I hope you will enjoy reading these stories as much as I did compiling them…and that they may intrigue you enough to want to seek out Weinbaum’s own stories if you have not already encountered them.
—Philip Harbottle,
Wallsend, England, July 2012
PENAL WORLD
BY THORNTON AYRE
From Astounding Stories, September 1937
That Fearn—and not Frank Jones—was the author of this, the first Ayre story to be published—is proven by the fact that a dozen years later, he incorporated whole swathes of it into his own ‘Golden Amazon’ novel, Lord of Jupiter (1949).
As the Amazon series progressed, the superwoman had been planet-hopping, and in this novel she adventures on the tempest-lashed hell planet of Jupiter, where she meets Relka, a true Jovian. Relka is one of Fearn’s most fascinating alien characters, and he was entirely based on Jo, the ‘Joherc’ Jovian character in “Penal World.”
Stanley G. Weinbaum was universally acknowledged by his peers as the creator of the first really memorable alien in science fiction. The noted SF historian Sam Moskowitz has written in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) that:
“It was Weinbaum’s creative brilliance in making strange creatures seem as real as the characters in David Copperfield that impressed readers most. Tweel, the intelligent Martian, an ostrich-like alien with useful manipular appendages—obviously heir of an advanced technology—is certainly one of the most memorable aliens in science fiction. The author placed great emphasis on the possibility that so alien a being would think differently from a human being and therefore perform actions which would seem paradoxical or completely senseless to us.”
Whilst Fearn’s Joherc is not quite in the same league, he is not so far below it.
On rereading “Penal World”, Fearn had realized that, suitably adapted, much of it could nicely be incorporated into his novel, including his vivid descriptions of the conditions on Jupiter’s surface:
“They afforded him a little shelter from the tycane—technical name for the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour wind forever raging from pole to pole of the giant world. Yet by reason of the enormous gravity the effect of the wind on a human being was about equal to a gale of one hundred miles per hour.” (“Penal World”)
“…as they emerged from beyond the protection of the dome’s bulk the full fury of the eternal hurricane of Jove smote them. They both staggered beneath its onslaught, but did not lose their balance. Mightily though it blew they could still make slow, laborious progress, the reason being that the wind, held by the vast gravity, only equalled the pressure of an earthly gale at perhaps ninety miles an hour.” (Lord of Jupiter)
“With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet Trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird below-zero Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs and angles, more crystal than vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell.” (“Penal World”)
“…the trees of the crystalline jungle sprouted branches of much the same pattern as newly woven cobwebs, rings of interlace, glittering crystal, the outermost edges of the rings being octagonal in shape. Here there was weird, fantastic beauty, every atom of it composed of ammonium base. Even the ‘grass’ was composed of fantastic spears of glass-like substance, which cracked to powder as the pair advanced.
“Ever and again, as they stumbled more deeply into the preposterous wilderness, below-zero forms—living by dividing upon themselves in the fission style of a unicell—scudded into safety, looking rather like spiked glass marbles shot through with veins of superb colour.” (Lord of Jupiter)
“Still they watched as the joherc came into complete view—a biped, only two feet tall, with two legs nearly as thick as a man’s body and almost fantastically muscled. Further support was provided by the broad, kangaroo-like tail on which it sat ever and again. Its remaining anatomy was made up of a pear-shaped body, stumpy arms, enormous pectoral muscles and chest—in which, according to description and reconstruction at the settlement bureau, there beat three powerful hearts to create a normal circulation in the enormous drag. On the mighty shoulders was the strange, triple-jointed neck, semi-human face with wide, half-grinning mouth and scaly head. A pure product of ammonia, living in a climate ideally suited to it—a living, thinking creature of superhuman strength and swiftness, mentally active, yet humanly childlike in manner—a veritable cosmic paradox.” (“Penal World”)
“He found himself gazing at an incredible creature. He had the contour of a man standing three feet in height and probably every inch as broad. Short, blocky legs were very powerful. His arms, too, were short and corded with muscles. To this was added a great barrel of a chest, a neck like a pillar and a perfectly round head. He had yellow eyes, broad nose and a fanged mouth. He had neither hair nor raiment, his entire body seeming to be covered in crystalline scales.” (Lord of Jupiter)
Relka also shares the joherc’s passion for consuming crystalline ammonia salts. And like him he has no ears, and is telepathic (“nature’s provision to prevent us being deafened by the vibrations in this heavy atmosphere”) and is highly intelligent. However, Fearn added some new qualities for the purposes of the novel—Relka has a decided sense of humour, and a unique philosophy: “…we are a lazy race. We don’t want to progress. We understand most scientific things but are not interested enough to develop them. Our theory is that the more refined you become the less happiness you have.”
Fearn clearly had great fun with this amazing character, and he provides much light relief, as well as figuring in some key plot developments. He was to feature to even greater advantage in later novels, electing to join forces with the Amazon out of his own, queer sense of loyalty.
“Penal World” by “Thornton Ayre” was submitted to Astounding Stories and accepted by its editor Orlin Tremaine on 23 July 1937. Thus encouraged, Fearn went on to produce more stories in the same vein.
PENAL WORLD
Mad, idiotic world! Air of absolute poison—trees basically ammonium carbonate—creatures living in a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below zero centigrade—
James Cardew, former American citizen, was on Jupiter through no fault of his own. He was in no way to blame for the fact that he now stood inside his enormously reinforced spacesuit gazing out on a landscape incredibly vast and rugged, stretching to a colossal distance, bounded at remoteness by the boiling horror of the seven-thousand-mile-wide Great Red Spot.
Jupiter was the penal world of the system, last working place of the criminals of Earth, Mars, and Venus. And for a very good reason! Once a space machine landed on Jupiter it was common knowledge that, in the case of the huge convict machines at least, it could never leave. The titanic gravity of the planet claimed large-sized ships absolutely.
James Cardew had been framed by certain jealous officials of the space ways—shipped to Jupiter because he knew too much of graft and corruption in high places. For two years he had worked among the bitter-hearted men at the settlement—a vast underground abode of itanium metal, Periodic No. 187, vastly heavy, and the only known metal capable of withstanding, for six continuous months, the unbelievable pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere and down-drag. By the time the six months were up, this highly radioactive metal began to collapse—
The convicts’ entire life, therefore, consisted of building up the very walls that hemmed them in, And twenty miles away, where the walls were likewise always being repaired by good behavior men, was the underground residence of Governor Mason and his family, voluntarily marooned on this colossal world.
Despite the fact that within the governor’s abode and the settlement there were machines which nullified the crushing gravitation, men did go berserk at times—warders and prisoners alike. Some went to the exterior�
�a freely permitted act—quite unprotected, to die instantly in an atmosphere of pure ammoniated hydrogen at a frigid temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below zero centigrade.
Others were smarter. They frisked itanium spacesuits and furtively escaped in them—but they were never heard of again. Either way it was suicide.
James Cardew had done pretty much the same thing. Suicide had been in his mind for months; he’d been on the verge of walking unprotected to the exterior. Then, from the external reflectors in the main machine room, he had seen a spaceship of the private variety—small and easy to handle—fall like a brilliant comet in the dense atmosphere, dropping finally about two hundred miles due east. If he could reach that ship he might, by very reason of its smallness, break the effect of Jupiter’s drag and get back to Earth, square his wrongful conviction.
It was pretty obvious that the vessel had been accidentally caught in the giant world’s enormous attractive field; maybe the pilot had been an amateur, unauthorized by the space flying committees. Whatever it was, James Cardew realized that he had to reach that ship within three weeks before the violent atmosphere and pressure made an end of it.
Three weeks—two hundred miles across Jupiter’s terrible terrain. To escape the prison had not been difficult. It was now that the difficulties began.
Cardew’s gray eyes were grim behind the six-inch, unbreakable glass of his helmet; his lean, powerful face was set in grimly determined lines, the lines of a man accustomed, by now, to bearing inexorable strain. For every step he took he was forced to raise a weight about three times in excess of normal, including his densely heavy spacesuit, so designed as to exclude external and maintain internal pressures.
Even so, being a one hundred and sixty eight-pound man, he weighed four hundred and forty-eight pounds on Jupiter, with his space suit and heavy equipment added to it. It made of his body a vastly heavy, aching machine.
He took stock of his position from behind the protection of two upjutting rocks of tremendously dense material. They afforded him a little shelter from the tycane—technical name for the vast two hundred and fifty mile-per-hour wind forever raging from pole to pole of the giant world. Yet by reason of the enormous gravity the effect of the wind on a human being was about equal to a gale of one hundred miles per hour. Around the Great Red Spot, the one remaining portion of Jupiter still un-solidified, despite the frigid cold of the rest of the surface, the tycane had been known to reach the incredible velocity of over four hundred miles per hour—but then the Spot was recognized by all experts as the fester spot of Jove, seven thousand miles of bubbling, densely heavy materials—
Cardew, moving his arms with enormous effort, studied his compass inside its protective itanium case, and took stock of his direction. His route would lead him to the Fishnet Jungle, through a cleft of the Seven Peak Mountains, and after that along the shores of the Turquoise Ocean. The points were fairly familiar in his mind, but the jungle was the main thing that worried him—how he was going to pick his way through its weird mass.
Finally he pushed his compass back in place on his back and swiftly checked over his heavily shielded equipment—first-aid pack, down to a common container of smelling salts, tabloid provisions, and an oxygen-jet pistol, the only practicable weapon of destruction in an atmosphere containing vast preponderances of hydrogen and ammonia. Not much equipment, but enough in a world where every scrap of weight added to an already crushing burden.
Cardew braced himself and emerged from his protection into the full blast of the eternal wind. Since dawn had arrived about an hour ago, he had about eight clear hours in which to make further progress; with a bit of luck he might reach the Fishnet Jungle in that time. That it was already quite visible to him in the weak daylight filtering through the writhing clouds signified nothing. There were always the tycane and the constant down-drag to be reckoned with. He moved with labored effort, the strain bathing him in perspiration inside his hot, heavy suit.
To the rear, now far distant, gleamed the sunken dome of the penal settlement, and farther away still the governor’s habitation. To left and right there was naught but hard red ground. Once it had all been like the Red Spot; now it had cooled to produce an effect as dreary as anything that could be imagined.
Only the Fishnet Jungle, with its blunted trees and weird tracery branches—from which the fanciful name was derived—provided any relief in the otherwise crushed monotony. Even the highest summit of the distant Seven Peak Mountains only reached a thousand feet in height, held down by the mighty gravitation.
Cardew struggled on, forcing his weight-anguished body into the teeth of the tycane. He found it hard to believe that the wind outside his helmet was absolute poison, that the trees of the distant jungle were basically ammonium carbonate, living in a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below centigrade zero.…
Mad, idiotic world! It was populated, too, by creatures as mad as their environment. Cardew had heard of them—mighty strong things with a fairly high scientific intelligence—known as the joherc, derived from Jovian Hercules. Where they abided, however, was something of a mystery; since they were rarely seen on the surface.
Grunting with effort. Cardew went on slowly, slipping and sliding on ground of enormous hardness, one wary eye fixed on the distant, quivering upspoutings of molten matter from the Great Red Spot. No telling when it might decide to erupt. It had a nasty habit now and again of covering thousands of square miles of Jupiter with molten chemicals. That, in a landscape normally bitterly cold, produced effects almost too cataclysmic for imagination—certainly death for a lone traveler.
Occasionally the fitful gleams of sunlight through the dense scurrying clouds made the scene even more desolate, painted it with weak, washy colors, like some redstone plane of Earth at twilight. Gloom, depression, and barrenness—mighty Jove had all these attributes.
Cardew stopped only once, to nourish himself, on his journey toward the jungle. He moved a switch on his helmet and a spring, releasing itself, dropped into his open mouth a vitamin pellet, following it with a rejuvenating drink-essence tablet. Neither of them were more than quarter of a centimeter in size, but so potent in effect that he felt renewed strength surge into his aching limbs.
He rose up again from the rock against which he had been lounging and staggered on—onward all through the drab afternoon, battling the eternal wind, muttering threats, in good American, upon Jupiter and all it contained.
As he had calculated, he reached the outskirts of the Fishnet at dusk. The twilight was brief, dimmed from murky drabness into night, relieved only slightly by the clouded glow of the attendant moons.
With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird, below-zero forms of Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs, and angles, more crystal than vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell. There was something almost disgusting about the way the growths occasionally popped noisily and became two, growing with extreme slowness thereafter toward maturity and further reproduction. Cardew heard them bisect quite distinctly through his sensitive external helmet detector as he plodded onward—
Until he gained a Fishnet tree with branches lower than the rest— To scramble into them, though they were only six feet from the ground, demanded enormous effort—took thirty minutes of muscle-wrenching strain. But once he was in their firmly spread, bed-like mass he relaxed with a sigh, satisfied that he was safe from the weird ammoniacal crawlers.
Beyond a wish that he could get out of his space suit and have a real breath of honest fresh air, he had no regrets. So far, so good. His eyes closed with leaden weariness; the tree branch moved up and down in the grip of the tycane slowly, ceaselessly—
As he half dozed, the detec
tor phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twittering of the ostriloath—strange, birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth—and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of Jove, rolling everywhere at terrible speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all—
Then, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!
“Damned delusions!” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been—”
He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely—
Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of Europa shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, struggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all Jovian animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.
Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward—fired his gun as he went.
Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.
World Without Chance Page 3