Covid Reading Diary 2

Anthony Boucher, Margaret St. Clair and Chan Davis

Welcome to the second installment of my Covid Reading Diary. In case you missed it: this week I will be sending out more newsletters than usual because I am sick with Covid and have much more time to read and review science fiction and fantasy. God willing, next week I will be back on my bookselling grind and resume the normal publishing schedule of one to two newsletters per week.

Yesterday I reviewed Philip José Farmer’s The Alley Man which one subscriber described as a weird and problematic novella. Today I’ve got one fantasy and two science fiction short stories that will probably go down with a little less friction. Note that my reading is mostly not guided by any particular theme. I’m just letting my interests carry me in the moment.

“The Anomaly of the Empty Man” by Anthony Boucher

This is a fantasy and/or mystery story originally published in the April 1952 issue of Boucher’s own publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was republished in the 1955 collection of Boucher’s short stories Far and Away which is the format I read it in. I was interested in taking in some Boucher because of the big three science fiction editors and magazines of the 1950s, I have the least strong impression of Boucher and F&SF.

For reasons of trying to deepen my knowledge of the field, I am mainly focused on reading old science fiction this year and possibly beyond. I want to really understand it. As I’ve gone along, I’ve developed the nagging suspicion that I’ll never do so if I don’t understand its cousin fantasy. So in my studies I also read fantasy usually incidentally, as is the case here, rather than intentionally. This is happens to be kind of an ambiguous fantasy story published side by side with science fiction stories in both its original publication and in subsequent reprints.

To the meat of it! This is a story about a San Francisco private dick named Lamb who gets called in to help on weird cases by the police. It opens with Lamb showing up to the scene of a strange disappearance. A society guy who has a reputation as a philanderer is gone and in his rooms is a pile of clothes.

The odd thing is that the clothes are put together perfectly as though they were on someone and he just disappeared. Two clues are that the empty record player was left running and that the vacuum cleaner was found warm to the touch when the man’s valet discovered him missing.

First, Lamb tries pulling more clothes out and fitting them together as though they were on a person. When this fails, he decides to visit a curious individual who becomes the story’s narrator for its middle half and who is the story’s most interesting character.

Enter Doctor Horace Verner, a man whom Lamb describes as between 70 and 100 with “a mane of hair like an albino lion and a little goatee like a Kentucky Colonel who never heard of cigars.” His hands have an “un-English mobility.” Verner spends a lot of time talking about the non-standardized sizes and shapes of records that used to be pressed in the early 20th century. For our purposes, it is important to note that some records played from the inside out.

Verner then plays a moving piece of opera for Lamb before sitting him down for a drink and telling him a story about his time in early 20th century London. As a young man as now, he was an appreciator of music and at the time there was a great foreign opera singer who Verner would only call Carina, a name given to her by Verner’s cousin.

Scandal arose as a series of Carina’s gentleman callers died by suicide. Somehow Verner’s cousin was immune to this which Verner attributed to either an incredible strength or an incredible inadequacy. Verner had some fear that mob justice would take Carina. Instead she died a seemingly natural death on stage after giving one last great performance.

Following Carina’s death there were a number of disappearances that fitted the pattern of the case Lamb came to call about: men gone missing with their clothes piled on the floor as though they had disappeared from them and gramophones empty but left spinning. It came to be that both Verner and his unnamed cousin, a then-famous private detective, began separate investigations.

The cousin was a scientific-minded rationalist whose watchwords were, “Discard the impossible; and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.” (Emphasis supplied. The implication here is that the cousin is Sherlock Holmes). Verner, on the other hand, was a quasi-Fortean weird-finder who modified his cousin’s motto, “Discard the impossible; then if nothing remains, some part of the ‘impossible’ must be possible.” (Emphasis in the original.)

It came to be that the two cousins were in something of a competition. Ultimately Verner’s cousin hit a wall and tacitly admitted that Verner’s quasi-Fortean approach was right in this instance. Before bowing out, he shared with Verner the clue that the only thing connecting the disappearances was that each of the men had purchased Carina’s final record before vanishing.

Verner looked at the clues and took an intuitive leap. The record in question was one that played inside out and was of religious music that included the Lord’s Prayer. Said backwards the Lord’s Prayer is, naturally, a powerful incantation of black magic. There was but one thing to do.

Verner bought a copy of the record and set his gramophone to play it outside in like a typical record rather than inside out as it was designed to be played. He suddenly found himself transported naked to a living death dimension that was draining his life essence. Before it successfully consumed him, he thought quickly and said the Lord’s Prayer which broke the backwards incantation and transported him back.

He subsequently spent all of his available money buying out copies of the record and breaking them, preserving only the single copy which he had just played for Lamb.

This is the solution of the mystery according to Verner.

Lamb is convinced by this story and rushes back to the crime scene to tell his contact Inspector Abrahams. When he gets to the crime scene he finds Abrahams’ clothes in a pile on the floor and fears the worst. Then Abrahams pops out in a dressing gown and says he’s solved the mystery.

Abrahams explains that the vacuum cleaner put in reserve was used to inflate a balloon that the clothes were fitted around. The vacuum cleaner was then used to deflate this balloon and it was removed. This explained why the vacuum cleaner was still warm to the touch when the valet found it.

This is the solution of the mystery according to Abrahams.

Now convinced of Abrahams’ story, Lamb returns to confront Verner. Without trying to explain the vacuum cleaner’s warmth, Verner asks if the record player could have been turned on accidentally. Lamb concedes that the set up was such that it could not.

Verner then calls Lamb’s bluff by encouraging him to listen to Carina’s record in reverse. Lamb is set to do this. But Verner stops him at the last minute and says he’ll only let him do it once the man who has recently disappeared is found by the police.

The story closes with Lamb informing the reader that the man was never found.

The ambiguity here was delicious. I definitely recommend this one.

It was pretty cool that this is a story from 1952 that has a meme in it that one generally associates with the 1980s. Although apparently the idea of playing a record backwards for magical purposes goes all the way back to Aleister Crowley’s book Magick (Book 4) from 1913.

In any event, I still don’t have enough data to fit this into any kind of pattern telling me about Anthony Boucher or early F&SF but I am glad I read this story and will keep exploring both as time allows.

“The Pillows” by Margaret St. Clair

This is a creepy puzzle story about a menacing alien lifeform originally published in the June 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It crossed my path because I’ve been slowly picking my way through The Best of Margaret St. Clair where it was republished in 1985. St. Clair’s spooky, funny science fiction has become a standby for me and she’s earned a permanent place on the to-be-read pile.

I don’t think she ever quite made her way into the canon and maybe everyone was to blame. That said, she has sort of a cult following among the cognoscenti. At one point, one of my Twitter mutuals was hunting old men’s magazines on eBay to find stories by her that hadn’t been reprinted yet. I salute this but I’m not that far along on my St. Clair journey yet.

This one is about a scientist named Kent who has become fixated on a novelty item extracted from Triton called pillows. Devotees of the pillows say they are always warm and that they are good luck. By contrast scientists uniformly find they are 44 degrees but steadily drop to room temperature when measured. In general, serious people consider them to be children’s toys. Kent’s boss politely says as much to him when he is found spending time in the lab trying to figure them out.

So Kent takes time off and signs up to be spaceman and go to Triton with the hope of figuring out what is really go on. He is befriended by McTeague, the crew boss and a true believer in the pillows’ beneficial qualities. The pillows saved his marriage and his sick kid. Belying this McTeague constantly and dumbly repeats the refrain that the pillows are only a novelty and that Kent shouldn’t think too much about them.

This isn’t an action or adventure story. It’s about trying to deduce what is going on in a mysterious situation. The way the pillow hunt works is that when the men land on Triton they go out with a Mercurian hexapod, essentially an elaborate dog, which can sense where colonies of pillow are in the slabs of Tritonian rock. The hexapod hates the pillows but for some reason sits down on the rock when it finds them. The men then use atomic rays to cut the pillows out. The pillows are basically small warm invulnerable rectangles. Kent finds himself overwhelmed with a sense of euphoria while digging out the pillows.

The men find a corpse standing upright in a spacesuit. His identification indicates he is a scientific worker and he has a lot of thermometers and a Geiger counter in his bag. His death is mysterious because there is still air in his tanks and the suit is intact but he seems to have frozen to death and has not rotted. McTeague encourages Kent not to worry too much about it but Kent can’t let it go.

That night a minor accident causes Kent to deduce what the pillows are. He knocks over an old glass of ginger ale that is near a pillow when he is in bed reaching for a magazine. The ice had long since melted but the liquid is much colder than it should be when it strikes his skin.

From the data available he realizes three things about the pillows. To me, it seems like he should come to these in reverse of the order that he comes to them in but he comes to them as follows: (1) the pillows are sentient and want to come to Earth; (2) the pillows can affect events around them and, at least at present, really are lucky for their devotees; and (3) the pillows can reverse entropy and therefore, when they want to, can suck heat from objects near them that are cooler than they are. He concludes that pillows killed the man on the surface of Triton by sucking the heat from his body because they do not want to be observed and that their goal is to replace humanity. In the meantime, they are willing to trade favors to humans for quick transport to Earth.

Kent tells McTeague all of his deductions and conclusions. McTeague is patient with him and takes him to the captain who confines him to solo quarters under guard. There Kent realizes that the hold is full of pillows which are bound to kill him and that it won’t seem like they froze him to death afterwards because the pillows will return his body to its normal temperature and make it appear to be heart failure. Because this is a Margaret St. Clair story, this exact thing happens.

The story ends with the hexapod howling over Kent’s death and refusing table scraps from the smugly dumb McTeague who is reflecting that Kent’s heart giving out was a shame but that at least he was only a crazy.

This was a good one. Not earth-shattering. Better than some; worse than others. If you can find an affordable copy I definitely recommend the volume it came from The Best of Margaret St. Clair. It runs kind of high online but I lucked out and found mine in a used bookstore for $10 or $15.

I’ll also say that a lot of her work is public domain and that my friend who runs the SFFAudio podcast has collected a lot of scans of original appearances of her work on his public domain PDF page. There’s also Project Gutenberg which has a handful of free eBooks by her. And LibriVox has six free audiobooks.

“Adrift On The Policy Level” by Chan Davis

This is a satirical piece about 1950s corporate culture that first appeared in 1959 in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 5, an installment in editor and renaissance man Frederik Pohl’s original science fiction anthology series. This story and other short fiction and nonfiction by Chan Davis remains in print in this book.

I became interested in Chan Davis when I read this review of a recent biographical work about him. The book under review in it doesn’t dwell on the science fiction connection because he was mainly a mathematician but the SF/F-oriented reviewers note that he was the only big name science fiction fan to be dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I read “Adrift On The Policy Level” as a reprint in another Fred Pohl anthology: 1962’s The Expert Dreamers which collects science fiction stories by professional scientists. Despite the anthology advertising Dr. Davis’ bona fides this isn’t a particularly scientific science fiction story so much as it is a story about what the heady inner-workings of corporate life might seem like to a dazed academic.

This story opens with the scientist-protagonist Albert La Rue and his assistant’s salesman brother-in-law Calvin “Cal” Boersma taking a subway to a high end business district in Detroit. (Very science fiction moment: taking public transit through a prosperous future Detroit.)

The scientific discovery made by Albert, a professor of botany who studies plant metabolism, is not really central to the story. If I remember correctly, he has discovered that a particular fungus is essential to some strains of wheat that the capital-c Corporation is cultivating in farming colonies in Lapland and northern Canada and that by wiping out this fungus the Corporation could accidentally lose a large crop it had invested greatly in. The story is actually focused on how Albert and Cal go about trying to convey this idea to corporate officials so I may be getting that a little wrong. That said, it seems not incidental to me that the idea is of import to the food supply though this bit it is never stated; the idea’s importance is always framed in terms of corporate profits.

Albert and Cal have not been able to get an appointment. The basic premise is that they have to go through a series of interpersonally byzantine trials and travails to climb the corporate ladder to the Regional Director, the only person who can make a decision about whether Albert’s discovery is worthy of the Corporation’s consideration. Cal is there to do the talking, which is customary, and Albert is there as the specialist behind the idea, which is not ideal but is the best they have.

The first person on the corporate ladder is a receptionist who is a capital-m Model whose beauty waylays Albert. Cal handles this without a problem but her smile is devastating to Albert.

Next the men speak with an executive who looks down at a television on his desk the whole time Cal and Albert speak to him, fiddling with various buttons and seeming to work on other projects. This executive hears them out and connects them with a man called an expediter whose job it is to make their case more effectively than they can to the executive at the next level.

Albert asks Cal what would have happened to his idea without Cal’s sales talent. Cal answers that he wouldn’t have made it past the Model and further explains that an idea is only good if it can attract top sales talent. Albert is confused by Cal’s supposition but tacitly accepts that it is true.

During this period, Albert reflects that Cal and their expediter called what they worked at “personality” and that the experts in this field never publish their results. He notes that he hasn’t studied it and further reflects that it is the most important field in human culture.

As Albert engages in his reverie, the expediter takes him and Cal to the next level executive’s office where they are placed in chairs that are designed to lull one to sleep and expose one to mild narcotics via rough places on the chairs’ arms. They have to wait a long time and Albert almost falls asleep and then becomes entranced by the presentation of a woman expediter who sways her hips as she speaks.

Finally, their expediter comes to present and Albert is wowed by his command of the information and his style. He becomes such a passive observer that he is unable to respond when the presentation is over and the executive presses him over whether he thinks this matter worthy of the Regional Director’s time. Eventually Cal prompts a feeble yes out of him. The executive says they may see the Regional Director.

As they approach the Regional Director’s office the expediter informs them that he will not be going with them and departs despite Cal’s request that he stay. Once the expediter leaves, Cal announces that they are being brushed off and don’t stand a chance. Albert asks if Cal will still try his best. Cal affirms that he will and states that just getting this far is a feather in their caps.

The Regional Director is a woman, perhaps 50, who is quietly reading microfilm at her desk. She glances up at them as if to say she would like to speak to them but is very busy. The men wait patiently and her manner imbues Albert with a great deal of sympathy for her. He imagines how many corporate documents she must be reading on the microfilm. Sporadically she will glance back at up at them, increasing the effect. Albert decides the kindest act of his life will be to leave the Regional Director alone and he exits the room, soon followed by Cal.

After the men have emerge from the building, they reflect on the Regional Director’s greatness.

Cal says, “A real master! Sheer virtuosity.”

Albert reflects, “Our society certainly rewards its most deserving members.”

This is a story about a society that resembles our own whose strange rules of etiquette, highly bureaucratic structure and arbitrary relationships of power prevent an important idea from reaching fruition. The most savage bit of satire is that the protagonist himself has internalized the corporate salesmanship ideology that is preventing him from making a useful contribution. He thinks the most deserving members of society are powerful people who can dismiss him without making him feel upset.

I have a couple more anthologies with Chan Davis stories in them. Watch this space for more reviews of his stuff.

That’s all for now. Back tomorrow.