The Wind Between the Worlds (2 page)

Nerves
involves a disaster at a plant making nuclear isotopes. The precise cause of the trouble remains uncertain at the end of the story, but it is certainly natural: impurities of some sort caused a reactor to run out of control. The description of the plant and the processes appear to be modeled on those of an oil refinery, and the description of nuclear materials is very similar to that in
Twelve Eighty-Seven
, a novel by John Taine (pseudonym of Dr Eric Temple Bell) which had been serialized in
Astounding
in 1935.

The viewpoint character of
Nerves
is an older man, an MD, who (though an important figure) is entirely an observer of the efforts to control the disaster (his duty is to mitigate the harm caused to individuals). Love interest is provided by a young medical assistant (who later turns out to have technical training) and his devoted wife.

Instead of that real-world-of-the-future setting, del Rey built his new story—
The Wind Between the Worlds
—on an explicitly fictional premise: aliens have arrived on Earth and set up a matter transmitter system. The system links Earth with other planets whose intelligent life forms have reached a stage of civilization only slightly more advanced than ours. The transmitter sites are built of material which human science cannot affect.

On its face, this change is detrimental.
Nerves
got much of its power from the grimy industrial setting with which most readers would have been familiar, at least from stories and newsreels.
Wind
’s processes are magic, and the facility is built of Unobtainium.

Although del Rey does not say so, there is a very good reason why he might have made the choice he did. By creating a wholly fictional technological background for
Wind
, del Rey avoided the danger of being overtaken by events.

Nerves
describes the growing horror and panic of a reactor failure in a fashion which present-day familiarity with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima makes even more chilling than a reader in 1942 would have found it. The science, however, is complete nonsense. Del Rey wrote
Nerves
while nuclear reactors were top secret. The petroleum cracking-plant model cannot even be revised to work in light of greater knowledge, while the descriptions of isotopes, radiation burns, and similar matters have little connection with what a modern reader understands from the words.

Del Rey’s second major change from
Nerves
was in choosing a classic hero as the viewpoint character of
Wind
: a young male troubleshooter who happens to be working on the site when the crisis occurs. He immediately takes charge of local efforts to contain the crisis and is soon promoted (by the aliens behind the scenes) to complete control of the system.

The hero is aided by the female site manager, who has specialized expertise. She acts as the hero’s chief subordinate as well as providing love interest. Their physical relationship, while not particularly important to the story, is of considerable historical interest.

1) The hero and heroine have sex (though the viewpoint quickly cuts away).

2) The heroine is the aggressor.

3) The heroine explicitly has begun the scene as a virgin.

For the most part,
Wind
could have appeared in
Astounding
; indeed,
Wind
is in many fashions a more typical
Astounding
story than
Nerves
was. Campbell would never have permitted this sexual element, however—nor would any of the slick fiction magazines in 1951. Philip Jose Farmer’s
The Lovers
, involving a sexual relationship between a human and an alien, appeared the next year to great controversy, but in some ways
Wind
is (for its time) the more surprising.

The final major difference is that the crisis in
Wind
is the result of sabotage rather than accident as was the case in
Nerves
. It is not clear whether this change was del Rey’s own idea or whether it was one suggested by Gold and accepted by the author.

Herbert L Gold was a brilliant and successful editor, but he could be a difficult editor as well. According to A J Budrys, Gold literally rejected a story because he didn’t think Budrys
looked
like he could have written it. He was also probably the most intrusive editor in the science fiction field.

By 1959, Isaac Asimov had become so angry at Gold’s editing that he was only willing to submit a story to
Galaxy
under the condition that Gold would either accept or reject it as written. The animus against Gold’s methods became so general that in February 1960, Gold publically extended Asimov’s terms to all professionals: he would henceforward accept or reject
any
story by a professional without meddling.

This was an astounding concession in a field in which it was a given that an editor edits. I can explain it only in connection with the fact that Gold soon thereafter gave up the editorship completely as a result of PTSD from his service in the Philippines.

In the case of
Wind
, however, Gold did not himself do the rewriting. Del Rey says that he submitted a rough draft to Gold, who responded with many editorial directions. The bulk of these changes improved the story in del Rey’s opinion, but Gold insisted that a member of the hero’s team be one of the saboteurs. When del Rey reprinted the story in a collection of his own, he eliminated that editorial change.

The element of sabotage fits
Wind
’s background emphasis on hostility to aliens and anger at the economic disruption caused by matter transmission. That said, the cause of the crisis is wildly improbable as a means of intentional sabotage (a bottle has to shatter so that a large piece flies into exactly the right spot to hold a switch open) but it
is
the sort of thing that could happen through sheer bad luck.

My opinion is that Gold requested the cause of the crisis be changed from an accident to sabotage, and that del Rey agreed with him. Another reader may come to the opposite conclusion on the basis of the same (lack of) evidence.

Wind
gains structurally by one change forced by having only half the available wordage compared to
Nerves
. Del Rey reduced the length by writing a very straightforward story.
Nerves
has a subplot which, though well handled, turns out to be completely extraneous to the real problem and its solution. By sticking instead to his core theme, del Rey keeps the focus of
Wind
on the situation which threatens life not only on Earth but also on the planet at the other end of the linked matter transmitters.

Del Rey’s one dissatisfaction with
Nerves
was that it wasn’t the cover story of the issue in which it appeared (that honor went to a—minor—novelette by Anthony Boucher).
The Wind Between the Worlds
did have the cover (of the March 1951
Galaxy
). The artist, Don Sibley, isn’t a name to conjure with in the field of science fiction illustration today. When I read the issue in 1961, however, my fifteen-year-old self found the painting evocative of the cosmic immensity of the threat which the story describes.

Gold and del Rey set out to create a science fiction suspense story as effective as
Nerves
. Did they succeed? In the short term, no:
The Wind Between the Worlds
did not cause the sensation that the earlier story had. In the longer term, however,
Wind
holds up better than
Nerves
on close reading. Modern readers (or rereaders, like me) will find not only enjoyment but craftsmanship and thought-provoking questions.

In sum,
The Wind Between the Worlds
is a deliberate reflection of its greater predecessor; but in some ways, the reflection is better than the original image.

—David Drake

I
t was hot in the dome of the Bennington matter transmitter building. The metal shielding walls seemed to catch the rays of the sun and bring them to a focus there. Even the fan that was plugged in nearby didn’t help much. Vic Peters shook his head, flipping the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted about, so the fan could reach fresh territory, and cursed under his breath.

Heat he could take. As a roving troubleshooter for Teleport Interstellar, he’d worked from Rangoon to Nairobi—but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he’d met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he’d have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now.

Besides, a figure like Pat’s couldn’t be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Cloth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work.

She looked down at him, grinning easily. Her arm came up to toss her hair back, leaving a smudge on her forehead to match one on her nose. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but the smile seemed to illumine her gray eyes, and even the metal shavings in her brown hair couldn’t hide the red highlights.

“One more bolt, Vic,” she told him. “Pheooh, I’m melting… So what happened to your wife?”

He shrugged. “Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn’t her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn’t much of a husband.”

Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He’d grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy.

M
an had always been a topsyturvy race. He’d discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a worldwide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they’d achieved a genuine science of sociology.

DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac’s esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he’d built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine.

DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn’t believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles—then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were.

Such a secret couldn’t be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne’s explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost.

The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly—a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then…

Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in midair. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose. Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked.

Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world, perhaps some solar system, since there was no theoretical limit to the distance covered by matter transmittal.

It was a week of wild attempts to crack open the “observer” and of futile attempts to learn some-thing about it. Vic’s mind had been filled with Martians, and he had tried to join the thousands who flocked to DuQuesne’s laboratory to see the thing. But his father had been stubborn—no fare for such nonsense. And Vic had had to ‘wait until’ the papers sprang the final surprise, a week later.

T
he ball had suddenly moved aside and made no effort to stop the machine from operating. When power was turned on, it had disappeared, and this time the Envoy had appeared. There was nothing outlandish about him—he seemed simply a normal man, step-ping out of the crude machine.

In normal English, he had addressed the crowd with the casual statement that he was a robot, designed deliberately to serve as an ambassador to Earth from the Galactic Council. He was simply to be the observer and voice of the Council, which was made up of all worlds having the matter transmitter. They had detected the transmitter radiation, and, by Galactic Law, Earth had automatically earned provisional status. He was here to help set up transmitter arrangements. Engineers from Betz would build transports to six planets of culture similar to Earth’s, to be owned by the Council, as a non-profit business, but manned by Earthmen as quickly as they could be trained.

In return, nothing was demanded, and nothing more was offered. We were a primitive world by their standards, but we would have to work out our own advancement, since they would give no extra knowledge.

He smiled pleasantly to the shocked crowd and moved off with DuQuesne to await results. There were enough, too, from a startled and doubting world. The months that followed were a chaos of news and half-news. The nations were suspicious. There was never something for nothing. The Envoy met the President and Cabinet; he met the United Nations. India walked out; India walked back quickly when plans went ahead blithely without her. Congress proposed tariffs and protested secret treaties. The Envoy met Congress, and somehow overcame enough opposition to get a bare majority.