ladytrap.org

26 April 2006 LADYTRAP, INC. continentally drifting
SIMON'S DREAM PROJECT Z-GATTS' CYCLING ODYSSEY EXPERIENCE HUMANITY NAME THE COFFEESHOP STRANDED ON A DESERT ISLAND TYING THE KNOT! TRANSCENDING MATERIALISM THE SUMMER FILM FESTIVAL THE LADYTRAP MANIFESTO VOYAGE OF THE SUPERNOVA PEOPLE TRAVEL RECIPES COMMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY THE ORIGINAL LADYTRAP what is the ladytrap? contact the ladytrap EXPERIENCE SIMON'S LATEST EXPLOITS WITH VISUAL AIDES	Heather gave me a book of short stories from the 30s and 40s. Wonderful look into the speculative imaginations during World War and pending space exploration! I have written up summaries of them as I read them. Nightfall • Isaac Asimov • Astounding Sep '41 Forgetfulness • Don A. Stuart • Astounding Jun '37 The Sands of Time • P. Schuyler Miller • Astounding Apr '37 The Proud Robot • Lewis Padgett • Astounding Oct '43 Black Destroyer • A. E. van Vogt • Astounding Jul '39 Symbiotica • Eric Frank Russell • Astounding Oct '43 Seeds of the Dusk • Raymond Z. Gallun • Astounding Jun '38 Heavy Planet • Lee Gregor • Astounding Aug '39 Time Locker • Lewis Padgett • Astounding Jan '43 Within the Pyramid • R. DeWitt Miller • Astounding Mar '37 although clan of the cave bear was enthralling up to the end, i was ever-aware that at the end of ayla's destiny awaited countless tales of speculative fancy, ideal for consuming and digesting over the course of a few days, rather than a few months. gone are the sailing days when 500 pages was a way to spend an afternoon at anchor, and here in this life of work and endless tasks i appreciate fully my daily morsels of reading science fiction. isaac first told me of a planet with seven suns, and only once every 2000 years do they all set, leaving behind an overwhelming darkness that spawns madness and a complete breakdown of civilization every time. and now don relays to me the story of a people first leaving their home planet and finding ancient earth to colonize, discovering the ruins of an incredible city, the once-beating heart of a galactic empire now extinct, the only remaining descendants of whom are fifty people living in stone huts in the woods outside the city, people who have evolved beyond imperialism into a nearly-pure mental state of zen. i will report back as my old friends slowly share with me the state of dreamers' fantastic imaginations during the late depression and second world war. the sands of time p. schuyler miller 1937 a paleontologist is working on the skeleton of a dinosaur when a man named donovan appears with photos of dinosaurs and ancient plants. he says he has been back 60 million years to take the photos and the scientist claims they are only photos of very well-made models. donovan comes back a few days later with a broken arm and a very strange dead bird, which at least piques the curiosity of the digger, who follows him back to his home, a few miles across the desert. he is a physicist who has figured out how to time travel. space-time is helical, and one can jump from coil to coil, which has a period of 60 million years, and therefore the jumps are in 60 million year increments. he wants to prove his machine works so with the help of our paleontologist he hastily gathers a few items and tells his story: after his first trip to take photos, he went back to bury some lead vials of radium, with the hopes of digging them up in the modern day and proving their age. he was attacked by the dinosaur who bit his arm, and then saved by a mysterious 7 ft-tall woman who killed his aggressor and dressed his wounds. he passed out and came to alongside the woman and a few men (these are very tall men, perhaps aliens, perhaps a distant race of humans) who were being attacked by yet another race of men. a battle ensued and the tall folk won. then as they were getting into their spacecraft (they did't speak the same language) he made to leave and they tried to kill him and he took the girl hostage and escaped. as they made their way back to his time machine they were attacked by heat rays from the flying spacecraft but eventually escaped through a tunnel. they finally got back to the time machine, days later, but it can only carry one person. he was reluctant to leave her behind to certain death in the cretaceous jungles and came up with the idea to go home alone, enlist someone's help to operate the time machine, send the girl to the modern day, and have the helper send the machine back to get him. so after relaying this story, he departs, back 60 million years. the paleontologist waits and waits and donovan never returns. he spends his days continuing to excavate the area, looking for either the remains of the time machine or the radium capsules, but only finds a pair of human footprints on an ancient beach and some areas where sand has been fused into glass by a hot ray of heat. The Proud Robot Lewis Padgett, 1943 I couldn't stomach this story. It was a meant-to-be humorous tale about a self-trained science tinkerer who can make anything out of anything and who can only do it while drunk. he wakes up with a hangover one morning to find that the previous night he had built a narcissistic pain-in-the-ass robot named joe. he then gets hired by a movie producer whose home TV units are being outcompeted by illegal speakeasy movie theatres, to find a technical solution of some sort. I skimmed through it from there. The robot can hypnotize people to think he is someone else, and they use that in court. And somehow our hero conditions people to have a horrible reaction to ultrasonic noises in the movie theatres. Or something like that. And a pretty movie star. Black Destroyer A. E. van Vogt, 1939 Earthmen explorers from a galactic empire land on an isolated planet orbiting a sun with no nearby neighbors. Here they find the abandoned city of a once-great civilization and a single creature named a Coeurl, a black catlike creature with tentacles, huge forelegs, and the ability to manipulate all forms of energy through vibration. They underestimate its power and intellect and it is able to kill a few of them in order to eat the phosphorus in their bones, a necessary nutrient it calls 'id'. Coeurl has plans to steal their ship long enough to discover the secrets of space travel (which his predecessors never figured out) and build his own ship to go out and conquer the galaxy full of id-containing life forms (since he just ate the last one on his planet and his people are dying out). He eventually cleverly kills most of the crew and takes off into space with the rest aboard and they use their engineering cleverness and archaeological knowledge of historical patterns to barely defeat him with atomic blasters only after he has built his own ship and blasted out of the main ship in an attempt to escape with his new knowledge. In the end the ship's archaeologist concludes that this was not the descendant of the great race that built the cities but of the race that conquered them, akin to the barbarians that sacked Rome, a race of criminals whose strength at that time was their ultimate undoing. This story was readable and brought up some interesting points but was a bit frayed. Symbiotica Eric Frank Russell, 1943 I loved this story. It is told from the perspective of a young enlisted space traveler, in charge of armory maintenance on an interstellar explorer. The narrative is very reminiscent of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, in that it is casual and sarcastic, the characters depicted as gruff and simple-minded but loveable soldiers. In addition to the crew of humans are a few Martians (many-tentacled, strong, vastly intelligent, telepathic, and addicted to chess) and a large thinking robot named Jay Score. They land in a clearing on a heavily forested, extremely green planet and find a race of bipedal humanoids, green skin, wearing only loincloths and who each have a strange chrysanthemum-shaped organ protruding from their chest. These 'Greenies' lack advanced technology but have harnessed the forces of nature around them into formidable weapons, such as gourds that shatter and release sleeping gas, and tiny snakes they wear as anklets which they can kick at an enemy to bite him, paralyzing him. Each Greenie has a tree that he is symbiotic with and in which he can climb and hide very well. The chest organ is his connection to it. Nearly half the crew is taken hostage and carted off deep into the forest in wicker baskets and canoes, during which journey our men witness many of the fantastic mysteries of the plant-descended life on this planet. Trees act as giant venus flytraps. Other trees release flesh-eating fog. Small bushes walk around and dissolve skin and clothing. Captain McNathy frustrates his men in his relentless adherence to interstellar law, that is, that indigenous populations should never be harmed and that leaders should be treated like diplomats and up to the point when the Greenies are about to sacrifice them to their king tree, a sentient being with a drumlike beating heart, he still believes that they won't harm him without completely a dozen forms in triplicate. So to his agitation he is saved by his men in a bloody battle that includes the robot hurling mini atomic bombs and communicating with the ship through a "tiny" radio strapped to his back. Battle ensues in this fantastic forest city where every building is built like an apron around a giant host tree, and our heroes escape, just barely, losing a few in battle and vowing never to return to this planet, lest they disturb further its precious order (by their captain's words) and lest they get their fleshy asses handed to them in wheatgrass protein shakes (by everyone else's opinion, except for the martians, who return to their chess competitions calmly as if nothing ever happened). seeds of the dusk raymond z. gallun, 1938 this story is superb. thousands of years after mars becomes completely uninhabitable in a dying solar system, one of billions of spores launched into space drifts aimlessly into earth's atmosphere and finds its way to a cold desert crust. this is earth far into the future, millions of years down the road. earth has become very cold as the sun peters out, and the moon has fallen closer, and the rotations have slown and the years have quickened. the surface of earth is complete competitive and most species remaining survive by hibernating through the long winters. among these are a race of intelligent crows, as clever as the humans of old. rodents are also intelligent, and ants have become even hardier and more able to eat anything organic. the children of men, called the itorloo, are warlike, destructive, and live in massive underground cities. recognizing that earth is on its way out, they are building giant ships to transport their entire race to venus to attempt to overcome the indigenous life there in order to claim a planet with more time to live. in the meantime, this spore starts to grow and we learn a little of its history. this is a very ancient intelligent plant race, one that never mastered the ability to manipulate metal and ore or to move quickly with force, but which possesses such complete instinctual understanding of chemistry and physics and biology to be able to synthesize the organic apparatus for whatever it needs, from eyes to ears to vocal devices, to electrocution, to custom-made viruses. as this spore starts to grow into an adult and spread more spores, a crow named kaw sees this and intuitively knows it could mean disaster for his people, for whom the competition for limited resources on the surface is already severe. frustrated by the inability of his tribe members to take action, due to their own fear, he flies hundreds of miles to the great domed entrance of the nearest itorloo city, knowing he must face the danger of their own hostility to warn them, since they are the only ones with the technology to possibly fight this quiet intruder. he makes contact with zar, a nightwatchman who can understand the bird language (kaw, as well, can mimic their tongue), who takes the news in a bad mood and shoots kaw at the end of it. he then goes out to check out the plant and destroys it, but it has already send billons of spores into the atmosphere. he knows the danger and when he reports back to his superiors, the itorloo temporarily halt the construction of their space fleet to built massive generators that will destroy all life on the surface of the planet. kaw, in the meantime, is not dead and begins the long hobble home. a few months into the journey, he comes to a magic gorge where hundreds of spores have taken hold. by this time they have learned his language and calm his nerves with hypnotic buzzing tones. they speak to him, take him into their influence, and he becomes their agent. "bring us an itorloo, alive, on foot" and he is off. he somehow finds zar and manages to talk him into dismounting from his aircar to walk into this gorge, where a cloud of puffed dust incapacitates him and he comes to, trapped with woody vines and low-voltage electric current running through his body from those bonds. he is kept in a hypnotic state and eventually the vines loosen enough for him to wrench free and destroy the lot. he returns to the city and is declared by a physician fit to return to work. time passes. kaw returns to his family, and the itorloo finish their generators and put them slowly into action. the effect on kaw and his people is preliminary sense of uneasiness and then a growing discomfort deep inside. they take to the skies, as far from the surface as they can, watching the doomed creatures below succumb to depression and listlessness. they also see the first fleet of spacecraft, five in total, launched for venus and then recalled at some point along the way. zar one day passes out unexpectedly and comes to in an overcrowded hospital. he learns that he was the source for a virus that spead secretly to every itorloo and activated all at once, killing them off in droves. this virus was developed specifically for humans by the spore-plants during his captivity. the fleet was recalled in hopes of finding a cure, since delivering the virus to venus would ruin all chances of survival there. it is hopeless, and the last ancestors of man die out in the space of a galactic heartbeat. the crows and rodents and ants are never harmed, rather, they are purged of the danger of the itorloo (the only potential threat to the newcomers), while the indifferent spore-plants spread across the dying planet and build their canal system that delivers water from the farthest reaches to every individual on the desert surface of earth. this is what created the canals on mars so many eons ago, and on the satellites of jupiter before that, and on whatever long-forgotten world around another star that was their previous home in the unreachable depths of the past. Heavy Planet Lee Gregor, 1939 Ennis is a massive being on a sea-planet called Heavyplanet with enormous gravity. The atmosphere is nearly as thick as the sea, and often the border between the two is blurred. The people of his world are intelligent and technologically advanced but do not have an energy source powerful enough to reach the incredible escape velocity necessary to blast off their planet. So their manifest destiny to explore space is waiting. They know that eventually someone will show up with the technology and are obliged to wait. Ennis patrols the seas in a sailboat of sorts, and following a flame from the sky he comes across a floating wreck. It is a human spaceship, and he finds it to be made out of remarkably flimsy material. He is huge and strong, by the necessities of overcoming enormous gravity. The machines of his people are much more durable. Peeling his way into the floating craft he finds the jelly remains of a crew crushed by immense atmosphere. Inside he finds what he realises is their propulsion system. It is atomic. He contacts Shadden, one of the scientists, to come quickly with a ship to retrieve it, before it is crushed and sinks into the sea. In the meantime, the warlike enemy of his people, the Marak arrive in a battleship. He knows they will have no respect for the potential of this technology and if it gets into their hands and they DO figure it out, they will wage war against the galaxy. They fight and fight, he always a step ahead of them, as they rip their way through wall after wall. A few times the ship is punctured below the waterline but he is able to weld the walls together again by squeezing it with his hands. Eventually he commandeers a neuron-agitating weapon (for mere projectile weapons are useless against their bulk) from their ship and uses it against them. And then an atomic-powered weapon which disintegrates several of them, wow. He wins just as Shadden comes over the horizon to retrieve the secret to their destiny. Time Locker Lewis Padgett, 1943 Okay, you'll recognize that author as the one who wrote the detective story I couldn't stomach about the drunken genius tinkerer. this one was much more manageable. Galloway is still in a drunken stupor and this time has invented a box that seems to shrink what you put into it into a much smaller and oddly-shaped object, which returns to normal size when it is retrieved. He theorizes that it transports the objects to another dimension or another dimension, and we are seeing these fourth-dimension representations of those objects placed far away. He has no need for it and an associate of his, Vanning, a lawyer who assists and defends criminals, buys it at a great price and takes it back to his office. In the meantime Vanning has a client who is under heat for embezzling money and who in a moment of panic of being pursued by the police, brings the cash right to Vanning's office. Big blunder! Incriminating! Vanning throws the suitcase of money into the special locker and watches it reduce to a copper-colored elongated egg. He sends his client out, who will be arrested but with no evidence of anything, and in the few moments he has to himself he sees something very strange appear in the box. A small bright green creature, all cubes and angles, moves to the egg and starts to pull it away. He reaches in, grabs the creature, and squeezes the life out of it, shutting the locker just as the police burst in, search the building, and find nothing. When they finally leave, he opens the box and it is empty! No suitcase, no squashed creature. Oh no! $25,000 credits gone, along with his 20% bonus! And now his client is PISSED, thinking he's trying to cheat him, and when this guy gets pissed he starts to get homicidal. Vanning goes to Galloway in stress and pays an enormous rate to get him to try to figure out where the money went. After some nerve-wracking long period, Halloway discovers that the objects are not transported to another dimension but into the future. Their reduction in size is explained by the shrinking of the universe (yes, on a whole the envelope is expanding but individually all the matter is getting smaller). But how far into the future, Vanning asks. Halloway doesn't know. Bummer. Vanning goes, dejected and fearful for his life, back to his office. And to his amazement, sitting in the middle of the room is the suitcase of money! He grabs it and starts to leave with it when a giant hand reaches from nowhere, grabs him, and smashes him. (The police come and remove everything, which explains the empty box of a week ago.) within the pyramid r. dewitt miller a young hot-headed archaeologist finds a pyramid nobody has heard of deep in the forest of the yucatan. there is already an old man there studying the pyramid, who has been doing so for years without telling anyone. young hothead wants to report this discovery and the old man implores him not to. he suggests this would have terrible consequences. to demonstrate his case, they go inside the pyramid and find four tombs with disintegrated bodies inside. there are dozens and dozens of rooms with this setup. then the old man pushes a certain brick and some very cleverly balanced mechanism reveals a secret chamber well within. here are four glass cases with beautiful nude sleeping green-skinned beings in them. the old man has deduced the following story from the evidence and inscriptions: this race comes from a planet in a highly eccentric orbit about our star, passing by earth only every several thousand years. on the last pass a small crew journeyed to earth (to colonize?) only to find that they could not survive there for whatever reason. a few sacrificed their lives to built this pyramid and put the remaining crew in a sort of hibernation. the pyramid was built in a location well-hidden from terrestrial folk but very obvious from above (i.e. from space). their hope was that when their planet came around again, they would be rescued. the inscriptions suggest that their return will be in 2040, just a hundred years in the future. it could mean dire consequences for earth if these people came back to find their heroes murdered and excavated. so the hothead agrees to keep it a secret from science and the masses, despite what it would do for his career. (consequently, the old man theorizes that all other pyramids on earth are the result of this burial technique catching on and spreading around the earth.)

26 April 2006

LADYTRAP, INC.

continentally drifting

SIMON'S DREAM PROJECT

Z-GATTS' CYCLING ODYSSEY

EXPERIENCE HUMANITY

NAME THE COFFEESHOP

STRANDED ON A DESERT ISLAND

TYING THE KNOT!

TRANSCENDING MATERIALISM

THE SUMMER FILM FESTIVAL

THE LADYTRAP MANIFESTO

VOYAGE OF THE SUPERNOVA

THE ORIGINAL LADYTRAP

what is the ladytrap?

contact the ladytrap

EXPERIENCE SIMON'S LATEST EXPLOITS WITH VISUAL AIDES

Heather gave me a book of short stories from the 30s and 40s. Wonderful look into the speculative imaginations during World War and pending space exploration! I have written up summaries of them as I read them.

Nightfall • Isaac Asimov • Astounding Sep '41

Forgetfulness • Don A. Stuart • Astounding Jun '37

The Sands of Time • P. Schuyler Miller • Astounding Apr '37

The Proud Robot • Lewis Padgett • Astounding Oct '43

Black Destroyer • A. E. van Vogt • Astounding Jul '39

Symbiotica • Eric Frank Russell • Astounding Oct '43

Seeds of the Dusk • Raymond Z. Gallun • Astounding Jun '38

Heavy Planet • Lee Gregor • Astounding Aug '39

Time Locker • Lewis Padgett • Astounding Jan '43

Within the Pyramid • R. DeWitt Miller • Astounding Mar '37

although clan of the cave bear was enthralling up to the end, i was ever-aware that at the end of ayla's destiny awaited countless tales of speculative fancy, ideal for consuming and digesting over the course of a few days, rather than a few months. gone are the sailing days when 500 pages was a way to spend an afternoon at anchor, and here in this life of work and endless tasks i appreciate fully my daily morsels of reading science fiction.

isaac first told me of a planet with seven suns, and only once every 2000 years do they all set, leaving behind an overwhelming darkness that spawns madness and a complete breakdown of civilization every time.

and now don relays to me the story of a people first leaving their home planet and finding ancient earth to colonize, discovering the ruins of an incredible city, the once-beating heart of a galactic empire now extinct, the only remaining descendants of whom are fifty people living in stone huts in the woods outside the city, people who have evolved beyond imperialism into a nearly-pure mental state of zen.

i will report back as my old friends slowly share with me the state of dreamers' fantastic imaginations during the late depression and second world war.

the sands of time

p. schuyler miller 1937

a paleontologist is working on the skeleton of a dinosaur when a man named donovan appears with photos of dinosaurs and ancient plants. he says he has been back 60 million years to take the photos and the scientist claims they are only photos of very well-made models. donovan comes back a few days later with a broken arm and a very strange dead bird, which at least piques the curiosity of the digger, who follows him back to his home, a few miles across the desert.

he is a physicist who has figured out how to time travel. space-time is helical, and one can jump from coil to coil, which has a period of 60 million years, and therefore the jumps are in 60 million year increments. he wants to prove his machine works so with the help of our paleontologist he hastily gathers a few items and tells his story:

after his first trip to take photos, he went back to bury some lead vials of radium, with the hopes of digging them up in the modern day and proving their age. he was attacked by the dinosaur who bit his arm, and then saved by a mysterious 7 ft-tall woman who killed his aggressor and dressed his wounds. he passed out and came to alongside the woman and a few men (these are very tall men, perhaps aliens, perhaps a distant race of humans) who were being attacked by yet another race of men. a battle ensued and the tall folk won. then as they were getting into their spacecraft (they did't speak the same language) he made to leave and they tried to kill him and he took the girl hostage and escaped. as they made their way back to his time machine they were attacked by heat rays from the flying spacecraft but eventually escaped through a tunnel. they finally got back to the time machine, days later, but it can only carry one person. he was reluctant to leave her behind to certain death in the cretaceous jungles and came up with the idea to go home alone, enlist someone's help to operate the time machine, send the girl to the modern day, and have the helper send the machine back to get him.

so after relaying this story, he departs, back 60 million years. the paleontologist waits and waits and donovan never returns. he spends his days continuing to excavate the area, looking for either the remains of the time machine or the radium capsules, but only finds a pair of human footprints on an ancient beach and some areas where sand has been fused into glass by a hot ray of heat.

The Proud Robot
Lewis Padgett, 1943

I couldn't stomach this story. It was a meant-to-be humorous tale about a self-trained science tinkerer who can make anything out of anything and who can only do it while drunk. he wakes up with a hangover one morning to find that the previous night he had built a narcissistic pain-in-the-ass robot named joe. he then gets hired by a movie producer whose home TV units are being outcompeted by illegal speakeasy movie theatres, to find a technical solution of some sort. I skimmed through it from there. The robot can hypnotize people to think he is someone else, and they use that in court. And somehow our hero conditions people to have a horrible reaction to ultrasonic noises in the movie theatres. Or something like that. And a pretty movie star.

Black Destroyer
A. E. van Vogt, 1939

Earthmen explorers from a galactic empire land on an isolated planet orbiting a sun with no nearby neighbors. Here they find the abandoned city of a once-great civilization and a single creature named a Coeurl, a black catlike creature with tentacles, huge forelegs, and the ability to manipulate all forms of energy through vibration. They underestimate its power and intellect and it is able to kill a few of them in order to eat the phosphorus in their bones, a necessary nutrient it calls 'id'. Coeurl has plans to steal their ship long enough to discover the secrets of space travel (which his predecessors never figured out) and build his own ship to go out and conquer the galaxy full of id-containing life forms (since he just ate the last one on his planet and his people are dying out). He eventually cleverly kills most of the crew and takes off into space with the rest aboard and they use their engineering cleverness and archaeological knowledge of historical patterns to barely defeat him with atomic blasters only after he has built his own ship and blasted out of the main ship in an attempt to escape with his new knowledge. In the end the ship's archaeologist concludes that this was not the descendant of the great race that built the cities but of the race that conquered them, akin to the barbarians that sacked Rome, a race of criminals whose strength at that time was their ultimate undoing. This story was readable and brought up some interesting points but was a bit frayed.

Symbiotica
Eric Frank Russell, 1943

I loved this story. It is told from the perspective of a young enlisted space traveler, in charge of armory maintenance on an interstellar explorer. The narrative is very reminiscent of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, in that it is casual and sarcastic, the characters depicted as gruff and simple-minded but loveable soldiers. In addition to the crew of humans are a few Martians (many-tentacled, strong, vastly intelligent, telepathic, and addicted to chess) and a large thinking robot named Jay Score.

They land in a clearing on a heavily forested, extremely green planet and find a race of bipedal humanoids, green skin, wearing only loincloths and who each have a strange chrysanthemum-shaped organ protruding from their chest. These 'Greenies' lack advanced technology but have harnessed the forces of nature around them into formidable weapons, such as gourds that shatter and release sleeping gas, and tiny snakes they wear as anklets which they can kick at an enemy to bite him, paralyzing him. Each Greenie has a tree that he is symbiotic with and in which he can climb and hide very well. The chest organ is his connection to it.

Nearly half the crew is taken hostage and carted off deep into the forest in wicker baskets and canoes, during which journey our men witness many of the fantastic mysteries of the plant-descended life on this planet. Trees act as giant venus flytraps. Other trees release flesh-eating fog. Small bushes walk around and dissolve skin and clothing.

Captain McNathy frustrates his men in his relentless adherence to interstellar law, that is, that indigenous populations should never be harmed and that leaders should be treated like diplomats and up to the point when the Greenies are about to sacrifice them to their king tree, a sentient being with a drumlike beating heart, he still believes that they won't harm him without completely a dozen forms in triplicate. So to his agitation he is saved by his men in a bloody battle that includes the robot hurling mini atomic bombs and communicating with the ship through a "tiny" radio strapped to his back.

Battle ensues in this fantastic forest city where every building is built like an apron around a giant host tree, and our heroes escape, just barely, losing a few in battle and vowing never to return to this planet, lest they disturb further its precious order (by their captain's words) and lest they get their fleshy asses handed to them in wheatgrass protein shakes (by everyone else's opinion, except for the martians, who return to their chess competitions calmly as if nothing ever happened).

seeds of the dusk
raymond z. gallun, 1938

this story is superb. thousands of years after mars becomes completely uninhabitable in a dying solar system, one of billions of spores launched into space drifts aimlessly into earth's atmosphere and finds its way to a cold desert crust. this is earth far into the future, millions of years down the road. earth has become very cold as the sun peters out, and the moon has fallen closer, and the rotations have slown and the years have quickened.

the surface of earth is complete competitive and most species remaining survive by hibernating through the long winters. among these are a race of intelligent crows, as clever as the humans of old. rodents are also intelligent, and ants have become even hardier and more able to eat anything organic. the children of men, called the itorloo, are warlike, destructive, and live in massive underground cities. recognizing that earth is on its way out, they are building giant ships to transport their entire race to venus to attempt to overcome the indigenous life there in order to claim a planet with more time to live.

in the meantime, this spore starts to grow and we learn a little of its history. this is a very ancient intelligent plant race, one that never mastered the ability to manipulate metal and ore or to move quickly with force, but which possesses such complete instinctual understanding of chemistry and physics and biology to be able to synthesize the organic apparatus for whatever it needs, from eyes to ears to vocal devices, to electrocution, to custom-made viruses.

as this spore starts to grow into an adult and spread more spores, a crow named kaw sees this and intuitively knows it could mean disaster for his people, for whom the competition for limited resources on the surface is already severe. frustrated by the inability of his tribe members to take action, due to their own fear, he flies hundreds of miles to the great domed entrance of the nearest itorloo city, knowing he must face the danger of their own hostility to warn them, since they are the only ones with the technology to possibly fight this quiet intruder. he makes contact with zar, a nightwatchman who can understand the bird language (kaw, as well, can mimic their tongue), who takes the news in a bad mood and shoots kaw at the end of it.

he then goes out to check out the plant and destroys it, but it has already send billons of spores into the atmosphere. he knows the danger and when he reports back to his superiors, the itorloo temporarily halt the construction of their space fleet to built massive generators that will destroy all life on the surface of the planet.

kaw, in the meantime, is not dead and begins the long hobble home. a few months into the journey, he comes to a magic gorge where hundreds of spores have taken hold. by this time they have learned his language and calm his nerves with hypnotic buzzing tones. they speak to him, take him into their influence, and he becomes their agent. "bring us an itorloo, alive, on foot" and he is off.

he somehow finds zar and manages to talk him into dismounting from his aircar to walk into this gorge, where a cloud of puffed dust incapacitates him and he comes to, trapped with woody vines and low-voltage electric current running through his body from those bonds. he is kept in a hypnotic state and eventually the vines loosen enough for him to wrench free and destroy the lot.

he returns to the city and is declared by a physician fit to return to work. time passes. kaw returns to his family, and the itorloo finish their generators and put them slowly into action. the effect on kaw and his people is preliminary sense of uneasiness and then a growing discomfort deep inside. they take to the skies, as far from the surface as they can, watching the doomed creatures below succumb to depression and listlessness. they also see the first fleet of spacecraft, five in total, launched for venus and then recalled at some point along the way.

zar one day passes out unexpectedly and comes to in an overcrowded hospital. he learns that he was the source for a virus that spead secretly to every itorloo and activated all at once, killing them off in droves. this virus was developed specifically for humans by the spore-plants during his captivity. the fleet was recalled in hopes of finding a cure, since delivering the virus to venus would ruin all chances of survival there.

it is hopeless, and the last ancestors of man die out in the space of a galactic heartbeat. the crows and rodents and ants are never harmed, rather, they are purged of the danger of the itorloo (the only potential threat to the newcomers), while the indifferent spore-plants spread across the dying planet and build their canal system that delivers water from the farthest reaches to every individual on the desert surface of earth. this is what created the canals on mars so many eons ago, and on the satellites of jupiter before that, and on whatever long-forgotten world around another star that was their previous home in the unreachable depths of the past.

Heavy Planet
Lee Gregor, 1939

Ennis is a massive being on a sea-planet called Heavyplanet with enormous gravity. The atmosphere is nearly as thick as the sea, and often the border between the two is blurred. The people of his world are intelligent and technologically advanced but do not have an energy source powerful enough to reach the incredible escape velocity necessary to blast off their planet. So their manifest destiny to explore space is waiting. They know that eventually someone will show up with the technology and are obliged to wait.

Ennis patrols the seas in a sailboat of sorts, and following a flame from the sky he comes across a floating wreck. It is a human spaceship, and he finds it to be made out of remarkably flimsy material. He is huge and strong, by the necessities of overcoming enormous gravity. The machines of his people are much more durable. Peeling his way into the floating craft he finds the jelly remains of a crew crushed by immense atmosphere.

Inside he finds what he realises is their propulsion system. It is atomic. He contacts Shadden, one of the scientists, to come quickly with a ship to retrieve it, before it is crushed and sinks into the sea.

In the meantime, the warlike enemy of his people, the Marak arrive in a battleship. He knows they will have no respect for the potential of this technology and if it gets into their hands and they DO figure it out, they will wage war against the galaxy.

They fight and fight, he always a step ahead of them, as they rip their way through wall after wall. A few times the ship is punctured below the waterline but he is able to weld the walls together again by squeezing it with his hands.

Eventually he commandeers a neuron-agitating weapon (for mere projectile weapons are useless against their bulk) from their ship and uses it against them. And then an atomic-powered weapon which disintegrates several of them, wow. He wins just as Shadden comes over the horizon to retrieve the secret to their destiny.

Time Locker
Lewis Padgett, 1943

Okay, you'll recognize that author as the one who wrote the detective story I couldn't stomach about the drunken genius tinkerer. this one was much more manageable. Galloway is still in a drunken stupor and this time has invented a box that seems to shrink what you put into it into a much smaller and oddly-shaped object, which returns to normal size when it is retrieved. He theorizes that it transports the objects to another dimension or another dimension, and we are seeing these fourth-dimension representations of those objects placed far away.

He has no need for it and an associate of his, Vanning, a lawyer who assists and defends criminals, buys it at a great price and takes it back to his office.

In the meantime Vanning has a client who is under heat for embezzling money and who in a moment of panic of being pursued by the police, brings the cash right to Vanning's office. Big blunder! Incriminating! Vanning throws the suitcase of money into the special locker and watches it reduce to a copper-colored elongated egg. He sends his client out, who will be arrested but with no evidence of anything, and in the few moments he has to himself he sees something very strange appear in the box. A small bright green creature, all cubes and angles, moves to the egg and starts to pull it away. He reaches in, grabs the creature, and squeezes the life out of it, shutting the locker just as the police burst in, search the building, and find nothing.

When they finally leave, he opens the box and it is empty! No suitcase, no squashed creature. Oh no! $25,000 credits gone, along with his 20% bonus! And now his client is PISSED, thinking he's trying to cheat him, and when this guy gets pissed he starts to get homicidal.

Vanning goes to Galloway in stress and pays an enormous rate to get him to try to figure out where the money went. After some nerve-wracking long period, Halloway discovers that the objects are not transported to another dimension but into the future. Their reduction in size is explained by the shrinking of the universe (yes, on a whole the envelope is expanding but individually all the matter is getting smaller). But how far into the future, Vanning asks. Halloway doesn't know. Bummer.

Vanning goes, dejected and fearful for his life, back to his office. And to his amazement, sitting in the middle of the room is the suitcase of money! He grabs it and starts to leave with it when a giant hand reaches from nowhere, grabs him, and smashes him.

(The police come and remove everything, which explains the empty box of a week ago.)

within the pyramid
r. dewitt miller

a young hot-headed archaeologist finds a pyramid nobody has heard of deep in the forest of the yucatan. there is already an old man there studying the pyramid, who has been doing so for years without telling anyone. young hothead wants to report this discovery and the old man implores him not to. he suggests this would have terrible consequences.

to demonstrate his case, they go inside the pyramid and find four tombs with disintegrated bodies inside. there are dozens and dozens of rooms with this setup. then the old man pushes a certain brick and some very cleverly balanced mechanism reveals a secret chamber well within. here are four glass cases with beautiful nude sleeping green-skinned beings in them. the old man has deduced the following story from the evidence and inscriptions:

this race comes from a planet in a highly eccentric orbit about our star, passing by earth only every several thousand years. on the last pass a small crew journeyed to earth (to colonize?) only to find that they could not survive there for whatever reason. a few sacrificed their lives to built this pyramid and put the remaining crew in a sort of hibernation. the pyramid was built in a location well-hidden from terrestrial folk but very obvious from above (i.e. from space). their hope was that when their planet came around again, they would be rescued.

the inscriptions suggest that their return will be in 2040, just a hundred years in the future. it could mean dire consequences for earth if these people came back to find their heroes murdered and excavated. so the hothead agrees to keep it a secret from science and the masses, despite what it would do for his career.

(consequently, the old man theorizes that all other pyramids on earth are the result of this burial technique catching on and spreading around the earth.)