John W. Campbell gave us the aliens of Penton & Blake in a series of five stories. Campbell, who was the star of super-science fiction, did something a little different with this series. It wasn’t for Astounding but the more juvenile Thrilling Wonder Stories. Because of that, these tales are more adventure-oriented and, in my opinion, more fun than Campbell’s other stuff of the same time period. One of the things that make it more enjoyable are the weird creatures he conceives to inhabit his solar system.
Things begin with Penton & Blake being exiled from Earth for working with the forbidden tech of nuclear energy. They use their discovery to power a spaceship, the Ion, and head for the inner planets of Mercury and Venus.
The Scissor Tree of Venus
“…Venus had some peculiarly unpleasant specimens.”
Blake groaned. “You telling me. I’m the bright boy that fell for that pretty fruit and climbed right up between the stems of a scissor tree…”
The nasty plants of Venus have a hundred ways to kill you. “…He tried a rope on one leaf but the leaf neither stabbed, grabbed, nor jerked away, as he had half expected after his lesson with the ferocious plants of Venus. Blake pulled a leaf off, then a few more. The plant acted quite plant-like, which pleasantly surprised him.”
The plants of Mars are quite earthly compared to the monsters of Venus. You can see several of the dome-shaped plants in the illustration below.
“The Brain Stealers of Mars” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1936) is an important story for Campbell. He had a chance to try out the idea of an alien that can copy you. This would be the crux of his more famous “Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science -Fiction, August 1938), the basis of The Thing From Another World (1951).
The Martians
“‘They’re centaurs,’ gasped Blake. ‘Will you look at that one over there–a nice little calico…'” When Penton & Blake arrive on Mars they discover that the Martians are centaur-like creatures. They once came to Earth giving rise to the stories of in our myths. They found Earth too primitive so they returned to Mars. They brought the parasitic Thushol (brain-stealers) with them. The centaurs can do a brain-download that gives you their language and history. This looks like being strangled.
These centaurs make me wonder if Campbell had Edgar Rice Burroughs in mind. Not his Mars (Barsoom) but his Moon series. In The Moon Maid (1920), the satellite is inhabited by the centaur-like Va-Gas. S. P. Meek would borrow similar creatures for his “Submicroscopic” (Amazing Stories, August 1931) and its sequel “Awlo of Ulm” (Amazing Stories, September 1931).
The Thushol
The brain-stealers of the title aren’t actual thieves of brain matter (ala “Spock’s Brain”) but creatures that copy you exactly. This makes it very hard to know who is real and who is a copy. “The thushol are built of protoplasm–but infinitely more adaptable protoplasm. They can do something about it, make it take the form of a bone cell and be part of a thigh bone, or be a nerve cell in a brain…” The Martians figure one third of their population are actually thushols. Since they can not tell which is or which is not, they stopped worrying about it.
The Thushol don’t actually steal your brains but telepathically steal your thoughts and knowledge so they can appear as anything they like, even you. They have lived parasitically off the centaur-like Martians for eons and now wish to return to Earth to live off humans. These visitors were responsible for the legends about dopplegangers.
Campbell’s story is really a puzzle tale. How do you know which is the real Penton and Blake? Ten of each go to the ship to return to Earth. The two men have to find a way to sort out the fakes. But since they are telepathic, they can read your response to any test and fake it. This is a comic situation in this tale (if you consider ray-gunning ten clones at a time funny). When John Carpenter uses the same idea in The Thing, it becomes a hot wire in blood to test for the monster. Much creepier. P&B don’t have any such easy method. Penton ends up using pepper. He gambles that only the real Blake will sneeze.
“The Double Minds” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1937) has Penton & Blake arrested on Ganymede. Campbell throws a lot of backstory at the reader, with Penton & Blake leaving Mars to return to Earth, where missile fire drives them back into space. They decide to explore the outer planets.
The Lanoor and The Shaloor
“How can I describe him? He’s a Ganymedian jailer, to you. They all look alike. Since we are the first human beings ever to see Ganymedians —or Ganymede itself—there aren’t any words in the language to describe him. He is seven feet three inches tall, weighs about one hundred and fifty—or he would on Earth. He has that attractive green hair they all have, and he is wearing a Shaloor guard’s uniform…”
The Ganymedians are either Lanoor, the original aliens or they are Shaloor, the converted aliens. The Shaloor found a way through surgery to use both sides of the brain as dual brains. This makes them far smarter than the Lanoor. It also makes them cruel and deceitful. They see this as the most intelligent way to be. Not surprising, the Lanoor want to revolt. They are kept in check by superior brain power and the threat of the Shleath.
The Dough Balls – The Grethlanth
These small soft creatures are used by the Ganymedean police to apprehend criminals. The dough balls glom onto their victim and encapsulate them. This idea was used on The Prisoner TV show in the 1960s. Penton finds he can scare off the fearless dough balls with his electric flash.
A two-foot thick, doughy mass was rolling of its own volition in his direction. He turned down a side street and increased his pace. He began to jump from side to side but it caught up with him. It was soft, and squashy, but rubbery. It simply clung about his feet, and crept slowly up and over his legs, up his body, while he tore great holes in the doughiness that persistently grew together again.
The White Flower
P’Holkuun the Ganymedean explains the weapon that is the White Flower:
“They used it only once. They are afraid of it themselves, so they will be reluctant to try it. It is a mold that turns a healthy man into a mouldering, putrescent corpse in thirty seconds. The flesh falls from his bones in white lumps. And anything that touches him, or passes near, within thirty hours—follows him! So, if you see a man turn white, and hear his scream—there is no need to help such a one. Leave him quickly…”
The Shleath
The Shleath are a gigantic version of the Grethlanth, fifty feet in diameter.
And in the great hall below, three monstrous things pulsed and staggered, three things like green, gold and purple amoebae fifty feet in diameter. They were surging and wavering madly, and then suddenly they stopped and ran together. Horribly they merged into a single, frightful mass of pulsing, nauseous flesh. An oozing, angry mass of protoplasm, it charged for the wall, and miraculously sent a vast finger of jelly-stuff sprouting swiftly upward, past the balcony, toward them!
The Shaloor use the shleath for construction and protection. These gigantic amoebas can devour humans whole. The Shaloor defeated the Lanoor by sending a shleath up a drainpipe. The creatures can eat anything and are indestructible. They can eat other shleath to form a super-shleath. Penton defeats them using his web of electricity that he perfects on the Grenlanth first. Unfortunately, P&B blow the gigantic shleath into a billion pieces, each a living menace as they flee the planet.
“The Immortality Seekers” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1937) has the duo fly to the moon of Callisto. They are met by a civilized and scientific people, the Callistans.
Callistans
…The premier was an unusually tall man, even among the eight-foot Callistans, with grey-white hair and a jet-black beard clipped in a style strongly reminiscent of the ancient Assyrian custom.
Because of their thinnest and height, the Callistans find the Earthmen to be brutishly muscular. The Callistans do not have nuclear energy or even electricity. Their technology is organic. Since their Science is organically based, they have a possible serum for immortality. It requires the element beryllium. Unfortunately for P&B, their ship is made mostly of this “Second Metal”. They become instant prisoners.
Callistan Dogs
…Blake looked blankly at the animal, now sufficiently motionless for observation. It was long, two feet long. It was low, not more than six inches at the shoulder, and it had a doglike head, with rather friendly, violet eyes. But it had six short, stubby legs, each armed with four sharp claws. It was smiling, more or less, in a friendly sort of way,-and displaying a set of teeth that started with glistening, greyish fangs, almost metallic in their luster, and ranged backward to a group of opposed molars as broad as a man’s thumb-nail. It had a soft, grey-brown coat of fur, and a long, gently wagging tail…
“This animal,” Pipeline stated, dogmatically, following his mate, “is, as are all members of this system of evolution, equipped with six pedal members . . . These six limbs are normally operated in the manner of a pacer, those on one side moving in unison . . . However, some members of the species vary this gait in almost any possible combination…
Callistan dogs resemble the dachshund in size and shape with six legs. They crave borax because they can not reproduce without it. The animals can’t talk but they can repeat words they have heard. Blake thinks they have the ability to edit and arrange these recordings to get across meaning.
In the next story, Penton and Blake take a breeding couple (Pipeline and Pipeliness and their litter) to Ganymede and let the dogs loose on the Shleath, which are full of borax. They hope that this act will make up for the disaster they caused.
Stragath
Stragath is laboratory-engineered living food. Imagine a hot dog that is alive. The delicacy is named after a poisonous red worm. When the Earthlings first eat them they are frightened it is the real thing. They realize it only resembles the killer alien.
Meat Engine
When P&B lift the hood of the Callistan car they don’t find a six-cylinder radial type but a living thing that powers the vehicle.
“…That, my boy, is not an engine. That is an animal, a nice, synthetic animal.”
“Animal! A six-cylinder animal? With a gear-box and ignition system?”
“No, six-muscle animal. The supercharger is not a supercharger; it’s a blower, a mechanical lung. The fuel tank contains not gasoline, but a sugar solution. I tasted it. The ignition system, on the other hand, is made up of synthetic nervous tissue, and a few, miniature electric cells for stimulation. Muscles, my friend, don’t need a high oxygen concentration; they repair themselves, renew themselves, and grow stronger with use.
“I didn’t have time to look, but I suspect that that animal engine also has a series of synthetic kidneys to remove waste products, and probably some oil-secreting cells, like the oil glands in your elbow, to supply lubrication. Six muscles pulling on tendons connected to a slipring—probably made of non-poisoning silver—a metal crankshaft geared direct to the wheels. The speedometer reads to the equivalent of eighty miles an hour; about the speed of a greyhound in good training.”
“The Tenth World” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937) has Penton & Blake go to an unnamed tenth planet beyond Pluto. The planet is extremely cold and dark. They find two forms of life, both boulder-like. In the next story P&B find out the inhabitants of the planet’s moon call the planet Turlun.
Land Whales
I have called them “land whales” and despite being intelligent no name is offered for the only animal life on the planet. These gigantic creatures have divided their minds so much that the thinking part and acting part are not the same. (Campbell tried this one way with the Lanoor and the Shaloor, now again.) So while the creatures hold a telepathic conversation with P&B, they also try to grab them for their heat.
The vast Things were slowing down somewhat and came into clearer focus now. Sunlight showed them only vaguely, huge things, a hundred feet long and thirty in diameter, immense cylinders of utter, jet black rolling swiftly across the level plain. Their very blackness made them almost invisible against the dark plain. They were black with the blackness of space itself; an utter, total absorption of every ray of light that struck them…
One grabs Penton for a short while, sucking the heat out of him through his spacesuit. This is the image at the beginning of the story by M. Marchioni.
Jerked through the air helplessly, upside down, he was slammed against the black, wrinkled hide of the huge thing. Instantly, half a dozen tentacles snapped around and against him, forcing him against the black surface.
The land whales are virtually immortal. One of them that talks to the earthlings is a million Earth years old. They can solve any problem because they are so long-lived. Despite this, they all seek an end to their long, pointless existences and cheer when P&B shoot and kill them with their ray guns. The dead bodies are flocked by other land whales because of the escaping heat.
In the end, the Earthmen destroy many of the creatures when they explode the free oxygen and hydrogen in the environment as a diversion so they can get back to their ship.
Drutheg
The first creatures the explorers see are also boulder-like but are not land whales. These smaller balls collect around a lake of pure hydrogen.
“…A sort of plant. It moves around very, very slowly, staying near streams and lakes. Most of them live in streams. They consume water, and nitrogen, and some other things, and sun themselves, and throw out oxygen and hydrogen. There is practically no water on this entire planet; the drutheg break it all down to hydrogen and oxygen. All the water there is, is in our bodies; we make it, you understand, from the food we eat.”
“The Brain Pirates” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1938) takes the Earthlings to the moon of the Tenth Planet.
The Pornan
…The moon-faced inhabitant did have large eyes; it was only the immense roundness of his face that made them appear small. Now at the ground level, Blake could better judge their height and size. About five feet tall, each was, and approximately six feet in circumference at the equator—which was quite marked. They resembled diminutive, but well inflated carnival balloons made in caricature shapes.
The Pornan are telepathic humans who have evolved on their heavy gravity moon. Because of the Krull, they must wear protective suits that make them look grossly fat like the Michelin Man. Once out of their gear, they look a little different:
…His body was squat and enormously powerful, the huge chest heavily banded with thick sheets and cords of muscle, great rippling cords of it flowing into thick, muscle-ridged arms. His torso tapered to a narrow waist, then expanded into blocky, corded legs. Far from pudgy, there was not an ounce of fat on that perfect specimen of the powerfully muscled denizen of this heavy-gravity world.
The Krull
“‘A krull is somewhat like your monkey. A higher species. Quite intelligent. Delights in mischief. Smaller than we are, and very bony…’ Rabbit-earred, rabbit-faced, four-limbed creature the size of a ten-year-old child, it had a surprisingly chunky body. Details of arms and legs were rather blurred, as both were working with a truly amazing determination and efficiency…The red faded gradually into a handsome purple body, marked by a large and unnaturally brilliant orange stripe down the middle of the back.”
The Krull possess the ability to shield their existence from other minds. Because of this, they cause many accidents among the Pornun. Penton and Blake solve the Pornun’s krull problem by using extremely bright atomic flashlights to blind them. Since the Tenth Moon creatures live in such darkness their eyes are large and vulnerable. The flash stops the monkeys from thinking about being invisible so you can shoot them.
Conclusion
The Penton & Blake aliens were collected in an ACE Double called The Planeteers (1966). Campbell never wrote enough of the stories for a proper book, which is too bad. (The Pornan tell P&B there are actually twelve planets in our system, so more stories were possible.) I would trade any number of stories about nuclear power for more P&B adventures. Campbell’s inventive alien building is always hinged on evolution and environment, not just googly eyes for surprise sake. I think these stories influenced Arthur K. Barnes, who would supply a menagerie of cool aliens for his Gerry Carlyle series in Thrilling Wonder starting in 1937. (Yes, those are coming up soon.)
