Last month
we read Edmond Hamilton's "The Vampire Master," a four-part serial that began in the October 1933 issue of
Weird Tales. Two years ago I read Robert E. Howard's
"Pool of the Black One" from the same issue. And yet this issue contains still more tales that cry out to be read, drawing me to them like a space alien using its uncanny powers to break my will and force me to do its bidding! Let's check out three more of the stories that are lurking behind one of Margaret Brundage's most mesmerizing covers, those by space opera pioneer Jack Williamson and prominent members of the Lovecraft circle Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long.
"The Plutonian Terror" by Jack Williamson
Forty-two years after its debut, "The Plutonian Terror" was reprinted in The Early Williamson, a book I remember borrowing from the Iowa Public Library soon after I moved to Iowa from Westchester County. I don't think I read "The Plutonian Terror" back then, though.
Ellis Drew is a big strong engineer, and a genius who came up with all the scientific innovations necessary to build Earth's first spaceship. A martyr to science, he has foresworn women so he won't be distracted from his scientific destiny! His companion on mankind's first trip to the Moon is Keening the technician, another martyr to science. This little guy wears bandages over his face at all times and speaks in a rasp--he explains that his reckless experiments with hard radiation led to his face and throat being burned away!
Our story begins as these two Stakhanovites of the slide rule set are returning to Earth after spending a year exploring lifeless Luna. They spot an odd thing, maybe an asteroid, maybe a spaceship, crossing their path like 100 miles ahead of them; whatever it is, it looks like a cube a mile across, and it is moving too fast for them to get any closer to it.
Drew and Keening land near the house of a scientist, one of Drew's supporters, Frederic Durand, who has a gorgeous daughter, Tempest. Before he blasted off for Luna with ol' bandage face, Drew told Tempest, who was keen on marrying him and even wanted to come to the moon with him, that science left no room in his life for women. While he was on the moon he came to his senses, and now he plans to propose to Tempest as his first act upon returning to this big blue marble.
But back on Mother Earth our astronauts make a shocking discovery--the Earth has been deserted! No people are to be found--anywhere! By charting that cube's course and interpreting other clues Drew and Keening realize that aliens must have kidnapped the entire human race and carried them off to Pluto! So D & K re-provision their spaceship and take off for Pluto, "black planet...border world....last outpost against night of void cosmos."
On Pluto, as on Earth, Williamson expends a lot of ink elaborating striking images, trying to set a mood, and I think he succeeds. Among the mountains and crags that cover the surface of cold black Pluto, D & K spot the mile-wide metal cube in the bottom of a pit that is miles across and scores of miles deep; the bottom of the pit glows with blue radioactive fire. They guide their little space ship down the shaft and explore on foot, and experience the kind of horror we expect to find in Weird Tales! Pluto is ruled by the ultimate product of evolution (life arose on Pluto long before it did on Earth), a giant blob of goo that is a huge brain, kept alive by machines. This mountainous brain has hypnotized and murdered the entire human race, and our heroes discover that the cube is a giant pantry--the bulk of the population of Earth is stacked up on its shelves, doomed to satisfy the brain's cravings for a midnight snack over the next few centuries. A small proportion of humanity is serving as the brain's robotic zombie army, which D & K have to fight.
After some yucky horror scenes the adventure plot is resolved by a device similar to that used in H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds--germs brought from dirty filthy Terra enter the brain after Ellis punctures a hole in it, and the brain dies in moments from infection; when it expires, the zombies collapse. Then comes the amazing, and, I guess, heart-warming, denouement of the psychological plot--there is no Keening! The short technician is in fact Tempest Durand in disguise! With the rest of the human race exterminated, these two lovers have the solar system all to themselves!
A fun gore and horror-oriented space story--thumbs up! SF fans will find familiar the idea that the pinnacle of evolution is a practically bodiless brain, and may vaguely recall, as I do, that Williamson's classic novel, The Legion of Space, also features returning space adventurers finding Earth's population reduced to a zombie-like state.
We might also consider the possibility that "The Plutonian Terror" could be thought of as a feminist story. Tempest Durand might be considered a feminist hero--she flouts the wishes of a man to join the crew of humanity's first spaceship, and proves herself an adept technician and handy with a rifle and a revolver. Of course, a hard-core feminist might tell you that since Miss Durand performed these feats because she was in love with a man she is suffering from false consciousness and "The Plutonian Terror" fails the Bedlam Test and is thus patriarchal propaganda. Oh, well.
"The Seed from the Sepulcher" by Clark Ashton Smith
Edmond Hamilton isn't the only guy to take to the pages of speculative fiction magazines to remind us of the fact that
plants are dangerous. In this story, which has appeared in a gazillion anthologies, Clark Ashton Smith passes along that same warning that warms the hearts of the good people who manufacture Roundup.
Dateline: Venezuela! James Falmer and Roderick Thone are professional orchid hunters who brave tropical diseases and God-knows what other threats to search Latin American forests for plants to sell. They had heard of a ruined city on a tributary of the Orinoco where, it was said, that the pit into which the ancients threw their dead was full of gold and silver. So they and two local guides headed to the purported site of this ruin. Along the way Thone caught one of those diseases and had to stop to nurse his fever, but Falmer and one of the native guides forged ahead to the ancient city. But when he got back three days later, the once upbeat and chatty Falmer was a changed man, now sullen and taciturn. He didn't find any treasure, and he refuses to offer any details of his explorations of the ruin.
The next day while canoeing down the river Falmer has a terrible spastic fit, and after shooting his comrade full of morphine, Thone finds a weird bump on his head. Falmer briefly recovers and tells the horrific story of his adventure in the ruined city, which was so strange he thought it must have been built by beings from another world!
Falmer discovered the pit, and rappelled down into it, finding at its bottom lots of crumbling bones but no treasure. Oh, and something else, a sort of thick vine whose roots and branches were all intertwined with the skulls and bones of skeletons, having apparently sprouted within a dead guy's head and sent its roots and branches through dead bodies as they grew. As Falmer climbed out of the pit a bud or spore or something on the vine burst, spraying a powder into his face. A frantic Falmer is certain that a monstrous plant is now growing within his own skull!
When the Indian guides get wind of what is wrong with Falmer they abandon the white men, and Thone tries to bring the afflicted man back to civilization himself, but is overcome by a relapse of his fever. While coming in and out of consciousness over a period of days, Thone observes as the alien plant grows and devours Falmer, a process Smith describes in disgusting detail. Eerily, a large flower blossoms from the plant, and its petals form a caricature of Falmer's face! Even when his fever subsides, Thone cannot escape--he finds he is being hypnotized by the alien plant, which has some kind of inhuman intelligence. Dominated by the plant's will, Thone crawls to it, to have his own body invaded by its roots and stems!
Both "The Seed from the Sepulcher" and Williamson's "The Plutonian Terror" feature aliens who use hypnotic power to break people's wills and control their bodies--these diabolical E.T.s don't even let their victims rest after they have killed them, but work their dead bodies like puppets after they have slain them. I guess these stories reflect our fears not only of pain and death, but of losing control of our own minds and bodies, of being mastered by the wills of those whose wills are stronger than our own. I guess everybody who has ever worked a job or had a spouse can identify with this sort of horror.
Thumbs up for "The Seed from the Sepulcher!"
"The Black, Dead Thing" by Frank Belknap Long
"The Black, Dead Thing" starts like a mediocre comic piece, with our narrator, some sort of professional or businessman, I suppose, who is on a cruise, making tepid jokes about how he can't really afford a cruise and how much he is suffering from sea sickness. He recovers from his illness around midnight and goes out on deck, only to suffer a sudden relapse. He sits down on a deck chair he hadn't expected to find so late at night, only to find it smells horrible and that sitting in it radically alters his consciousness. The narrator, while in contact with the chair, exists in two dimensions at once, our own dimension in which he is sitting on a deck chair on a cruise liner, and a dimension of horror in which he is sinking through an ocean full of monsters and corpses.
The narrator springs up and alerts the Deck Steward, who explains to him that the ship is haunted; around midnight on the second night of each voyage a monster like a huge eel with a monkey's face appears and pulls out the deck chairs and lays in them. On one trip a passenger was found to have been murdered by the monster, torn to pieces.
The Deck Steward helps the stunned narrator get to his stateroom. In the room the narrator finds a horrifying figure, which, I guess, turns out to be the monster disguised as a dead man wearing the clothes of the passenger who was killed on that earlier voyage.
The story sort of ends there, with no resolution; what the monster is and why it does what it does is never explained, and the monster is never exorcized or anything. The cruise ship completes its cruise to Havana, Haiti, Martinique, etc, and the narrator says he couldn't enjoy any of it, so spooked was he by his experience on the second night of the voyage.
I have to give this one a thumbs down. The tone is all over the place, nothing is resolved, and the monster has no clear character or personality, it just does all kinds of random stuff (it is from another dimension and can provide access to other dimensions, it likes to sit in deck chairs, it kills people for no discernible reason, it can change shape, it terrorizes people for no discernible reason....)
Other people have been more impressed by this story than I have been, and it has been included in five or six anthologies, including anthologies marketed to young people. Go figure.
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Jack Williamson and Clark Ashton Smith came through for us, but Frank Belknap Long brought an incoherent mess to the table (
not for the first time, or
the last time.) More stories from magazines that were old before I was born in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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