Fletcher Pratt
Authors: Alien Planet
FLETCHER PRATT
This novel was originally published in 1932; the date is of importance only in relation to the footnotes, which comment upon scientific material in the narrative from the standpoint of what was known in the early Thirties. .The story itself purports to have occurred some twelve years earlier, which would place it between 1919 and 1920. It is presented here as a period piece, and no attempt has been made to update it in any way.
In 1919-20, it would have been entirely possible for an alien being from some other galaxy to have landed on Earth, in a wilderness region, without his presence being known or suspected—except to human beings who happened to be close by. It would have been equally possible for his presence to be concealed, and for him to have departed again without the world being any the wiser.
To the best of our knowledge this is the last literate science fiction novel to appear in science fiction magazines wherein the traditional technique of the "marvelous voyage" and the "manuscript found in a bottle" is combined with a penetrating and satiric representation of human society through the method of exploring an alien culture. Satire has, indeed, appeared since 1932; but the styles of presentation have changed. We feel that this novel, whether or not it is truly the last of its kind, is worthy of inclusion with the classics of imaginative fiction.
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ALIEN PLANET Copyright 1962, by Inga Pratt
Copyright, 1932, by Teck Publishing Co.
An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co., Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Second Ace printing: January, 1973
Printed in U.S.A.
Those who
followed the technical periodicals during the Thirties know that the Hudson-Bird expedition to Central Asia was most successful, scientifically. But there is one result of the expedition's labors which is now being given to the world for the first time. Briefly, its history is this:
While the expedition was in Mongolia, Professor Hudson was visited one night by the headman of a small village near Kiakhta. The headman's only son was, it appeared, going blind. Professor Hudson acceded to the headman's request for aid (for some reason the man thought Hudson to be in league with the powers of the air) and found that the boy was suffering from ophthalmia. Hudson treated him and left some eye-wash with the chieftain, to be used with certain incantations which the professor invented on the spur of the moment to make certain that the eye-wash was used properly and not drunk.
There was some difficulty about the camel-train at this point and the expedition was forced to remain in the neighborhood for three weeks. The headman, whose son had now completely recovered, became almost embarrassing in his gratitude, and capped the climax by offering to present Professor Hudson with a stone that had fallen from the skies. Thinking it might be of some interest as a meteorite, the professor accepted the offer, and the next day the headman arrived with the stone, which was about thirty inches in diameter, roughly prolate in shape and deeply pitted. It was packed with other specimens and forgotten for a time.
During the return journey, while the expedition was descending a pass in the Great Khingan, one of the pack animals, becoming frightened at a bird which swerved near, lost its footing and tumbled from a ledge into a rocky valley a hundred feet below. The animal was killed, and the case it carried burst. Among the contents was the meteorite which the headman had presented to Professor Hudson. It struck on a projecting pinnacle of rock and a piece was broken off: Upon retrieving it, members of the expedition noted that the surface of the break was clearly metallic and not at all like that of the average meteorite, and further examination revealed it to be faintly radioactive.
Subsequent chemical examination showed that the meteorite was in fact composed of a perfect alloy of tantalum, platinum and other metals, with a small quantity of uranium X present (which accounted for the radioactivity). The combination was so exceedingly curious that Professor Hudson had it cut in two for further examination upon the arrival of the expedition in New York.
It proved to be hollow, and within the central core were several extremely thin sheets of nickel closely covered with minute writing. To the astonishment of those present, the writing, on being placed under a magnifying glass, proved to be in English. It had been applied to the metal by some means, chemical or mechanical, whose exact nature is not known.
The present narrative is a recension of that found on the nickel sheets. It tells its own story. The internal evidence of its authenticity is good; it was apparently begun at some leisure (even with an eye to publication) and finished in haste and under the shadow of some overwhelming event. The account holds together as a whole; it has no scientific inaccuracies that can be checked, except insofar as it disagrees with the Einstein theory of velocity in empty space, and this disagreement is explained in the narrative itself.
However, at points in the narrative, some sheets are missing, so that it has been necessary for the transcriber to condense and summarize. In addition certain restrictions were placed upon the transcriber by the conditions under which the sheets were turned over to him after Professor Hudson's death.
In the letter accompanying the sheets, Hudson tells of his attempts to check external evidence. No traces could be found at Joyous Gard, but a broker named Alvin Schierstedt disappeared from a cottage on Sunderland Lake under circumstances of considerable mystery in 1920. The only Merrick Wells, lawyer, who was in practice at the time, and might have supplied the final check, acknowledging that he was the Merrick Wells of this story, was killed in an aviation accident in the spring of 1928. Due to the lack of corroborating evidence, as well as to material which the transcriber was bound to admit, Professor Hudson and his colleagues decided to postpone publication of the narrative of Alvin Schierstedt during their lifetime.
The actual transcribing of the manuscript on the nickel plates was a matter of no small difficulty, particularly as the writing was in an exceptionally illegible hand. After some experiment, the happy idea of putting the sheets in an old-fashioned magic lantern (so arranged as to give a positive instead of a reversed image) was hit upon. A friend worked the lantern and I sat before the screen transcribing the manuscript direct on the typewriter. The writing, which was not very good in the first part, became worse as the manuscript continued, and finally so bad that a considerable portion had to be omitted entirely. The division into chapters, was, at the beginning, the work of the author—Mr. Schierstedt. Toward the end, the division is mine, as a large portion of the latter part was lumped in a single connected whole.
Fletcher Pratt.
On an
evening so ideal as that when the adventure began we hurried through the dishwashing with uncleanly speed and adjourned to the "front yard" for a pipe before the fire. The front yard was a yard by courtesy only; the name implies clearings and settled dwelling places, whereas our front yard reached out for miles into hills thickly covered with virgin forest.
We had chanced on the spot some years before, after taking a wrong turn during a walking trip in the Adirondacks. It won our hearts at once, and when we got back to the city, Merrick turned all his legal wiles to the task of finding the owner. It proved by no means easy; it took nearly a year to locate and make a deal with one Pierre Chevigny of Three Rivers, Quebec.
We were settled before the fire, drinking in the glory of the night; one of the most gorgeous I have seen anywhere. As we leaned back, we could see the vast pageant of the Milky Way wheeling across the central heavens. Below it was mirrored in the lake, still as marble, save where some touch of the tiny airs that always lurk in the funnels of the mountains touched it. Through the trees, dark and spectral, or picked out with crude orange by the light of the fire, we could just catch this multiple reflection of the stars.
It was Merrick who noticed the big meteor first. Not caring to break the charm of our quiet content, he swung his arm up to call my attention to it. For perhaps two or three minutes we watched it, as it grew and grew, to the size of a street light, to the size of a great electric arc-light, to the size of a full moon, a yellow globe of dazzling radiance, rushing straight toward us. I realized suddenly that it was going to strike and that it was aimed right between my eyes. Merrick was on his feet, striking the end of a burning log and scattering the fire in a shower of sparks, and then the monster was upon us.
There was a blinding rush of light, a whistling roar of air, and the meteor struck the verge of the lake, not two hundred yards away, with a terrifying crash and an up-flung pillar of steam and driftwood. We heard the sough of the waters as they closed round the sizzling shape, saw the boughs of the trees tossed by the wind of its passage, and with common impulse raced down toward the spot.
After all, it was not so large. Formless and black, its top stood out from the steaming water of the miniature bay created by its arrival, perhaps two feet across. A tiny spot still glowed redly on the pitted irregular surface. For the rest it was simply a big, black stone. We gazed at it more or less vacuously for a moment, then turned toward each other, and laughed at the relief of the sudden tension.
We went back to reconstruct our scattered fire, but the celestial intruder had broken in on our train of thought and it refused to be restored; so after a few desultory attempts at conversation, we dragged off to bed.
We were up at sunrise the next morning. After the mutational dip in the lake, I set about getting breakfast while Merrick looked up wood and water for the day's utilities. I was just coaxing a refractory fire into burning, when I heard his shout. "Oh, Al!"
"Well, what is it?" I called back without turning around. I was annoyed by the stubbornness of the fire.
"Come here a minute."
"Can't it wait?"
"No. Come here, quick." I abandoned fire and breakfast to run down the path to the water. He was standing at the lake's edge where the meteorite lay nearly buried in mud and water.
"Look," he said, pointing. I followed the line of his finger to see a slow little curl of mud clouding the clear water, as when one stirs the bottom with a stick.
"Well, what of it?" I asked with some asperity, and was-about to return to my interrupted cooking when my ear caught a gentle hissing noise.
"What is it?" I asked. "Turtle?"
"Don't think so. Turtle wouldn't make that much fuss. Something going on inside our visitor."
The mud was clearing now and the hissing had ceased. "Probably chemical action of some sort," said I. "Come on, let's get breakfast and look at it afterwards." Merrick gazed for a moment or two and then followed my impatient steps toward the shack.
Breakfast diverted us both from the subject and when it was over, Merrick set off in the canoe for the spot where he thought a crane had built a nest and would now be teaching the young to fly, while I retired to a corner with my microscope and a field book of fungi to identify a curious pink mushroom I had found.
The sun was high and I was beginning to wonder whether it were not time for lunch when I heard the grate of the canoe on the beach and Merrick's hail. A moment later he appeared, swinging a couple of pond lilies in one hand.
"Any luck?" I asked.
"Some. Think I saw one of the young cranes. Either that or an awfully small old one. Say, there's quite a stew going on around that meteorite of ours. Wonder what it's got inside it to make the water act so."
"That's odd," I remarked. "They're not usually composed of things that would be very soluble, I believe.*
*
He was quite right. Most meteorites are crystalline rock of extremely permanent character. A few are metallic iron, alloyed with nickel and cobalt. But in either case, there is little or no chemical action with water.
Most of those I've heard of were pretty largely iron. What's it like?"
"Oh, quite a sizzling and bubbling. Lot of mud stirred up. Maybe the inside is still hot and the water's getting at it."
"Possibly," I agreed, not deeply interested. "We ought to get some sticks and lever it out of there. I'll chip a piece off and take it to the museum when we get back and see what they think of it."
lunch put an end to the subject, but after we had eaten I dug the old axe-head we used for a wedge out of the wood pile and went down to see if I could chip a fragment off the gift showered so unexpectedly on us by the skies.
When struck, it gave back a dull ringing sound as though I were striking an anvil, and my utmost efforts with the axe-head failed to bring loose the smallest chip. Finally, I propped the axe-head between a couple of stones where it would bear on a projecting boss of the meteorite, and getting the good axe from the shack, struck it a swinging blow. There was a heavy clang of metal meeting metal, a few sparks and the axe-head, accompanied by fragments of stone, sailed through the air at a tangent to bury itself deeply in the mud.
When I fished it out again, I found the edge quite turned over but on the flinty surface of the meteorite only the slightest scar was to be seen. There remained the chance of breaking a piece loose by the old Indian method of building a fire on it and then hastily pouring water on the hot rock, but I regarded it as hardly worth the trouble, and went about my business of the afternoon without more than a casual thought of this singular shooting star.
Dusk had come again, and we were just finishing off an uncommonly good dinner of lake trout when the mystery solved itself. The woods are filled with small noises at this hour, and neither of us gave particular attention to the slap of some flat surface against the water, but when it was followed by the gurgling rush of waves, we both looked in the direction of the meteorite.
"What was that?" asked Merrick.
"More chemical action down there, I fancy," I replied. "Let's go see." I rose from my chair, and then catching sight of the expression of stark amazement on Merrick's face, turned swiftly to meet the most astonishing sight ever seen on an Adirondack lake, or for that matter, anywhere else.
A man stood, half-leaning against a tree, perhaps fifty yards from the porch where we sat. His clothes, of some closefitting dark material, were dripping wet and spotted with mud. On his head was a helmet, with narrow projections over the ears that gave him an odd, faun-like appearance. In one hand he gripped an electric flashlight, and his head was bent as though he had difficulty in holding it upright.
For a moment we stood, transfixed with astonishment, then both together sprang toward the stranger. As we did so, he lifted his head with an effort, looked at us a moment, cried "Kingomi!" in a strong, resonant voice, and tumbled in a dead faint at the foot of the tree, the flashlight dropping from his hand.
We got him on the porch, and while Merrick went for some of the illegally potent beverage with which old Pierre kept us supplied, I made shift to wash from the face of the stranger some of the caked mud, sweat, and blood which encrusted it. My labors revealed a not unpleasing masculine countenance, with the long lines from nostril to lip deep-graven by fatigue. When Merrick had forced a teaspoonful of the cognac into his mouth, the stranger opened a pair of sharp eyes, looked at us a moment, lifted his hands toward his head as though to remove the encumbering helmet and then, his forehead wrinkling with pain, closed his eyes again.
He was obviously badly done up. Just as obviously he wanted the helmet off, and while Merrick lifted his head, I tried to pull it loose. Despite my utmost efforts it would not budge.
"Wait a minute," said Merrick. "Don't pull his head off. There's a button." He pointed to a spot just over one ear where two little flattened studs were recessed into the glossy covering. At a venture I turned the upper one. Immediately, from inside the helmet, a voice began to speak, as though we had turned on a radio set in mid-sentence.
"—arroum livolongale,"
or some such gibberish it said, as nearly as I could make out; but Merrick had returned the stud to its original position in feverish haste and it fell silent again.
"Golly," he remarked, "it's a radio set. Here, let's see what the other stud will do."
But as I bent over I saw that the eyes of the patient were opening again and motioned Merrick back. This time he succeeded in raising his hands to the peculiar helmet; there was a snapping of tiny levers, and he dropped his arms again with a little gasp.
I reached for the helmet, understanding that whatever lock had held it in position had been released. It came away in my hand, revealing to our complete astonishment, a head as bald as a newly-laid egg, contrasting oddly with the youthfulness of the man's face. He smiled wanly as I got the apparatus off, and then lay relaxed with closed eyes, apparently not unconscious, but as though ill or injured.
"Seems to be hurt," said Merrick. "I don't know much about anatomy, but with the manual and what we do know between us, I imagine we can find out if anything's broken. D'you suppose you can make him understand what we're after?"
"Apparently he doesn't understand English," I answered, "and I have no idea what that language was we heard his radio spouting.
Parlez-vous Francais
?"—this last to the visitor.
He merely opened his eyes on being addressed, but there was no gleam of comprehension, and Merrick, who was more of a linguist than I, tried him in German, Spanish and Portuguese, with equally barren results.
"No, go," said Merrick. "Let's try direct action," and he began feeling of the stranger's arms and legs. Apparently there were no breaks. "But I'm not much of a doctor," protested my friend. "Wonder if we could get him in to Fort Ann."
There were five miles of lake and five more of particularly villainous country road between Joyous Gard and Fort Ann. How we were to get a sick man that far with no means of transportation besides a canoe, which would be useless once we left the lake, I did not see, and I said so.
"He's probably suffering more from fatigue and shock than anything else, and has some lake water inside him, too. Suppose we give him another dose of brandy and later on we'll try to feed him."
"O.K.," said Merrick, "and if he's not better by morning, one of us can run in to Fort Ann and dig up a doctor." Our patient was better in the morning, however; he sat up in the bunk and accepted a cup of coffee with languid gratitude, drinking the liquid with relish. Toast, on the other hand, he first nibbled and then refused. When we offered him one of the small fish we were breakfasting on, he dug away at it with his coffee spoon and then crammed a goodsized portion, bones and all, into his mouth. I imagine the bones surprised and hurt him; he made an inarticulate sound of displeasure and spat them out, looking at us with some indignation, which changed to obvious astonishment as we separated the bones from our portions before eating.
After breakfast, the stranger (whom Merrick forthwith christened "Friday") went to sleep again, and Merrick and I strolled to the beach to have another look at what must have been his vehicle. There was not much of it visible; his exit had evidently been made under water. Below the clear surface, a double ring, not more than a couple of yards in diameter, indicated where the top had come off. It was a wonder he had not been drowned in escaping, and at the time, more of a wonder that he had not been burned to death.
At one side of the main mass of the thing, where the hole made by its arrival rose sharply to the beach, lay the lid, half in and half out of the water—a huge thing that it took both of us to pull up on the sand. We marveled that Friday, faint and weary as he was, had been able to move it at all.
The outer coating was as we had seen—some extremely hard material, pitted and scarred by the heat of its contact with the atmosphere. The inner surface was a light gray in color, soft to the touch, but firm and rubbery. When Merrick jabbed it with his knife, the material closed over the wound without leaving a visible scar. At the edges a white layer of some third composition, about an inch in thickness, lay between the lining and the outer hard shell. It was as unfamiliar as the other two and Merrick's knife would not even scratch it. Clearly, for one who was neither a chemist nor a metallurgist, there was little information to be gathered from the composition of this singular vehicle; leaving it where it lay, we returned to the shack.
On the way up the path my foot struck the flashlight the stranger had dropped the night before. I bent to pick it up, noted that it was of the ordinary cylindrical type but furnished with a frosted glass cover, and pointing it off to one side, idly snapped it on. Immediately there was a low buzz and a beam like a lightning flash leaped from the ground glass into the trees. We heard a vicious
whup!
saw a gleam of flame, and when I snapped the flashlight off again, we could easily perceive the circular hole—all burned round the edges, where the beam had struck a foot-thick maple.
"Heavens!" I said, gooseflesh creeping on my back, "Lucky I wasn't looking into that thing when I turned it on. What is it?"
"Don't know," said Merrick. "Never saw anything like it. Golly, this beats a gun if it's real. Let's try it on the lake and see how much range it has."
We stepped back to the shore, and holding the dangerous flashlight carefully, I pointed it far down the lake and pressed the key. The buzz and flash were repeated, and perhaps a mile away a silver plume of steam sprang from the water.
"A heat-ray," pronounced Merrick. "Just like H. G. Wells'. This johnny knows his stuff, whoever he is. He's got a nice adjunct to the gentle trade of murder there. Better put it away. He might get peeved and try to use it on us."
For the next three or four days Friday did not seem inclined to try to do anything. He rested in the bunk, watched us at our daily tasks and enjoyments with a friendly but detached interest, and slept. Though he accepted food with a certain graceful courtesy, he seemed curiously uneducated as to table manners. From the first he refused to use a fork, testing its sharp points with an inquisitive finger and laying it aside. The iron knives we used in lieu of silver at the camp, he examined with interest, but did not attempt to use. Spoons alone he seemed perfectly familiar with, and pressed into service for all his eating. Indeed, he acted surprised when he failed to cut the steak we gave him one evening with the edge of his spoon, and after several ineffective attempts at dividing the meat by this means, finally picked up the whole piece and worried a mouthful loose with his teeth.
He made no attempt to speak in any language, and as the days passed we noted a further peculiarity. Although he did nothing but lie in the bunk, he was no more in need of a shave than when he had arrived, and there was not a trace of hair on his bald but singularly youthful head.
The days since his arrival had grown into nearly a week in this state of burning curiosity on the one side and polite suspended animation on the other, when one evening, when rain pattered on the roof and the wind rattled the window frames, Merrick and I sat before the fire in the larger of our two rooms, reading. Friday had risen from his bunk and was ensconced in one of our chairs at one side of the fire, watching us with silent interest.
As it happened, Merrick was reading one of those one-volume editions of Shakespeare.
"Do you know," he remarked, "I have always thought 'King John' the most underrated of Shakespeare's plays. There is some of the most gorgeous rhetoric he ever wrote in it—better than anything that has been done since, even Yeats's 'Wanderings of Oisinn.' Listen to this—" and he began to read the last lines of the play, the speech of the Bastard which ends with:
"Come the three corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them; nought shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true."
Merrick reads poetry very well, and I heard him as I always do, with a little thrill of pleasure. But it was upon our guest that the greatest effect was produced. He rose from his chair, staring at Merrick, and then pointing to the book, began to move his hands vigorously.
"For the love of Mike," said Merrick, "what do you suppose he wants now?"
"Wants you to read some more, of course," said I. "Try it." He ruffled the pages a minute and then began again. The stranger smiled and bowed, with a scraped-back foot, in approval. After a moment, when Merrick came to a pause, Friday rose, went to his bunk, and returned with the curious radio helmet he had worn when we first saw him. After fiddling with some keys inside it for a moment he put it on, lay down on the floor beside the fire, and closed his eyes.
"I've got it," said Merrick after a moment. "He wants me to read to him while he's asleep. But what for?"