in for a short while. I’ll be taking the IRT to Manhattan in any case. There are some Pope and Dryden manuscripts, letters for the most part, on exhibition at the 42nd Street Library. You may have read about it in the papers. It goes off in a few days.”

  I decided then to accept the possibility that he might at any moment begin to recede and vanish into the past to find out exactly how he would feel if he knew about the recognition that would follow his vanishment into the astral realm in 1937, particularly after the publication of The Outsider and Others by Arkham House in 1939.

  “I’ve always felt,” I said, “that your best stories should be preserved in hardcover before just the readers of Weird Tales think they’re great and all that, but forget why you don’t send a collection to Putnam’s or Scribner’s to preserve them. It’s so easy to do, and if they come back—well, what have you lost, really?”

  “I could lose more than you think if I make a fool of myself, Belknapius. I wouldn’t care to submit stories to one of the major publishers unless I could be sure they conformed to the critical standards I’ve always set for myself. And in many ways I’ve failed dismally—”

  “That’s simply not true,” I said. “‘The Dunwich Horror,’ ‘The Colour out of Space,’ ‘The Shunned House,’ ‘The Music of Erich Zann,’ even ‘The Rats in the Walls‘—although I’ve never cared for that one quite as much—are tremendous things. In fact—”

  “Things?” he interrupted me with one of his customary reproving denials. “Despite your usual youthful over-exuberance you’ve chosen a very good word there. That’s precisely what they are—things altogether too mechanical and contrived, largely because I made the mistake of letting myself think—to some slight extent at least—of Wright and the readers of Weird Tales when I wrote them. I should never have allowed for a moment such a thought to intrude. But that’s only one small part of it.

  When I wrote those stories what I most sought to do was to capture the feeling of alienage, of utter strangeness, I felt would be present in the minds of anyone exposed to some ghastly reversal of ordinary, usually taken-for-granted rules of Nature, either in some quite familiar New England setting or in some vortex of dissolving energy and matter that would make such an entrapped individual a hostage to terror. I always know what I wanted to achieve in those stories, but knowing and succeeding do not automatically coincide. Never has a single one of my stories completely satisfied me.”

  “I’ve often wondered,” I said, “precisely how you would feel if you discovered, at some time in the future, that you were totally mistaken concerning that failure, and if acclaim as one of the truly great writers in the genre, perhaps comparable only to Poe, would set you a little apart from even such masters as Machen and Blackwood.”

  “How would I feel? Very much the same way as anyone lost to all sanity would probably feel if you succeeded in making him believe he had much in common with Leonardo on the strength of a not wholly bad water-color he’d produced while riding in the subway from Red Hook to Manhattan.”

  “I’m quite sure you do not feel that way about your best stories,” I told him.

  “But I do,” he assured me. “They seem to me to fall short, in one way or another, of what I hoped I might succeed in achieving when I sat down to write them. Something is simply not there. A feeling of terrifying lack of purposefulness in the entire physical universe. If my stories seem to you successful it is only because I’ve succeeded in accomplishing that to some very slight extent on rare occasions.”

  For the first time since we had been talking the look of strain that arose from obligations and duties postponed returned to his features, making me realize that even on the astral plane there could be no escape from household worries.

  “Sonia will be expecting me back by seven and—Good grief, it could almost be that now.”

  He removed from his vest the heavy, conspicuously ornate gold watch that was still attached to an equally massive, many-years-out-of-date chain that he’d often told me was a “Grandfather Phillips legacy,” and glanced at it in consternation. A kind of subdued, spectral radiance streamed from the dial across his fingers.

  “Six fifteen,” he murmured. “At this hour the subway crush will for the most part be over, but I’m afraid it will be well past eight when I get to Clinton Street.”

  “You mean—Sonia is back from her last trip? You never told me.”

  “She’ll be here very briefly this time,” he said. “Well, I’ll have to be going. There’s something else I forgot to tell you. Wright thought your last story was utterly splendid. Even better than ‘The Hounds of Tindalos.’ What was the title? I seem to have—”

  “‘The Space-Eaters,’” I said. “You are the central character. I thought of course you’d received my letter.”

  “Mrs. Gamwell”—he always spoke of his aunts in formal fashion—“has not been too well the past fortnight. That accounts for her delay in forwarding it. It is probably now in my mailbox.”

  He nodded and, quite suddenly, ceased to be standing before me. I had expected that there would be a gradual fading, and the abruptness of his departure was extremely startling.

  I crossed to the window, sat down, and devoted a full hour to reflection.

  In recent years I’ve come more and more to realize that while the world may undergo profound changes—often in a comparatively short period of time—basic human relationships remain startlingly the same. This can make us feel, at times, that the past is simply repeating itself, over and over, and that hardly anything changes. Paradoxically, that assumption is both true and false, because, to a very large extent, much depends on the position in which we find ourselves in a kind of traveling observatory that is constantly in motion, and the way we feel, both outwardly and inwardly—subjectively, if one prefers that term—about everything that is observed.

  Why then should all this not be equally true on an astral plane? I felt I now knew pretty much what to expect in relation to the age and appearance of my spectral visitors when I dialed the communicating instrument. It could well vary with every such materialization and depend to a large extent on what was most in conformity with our shared memories and emotions at some one particular observation post as the great time clock swung back and forth in constantly changing orbits.

  HPL had been in my presence again at a particular post which the communicating instrument had made very real on the astral plane, or I had been in his presence. But that did not mean that the next time I made use of the communicating instrument I would encounter the spectral presence of the HPL I knew in his New York days and not find instead that he was greeting me fr
om Providence with some much later memories to share, in the Poe-haunted shadows of the Ancient Hill.

  HPL had a rare capacity for analyzing with total honesty and without so much as the blinking of an eyelash—I’m speaking figuratively here, of course—the changes in his thinking that time and circumstances had made inevitable across the years. Much of that stemmed, I’ve always believed, paradoxical as it may seem, from the great kindliness and generosity of spirit that no one who met and talked at length with him could have failed to sense. He wished to spare others from blaming themselves too harshly for errors in judgment and personal shortcomings—intellectual, aesthetic, emotional—which he had, at various times in the past, possessed. No one, he was very careful to make plain, could ever hope completely to outgrow his or her shortcomings, even with an extended life span of a hundred and six, but trying was of tremendous importance and should never be abandoned. Even if the entire cosmos reeled with an ultimate kind of absurdity, there was nothing quite as valuable as preserving one’s inner integrity in that respect. Although I did not always see eye to eye with Howard about not a few areas of human thought and experience, with that one I could not have been more in agreement, except that if I had ever been called upon to exercise such total candor I fear that the kindliness I’ve mentioned would have been less in evidence, swallowed up by an egotistical kind of self-preoccupation.

  Since the space limitations imposed by this memoir prevent me from dwelling more than very briefly on areas in which our views did not coincide—and they are of far less importance than what he achieved in realms of dark splendors—I’ve chosen one that sheds some light as well, if only by a kind of indirection, on several of the others.

  In his last lengthy letter to me, which I received late in 1936, he made it unmistakably plain that he had not modified even slightly the way he felt about American poetry after it began to depart from traditional patterns with Whitman far back in the Pleistocene, and, much later, of course, with Pound and T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. The Waste Land became for him a kind of paragon or symbol of a new kind of nonsense verse, which he parodied hilariously soon after it appeared in The Dial in 1922. In the ensuing fifteen years his view of that poem remained unchanged. I also read it for the first time in The Dial, and thought it an extraordinary poem.

  To me there has always been something irresistibly challenging about the avant-garde. It can perpetuate both a wide variety of horrors or shining achievements which the years will vindicate as having been certain to endure. Perhaps the way I’ve always felt about it is a little crazy, in a way. But so is the way Howard always felt about Pope, and “His Britannic Majesty” and the eighteenth century in general. If we cannot all be a little crazy in our various ways, the world would be a very dull place indeed.

  I waited more than a week before I turned to the astral phone communicating instrument again, not wishing to greet another spectral presence before a completely serene mood had come upon me.

  I’ve never known any member of the writing profession who was more genuinely well-liked as Otis Adelbert Kline. In the course of a long friendship I met and talked with many of both his close personal friends and his business associates, and dissenting voices in that area were conspicuous by their rarity. He was a man of firm convictions, and always resolute in his defense of them. But it was never to the point of belligerent contentiousness. Life, he seemed to feel, was much too short and peace of mind too important to go into a rage over anything that was no more than an opinion. (There are some opinions I’ve experienced difficulty in exercising quite the same kind of restraint about, but I’ve never been entirely sure as to whether that was wise or foolish.) I doubt if Otis would have felt exactly as Will Rogers did when he said he had never met a man or woman he did not like. But he never seemed to feel a need to take off the gloves and sail into an opponent on the argumentative level in bare-knuckled fashion. By the same token the ironic, black humor way of demolishing an opponent he seemed content to leave to others who could forge anger into a kind of aesthetic weapon, and derive great pleasure from doing so.

  Despite the infinitely greater maturity of the science fiction and general fantasy genres today, in at least their literary level, close to mainstream importance, three early travelers—Burroughs, Merritt and Kline—were as influential as Gernsback, I’ve always felt, making it possible for journeys to other planets and into other dimensions of space and time to become a widely acclaimed, widely popular newsstand phenomenon of those times. (The Buck Rogers cartoons accomplished much the same thing, but on, I’ve always felt, the even more often naive, far from sophisticated, entertainment plane to which writers of serious literature were very careful not to descend. Just a little too careful, perhaps, for when there were certain untrodden wastes to cross the early far Western pioneers welcomed into their companionship men of exceptional gifts whose story-writing capabilities created legends of enduring worth.)

  Before uncradling the astral communicator I went over, in retrospect, the periods—many long, but others no more than a few days in duration—in which I had talked at great length with Otis concerning my own stories and how he felt they shaped up professionally, since, as my literary agent, he had to consider whether or not they were likely to please at least two or three out of—at that time—about twenty magazine editors in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Important as most of those discussions were they now seemed to dwindle in significance when I remembered how much greater had been my enjoyment when, in the few years preceding his passing, we had traveled in a rowboat a mile or so beyond where wheeling gulls arose in flight from barnacle-encrusted rocks and dropped anchor where the fishing never failed to be rewarding.

  How could I ever forget summers spent at The Midge, and the “fish-roasts” that were enhanced by the fragrance of the surrounding woodland and the presence of his wife and charming daughter, on whom had been bestowed at birth the miraculous name of “Orafay”? What made all this seem just as miraculous was the simple and incredible fact (the synchronicity factor almost had to be present here) that as a very young child—not more than six at the most—I had walked on a Short Beach strand not very different from the one that I had found at The Madge on my first visit to that New Haven shore point. When Otis had moved there with his family I had never once told him that he would find the name of the Mansfields, my maternal ancestors, on a small village-green monument a short distance away!

  With all that in mind I couldn’t help wondering what period-aura, what memory-shared moment in time would accompany his spectral presence when my “phone call” was followed by a visit in the small hours. (It was long after midnight when I uncradled the communicator with, suddenly, slightly unsteady hands.)

  He spoke quite briefly on the phone, and, as had happened with HPL, nothing about his voice seemed changed. “Frank? Ellen told me you’d probably phone to find out if I’d be coming over tomorrow to have another tooth extracted. The one your father took care of yesterday. Had been giving me the most trouble, but there are two others that have been acting up. You told her you wanted to be at home if I decided to get the whole damned mess taken care of in one more session. I suppose I might as well. I’ve some bad news, but it will keep until I get there.”

  HPL’s visit had seemed a kind of ghostly repetition of a dimly remembered occurrence that had actually taken place at some time in the past. But a phantom with a toothache? I had a very dim recollection of one such visit, but two? Yet it must have taken place, and what he had to tell me came as so great a shock that my every doubt was dispelled when it came in a slightly shaken voice. “Bob Howard is dead. He killed himself. And he sent me a new story less than five weeks ago.”

  If a spectral shape can have a toothache, a sudden change of mind concerning anything as trivial as a dental appointment under stress of strong emotion is understandable enough, and it did not surprise me in the least when his faintly luminous form quivered, and
was gone.

  However you may choose to define genius—even keeping in mind the simplistic claim that it stems largely from a capacity for hard work and the taking of pains—I have never doubted that John W. Campbell, Jr., had considerably more than a touch of it. Both as an editor and as a writer it gave him pleasure—and this, too, I have never doubted—to discuss with conviction one or two aspects of an important subject as if there was little likelihood that future developments might not bear him out. As often as not they did, but it could lead as well to some wrong guesses that he knew would be forgiven by the indisputable fact that it is human to err.

  The one that I look back upon with close to incredulous awe—so monumental was it in relation to what the swiftly passing years have revealed—appeared in an editorial column when TV was still in its infancy. The new visual medium, he assured the readers of Analog, would never be a major one in the entertainment realm because—hold your breath!—the limits it imposed on the viewer were far too much on the busy housewife, kitchen activity side! At most TV could serve as a momentary daytime distraction between the almost constant need of answering the phone or doorbell amidst the clatter of dishes or to check on the washing machine, and the impatience of waiting for the infinitely greater pleasure of entertaining guests or dining out and watching the movies, in the company of many others, on the wide screen.

  Whether or not something close to such a view was held by many others at the time, the tremendous growth of TV could hardly have been foreseen in the sober actuality realm. J.W.C. still has to be faulted here, I’ve always felt, for so complete a failure to realize that a medium that could bring so much of the outside world into millions of homes on the visual plane would usher in the kind of change in human communication that the computer is now carrying forward in another Gargantuan leap. Entertainment, of course, is just one aspect of the change, but in dealing with that factor as he did he bad-guessed a great deal more. It is difficult to imagine a housewife today who would not rush from the kitchen into the living room to watch the emergency recovery of a satellite in space, or a mountainside view of a wrecked plane with a helicopter hovering overhead on a quite large screen. And on returning to the kitchen she might well be upset to discover she had missed both General Hospital and All Our Children on an only slightly smaller screen.