Torrance On Van Rijn

"Hiding Place," see here.

Captain Torrance thinks like Eric Wace:

"'[Van Rijn] sits in his suite with a case of brandy and a box of cigars. The cook, who could be down here helping [the engineer], is kept aboard the yacht to fix him his damned gourmet meals. You'd think he didn't care if we're blown out of the sky!'" (pp. 590-591)

Remembering his oath and position and succumbing to habit, Torrance apologizes and proceeds to test the gorilloids for intelligence. A nervous-impulse tracer detects synaptic flows and casts a 3D image of the functioning nervous system. Then, anatomical correlation should identify the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and also the degree of brain activity independent of other nerve paths. The gorilloids have small brains but might have more efficient neurones.

If a Chereionite were present, then he would be able to detect, interpret and even understand brain emissions, a qualitatively different proposition from merely measuring brain activity. Here is the old philosophical mind-brain problem yet again.

Torrance, like Torres in "Margin of Profit," is both a captain and a Lodgemaster - a conflict of interests, I think.

Alien Animals II

See here.

By a process of elimination and by some positive inferences, Nicholas van Rijn deduces that the helmet beasts insert their cilia into the gorilloids' sphincters and that the two organisms thus linked form a single intelligence. These beings hid in their own zoo by separating into their two symbiotes. One positive clue was cabins with bunks for both: niches for gorilloids and cubbyholes for helmets.

In true future history style, these beings are appropriately referred to centuries later when Dominic Flandry encounters tripartite symbiotes. Flandry does not at this point refer to Nicholas van Rijn but does reveal that the planet of the Togru-Kon-Tanakh, the bipartite beings, is called Vanrijn! - which we had not known before.

Today has been taken up with a Catholic funeral and its aftermath. One friend of the deceased attended wearing his Jewish skullcap. I will shortly return to the same Community Center to meet two other sf fans and expect some of the family from the funeral still to be present. The deceased had had 13 children, 35 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.

A next project for this blog might be to reread and post about The Man Who Counts. I will also be reading for the first time the second Modesty Blaise novel, to be discussed on Comics Appreciation. Life continues to be a blast.

The Zoo Ship

"Hiding Place," see here.

See blog search results for:

alien zoo (scroll down)
gorilloids

The zoo ship recalls Superman for three reasons:

(i) he had an alien zoo and Anderson's Captain Torrance refers to "'...Luna City Zoo.'" (p. 572);

(ii) one of Superman's villains collected not individual organisms but miniaturized, bottled, inhabited cities;

(iii) in another story, a spaceship fired a duplication ray at a planetary

surface so that the target organism remained on the planet while an exact duplicate of it appeared inside the spaceship, like a Star Trek transporter that did not disintegrate the original.

Although Poul Anderson's Technic History is better written either than Star Trek or than most Superman scripts, all are sf so that conceptual comparisons are appropriate.

Brains

"Hiding Place."

Nicholas van Rijn, Captain Torrance and the crew of the Hebe G.B. search for intelligent beings hiding among the animals in the alien zoo ship. The gorilloids seem to have limited cranial capacity. When van Rijn suggests that they might have brains not in their heads but in their bellies, Torrance replies that some people do. This is equivalent to Captain Torres in "Margin of Profit" acknowledging that van Rijn has guts.

Torrance goes on to expound empirically what some now argue speculatively, that animals keep their brains near their principal sense organs which are usually at the top. Otherwise, neural paths would become too long. Larry Niven's Puppeteers have their brain in their body with one eye and one mouth with malleable lips also serving as fingers at the end of each arm-neck.

Torrance adds that a smaller brain will not mean less intelligence if the neurons are more efficient but how do neurons work? They fire electrically and interact chemically but how does this cause either consciousness or intelligence? We judge whether an organism is conscious, then whether it is intelligent, by observing not its neurons but its behavior. If behavior includes exchange of signals, then we ask whether signals have become symbols, i.e., language, i.e., intelligent communication.

Eliminations

How a process of elimination identified the zoo keepers (see recent posts and here):

Eliminated
The gorilloids (tested with a specially devised instrument):
color blind;
unable to focus on the ship's instruments;
brain small;
most brain activity controlling animal functions;
canine intelligence level.

The lone elephantoid (this and the rest considered logically):
too big;
one individual not enough to pilot and land the ship, then collect and care for specimens etc.

The tiger apes:
reverting to quadrupedalism;
not specialized enough.

The caterpiggles:
the emergency acceleration switch fell too easily, thus not suitable in high gravity;
such light shelves would not be built in high gravity.

The tentacle centaurs...
...breathe hydrogen, therefore would not use copper oxide rectifiers exposed to their atmosphere.

The helmet beasts:
too small and slow;
not enough room for real brains.

Solution
The cabins have big and small cubbyholes. A zoo keeper is a helmet beast symbiotically attached to a gorilloid. Flandry informs us that the planet of the Togru-Kon-Tanakh came to be named "Vanrijn."

Alien Animals

Nicholas van Rijn and his crew, including one Ramanujan and one Altaian, explore an alien zoo ship. They find:

a giant tendrilled shark;

tiny, flying, scaled, glittering reptiles;

tiger-striped, bear-sized, clawed, carnivorous mammals (tiger apes);

red, six-legged, otter-like creatures;

black, faceless, hydrogen-breathing quadrupeds with six ropy arms, two ending in boneless fingers, living under high pressure in triple gravity at seventy below (tentacle centaurs);

snakes living in the same conditions as the tentacle centaurs;

a green, scaled, elephant-sized quadruped with a trunk ending in psuedodactyls (the elephantoid);

large, oxygen-breathing bipeds with sphincters in their necks (gorilloids);

small, helmet-like quadrupeds with tentacles ending in cilia and human-like eyes (helmet beasts);

dark blue, silver-spotted, man-sized, oxygen-breathing caterpillars with two arms and hands, each with no thumbs but six opposable fingers, from a high gravity planet (catterpiggles).

This shows the difficulty of imagining alien animals without comparing them to Terrestrial animals. Superman had an extra-terrestrial zoo in his Fortress of Solitude. As described by Alan Moore, this contained "neonmoths" that shrieked with human voices and sentient puddles that evaporated when overexcited.

This comparison of a Nicholas van Rijn story with a Superman story is not frivolous. Although Superman initiated the new genre of "superheroes," he himself is an sf character who, while flying through space, can encounter interstellar traders like van Rijn or pirates like van Rijn's enemies in this story, the Adderkops.

(How can the Adderkops, having colonized a planet in unknown space a century ago, have increased the number of their warships since then?)

Ice Ships And Brains

The Man Who Counts, see here.

Having posted about ice ships in In Mid-Battle, I searched the blog for previous references and found:

Ice And Fire
Van Rijn At War

The blog is full of repetitions and second and third thoughts. In Torrance On Van Rijn, I described the measurement of brain activity in alien organisms. It occurred to me to contrast the mere measurement of such activity with the detection and interpretation of brain emanations. This prompted a reference to the philosophical mind-brain problem but it did not occur to me until later to make a link to my own article on this subject which can be seen again here.

The tripartite Didonians are intelligent only when conjoined whereas the helmet beasts, I think, remain intelligent even when separated from the gorilloids. The latter, when separated, have a canine level of intelligence with most brain activity comtrolling only animal functions. See Eliminations.

The Man Who Counts, Chapter III

On Diomedes, human beings must be immunized against hay fever, asthma and hives and the local food would quickly poison them.

Wace thinks that the naked van Rijn resembles that extinct ape, a gorilla. In "Hiding Place," when van Rijn sees the organisms that come to be called "gorilloids," he comments:

"'We had one like them on Earth once.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 581.

Thus, Anderson remembers between stories that gorillas are extinct in this future history.

For once, van Rijn offers candles not to St Dismas but to "'St Nicholas...patron of wanderers...'" (p. 354). To make a comparison with paganism, Woden is the Wanderer. In "Margin of Profit," Captain Torres calls St Nicholas "'...patron of travelers...'" (p. 159). Not St Christopher?

In The Man Who Counts, van Rijn does complain to St Christopher when he sees that the Diomedeans propose to pull the rescued human beings through the water with a rope. Without knowing a word of any Diomedean language, van Rijn persuades a Diomedean not only to rescue the human rations but also to airlift him at least from the sinking vessel.

DD Harriman, the title character of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, gets mankind to the Moon and out into the Solar System whereas van Rijn, the title character of Trader To The Stars and The Man Who Counts, operates on an interstellar scale.