LITMIR.BIZ

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I insist that using the term “carrier” instead of “horse,” while misleading, is not inaccurate. However, I would like to know just what sort of picture the term conjured up in the reader’s mind. In Chapter Ten, in the battle scene, you’ll find the following:

      “The combination [of attackers from both sides], plus the fact that the heavy armor was a little unwieldy, overbalanced him [the commander]. He toppled to the ground with a clash of steel as he and the carrier parted company.

      “Without a human hand at its controls, the carrier automatically moved away from the mass of struggling fighters and came to a halt well away from the battle.”

      To be perfectly honest, it’s somewhat of a strain on my mind to imagine anyone building a robot-controlled machine as good as all that, and then giving the drive such poor protection that he can fall off of it.

      One of the great screams from my critics has been occasioned by the fact that I referred several times to the Spaniards as “Earthmen.” I can’t see why. In order not to confuse the reader, I invariably referred to them as the “invading Earthmen,” so as to make a clear distinction between them and the native Earthmen, or Incas, who were native to Peru. If this be treachery, then make the most of it.

      In other words, I contend that I simply did what any other good detective story writer tries to do—mislead the reader without lying to him. Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” for instance, uses the device of telling the story from the murderer’s viewpoint, in the first person, without revealing that he is the murderer. Likewise, John Dickson Carr, in his “Nine Wrong Answers” finds himself forced to deny that he has lied to the reader, although he admits that one of his characters certainly lied. Both Carr and Christie told the absolute truth—within the framework of the story—and left it to the reader to delude himself.

      It all depends on the viewpoint. The statement, “We all liked Father Goodheart very much” means one thing when said by a member of his old parish in the United States, which he left to become a missionary. It means something else again when uttered by a member of the tribe of cannibals which the good Father attempted unsuccessfully to convert.

      Similarly, such terms as “the gulf between the worlds,” “the new world,” and “the known universe” have one meaning to a science-fictioneer, and another to a historian. Semantics, anyone?

      In Chapter Ten, right at the beginning, there is a conversation between Commander Frank and Frater Vincent, and “agent of the Assembly” (read: priest). If the reader will go back over that section, keeping in mind the fact that what they are “actually” talking about are the Catholic Church and the Christian religion as seen from the viewpoint of a couple of fanatically devout Sixteenth Century Spaniards, he will understand the method I used in presenting the whole story.

      Let me quote:

      “Mentally, the commander went through the symbol-patterns that he had learned as a child—the symbol-patterns that brought him into direct contact with the Ultimate Power, the Power that controlled not only the spinning of atoms and the whirling of electrons in their orbits, but the workings of probability itself.”

      Obviously, he is reciting the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. The rest of the sentence is self-explanatory.

      So is the following:

      “Once indoctrinated into the teachings of the Universal Assembly, any man could tap that power to a greater or lesser degree, depending on his mental control and ethical attitude. At the top level, a first-class adept could utilize that Power for telepathy, psychokinesis, levitation, teleportation, and other powers that the commander only vaguely understood.”

      It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the miracles attributed to many of the Saints; Pizarro certainly did. His faith in that Power was as certain as the modern faith in the power of the atomic bomb.

      As a matter of fact, it was very probably that hard, unyielding Faith which made the Sixteenth Century Spaniard the almost superhuman being that he was. Only Spain of the Sixteenth Century could have produced the Conquistadors or such a man as St. Ignatius Loyola, whose learned, devout, and fanatically militant Society of Jesus struck fear into the hearts of Protestant and Catholic Princes alike for the next two centuries.

      The regular reader of Astounding may remember that I gave another example of the technique of truthful misdirection in “The Best Policy,” (July, 1957). An Earthman, captured by aliens, finds himself in a position in which he is unable to tell even the smallest lie. But by telling the absolute truth, he convinces the aliens that homo sapiens is a race of super-duper supermen. He does it so well that the aliens surrender without attacking, even before the rest of humanity is aware of their existence.

      The facts in “Despoilers of the Golden Empire” remain. They are facts. Francisco Pizarro and his men—an army of less than two hundred—actually did inflict appalling damage on the Inca armies, even if they were outnumbered ten to one, and with astonishingly few losses of their own. They did it with sheer guts, too; their equipment was not too greatly superior to that of the Peruvians, and by the time they reached the Great Inca himself, none of the Peruvians believed that the invaders were demons or gods. But in the face of the Spaniards’ determined onslaught, they were powerless.

      The assassination scene at the end is almost an exact description of what happened. It did take a dozen men in full armor to kill the armorless Pizarro, and even then it took trickery and treachery to do it.

      Now, just to show how fair I was—to show how I scrupulously refrained from lying—I will show what a sacrifice I made for the sake of truth.

      If you’ll recall, in the story, the dying Pizarro traces the Sign of the Cross on the floor in his own blood, kisses it, and says “Jesus!” before he dies. This is in strict accord with every history on the subject I could find.

      But there is a legend to the effect that his last words were somewhat different. I searched the New York Public Library for days trying to find one single historian who would bear out the legend; I even went so far as to get a librarian who could read Spanish and another whose German is somewhat better than mine to translate articles in foreign historical journals for me. All in vain. But if I could have substantiated the legend, the final scene would have read something like this:

      Clawing at his sword-torn throat, the fearless old soldier brought his hand away coated with the crimson of his own blood. Falling forward, he traced the Sign of the Cross on the stone floor in gleaming scarlet, kissed it, and then glared up at the men who surrounded him, his eyes hard with anger and hate.

      “I’m going to Heaven,” he said, his voice harsh and whispery. “And you, you bastards, can go to Hell!”

      It would have made one hell of an ending—but it had to be sacrificed in the interests of Truth.

      So I rest my case.

      I will even go further than that; I defy anyone to point out a single out-and-out lie in the whole story. G’wan—I dare ya!

      (SECRET ASIDE TO THE READER; J. W. C., Jr., PLEASE DO NOT READ!)

      Ah, but wait! There is a villain in the piece!

      I did not lie to you, no. But you were lied to, all the same.

      By whom?

      By none less than that conniving arch-fiend, John W. Campbell, Jr., that’s who!

      Wasn’t it he who bought the story?

      And wasn’t it he who, with malice aforethought, published it in a package which was plainly labeled Science Fiction?

      And, therefore, didn’t you have every right to think it was science fiction?

      Sure you did!

      I am guilty of nothing more than weakness; my poor, frail sense of ethics collapsed completely at the sight of the bribe he offered me to become a party to the dark conspiracy that sprang from the depths of his own demoniac mind. Ah, well; none of us is perfect, I suppose.

      CUM GRANO SALIS

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