"Half-Past Eternity"

Longtime fans of John D MacDonald’s novels and short stories are probably aware that his early science fiction novel Wine of the Dreamers originally appeared as a novella in an early sf pulp magazine. Although billed on the cover of the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories as “A Complete Novel,” it clocked in at “only” 44,000 words, far short of the approximately 80,000 that would make up the novel of the following year. More serious fans of his work would also know that his second science fiction novel, Ballroom of the Skies, was based on another earlier novella, one titled “Hand From the Void,” a 20,000 word piece that appeared in the January 1951 issue of Super Science Stories. The characters names are different, as is the locale, but it’s the same plot structure, same basic protagonist, many nearly identical scenes, and the same ending as the novel that was published about two years later.

MacDonald’s third and final science fiction novel didn’t appear until the end of 1962, long after most of the pulps had died and long after he had been a regular contributor to this genre. But even The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything had an antecedent, believe it or not, although not one so obviously patterned on previous plot and characters. This 20,000-word novella was published in the July 1950 issue of Super Science Stories and its subject was time: time and the ability to manipulate time for certain individuals. But unlike Kirby Winter, who could slow it down to near cessation with the use of a particular pocket watch, the device in “Half-Past Eternity” is modern medicine.

It’s one of MacDonald’s more delightful stories, in that it is barely science fiction for much of its early pages, and the subject matter of the plot straddles several different story types and works on several different levels: it’s a crime story, a sports story, a business story and a science fiction story. This gives the author the opportunity to show off his mastery of several of the devices he used to write all different kinds of fiction during his pulp days. And even though it is first and foremost a science fiction story, its real strength and attraction lies in the characterization of its protagonists, a hustler and con man and a woman who figuratively sells her soul for money.

The opening scenes of the story come straight out of any number of stories MacDonald wrote for Fifteen Sports Stories or Dime Detective.

The Kid didn’t talk. Nat February talked. Which is what you might have expected.

The kid had a punch like the business end of a mule, sure, and he kept pouring in, shuffling flat-footed, game all the way through. But everybody on the Beach knew that the kid, who, by the way, at thirty-one was a kid no longer, had suffered slow degeneration of the reflexes to the point where his Sunday punch floated in like a big balloon and he could be tagged at will.

The kid has has managed to score a match with an up and coming contender named Jake Freedon, and the kid is seen as nothing more than a waystation on the way to a championship match. “There was no question about Jake Freedon winning. The kid was all through in the fight game although nobody had told him that yet.” Nat February, a well-regarded bookie in this seedy, marginal little world, certainly knows that. Imagine his surprise when he is approached by a dignified, if shabby old gentleman who wants to bet a large sum on the kid. After attempting to dissuade him, February takes his money and gives him long odds of the kid knocking out Jake in the first round. If that happens, the gentleman -- whose name is Garfield Tomlinson -- will clear $96,000.

Of course, it does happen, so quickly that most can’t tell how Jake Freedon ended up face down in a pool of his own blood with a broken jaw. Jake later describes it to his disgusted backers:

“I tell yah,” Jake mumbled, “I never seen the punch coming. Not at all. I know, I’ve been hit before, but then I seen it when it was too late to duck. This time I never even knew I was hit. I’m moving in and boom -- I’m walking up the aisle with rubber knees.”

February pays off, but his losses aren’t as great as they could have been. A sixth sense told him to spread the bet around town, which while lowering his profit had Jake won, substantially cushioned his loss when the impossible happened. But the upset doesn’t go down well with a particular bookie, whose collector -- a man by the name of Sam Banth -- is also a minority owner of the concern. He has seen his investment go from $10,000 to $2,200, and in disgust he takes what’s left and quits.

This is our protagonist, for want of a better word. A former stockbroker, Sam Banth quit the brokerage house where he worked to climb the ladder of a different and more direct form of gambling. His ambition is intense and his guile more sophisticated than that of an average debt collector. His physical description is the first clue that this will not be a typical MacDonald leading character. He is young, tall and well dressed, but:

Taken as a whole, Sam Banth’s face was well proportioned, almost handsome. But each individual feature was oversized, heavy. The big lips rested together with a hint of ruthlessness and brutality. Pale eyes protruded slightly, and they looked coldly incapable of any change of expression. His neck and sloped shoulders were ox-heavy.

Before walking out on his former senior partner he breaks the man's nose.

Convinced that the boxing match was somehow fixed, he pays a visit to the winner, who is celebrating his victory. The kid, with a faraway look in his eyes, is sitting at a table covered with bottles. He’s playing a kind of a parlor trick for the party’s guests. When somebody blunders against the table and one of the bottles drops, the kid reaches out with lightning speed and catches it inches from the floor. He is able to do this despite the fact that he is obviously drunk. When Sam finds out from February that the big winner’s name was Garfield Tomlinson, he does a little research at the city library.

At last he found the references he wanted. His hand began to tremble. Dr. Garfield A. Tomlinson -- Pathologist. From the magazine index he located the Journal of American Medicine for February, 1946. Relation Between  Hormone Theories and Tissue Entropy in Geriatrics. He read the article with great care. Much of it was meaningless to him, but he absorbed a few of the basic ideas.

It doesn’t take much to find out that Tomlinson lives in a rambling farmhouse outside of Kingston, New York, and Sam wastes no time in heading for the place. The door is answered by a young woman, and MacDonald’s description of her is detailed and characteristic of his introduction of his female romantic interests.

Sam, in one searching glance before he smiled, took in the straight tallness of her, the wood-smoke eyes which had sooted the lashes heavily, the ripe tautness across the front of the blue work shirt, the lorelei curve of flank which blue jeans couldn’t hide, the softness and petulance and discontent in the wide mouth. She was a big girl. A big restless unhappy girl with annoyance at him and the world showing plainly.

She is Linda Tomlinson, the doctor’s daughter, and she tells Sam her father is in the barn around back. Before she can close the door on him there is this telling exchange:

Sam: What do you want most in the world, Miss Tomlinson?

Linda: That’s a stupid question. Money. Enough to smother me.

Sam: What would you say if I told you that because I came here you’re going to have exactly that?

Linda: I would say you’ve got nails in your head, friend.

Using a ruse to gain entry into Tomlinson’s barn/laboratory, Sam lays out his suspicions about what the doctor is doing and what he did to the kid.

Let me hazard a series of guesses. Your funds are running low. You are at a critical and interesting stage in your experimentation. You have learned to apply new principles, apparently. The main ways of getting finds are too slow. Maybe you’re so far off the beaten path no institution will give you a grant. Maybe they would if you showed them what progress you’ve made, but you’re not ready to do that yet. You contact [the kid], manage in some way to give him a set of reflexes faster than any man ought to have, and then you bet all your funds and collect a small fortune.

Tomlinson is forced to admit that Sam is correct and goes on to explain the the method he has discovered to increase a subject’s speed by stimulating glands in order to telescope time. A test subject so treated would have a reduced lifespan but would live out that lifespan with reactions and perceptions much faster than those not treated. In the case of the kid, he was selected because he had no other set of skills with which to make a living, and would have eventually become a charity case. “I speeded him up at first,” explains Tomlinson, “in the ratio of a one tenth decrease in lifespan. The effect was to make him live sixty-six seconds for every sixty, thus speeding his reaction time by one tenth of a second.” When that didn’t have the desired effect it was increased to one-fifth. The effect was permanent and the kid had to be coached to slow down all aspects of his manners and appearance lest his change become apparent to anyone who knew him before.

Sam is, of course, here to exploit the discovery and he lays out his plans to Tomlinson. Sam will begin identifying sports figures who have ability but are either missing one element of talent or who are aging and have lost a step. A baseball player who can field well but can’t hit. A tennis player whose legs have “given out.” a golfer who was never able to drive the long ball, a circus acrobat team, even a professional magician. Sam will used the Tomlinson’s farm land to build a sprawling sports camp to provide the extending treatment and training regimen. In exchange for receiving the treatment the subjects agree to sign over half of their earnings to a corporation owned by Tomlinson, Sam and Linda. This income will be supplemented by heavy betting on games where the subjects are involved. Tomlinson will get more money for research, Sam will get rich, and Linda will get rich and… get Sam. They eventually realize that they are “kindred spirits” and become romantically involved.

But it’s never enough for Sam. Despite the initial success and money pouring in, he always wants more, and once he learns that Tomlinson has developed a simpler method for the process, one that any layman can perform, well… Let’s just say that Sam does not have any Road to Damascus moment in this story.

“Half-Past Eternity” is a terrific work, one that is as inventive and entertaining as anything MacDonald ever wrote for the pulps. It hums along at a breakneck speed and is over too quickly, even for 22,000 words. Sam Banth is an unusual protagonist for MacDonald, an unredeemed charlatan who nonetheless evokes sympathy from the reader at times. Likewise, Linda Tomlinson is equally immoral, yet not at quite the same level as Sam, as if MacDonald was simply unwilling to create a female character who was 100% evil. And the grand finale of this novel -- the final chapter titled “The Endless Twilight” -- is as good as anything JDM ever wrote in the science fiction field. It is there that the reader will discover the seeds of The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything.

The literary device of manipulating time was an old one that went all the way back to H.G. Wells’ 1901 story “The New Accelerator” and was the subject of a 1923 French film titled Paris Qui Dort. I’m hardly an expert on the history of science fiction, but I don’t find much use of this theme before  MacDonald re-introduced it in “Half-Past Eternity,” and the most frequently cited progenitor of this sub-genre, Arthur C. Clarke’s “All the Time in the World,” wasn’t published until 1952, two full years after MacDonald’s novella. Of course, the version of time manipulation that everyone remembers the most -- at least those of my own generation -- is Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode, “A Kind of a Stopwatch,” which, like much of Sterling’s work on The Twilight Zone, owed a lot to earlier science fiction -- in this case to both Clarke’s work and, especially,  MacDonald’s The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything. And the “surprise” ending of Serling’s teleplay owes not a little to the final chapter of “Half-Past Eternity.”

The novella was anthologized twice, first in a 1971 collection edited by William J. Nolan titled The Human Equation, and again in MacDonald’s own science fiction anthology Other Times, Other Worlds. Both books are out of print but easily obtainable via the usual online sources. Curiously, Other Times, Other Worlds seems to be the only fiction book of MacDonald’s to be denied a reissue as an eBook. This is a shame, as it is absolutely essential JDM, containing some of his best work in the short form. Hopefully this omission will be corrected some day.

"Delusion Drive"

"Delusion Drive" was one of three John D MacDonald stories published in the April 1949 issue of the science fiction pulp Super Science Stories. This was MacDonald's first appearance in the magazine that would eventually publish eighteen of his tales, and he started with a bang, penning more entries in this issue than any other other author. Still, as one can see from the cover, he wasn't an established name in the s-f community as yet and only received a name blurb: no cover art, no title copy. His novella titled "Death Quotient" was the only story to bear his real name, as the other two were assigned house names: "All Our Yesterdays" was credited to "John Wade Farrell" and "Delusion Drive" was supposedly written by Peter Reed.

Super Science Stories has a rather fractured publishing history, and it probably should be considered two separate pulp magazines. It began in 1940 (six years before MacDonald started writing) as a fairly standard science fiction adventure pulp with writer Frederik Pohl serving as the initial editor. Pohl used his position to publish much of his own work, but also was responsible for publishing early stories by Isaac Asimov, James Blish (his first), Ray Bradbury (his first paid piece) and L. Sprague De Camp, whose collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller -- Genus Homo -- has been routinely considered the magazine's finest moment. This first incarnation of the magazine lasted only 16 issues and ended with the May 1943 issue. (To further confuse matters, three of the 16 issues were titled Super Science Novels.) 

In January 1949 the publisher (Popular Publications' subsidiary Fictioneers, Inc.) launched a second version of the magazine, continuing the same numbering system for volumes and issues. Now edited by Ejler Jakobsson (with author Damon Knight serving as assistant editor), the pulp published 15 more issues before expiring for good with the August 1951 issue. And although the second incarnation of Super Science Stories began in January, its second issue wasn't published until April, the issue featuring these three JDM stories. Another gap followed until the third issue was published in July, when it settled down to a bi-monthly schedule. Then again, in 1951, there was a gap between January and April before sputtering off with its final two issues.

MacDonald's contributions to Super Science Stories seem more impressive when taking into account this sporadic publishing history. Of the second version's 15 issues, MacDonald stories appeared in ten of them, and of those ten, seven featured more than one JDM story. Pretty impressive for an author who was only dabbling in the world of science fiction.

"Delusion Drive" is easily the weakest of the the three MacDonald stories appearing in the April issue, although it isn't a bad effort. It takes a fairly standard plot that had been used in countless seafaring stories and puts it into space. What makes "Delusion Drive" interesting -- and what obviously made it interesting for the author -- is how the issue of long-distance space travel is dealt with, that ageless problem for both author and scientist alike, faster-than-light travel (FTL). Here MacDonald calls it "Space Rip."

The protagonist of "Delusion Drive" is named Bill Torrance, an eighteen-year-old would-be "space rat" whose outer space travels have been limited to the "VEM run." (I assume that's Venus-Earth-Mars.) He's signed on to the Leandor, "one of the middle-sized freighters of the Troy Line" as a cook's helper. Torrance walks with an affected swagger, a ruse he hopes will convince his fellow crewmates that he is a "hardened space rat," not a novice.

"I wanted them to think I'd been outside the [solar] system and knew all about Space Rip, which was the way the Leandor traveled."

But as he is unpacking his bags near his bunk, he carelessly asks his roommate Jameson about "the Rip," and Jameson immediately tags him as a "greeny." "You'll know it when it starts, Greeny," he tells him contemptuously. 

"He had a nasty, superior way about him and I didn't answer. But I saw that he kept licking his lips and that he was afraid."

As the two await the jump to FTL, Torrance lies in his bunk, wishing he hadn't said anything.

"My remark had been stupid. I'd read enough about Space Rip to know that nobody has been able to explain the feeling... I grabbed the bunk stanchion to brace myself, but it wasn't that kind of a jar, the sort that you can brace yourself against. It felt as if I had been swatted by a huge club, and yet instead of a club it was made of sharp knives set close together. The knives were 'so sharp that my body offered no resistance and so the big club passed right through me, leaving me ... sort of misty and vague. Apart at the seams. I noticed the greyness then. All colors gone. Everything was a shade of grey and everything had a slight, almost noticeable flicker about it, like the old movies in the museum. All feeling of movement was gone."

When Torrance is called to the galley to begin work, he engages in a long, somewhat philosophical conversation with the cook about the mechanics -- as they understand it -- of Space Rip. In its most basic terms, the Rip changes the ship into "something that isn't physical and then it reassembles it on the other end." When the cook tells him that what they have been changed into is "a concept," things get deep, and MacDonald veers off into ideas and theories that stop the narrative dead in its tracks. It's not as bad as the mind-numbing "science" in his "Escape to Chaos," but it's pretty close.

Then, as the journey is about to end, the story resumes and we get guns, knives and all sorts of unexpected excitement. And an ending that could have come out of any adventure pulp of the day.

As MacDonald famously wrote in his afterword to Other Times, Other Worlds, "One must be able to sustain one's own belief in order to write believable fiction." He was referring specifically to how "the merciless mathematics of Einstein and Fitzgerald" kept FTL technology from ever being feasible. He claimed that even the simple act of writing about it was "cruel" and "counterproductive to the races of man."(!) Well... MacDonald could certainly be a superior-sounding prig when he wanted to, but it is clear from "Delusion Drive" that he thought something like Space Rip somewhat possible, even back in 1949. Besides, the world of science fiction would be nothing without some means to travel to the stars relatively quickly, and writers have given us many different variations on the idea, from Star Trek's warp drive, to Star Wars' Hyper Space, to the neatest of all (at least from a fictional point of view), Battlestar Galactica's instant FTL "jumps." All of these methods originated in science fiction pulp writing and became especially prevalent in the post-atomic age. From more and more powerful rocket fuels, to atomic motors, to warp drives, hyperspace, wormholes and stargates, s-f authors continually came up with new, sometimes novel ways to transverse the impossibly huge distances of outer space. MacDonald's Space Rip seems to have been inspired by the "space warp" school of thought, one seen sporadically in fiction before 1949 and which gained household name recognition with the creation of Star Trek. MacDonald even gave his Space Rip theory an algebraic equation, calling it "Dakeon's Formula" (For all you would-be inventors, here it is: The square root of the distance in light years equals the cube of the trip time in weeks. Please get back to me if the thing really works.)

"Delusion Drive" is currently available in eBook format, included in the Wonder Audiobooks JDM anthology Death Quotient and Other Stories, which you can find on Amazon or any similar online book store for under five bucks.

"The Miniature"

Before he became a writer, John D MacDonald attended the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Syracuse, where he graduated with an undergraduate degree in Business Administration. He went on to earn an MBA at Harvard Business School, earning his postgraduate degree in only eighteen months. Although MacDonald's heart was never really in it, he made a few attempts at a career in the world of finance before joining the Army in 1940. Yet it is clear from reading the author's fiction that his failures were not due to a weak grasp of the subject, for the works of John D MacDonald are peppered with an interesting and informed knowledge of economics on both a micro and a macro level. This insight could appear as an aside in a long-forgotten short story or as the plot for a full length novel (see Pale Gray for Guilt). Indeed, this preoccupation and fascination with economics eventually gained full form in the recurring character of Meyer, the brilliant and renowned economist who also happens to be Travis McGee's sidekick. It was Meyer, not McGee, who was really MacDonald's alter ego, an admission hinted at by the author and stated flatly by his wife.

In one of MacDonald's early short stories, "The Miniature," the protagonist is actually an economist -- a professor of economics, to be precise -- and MacDonald uses the tale to explore the possibilities of the value of money in a world where gold has lost its value. It originally appeared in the September 1949 issue of Super Science Stories under the house name of Peter Reed, a necessity owing to the fact that this particular issue of the science fiction pulp contained another JDM tale. Given the current political arguments over the Federal Reserve's plan to purchase $600 billion of federal debt and the worldwide condemnation it has ignited, "The Miniature" proves to be an interesting history lesson as well as a reminder of the fact that the money in our wallets was once actually backed by something tangible.

It's certainly not the plot of "The Miniature" that makes it worth re-reading after sixty years, employing a derivative and overused device that must have been old even in 1949. It's a time travel story, the kind where the protagonist is suddenly thrust into either the future or the past, he or she witnesses amazing things, and is then sent back, disbelieving the entire experience until an artifact -- either brought back or left behind -- causes them to accept the veracity of the event. Think the sand-in-the-shoes at the end of The Twilight Zone episode "King Nine Will Not Return." Luckily MacDonald tells the story with a breezy, semi-humorous voice that partly takes the reader's mind off of the obviousness of the plot.

Professor Jedediah Amberson is walking through the front door of his local bank, on his way to cash a check, when he feels a faint movement.

"It was, he thought, almost a tremor. Once he had been in Tepoztlan, Mexico, on a Guggenheim grant, doing research on primitive barter systems, and during the night a small earthquake had awakened him. This was much the same feeling. But he stood inside the bank and heard the unruffled hum of activity, heard no shouts of surprise. And, even through the heavy door he could hear the conversation of passers-by on the sidewalk. He shrugged, beginning to wonder if it was something within himself, some tiny constriction of blood in the brain. It had been a trifle like that feeling which comes just before fainting. Jedediah Amberson had fainted once."

Of course, Professor Amberson has just traveled through time, although he doesn't realize it yet. "Not a man to take much note of his surroundings," he writes out a check on the counter and gets in line to see a teller. The scornful young man in the teller window looks intently at the check and then tells Amberson to go play his games elsewhere. It is only then that the good professor notices the strange way the man is dressed, in brightly-colored clothing that look like pajamas. When the teller refuses, Amberson makes enough of a scene that the guard walks over and confronts him, a guard who is dressed even more strangely.

"The man wore a salmon-pink uniform with enormously padded shoulders. He had a thumb hooked in his belt, his hand close to the plastic bowl of what seemed to be a child's bubble pipe."

There is an altercation which leads to the professor being shot with some kind of ray gun that prevents him from moving. Only then does the bank manager emerge from his office, a "fussy little bald-headed man" wearing "pastel blue pajamas with a gold medallion over the heart," who wants to know what all the commotion is about. Once he opens Amberson's change purse and sees a 1949 quarter, he has the professor brought back to his office. It's all now perfectly clear to the manager, but not to Amberson. This is not 1949 but "year eighty-three under Gradzinger calendar." The manager opens the windows to his office and reveals a strange cityscape, unrecognizable to Amberson, who now realizes he's not in Kansas any more.

But this is not really a problem, for the manager need only call the "Department of Temporal Technics" at Columbia University to send over a few technicians who will send the professor back. It is while they are awaiting the arrival of the time boys that Amberson takes the opportunity to ask about the economics of the future world. The currency is now small plastic pellets, although the monetary decimal system has been retained, and when Amberson makes the presumption that the currency is still backed by gold, he gets a dismissive answer.

"Greenbush gasped and then laughed. 'What ludicrous idea! Any fool with public-school education has learned enough about transmutation of elements to make five tons of gold in afternoon, or of platinum or zinc or any other metal or alloy of metal you desire.'"

The professor suggests other possibilities, such as units of energy, precious stones, even rare national resources, only to be laughed at by the manager. Perplexed, Amberson asks a question that must sound strange to anyone who was not an adult before 1970:

"But currency, to have value must be backed by something!"

It is backed by "something," something that is still rare in a future where there is an abundance of everything else that once had value, something that can not be duplicated with speed or mass-production, something that the manager just happens to have stored in his "refrigerated" bank vault: an "HUC."

To find out what that acronym stands for, you'll have to read the story.

It's hard today to recall that once our money was backed by precious metals, and that one could actually walk down to the Treasury Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC and exchange bills for silver or gold. Historically this was always the case, with a few periods of national crisis (World War II, the Great Depression) when that standard was relaxed. When MacDonald wrote "The Miniature," the United States had returned to the gold standard only three years before as a result of the Bretton Woods agreement that set a system of fixed exchange rates and pegged the value of gold at $35 per ounce. That system was followed until 1970, when Richard Nixon closed the gold window and began a system of fiat money, where the currency of the nation was backed by nothing more than "the full faith and credit" of the United States Government. The world followed suit (the dollar being the world's primary currency) and the gold standard has never been used since. 

Interestingly, a few days before I re-read "The Miniature," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Council on Foreign Relations that "fiat money has no place to go but gold," and the continuing troubles of the world economy bring almost daily calls for a return to some sort of "sound money" policy.

It makes me wonder what MacDonald would have thought of our current economic mess. A Keynesian most of his life (recall the name of Meyer's boat at Bahia Mar), MacDonald had a change of heart after the economic troubles of the Nixon, Ford and Carter eras, and he told George Vassallo in his last-ever interview that he believed the world economy was doomed, "unless we dump Keynesian theory and embrace Schumpeter's vision of the reward to the innovator." He even blew up the John Maynard Keynes at the beginning of Cinnamon Skin!

"The Miniature" was included in MacDonald's 1978 science fiction anthology Other Times, Other Worlds -- which can be found on used book sites -- and it is currently available in eBook form (marred by several typographical errors) as an entry in Wonder Audio Books' Death Quotient and Other Stories.

"Escape to Chaos"

Sometimes, John D MacDonald could be too smart for his own good.

Take, for example, his 1951 science fiction novella "Escape to Chaos." What is basically a sprawling space opera becomes bogged down by some of the most mind-numbing science I've ever encountered in a s-f piece, requiring repeated re-readings and head-scratching. Combining quantum physics, statistical probability and multiple dimensions of reality, the premise for this saga is so confusing that even after you've read it you're not really sure of what happened. Perhaps it's just me, or perhaps MacDonald was padding a basically-simple adventure story to garner a higher paycheck -- who knows? And it's not as if one can just gloss over the difficult passages, because they are essential to understanding the basic premise of the story. Thankfully most of JDM's science fiction is far more readable than "Escape to Chaos."

Appearing in the June 1951 issue of Super Science Stories, this 18,000-word story would mark MacDonald's final appearance in that venerable pulp, as the magazine would publish only one more issue before folding. In any event, the author was winding down his work in s-f and would write only a handful of subsequent stories. One gets the feeling from "Escape to Chaos" that he was tiring of the genre and was looking for a way to keep it interesting, but unfortunately his method put enjoyment of the story out of the reach of all but the most dedicated and learned readers.

At its most basic, "Escape to Chaos" is MacDonald's favorite science fiction construct, the same premise used in his two early s-f novels and in several of his stories: aliens of superior intelligence and technological advancement surreptitiously manipulating the direction of civilization's social evolution. In Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies, it was aliens working to change the people of Earth, but in "Escape to Chaos" Earth is the advanced culture, or at least one of them, working to secretly advance the peoples of other planets in various different dimensions, here called Eras. The science of "Symbolic Probability" has made possible the discovery of 26 separate Eras, all in different stages of advancement. Through a principle called the "Oxton Effect" a government agency known as the "Bureau of Socionetics" has begun sending teams of trained agents into these different Eras in order to bring about a more rapid level of evolution. Since open involvement would cause a greater deviation and a lower probability of success along the lines desired, everything is done in secret. Once a certain level of advancement is reached the Oxton Effect allows these different dimensions of reality to co-exist, affecting each other's "languages, the mores, even the fads and fashions." The ultimate goal of all of this? Unity.

The action of the story follows the efforts of one particular team, a male and a female, working together in a fairly advanced civilization that has nonetheless fallen into a state of social decay. Ruled by a despotic emperor named Shain, this empire controls an entire galaxy from the central planet of Rael, and it rules it with an iron fist. Shain's third son, the big, handsome hunk known as Andro, has taken a look around the empire and he doesn't like what he sees.

"He had seen the prancing perfumed artists, claiming an ultimate reality in incomprehensible daubs. He had visited the slave markets of Simpar and Chaigan, and had been sickened. He had seen that the ships were old ships, the weapons old weapons, and the old songs forgotten. He had seen the dusty rotting machines that had been the hope of man, while ten thousand laborers built, by hand and whip a temple to the glory of the House of Galvan...And he had said, 'This is the dark age of Empire. We have had enough.'"

For five years Andro has led an open revolt against his father's empire, and for five years he has made several miraculous escapes, thanks to the hidden work of the Field Team of Calna and Solin. Calna (the female of the team) has gradually become emotionally attached to Andro and his work, and after a sixth near-death-experience saved by Calna, the team is call to the office of the Deputy Director to explain themselves. It is determined that a.) Calna needs a vacation, b.) Andro will be left in a permanent state of suspended stasis and, c.) a distinctive tattoo on Andro's arm will be removed and somehow delivered to his father's top agent Deralan, who has been in charge of hunting down the rebellious son, as proof that Andro is dead.

Calna pretends to go along with the plan but at the first opportunity steals one of the Team ships allowing her to travel between dimensions, saves Andro and goes into hiding with him in one of the twenty-six dimensions. All of the other Field Teams are pulled from their assignments in order to hunt her down. Meanwhile, Deralan has received the tattoo and has shown it to Shain in order to prove that he has at last accomplished his task, but he has his own secret doubts and begins an undercover search of his own for Andro. Calna and Andro fall for each other and Calna begins working for the rebellion, knowing that she can never return to the Bureau of Socionetics.

What could have been a halfway-enjoyable, pulpy, adventuresome joyride is undermined by MacDonald's insistence on bogging down the narrative with overly-technical passages that bring the story to a dead halt. It would be one thing if this "science" was understandable -- perhaps it is, to some readers -- but it borders on the indecipherable for a reader like me. Like most of JDM's loyal readership, I enjoy his forays into science fiction only when the "science" doesn't undermine the "fiction," and when he's more concerned about the characters he has created than the make-believe world they inhabit.

"Escape to Chaos" has been reprinted once, included in a 1976 anthology titled Galactic Empires (Volume Two), edited by Brian Aldiss. Used copies appear now and then.

"All Our Yesterdays"

"One man sat in his death cell, hoping for the miracle he knew would never come. Another watched him, owl-eyed, across the abyss of time; and neither dreamed that their lives were bound up together—that of these two, who were separated by centuries, one must die for the other!"

"All Our Yesterdays" is a John D MacDonald time travel story, a work of science fiction that originally appeared in the April 1949 issue of Super Science Stories under the house name of John Wade Farrell. The pseudonym was necessary since MacDonald had another story -- "Death Quotient" -- in that same issue under his own name, and pulp editors rarely if ever allowed two stories to appear with the same author's name. In addition, MacDonald had a third story in that same issue, "Delusion Drive," under yet another house name, Peter Reed. And one wonders why the exact number of JDM stories is still a subject for debate...

The subject of time travel was an immensely popular one in the science fiction pulps of the forties and fifties, although MacDonald doesn't seem to have employed it often. His use of it in "All Our Yesterdays" falls more into the category of "time paradox," that subcategory of time travel where careless actions while in the past reshape those of the present and future. Its most notable example is perhaps Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," where the mere act of killing a butterfly in the Mesozoic Era causes subtle-but-major changes in the present, much to the horror of the perpetrator. And although "All Our Yesterdays" predates Bradbury's tale by three years, the time-paradox trick had been around since at least 1938 with Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time, and I'm sure the s-f expert could cite earlier examples. MacDonald's perhaps-unique approach to the subject involves a futuristic initiate class who are permitted to observe the past, not by travelling themselves, but by sending some sort of unseen camera and microphone back so that they can look but not interfere.

Ghan the younger is a "tenth-level" crime-seeker on future Earth, a relatively high-level initiate whose job it is to observe crimes taking place in the past on a three-dimensional screen in his home. The focus of this effort is to view instances where justice has miscarried and Ghan's favorite era is mid-twentieth century United States. The powers that be are well aware of the dangers of attempting to manipulate the past, which is why only tenth-level mentalities are permitted to use the machines. While the devices they use do not permit a body to actually travel to the past, with the proper nudging of the controls one could bring the camera so close that it would be observed and even felt. Their reasoning is spelled out in the story's brief preface:

"It is more than a problem of focus. It is more than a question of intellectual curiosity. Though the tendency is for divergence to swing back to norm, it is recognized that objective interference in any case may have a long range effect sufficient to cause objective alterations in present society. Thus, the entertainment quotient of Crime-seeking is perforce limited to those tenth-level mentalities where, due to knowledge, thalamic motivations can be recognized as such, and discounted. Any attempt by a tenth-level mentality to indoctrinate any lesser mentality in Crime-seeking procedure will result in social isolation for an indefinite period. The clearest analogy of the danger of objective interference is that of the primitive man who, clinging to a limb, saws it off between his body and the trunk of the tree."

But Ghan the younger has a problem: he's fallen in love with a "lesser mentality," an eighth level hottie named Luria, "of the cobalt eyes, the honey flesh, the rounded warm arms and soft lips." The couple has been enjoying secret assignations in Ghan's home for a while now, and the only thing he worries more about than being discovered is the possibility that Luria is secretly seeing another eighth level, "a hulking brute of a man" named Powell. The trick then is to keep her happy and occupied, but when Ghan refuses to allow her to see the time machine in action, her first reaction is to threaten to return to Powell. Ghan can't allow that and keep his sanity, so he reluctantly agrees to allow her one viewing. He pulls out a book on twentieth century crime and Luria points at random to a particular name: John Homrik. Homrik was a resident of Kingston, New York back in 1948 and was executed for murdering his child bride Anna, and then faking it to make it appear she had hung herself in the kitchen of their apartment. Ghan adjusts the camera to reveal the death row section of the prison where Homrik is held and it follows him down the green mile as he is strapped into the electric chair and executed. 

Luria is transfixed, not only at how realistic the three dimensional images are, but at how different men appeared back in that dim past, "...strong and... like a man. In these days there are no men like that." Luria immediately asks Ghan to allow her to see the actual crime committed, and having agreed once, he agrees again. They witness the couple at home after an incident of infidelity on Anna's part. Anna is deeply guilty and abject, while John does his best to try and convince her that she is forgiven. They make love and afterward, while John is sleeping, Anna is observed sneaking out of bed, walking into the kitchen and hanging herself. It's a miscarriage of justice, just the type of thing Ghan is trained to look for and he makes a mental note to tell his associates about this particular case. But Luria wants more. Luria wants to prevent the suicide, to prevent Homrik's unjust execution. While Ghan attempts to explain why such an action could change everything they know, Luria climbs onto his lap, chews on his ear and begs him to let her see the suicide just one more time...

"All Our Yesterdays" is a neat but predictable tale, an interesting exercise in plotting and character that allows MacDonald to play the Great Moralizer on a grand scale. It's inclusion in the recent eBook anthology Death Quotient and Other Stories allows the modern reader a chance to enjoy this fable for the first time in sixty years, but unfortunately the story suffers from the same sloppy editing that mars the other inclusions in that collection. Here the editors begin the text with the Super Science Stories promotional blurb (included above) as the first paragraph of the story, complete with exclamation mark! Since that is a grammatical immaturity MacDonald never practiced, it's error is obvious. The blurb is immediately followed by the introductory preface quoted earlier, making the lurch into the actual narrative jarring indeed. I was an early purchaser of this eBook, and I bought the Acrobat version, so perhaps these errors are not present in other formats, or they have hopefully since been corrected.

"Hand from the Void"

"Hand from the Void" is an obscure and long-forgotten John D MacDonald novella that was originally published in the January 1951 issue of Super Science Stories. It's around 20,000-words long and was written toward the end of that huge spurt of science fiction pieces MacDonald produced in 1949 and 1950 (30!) It is a well-written, interesting and thoughtful mystery where the "science fiction" aspect of the story isn't revealed until the final third of the novella. It is all-together a typically well done JDM s-f effort, with one important exception: it's virtually identical to MacDonald's second science fiction novel Ballroom of the Skies. It has the same plot, the same structure, a nearly identical protagonist, several very similar scenes and, for the most part, the same ending. It preceded Ballroom by nearly two years and the debt that novel owes to "Hand from the Void" has, to the best of my knowledge, never been acknowledged.

There are, of course, other cases of MacDonald penning very similar stories. I've already pointed out the similarities between short works such as "Wild, Wonderful Old Man" and "End of the Tiger," and between "I Love You (Occasionally) and "He Knew a Broadway Star," but this is the first time I've spotted a story that is essentially a run-through for a subsequent novel. The closest example of that exercise is the adaptation of his serial "My Brother's Widow" into the novel Area of Suspicion, but that was fully acknowledged, both in the novel itself and by the author himself prior to its publication. Ballroom of the Skies was obviously built upon the framework of "Hand from the Void," but it is a far better work, with its post-war setting being the most dramatic difference. "Hand from the Void" takes place in the here-and-now of 1951 America and has a political aspect MacDonald did away with for the later novel. It is fascinating for both its echoes of the 1948 third-party Dixiecrat incursion as well as for its prescience in mirroring the appeal of Ross Perot in 1992.

Jeff Rayden and Julie O'Reilly are a pair of investigative magazine reporters working for the popular Crux, a periodical boasting a circulation of over two million readers. Jeff is writer and Julie photographer, and together they are on their way to San Ramon, Texas to interview Borden Means, the subject of their next article. Jeff and Julie have been a team for a long time and were once in love, but "too much dough and too much reputation and too many assignments" have soured that relationship and it's begun to color their work. But before the two of them can get into yet another argument about it, a stewardess informs them that their plane is making a special landing in "Dos Almas" to drop the two of them off. When an astounded Jeff asks how such a thing could be possible, he is informed that Mr. Means has arranged it.

Borden Means is a Texas millionaire who been making highly successful political speeches and who has drawn a vast and growing following.

"A muscular bachelor of fifty-two, he had accumulated a fat fortune in Texas oil lands. Now he had given up the accumulation of more money and had purchased network time to lecture America. No, the man had nothing to say, and yet -- in the way he said it... Each time Jeff read the speeches he had felt his heart begin to pound, felt the flush of excitement on his face, felt a rebirth of confidence in himself and in the world. He knew that it was puerile to be aroused by tag words and emotional clichés. Yet all Means had to do was say something about home and mother -- and he took you back to the summer evenings of childhood, the dusk walk to the corner store for ice cream, the murmur of voices on the front porches, the aimless lazy slap of a screen door..."

Still, Jeff is confident that he and Julie will expose him like they had all their other subjects: "Loud little men with egocentric ideas and concentrated lust for power."

Means meets them at the airport and together they are chauffeured to his country home. There they meet his assistant Laura, a blonde haired, blue-eyed woman who bears a striking resemblance to Means chauffer. Means tells them that what he is after is a better world:

"That's rather simple, isn't it? I talk about the things every man wants. We've lost sight of our objective. I help people regain their faith in this world and in a good future for mankind. When enough of them realize, through me, that a better world is attainable, then they will band together to make that world possible."

Jeff and Julie accompany him to his large estate in San Ramon, and along the way Means displays an amazing familiarity with the past work of the pair, remarking that their articles of late have been faltering. When Jeff questions his sincerity Means lectures him in a booming voice that was like "the toll of a distant bell," and makes the hair on the back of Jeff's neck stand up. Means is scheduled to speak that evening in San Ramos and the crowds are overflowing into the streets. When he walks upon the stage the crowd erupts into wild applause that is cut short when Means raises both of his arms. In dead silence and with rapt attention the throngs listen as Means speaks of love and hope and promise and a better tomorrow. Julie is mesmerized and tears stream down her cheeks, and even skeptical Jeff is swept along.

"It was as if Means spoke as with some new tongue that reached directly into his mind. It played with emotions rather than with the intellect. The great voice rose and fell, more delicate at times than a violin, and suddenly as powerful as the northern seas... At the end Jeff was on his feet with all the others, screaming his approval, yelling out his eternal dedication to Borden Means and all he stood for or wanted to stand for."

Yet once the speech is over Jeff manages to disengage himself from the spell. Back in his hotel, he finds that his editor from Crux has come to town, and he makes it clear to the pair that their piece on Means is to be complementary. When Jeff objects he is summarily fired. Julie stays on and will work directly with Means, maintaining an office at his estate.

The next scene is almost a mirror image of one used in Ballroom of the Skies, as Jeff negotiates with the editor of a sleazy magazine to publish his expose of Means. No other periodical will touch it, as Means' popularity is spreading like wildfire. Jeff has done a bit of investigating and has uncovered many strange things about the man. The plane that he and Julie flew to San Ramos in has no record of an unscheduled stop at Dos Almas. None of the people or crew on board have any memory of the stop, but recall the duo landing with the rest of the passengers. Then he discovers that there is no such place as Dos Almas. He has dug deeply into the life of Borden Means and has discovered an unremarkable loner who has been focused solely on making money. He made it big in oil and has no time for women, booze, gambling or even friends. It's the picture of a "sour, greedy, tight-fisted man [who] snapped everybody's heads off, bullied his employees [and] chiseled whenever he could get away with it.... All of a sudden he turns into a guy so warm and human it makes your heart bleed. Why?"

Yet interviews with any former employee or business relation yields only the fondest of memories. Even copies of old newspapers in libraries carry the altered version of Means' past. With Means' popularity growing by the hour, a movement to have him installed as president is begun. Money is pouring in from every part of the country and buttons that read simply MEANS are worn by more and more people, their expressions one of "concealed exaltation." Jeff returns to San Ramos and confronts Means with his discoveries and is dismissed, but not before Means declares:

"They are listening to me! They hear me! We shall have a peaceful and unified world. Violence will die. Man will live with man in peace and security. There is talk of my being president. I shall not settle for that. I shall be President of the United and Federated States of the World!"

Jeff manages to see Julie and they drive into town together, where Julie breaks down and tells him of all the strange things she has witnessed in the house. She speaks the words every self-satisfied male loves to hear from a woman: "Oh Jeff, how right you were! How desperately and incredibly right!" She relates an incident where she walked in on Means unannounced, only to find him sitting bolt upright at his desk, his face "empty, empty, empty. Dead. Dead forever, since the beginning of time. He wasn't breathing!" then he suddenly came to life and was his normal self.

Jeff: "A robot! By God, a robot!"

Julie: "No Jeff. It's something worse than that. Worse!"

Jeff: "What's worse than that?"

Julie: "The walking dead, Jeff. He's dead, Jeff, and somehow they use him."

To reveal any more at this point would spoil the story, and assuming anyone ever gets the chance to locate a copy I'll leave it here. From this point forward the plot pretty much parallels Ballroom of the Skies, in both its structure and scene. The forces behind Means are basically the same as the ones causing havoc on Ballroom Earth, and the protagonists are given the same sort of choices and, ultimately, responsibilities that Dake Lorin is given. Then "the real work begins."

The author's original title for "Hand from the Void" was "The Decoy," a reference that is made clear later in the narrative. There are echoes of other MacDonald science fiction works here, including control of the masses in "Trojan Horse Laugh" and of man uniting against a common enemy featured in "Death Quotient." The author always wrote far better science fiction when he was able to place the story in a familiar and recognizable setting, and it helps that the s-f portions of "Hand from the Void" come in the final third of the book -- up until then it's just a case of a lot of mysterious things happening that could mean either a deranged protagonist or an unreliable narrator. In any case, it's a fun story that ultimately deals with a lot of weighty issues toward the end, even if it does lack suspense or any real violence.

"Hand from the Void has appeared in no anthology that I am aware of, but would make a good choice for inclusion in the next JDM s-f eBook, should there be one.