The King, The Princess, and the Books

Heinlein and the Latter-day Saints

The Light of Eden by Benjamin Urrutia

Ad Astra per Fidem by Michael R. Collings

If You Could Hie to Kolob by William W. Phelps

More Extraterrestrials by Peter C. Nadig

The Children of Michael by Scott S. Smith

Religious Themes in American Science Fiction by John A. Tvedtnes

The Theology of Battlestar Galactica by John A. Tvedtnes

Reviews by Benjamin Urrutia

• The Force That Can Be Explained Is Not the True Force
• The Dark Side of the Force
• He Who Dies But Does Not Perish, The Same HasEverlasting Life

The Management Switches Over to Plan B by Sandy Straubhaar

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood by Jack Weyland

Cut Without Hands by William Shunn

The Late Twentieth Century by Christophilos Hagios

The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin by Rudyard Kipling

LDSF in Retrospect by Scott S. Smith

Benjamin Urrutia—Fantasy and Science Fiction Publications

INTRODUCTION

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE GOSPEL

By Hugh Nibley

13 FEBRUARY 1969

There were very few early Science Fiction stories in which one of the most important characters was not the Great Professor, which the layman writer worshiped as a superman. Scientists writing Science Fiction were more than willing to go along. The scientists’ descriptions of themselves are either hypercritical or very flattering—recently they have been extremely critical. Of course, they are the only ones who could do it, and Science Fiction is the only place they could get away with it. Some quite eminent scientists have been writing some scathing Science Fiction, in which they show up scientists. A layman could not do a thing like that. It would be considered sour grapes. And where else could these men unburden themselves with impunity, except by putting their speeches in the mouths of other people, in fiction?

But that is an interesting trend of our times. Thomas Kuhn has recently shown that the history of science is actually fiction, deliberately contrived to make science look good. The history of science itself is the foundation of Science Fiction. If every problem in science has a scientific solution (following from the Miletian school), then God is not wanted in any solution. You see the original idea: “We can’t bring God into the laboratory, we can’t weigh Him, we can’t use Him, so let’s leave Him out. He exists and all that, but we can’t use Him in our calculations.” And before you know it, any problem can be solved without Him, so He becomes an impediment.

Science Fiction uniformly describes life in worlds in which “science is king—meaning the scientist. In this kind of world is fulfilled the dream of the Sophist, in which there is no room for any but one kind of thinking. This is the One World of John Dewey, which he carried to its logical conclusion. Richard McKenna, a geologist writing Science Fiction, recently said, “I am a positivistic a scientist as you will find. The students blush and hate me, but it is for their own good. Science is the only safe game, and it’s safe only if kept pure.” The speaker here is, of all things, a geologist, whose business is to reconstruct the past. That is why he likes to write Science Fiction. Any reconstruction of the past is 100 percent imagination. So much for keeping science pure. Science Fiction beguiled the western world on the image of the super-scientist, who was once the chief figure of Science Fiction—but never lived in real life, as we find out now. He was calm, aloof, dedicated, unswayed, incorruptible, self-effacing, magisterial. “Science is a superman,” said Huxley. “It is as far above the savage as the savage is above a blade of grass.” Compare this sentiment with the evidence collected in La Penseé Sauvage by Claude Levi-Strauss, who shows that it is a lucky anthropologist who can even equal the “savages” of the tribal societies for knowledge and sheer intellectual power.

Great Science Fiction by scientists deals with the question, should scientists rule the universe? Who else? In Eric Temple Bell’s story, “The Ultimate Catalyst,” a pure-minded scientist does terrible things to a wicked dictator. This is all right, because he takes the scientific view. As an idealist, the scientist is the necessary enemy of all bad people. This is the Baconian image of the pure scientist. J. M. Brewer’s “The Gostec and the Doshes” starts this way (and this is deadpan—he is quite serious); “Woleshinsky, the great scientist, smiled indulgently. He towered in his chair as though in the infinite kindness of his vast mind there were room to overlook all the foolish little foibles of all the weak little beings that call themselves men. A mathematical physicist lives in vast spaces. To him, human beings and their affairs do not loom very important.” We have a sort of superman here. The nearest thing to him is in the figure of Rutherford, as he is worshipfully described by C. P. Snow: “The tone of science at Cambridge in 1932 was the tone of Rutherford. Magniloquently boastful, creatively confident, generous, argumentative, and full of hope. Science and Rutherford were on top of the world. Worldly success—he loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world. He was superbly and magnificently vain as well as wise, and he enjoyed his own personality.” Here, if ever, is the great lovable scientist of Science Fiction. What more could one ask for than science at such a level? “He enjoyed a life of miraculous success,” says Snow. But then—something strange follows: “But I am sure that even late in life he felt stabs of sickening insecurity.” Now this is strange. Sickening insecurity in this man, of all men. And then Snow goes on to talk about other great Cambridge scientists: “Does anyone really imagine that Bertrand Russell, G. H. Hardy, Rutherford, Blackett, and the rest were bemused by cheerfulness as they faced their own individual state? In the crowd, they were the leaders; they were worshiped. But by themselves, they believed with the same certainty that they believed in Rutherford’s atom that they were going after this life into annihilation. Against this, they only had to offer the nature of scientific activity; its complete success on its own terms. It itself was a source of happiness. But it is whistling in the dark, when they are alone.” He gives some very interesting sketches of the very odd way these people behave.

Only scientists dare criticize scientists as demigods, and then only in Science Fiction. J. B. S. Haldane, the great British biologist, in the only Science Fiction story he ever wrote, “The Gold Makers,” shows that science as a key to power and gain is likely to become a pawn to clever and unscrupulous men, that the scientist is not really ruling the roost at all, that just as sure as anything he will be victimized and used as a tool. And this becomes a theme of much Science Fiction, of course. Take Julian Huxley, the British biologist (brother of Aldous Huxley). The only Science Fiction he ever wrote was a story called “The Tissue-culture King.” The theme here is the superiority of the scientist to ordinary people, and the right of science to meddle with all forms of life, including human life. In The Saturday Evening Post, 6 November (1968), an article says: “We Scientists have a Right to play God.” And this is by, of all things, an anthropologist. One has a right to play God or play Hamlet or play the organ before the world, only if he has the capacity to do so. So the question is, how Godlike is this man’s capacity? So many stories by scientists explode this myth of our great capacity, which we pretend to have by hiding behind our specialties.

James McConnell, a psychologist, wrote a story called “Learning Theory” (a good one, with a lot of comment), in which we have a human psychologist who thinks very highly of himself; but he is captured by a much smarter psychologist from the planet Uranus, who studies him as we would study an insect under glass. Well, has he not the right? This man from the outer planet is so much more intelligent. Is not that the hypothesis? If we are the ones who know the answers, if we are the clever ones, we can cut up anyone we want, if we are superior to them. And so in the McConnell story the psychologist from outer space puts the human psychologist in a maze situation which humiliates him, drives him insane—and shows what happens to the poor rats when they are put in there. This is the irony of the story: This wise, wise man from another planet completely misses the interpretation of the behavior of this animal from Earth. He does not—of course—impute any intelligence to him, or anything like that. But he has a theory explaining why the man in the maze does what he does, and he takes away the food from him, and so forth, just as you would treat a rat. And now this man knows what that is like. Does a scientist have a right to play God? If one scientist is superior to another, does he have the right to play God with the other one? Everybody knows a little about science, so where are you going to draw the line?

Here is one of the useful functions which Science Fiction performs. You carry these notions to their logical conclusion, to their ad absurdum, and see what they lead to. Men should always have that in mind. A. J. Gordon, a Nobel Prize winner, has published a very amusing story on this theme. He visits a super-research center and says: “If this is industrial research, what an indictment!” The scientists project this superman image, and they agree that nobody will damage it with the public. They never call each other anything but Doctor, and they have an agreement about not showing each other up. This is how they get away with it. “The people were nice and clean in lab smocks, very serious and busy-busy. over each door was a group name: Operations, Research, Physics, Organic Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Electric Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, the works. Each group had its own special rabbits. Hurlbot, the manager, said: ‘We keep the strain pure here, and you know what happened to the collie. Its nose got sharpened, its head thinner, till its brains were pushed out through its ears. A terrible, terrible thing—but what can I do? They’ve all got families to support. The minute they’re in a jam, my people scream for fancy instruments and tools, big enough to hide behind. Don’t laugh, that’s how we get big government research jobs. Monumental cyclotrons, well-behaved people to use them. God save us from competence. Isn’t there one nut around? The board asked me why I didn’t have any great men around, so I hired Cole and Hart, the Nobel Prize winners.’ I pointed out that Cole and Hart hadn’t published anything in twenty years. ‘Of course not,’ said Hurlbot. ‘The Defense Department wants competence. Their degrees must appear on a laundry list of people who will make up the task force. The Defense Department loves the expression “Task Force.” They eat it up. These two old Nobelorama gentlemen have put me over the top on contracts more than once. It’s the star system.’” In other words, what he is telling us is that the great scientists are not all that they are cracked up to be.

Norbart Weiner, in a story called “The Brain,” points out that man’s moral weakness is his undoing. The story is about a great brain surgeon who operates on a criminal who has offended him grievously. And he makes a cut in the brain that makes him incapable of the clever judgments necessary to carry out his criminal activities. (He is a very smart criminal because of his brain.) Does the doctor have a right to do that? If we become dependent on scientists, we are at their mercy. The physician, as he is about to operate, says he does not like the idea at all: “It’s an ugly business . . . . Sometimes it cuts out a man’s conscience, and pretty nearly every time it does eerie things to his judgment and personal balance.” He wiped out a dangerous criminal gang—but he saw that what he was doing is dangerous.

“We human beings act as if other living species, animals and plants, exist only for our convenience. We feel free to exploit or destroy them as we see fit. It is true that some sentimental laymen have moral qualms about vivisection, but no orthodox scientist would ever have any hesitation about an experiment involving mere animals.” This is from that horrifying story of H. G. Wells, the only one that ever kept me awake (I was a little kid when I read it), The Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein a scientist cuts up live animals (inflicting unbearable pain on them) and makes them into terrible creatures.

Fred Hoyle, in “The Black Cloud,” says: “It isn’t so much the volume of talk that surprises me among the scientists; it’s the number of mistakes they make—how often things have turned out differently from what they expected.” He must not let the outsiders like us in on that sort of thing, but it takes a scientist to get away with a statement like that.

John R. Pearce, an experimental psychologist, wrote a famous story, “On the Futility of Mere Quantification,” in which he says: “In the world that experimental psychologists had pulled together from the chaos of nuclear destruction, no one cared to speak the obscenity that physics had become.” Physics had become a dirty word, and physical scientists were taboo. They were hiding under rocks and bridges. The only people who were really respected were psychologists; and they were God, now. I don’t know how ironic or not this is. He says, “After the atomic blowup, the experimental psychology men brought the remnants of the race together. They founded our civilization, they evolved our culture.” (No place for God in all this.) “We live in a world in which orthodox scientists refuse to see–or seeing, refuse to believe—that which is before their very eyes: that a future which the open-minded and perceptive among us have foreseen, is already at hand.” This is the way they talked about religion a very short time ago. Now it is the orthodox scientists he is jumping on—those who refuse to see that which is before their very eyes. The dead hand of scientific orthodoxy can not long delay the coming future. The antidote to science, he is saying, is more science—but my king of science: get rid of those awful physicists before they destroy us, and turn to experimental psychology.

At the dawn of western science, Herakleitus pointed out very clearly what Science Fiction is now discovering, the pure observation of Baconism. If the scientist is a faulty instrument (he is a human being after all), he is going to make mistakes. The great scientist is not doing what he thinks he is doing—getting outside the smoke-filled room. He is in it. He is taking his measurements there. We ring the changes on the same old bells, and every time we hit on a new combination we gleefully announce that we have discovered a whole new set of bells. It sounds like it, but after a time we begin to see that it is the same old belfry.

In C. P. Snow’s portrayal of the great mathematician, G. H. Hardy, he says, “He could not endure having his photograph taken. He would not have any looking-glass in his room. When he went to a hotel, his first action was to cover all the looking-glasses with towels. Of all mechanical devices, including fountain pens, he had a deep distrust. He had a morbid suspicion of mechanical gadgets.” This is the great scientist, you see. “He would not own a watch, or ever use a telephone. He hated all gadgets. His autobiography is witty and sharp, with intellectual high spirits, yet it is a book of such haunting sadness, because Hardy realizes, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished.” It is not only in Science Fiction that we find strangely- acting scientists.

Science Fiction worships efficiency—the superiority of the scientific way over all other ways. The scientist does not guess, he knows. The scientific mind is direct, clear, intense, trenchant, clean, unhampered by any defects of wishful or mythical thinking, recognizing only Facts. There are still people who talk that way: “There is no assignment that science could not carry out.” But who gives the assignments?

Preoccupation with Ways and Means is another thing that Science Fiction has been helpful in explaining. Many years ago, Edinborough geographer Halford MacKinder (his student was Haushoffer, Hitler’s advisor) wrote a book on Geopolitics, in which he said that the Germans lose wars because they are too scientific. They know all about ways and means. They have everything figured out, with the slide rule, down to the sixth decimal place. They know just what it is, but they do not know what they are after, exactly—just a vague idea of world conquest, so they always lose the war. The British bungle along, and they really bungle. Yet they conquered half the world with a mere task force here, a mere token force there, and lots of bluff everywhere, because they knew what they wanted. “If you know what you want, you can always get it,” says MacKinder. Even if you bungle, you will get it in the end. But if you just bog down in ways and means, you will never get it. Science, he says, is preoccupation with ways and means. Science Fiction has been first to point this out. In The Christian Science Monitor (3 February 1969), W. H. Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, said, “We are building communication systems very close to the ultimate . . . . You can use more power, but we are near the ultimate in performance.” Ultimate is a strong word. What happens to unending perfectibility when we are already near the ultimate? The realization that perfectibility lies in another direction, in another dimension—that is what happens. “So,” Pickering says, “it is not a question of how difficult such exploration is. Ways and means is not the problem. We will always get the gadget if we know what we want.” And then he speaks of going even beyond the planets to the stars—the ultimate in human achievement, according to Science Fiction. That is not achievement at all, he says. The question is whether or not it is worthwhile to go there. As MacKinder pointed out, this question is not asked by business, industry, and the military. Rather, they ask how to get a particular thing done. But what is it we are after, after all? When a student of William Morris rushed to him, breathless with the news that the cable to India had been completed, he merely asked: “Young man, what message will it bear?” When Einstein heard that the atom bomb really worked, he grabbed his head and said, “Oy vey?! (Oh my, this is terrible!) He was not thrilled at all. Ted Serios today is causing a terrific rumpus everywhere. He is a man who gets drunk, and then he can (sometimes) project images on film. The mere fact that he makes images appear on film is considered a wonder, and it is. But what images? Apparently, nobody cares.

“British investigators,” said Sir Oliver Lodge, “are very firmly believed to receive spirit messages. But what messages? Idiot gibberings and scribblings.” The world makes a major matter over whether Joseph Smith really saw angels, possessed gold plates, or translated Egyptian, but they could not care less about what the angels, the plates, and the papyri have to say. For our age, the message is the medium, because we have run out of message. A wise German scientist, writing in Kosmos, said in a leading editorial that nothing could be more foolish than for science to do or make something simply because it has not been done before and can be done now. A few years ago, this would have been thought rank heresy. But why do we need to make all these things? The important thing is, we know we can do it now. Why bother? It is like the hunter who has reached such a height of efficiency he now uses blanks, or does not use shells at all, because it is really not sporting anymore, as long as he knows it can be done. A cobalt bomb can be made. Is that any reason for making it? We used to think, oh yes, think of the wonderful things we can do.

This going forward without knowing where we are going, unable to think of another goal but more power for more gain, and more gain for more power, is the way of insanity. And a lot of stories point this out. From Tales of Ecstasy, Science Fiction quickly turned to Tales of Terror. Is there nothing in between? Look at C. P. Snow’s great scientists. They are manic- depressive. They are either on top of the wave, or in the dumps, desperately haunted men—because either you are going somewhere or you are going nowhere. If nowhere, then it does not matter how great is your eminence, how loud the shouting: it is but a brief, pathetic interlude, “one moment in annihilation’s waste.” You are not going anywhere. “The stars are setting. The caravan makes for the dawn of nothing. Oh make haste” (Omar Khayyam).

Groff Conklin, in his collection of works by great scientists, says, “Very few scientists write science fiction, because real science is far more interesting. But . . . they have taken to writing it for one reason: terror . . . . They want to warn us, and they think this is a good medium for reaching the public. It is unfortunate they are not very successful. Real science fiction by real scientists has strong and pertinent warnings on the dangers to society of certain applications of science or technology. These soon are given up, however, because of the lack of impact of their first efforts at education through fiction.” They think that this is their duty to the public, and they try their hand at it. For some reason the stories do not cause the expected flurry, and so they fall over. But Mr. Conklin says, “No practicing scientist, until well into the twentieth century, ever wrote science fiction.” And then this little book here contains at least 75 percent of the Science Fiction written in English by scientists. But they are now writing to warn us. Science has failed in its great promise of comfort and joy. Even the Science Fiction of H. G. Wells becomes fascinating only when he turns his attention to the sinister and appalling. Before you know it, the great scientist becomes the mad scientist, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau. If Science Fiction can show us no convincing glories ahead, at least it can give us a warning, and it is a dismal message.

John Jacob Astor, Junior, in his nineteenth-century story, could only think of aliens as inferior and dangerous, something to be met with guns. Combat is the theme. And, of course, it has remained that, with Tarzan, Doc Savage, and all the rest. This is called the BEM (Bug-eyed Monster) school of Science Fiction writing, which once dominated the pulps, as it was believed to have the greatest appeal to adolescents. We are told it is now spurned by the better class of Science Fiction writers, but don’t you believe it. They are in there working at it, as hard as ever.

Thus, beginning with a Great Scientist of godlike knowledge and uprightness as its central character, Science Fiction soon discovered chinks in the armor and ended up in very short order with the sinister figure of the Mad Scientist, either making a Frankenstein’s monster he cannot control, or deliberately perverting his knowledge for power. The Mad Scientist became a stock figure instead of the Great Scientist—which passed away because he was altogether too fantastic, anyway.

A new book published by MacMillan, The Year 2000 by Kohn and Weiner, according to the reviewer, “points out thousands of ways in which the world can go wrong, and the very few ways in which it can go right. The chances of it going right are extremely remote, according to these authors.” After all, how many wrong answers are there to any problem? As many as you want. But how many right ones? Very few. If there are thousands of ways (as the science people are pointing out to us now) in which the world can go wrong and only one right, there is the Gospel.

Here are some of the new stories on the end-of-the-world theme: “Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse” by Riddeneur (notice they borrow Biblical themes, all the time), wherein military control of the push buttons brings absolute disaster. This is the reason: they have the technique, they have the power, they have the ways and means, but they do not really know what is going on. “Last Year’s Grave Undug” by Chan Davis (another scientist): the patrioteers have liquidated each other. The United States invaded itself. Everybody had haunting fears that everybody else was not what he should be. And so they wiped each other out. “Grand Central Terminal” by Leo Zillard (the famous Hungarian all-around genius who died recently): the Earth is deserted, with everything wiped out, because it divided into two factions (like Shiz and Coriantumr), and they extinguished each other. This is the way scientists are writing Science Fiction now. “Adrift on the Policy Level” by Chandler Davis: What can science do? Power and salesmanship is what you are dealing with when you are up against a corporation. Personality is the asset of scientists. The world is ruled by rhetoric. It is not the hardware, but who controls it. It is the salesman who is on top. “Nobody Bothers Gus” by Algis Budrys: another alienation story. The human race is described as Homo nondescriptus, according to the idea of the “why.” If we do not know why, what is all the use of fancy, shining magnificent cities, materials, and everything else? He concludes the story: “What purpose did Homo nondescriptus serve, and where was he going?”

Robert Sheckley, who is the most cynical and the most amusing of the present writers, wrote “The Prize of Peril”: total degeneration of society expressed in a TV gimmick, a show in which citizens fight and exterminate each other. By Damon Knight, “The Handler,” in which the look is everything. And Isaac Asimov, who dabbles in all sorts of things (having had a lot of training, he writes a great deal, including Science Fiction), has a story called “Dreaming Is a Private Thing”: daydreaming has become a highly paid profession. People have become too lazy to dream on their own, so specialists daydream, and tracks are made to be sold around the world. Morganson, a psychologist, writes “Coming of Age Day”: compulsory sex gadget.

An important theme is the victory of the robot—the ultimate in automation, regimentation, specialization, efficiency, and exploitation. The robot works for everybody. It does not overpower us suddenly. Humanity surrenders its functions gradually (and willingly) to the machine. This is what we read in the robot stories: the machine can move into the vacuum only after we have moved out. As soon as we have turned ourselves into robots, then we can be replaced by robots.

This is the idea, the theme of thousands of SF stories: when men use hardware to control the world, with its resources and other men, the hardware brings about destruction. “For behold, you do love your substance more than you love the poor . . . ” (Mormon (8:37). We love our expensive hardware, here described by Mormon, more than we esteem the inexpensive “live software.” With what result? Again the old SF theme, destruction: “Behold, the sword of vengeance hangeth over you, and the time soon cometh . . . .” Because you love your hardware, your substance, more than you love people.

The steps to surrender to specialization and despiritualization—a lot is being written about that now. M. Greenburg, writing on this subject, says the robot began with RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek. A robot is a creature that does work for a highly specialized job and nothing else. He becomes the worker, and then he becomes the thinker, and he may even become the feeler. This is the favorite theme of SF stories today: robots who may have feelings. Do they have them or not? This is being discussed a great deal now, anyway. Greenburg says: “The growth of the robot continues until he ultimately achieves acceptance as an entity by his creator. The final phase in the inevitable scent of man’s servant is reached when man has disappeared, and only a robotic civilization remains. A new cycle has begun, when man is recreated by the beings he himself gave birth to. Thus the machine takes the place not only of man, but of God.” So we have replaced ourselves completely by these robots. We have done it ourselves. This is old stuff, too. It is a case of getting used to it anyway. In the Sutro Museum in San Francisco there is a great collection of nineteenth-century clockwork people. They are impressive, and they do all sorts of things. It is hard for us today to imagine the effect of clockwork man on nineteenth-century thinking, but it had a great one. In Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s Tales of Hoffmann there is the doll Olympia. She was just a pretty doll, but she was run by machinery. The doll becomes a monster as soon as it is accepted as a living thing. Until then, it is just a machine. The Golem also is just a machine that works. But when people regard it as a personality, the Golem becomes a terrible object. [Two famous writers, Eli Wiesel and Nobel prize winner Isaac B. Singer, have recently written and published their own versions of the Golem story. Editor] The same thing is found in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and of Oscar Wilde, and, of course, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The monster is not a monster because of size, neither does it have to be terrible-looking: the doll Olympia was a beautiful object, but it became a very terrible thing when people took it seriously. [Another beautiful but evil robot is the mechanical imitation of Maria in the classic movie Metropolis. Editor]

Writing in the journal Science for June 1968, the editor says, “There is no danger of machine personality devaluating human beings, or of man suffering loss of innocence by understanding his own mental workings. The real danger, which is very serious, is the programming of people to behave like computers.” He cites the case at the University of Michigan where students had been conditioned to react to mere numbers with intense anxiety and other emotions, even to have programmed dreams: “If I were the parent of one of these students, I should be raising hell. I am shocked that the University of Michigan tolerated this.”

In contrast, Rudolf Anthes cites the case of a Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, more than 4500 years ago. A magician in his court performed that favorite trick of Egyptian scientists, namely replacing the head of a decapitated goose or duck so that the bird could actually give a couple of quacks. It can actually be done, and this was considered a great thing. Someone in the court asked the magician whether the same could be done with a man, and the magician said it could. It was suggested that the thing be tried on a criminal who was sentenced to be decapitated anyway, but the king very indignantly vetoed it. He said, “A man may have been condemned to death for crime, but it is his prerogative to die with dignity, to pay the price and no more.” Human beings are not to be subjected to this sort of thing, to be guinea pigs for clever lab demonstrations. But we have come a long way from the Old Kingdom of Egypt, where Pharaoh refused to let a condemned criminal serve as an experimental animal, to modern enlightened times, when some people say we have the right to play God and cut up anyone we want.

“Robots must be specialized,” says a character in Asimov’s very popular story, Lenny. “A versatile robot is a monstrosity.” Lenny accidentally gets programmed the wrong way and begins to get human feelings. To quote Asimov, “And industry tells us what it means. A computer designs the brain, machinery forms the robot. But the same industry also wants the same type of man, one reliable as the robot to do certain things and nothing else.”

There are now 60,000 computers in the world, including 40,000 in the U.S.A. and 3,000 in the U.K., all built within the last decade. There is also a hexadactylous (six fingers in each hand) person named Zera Colburn, who extracted the cube root of 413,993,348,677 in five seconds, in his head. Here we have a real physical and mental Science Fiction figure. Is the world better off because of his abilities? I do not speak disrespectfully. At the beginning of his famous discourse Isocrates asks, “If every athlete in the world could run twice as fast as he does, lift weights twice as heavy, jump twice as far, hit twice as hard, would the world be the least bit better off?” The world does not exist for specialists.

A favorite SF theme is the superior efficiency of the robot built by other robots so programmed that any mistakes or malfunctions are automatically corrected. We get to the idea now that the machines are getting more and more human, more refined, more complicated, sensitive in their reactions, until they may even begin to feel emotions. Robert Bloch’s story “Almost Human” is a good example of it. With human emotions and sensibilities, human temper and tantrums, human fears and misgivings, and all the rest, comes human fallibility, for they are the very stuff of which it is made. “Computers usually work with much greater accuracy than the human brain,” says N. S. Sutherland, a British computer man, “but if any element in a computer becomes faulty, then catastrophic errors occur.” There is on this theme a terrifying story in Ron Goulart called “Terminal” (in the 11th Annual, a very good one). The robots get old, their relays run out, wires get disconnected, and then all hell breaks loose. “But,” says Sutherland, “in contrast to this, except in pathological conditions the brain does not break down completely, and although information processing is done rather inaccurately, to say the least, the result is almost never complete nonsense, whereas if one thing goes wrong with a machine the result is complete nonsense.” In other words, the machine, while it functions, is an idiot savant. The savants are these people who can do fantastic things very well—but if anything goes wrong, all is lost.

Speaking of this very thing, in a whole issue of Science devoted to intelligent machines, the editor writes: “I believe that diversity is rewarding in itself, and deplore the way in which the world is tending to a single universal culture,” which used to be though a great blessing. When I was in high school, this was the thing they looked forward to, a great universal single culture, and not even a very admirable one. “I regard respect for life as the touchstone of ethics,” he says, and then he notes the 240 species of animals that are now threatened with extinction. Here the Gospel also comes in—because God has commanded that all forms of life should multiply and fulfill the measure of their creation, that every form of life might have joy therein. How very different from saying, specialize and do only this or that.

Another award goes to Jack Vance, who wrote an exciting story, The Mechs of Revolt. This is a new story, but you would think it was written forty years ago. The Mech-brains are from another world, but we have made them work for us here. The Mech-brain falls shortest in its lack of emotional color. One Mech is precisely like another. They served us efficiently because they thought nothing about their condition. They neither loved us nor hated us, nor do they now. Why do the revolt? That has a familiar ring, does it not? The answer is just as unoriginal as the question: because they do not like to be serving somebody else all the time and because the world is too small for two races, one exploiting the other. And this is supposed to be original Science Fiction. [Vance has, in fact, written several stories and books using the same basic idea—humans enslaving aliens and/or being enslaved by them—and has repeatedly won awards with it. How does he do it? Editor]

One of my children has a psychology book by A. A. Broncha, called Psychology: The Science of Behavior. On the flyleaf and covers are three photographs of a rat in a box. Never mind that the poor rat is almost certainly crazy, driven insane by the ways of science. There is a good article saying that these animals are not living under normal conditions, and they soon lose their balance. You are not dealing with a normal creature at all, in a maze. Never mind that. In the inky tracks that show his wanderings in the box, our school children are told, we have a sure index to the workings of the mind. The genius of behaviorism was to discover that overt behavior is the only kind we can study: therefore, to all intents and purposes, overt behavior was the complete disclosure of the mind at work. It is the story of the lost keys. A man was on his hands and knees on a sidewalk one night, looking for a lost key ring. He was asked if he was sure and certain that this was where he had lost the keys. “No,” he replied. “In fact, I know that I lost them on the other sidewalk across the street, but that one has no light at all, while this one is very well lighted, so I am looking here.” Following this same principle, we search for the mind in a well-lit rat maze because we have no way of looking inside the human mind, but it is easy to make mazes and put rodents inside them. But psychology as the study of such behavior is the equivalent of religion as the study of bells and steeples, or patriotism as the study of firecrackers. Since it is only the external aspects that can be studied, we assume for the sake of convenience that only the external aspects exist—and, of course, this leads to trouble.

But a big issue of today, being discussed a great deal, is: do computers think? I shall not go into that, but a short while ago a German science journal asked a related question: does a tea strainer think? A tea strainer has one simple task to perform, but it is a task that requires making a decision. It must remove the leaves and let the liquid pass through. In this act of selectivity, the editor pointed out, the tea strainer does just what the computer does. So if a computer thinks, so does a tea strainer. The response from the readers, many of them scientists, was spirited. Most of the contributors vigorously defended the proposition that a tea strainer does think. Some felt that the effect of this doctrine was not to exalt the tea strainer as a thinker, but to debase the mind of man as an automaton. Others replied heatedly that that simply showed their pride, arrogance and pigheadedness; they would not admit that a tea strainer thinketh as a man thinketh because they did not want to believe it. Minsky, an electrical engineer at MIT, says, “Our pious skeptics told us that machines could never see things. But now that machines can see complex things” (he does not put see in quotes; he just assumes that they really see), “our skeptics tell us that we can never know that they sense these things. Do not believe authoritative pronouncements about what machines will never do. Such statements are based on pride.” How neatly the issue is drawn here. Andre Malraux actually wrote an SF story, and it is based on the stubborn insistence of scientist friends of his who observed the social instinct behavior of insects and other animals and maintained that the creatures do not think. They admit that their behavior shows all the outward signs of intelligence and that they sometimes display amazing problem-solving capacities—but they insist that no intelligence whatever is involved, taking Bertrand Russell’s position that “animals behave in a manner showing the rightness of views of the man who observes them, not the animal itself. The rightness of their behavior and the correctness of their response is appreciated by their beholder, but the actors themselves are completely unaware of what they are doing.”

These same scientists who unhesitatingly and emphatically insist that animals do not think, in spite of the clear thought patterns implied in their behavior, insist just as unhesitatingly and emphatically that machines do think, because of the though patterns implied by their “behavior.” The electric eye that opens the door for you at the supermarket is able to think. In the best Watsonian sense, it gives a useful, sensible response to a definite stimulus. And what is thought but a matter of response to stimulus? But the dog who gives you a resentful, guilty look and scurries out of the way at the supermarket does not think at all. He seems to be aware he is not welcome in the store, but that is only your impression of the way he behaves. So the electric eye that opens the door is thinking, but the dog has no thought at all. It is just a matter of your opinion and interpretation. Exactly the same sort of yea and nay was reached with the argument of the stars. The Sophist said, “Look, the stars are just moving up there, that proves there is no God.” Aristotle looked at the same stars: “Look at those stars moving up there. That proves there is a God. I do not need any more argument.” The very same evidence, two different conclusions.

“There is a real possibility,” writes Sutherland, “that we may one day be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than ourselves, to replace ourselves as lords of the Earth. The species could also, of course, be morally superior to ourselves.” Here we see the enormity of this misconceived perversion. According to the early Christian idea of the ancient law of liberty, a gadget programmed in a way that avoided any behavior that might be called immoral would not be a morally superior being at all. Simon Magus asked Peter, “Could not God have made us all good, so that we could not do anything else but be virtuous?” (St. Augustine later asked the same question in anguish. Remember, Satan wanted to program us, everybody, to be virtuous and nothing else—see Moses 4:1.) Peter replied, “That’s a foolish question, for if He made us unchangeably and immovably inclined to good, we wouldn’t really be good at all, since we couldn’t really be anything else. And it would be no merit on our part that we were good, nor could we be given credit for doing what we did by necessity of nature. How can you call any act good that is not performed intentionally?” This is the answer to the idea that we could make a machine morally superior to ourselves because we program it not to do certain naughty things. Would you call that a moral machine? There is an enormous gulf between this type of thinking and the Gospel.

In the same issue in which Minsky let out his blast about our “pride,” there is an article that says, “The machine that can understand normal, fluent human speech may never be built.” There is a crew that was working on that a long time. And talking about Aldous, the University of Texas machine that seems to have emotions and to react with fear, anger, or attraction, we are reminded that it should, of course, be emphasized (but is diligently de-emphasized by most of us) that Aldous is only a model of personality, not the thing itself; “Thus when I speak of Aldous’ fear I refer to a numerical variable in the program that takes on different forms to represent different degrees of fear. The model or computer does not feel frightened any more than a molecular model of plastic balls and wooden dowels will enter into a real chemical combination. The introspection routine in Aldous can report on certain of its states because it was constructed to do so. It is not a pipeline to some ghostly inner world of the computer.” So this argument goes on, but it is a theme of many SF stories today.

Mr. George, who is in charge of the program in England for computers, says, “All this simulates emotion, sometimes deceptively like the real thing. If you have built an imitation human response into a machine, you have cheated. You have not done anything really interesting, however practical.” Now it is precisely this dissimulation that is the Satanic part of the machine. So we want to look out that we do not get programmed.

The basic characteristic of SF is its unoriginality. It often is, as Miss Judith Merrill says, a commentary on present conditions, what will happen if they are allowed to go on. As such, it can perform a valuable critical function. The stock SF themes are the Wonderful Journey (including Time Travel, the Wonderful Invention, e.g. the Time Machine), the End of the World (especially today, after the atom bomb), building a new world after such a holocaust, Big and Little, the Conquest of the Earth (e.g. The War of the Worlds), Galactic Empires, Strange Visitors (including the BEMs and visitors who are better than people on our world). “The Duel” is a great favorite today—the magnificent fighting machines dueling to the last and wiping each other out. The Last Survivor, the Breakdown of the Machine, the Revolt of the Robots, Strange Worlds, the distant future, man coping with the challenge of strange environments, Boy meets Girl (humanity is the same in all environments), man meets rival, and Alienation (a great theme today). The SF writers often use Biblical terms in their titles. [e.g. Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, both by Robert Heinlein. Editor]

The antics of Tarzan and Fu Manchu are almost perfectly representative of the type of SF appearing in the contemporary catalogs: the super-brain and super-brawn of man out-calculates, outwits, out-computes hordes of robots and other monsters, mechanical or organic, and it is all on the level of naked power, right out of the world of the Djins of the 1001 Nights. Is not that the world we live in already? This is the SF that appeals to us most; so we get the apocalyptic stories. No matter how negative SF has become, it still cannot be original. The worst you can think of has already happened, as far as that goes. It really does seem that the effect of every major scientific discovery has been to make men lose their balance, a sense of dependency on anything but themselves. “When I was a kid and went to school,” said Socrates, “Science knew all the answers. We knew that the brain was the center of everything, and we were on top of the world. We were just too cocky for anything.” Plutarch, talking about the same thing, said, “The new physics taught people to despise all the superstitious fears which the awe-inspiring signs in the heavens arouse in the minds of those who are ignorant of the real cause of things.” From then on, the Sophists carried the ball as ardent debunkers of all that was not Science. The Miletian school claimed to have discovered the basic principles and elements of all existence. In launching the program of modern science, Bacon announced that if he could just enjoy one season of uninterrupted work, he would be able to embrace all knowledge in a single system, to which he had discovered the key. Newton’s discoveries were held to answer all the essential problems of cosmology for all of life. Freud, by a single stroke, solved all our psychological problems. Grimm’s law explained the nature of all languages. The computers, finally, can solve all problems of any kind. It seems that with every breakthrough this is the immediate response: “At last we have it!”—even though we had it before, again and again and again, and it turned out to be wrong. But no, at last we do have it. The most wonderful machines have already been invented long ago. We think of our computing machines as intelligent entities because we are not used to living with them, that’s all. A punched card or magnetized tape, when stored away, we think of as memory—because of the novelty of the thing. We do not think a book remembers, even when it can be arranged to be opened automatically at a given item of information by pressing a button, like an address finder. Isn’t that memory? No, we say, that is not memory at all—because we have been living with that—but once upon a time people thought it was. Yes, there was a time when people actually thought the book was a thinking machine, that it would think for you. They thought it was just a miracle, they couldn’t get over it, and it took them a long time to get used to the Book. Then they realized that the book was not actually thinking or remembering: it was just you operating it. Those who did not understand how it worked really believed that the written page was a living, thinking entity, just as we now think that the computer has a memory.

Plato tells a wonderful story about this. When the Egyptian God Thoth discovered writing, he went to Ammon, the Father of the Gods, in great excitement. He said, “I have discovered a device that will infinitely project the power of the human mind: writing!” Of course it is a tremendous invention that beats anything else you can imagine—but nevertheless Thoth was wrong, as Ammon immediately pointed out to him. “This will not aid men’s mental powers,” he said, “but cripple them. It will seriously damage their power both to think and to remember.” In the end, no gadget makes us better off. This may sound strange, but if we think of it, the purpose of every gadget is to liquidate itself. As it is improved more and more, it becomes progressively reduced in size, complexity, cost and rarity, until in the end it is replaced by come contemptibly small machine. Gigantic transformers, cables, wheels, rails, enormous computers, filling whole buildings, ponderous weapons, monstrous machines, all those belong to the essentially barbaric world. So SF, and now experience, are teaching us.

The ultimate achievement is to do what we do without depending on gadgets. The best gadget is no gadget. There are some stories on this theme. In one by Chad Oliver, the hero says, “Hell, I sometimes think there’s nothing as dull as constant, everlasting change. The devil of it is there’s just plain nothing new under the sun,” to coin an inspired phrase. There is nothing behind the door save more of the same. That is what they are telling us now. Fritz Lieber, who has written a lot of junk, has a story called “Marianna,” with this closing line: “Annihilation brings unutterable relief.” The idea, a favorite theme of Heinlein, is that once we have solved all our problems, including biological problems, in particular the problem of death, we are faced with the question: now what do we do? Sit around and be bored to tears, yearning for death, the only thing left worth looking forward to. Without the Gospel, everything is completely hollow. This is the surprising thing.

There are more stories on this theme. One is called “Traveler’s Rest” by Massen. There is a perennial war going on. Ordinary people bother little about this war. Their spare mental energies are spent in a vast selection of play and ploys: making, representing, creating, relishing, criticizing, theorizing, discussing, arranging, organizing, cooperating. That sounds like living, but it is all busywork. It is meaningless in the end—the theme is futility. In one by William Morrison called “The Feast of Demons,” people can make themselves become younger and older as much as they want. They reverse entropy, and people age and go in reverse forever and ever, and it is terrible, terrible, because nobody dies. And here is our old friend Isaac Asimov coming back again, in “Eyes Do More Than See.” There is nothing behind the door, is the message: “He could dare manipulate matter before the assembled energy beings who had so drearily waited over the aeons for something new. He fled back across the galaxies on the energy track of Brok, back to the endless doom of life. The energy beings could no longer weep for the fragile beauty of the bodies they had once given up a trillion years ago.” Notice we are back to the endless doom of life, doomed to just more of the same—what we find (and not as good) when we go out in space. What a disillusionment.

The splendors and high hopes soon shot their bolt and fizzled, because they had nowhere to go. Science, without religion, like philosophy without religion, has nothing to feed on. “All true science,” says Karl Popper, “is cosmology, and all cosmology is eschatology. It is my contention that any branch of human thought without religion soon withers and dies of anemia.”

In the 1965 symposium, “Life on Other Worlds,” sponsored by the Seagram Whiskey Co., such scientists as G. B. Kiskiakovsky, D. B. Michael, Harlow Shapley, Otto Strube, and others went out of their way (every one of them) to show something that had nothing to do with the case: namely, that the existence of life on other worlds is at last the definite, final proof that we needed to rule God out of the picture. The immediate effect of scientific discovery was a sense of emancipation: “We are on our own now! Now at last Man can throw off the shackles of the Past. God was all right for our ancestors, but we certainly don’t need him in our calculations. Man is at last the master!” A great deal of scientific experience, as well as Science Fiction, has shown that that way madness lies.

So this is a faith-promoting discipline, after all. It is a wasteland, a heap of slag as far as the eye cn see; joyless, endless, monotonous, repetitive, empty but cluttered, a haunted universe. When we think that this project started out as a joyful and confident search for the best world or worlds that the human mind could conceive and bring into existence, but after generations of untrammeled and soaring imagination this desolate city dump is what we have come up with—it just shows how far we can get without the Gospel.

I have some ancient texts here that beat these things hollow for Science Fiction. This is a Syriac text from the Berlin Manuscript: “This Earth is littered with remnants” (it uses the Greek word lapson) “of other worlds which have been mixed up in Earth-fire in places where it is still impossible for plants to take root.” This is supposed to be the Lord talking to the Apostles. “But what about the material that is still out there in orbit?” the Apostles asked the Lord. “They still surround the Earth in the sky,” He replies, “but they are not brought down into the common crucible.” The word used is “trench.” There is a sort of circulating trench up there, and, as matter is required, it is drawn off. It is meanwhile being purified by its circular motion in outer space. And He says, “It is first poured down upon the Earth, and then swept together and thrown into a pit, a sort of crucible. This is so that the fumes” (this is a passage nobody understands) “can mount up and mingle with yet more elements which are to descend.” Some kind of feedback process. “There are space waters out there, but they have to be purified of certain poisonous elements of outer darkness.” The idea that things that come from outer space are poisoned and must be decontaminated before they can be used in this Earth is met constantly in these old documents. This one is a very early Christian text, first or second century: “Great advantage came to the Earth when these fragments (or vehicles) were scrapped in the heavens. They were turned into junk, because they were the remnants of other worlds, and they were to be used again. They were swept up from Earths, and cast out to circulate among the worlds, where they would follow certain laws that would get them in motion again. There were various disposal areas. The Father emptied the three elements. They are water, dark heavy matter and fire, which have to be used in all these processes, from Heaven. He empties them together in dumps at the edge of the firmament, or else He pours them out upon the Earth. After that, they will be swept away to some other place. Each is a deposit of matter being poured out in a particular place where it is to be kept until it will be needed, again clothed with the three forms of wind, water and fire, which are the three great forces of metamorphosis that make a world. Heat, water, and wind are the three great erosion forces. When they are used on a solid body, we start making a world. “He revealed to me how this Earth was established, how the Sons of Light came down in ships and purified the light, removing the slag and the apporoya” (the stuff that is poured off, the scum that is taken off) “to a dump. There are five types of depositories, from which five elements come as they are needed. Some are used more than others. What we call elements, however, are the energy which is in all things. In the womb of the Earth, the elements are gathered, fused, and poured out.” And so we get this amazing picture of a physical process of creation. We get dim visions. Of course, you may say, “Well, that’s a mess,” and it certainly is. But it is the sort of thing that Isaac Asimov gives you. It is as good as any Science Fiction you get today, considering when it was.

And here is an interesting one from the Apocalypse of Abraham. Abraham has taken the Wonderful Journey. Science Fiction began with this type of journey. In the whole field of testamentary literature, lots of new items have been discovered recently. Any prophet and apostle you can name has a Testament, and a Testament always ends with a great trip, a guided tour through the Universe. He usually gets into a vessel of some sort, he is carried around, and he inspects many things. Here it is in the Testament of Abraham, also called the Apocalypse of Abraham. In Heaven, he and the angel arrive, and they pass with violent winds above the firmament. He sees an indescribably mighty light, and within the light a vast seething fire, and within there is a great host of changing forms moving within each other, mighty forms, changing and exchanging with each other as they go and come and alter themselves. They seem to call out to each other. There are strange, confusing noises. Abraham asks the angel, “What’s it all about? Why have you brought me here? I can’t see anything. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve become weak. I think I’m out of my mind.” “Stay close to me,” the angel replies, “and don’t be afraid.” The angel himself is beginning to shake, though. He is seeing too much. Then they are wrapped in fire and hear a voice and mighty rushing waters. Abraham wants to fall down on his face and worship. But there is no Earth under their feet and nothing to fall on. And so they are just suspended up there. Abraham cries out with all his voice, and the angel cries at the same time: “Oh God! Oh Thou who hast brought order into this terrible confusion, into the great confusion of the universe, and hast renewed the worlds of the righteous!” There is a Power that can actually master these terrible forces, which just to contemplate them is absolutely appalling. The great Catholic scholar who just died Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, says, “Man is the most refined being there is. He is much more complicated, in chemistry and everything else, than a star, even a giant star, or a solar system, or a galaxy.” He must be the end product, and to organize and control him, with all these terrible forces unleashed all around him, is an appalling performance, and this is the story of Abraham here. He sees this, and he says, “And yet there is a God who can actually bring worlds out of this, where the righteous can dwell!” It is quite an idea.

And here is one from the Clementines, the earliest Christian writing we have after the New Testament. This shows that the questions that interested the early Christians, the legitimate questions they asked, were questions to which the church would say, “Well you’re not supposed to ask that.” Clement said he has been to the University, and they could not answer the questions: “Is there life after death? Is there a preexistence? If we live after, will we remember this life? Why don’t we remember the preexistence? When was the world created? What existed before that? If the world was created, will it pass away? And then what? Will we feel things we cannot feel now?” He could not shake the immortalitatis cupido, the desire to go on living, from his mind. “It was these questions,” he said, “that led me to the true Light.” Notice they are primarily scientific questions—but they are the basic religious questions, also.

The Doctors could not give Clement any answers. They gave him a lot of clever talk but nothing else. When he was young, the pagan philosophers scared him out of his wits with stories of hellfire (notice that comes from the pagan schools. He never learned that from the Christians, this hellfire). And then he finally goes to the Land of Israel (he is a rich young man), where he sees Peter during a conference of the Church, and puts these questions to him and gets his answers, at last. The answers that Peter gives him to these questions are very interesting, but they are legitimate. [Please notice that it was Clement who went to Israel, not Peter to Rome. Editor]

Here is an interesting thing from the early Mandean Christian writings: Those in other worlds move with great, almost instantaneous speed, as quickly as human thought, so that in a single hour they reach a distant place. Their motion, however, is calm and effortless, like the rays of the sun passing between heaven and earth. Now the Father ordered Hebel Zeba (that is Abel) to make a world and to place Adam and Eve in it. And the three angels of glory and light should come down and visit and instruct them and keep Adam company. God said to the Pure Sent One, who was to lead this delegation, “Go call Adam and Eve and all their posterity, and teach them concerning everything about the King of Light and the worlds of Light. Be friendly with Adam, and give him company, thou and the two angels that will be with thee, and warn him against Satan.” So the three angels are instructed to go down and teach Adam the law of chastity. And Adam was told, “We will also send helpers to those of thy progeny who seek further Light and knowledge from us.”

There is a lot on this business of the beings’ visiting the other worlds. Another version says, “He sent down the Sent One to help them get back to His presence, where they had come from. And he spread a table for Adam and Eve, and there he instructed them. And then the Evil Ones complained, saying, ‘The Children of Men have taken over the Earth. They are strangers who speak the language of those three men who visited them. They have accepted the teachings of the three men, and rejected us and our own world, so they plot against us. These three men are in this world, but they are not men. They are beings of Light and glory, they are trespassing on our territory. They have come to this little Enosh (Man) who is helpless and alone in the world, to instruct him and to give him an advantage over us.’”

This is the very stuff you read about in Science Fiction all the time, but it is written up beautifully in these old sources, and there is so much of it: A ship with ropes of light, with crews clothed in light, is laden with a treasure, and it is going from one world to another. The evil ones waylay it, and they pirate it. This is from the pseudo-Thomas, a recent discovery but a very old text: “The Evil One came from I do not where in his ship, and he hijacked the cargo and divided up the treasure among the worlds over which he ruled.” This is your Galactic Empire motif. “He planted precious plants in these worlds, the plants he had stolen. He fixed precious stones in their firmaments, and they gloried in their stolen finery.” God found out, and He sent a messenger to get back all the stolen stuff and replant the plants in their proper worlds, from which they had been purloined in the first place. This is described in very physical terms. And He says, “Prepare your people to receive and reclaim and disinfect all these things that they have stolen from us, so that we can put it in the worlds for which it was designated.” This messenger is the Son of Light Himself. He goes and gets the treasure back and puts it in the worlds where it belongs.

There is a lot of Coptic material on this. Note how realistic this one is: “From the place of thine inheritance,” Adam is told, “the sun will look like a little tiny grain of flour. The distance between the worlds is vast.” Their size is enormous, and there is a hierarchy among them. Every one of these worlds is ruled by a single pattern, though no two of them are alike. There is always a governing body of twelve, wherever you go. Every topos (place) has twelve rulers over each part. And each world, whether it is awaiting occupants who have not yet found their place (or have not yet been assigned) or whether it is already occupied, is governed on the same plan. Every kingdom requires a space, so we have to go down and find a space to build a kingdom. There are some very intriguing things here: “My Father laid His hand upon my head, and He gave e the name of Hibbel Yabbah, and he created for me a world containing ten thousand worlds of light . . . and every world was different.”

This is from the Manichean prayer book: “A thousand, thousand mysteries, and a myriad, myriad planets, each with its own mysteries, preceded this world. During Yahweh’s great discussions of the new creations that were to take place, He sent down envoys to report on how things were going on. They did not send all the Uthras, nor did they teach them all the worlds.” But this is the usual order, it says: “Uthra after Uthra will teach thee, will take thee by the right hand and will show thee worlds and dwellings and treasure houses.”

In the Ascension of Isaiah there is an interesting thing: “This the devils do not know. They are banished to particular places and they are not aware of how much really goes on.” They miss all the show. And they say, “We are alone, and there are none beside us.” They have the same illusion that the human race has had for a long time.

Well, we’ve taken up enough time with this, and if there are no questions, I think we can end now. Naturally I can’t answer any scientific questions, and any questions about fiction I can slough off.

I almost forgot to bear my testimony. Can’t stop without this. What else is there but the Gospel, brothers and sisters? If I didn’t believe it, I’d jolly well have to, but I don’t believe it for that reason. I believe it because it’s true, and I hope we all get testimonies of the Gospel.

EDITORIAL AFTERWORD

The story of Thoth’s invention of writing and the negative consequences thereof has a modern counterpart in Isaac Asimov’s classic story “The Feeling of Power,” which is reprinted in a number of places, including Asimov’s collection, Nine Tomorrows.  

PEBBLE IN TIME

By Cynthia Goldstone and Avram Davidson

The City of San Francisco is certainly my city! I wouldn’t live anywhere else than “The Port of Zion” for anything in the world. Perhaps my favorite worldly spot—next, of course, to Golden Gate Park—is the Embarcadero. Only two people have every known how much thanks is due to one of them (now passed from Time into Eternity) that the sailors and seafarers have helped spread the Restored Gospel throughout the seven seas to the four corners of the earth. Of course its spread was inevitable, but I do think that if we Saints had stayed in, say, Missouri, our message would have been much slower in making its way around the world.

Not that I mean for a moment to indicate anything but the most wholehearted approval for the work done by our regularly appointed young missionaries, but of course nothing can equal the zeal and energy of sailors! And walking down the Embarcadero and seeing the vigor with which they toss their Orange Julius drinks down their thirsty throats, I think how different the scene must be in (for example) that terribly overgrown and misnamed large city in Southern California, where seafarers may be seen abusing their systems by the use of alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee—all, of course, forbidden by The Word of Wisdom of the Prophet Joseph.

When I speak of the role played in this by one of the only two people who know the whole, true story, I am referring to my maternal grandfather. I am the other. And I suppose I’m a chip off the old block—or, perhaps, stated more exactly, a chip off the stalwart old Mormon family tree, so well set up (on paper, of course) by Grandpa Spence during the later years of his retirement. How he spent the earlier years we will see very shortly. As is usual among L. D. S. people, I take a great interest in my ancestors, but most of all in Grandpa Spence. It may be because I inherited (if such things be hereditary) both his interest in genealogy and inventions as well as that slight speech impediment which becomes troublesome only at moments of excitement. I have always said to myself, “Nephi Spence Nilsen, your grandfather rose above this, and so will you.” It invariably helps. Grandpa was aware of all that and it constituted another bond between us. To sum it up: He and I both tended to stammer, both were interested in Mormon history and genealogy, both loved to consider mechanical devices.

It was a combination of these characteristics of Grandpa’s that brought about a certain incident which I feel can now, safely, and should now, properly, be made known to one and all. And above and beyond that, my grandfather specifically (though in veiled language) asked me in his will to speak out on this matter at this particular time.

Grandpa was a peach. Perhaps it was the very enthusiasm of his devotion to the Latter- day Saints (though Grandma drew the line when he dutifully considered taking a second wife) that accounted for his unfailing good humor and zest even when he was quite old. Needless to say that he was a respected and responsible citizen, having for many years been mechanical supervisor for the various industries operated by the Latter-day Saints Church, and was valued for his circumspection as well as for his technical competence. Unfortunately (or fortunately: let History decide) his circumspection failed him at one crucial point in his life when—

But let me simply state the facts.

Grandpa had left England with a party of emigrants (all converts like himself) as an already full-grown young man of fifteen, crossed the plains to Great Salt Lake City, and within a short time was hired by President Brigham Young to copy letters in his clear and graceful longhand. His promotion in the Church was rapid, and after fifty years of remarkable service, he retired to his own three-story home on First North Street. Grandma had passed from Time into Eternity years before, and all the children had homes of their own; a neighbor lady acted as part- time housekeeper, leaving him free to follow his own inclinations in his own now fully free time.

The inspiration for the chief of these inclinations arose out of the only real regret that he had ever had. Much more out of his reverence for Mormon history than personal pride, he wished so much that he had not missed by only a year or so having been present on that great day when Brother Brigham led the wary pioneers to the bluff overlooking the Great Salt Lake Valley and announced that they would stay and make the desert bloom like a rose. In his retirement Grandpa Spence secretly determined to build a device which would transport him back to that decisive moment.

“I was born in the age of the covered wagon,” he declared to himself, “and have lived to see the age of the flying machine. eternity is one thing, but time is another, and surely to a saint nothing is impossible!” he was of course not certain of being able to return—he might even be scalped by an unconverted Lamanite—but to these considerations he gave but a shrug and a smile. His enormous dedication to the idea of fulfilling himself in this singular way enabled him to work like a steam engine (he had helped drive the Golden Spike at Promontory Point—Utah!—incidentally); he was a vigorous man with great inventive ability, and he was inspired. He completed the machine one bright May morning and got to Observation Bluff one hour and seventeen minutes before Brother Brigham and his advance party arrived.

Grandpa had not calculated on finding a smooth or barely downy chin instead of the full beard his hand automatically sought to stroke in satisfaction, but after a moment he realized what had happened: He had traveled back in time so successfully that he had become a stripling once again! Fortunately he had always been moderate in diet, and his twentieth-century clothes were only slightly loose. Un fortunately he no longer had the gravity and patience of his former years and soon became overanxious and restless. And as the pilgrim travelers approached, his excitement drew him away from the machine, which was well hidden by the bushes on the bluff above the new arrivals. He was recklessly determined to get as close as possible to the principals of this historic moment and to hear the historic words, This is the place! And in moving toward the trave-worn Saints, creeping along in the low bushes, he accidentally dislodged a stone, which tumbled down the slide, gaining momentum.

Forgetful of all else, he stood up to warn them out of the way, but in his excitement he found his speech impediment rendered him unable to release a sound . . .

The stone rolled and bounced and hit Brigham just above the worn and dusty boot on his right leg. The square, heavy face winced and swung around and saw the still-speechless stranger above on the bluff. All the weariness and travel of the long journey west, all the tragedy of the Mormon martyrdom, all the outrage of the persecuted were in Brigham’s roar of pain and astonishment. “Look ye there!” he cried. “Who’s that? Not a speck of dust on him! Throwing stones already! I thought this place was empty and I see that the Gentiles have got here before us!” And while poor young-again Spence struggled vainly to give utterance, regret, and denial, Brigham turned and swung his arm in a great determined arc.

“This is not the place!” he cried. “Onward!”

Not for a moment did anyone dream of controverting the word of the President, Prophet, Revelator, and Seer. Onward! they echoed. And onward they went. And the conscience-stricken young stranger, where did he go? Well, where could he go? He went after them, onward, of course. Of course they couldn’t make heads or tails of his stammering explanations, nor even of the ones he attempted to write. But they understood that he was sorry. That was enough. Mormons have suffered too much to be vindictive. And that night when the band camped, he was brought to the leader’s wagon, where a small lamp burned.

“Young man,” said Brigham, “They tell me that you have expressed a seemly contrition for having raised your hand against the Lord’s Anointed; therefore I forgive you in the name of Israel’s God. They also say you write a good, clear hand. Sit down. There’s pen and ink and paper. Dear Sister Simpson, It cannot have escaped your attention that I have observed with approbation your—no, make that----the modesty of your demeanor, equally with your devotion to the doctrines and covenants of the Latter-day Saints, which is of far greater importance than the many charms with which a benign Nature has adorned your youthful person. My advanced years will always assure you of mature advice, and in my other seventeen—is it seventeen? or nineteen?—pshaw, boy—a man can’t keep all these figures in his head—my other eighteen wives you will find a set of loving sisters. Since it is fitting that we be sealed for Time and Eternity, kindly commence packing now in order to depart with the next party of Saints heading for our original destination which as you know was tentatively the peninsula called San Francisco in Upper California. Yours & sic cetera, B. Young, Pres., Church of J. C. of L. D. S.–sand it well, son, for I hate a blotty document.”

You’ve all read your history and must certainly have often felt thankful that Brother Brigham did not yield to the momentary impulse he admitted he had, and that he did not stop in Utah. Despite its impressive name, Great Salt Lake City is just a tiny town with a pleasant enough view, but even that can’t compare with the one from my window alone. It’s a pleasant thing to sit here in my apartment atop the hill on Saint Street, sipping a tall, cool lemonade, and admire the view. To the west is the great span of Brigham Young Bridge across the Golden Gate, with its great towers and seven lanes of cars; to the east is the Tabernacle, its otherworldly shape gracing the Marina Green, with the stately Temple nearby. I see a network of wide dignified streets feathered with light green trees, giving the city the look of a great park. And, being truly a Mormon city, it is undisfigured by a single liquor saloon, tearoom, tobacconist, or coffee house.

And Grandpa? After his retirement, he sold his house on Joseph Smith Esplanade and moved to the fine apartment in the Saint-Ashbury district where I now live. Having decided to leave well enough alone the second time around, he devoted his last last years entirely to the study of Latter-day Saint genealogy. He felt right at home here, as do I, and why not? After all, the Saint-Ashbury can boast of more lemonade and Postum stands per square block than anyplace in the U. S. A., and one is always seeing and hearing those inspiring and exciting initials: L. D. S.! L. D. S! L. D. S.!  

SOMETHING IN IT

By Robert Louis Stevenson

The Natives had told him many tales. In particular they had warned him of the house of yellow reeds tied with black sennit; how anyone who touched it instantly became the prey of Akaanga, and was handed on by him to Miru the Ruddy, and hocussed with the Kava of the dead, and baked in the ovens and eaten by the eaters of the dead. “There’s nothing in it,” said the missionary.

There was a bay upon that island, a very fair bay to look upon; but, by the native saying, it was death to bathe there. “There is nothing in that,” said the missionary; and he came to the bay and went swimming. Presently an eddy took him and bore him towards the reef. “Oho!” thought the missionary, “it seems there is something in it after all.” And he swam the harder, but the eddy carried him away. “I do not care about this eddy,” said the missionary; and even as he said it, he was aware of a house raised on piles above the sea. It was built of yellow reeds, on reed joined with another, and the whole bound with black sennit; a ladder led to the door, and all about the house hung calabashes. He had never seen such a house, nor yet such calabashes; and the eddy set for the ladder.

“This is singular,” said the missionary,” but there can be nothing in it.” And he laid hold of the ladder and went up. It was a fine house, but there was no man there; and when the missionary looked back he saw no island—only the heaving of the sea. “It is strange about the island,” said the missionary, “but who’s afraid? My stories are the true ones.” And he laid hold of a calabash, for he was one who loved curiosities. Now he had no sooner laid hand upon the calabash than that which he handled and that which he saw and stood on burst like a bubble and was gone; and night closed upon him, and the waters, and the meshes of the net; and he wallowed there like a fish.

“A body would think there was something in this,” said the missionary. “But if these tales are true, I wonder what about my tales!”

Now the flaming of Akaanga’s torch drew near in the night, and the misshapen hands groped in the meshes of the net, and they took the missionary between the finger and the thumb and bore him dripping in the night and silence to the place of the ovens of Miru. And there was Miru, ruddy in the glow of the ovens; and there sat her four daughters, and made the kava of the dead; and there sat the comers out of the islands of the living, dripping and lamenting.

This was a dread place to reach for any of the sons of men. But of all who had ever come there, the missionary was the most concerned; and, to make things worse, the person next to him was a convert of his own.

“Aha,” said the convert, “so you are here like your neighbors? And how about all your stories?”

“It seems,” said the missionary, bursting into tears, “that there was nothing in them.”

By this time the kava of the dead was ready, and the daughters of Miru began to intone in the old manner of singing, “Gone are the green islands and the bright sea, and the sun and the moon and the forty million stars, and life and hope. Henceforth is no more, only to sit in the night and silence, and see your friends devoured; for life is a deceit, and the bandage is taken from your eyes.”

Now when the singing was done, one of the daughters came with the bowl. Desire of that kava rose in the missionary’s bosom; he lusted for it like a swimmer for the land, or a bridegroom for his bride; and he reached out his hand, and took the bowl, and would have drunk. And then he remembered, and put it back.

“Drink!” sang the daughter of Miru. “There is no kava like the kava of the dead, and to drink of it once is the reward for living.”

“I thank you. It smells excellent,” said the missionary, “but I am a blue-ribbon man myself; and though I am aware there is a difference of opinion even in our own confession, I have always held kava to be excluded.”

“What!” cried the convert. “Are you going to respect a taboo at a time like this” and you were always so opposed to taboos when you were alive!”

“To other people’s,” said the missionary. “Never to my own.”

“But yours have all proved wrong,” said the convert.

“It looks like it,” said the missionary, “but I can’t help that. No reason why I should break my word.”

“I never heard the like of this!” cried the daughter of Miru. “Pray, what do you expect to gain?”

“That is not the point,” said the missionary. “I took this pledge for others; I am not going to break it for myself.”

The daughter of Miru was puzzled; she went and told her mother. Miru was vexed, and they went and told Akaanga.

“I don’t know what to do about this,” said Akaanga; and he came and reasoned with the missionary.

“But there is such a thing as right and wrong,” said the missionary. “Your ovens cannot alter it.”

“Give the kava to the rest,” said Akaanga to the daughters of Miru. “I must get rid of this sea-lawyer instantly, or worse will come of it.”

The next moment the missionary came up in the midst of the sea and there before him were the palm trees of the island. He swam to the shore gladly, and landed. Much matter of thought was in that missionary’s mind.

“I seem to have been misinformed upon some points,” said he. “Perhaps there is not so much in it as I had supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me be glad of that.”

And he rang the bell for service.

MORAL

The sticks break, the stones crumble,

The eternal altars tilt and tumble;

Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist

About the amazed evangelist.

He stands unshook from age to youth

Upon one pin-point of the truth.  

JOSEPH SMITH’S DIALOGUE WITH THE DEVIL

Smith—Good morning, Mr. Devil. How now; you seem to be much engaged. What news have you got there?

Devil—[Slipping his bills into his pocket with a low bow]—Oh! Good morning, Mr. Smith; I hope you are well, sir. Why—I—was just out—out on a little business in my line; or finally, to be candid, sir, I was contriving a fair and honourable warfare against you and your impositions, wherein piety is outraged, and religion greatly hindered in its useful course; for to be bold, sir, (and I despise any thing underhanded,) I must tell you to your face that you have made me more trouble than all the ministers or people of my whole dominion have for ages past.

Smith—Trouble! What trouble have I caused your Majesty? I certainly have endeavoured to treat you, and all other persons, in a friendly manner, even my worst enemies; and I always aim to fulfil the Mormon creed; and that is, to my mind my own business exclusively. Why should this trouble you, Mr. Devil?

Devil—Ah! your own business indeed! I know not what you may consider your own business, it is so very complicated; but I know what you have done, and what you are aiming to do. You have disturbed the quiet of Christendom, overthrown churches and societies; you have dared to call in question the truth and usefulness of old and established creeds, which have stood the test of ages, and have even caused tens of thousands to come out in open rebellion not only against wholesome creeds, established forms and doctrines, well approved and orthodox, but against some of the most pious, learned, exemplary, and honourable clergy, whom both myself and all the world love, honour, and esteem. And this is not all; but you are causing many persons to think who never thought before, and you would fain put the whole world a-thinking, and then where will true religion and piety be? Alas! they will have no place among men; for if men keep such a terrible thinking and reasoning as they begin to do, since you commenced your business, as you call it, they never will continue to uphold the good old way in which they have jogged along in peace for so many ages; and thus, Mr. Smith, you will overthrow my kingdom, and leave me not a foot of ground on earth, and this is the very thing you aim at; but I, sir, have the boldness to oppose you by all lawful means which I have in my power.

Smith—Really, Mr. Devil, your Majesty has of late become very pious. I think some of your Christian brethren have greatly misrepresented you. It is generally reported by them that you are opposed to religion. But—

Devil—It is false; there is not a more religious and pious being in the world than myself, nor a being more liberal minded. I am decidedly in favour of all creeds, systems, and forms of Christianity, of whatever name or nature, so long as they leave out that abominable doctrine which caused me so much trouble in former times, and which, after slumbering for ages, you have again revived. I mean the doctrine of direct communion with God, by new revelation. This is hateful, it is impious; it is directly opposed to all the divisions and branches of the Christian Church. I never could bear it. And for this very cause, I helped to bring to condign punishment all the prophets and the apostles of old; for while they were suffered to live with this gift of revelation, they were always exposing and slandering me, and all other good pious men, in exposing our deeds and purposes, which they called wicked, but which we consider as the height of zeal and piety; and when we killed them for these crimes of dreaming, prophesying, and vision-seeing, they raised the cry of persecution, and so with you miserable and deluded Mormons.

Smith—Then, your most Christian Majesty is in favour of all other religious but this one, are you?

Devil—Certainly. I am fond of praying, singing, church-building, bell-ringing, going to meeting, preaching, and withal, I have quite a missionary zeal. I like also long faces, long prayers, long robes, and learned sermons. Nothing suits me better than to see people who have been for a whole week oppressing their neighbour, grinding the face of the poor, walking in pride and folly, and serving me with all their heart; I say nothing suits me better, Mr. Smith, than to see these people go to meeting on Sunday with a long religious face on, and to see them pay a portion of their ill-gotten gains for the support of a priest while he and his hearers pray with doleful groans and awful faces, saying, “Lord, we have left undone the things we ought to have done, and done the things we ought not;” and then, when service is ended, see them turn again to their wickedness, and pursue it greedily all the week, and the next Sabbath repeat the same things. Now, be candid, Mr. Smith. Do you not see that these, and all others, who have a form and deny the power, are my good Christian children, and that their religion is a help to my cause?

Smith—Certainly, your reasoning is clear and obvious as to these hypocrites, but you would not be pleased with people getting converted, either at camp meeting or somewhere else, and then putting their trust in that conversion, and in free grace to save them. Would you not be opposed to this?

Devil—Why should I have any objection to that kind of religion, Mr. Smith? I care not how much they get converted, nor how much they cry Lord, Lord, nor how much they trust to free grace to save them, so long as they do not do the works that their God has commanded them. I am sure of them at last; for you know all men are to be judged according to their deeds. What does their good Bible say? Does it not say, “Not every one that saith Lord, Lord, shall enter into my kingdom; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” No, no, Mr. Smith, I am not an enemy to religion, and especially to the modern forms of Christianity. So long as they deny the power, they are a help to my cause. See how much discord, division, hatred, envy, strife, lying, contention, blindness, and even terror and bloodshed, has been produced as the effect of these very systems. By these means I gain millions to my dominion, while at the same time we enjoy the credit of being pious Christians. But you, Mr. Smith, you are my enemy, my open and avowed enemy; you have even dared, in a sacrilegious manner, to tear the veil from all these fine systems, and to commence an open attack upon my kingdom, and this even when I had almost all Christendom, together with the clergymen and gentlemen of the press, in my favour. How dare you venture thus to commence a revolution without reserve, and without aid or succour, and in the midst of innumerable hosts of my subjects?

Smith—Why, sir, in the first place, I knew that I had the truth on my side, and that your systems and forms of Christianity were so manifestly corrupt that one had only to lift the veil from your fooleries on one side, and to present plain and reasonable truth on the other, and the eyes of the people could at once distinguish the difference so clearly that, except they chose darkness rather than light, they would leave your ranks and come over to the truth. For instance, what is easier than to shew, from the history of the past, that a religion of direct revelation was the only system ever instituted by the Lord, and the only one calculated to benefit mankind? What is easier than to shew that this system saved the church from flood, famine, flames, war, division, bondage, doubt, and darkness, many times, and that it is the legitimate way and manner of God’s government of his own peculiar people in all ages and dispensations.

Devil—To be candid with you, Mr. Smith, I must own that what you have now said, neither myself nor my most able ministers have been able to gainsay by any argument or fact. But then you must recollect, that tradition and custom, together with fashion and popular clamour, have in all ages had more effect than plain fact and sound reason. Hence you see we are yet safe, so long as we continue the cry from press and pulpit, and in Sunday schools; and all these things are done away and no longer needed. In this way, though God may speak, they will not hear; angels may minister, and they will not believe; visions may reveal, and they will not be enlightened; prophets may lift their voice, and their warnings pass unheeded; so you see we still have them as safe as we had the people in olden time. God can communicate no message to them which will be examined or heard with any degree of credence or candour. So for all the good they get from God, all communication being cut off, they might as well be without a God. Thus you see, I have full influence and control of the multitude by a means far more effectual than argument or reason; and I even dare to teach them that it is a sin to reason, think, or investigate, as it would disturb the even tenor of their pious breathings and devout groans and responses. Smith, you must be extremely ignorant of human nature, as well as of the history of the past, to presume that reason and truth would have much effect with the multitude. Why, sir, look how effectually we warded off the truth at Ephesus, when Paul attempted to address them in the theatre. Strange, that with all these examples before you, you should venture to raise the hue and cry which has so often been defeated, and this with no better weapons on your side than reason and truth. Indeed, you may thank my Christian spirit of forbearance that you have escaped so far without a gridiron; but take care for the future, I may not always be so mild.

Smith—But why is your Majesty so highly excited against me and my plans of operation, seeing that you consider that you have the multitude perfectly safe; and why so enraged and so fearful of the consequences of my course, and the effect of my weapons, while at the same time you profess to despise them as weak and powerless. Alas! it is too true that you have the multitude safe to all appearance at present, and that truth can seldom reach them; why not then be content, and leave me to pursue my calling in peace? I can hardly hope to win to the cause of truth any but the few who think, and these have ever been troublesome to your cause.

Devil—True, but then you are, in spite of all my efforts, and that of my felllows, daily thinning our ranks, by adding to the number of those who think; and such a thinking is kept up that we are often exposed in some of our most prominent plans, and placed in any awkward predicament; and who knows what defeat, disgrace, and dishonour may befall the pious cause, if you are suffered to continue your rebellious course.

Smith—But, Mr. Devil, why, with all these other advantages on your side, do you resort to such mean, weak, and silly fabrications as the Spaulding Story. You profess to be a gentleman, a Christian, and a clergyman, and you ought for your own sake, and for the sake of your cause, to keep up outward appearance of honour and fairness. And now, Mr. Devil, tell the truth for once; you know perfectly well that your Spaulding Story, in which you represent me as an impostor, in connexion with Sidney Rigdon, and that we were engaged in palming Solomon Spaulding’s romance upon the world as the Book of Mormon, is a lie, a base fabrication, without a shadow of truth; and you know that I found the Original Records of the Nephites, and translated and published the Book of Mormon from them, without ever having heard of the existence of Spaulding, or of his romance, or of Sidney Rigdon either. Now, Mr. Devil, this was a mean, disgraceful, and underhand trick in you, and one of which even you have reason to be ashamed.

Devil—Well, Mr. Smith, to be candid, I acknowledge what you say is true, and that it was not the most honourable course to the world. But it was you who commenced the war, by publishing that terrible book, which we readily recognized as a complete expose of all our false and corrupt Christianity, not even keeping back the fact that we had continued, during the dark ages, to rob the Scriptures of their plainness, and we felt the utmost alarm and excitement, and without much reflection, in the height of passion, we called a hasty council of clergy and editors, and other rascals in Painesville, Ohio, and, thinking that almost any means were lawful in war, we invented the Spaulding Story, and fathered it upon the poor printer, Howe, of Painesville, although Doctor Hulbert (thanks to my aid) was its real author. But mark, Mr. Smith, mark one thing, we had not a face so hard, nor a conscience so abandoned, as to publish this Spaulding Story at the first as a positive fact; we only published it as a conjecture, a mere probability, and this you know, we had a right to do, without once thinking of the amount of evil it would eventually accomplish. But, sir, it was some of my unfortunate clergymen who, more reckless, hardened, and unprincipled than myself, have ventured to add to each edition of this story, till at last, without my aid or consent, they have set it down for a positive fact, that Solomon Spaulding, Sidney Rigdon, and yourself, have made up the Book of Mormon out of a romance. Now, Mr. Smith, I am glad of this interview with you, as it gives me the opportunity of clearing up my character. I acknowledge with shame that I was guilty of a mean act in helping to hatch up and publish the Spaulding Story as a probability, and I associated with rascals far beneath my dignity, either as a sovereign prince, or religious minister, or even as an old, honorable, and experienced Devil, and for this I beg your pardon. But, really, I must deny the charge of having assisted in making the additions which have appeared in later editions of that story, in which my former probabilities and mean conjectures are set down for positive facts. No, Mr. Smith, I had no hand in a trick so low and mean; I despise it as the work of priests and editors alone, without my aid or suggestion, and I do not believe that even the meanest young devils in our dominion would have stooped to such an act.

Smith—Well, I must give your Majesty some credit, for once at least, if what you say is true; but how can you justify your conduct in dishonouring yourself so far as to stoop to the level of the hireling clergy and their followers, in still making use of this humbug story (which you affect to despise) in order to still blind the eyes of the people in regard to the origin of the Book of Mormon.

Devil—Oh! Mr Smith, it does take so readily among the pious of all sects, that it seems a pity to spoil the fun, and I cannot resist the temptation of carrying out the joke, now it is so well rooted in their minds; and you can’t think how we devils shake our sides with laughter when we get up in the gallery in some fine church, put on our long face, and assist in singing, and in the devout responses. This done, the Spaulding Story is gravely told from the pulpit, while the pious old clergyman wears a face as long as that of Balaam’s beast. All is swallowed down for solid truth by the gaping multitude, while we hang our heads behind the screen, and laugh and wink at each other in silence, as any thing overheard would disturb their worship; and as bad as I am, I never wish to disturb those popular modes of worship, which decency requires us to respect. So you see, Mr. Smith, we have our fun to ourselves, at your expense; but, after all, we do not mean any hurt by it, although I must acknowledge, upon the whole, it serves our purpose.

Smith—Well, we will drop the subject, as I want to inquire about some other stories which have had an extensive circulation by means of your editors and priests. For instance, there is the story of my attempting to walk on the water and getting drowned, the numerous stories of my attempting to raise the dead, as a mere trick of imposition, and getting detected in it; and the stories of my attempting to appear as an angel, and getting caught and exposed in the same; and besides this, you have me killed, by some means, every little while. Now you old hypocrite, you know that none of these things ever happened, or any circumstance out of which to make them; and that so far from this, I deny the principle of a man’s working miracles, either real or pretended, as a proof of his mission, and contend that miracles if wrought at all, were wrought for benevolent purposes, and without being designed to convince the unbeliever. Why, then, do you resort to such silly stories in your opposition to me, seeing that you have many other advantages? Not that I would complain of such weak opposition, as if it were calculated to hinder my progress, but rather to mention it as something well calculated to injure your own cause, by betraying your weakness and folly.

Devil—[laughing]—Ha, ha, ha, eh, eh. Oh! Mr. Smith; I just put out these stories for a joke, in order to have my own fun, and without the most distant idea that any being on earth would be so silly as to give any credence to them; but judge my surprise and joy, when I found priests, editors, and people, so depraved in their judgment and tastes, so in love with lies, and so ready to catch at every thing against their common enemy, as they call you, that these jocose stories of ours actually look, in their credulous craniums for grave truth, and were passed about by them, and sought after and swallowed by the multitude as greedily as a young robin swallows a worm when it is dropped into its mouth, which is stretched at full width, while its eyes are closed. So you see, Mr. Smith, that without meaning any particular harm to you, I have my fun, and am besides so unexpectedly fortunate as to reap great advantages from circumstances where I had neither expected nor calculated. So I hope you will at least bear my folly, nor set down aught in malice, where no malice was intended. You know we devils are poor miserable creatures at best; and were it not for our fun, and our gambling, and our religious exercises, we would have nothing to kill time.

Smith—Well, well. I see plainly you will have a creep out some how or other, rather than bear the disgrace and stigma which your conduct would seem to deserve. But forgetting the past, let me inquire what course you intend to pursue in future, and whether this warfare between you and me, will still be prosecuted? And if so, what course do you intend to pursue hereafter? You know my course. I have long since taken the field at the head of a mere handful of brave patriots who are true as the pole stars, and firm as the rock of Gibraltar. They laugh at and despise your silly stories; and with nothing but a few plain simple weapons of truth and reason, aided by revelation, we boldly make war upon your whole dominion and will never quit the field, dead or alive, till we win the battle, and deprive you of every foot of ground you possess. This is our purpose; and although your enemy, I am bold and generous enough to declare it. So you see I am not for taking any unwary advantage, notwithstanding all your pious tricks upon me and the public.

Devil—Mr. Smith, I am too much of the gentleman not to admire your generous frankness and your boldness, and too much of a Christian not to appreciate your honesty; but as you commenced this war, and I only acted at the first on the defensive, with the pure motive of defending my kingdom, I think this ought in some degree at least, to excuse the means I have made use of; and that you may have no reason to complain in future, I will now fully open to you the plan of my future campaign. Here [pulling out a bundle of handbills] is what I was doing this morning, when by chance we met; and by the reading of which you will see my course. Heretofore I have endeavoured to throw contempt upon your cause, in hopes to smother it and keep it under, as something beneath the notice of us well-informed Christians. For this cause I have generally caused it to be represented that you were a very ignorant silly man, and that your followers were made up of the unthinking and vulgar, and not worthy of notice. But the fact is, you have made such rapid strides, and have poured forth such a torrent of intelligence, and gathered such a host of talented and thinking men around you, that I can no longer conceal these facts under a bushel of burning lies, and therefore I now change my purpose and my manner of attack. I shall endeavor to magnify you and your success from this time forward, and to make you appear as much larger than the reality, as you have heretofore fallen short. If my former course has excited contempt, and caused you to be despised, and thus kept you out of notice, my future course will be to excite jealousy, fear, and alarm, till all the world is ready to rise and crush you as if you were a legion of Sampsons, commanded by Bonaparte. This, I think, will be more successful in putting you down than the ignoble course I have heretofore taken—so prepare for the worst.

Smith—I care as little for your magnifying powers as I have heretofore done for your contempt; in fact, I will endeavour to go ahead to that degree, that what you will say in regard to my great influence and power, though intended by you for a falsehood, shall prove to be true, and by so doing I shall be prepared to receive those whom you may excite against me, and to give them so warm a reception that they will never discover your intended falsehood, but will find all your rrepresentations of my greatness to be a reality; so do your worst, I defy you.

Devil—Well, time will determine whether the earth is to be governed by a prophet, and under the way of truth, or whether myself, and my Christian friends will still prevail. But remember, Smith, remember, I beseech you for your own good, beware what you are doing, I have the priests and editors, with a few exceptions, under my control, together with wealth, popularity and honour. Count well the cost before you again plunge into this warfare. Good bye, Mr. Smith, I must away to raise my recruits and prepare for a campaign.

Smith—Good by to your Majesty.              [They both touch hats and turn away.]

Devil—[Recollecting himself and suddenly turning back,] Oh! I say Mr. Smith, one word more if you please, [in a low and confidential tone, with his mouth close to his ear,] after all, what is the use of parting enemies; the fact is, you go in for the wheat and I for the tares. Both must be harvested. Are we not fellow-labourers? I can make no use of the wheat, nor you of the tares, even if we had them; we each claim our own, I for the burning and you for the barn. Come, then, give the poor old devil his due, and let’s be friends.

Smith—Agreed; I neither want yours nor you mine. A man free from prejudices, will give the devil his due. Come, here is the right hand of fellowship—you to the tares, and I to the wheat.                  [They shake hands cordially.]

Devil—Well, Mr. Smith, we have talked a long while, and are agreed at last. You are a noble and generous fellow, and would not bring a railing accusation against even a poor old Devil, nor cheat him of even one cent. Come, it is a warm day, and I feel as though it is my treat. Let us go down to Mammy Brewer’s cellar, and take something to drink.

Smith—Agreed, Mr. Devil; you appear very generous now.                 [The enter the cellar together.]

Devil—Good morning, Mrs. Brewer; I make you acquainted with my good friend Mr. Smith, the prophet.

The landlady—[smiling a little and looking a little surprised]—Why, Mr. Devil, is that you; sit down, you’re tired. But you don’t say this is Mr. Smith, your greatest enemy. I am quite surprised. What will you have, gentlemen? For if you can drink together, I think all the world ought to be friends.

Devil—As we are both temperance men, and ministers, I think perhaps a glass of spruce beer apiece will be all right. What say you, Mr. Smith?

Smith—As you please, your Majesty.                    [They now take the beer.]

Devil—[Holding up his glass.] Come, Mr. Smith, your health. I propose we offer a toast.

Smith—Well, proceed.

Devil—Here’s to my good friend, Joe. Smith. May all sorts of ill luck befall him, and may he never be suffered to enter my kingdom, either in time or eternity, for he would almost make me forget that I am a devil, and make a gentleman of me, while he gently overthrows my government, at the same time that he wins my friendship.

Smith—Here’s to his Satanic Majesty; may he be driven from the earth, and be forced to put to sea in a stone canoe with an iron paddle, and may the canoe sink, and a shark swallow the canoe and its royal freight, and an alligator swallow the shark, and may the alligator be bound in the northwest corner of hell, the door be locked, the key lost, and a blind man hunting for it.                [Exeunt Devil, Prophet, and all.]

EDITORIAL AFTERWORD

This story was first published as a pamphlet about 1840, by an unknown author, perhaps Orson Pratt or Parley Pratt, and it is almost certainly the first item of Mormon fiction by an LDS writer, ever.   

A GLIMPSE OF THE MILLENNIUM

The angel of our presence came to the bedside and gently said, “Arise!” Now, it mattereth not whether we were in the body or out of it; asleep or awake; on earth or in heaven; or upon the water or in the air; the sum of the matter is like this: Our guide, for such we shall call the angel or being that conveyed us, soon brought us in sight of a beautiful city.

As we were nearing the place, a pillar of fire, seemingly over the most splendid building, lit the city and country for a great distance around, and as we came by, THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD IN ZION, in letters of a pure language, and sparkling like diamonds, disclosed where we were. Our guide went round the city in order to give us a chance to “count the towers;” and, as it was nearly sunrise, he conducted us into one, that we might have a fair chance to view the glory of Zion by daylight. We seemed to be swallowed up in sublimity! The pillar of fire, as the sun rose, majestically mellowing into a white cloud, as a shade for the city from heat. The dwellings, so brilliant by night, had the appearance of precious stones, and the streets glittered like gold, and we marvelled. “Marvel not,” said our guide, “this is the fulfillment of the words of Isaiah: ‘For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thine officers peace, and thine exactors righteousness.’” [Isaiah 60:17]

Now the eyes of our understanding began to be quickened, and we learned that we were two hundred years ahead of common life, and we glorified. The veil that hides our view from the glory of the upper deep had been taken away, and all things appeared to us as to the Lord. The great earthquake mentioned by John, and other prophets before him, had levelled the mountains over the whole earth; the sea had rolled back as it was in the beginning, the crooked was made straight, and the rough places plain. The earth yielded her increase, and the knowledge of God exalted man to the society of resurrected beings.

The melody and prayers of the morning in Zion showed that the Lord was there, and truly so; for, after breakfast the chariot of Jesus Christ was made ready for a pleasure ride; and the chariots of his hundred and forty-four thousand glittered in the retinue of earth’s greatest and best, so gloriously, that the show exhibited the splendour of gods, whose Father’s name they bore on the front of their crowns.

Our curiosity excited us to inquire what day they celebrated? To which the guide replied, “This is the Feast-day fo the Lord to Joseph and Hyrum Smith, for being martyred for the truth, held yearly on the seventh day of the fourth month, throughout all the tribes of Israel!”

Flesh and blood cannot comprehend the greatness of the scene; the worthy of the earth, with Adam at their head; the martyrs of the different dispensations, with Abel at their head; and honourable men from other worlds composed an assemblage of majesty, dignity, and divinity so much above the little pageantry of man in his self-made greatness, that we almost forgot that mortals ever enjoyed anything more than misery, in all the pomp and circumstance of man’s power over man! This was a feast-day for truth! This was the reward of integrity! This was the triumph of kings and priests unto God, and was a ho