Across Space by Edmond Hamilton

"They experimented upon me as on a guinea pig, turning different rays on arms and legs to observe their action.  They would not kill me outright for I was too valuable a specimen.  And God, how I prayed for death!"

As you know, Bob, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have taken up a sacred quest--to read at least one story from each issue of the seminal speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales that was printed in the 1930s.  And we have made some progress, as these links below attest:

 1930  1931 1932 1933  1934  1935  1936  1937 

Of course, Weird Tales didn't begin publishing in the 1930s, but in the 1920s.  Let's take a break from the '30s and embark on a brief trip to 1926 and read a serial from Weird Tales that appeared over three different issues behind three different women-in-peril covers, a serial penned by our pal Edmond Hamilton.  Weird Tales is most famous for horror stories and sword and sorcery stories, but the Unique Magazine did offer readers some science fiction stories, like Hamilton's space opera "Crashing Suns" and its sequels and Hamilton's post-apocalyptic tale "Day of Judgement", stories full of mad scientists, space naval battles, aliens, mutants, and so on, and I'm guessing the topic of today's discussion, "Across Space," will be a science fiction tale of some type.  Let's dig in and see!

"Across Space" consists of 15 teeny little chapters, plus prologue and epilogue.  The prologue describes a fat little astronomer in a mountain top observatory who is the first to notice that Mars has stopped orbiting the sun; he then goes home to eat some pie.  This guy has a good perspective on life-work balance.

The story proper, we learn in Chapter 1, is a first-person narrative delivered by an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley.  The first three chapters foreshadow (for example, the narrator has a dream of being tied to railroad tracks as a train bears down on him) and then announce the disaster Earth is in for--Mars is heading for Earth, certain to destroy us all! 

Hamilton was a working writer who churned out copy in mass quantities to make a living, and as a result rehearsed the same themes and plots again and again.  (H. P. Lovecraft, who saw himself as an artist, often complained that prolific writers like Hamilton and Jack Williamson were wasting or even ruining their talent via such practices.  While Hamilton won the famous nickname of "World Wrecker Hamilton," in his correspondence Lovecraft would call Hamilton such things as "Hectograph Eddie" and "Single-Plot Hamilton.")  And here in "Across Space" we see plot elements and themes we've seen in Hamilton's work before.  Hamilton's space opera stories often entail intelligent agencies moving planets and stars around like so many ocean liners or aircraft carriers--see the aforementioned "Crashing Suns" tales as well as "Thundering Worlds."  These space operas often also include a scene of torture, and "Across Space" includes just such a scene (see epigraph above.)  Hamilton also provided Weird Tales readers a steady diet of stories in which all life on Earth is threatened, including "The Life-Masters," "The Plant Revolt," "The Death Lord" and  "When the World Slept."

In Chapter 4 the narrator talks to a physicist who is a sort of mentor of his; this guy has pieced together clues derived from the newspaper, the behavior of his compass, and knowledge of his disappeared friend, and come up with the theory that the answer to this Mars disaster can be found on Easter Island!  You see, the physicist's pal, an anthropologist, thought the statues on Easter Island were the work of a nonhuman race, and went to the island two years ago to investigate, only to disappear without trace.  And just yesterday a ship reported that there was a volcanic eruption on Easter Island, which the physicist regards as unlikely.  

In Chapter 5 the physicist and the chemist are on the U. S. Navy's most advanced bomber seaplane, flying to Easter Island in hopes of figuring out what is going on and saving the world!  On the radio they listen to reports to how the common man is responding to knowledge that the world is about to be destroyed.  He's not responding well!  In India they are resorting to human sacrifice!  In Africa the blacks are massacring the whites and each other!  Chicago is in flames, and New York is one big party, the people having given themselves over to "unbridled license."

In Chapter 6 our heroes investigate Easter Island at night; what the sailors thought was a volcanic eruption is in fact a red beam of light a half-mile across that for a few minutes each night shoots up from the island's extinct volcano towards Mars--this must be what is drawing Mars to Earth!  As the shaft of crimson energy glows, a sort of chanting can be heard from the volcano crater!  In Chapter 7, twenty-four hours later, the chemist and physicist have scaled the volcano to get a closer look at the nightly fireworks, and are captured by skinny pale-skinned men with bat wings who carry them down into the volcano.  This cliffhanger concludes the September installment of "Across Space."

Chapters 8 through 13 grace the October issue.  In chapters 8 and 9 we get a sort of travelogue as the two captive scientists are conducted down a huge elevator to a largely deserted subterranean city and put into a cell by the white bat-people, to be guarded by members of their slave race of slimy headless tentacle-armed beastmen.  Already in the cell is the aforementioned MIA anthropologist, and in Chapters 10 through 12 this broken man, three of whose limbs the bat-fiends have burned off in their ray gun experiments, explains his torturers' origin (they are the descendants of Martian colonists who fled tyranny on a high-tech Mars when humans were mere apemen), history (they lived on a Pacific continent until it sank beneath the waves--only Easter Island, the mountain where they had erected statues of their kings, remained above the surface--and then retired to this city that they had built in a huge cavern) and current operations (over the centuries, life underground lead to low fertility, so now the colonists want to return to the surface, and have made friends with their brothers on Mars and figured out how to channel the Earth's magnetism and use it to draw Mars here so they will the necessary numbers to overwhelm us natives.)  In his copious free time the anthropologist has been puzzling out a way to save the Earth, and Chapter 13 foreshadows the way the characters will pull our bacon out of the fire in the third and final installment in November.

That November issue's chapters 14 and 15 deliver readers the tragedy and triumph of the story's climax.  The Martian colonists' slave race are the products of what we might call genetic engineering--they are totally artificial life, almost mindless and controlled by telepathy, reminding us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's 1931 At The Mountains of Madness.  The anthropologist has over his months of captivity been experimenting with mentally influencing the slaves himself, and when all three men focus their thoughts on their guards they find themselves able to direct the slimy robotic creatures to set them free.  The three scientists (the legless anthropologist has to be carried) sneak back through the empty city--all the Martians, save two guarding the ray projector, are attending services at their temple--to the surface and the magnetic ray control center.  The one-armed anthropologist is killed in the fight, but our heroes take the control center.  The physicist sends the chemist ahead, out of the volcano, ostensibly to get help from the pilot of the U. S. Navy bomber, and then he activates--at full power!--the green ray that pushes Mars away from Earth (the bat people were going to use this ray to slow the descent of Mars once it got close.)  The bat-people come after him, but the physicist then activates both red and green rays--crossing the streams!--causing an explosion that kills him and every one of the Martian colonists.  Earth is now Martian-free!

In the epilogue we learn that Mars is now a moon of Jupiter, and that there is a colossal statue of the physicist at the mouth of San Francisco Bay.  One presumes that in the woke future, this statue, a monument to the man who committed genocide against the people of Mars in an act of human supremacy, will be torn down after the San Francisco city council has called for a retroactive ceasefire between Earth and Mars.  This is your reminder to take time out to cherish any work of art you care about, because there is no telling when it will be unexpectedly destroyed. 

"Across Space" is an acceptable entertainment spiced up with generous portions of speculative science and of gruesome horror.  "Across Space" was reprinted in the first volume of Haffner Press's The Collected Edmond Hamilton in 2009 and in 2015 our Italian friends published it in a trade paperback with a lamentable cover along with Hamilton's 1929 story "Locked Worlds."

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