The Short Story Man
Arthur Porges (1915-2006) is perhaps best remembered for the story “The Ruum” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1953) This is an unusual thing in that Arthur wrote seventy-odd short stories, some in Science Fiction magazines, some in Mystery magazines. He did not write novels, and most of his stories aren’t in series. (He was also brother to Irwin Porges, the man who wrote ERB’s biography, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). Like Edward D. Hoch, Arthur was a true short story writer, finding his metiere in short fiction. He didn’t even bother to collect his stories in books. Working in a time after the Pulps, this is a recipe for disaster.
Mike Ashley in his preface to The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections (Ash-Tree Press, 2002) tells us: “…Years ago, his agent advised him that there was no market for short story collections, and so Porges never compiled any.” Fortunately there are now six (2002-2014). This meant Arthur made his money by selling stories, then re-selling them to anthologies. “The Ruum”, which has been anthologized over twenty-five times must have been a meal ticket.
The Ruum
“The Ruum” begins with an alien ship, the Ilkor, abandoning a collecting robot during the Age of the Dinosaurs. The ship meets with pirates and is destroyed. We cut to a remote valley in the Canadian wilds where Jim Irwin waves good-by to his partner, Walt Leonard. The men are uranium prospectors, both seriously in need of a good find. Jim builds a lean-to for his supplies then caches his dynamite two hundred yards away for safety. The prospector has three weeks to find uranium. Most of that time rolls by without any prospects. He has one last spot he wants to check out.
When he arrives he finds the strangest sight: animals in suspended animation, lined by like a butcher’s market. The animals date all the way back to the dinosaurs, though only smaller examples, under two hundred pounds. Then Jim sees what collected them all:
Jim Irwin had once worked with mercury, and for a second it seemed to him that a half-filled leather sack of the liquid metal had rolled into the clearing. For the quasi-spherical object moved with just such a weighty, fluid motion. But it was not leather; and what appeared at first a disgusting wartiness, turned out on closer scrutiny to be more like the functional projections of some outlandish mechanism. Whatever the thing was, he had little time to study it, for after the spheroid had whipped out and retracted a number of metal rods with bulbous, lens-like structures at their tips, it rolled towards him at a speed of about five miles an hour. And from its purposeful advance, the man had no doubt that it meant to add him to the pathetic heap of living-dead specimens.
Thus the race begins. At first Jim tries to shoot the thing with his .30-06. Bullets just bounce off. The machine moves at a steady five miles an hour so Jim runs ahead of it. He finds a rock perched on another and plans a trap. Jim is ex-military and knows how to set a trap. The Ruum tracks by following spoor so Jim walks around the base of the stone. When the robot appears, the man pushes the hanging rock onto it. The Ruum flattens then crawls out from under.
Jim runs again. He comes to the base of a cliff. He climbs it and waits. The Ruum spots him, sending out a climbing tether. Jim wants to kick the hook at the end but uses a stick instead. The branch crackles with electricity. If Jim had used his foot he would have been electrocuted. He uses his gun to shoot the hook and sends the Ruum down. Again and again it tries, but he shoots it. The Ruum sends out three hooks at a time now. No matter how fast Jim shoots, at least one tether works. He runs.
It is now that he is getting tired he thinks of his dynamite. He goes to his camp and sets up a trap. When the Ruum appears a grizzly also wanders into camp. The beast attacks but its claws can not pierce the steely hide. It tries the lethal bear hug but no good. The Ruum sends a saw blade to its throat and the bear is dead. Jim is watching this from his hiding place near the dynamite. He can’t use a fuse. He will shoot the dynamite with his .22 pistol.
The Ruum locates him and proceeds over the dynamite. Jim shoots and the explosion knocks him down. While lying there, the Ruum has him. It is all over. He will end up a frozen specimen with the rest of the menagerie. The Ruum examines him and turns away. It already has one of those, a prehistoric hunter. It only collects one of each type of animal.
Walt shows up in the float plane the next morning. Jim tells him the amazing story. Walt believes him. Jim’s wild race has cost him at least ten pounds.
Now SF fans are going to make a connection with this story and Fredric Brown’s “Arena” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944). This is fair since both stories are a man against an alien, but where Brown’s tale takes place in an enclosed arena, Porges’s tale is a race. The relentless pace of the pursuer is closer to the killer snails in Patricia Highsmith’s “The Quest for the Blank Claveringi” (The Saturday Evening Post, June 17, 1967). They are slow but if you stop to sleep you are dead. I quite enjoyed the Northern aspects of this tale, taking place in the wilds of Canada. Porges’s details about peep sights, lean-tos and grizzlies show a level of verisimilitude that the story did not need for a SF magazine.
A Specimen For the Queen
A sequel was written for “The Ruum” called “A Specimen For the Queen” seven years later (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1960). (It has been anthologized only once.) This tale begins with a glimpse into the species that plans to invade Earth. They are a bee-like race that enjoys dissecting the various subjugated species, especially the top one. The scouts are about to head for the cities when they find the Ruum. The bees are so arrogant they allow it to enter their spacecraft.
Very quickly the bee-men regret this decision. The Ruum begins cutting hole through the walls of the different sections in search of one specimen. Guards armed with ray guns are unable to stop it. No weapon can do more than cook the dust that has collected on the outside.The bee commander, Captain Zril, decides two things: one, that the Earth is too dangerous to invade if one of its creatures is this much trouble and two, to take the ship into space and hyperdrive. He wants to get back to the homeworld so bigger weapons can be used against the Ruum.
The robot gets to the control room and decides it will take Zril. Out comes the syringe filled with the green suspended animation fluid. The rest flee. They have made another mistake. They can no longer control the ship. When one of the crew tries to sneak in to retrieve the commander, the Ruum switches to guard mode and won’t allow any bees into the control room.
The ship is on auto-pilot but can’t land properly. It strikes the landing pad and explodes. The only thing to survive is the Ruum. But it isn’t entirely whole. It’s programming to gather only specimen of 160 pounds has been altered to 3500 pounds. The exact size of the queen. The Ruum begins a path to her….
Porges pokes a bit of fun at the U. F. O. crowd when he explains how the bees operate. The scouts take select specimens from remote places but avoid alerting the main population of the coming invasion. The invader laughs when it thinks how some specimens actual volunteer to be taken. The terrible fate waiting for them is quite nasty.
Other Stories
The ISFDB lists another story in the series “Emergency Operation” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1956) about minute aliens who can go inside a man’s body to remove a particle of plutonium. Very Fantastic Voyage (1966) (with an adaptation by Isaac Asimov) but nothing to do with the Ruum so I am ignoring it. It seems more likely part of the same universe as “The Fly” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1952) in which a miniature spaceship blows off a guy’s hand when he tries to swat it.
The stories of Arthur Porges deserve to be better remembered. Like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont and Ray Bradbury, Porges is an American treasure. Their short stories are the core of a storytelling tradition best exemplified by television shows like The Twilight Zone. It is not surprising that anthologies, often for the school market teaching how to write short fiction, contain Arthur Porges’s brilliant Ruum tales.
