Fantastic Universe, May '54: J Williamson, F B Long, C Jacobi, & H Kuttner

Our last exciting venture into 1950s speculative fiction included reading a story I didn't care for by Richard Matheson that appeared in the May 1954 issue of Leo Margulies' Fantastic Universe.  We noted then that this issue was full of stories by big names and by medium names we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and today we're going to read some of them.  (Note that we read the Robert Bloch story in this issue of Fantastic Universe, "Goddess of Wisdom," when we were reading the stories in the Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow.)  Allow me to point out that I am reading these stories from the 1954 magazine, not later and perhaps revised printings in books.    

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" by Jack Williamson

Yeah, yeah, the title of this one sounds like it belongs on a porn story, ha ha, always with the jokes, you guys.  "The Hitch-Hiker's Package" does not seem to have been a big hit for Jack Williamson--it was not reprinted until our own pornified 21st century, in the seventh volume of Haffner Press' Collected Stories of Jack Williamson.  (If I was rich, I would buy all eight volumes of this series, but of course if I was rich I would be living in Manhattan, spending my time exploring the world's greatest city, not sitting at home reading stories from old magazines, so I guess if I was rich I wouldn't buy all the books in that series after all.  Hmm.)  

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" is an acceptable filler piece that would fit in just fine in Weird Tales, which published a bunch of Williamson stories back in the day, among them "The Mark of the Monster," "Wizard's Isle," and "The Plutonian Terror." 

Jason has picked up a pathetic skinny hitchhiker clad in worn-out clothes and gripping a package wrapped up in newspaper.  Another car recklessly gets in Jason's way and an accident is narrowly avoided.  When Jason looks over at the passenger seat he finds the hitchhiker is gone, but the package is there on the seat.

Jason begins to drive automatically, in a sort of daze, off the highway, to a small depressed town.  Jason has has never seen this place before, but every street and building of it feels oddly familiar, in particular the local bank, which is shuttered.  He drives up to an old house and goes inside to be ecstatically greeted by a black servant ("a negress") and by a skinny old woman who thinks he is her son.  Jason automatically opens the package--it is a stack of cash and a bunch of bonds.  He hears himself apologizing for robbing the bank years ago, driving it out of business and his father to suicide.

Then Jason wakes up to find people helping him--he has been injured in a car accident, and the hitchhiker is laying dead beside him; the package is absent.

An unobjectionable but forgettable Twilight Zone sort of thing, a supernatural story the mechanics of which can't bear much scrutiny but which is competently written and somewhat entertaining.    

"The Calm Man" by Frank Belknap Long  

Here's another story by a Weird Tales alum that would languish unreprinted until this wild 21st century of ours.

We just read a story by Richard Matheson in which an Earthwoman was impregnated by a Martian, and here we have a story by Frank Belknap Long on the very same theme.  Maybe try keeping it in your pants, you damned dirty Martians.  (Of course all you Martian sympathizers are going to say this is just legit payback for John Carter getting his Earth mitts on that dish Dejah Thoris, aren't you?)  

Sally is a shy young woman but also eager to get married, and so she agrees to marry a guy she meets at a party after only have known him for like 20 minutes.  This dude, James Rand, has a good job in the city and sets them up with a nice cottage in the country and pretty soon Sally is mother to a healthy baby boy, Tommy.  But is Sally happy?  No!  In fact she is miserable!  James is totally dispassionate, distant, cool; he even assesses his son the first time he sees him with less human feeling than a doctor might--there is no pride, no joy in the man's response to the sight of his son, and no joy in their marriage!  

The drab lonely marriage grinds on, year after year.  James is not cruel, but he is terribly distant, unaffectionate, disinterested.  Sally's only comfort is Tommy, but sometimes Sally gets hints that Tommy is much like his father, distant and aloof.

Tommy is eight when Sally gets a phone call from James' office--it is James, imploring her to rush to him!  James has always discouraged her from coming into the city to his office, and so Sally has never even seen the building his office is in.  Today when she enters James' office for the first time she finds  a dead body, unmarked by injury!  The body looks superficially like her husband, but on close inspection details like birthmarks and the volume of hair on the hands and the texture of the skin are all wrong--this is not James!

Sally hurries back home, in time to hear her husband and son talking through a door, and she learns the astonishing truth.  James is a Martian!  His ship crashed on Earth like nine years ago and he has been spending his time repairing it--in order to make money and to keep his true identity and activities a secret, he has been sending an android into the office every day.  James tells Tommy that the ship is now repaired, and the two of them can fly to Mars and live lives of adventure.  Martians, James explains, are eagles, while Earthers are mere sparrows, and the two of them can't be tied down to this lame planet and its lame inhabitants, not even by Tommy's mother and his own wife!  As a hidden Sally watches, her husband and her son blast off in a rocket ship, leaving her forever.

"The Calm Man" is better written and has more human feeling than many of Long's often shoddy productions, but there are problems.  James tells Tommy a Martian needs a son or he will wither and die, and that Mars is a world of adventure that has a "fire" and a "glow."  But if that is the case, why has James been so cold towards Tommy for eight years, and why has James in general always been so dispassionate and boring?  If Martians are "eagles" who love adventure and have a "fire" and a "glow" about them, why is James such a cold fish?  Long could have handled this aspect of the story a little better, perhaps making a point of how James was cold towards Sally but excited about his son and about some esoteric hobby, like astronomy or electronics or something like that that would foreshadow his eventual return to Mars in a space ship he patched up with his own two hands.  Oh, well.

An element of "The Calm Man" that jumped out at me has to do with Sally's trip to the city on which she unexpectedly discovers the devitalized android.  Those who have read H. P. Lovecraft's letters are aware that Long saw himself as an artist and had contempt for work done for money and that, for a while at least, Long was a communist and a supporter of the Soviet Union.*  I was reminded of this when reading about Sally's feelings as she rode into town and then walked through the office building where she believed her husband worked.

The ride to the office was a nightmare...Tall buildings swept past, facades of granite as gray as the leaden skies of mid-winter, beehives of commerce where men and women brushed shoulders without touching hands. 

 ....

How horrible it must be to go to business every day, she thought wildly. To sit in an office, to thumb through papers, to bark orders, to be a machine. 

These ideas come out of nowhere in the context of this story, but ring true as the authentic voice of the sensitive, alienated, and self-important young anti-capitalist poet!

I'm going to give "The Calm Man" a mild recommendation--I certainly recommend it to people interested in Long's career and personality.

*See H. P. Lovecraft's October 11, 1926 letter to August Derleth, June 19, 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, Nov 26, 1932 letter to Derleth, and early December 1932 letter to Derleth; also Robert E. Howard's Jan-Feb 1935 letter to Lovecraft.

"Made in Tanganyika" by Carl Jacobi

"Made in Tanganyika," yet another story by a guy I associate with Weird Tales, wasn't anthologized until 2016, but it was reprinted in 1964 in Arkham House's Jacobi collection Portraits in Moonlight.

I kind of like the tone and ideas of this story, and the motivations and behavior of the characters are good, but the plot doesn't quite add up, relying on multiple unlikely coincidences and operating under a surreal dream logic in which anything can happen; as a result, the story is a little hard to take seriously and is not quite satisfying.

It is the future of self-driving electric cars, of government experiments that hint that travel across time may be possible, of scientists claiming that "secondary worlds" may "impinge" upon our own.  Forty-year-old bachelor and sea shell collector Martin Sutter buys a new automobile and takes it for a spin.  He comes upon a strange sight--a roadside stand selling television sets.  An odd way to sell TVs, but Martin needs a new TV himself so he stops and buys one.  The thing he brings back to his apartment certainly looks strange, perhaps a new-fangled model, and he has trouble getting it working.  On its back it says it was made in the Empire of Tanganyika, which is odd, because Tanganyika is a colony of another power, not some kind of empire.

A guy comes to Martin's apartment--he is Lucien Travail, a fellow shell collector who is looking for lodging.  Would Martin accept a roommate?  Thinking it may be fun to live with a fellow shell fanatic, Martin agrees.  Lucien thinks he can fix the TV, and sure enough, after he fiddles with it, it begins to show a picture--of a beach littered with shells!  And not any shells Martin the shell expert is familiar with, but shells presumably from another planet or from one of those parallel dimensions Martin has been hearing about!

Martin returns to where he bought the TV, but the stand is gone.  He finds that this plot of land is some kind of state memorial park--it was here many years ago that the first hydrogen bomb was detonated!  (There is a sort of understated humor to this story that I like.)  Martin experiences strange phenomena in this park--at certain times of day this portion of his universe seems to intersect with a portion of another universe, that beach he saw on his queer new TV, the beach with the alien shells!  Martin fills a basket with the exotic shells and brings them home.

Parallel to the interdimensional communication and travel plot we've got a plot involving what appears to be the attempt of Lucien to steal some or all of Martin's shells.  Martin has amassed a large and very valuable collection and museums sometimes send him letters offering to buy it, offers Martin always rejects.  It seems like Lucien is not necessarily a lover of shells himself, but a man on the make just hoping to get rich quick in the shell game, perhaps simply by stealing Martin's shells and selling them.

Martin saws open one of the alien shells with a special tool, and upon close examination it looks like the interior of the shell consists of furnished rooms for tiny people!  A ray comes out of the Tanganyikan TV and Martin is shrunk and installed in the tiny rooms!  He manages to escape and return to normal size, and then hatches his own scheme: trying to get the increasingly obnoxious Lucien transported into the shell.  But Martin's plan goes awry, and he ends up trapped in the shell with Lucien, with no way for either of them to get out.

I think as with Long's "The Calm Man," I am going to give Jacobi's flawed "Made in Tanganyika" a mild recommendation because I enjoy the style and characters as well as the general atmosphere and spirit of the thing.

"Where the World is Quiet" by Henry Kuttner

This story appears under the pen name C. H. Liddell, and is another example of a story from this issue of Fantastic Universe that had to wait until the turn of the century before it was reprinted.  "Where the World is Quiet" is a traditional sort of weird adventure story, incorporating many elements we see in  the Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories of Kuttner's wife, C. L. Moore--in another dimension our hero encounters a seductive alien with psychic powers who tries to prey on humans; the alien is killed by gunfire after losing a psychic struggle.   

Our narrator, Dr. White, is an anthropologist working in Peru near the Andes.  The local priest, a cripple, tells him that seven young Indian girls have disappeared since the earthquake three months ago, apparently having walked one by one up into the foggy mountains.  The uneducated Indians believe these virgins have been summoned by some recently awoken demon or ancient Incan god, and they are too scared to go looking for the girls, and of course the crippled priest can't go.  So White, with his Ph.D. and working limbs privilege, goes looking for them.

Beyond snow and fog, at the top of a mountain, White comes to an unnaturally warm valley where he discovers alien ruins and alien plants.  He finds the Indian girls, but they are like zombies, more or less physically intact but practically mindless.  He also meets a friendly alien, a sort of five-foot-tall white flower that exudes femininity, can walk and communicate telepathically, and is accompanied by a servant robot, a sphere with three tentacular legs.  The flower explains that a space-time quake deposited this chunk of land from the far future, her and her robot from the distant past, and an evil monster from who knows when, here on the mountain top.  She will soon die because she subsisted in her naive epoch on cosmic rays that nowadays are too weak to sustain her.  White gives her some of his blood to help her last a bit longer.  The flower explains that the monster who was also stranded here by the space-time quake can survive by devouring the life force of human beings--it can use its mental powers to summon people and then suck them dry and, if it so chooses, inhabit and operate their bodies.  This monster must be slain or it will eventually conquer the Earth.  First, the Indian girls' bodies must be destroyed, so the monster has no refuge--it can only be truly be killed while it is in its own body.  Then the flower person gives White the lion's share of her own life energy so he will be strong enough to win the psychic battle with the monster; after the mental struggle, White shoots the monster dead with his pistol.  With the monster's demise, this warm valley starts getting cold, and our guy White bids farewell to the dying flower and the immortal robot who will stay up n this valley alone forever and returns to the base of the mountain.

An acceptable weird science fiction tale.  Like the C. L. Moore stories I mentioned, "Where the World is Quiet" is a worthy subject of all kinds of sex, gender, race and class analysis.  Get to it, grad students!  

With no money to hire an artist to depict the monster, the flower woman, or the spherical robot, the small presses which have published "Where the World is Quiet" in chapbook form resorted to mundane and presumably free images that reflect the story's Latin American setting

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While none of these stories is spectacular, each is creditable and neither editor Margolies nor any of the authors need have any regrets about the stories we've read today--I found reading them to be a pleasant diversion.  

More 1950s genre fiction in our next episode--stay tuned!