Astounding, February 1936: F B Long, R Z Gallun and J R Fearn

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been reading fiction by that iconic Weirdie Frank Belknap Long.  In response to my blog post about Long's 1971 Gothic romance stinker The Witch House, one of my perceptive and well-informed readers suggested giving Long's 1936 story from Astounding, "Cones," a spin, pointing out that important SF anthologist Groff Conklin reprinted "Cones" in his 1951 anthology Possible Worlds of Science Fiction.  We love Astounding here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's read "Cones" and two additional stories from the same issue of the leading magazine of science fiction of the World War II era, then edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, one penned by Raymond Z. Gallun, whose work we are pretty fond of, and one by John Russell Fearn, about whom we are somewhat skeptical.  (We've already blogged about this issue's immortal cover story, H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness.")

"Cones" by Frank Belknap Long (plus special bonus: 1951 version!)

"Cones" comes to us as four chapters.  Chapter I is full of science lectures on Mercury, first discussion of climate and orbit and rotation and such, and later descriptions of the horrible dangers of the Mercurian surface, like the electric current that runs through the soil that, in some spots, is powerful enough to reduce a man to ashes in seconds.  We actually witness a man being burned thusly, with Long describing the whole horrific process, the guy's limbless torso jerking around and that sort of thing, but first we meet our heroes.  We've got our male lead, Gibbs Crayley.  On Earth, Crayley was an innovating, risk-taking bacteriologist who aroused public and government animosity, and so left Earth to become an adventurer, exploring Venus, Mars, Luna, Pluto, asteroids, and now Mercury.  He bickers with our female lead, Mona Massin, one of Earth's most beautiful women, a woman who rejected the many men who pursued her on Earth because all she cares about is astronomy.  Oh yeah, she also cared about her cat, which stepped on one of those Mercurian shock patches and was reduced to a cinder.  Along with our leads are six other smarty smarts, each described in a single line, one of whom gets killed as Chapter I ends.  Zap!

Another man dies at the start of Chapter II, this guy being felled by an even more mysterious danger, his body shriveling within his space suit--when Crayley lifts his stricken body it is astonishingly light.  Long spends much of this chapter describing the reactions of the surviving  astronauts to this horror, the fainting and the stunned staring and the agonized groaning and so forth; "Cones" really feels like a horror story.  Long also dwells on the fact that all the men on the team are obsessed with Massin.  

This obsession takes center stage in Chapter III, as men declare their love for Massin, who feels only contempt and pity for their misery.  As we all have heard a thousand times, the way to win a woman is to play hard to get, to ignore her or even "neg" her, and so of course it is the cold and callous Crayley, as obsessed with knowledge as is Massin, who attracts the interest of the frigid astronomer.    

Crayley looked at her.  He had always thought her a rash little fool, but he had to concede that her impersonality matched his own and was really magnificent.

(I can never remember the difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath," and suspect like most psychological jargon that these terms are just sloppy catchphrases that reflect the intellectual bankruptcy of the soft sciences, but if I took psychobabble more seriously I'd say that in Crayley and Massin we have portraits of one or the other or maybe both.)

Crayley experiments on the dead man's shriveled blue body and Massin watches.  It becomes clear that all of the calcium in the man's body has been removed!  We get more science lectures as Crayley tries to figure out what sort of creature did this to his fellow astronaut and how to capture a photograph of an apparently invisible form of native life.  

Crayley prepares a camera that can photograph creatures of energy that move so fast the human eye can but dimly perceive them.  But he slips while climbing a ladder and hurts his ankle so he can't go out onto the Mercurian surface to get the snaps himself.  Two other guys have to go and they are dramatically killed while Crayley and Massin watch; happily, these pioneers didn't die in vain--Crayley and Massin get the pictures back and learn that the natives are 20-foot tall cones of energy and they are massing to attack the ship!  Just then the one non-American member of the crew, "a Latin," goes berserk and launches the ship into space and tries to murder all the other men aboard so he can have Massin all to himself.  As the ship ascends the natives cast one last bolt of energy up at it, killing the trigger-happy Latin.  Crayley and Massin, only survivors of the expedition, admit their love for each other and head back to Earth with some amazing data on Mercury and its native life.

This is a crazy science-fiction horror story and I like it.  I enjoyed all the science and technology stuff, all of which, by accident or design, serves the story's weird horror atmosphere--for example, the space suits don't have radios so outside the ship the astronauts have to communicate via sign language, which adds to their danger and the story's feeling of isolation.  I always like stories about disastrous sexual relationships and Long delivers that kind of material in spades; I also like how their single-minded pursuit of knowledge has turned the main characters into amoral anti-social jerks.  And then there is the gore and the otherworldly nature of the aliens, the sort of stuff we might expect from a Weird Tales alum like Long.  

So, thumbs up for "Cones," a story that doesn't deny that the quest for love and the quest for science are worthwhile, but also tells you that pursuing love or pursuing knowledge can turn you into a monster who puts himself and everybody nearby at terrible psychological and physical risk.  Were truer words ever spoken?

But wait--there's more!  I encountered a typo early in my reading of the version of "Cones" in Astounding and so took a glance at the version in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction and found that the story there was quite different!  Radically different!  In the book version, Crayley isn't a renegade who left Earth because both the establishment and the masses scorned him and feared his risky experiments--instead he's the head of a government expedition!  And the female lead is not some super beautiful woman with whom Crayley has a difficult relationship--it is his wife Helen!  The cat is now a dog!  Most radical of all, the entire business of all the other men competing for the female crewmember's affections has been excised!  In fact, whereas in the magazine version of "Cones" the presence of a gorgeous woman on the ship makes the men go crazy and jeopardizes the mission, in the book version the presence of a woman inspires them to greater heroism!

The 1951 book version of "Cones" is a much more optimistic, pro-woman, pro-humanity, pro-science text than the 1936 magazine version.  Casualties are lower (but still high), and the men all behave much better, both more chummy and more competent.  The plot regarding the aliens is the same, but the character arc subplot of the magazine version--involving the callous and combative male and female leads realizing they love each other--is gone and in its place we get a character arc which has a member of the crew who thinks Crayley's science obsession makes the man inhuman coming to understand that it actually makes Crayley the best kind of human!  

In reading the book version I missed the over-the-top bitterness and melodrama of the magazine version--the astronauts in the book printing are a bunch of pro-social goody goodies and Crayley's singlemindedness is vindicated!  The science is perhaps better in the book version, though--for example, the sign language bit makes more sense, as it is explained that the electrified surface of Mercury interferes with radio reception.

I will say that the book version of "Cones" is just acceptable--I like all the weird horror and sexual tension that leads to internecine violence in the original.  I wonder what's behind these changes to "Cones"--did Conklin demand a less sexist and racist story, or just a less sexy story, or just a more optimistic story, or just a story which focused more on Mercury and less on interpersonal drama?  Did Long pick up the manuscript thinking to update the science and fix some typos and while he was reading it decide to change its tone because he was in a better mood or had changed some of his thinking after 14 or 15 years?  I also wonder what version of the tale was included in the 1972 Long collection Rim of the Unknown.  

"Buried Moon" by Raymond Z. Gallun

With "Buried Moon," a story I think may never have been reprinted, Gallun delivers a solidly entertaining story with striking images, strange ideas, horror elements and a vividly realized psychological experience.  Gallun is becoming a sort of MPorcius favorite!

"Buried Moon," like both versions of Long's "Cones" addresses the idea that science can take away your humanity.  Tod Cram (Dickensian name, I guess) was a brilliant scientist and inventor who married a beautiful woman but neglected her to focus on his work--building a vehicle that could bore through the earth so he could investigate a mysterious crater on the ocean floor!  These two came to hate each other and Cram even struck her.  (New Wave types would complain that "old" science fiction didn't deal with the issue of sex--I note the examples of Barry Malzberg and Harlan Ellison in my blog post on Malzberg's Herovit's World--but today we have 1936 stories by Long and Gallun that are all about sexual relationships.  Today I warn you again that you can't trust what critics say about texts, you have to look at the texts themselves.) 

The mole machine is wrecked during its voyage, but it breaks into a mile-wide hollow meteor that was once a tiny moon of Earth--the interior of this little moon is home to a sophisticated civilization of spider-people, the typical specimen of which is somewhat larger than a tarantula.  The spider people capture Dr. Cram and use their technology to mess with his brain, making him identify with these arachnid aliens as if he is one of them and getting his help in fixing the mole machine so they can use it to travel to the surface and take over!

Gallun starts his story in medias res, with a dazed Cram waking up all confused, both identifying with and finding revolting the spider people--we readers learn about his true identity and earlier life and about the history of the spider moon in fragments as Cram himself recalls things and as data is inserted into his brain by his many-limbed captors.  He is about to launch the mole machine upwards to unleash the intelligent arachnids on the native people of Earth when he stumbles upon a photo of his wife and it jars him into realizing his true duty lies not with the eight-legged freaks, but with the bipeds who are his own kind!  He commits suicide, and the ability to control the mole machine dies with him, saving the human race...for now! 

Gallun has a good writing style, and this story has a pile of elements I always appreciate, like spiders, failed sexual relationships, suicide, and people messing with your brain.  Thumbs up!

In "Buried Moon" we have a forgotten gem I enthusiastically recommend to classic SF readers!  I say again that it pays to look into these old magazines!

"Mathematica" by John Russell Fearn 

It is the future--1980!  Man's first space flight took place five years ago, and there is already a human settlement on Mars.  In 1977 a tiny planet was discovered quite close to the Sun, an artificial planet made of metal!  A sample of the metal has been brought back to Earth, where its astonishing properties are investigated.  When a person in proximity to the fragment thinks of something, those thoughts materialize!  You think of a tiger, a tiger appears!  But the new thing vanishes almost immediately.

Unable to make either heads or tails of the mysterious new element, the fragment is put into storage.  A year later a strange being appears at the lab.  Like so many men of the future in SF, this guy has an emaciated body and a huge skull housing a super brain.  This freak, Pelathon, tells Dr. Farrington and his assistant (our narrator) that Farrington created his (Pelathon's) universe just by thinking it up while near the fragment!  While one year passed in our universe, thousands have passed in Pelathon's, giving humanity there time to evolve into superbrainiacs.  Pelathon built a time-space ship to find his maker, and having found him, proposes that he, Farrington, and the narrator embark on the quest to discover the maker of our own universe!

Chapter II features some jawing about James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and how electrons are waves that exist in multi-dimensional space and how our universe is merely an atom in Pelathon's universe and so on.  Then in Chapter III our three heroes set out to the artificial planet near the Sun, sadly confident they will never return to their native universes.  Inside the metal sphere they find innumerable gigantic wires and cables and a bewildering array of titanic machinery, gears and pistons and what not, all working smoothly.  Pelathon begins shrinking their ship, and they enter another universe that encompasses no more space in our universe than does a single electron.

In Chapter IV, after descending through six or seven levels of universes within universes, Pelathon's ship guides them to a red planet they hope is the world from which emanated the thoughts that generated our universe.  There they meet a man with an even bigger head than Pelathon's--so big he has to wear an appliance to hold it up!  This guy, Si-Lafnor, created our universe to precise specifications, including the potential for human life.  Si-Lafnor delivers a science lecture incomprehensible to me about how all universes and everything in them are just mathematical figures, and the chapter ends with the disclosure that he wants to travel to smaller universes himself in search of the maker of his universe.

In Chapter V, after some additional work which our heroes observe, Si-Lafnor, the man who created Earth, vanishes, seeking his own creator.  Having learned from him, and now with access to Si-Lafnor's vast store of equipment, Pelathon tackles the project of sending our narrator and Farrington back to their native universe and himself back to his.  He doesn't make much headway, and Farrington and the narrator die because there is no food on this red world (Si-Lafnor used his technology to transmit energy directly to their bodies, but Pelathon--who doesn't need to eat himself--didn't figure that technique out quickly enough to nourish them.)  But don't fear--the Earthers live on as a corporate entity of pure thought, unburdened by physical bodies!  After an indeterminate period, maybe thousands of years, in blackness, where living, and knowing, and being have never been heard of, the two scientists find themselves in bodies again, strange alien ones, confronted by a being of everchanging indistinct form--the being that created all mathematics and the first universe from which all others have ultimately sprung!

This First Creator, "the original mathematician," is no pussycat and proposes reducing Farrington and assistant to mere dust, or some other similarly horrible fate, "cancelling them for all time."  But in Chapter VI Si-Lafnor appears--Si-Lafnor knows enough math to have made himself uncancellable, and after a psychic battle of competing math equations with "the original" he confers this immortality on the Earthmen.  In Chapter VII he builds a new universe much like that of the Earth in which Farrington and his assistant were born and sends them there in new--superior and immortal--human bodies.  They are soon joined by Pelathon.  But the Earthmen find this new Earth not much like their own at all, and as unkillable immortals they have nothing in common with its people.  Si-Lafnor goofed, and an endless life of loneliness awaits them as the story ends, though Fearn hints that in a sequel Pelathon may be able to figure something out.  (Indeed, a sequel to "Mathematica" appeared in Astounding a few months later.)

"Mathematica" drags during the lectures, which are largely about abstract mathematical concepts and subatomic physics, stuff I can't even visualize and which carry no emotional weight, unlike Long's lectures about Mercury's geography which paint pictures in the mind and can stir human feelings.  And of course "Mathematica" is one of those stories in which the main characters are passengers and spectators instead of the drivers of the plot.  Still, some of the ideas and some of the images are entertaining, so we'll call the story acceptable.  "Mathematica" would be reprinted in 2001 in The Best of John Russell Fearn.  The cover of this book seems to be illustrating "Mathematica," what with the formulas and the fact that there are three men in the ship and one has an oversized noggin.

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The Long and the Gallun are good, with the Gallun being a real winner, and the Fearn isn't bad--looks like we've got a good issue of Astounding here!  It is nice to see Long acquitting himself well after having read so many misfires from him.  It's more Long next time, something from the 1960s, so place your bets on whether we'll be getting another fun interesting piece or another shoddy heap of sludge.