Reader Hank Davis sets me straight on A.E. van Vogt’s story “The Vault of
the Beast,” and says I can use his name. Hank!! How could I NOT use his
name?!
“Dear Mr. Derbyshire—I have to differ with the synopsis of the short story
’The Vault of the Beast’ by A. E. van Vogt which you’ve quoted on the
corner. I may make a mistake myself — I’ve read the story at least three
times, but the last time was over 20 years ago — but that synopsis (which I
assume a reader emailed to you) definitely gets it wrong. It isn’t the
greatest mathematician who’s shut up in the vault, and the vault doesn’t
have a time lock.
“Here’s the situation as I recall it — but WARNING! reading this may spoil
the story for you. . . .
“A monstrous Thing from another dimension came into our spacetime, arriving
on Mars eons ago, but its passage rendered it unconscious. The Martians read
its thoughts, realized it was a terrible threat, but could not (would not?)
kill it, so they built a vault of indestructible material with a door that
had a combination lock, and shut it inside before it awoke. The combination
that will open the lock is ‘the ultimate prime number.’ Eons pass, the
Martians are extinct, humans have a Martian colony, and the Thing has
managed to — find? create? (my memory is vague here) — a creature which
can imitate anything it encounters, like a human, or part of the wall of a
spaceship, and sends it to Earth to ‘find the greatest mathematician.’ The
shapechanger finds said mathematician, gets him back to Mars, and gets him
to open the vault. The Thing charges out, ready to conquer the Solar
System — and disintegrates. It can’t survive in our spacetime. The
shapechanger is now dying (I don’t quite recall why), but tells the
mathematician that it knew that the Thing would not survive, but didn’t tell
it because it wanted it to be destroyed. The end.
“Now, this sounds terrible, told this way, and I may have killed the story
for you, but all of this is revealed to the reader in a scattered fashion
(the story beings with the shapechanger already on a ship to Earth), and van
Vogt keeps all the balls in the air in a brilliant breathless razzle-dazzle
fashion, rather like a classic Hitchcock movie, and the reader never stops
to think about the problems of the story, which are obvious in my synopsis .
. . such as, why did the Martians put a combination lock on the door instead
of just sealing the critter inside permanently, and if the Thing couldn’t
survive in our spacetime, why didn’t it go poof when it initially landed on
Mars? But while I was reading it (even on the third reading when I was in my
30s) van Vogt’s storytelling magic kept me turning the pages.”
A.E. van Vogt was one of the true greats from the golden age of sci-fi
(1940s & 1950s, roughly). Among many other things, he wrote Slan, the
archetype of all telepathy novels, now apparently out of print, and The
World of Null-A
, about which I remember
almost nothing except that I couldn’t put it down. (The “A” in “Null-A”
stands for “Aristotle,” by the way — in those days, even the authors of
space opera shoot-’em-ups believed they had a duty to make the reader think
a little.)