Strange Ports of Call Read online

  COPYRIGHT 1948 BY AUGUST DERLETH

  All rights reserved; no portion of this book may be

  Reprinted without permission of the copyright

  owners listed on pages 392 and 393.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by George J. McLeod, Limited, Toronto.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York

  Strange Ports of Call

  About the Book

  Introduction

  August Derleth

  THE CUNNING OF THE BEAST

  Nelson Bond

  THE WORM

  David H. Keller

  THE CRYSTAL BULLET

  Donald Wandrei

  THE THING FROM OUTSIDE

  George Allan England

  AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

  H.P. Lovecraft

  MARS ON THE ETHER

  Lord Dunsany

  THE GOD-BOX

  Howard Wandrei

  MR. BAUER AND THE ATOMS

  Fritz Leiber Jr.

  THE CRYSTAL EGG

  H.G. Wells

  JOHN JONES’ DOLLAR

  Harry Stephen Keeler

  CALL HIM DEMON

  Henry Kuttner

  MASTER OF THE ASTEROID

  Clark Ashton Smith

  A GUEST IN THE HOUSE

  Frank Belknap Long

  THE LOST STREET

  Carl Jacobi

  Clifford Simak

  FORGOTTEN

  P. Schuyler Miller

  FAR CENTAURUS

  A.E. van Vogt

  THUNDER AND ROSES

  Theodore Sturgeon

  THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH

  Robert A. Heinlein

  BLUNDER

  Philip Wylie

  THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC

  Ray Bradbury

  Acknowledgments

  Mankind has long pondered the curious wonders of worlds beyond its ken—of life as it existed before the dawn of civilization, of fantastic creatures from other planets, of man’s strange destiny in centuries to come.

  Collected between the covers of this anthology are twenty modern masterpieces of science-fiction. Included are a complete novel by H. P. Lovecraft and H. G. Wells’ classic of long ago, The Crystal Egg, both here anthologized for the first time. Most of these stories have never before appeared in book form, and all of them are out of print.

  The book begins with a memorable allegory on the creation, The Cunning of the Beast by Nelson Bond, and ends with two stories of the earth’s destruction, Philip Wylie’s Blunder, and The Million Year Picnic by Ray Bradbury. Between them is a miniature history of mankind and a glimpse of its future.

  In The Worm by David Keller, a monstrous brute from forgotten centuries, victim of nature’s cruelest hoax, vents its pent-up rage on a lonely New England farmer. Two daring adventurers discover the long-buried Egyptian secret for transcending time and space in The Crystal Egg. You will not soon forget Clark Ashton Smith’s picture of a rocket ship lurching drunkenly through space, a human derelict at the controls, in Master of the Asteroid.

  Strange Ports of Call is an exciting reading experience—a daring, perhaps even a prophetic view of the unknown mysteries of flesh and spirit, of time and space.

  August Derleth, who selected the stories for this collection, has few peers in the realm of the fantastic. He has edited five anthologies in the genre, and is himself one of the most prolific writers in the field. Among his most recent collections is The Sleeping and the Dead, thirty tales of the spectral and the psychic. Represented in the anthology are such masters as Lord Dunsany, Edith Wharton, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, Arthur Machen, Montague Rhodes James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu. A book sure to delight the most sated reader of the macabre and to transform the casual reader into a devotee.

  INTRODUCTION

  FEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE VARIOUS branches of fantasy in fiction have occasioned such interest and controversy as that development known as science-fiction. The controversy about science-fiction is all the more pointed because many of its most vocal adherents do not themselves seem to know how to define it. It has been described by one anthologist as fiction which concerns itself solely with the future, and by another as fiction of prophecy, philosophy, and adventure. But actually science-fiction embraces all imaginative fiction which grows out of scientific concepts, whether in mathematics or geology or nuclear fission or biology or any scientific concept whatsoever, whether already demonstrated or whether projected out of the writer’s imagination into future space and time.

  The classification is a modern one, but the science-fiction story has a long and honorable lineage, only slightly less long than that development of fantasy popularly known as the Gothic novel, though the early classics of science-fiction, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Lewis Holberg’s Journey to the World Under Ground (c. 1740)—so great an influence on the work of Edgar Allan Poe—were primarily written as social criticism, and were utopian in concept. Indeed, save for such an outstanding exception as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), most of the novels in the genre which followed in the nineteenth century were predominantly utopian in character, and for more than a century the science-fiction novel was first and foremost a sociological novel.

  With Poe, however, the direction changed, becoming more philosophical and adventurous. After Poe came Fitz-James O’Brien, Jules Verne, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frank Stockton, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, and many another, though it was Verne and Wells who made the science-fiction novel popular, Verne particularly exemplifying the tale of adventure based on scientific concepts and prophecy, Wells that of the philosophical direction. Indeed, even today for the general reader—as apart from the aficionado—Wells and Verne stand for their knowledge of what is science-fiction, and it is such novels as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon that the average reader conceives of as science-fiction.

  The modern development, however, has been away from Verne and Wells. The renaissance of science-fiction came about in 1926, when, inspired by the success of Weird Tales, established in 1923 and using science-fiction stories as well as tales of horror, the supernatural, and contes cruel, Hugo Gernsback launched the magazine Amazing Stories. Though this magazine was given over at first very largely to reprints of stories which had appeared elsewhere—in Blue Book, Munscijs, Argosy, Science and Invention, and similar magazines—it soon began to publish original work from new writers. The success of Amazing Stories in turn stimulated competitors, and soon there were a host of magazines specializing in stories of science—from among which, at first under the guidance of Harry Bates, and later, under that of the astute and able John W. Campbell, Jr., Astounding Science-Fiction easily outdistanced all competitors to lead the field in the publication of new and different work in the genre.

  It is a curious and lamentable fact that in most science-fiction stories human beings are somewhat less than human beings; they are effigies of men and women, and there is no human warmth in them. The writer’s interest is primarily in the “gadget” or, in modern parlance, the “gimmick,” and it is this which ensnares his whole interest at the expense of his characters. Yet the plain and indisputable fact is that the great stories, whether in the fields of romance or fantasy, concern people to whom something happens, and not just people who are conveniently present to attend the birth of some fanciful scientific concept. It is because of this curious lack that there are so few really memorable stories in the genre of science-fiction.

  The overwhelming majority of science-fiction stories are
merely orthodox adventure tales with the trappings of interplanetary travel or prophecy, written on an adolescent level; indeed, though many very capable writers have broken away from this early tradition, there are still magazines in the field, the letters-columns of which appear to be editorially conducted and in part written on a level which can only be described as sub-moronic, a distinction all the more pointed when these pages are compared to the famed “Brass Tacks” section of Astounding Science-Fiction. The early science-fiction tale, however, was as hackneyed as one can imagine. I have described it elsewhere ° by contrasting it with the adventure story formula in these words:

  The difference lies primarily in this: that instead of a traditional villain who also wants the girl, a host of Martians, Venusians, or what have you, serve as villains in the piece against a background of extensions of known scientific concepts into the realm of the extremely fanciful. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian tales are prototypes, and the basic theme seldom varies—motivated by a variety of events such as a terrestrial plague, a vital interest in rocket-ships, the noble impulse to be sacrificed to science, and so forth, the hero and the heroine, who is sometimes a stowaway, set forth bravely into the interstellar spaces. They duly arrive at the moon, Mars, Venus, or some hitherto unknown world or galaxy, and there immediately encounter creatures who are inimical to them . . . and there begins a titanic struggle for the girl, who, strangely, seems also to be an object of especial interest to the insectile or batrachian or reptilian inhabitants of this extra-terrestrial place. After a series of harrowing adventures, which may or may not include a full-scale war between worlds, the hero fetches the heroine back from hideous captivity, and they make the rocket-ship or the interstellar patrol just in time, with a horde of ravening citizens of this alien world at their heels.

  Fortunately, this pattern has been subjected to such ridicule that it has all but died out in contemporary magazines of science-fiction. The work of such writers as Olaf Stapledon, S. Fowler Wright, C. S. Lewis, H. F. Heard, Garrett Serviss and a few others pioneered the direction away from the simple adventure-romance pattern, and the result has been wholly felicitous. Yet it would be going too far to assert, as one anthologist did, that the majority of the writing being done in this still virtually new field is literature. Far too much of science-fiction today suffers from coterie writing, which makes it impossible for the general reader to follow the science-fiction story with any vital understanding. That is to say, too many writers in the field have developed on the one hand a flip, casual, over-the-shoulder manner of writing which is far removed from literature, and on the other, an assumption that the reader knows his basic science sufficiently well so that he will immediately grasp any concept put forward by them.

  But there is still a substantial minority of excellent writing in the field of science-fiction, and I have striven to gather together in this book certain stories, all now out of print, which seem to me to have sufficient literary value to assure them of an existence extending beyond our immediate time. Some of the stories I would like to have had for this anthology have already appeared in other fine collections—Donald A. Wollheim’s The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction and The Portable Novels of Science; Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science-Fiction; and Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—but none of the stories in this book has ever appeared in any anthology and the majority of them have never appeared in book form.

  It is not by coincidence that Strange Ports of Call begins with a memorable allegory, in science-fiction terms, on the creation—The Cunning of the Beast, by Nelson Bond—and that it should end with two stories of the earth’s destruction—Blunder, by Philip Wylie, and The Million Year Picnic, by Ray Bradbury. Between them is a miniature history of mankind and a glimpse of his future in terms of science-fiction. There are stories of mutation in nature (The Worm, by David H. Keller), of man confronted by something beyond his ken (The Crystal Bullet, by Donald Wandrei; The Thing from Outside, by George Allan England), of man’s exploration of the remote history of the earth (At the Mountains of Madness, by H. P. Lovecraft), of an elusive contact with a sister-planet, delightfully tantalizing and told with a mock-gravity which jibes gently at the frequent newspaper accounts of strange radio messages “from space” (Mars on the Ether, by Lord Dunsany—for awareness of which, as well as for other helpful suggestions, I am indebted to A. Langley Searles), and Mr. H. G. Wells’ early story of contact with Mars in a less orthodox manner (The Crystal Egg).

  There is a story of higher mathematics which is a minor classic of science-fiction and is not without humor (John Jones’ Dollar, by Harry Stephen Keeler); there are tales of man’s scientific experiments escaping his control (The God-Box, by Howard Wandrei; Mr. Bauer and the Atoms, by Fritz Leiber, Jr.); accounts of malign invaders from outside (Call Him Demon, by Henry Kuttner; A Guest in the House, by Frank Belknap Long; The Lost Street, by Carl Jacobi and Clifford Simak); unorthodox interplanetary tales (Master of the Asteroid, by Clark Ashton Smith; Forgotten, by P. Schuyler Miller); and there are three notable stories of man’s future worlds (Far Centaurus, by A. E. Van Vogt; Thunder and Roses, by Theodore Sturgeon; The Green Hills of Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein).

  Each of these stories is distinguished not alone for originality of concept, but for manner of presentation. They exemplify the best in science-fiction, that respectable body of work which seems to me destined to be looked upon by future generations as the outstanding science-fiction in the short form of the genre, since, admittedly, as John W. Campbell, Jr. has pointed out in his foreword to The Best of Science Fiction, the longer form is “far more apt to be effective than the short story.” Quite possibly the excellence of Lovecraft’s short novel, At the Mountains of Madness, bears out Mr. Campbell’s contention; yet none of these stories suffers for the need of explanatory text for the primary reason that these stories, unlike much science-fiction, concern man first and foremost—man in his reaction to other dimensions, other laws, other science, other worlds—and their appeal is thus that basically universal one of related and recognizable human behavior. The men who walk through these stories are no mere stock characters, no imaginative creations designed to symbolize the inhabitants of other worlds; they are multi-dimensional, intensely real people, confronted with violations or mutations of those laws of science which they had come to believe unalterable.

  Strange Ports of Call, therefore, supplements the stories in the four collections previously named; and the reader is urged to read these collections as well, if he has not already done so. Together, they offer a well-rounded picture of the science-fiction of our own time. For the nonce—turn the page to invade other worlds of flesh and spirit, of space and time; strike out into unknown country which holds forth the fascinating possibility of becoming a part of the world of tomorrow.

  August Derleth

  Sauk City, Wisconsin

  27 January 1948

  Nelson Bond (1908- ) lives and works in Roanoke, Virginia. He is the author of many short stories in magazines ranging from Scribner’s to Blue Book and Weird Tales, and he has been represented in many anthologies, of which the most recent was The Night Side: Masterpieces of the Strange and Terrible (1947). His first collection, Mr. Mergenthwirker’s Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales, was published in 1946 by Coward-McCann.

  THE CUNNING OF THE BEAST

  Nelson Bond

  THERE HAS BEEN MUCH DISAGREEABLE comment on the case of our late brother, the Yawa Eloem, and we number amongst us many who feel that the punishment meted out to him, severe as it was, still did not exact complete retribution for the evil he loosed in our midst.

  It is with these vengeful ones I should like to take issue.

  Now, let it not be thought that I view with approval the experiments of the learned and unhappy Doctor Eloem. The reverse is true; being one of his oldest friends and earliest confidants, I was perhaps the first to warn him against doing that which he did. This warning I delivered on the night th
e Yawa conceived his staggering ambition.

  But in refutation to those who contend that his intention was to overthrow our great civilization, destroy our culture, and turn the rulership of our beloved homeland into the hands of barbarian monstrosities, I feel I should present the true facts.

  Doctor Eloem is more to be pitied than scorned. His was the sad fate of one who, delving into secrets better left unlearned, succeeded only in creating a monster stronger than its maker

  Well I remember the night the Yawa’s dream was born. It was the Night of Utter Black which occurs but once in each twelve revolutions of Kios. Both suns were set, and all nine moons were vanished from the sky. No doubt the burning stars shone true in the encircling jet vault of space, but from our refuge they could not be seen. Great clouds hung thickly to our shielding Dome; against its transparent hemisphere, from torrents of corrosive rain lashed in unending fury.

  Though our shelters were warmed and kept dry for just such times as these, my body creaked and groaned when I tried to move; one limb was so stiffened in its socket that I could scarcely will it to function. Eloem was in better condition, having but recently completed a rehabilitation at the Clinic, but the condensation affected his vision, and time and again, as we huddled there in misery, he wiped the moisture from his visor.

  Dimly we heard the thud of running feet, and peering fearfully into the mists we saw it was our friend Nesro, who had been caught in the deadly storm and was belatedly racing to shelter. But even before we could call him to our Dome, he fell prey to the cursed climate. His footsteps faltered; his joints locked; he stumbled and fell headlong.

  A horror gripped us. For a Kiosian to lie for more than minutes on that drenched ground meant certain ending. But we were helpless. To attempt a rescue without shedders would only put us in the same plight.

  Eloem lurched to his feet, and what he said should convince his enemies that, whatever else his faults, he was no coward.