The early williamson, p.16
The Early Williamson, page 16
‘With all my heart!’ his cold voice cried. ‘And since I fear the lady would find little joy in a life without you, I shall also set you at liberty!’
With tears of joy in his eyes, the captain grasped the Black Hawk’s cold hand.
‘Come,’ the pirate said. ‘Forget the favor, if such it is. You have earned it. Your wife will be shown to her rooms, and we shall watch the fate of those prisoners who were not so fortunate as yourself.’
The Black Hawk led Captain Grant away through the rocket’s maze of passages, and a servant guided Nell to a luxurious stateroom.
The Captain will never forget the horror of what followed.
The mocking saturnine pirate conducted him into a domed room, whose curved walls and roof glistened with silvery brilliance.
The floor of that room was transparent crystal. Beneath was a large circular compartment, without visible openings. Its floor was covered with a curious red substance, in oddly shaped masses. Grant shuddered as he saw those crumbling red forms. They looked weirdly like decayed statues—they were horrible travesties of human shapes.
‘The space below us,’ the Black Hawk explained, in his chill, mocking voice, ‘contains a certain variety of crimson fungus. The original spores came from the jungles of the third satellite of Neptune.
‘The fungi, you know, are a group of thallophytic plants, of which molds and mushrooms are members. They are devoid of the chlorophyll to which green plants owe their color. Reproduction is largely by means of asexual spores. A characteristic is the great speed with which some varieties grow.
‘This particular type has a peculiar avidity for human flesh, and grows with unprecedented speed. It amuses me to watch its development upon the bodies of my less fortunate captives. But watch the results for yourself!’
A panel had suddenly slid open into the space below the crystal floor. A man, stripped to the waist, whom the captain recognized as a luckless engineer from his crew, was thrown into the strange room. The panel instantly closed.
The naked man fell on his face in a cloud of red dust. In a moment he stumbled to his feet, coughing, gasping, strangling, beating wildly at his face.
The Black Hawk touched a lever that seemed to close the circuit of a microphone. Instantly the captain heard a scream of insupportable agony from below.
The man below the crystal floor darted madly through the red dust, hammered wildly on the walls with bare fists, shrieking, moaning, pleading for aid, praying.
Suddenly his tortured body stiffened, grew rigid. Curious masses of scarlet filaments or hypha, resembling tufts of red hair, sprang from nostrils, eyes, and ears.
Crimson growth spread swiftly, until the body seemed covered with red fur.
And in a few moments it fell over, crumbling, with a crimson cloud of spores swirling about it.
‘What do you think of my hobby?’ The Black Hawk inquired with a taunting smile.
Captain Grant was sick with horror.
‘You—you demon!’ he choked.
Blind rage suddenly overcame his shuddering horror.
Clenching a fist, he swung abruptly upon the Satanic pirate.
The Black Hawk’s hand came up swiftly, holding a tiny but deadly ray tube.
‘You forget yourself, Captain,’ he said. ‘Remember that I promised to spare you and your wife from undergoing the little ceremony we just witnessed. Do not make me recall that promise.’
The captain fell back before the menace of the weapon, suddenly weak and trembling.
‘Let me out of this infernal place,’ he muttered.
The Black Hawk called a steward to show him to his room.
For a week Captain Grant and his wife were enforced guests of the pirate, treated with deliberate, if taunting, courtesy.
The black rocket, laden with plunder, continued her restless cruise of the void.
Then, after a night of troubled sleep, the captain awoke to find Nell gone from the luxurious stateroom which they occupied.
At once, he sought the Black Hawk, who greeted him with his usual half-sneering politeness.
‘Your wife is slightly unwell,’ his cold tone informed Captain Grant. ‘She has the attention of my specialists. You need fear nothing on her account.
‘And you will be interested,’ he added, ‘to know that we are soon to part. In a few hours we enter the atmosphere of the planet Venus. You and your wife will be landed there today. I regret that I must lose your companionship.’
‘Whatever happens to me, please don’t harm Nell,’ the captain pleaded.
‘My word is still good,’ the Black Hawk said coldly.
Several hours later, somewhat to the surprise of Captain Grant, the rocket landed on firm ground. He was assisted from the port, and looked about anxiously.
The slender black hull of the rocket lay on a bare sandy beach. Above it rose a barren gray rock. A vast waste of green-grey ocean stretched away in all directions. Dense gray clouds filled the sky.
The tall form of the Black Hawk stepped out beside him. ‘An island on the planet Venus,’ he said. ‘It’s less than a thousand miles to the city of Thalong, from which aid can reach you.’
‘But my wife—’ the captain cried.
‘Here she is.’
The Black Hawk pointed to two large chests, of a white, silvery metal, which the crew were busy lowering through the port. In a moment they lay side by side on the sandy beach.
‘Your wife is in one of them,’ the pirate said, with a demoniac smile. ‘She is under a mild anaesthetic which will keep her sleeping quietly for twelve hours. The chest contains sufficient air to last her that long, and no longer. It contains also a supply of food and water, and a portable radio transmitter, with which you may summon aid. The chest is not locked—you have merely to lift the lid.’
‘And the other chest?’ The captain’s voice was anxious.
‘Ah! the other chest!’ The Black Hawk smiled. ‘The other chest! It is filled with spores of crimson fungus. If you, by any unfortunate mistake, open it, a cloud of the spores will instantly fly out and settle on your skin. You will meet the fate of the man we watched through the crystal floor.’
‘Which chest -‘ Captain Grant cried, his voice trembling.
‘Ah yes, which chest!’ The Black Hawk’s suave tone replied. ‘That is for you to decide. Remember your wife will live only twelve hours, if the chest is not opened. And good-by, my friend.’
Leaving Captain Grant shaken and speechless, the pirate of space sprang back through the port. Roseate flame hissed from the exhaust nozzles of the long black ship. It leapt up to vanish in the gray clouds.
The captain was left alone with the chests.
They seemed identical in every respect. The ornate pattern engraved in the silvery metal was the same on each chest. They were roughly three feet square by six in length.
The captain fell furiously to examining them. He could detect no faintest difference. He held his ear against each, in hope that some faint sound of breathing might reach him, to reveal which held his precious Nell. But he heard nothing.
He left the chests and walked anxiously up and down the beach, gazing wildly over the vast desert of water, staring into the gray gloom of the sky. Many times his heart leapt, as he thought he glimpsed a distant rocket plane. And always it fell again, when he found his eagerness had deceived him.
He turned again to the bright chests, lying side by side on the white sand. He ran from the one to the other listening, feeling them, even tugging a little at the lids.
His brain was a wild chaos of wonder. Suppose the Black Hawk had tricked him? Suppose the chests were empty? Suppose both contained the fatal spores? Suppose his lovely Nell were in one and the food and radio set in the other?
Again he walked up and down beside them, thinking madly. Hours went by, and he must soon release his wife or she would be suffocated.
Impulsively, he bent to raise the lid of the nearest.
His eyes caught fine letters engraved on the edge of the silvery lid.
‘the other one.’
The Black Hawk had cut it there. A warning. Captain Grant ran to the other chest. But with his hand on the lid, he paused, trembling, his body clammy with a cold sweat.
Might the warning be false? Had the letters been cut there to cause him to open the deadly chest? Or did the pirate intend the words to save his life?
He ran back toward the first chest, he stopped, and collapsed in a trembling heap. Cold sweat chilled him; a strange dizziness came over him, his throat was dry; he trembled.
But the time was up—he must delay no longer. He tottered to his feet, ran back to the chest without the warning, tugged at the lid. Dizzy weakness overcame him.
‘A trick,’ he muttered.
He turned and staggered to the other, and grasped the lid. The inscribed words, ‘the other one’ caught his eye again. He recoiled as from a deadly snake.
He ran away from the chests, stumbling across the sand, eyes wild with fear. He imagined the swift red mold growing over him, choking him, converting him into a rotting, crumbling mass.
He would not open the chest! There was a fair chance that he would be discovered by some passing air-liner before he starved to death.
Then the hideous vision of the death of the scarlet fungus was dispelled by a picture of Nell as she had been on the recent wedding day. Happy, singing, gloriously lovely, devoted to him. She was in one of the chests, suffocating. He could not let her die!
He rushed back to the chest with the warning on it. As his fingers sought the lid, he imagined the sudden swirl of red spores, the agonizing pain he would suffer as the quick growth entered his lungs, covered his body, choking him, piercing him with swift-growing rootlets.
Trembling weakness overcame him. He staggered back, wiping cold perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand.
For a moment he paused, irresolute. Then he pictured Nell, awaking in the coffin-like prison, beating weakly against its walls, gasping for breath, dying. He staggered toward the other chest, hesitated, ran back to the one with the warning words.
With a sudden convulsive effort, he tugged at the heavy lid…
*
My translation of Stockton’s classic story is not complete, as I see now. The Black Hawk should have had a seductive, headstrong daughter. She should have been struck with a wild passion for Captain Grant and a jealous hatred for his bride. She should have been tormented by the hard choice between surrendering him to her rival or condemning him to death. The tantalizing warning scratched on the chest should have reflected her unguessable decision. No such objections came, however, from the editors of Wonder Stories in 1931.
Though the great depression had gripped the country by then, my writing income rose that year to $1,267. Harry Bates bought two more shorts. In ‘The Pygmy Planet’ the hero makes a flight down through size to visit a tiny artificial world created in a laboratory. It was featured in Astounding for February 1932, with another lovely Wesso cover. ‘Salvage in Space’ will be reprinted below.
My largest check that year came from another Clayton pulp, Strange Tales, for ‘Wolves of Darkness.’ Another first-draft story, one that almost wrote itself, it was a twenty-five-thousand-word shocker about creatures of darkness that break through from another space to seize the bodies of animals and people. Harry Bates sent me $500 for it and a three-word note, ‘God is love.’ It was featured in the issue for January 1932, with a terrifying Wesso cover that showed the half-nude heroine kneeling on the moonlit snow, embracing two snarling, green-eyed wolves.
I wrote that in April. In the first two weeks of May I completed another novelette, ‘The Lady of Light,’ which was rejected by Argosy and Astounding, but finally published in Amazing for September 1932, earning $125.
Suddenly rich, I joined Ed Hamilton that summer for a boat trip down the Mississippi. A couple of years older than I, Hamilton had been I think the most prolific and popular Weird Tales writer since about 1926. We had got in touch through a fan named Jerome Siegel, later distinguished as a co-creator of Superman, but we met face to face for the first time in a Minneapolis hotel.
He had been dreaming of a houseboat trip. When that seemed impractical, we started down the river in a fourteen-foot boat with an outboard motor. Neither of us had ever been in such a craft. We almost ran it under a barge and almost capsized it when we steered too close to the first steamboat we met. At Vicksburg, with the motor worn out, we sold the boat and went on to New Orleans aboard the old Tennessee Belle, a craft straight from Mark Twain.
After all the mishaps, we were still good friends. I later made several long visits to his home in western Pennsylvania; he came to New Mexico, and we spent the winter of 1932/33 on the beach of Key West, living there near Ernest Hemingway’s place in a house with its own cistern and its own tropical orchard that we rented in those depression days for eight dollars a month. (Hemingway was hunting lions in Africa.)
Back in New Mexico, I wrote several novelettes and spent most of the winter on another novel. ‘The Moon Era,’ featured on the cover of Wonder Stories for February 1932, was one of the last and no doubt the best of my first-draft stories. It has already been reprinted in two Doubleday books, Sam Moskowitz’s Three Stories (1967) and Asimov’s Before the Golden Age (1974). Its chief innovation is the character of the Mother, I think one of the first sympathetic space aliens in science fiction.
Another novelette was ‘The Wand of Doom,’ a horror story with local color I had picked up along the
Mississippi. Revised after rejection by Strange Tales, it became my first sale to Weird Tales, published in the October issue, 1932.
I recall Farnsworth Wright, its long-time editor, with a special fondness. Though the contents ranged from magnificent to awful, Weird Tales had a spell of fantastic strangeness that justified its claim to be ‘the unique magazine.’ I think it was never very profitable, but Wright paid an honest cent a word on publication.
As unique as the magazine, Wright was being slowly disabled by Parkinson’s disease. The solemn look of his stiffened features concealed a ribald humor and a generous interest in his writers. Something of a scholar, he wanted to edit Shakespeare. I still prize my copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he published as the first volume of Wright’s Shakespeare Library in pulp magazine format. Fortunately, he also liked my work. He told me ‘The Wand of Doom’ was the most popular story he had run in two years, and I recall good visits to his office and his home.
‘Red Slag of Mars’ was a third novelette, written in January of 1932 for Wonder Stories Quarterly and printed in the spring issue for that year. Remotely based on a plot submitted in a contest, it develops the notion that the quarreling peoples of Earth might unite themselves to face an invented external menace. A notion still alive, I see, in current science fiction.
But my chief project, that winter, was the novel Golden Blood. That was before I built my own small cabin on the ranch, and I remember working till dawn, night after night, by a kerosene lamp in the family living room, after everyone else was in bed.
The setting was the Arabian desert, which I had never seen. My interest in the oriental had been excited by the Weird Tales writers, especially by E. Hoffman Price. I culled details from travel books and sprinkled the narrative a bit too freely with phrases of third-hand Arabic.
In a serious effort to break into Argosy, I constructed the story as a six-part serial, with a dramatic break at the end of each 10,000-word installment. After a good deal of cutting and revising, I re-typed the whole manuscript. This was the first time I had ever spent so much time on a story, and I mailed it out with high hopes.
As usual, however, Argosy returned it, even though the editors liked ‘the nice color.’ I sent it to Wright. He accepted it promptly and ran it in Weird Tales for the months of April through September 1933. The first two parts had stunning covers by J. Allen St. John, the great Burroughs illustrator, and the readers applauded it.
‘The Plutonian Terror’ is included here as the first of the ‘weird-scientific’ short stories I did for Weird Tales. Though I can find no file card, it must have been written in 1932. It was printed in the issue for October 1933, following the last part of Golden Blood. At 9,000 words, it brought $90.
THE PLUTONIAN TERROR
The strange, dead silence of the ether was the first grim hint of unconceived catastrophe.
Back to Earth the first explorers of space were slanting, returning from a perilous year on the barren moon, eager to feel again the poignant joys of human intercourse. Through the transparent ports of the Cosmobile’s steel-domed bridge, the two first adventurers of the void scanned with proud joy their native planet. They were nearing home!
Earth swam before them, a swelling green-blue sphere, swathed indistinctly in the misty radiance of its atmosphere. Soft and warm and bright it shone, against the startling, frozen, eternal blackness of the star-set universal void. The foreboding sense of ruthlessly alien cosmic immensities was strong in them; and they yearned for the welcoming arms of Earth, with keenest nostalgia for the world that held all they owned and had known and loved.
‘Oh, Ellis,’ little Keening whispered through the white bandages that masked his face, ‘aren’t we in radio range?’
‘Why, that’s right, we are!’ cried the tall young engineer. ‘Try it. We had fair reception this far, on the outward trip.’
So the smaller man withdrew his eyes from the supernal panorama of cosmic space, and donned the head-phones of the compact little set built in the top of the chart-table. Impatiently he manipulated the dials, and at last cast aside the headset in exasperation.
‘Not a thing,’ he whispered. ‘Quiet as the grave.’
‘Queer,’ Ellis muttered. ‘There should be something This far out we got a dozen stations—’
Keening’s dry, muffled whisper cut him short.
‘That! What is it?
The little man pointed out into the void, and Ellis saw the cube. A silvery cube, bright, sharp-edged, hung in the ebon depth of space. It looked small, and far off, so that it was not prominent among the still stars. Yet its sunward faces shimmered, and it crept across the firmament. Unmistakably cuboid it was, and relatively near.
