Jack Williamson's "The Alien Intelligence"

Our Strange Adventures series continues with Edmond Hamilton’s good buddy, Jack Williamson. Jack would pen several fantastic adventure novels, some more Science Fiction, others more Fantasy.

Jack Williamson made his debut in Amazing Stories (December 1928) with “The Metal Man”, an A. Merritt-inspired tale of a man who discovers a weird extra-stellar phenomenon and gets turned into metal as a consequence. This story caught everyone’s attention but Jack wrote a far more ambitious third story (“The Girl From Mars” with Miles J Breuer was second) with the two-part serial “The Alien Intelligence” (Science Wonder Stories, July August 1929) that was reprinted twice, first in Captain Future (Spring Summer Fall 1942) then the Wonder Story Annual (1951). Because of this we have three different sets of illustrations from Frank R. Paul, and two uncredited artists. The story is again a Merritt style lost world tale with weird perils and lurking menace.

Williamson does a good job of maintaining a credible feel while incredible things happen. He would later write Merrittesque pieces with more color like 1933’s Golden Blood for Weird Tales. In “The Alien Intelligence” he tries to remain more scientific in tone. Golden Blood and Dreadful Sleep have a stronger sense of magic that will get explained away later as super-science. In “The Alien Intelligence” (Science Wonder Stories, July August 1929) we have the same but the author doesn’t allow us any real question of whether it is magic or science.

Jack talks about his interactions with Hugo Gernsback, the editor, on this story:

I finished it during the Christmas break of my first college year and mailed it to Amazing Stories. Eventually I got a letter from Hugo Gernsback, who had taken my manuscript along when he left to set up his new publishing enterprises. He offered me ‘space rates’ for it. Hungry for publication, I agreed without asking what ‘space rates’ would come to. He renamed the story ‘The Alien Intelligence’ and ran it in the second and third issues of the new Science Wonder Stories. His check, when it came, was only $75. I had expected half a cent a word, which would have been nearly twice that. (The Early Williamson, 1975)

Part One

The story begins with our hero, Winfield Fowler, receiving a strange and desperate radio message from his old friend, Horace Austen. Fowler follows Austen’s trail to the Mountain of the Moon in Australia, a largely unexplored area at the time of the story. He finds a mysterious metal ladder that takes him to a bizarre lost world. While descending another long ladder he witness the attack of strange flying vessels against the city of Astran. Fowler falls but doesn’t die.

Upon waking in the morning, he approaches the city. He hides when warriors armed with crystal weapons and armor show up. In Austen’s message, Fowler learned he must find an ally in the city, a woman named Melvar. Once in the city, he meets her and her younger brother, Naro, hides away from the angry city dwellers and learns much from a letter Austen left for any outsider who might come after him. The city of Astran is under attack nightly by the flying monsters known as the Krimlu, evil beings who swoop down and kidnap people. They also are attacked by the Purple Ones. Later Fowler would learn how these monsters are created.

Fowler also learns that Austen had been in the city. He had amazed the Astranians with fire, which they did not possess, then left to discover what the secret behind the Krimlu and a mysterious Silver Lake. Fowler wishes to follow but Melvar is taken by the temple priests for sacrifice. Armed with his pistol, Fowler and Naro go to save the woman. The high priest is about to pour water from the Silver Lake on her, turning her into one of the demonic Purple Ones, when Fowler shoots the bowl. It pours all over the high priest instead. (This moment was chosen for two illustrations.)

Fleeing the city, the trio go to the Silver Lake. Fowler drips one drop on his arm by accident and suffers great pain and loss of the use of his arm for a while. The searchers witness how the lake was created when a gigantic metal sphere appears, dropping and rising, casting the weird liquid into the reservoir.

Part Two

The trio camp, allowing Fowler to regain his strength. They are attacked by one of the Purple Ones. These creatures, once human, have been bathed in the silver liquid, turning them into laughing, shrieking killing machines:

I turned in time to see a weird figure, gnarled and stooped, with long white hair, slink swiftly and furtively from a great rock to the shelter of the red brush. Squat and bent as it was, there was no mistaking that it was human in shape, and that the skin was purple.

The scientist shoots the monster over and over but it is only after Naro cuts what is left of its head off with a sword that it dies.

Later, one of the red burning ships that fill the night lands and Fowler sees they are rocket ships. Three of the Purple Ones comes out of the vessel. To survive, the humans climb a boulder and fight for their lives. Naro and Fowler slip off the rock and confront and kill them. A strange form rises from the open ship. It disintegrates part of the boulder with a ray weapon. A lucky shot from Fowler causes the other attacker to explode. This leaves the ship open and available for the three searchers.

Fowler experiments with the craft, figuring out how the vessel works. He sees that it burns the silver liquid as fuel, casting a red mist as exhausting. This is why the ships look red in the sky. The trio take off as new ships come to stop them. There is a short aerial battle, in which Fowler is able to ram one of the others. They flee into the country of purple mist and escape.

Abandoning the ship, Fowler and his friends walk along a red forest, not trusting the weird foliage. They find evidence of Austen’s mining of iron pyrites, coal and copper. They discover his camp, filled with amazing scientific adaptations. The man himself appears and Melvar and Naro are excited to see him. Fowler gives him the equipment he asked for. The scientist can now finish his experiments explaining the technology of the Krimlu. Fowler gets his first glimpse of a Krimlu base. The Purple Ones work endlessly like robot slaves.

Austen gets Fowler to help him climb down into the underground tunnels. The old man sends a message up to the younger telling him that Austen is going to blow up the Krimlu base. Fowler is to take Melvar and Naro away quickly. Fowler is about to climb down after him when he smells smoke. The red forest is on fire. The heat of the fallen rocketship has set the forest ablaze. Fowler races back to the camp, believing Melvar and Naro dead.

The young scientist searches the burn landscape for a way out. He stumbles on a lone Krimlu, seeing one for the first time:

That unearthly thing rested upon a frame of metal. It was the head of a metallic monster. It was set on an oblong box of white metal, to which were attached six long-jointed metal limbs. The being stood nine feet high, at least. It was standing on three of the limbs and holding my rifle, which I had left where I had been lying, turning it and feeling of it with a cluster of slender, finger-like tentacles on the end of the metal arm. It was working the mechanism of the gun, and apparently looking at it, though it had no eyes that I could see.

Suddenly the gun went off, throwing up the sand between me and the monster. With a grotesquely half-human attitude of alarmed surprise, the being dropped the gun and sprang back like a gigantic spider. The motion freed me from my paralysis of horror, and I started backing cautiously around the boulder, afraid to run. As I moved it sprang forward and a slender tube of white metal, in one of the tentacled hands, was suddenly pointed toward me. As the monster moved, there was a humming sound from it, and little jets of purple gas hissed from holes in the sides of the box-like body.

Fowler shoots the creature’s heat ray tube out of its claw. A second shot blasts the glass dome housing the monster and it dies.

He returns to the rocket that caused the fire, finding Naro’s skeleton. Inside , Melvar is alive, thanks to her brother. Fowler uses the ship to escape the world of the Krimlu as it explodes. Austen has succeeded. The entire valley of the Mountain of the Moon, including the city of Astran, collapses. The pair land outside, getting aid from a sheep ranch. Fowler has escaped with the woman he loves and pocket full of gems.

There is a lot to unpack here. The influence of H. G. Wells is evident, especially in the second half. The Purple Ones with their long, white hair are very Morlock like. The Krimlu, being one of a long line of squidgies-inside-a-robot suit creatures like the Daleks, resemble a smaller version of Wells’s Martians and their tripods. Williamson tells us the Krimlu are creatures of ant-descended evolution. Fowler’s fight with the robotic alien will be repeated again in “The Moon Era” and again in The Legion of Space. Fowler destroys it fairly easily. Later versions will require more desperate action.

The Wells influence also makes this exploration of a weird land more a Science Fiction tale than a Fantasy. Later Williamson tales, like Golden Blood and “Dreadful Sleep” in Weird Tales feel more like Fantasy but ultimately are explained as SF. Tales of alien landscapes intrigued Williamson so much that his last book, The Stonehenge Gate (2005) explores the same territory but with much more sophistication seventy years later.

Jack Williamson was best buddies with Edmond Hamilton. The rocketship aerial battle smacks of Ed Hamilton’s “The Hidden World”, a story written around the same time. But Williamson addresses something no Hamilton hero ever would. Fowler acknowledges his lack of skill and understanding on how to fly the rocket. In “The Hidden World”, the heroes fly stolen ships with more skill than the creatures who invented and trained in them. Highly fantastical. Williamson isn’t having any of that. Fowler admits he got lucky and was largely desperate and clumsy in his attack.

Conclusion: Merritt Himself

All this Merritt-style writing and a fan letter got the attention of the author of The Moon Pool and “The People of the Pit”. in The Early Williamson Jack mentions:

Somehow, I persuaded A. Merritt to let me collaborate with him on a serial for Argosy, which was then one of the top adventure pulps, paying five or six cents a word. Merritt was still my idol, and I vividly recall my elation over his letters of advice and comment. The plot for our planned novel was my own and perhaps a bit wild. Our explorers, somewhere in the deserts of Asia, were to discover an enormous crystal mass that had developed a mind and will of its own. At school that fall, I spent the four- day Thanksgiving recess writing 20,000 words of the story, The Purple Mountain.

The great collaboration was never meant to be. Merritt’s response was lack-luster:

Merritt never returned the manuscript, and I suppose it no longer exists. His comment was short and not very committal. Then the associate editor of the American Weekly, the Sunday supplement for the Hearst newspaper chain, he explained that he had little time for fiction. That outcome isn’t very surprising, when I look back at it now. I had neither seen our Asian setting nor even read much about it. The human characters were so vague I can’t recall them. The writing must have showed my driving urgency. Clearly I had been trying too hard to lean on Merritt. (The Early Williamson, 1975)

It is too bad those 20,000 words are lost. Even if poor, early work, I would have enjoyed seeing them. I wonder if some of the ideas ended up in Golden Blood? By 1934, Jack would move on from imitating Merritt. He would write a space opera classic in The Legion of Space and his career was set. Science Fiction and space, not exotic lost world fiction, would be Jack Williamson’s calling.