Startling Stories, Mar '46: H Kuttner, C L Moore, F B Long and J Williamson

We've been reading quite a lot of Thrilling Wonder Stories lately.  Having just read a Henry Kuttner story in Thrilling Wonder which I considered a ponderous dud, let's try a Kuttner piece in TWS's sister publication, Startling Stories, one that comes highly recommended.  In 1988 James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock published a book called Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, and one of the books that made the list (apparently primarily the product of Cawthorn, not Moorcock) was Kuttner's The Valley of the Flame, which debuted in Startling's March 1946 issue.  We see a second Kuttner story in the same issue of Startling, this one co-written with Kuttner's wife, C. L. Moore of Northwest Smith fame, as well as stories by Frank Belknap Long and Jack Williamson; let's check out all four tales.

"The Valley of the Flame" by Henry Kuttner (as by Keith Hammond) (1946)

Valley of the Flame appeared in book form in 1964 under Kuttner's real name; nota bene, we are reading the 1946 magazine version here, which takes up like 47 pages.

Brian Raft is a doctor and a scientist, currently in the Amazon, running a clinic and investigating possible treatments for malaria--maybe the lore of the local Indians holds a clue to a remedy superior to quinine.  Helping him at the clinic is a Welsh biologist who has lived in these jungles for thirty years, Dan Craddock.  In "A God Named Kroo" and in "The Crystal Circe," Kutner presented us with modern Celts who kept in touch with their ancient heritage, and in Craddock he gives us another one.  This dude is always telling romantic stories about Welsh history or about Welsh ghosts, singing Welsh songs, etc.  At some point he must have suffered some terrible mishap, because his hands are terribly mutilated, though he can still manipulate any tool or medical instrument he must--and he can still lift a bottle of booze to his lips!

Two white men, apparently sick, come to the clinic from upriver, one a pilot, the other a graceful and mysterious figure.  Hanging from the pilot's neck is a strange artifact, a thing like a lens; when Raft looks into it he briefly sees a moving image of the face of a beautiful woman whose features suggest she is of an ethnicity he has never encountered in all his travels around the world.  The graceful man, Pereira, is also quite odd.  When Raft examines him, he finds this guy's body temperature, blood chemistry, heart beat and even skeletal structure to be quite unusual, and he wonders if this guy is some kind of mutant.

Pereira sneaks away, taking Craddock, apparently hypnotized, with him, as well as the lens that the pilot wore--the pilot moans that the lens contains his soul and he will die without it, and sure enough, it isn't long before he keels over.  Raft and a bunch of natives head off in pursuit of Pereira; it is a long journey, and Raft wakes up one morning to find the Indians gone, they having abandoned him or perhaps been picked off by jungle predators in the night.  Raft soldiers on alone, following the trail of Pereira day after day, but is he driven by his concern for Craddock or his hopes that he will have a chance to meet the gorgeous girl of the lens?   

At the end of the trail is a tunnel fashioned from a forcefield that leads Raft through a cavern to a hidden valley, where he meets the woman of the lens, Janissa, and catches up to Pereira.  He quickly realizes what we readers have already guessed--the people of this valley are of a race descended not from the noble ape like you and me, but from the selfish, sadistic, solipsistic, and sinister feline!  Yet again we SF fans have come face to face with cat people!

(Earle Bergey on the cover of Startling just paints Janissa as a conventional redhead with an unflattering facial expression, but on the Ace book version Ed Emshwiller comes through with a depiction of her that reflects some elements of Kuttner's description, like the tiger-striped hair.)

As is customary in these stories in which a guy finds himself in a strange kingdom where people fight with swords, our hero gets mixed up in their crazy politics and joins the side of the beautiful princess. Pereira and Janissa, we eventually learn, are the hidden valley's "Guardians," each the hereditary leader of one of the two subordinate royal families of the cat race.  These two don't really see eye to eye; Pereira has the upper hand and takes Raft captive.  Pereira's mail-clad soldiers take their prisoner on a long march through a forest of trees five miles high, each tree as thick as a city block and supporting its own ecosystem among whose populations are numbered mobile carnivorous vines, herbivorous arboreal crocodilians, and giant leech-like sap-sucking parasites.  Raft notices that time seems to flow slowly here in the valley--the sun crawls across the sky, when you drop things they drift softly to the ground, and a river moves sluggishly, as if its waters were thick and viscous. At the end of the march is a castle where resides the king of all the cat people, Darum, hereditary leader of the senior royal family of the cat people.

Darum is reputed to be insane, and he certainly has a bizarre relationship with a femme fatale known as Yrann.  The most beautiful woman in the kingdom but faithless and promiscuous, Yrann dallied with and betrayed Darum, but the king subdued her and now she reclines before his throne, wearing a veil and playing a musical instrument with which she conveys meaning the way R2-D2 communicates via beeps and whistles.  You see, her divinely lovely body may be perfectly intact, but behind that veil her face is a hideous mass of scarred flesh!

Pereira told his soldiers that Raft was Craddock, and in his interview with Darum, Raft tries to convince the mad king that he is in fact not Craddock.  Pereira and Darum are at odds, it seems, and Craddock is the bone of contention.  After his royal interview, Raft is visited by Janissa, who scales the castle walls to get into the room in which Raft is imprisoned so she can talk to him in secret.  We get a lot of exposition from her, and then, just like at the office when they put one of your colleagues who decided he couldn't make the big meeting because his kid has a softball game or something on speaker, she telepathically contacts Craddock via her lens so that the Welshman, Pereira's prisoner, can add further exposition of his own.

Long ago a meteor landed in this valley, which was then inhabited by a technologically advanced race who built all the castles the cat people today inhabit; colloquially, the cat people call this meteor "the Flame" and sort of think of it as an erratic life-giving god. The meteor's radiation has a powerful effect on the metabolism of life forms, and the nature of the effect is liable to fluctuate--after a long period of having a beneficial influence, the radiation became malignant.  The high-tech ancients studied how to regulate the radiation, but were worried about committing a blunder and making the radiation even more dangerous and procrastinated, delaying putting their plans in to action until it was too late--the radiation mutated their offspring into a bunch of wretched and disgusting monsters, physically weak and mentally deficient.  (You can see these aggressive but impotent freakazoids on the cover of the magazine.)

Thirty years ago Craddock stumbled on the valley and the ancients' notes, and somehow manipulated the Flame (wrecking his hands and burning up those documents--oops!--in the process), causing it to accelerate the metabolism of lifeforms in the valley to an astonishing rate--this is why time seems to flow slowly here.  In the thirty years since then, life in the valley has been through millions of generations, enough for the local jaguars to evolve into an intelligent bipedal race.  But today the Flame's radiation is again turning toxic, threatening to turn the cat people into pathetic freaks in a few generations; Pereira brought Craddock back to the valley in hopes he could fix the Flame.  Craddock doesn't really remember what he did to alter the meteor thirty years ago, but the cat people know that everything you see is stored in your brain, even if you can't consciously recall it, and Pereira has the technology to get that data out of Craddock's noggin.

The dispute between Darum and Pereira has to do with the fact that Pereira wants to get right to fixing the Flame, but according to tradition such a big decision has to be made by the king, not a Guardian, and such a risky move as tinkering with their life-giving and life-destroying god probably shouldn't be jumped into precipitously.  As a traditionalist, Janissa is siding with Darum.

After all this exposition, Janissa climbs back down the castle wall, leaving our hero in prison.  Luckily another woman comes along to free Raft--the mute musician with the mangled phiz, Yrann!  Yrann gives Raft a dagger and tries to get him to murder Darum.  Raft refuses and escapes, hurries off to rescue Craddock from Pereira.  Pereira has taken Craddock to a special part of the valley known as the Garden of Kharn; whereas the part of the valley with the five-mile high trees has a clear uncluttered floor between tree trunks, the Garden is a thick jungle of many different plants and creatures that share a collective consciousness.  The Garden tries to use its telepathy to seduce Raft into joining up and being integrated into the collective, but Raft resists, finds Pereira and Craddock, drives off Pereira, who has already drawn the info he needs from Craddock's brain and has no need to stick around and fight the two surface people. 

Back in Darum's castle, Raft and Craddock and the cat people technicians and scientists labor to get the same info out of Craddock's grey matter, and then build a machine to regulate the meteor's radiation based on his subconscious memories of those old documents.  To build it they have to use metals that cannot be found in the valley any longer--luckily these elements are present in sufficient amounts in stuff Raft brought from the surface, like his firearms.  This means that Pereira can't possibly build a similar device that will work, so when Janissa detects via telepathy that Pereira is on his way to the Flame, our heroes have to rush to stop him.  After a scene in which Yrann tries to kill Darum and she and the mad king both end up dead, we get the final scenes of fighting as Raft, Janissa and Craddock battle their way through the degenerate descendants of the ancients and then grapple with Periera in the crater of the Flame.  Craddock dies from fluctuations in the Flame as he integrates pieces from the machine he made with Raft (broken in all the fighting) with Periera's insufficient device and saves the valley.  Then Raft and Janissa express their love for each other and leave for a life together in our world, even though Kuttner had earlier brought up the fact that it is unlikely a union such as theirs could produce offspring.

I liked "Valley of the Flame" but I think it has a real problem: the individual elements are all cool, but they don't necessarily fit together smoothly.  The five-mile high trees are fun, but they don't have anything to do with the plot.  The Garden of Kharn is cool, but why did Pereira go there?  Janissa climbing the wall of the castle is a good adventure scene, but why did she risk her life to come see Raft when she knows she can't free him--just to give him a history lesson?  In the first two or three pages of the story we hear all about how Craddock is Welsh and incessantly talks about Welsh stuff, but then we never hear about it again.  Kuttner makes a big deal out of Yrann leading Raft to the treasure room where he retrieves the pilot's revolver and makes sure to keep the revolver in a waterproof pocket when he has to hide underwater, but Raft never actually shoots the revolver.  A number of times Kuttner hints that Raft is going to figure out what to do to resolve the plot by considering how people descended from cats differ from people descended from apes, but it never actually happens.  All in all, this feels like a story that could have used some more revising and polishing to make it feel more like a unified whole in which all the characters' actions make intuitive sense and serve the main plot and not just a collection of neato stuff jumbled together.

(We'll ignore such questions about the nature of the story's science as, "is it physically possible for your heart to beat a million times as fast as normal?")

Patriotic ad from page 6 of March 1946 issue of Startling Stories

"Shadow Over Venus" by Frank Belknap Long (1946)

Frank Belknap Long was a dedicated poet (H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow spent much of the summer of 1935 in a cabin working at a printing press, producing a collection of Long's poetry, The Goblin Tower, as a surprise for Long*) and "Shadow Over Venus" has a verse epigraph, a "Venusian folk chant" about a caged creature called the Gule who "knows why sorrow dogs our footsteps/And destroys the work of our hands."

*See HPL's January 18, 1936 letter to  F. Lee Baldwin.

It is the 22nd Century!  One of Earth's greatest explorers has been missing in the jungles of Venus for five years!  But today he finally emerges from the forest with a thick notebook of data and a bunch of native bearers who are lugging a caged specimen and climbs aboard the rescue ship.  Moments after boarding the space ship he falls over, deathly ill!

A swarm of venomous insects flies into the ship and almost kills everybody.  Somebody figures out that one of the native bearers, an unlettered savage, sneaked into the engine room and tinkered with some complex equipment so that it would vibrate at just the right pitch and frequency to attract that deadly insect attack.  The captain of the ship figures out what is going on--the specimen, a Gule, may look like a dumb beast but is in fact a being with intelligence far greater than not only the primitive native tribesmen but greater than Earth humans!  It can read and influence our human minds and easily work the natives like puppets!  The Venusian folk chant we read earlier is a clue that the Gules have for ages used their telepathic powers to stunt the cultural growth of the Venusian tribes.  The captain and his right hand man manage to take off and throw the monster out an airlock--the Gule can only influence one human at a time, so by working together in relay the two spacemen can get the cage out of the ship and into the void.

This is merely acceptable; the style isn't very good, and Long's effort to include a superfluous love story is lame.  "Shadow Over Venus" is a filler story, and has never been reprinted.

"Twelve Hours to Live!" by Jack Williamson (1931)

This is a reprint of a story from a 1931 issue of Wonder Stories.  Bizarrely, the cover of this issue of Startling attributes "Twelve Hours to Live!" to Clark Ashton Smith.   Proofreading is hard!  To assuage readers' possible annoyance at having paid for a rerun, the good people at Startling make a big production of saying they are inducting "Twelve Hours to Live!" into their Scientifiction Hall of Fame and performing a "service to the science fiction devotees of today and tomorrow" by giving this "science fiction gem of yesterday" some "new permanence."

Captain David Grant and his wife Nell are newlyweds!  He is commanding a space liner full of cargo and passengers through the inner solar system when they are accosted by the famous space pirate The Black Hawk!  Via heliograph, The Black Hawk demands their surrender.  Grant opens fire with the liner's meagre battery of ray projectors, but the liner's armaments are quickly silenced by the broadsides of the pirate ship.  The liner is boarded by space boats and captured after a bloody shoot out.

The Black Hawk is a sadist who makes Grant watch as one of his crew is murdered by exposure to mold spores from the third moon of Neptune--these old space operas by Williamson and his friend Edmond Hamilton often include scenes of terrible torture, and Williamson describes in some detail this poor bastard's cries of agony, prayers for help, how the mold propagates throughout his body and tendrils grow out of his nose and eyes, etc.

The Black Hawk then sets Grant down on an isolated island on Venus.  On the island with him are two large chests.  The Black Hawk tells him that one chest contains Nell, drugged unconscious but unharmed, and twelve hours worth of air, plus a supply of food and water and a radio to call for help.  The other contains the deadly mold spoors he saw in action on the pirate ship, which will infect him immediately if they are freed.  The story ends without revealing to us which chest Grant opens.

If you look at the original version of "Twelve Hours to Live!" in the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, you will find not only a drawing of Williamson wearing very fashionable spectacles and a cool coiffure, but the announcement of a contest--25 bucks for the best letter explaining how to choose the correct chest (and 15 for the second best and 10 for the third)!  The November issue reports that 1722 people sent in letters with ideas, and reproduces the three winning letters.    

This is a gruesomely fun story, a good example of the science lectures ("The fungi, you know, are a group of thallophytic plants...."), naval battles and horror scenes that characterize these old space operas, and I particularly liked the heliograph.

"Twelve Hours to Live!" would be reprinted in the 1975 collection The Early Williamson.   In ancillary autobiographical matter Williamson tells us he stole the idea for the story from Frank R. Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger?"  I bought a copy of the Spring 1976 issue of Starwind at the same Ohio antique mall where I got my copy of Future Day, and it includes an interview of Williamson by Darrell Schweitzer in which Williamson says that it was Isaac Asimov who convinced Doubleday to put out The Early Williamson.  Isaac Asimov: good deed doer!

"The Dark Angel" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1946)

"The Dark Angel" appears here in Startling under Henry Kuttner's name; isfdb credits it to Kuttner and Moore.  It seems to have been a success--Judith Merril included it in 1950's Shot in the Dark, an anthology of stories that are "out of this world" and "a different kind of mystery thrill," and it has reappeared in multiple Kuttner and Moore collections and SF magazines, including an issue of Science Fiction Monthly where it is accompanied by an essay entitled "Modern Masters of Science Fiction 12: Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore."

"The Dark Angel" is a tale of homo superior; I feel like Kuttner and Moore have addressed this topic multiple times already...looking at the archives I see 1944's "When the Bough Breaks" and "The Children's Hour" coming up; 1946's "Absalom" is another.

"The Dark Angel" has a frame story--a guy looks for and finds a guy in a bar who is drinking to forget, because Guy #1 thinks Guy #2 can explain to him a crazy thing he just saw at the Metropolitan Opera.  Guy #2 tells his tale of woe and terror.

Seventeen years ago Guy #2, Tim Hathaway, was a professional in his early forties, with a wife five years younger than he, Joanna.  They had no kids but they had a Pekingese.  (I guess the commies never convinced us to call these inbred little monsters "Bejingese."  Maybe someday soon.)  Joanna began exhibiting unusual abilities, like superstrength when they were involved in a car accident.  Tim caught her playing with a doll, making it walk around and dance with telekinesis.  Joanna explained that her father was some kind of scientist who spent time at a meteor site (Kuttner and Startling editor Sam Merwin, Jr. are really hitting the radioactive meteors hard this issue) and it must have altered his genes so that she is the vanguard of the race or species that will supersede us poor mundanes, her mutant powers only now manifesting themselves--in her youth she was in a sort of larval form, camouflaged to appear like one of us homo sapiens losers!  Joanna told Tim that she couldn't really love him any more, she can only see him as she sees the Pekingese, as a member of an inferior species!  She also says a lot of bunk about how the new race will be ruled by logic, not emotion, and this will give them the ability conquer the world.  

Joanna disappeared, but Tim, as the years went by, watched the newspapers, clipping all the stories about scientific breakthroughs by women, whom he figures are Joanna in disguise.  Seventeen years after she left him Joanna came back into his life; looking like she was twenty-five, telling him she might live to be a thousand, but is unhappy, lonely because she has never met a fellow homo superior, and has failed to develop a means of irradiating people in the way her father was irradiated; maybe she will be the first and last member of her species.

After she had explained this and enumerated to Tim some of her amazing powers she realized a drunk bum had been in the nearby bushes, listening, so she killed him with her psychic powers to protect her identity.  "I'm one woman against a whole world now.  Forget him.  His life was worthless."  

Tim decided that his wife was a threat to all humanity and that he had to go all Brutus on her to save the world.  With her amazing powers Joanna could do almost anything now, fulfill all her dreams, so she was singing a role in Faust at the Met!  Tim brought a pistol to the performance and made to shoot her down, but after drawing and aiming he didn't have the nerve to kill her and fled.  That was this very evening.  Our twist ending is that Guy #1 is a male homo superior, and now that he has the confirmation he wanted he kills Tim with his mental powers and goes off to find Joanna and with her sire a race of superbeings who are going to make us their slaves!  (It's a Hobson's choice between whether we'd prefer having these logic-chopping butchers ruling us or the ones in Peking--I mean Beijing!)

A good story.  As I have told you a hundred times, the disastrous sexual relationship is one of my favorite themes, and I also find the theme that power is corrupting, that people with superior abilities are liable to use those abilities to abuse others, compelling.  "The Dark Angel" is a great choice by Science Fiction Monthly to pair with their essay on Kuttner and Moore not only because it is well-structured and paced and has vivid images and all that, but because it illustrates something fundamental about K & M that Moore talks about in the intro to the 1975 Magnum paperback edition of Fury:

Yesterday I reread Fury for the first time in many years, and I'm not surprised, but interested, to see in it the two recurring themes which emerge quite explicitly in nearly everything we wrote.  Hank's basic statement was something like, "Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it."  Mine was, "The most treacherous thing in life is love."

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"The Dark Angel" is obviously the best story here, the one that is the most polished and economical and most closely addresses our ordinary real life concerns ("my marriage is in trouble because my spouse thinks he/she is better than me!" and "powerful people think I'm worthless and will exploit or kill me out of hand!"), but while the others have problems (the problem with the Williamson is that it is a gimmick that lacks a proper climax and resolution), they each have fun elements and are valuable specimens of the pulp SF of their eras from famous names who have received all kinds of accolades and had tons of influence.  A good issue of Startling!