I agree, Julia, that McReady made some ridiculous claims in Who Goes There. And, what’s interesting is that he is the hero of the story. I actually wanted to add to your list of fallacies that other characters made, as well. Frankly, they are all over this story. One example is when Blair discusses the impossibility of the aliens being capable of reviving after being thawed out of ice:
A fish can come to after freezing because it’s so low a form of life that the individual cells of it body can revive, and that alone is enough to re-establish life. Any higher forms thawed out that way are dead. Though the individual cells revive, they die because there must be organization and cooperative effort to live…This is an intelligent creature as high in its evolution as we are in ours. Perhaps higher. It is as dead as a frozen man would be. (Chapter 3)
Basically, Blair is saying if men can’t do it, aliens can’t either. How can he know whether or not the aliens have evolved extremely far past us and can somehow adapt to freezing temperatures? Another false argument is when Connant is describing the alien’s expression:
If that is the best it could do in the way of resignation, I should exceedingly dislike seeing it when it was looking mad. That face was never designed to express peace. It just didn’t have any philosophical thoughts like peace in it make-up. (Chapter 3)
What Connant also fails to realize is that maybe it doesn’t have philosophical thoughts like anger either. Interestingly, Blair fires back to Connant, “How do you know the first thing about the meaning of a facial expression inherently in human!…Just because its nature is different, you haven’t any right to say it’s necessarily evil.”
That last quoted made me ask myself just who is making the fallacies, the characters or the author himself? I do not believe something or someone of a different nature is “necessarily evil,” but in Blair’s case, he is dead wrong. He was also wrong to think the aliens could not revive themselves after twenty million years in ice. Maybe the aliens are not evil, but he was still wrong to think they would not do anything to survive even if it meant killing off humans. So, is the author saying or even trying to confirm that the other is always going to kill humans in order to survive? Another silly conclusion was when Connant says, “The idea of the creature imitating one of us is fascinating, but unreal because it is too completely unhuman to deceive us. It doesn’t have a human mind” (Chapter 7). But earlier Blair states, This is a member of a supremely intelligent race, a race that has learned the deepest secrets of biology” (Chapter 6). Well, if the aliens have mastered everything there is to know about the study of life, then could they have also picked up a little on the psychology of life as well?
It’s just interesting that there is so much arrogance in all these characters. Maybe the aliens are, like you said, only doing what they have to do to survive. I might even side with the aliens against these guys. I’ll give McReady his due on figuring out a test to weed out the aliens; however, I feel like McReady’s last statement about the “bluer sun” simply confirms the fact that none of these characters, even the “heroes,” are rarely coming to conclusions based on hard evidence. I think the author was enforcing the idea that these aliens were terrible because they were a different species from a different solar system.
