Frank Belknap Long: "The Vapor Death," "Exiles of the Stratosphere," and "The Lichen from Eros"

Alright, three more stories from Astounding by Frank Belknap Long.  Thus far, those stories Long contributed to F. Orlin Tremaine's magazine that we have read have been pretty imaginative as well as tragic, and on the whole entertaining; let's see if these three fit that profile.

"The Vapor Death" (1934)

On the title page of "The Vapor Death" there is a terrific illustration by Elliot Dold depicting a robot or mechanical man sitting on a spartan throne watching a dancing girl.  So I had high hopes for this one, hopes which were largely realized.

In structure, the plot of "The Vapor Death" is much like that of Long's "Green Glory," but it is a much more optimistic story.  It is the far future, and at birth everybody goes under the knife to have his or her brain removed and put into a super strong, super efficient robot body made of the wonder metal Alugan.  At least that is true in Asia, one of the world's two great powers.  The other great power is in North America, where the somewhat mysterious "Great Brain" resides in an extinct volcano.  The Great Brain is, I think, some kind of collective consciousness or just a merciless puppet master that controls directly the brains of million of people; the dictator of Asia, Calcon, by contrast, employs the traditional tools of the dictator, just ordering you to do what he wants on pain of death, not directly absorbing or directing your brain.  Calcon's Asia and the Great Brain are at odds, and Calcon feels he has to make a quick and decisive move because he suspects the Great Brain has just developed a super weapon! 

Calcon has another problem--a broken heart!  Of Asia's hundreds of millions, a tiny percentage don't take to having their brains removed and implanted in a Alugan body, because the surgeon makes an error or something.  These "primitive" people who retain their natural bodies live among the robot people, I suppose as second-class citizens.  Lulan is one of these primitives, a beautiful woman, and Mago, a handsome muscular man, another.  These two work in Calcon's lonely court.  Lulan's main duty seems to be to dance for Calcon.  Calcon, seeing Lulan's 100% natural hot body every day, has fallen in love with her.  Unsurprisingly, Lulan loves equally primitive Mago, which inspires Calcon's jealousy.  So, like in that Biblical story all my pious readers are familiar with, Calcon sends Mago off on a suicide mission--Mago will pilot the rocket plane that will bomb the extinct volcano that is Great Brain HQ!

Amazingly, Mago survives the mission!  After blowing up the Great Brain, Mago succeeds in eludong the North American interceptors, and heads back to Asia.  Before he arrives home, though, the Great Brain's super weapon strikes Asia!  At weapon is a vapor that dissolves Alugan!  All three hundred million Asians in Alugan bodies perish!

With the Great Brain and the Alugan wearers all dead, the only people on Earth are primitives with natural flesh bodies under control of their own brains.  Our sense of wonder ending has Mago and Lulan looking up at the night sky and declaring the primitive people of Earth will colonize the stars and create a civilization where war is unknown.  Good luck, you crazy kids!

I like it.  Besides having a good plot, the story has lots of fun little details; for example, the Alugan bodies have a light on them that changes color depending on the wearer's mood, I guess a replacement for the signals we primitive types transmit via facial expression.  

Donald Wollheim made "The Vapor Death" the cover story when he reprinted it under the title "The Robot Empire" in 1952 in Avon Science Fiction Reader No. 3.  You might consider this a step up for Frank and Calcon--when the story first appeared in the October '34 Astounding, Long's name wasn't even on the cover!  (Check out Earle Bergey's cover for Avon Science Fiction Reader No. 3--it is a transparent copy of Dold's 1934 interior illo!) 

"Exiles of the Stratosphere" (1935)

Here is another imaginative far future from Long.  Mankind, long ago, devised cities that hover in the stratosphere, and left the Earth behind to become wild.  Now, don't think for a moment that these sky cities are inhabited by peaceniks and hippies--the hundreds of flying metropolises up there are ruled by merciless imperialist warmongers and ceaselessly wage war on each other with every weapon conceivable: heat rays, cold rays, electroblasters, bombs full of acid or germs, you name it! The greatest of the war scientists who developed these weapons was Stuton, a leader in the Great Dome, the most powerful of the aerial cities.  But fifteen years ago he left the Great Dome to explore the surface of the Earth, a place that, for generations, the sky people had been taught to dread as a hellish jungle teeming with danger and disease.  Once down there, Stuton refused to return, and then he started projecting surface diseases up at the Great Dome, trying to inflict a plague on his home city!

Our protagonist is Lutaton, a disgraced soldier of the Great Dome.  He committed the infraction of showing mercy to a captive--the Great Domers torture and execute all captives, and Lutaton's simple act of mercy is considered an act of treason!  His punishment--to be sent to the surface of the Earth to hunt down Stuton and his comrades and slay them!  Only if he kills all the emigres will Lutaton be allowed back to the Great Dome.

Armed with a charged particle rifle as well as a puissant biological weapon, Lutaton, clad in a space suit, climbs down a ladder from the stratosphere all the way to the jungle of the Earth's surface, where monkey-like beasts inhabit the tree canopy and huge reptiles, much like dinosaurs, rule the swamps.  He quickly meets a beautiful young woman, Martellon; she was a kid when she accompanied the Stuton expedition, the daughter of one of the scientists on Stuton's team.  She tells Lutaton that, in contrast to the regimented life in the sky cities, life down here on Earth is free--but not every body can handle freedom!  Freedom went to Stuton's head and he became cruel and abusive.  When Martellon's father died, she tells Lutaton, "Stuton and his companions contended for me as though I were but a pawn in a game of chance."  (These are the kinds of euphemisms and metaphors you see in these old stories when some woman is at risk of being raped or forced into sex slavery.)  Fortunately, she escaped.

A tremendous reptile attacks, and Lutaton kills it.  Then Martellon leads Lutaton to Stuton's camp, but Lutaton doesn't have to kill the freedom-corrupted emigres--the giant reptile Lutaton just destroyed has already killed them all.  Thanks, Gojira!  Martellon can tell that the merciful Lutaton will not be corrupted by freedom, but will flourish down here with her.  We are left with the idea that Lutaton and Martellon will found a new way of life, one of disciplined freedom that will spread to the Dome and bring peace to everybody.  Good luck, you crazy kids!

The first half of "Exiles of the Stratosphere" is good; Long sketches out the history of the sky cities and the war-focused life of their inhabitants with economy, and it is a pretty cool setting.  The part on Earth feels abrupt though; the story is about ten pages long in Astounding and if Long had had fifteen to work with maybe it would have been better--perhaps we could have seen Stuton in action and heard his reasons for staying on the surface and attacking the Dome from his own mouth instead of just hearing about him from Martellon, and maybe that monster wouldn't have done Lutaton's dirty work for him.

I like "Exiles of the Stratosphere," but for some reason it has never been reprinted.  I guess I have different taste than the people in charge of book and magazine publication--this story is better than Long's famous "The Horror from the Hills," for example, which has been reprinted several times.   

"The Lichen from Eros" (1935)

This is a science-heavy story with a central image somewhat similar to one of the central images of Long's "Skyrock."  I'm afraid "The Lichen from Eros" is also tedious filler, a series of long scenes strung together, most of limited interest, that have little to do with each other.

Our main character, for the first half of the story at least, is Alfred Galton, a cameraman in the futuristic 1960s.  Galton films scientific stuff, and is a success in his field.  Today is a big day, because his mentor and considerably older cousin, world-famed scientist and explorer William Winters, is returning to Earth with the expedition he lead to the asteroid Eros.  Eros, in this story, is the nearest heavenly body to Earth, in fact a pair of asteroids that share an orbit.  This is also one of those stories in which all the planets support native life, and even Eros has an atmosphere humans can breathe, so Winters and company are expected to bring back specimens of the life there; Galton has been assigned to film the members of the expedition emerging from their ship and then all the specimens.

Long offers us quite long descriptions of the cameras Galton uses and of the space ship and its novel propulsion system and of the scene at the space port where many celebrities and journalists await the disembarkation of the expedition with eager excitement.  None of these details Long presents to us readers has anything to do with the plot or pays off in any way; I guess Long felt (or hoped) this stuff had intrinsic merit, or maybe he was just trying to reach a specific word count.  

Finally, the members of the expedition emerge from their ship.  But there are no specimens!  Eros is a barren world!  Winters hurries off with Galton to a Manhattan restaurant where space explorer gives his long and detailed description of Eros and the course of the expedition.  The dramatic crisis of the mission is that Eros has such low gravity that when Williams stepped out of the ship there he went flying and had a hard time getting back to the ship.  Additional drama is that other astronauts who tried to help him had the same problem.  

The Long stories from Astounding we have been reading recently all seem to have some kind of sexual/love element, and this one is no different.  One of the expedition members who hurried to help the flying Winters and found herself in the same predicament is a botanist, Ruth Brent.  Winters and Ruth are in love but have put off their relationship to pursue their science careers.  So when Ruth was hurt trying to help Winters, and briefly feared dead, Winters was all broken up.  But she was just unconscious.  Whew!  Winters found attached to her skin a patch of lichen; he thought this lichen must be toxic, as it was burning Ruth's flesh away.  Winters removed it and the lady scientist recovered.

Here come the worthwhile components of the story, the sense of wonder portion and the human drama portion.  Winters looked at the lichen under a microscope and discovered that the lichen was a city full of microscopic people and teeny tiny skyscrapers!  When Ruth scraped against the city and tore it off its rock the inhabitants thought themselves under attack and it was their energy artillery that was burning the Earthwoman's flesh.  As Winters watches, the city inhabitants, detached from their source of food, all die off.  One microscopic woman catches Winter's attention--she is incredibly beautiful, more beautiful than any Earthwoman Winters has ever seen.  Winters sobs while telling Galton about her.

Later, Winters takes Galton to his lab so Galton can get a look at this beautiful alien woman's dead body in a microscope.  Sure enough, the dead woman of Eros is so beautiful the vision of her will haunt Galton the rest of his days.  (Thanks, cuz, I guess.)  But, as the story ends, we are given to believe that Winters and Ruth will get married and Ruth will never know about Winters' infatuation with this microscopic alien.

The stuff about the tiny city and Winters' fascination with the alien woman are fine, but they take up a quite small proportion of the story, and the preceding parts don't connect to that portion of the story at all.  Galton shouldn't even be in the story, nor all that jazz about cameras and space drives--if I had been editing Astounding, I would have told Long that the story should focus on Winters and Ruth from the start so that the possibility of Ruth's death and the feelings the alien woman arouses in Winters have an impact on us readers.  Oh, well.  We're calling "The Lichen from Eros," which has never been reprinted, barely acceptable.

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I don't know why these relatively imaginative and entertaining stories have never been printed in book form; maybe because people think of Long as being a colleague of H. P. Lovecraft and thus some kind of horror writer and not a guy who wrote about space adventures and crazy far futures in which man faces bizarre forms of tyranny.  It's too bad.  I'm glad the internet archive has made it possible for me to read them, and I am glad that I overcame the aversion to Long that books like Survival World and Monster From Out of Time bred in me and gave them a chance.