Visitors – Five Stories by Clark Ashton Smith

Book Details

Five stories of aliens and humans, their interactions and their failures to interact. And ultimately, insanity and death. Whether humans visiting other worlds or aliens visiting Earth, each is revealed as “other” to the other.

The Dimension of Chance (1932)
Chaos ruled that bizarre world … like a nightmare, the men stumbled through a changing, shifting world … then came the Masters …
Chapter I
Chapter II – The World of Chance
Chapter III – The Masters of Chance

The Light From Beyond (1933)
Partaking of the strange fruit he felt lifted to a new world …
Chapter II – The Mystery Deepens
Chapter III – The Infinite World

The Visitors From Mlok (1933)
He was able to endure the tortures of that world, but when he returned to earth …
Chapter II – The World of Mlok
Chapter III – The Return of Sarkis

Master of the Asteroid (1932)
They worshipped him as a god, this man condemned to death on that lonely world …
The Log
Alone!
The Living Tomb

The Immortals of Mercury (1932)
An explorer caught by the aboriginals of Mercury….
Chapter I – Rescue!
Chapter II – A New Danger – Condemned!
Chapter III – Escape! – Into the Unknown
Chapter IV – Endless Hours – The Frigid World

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He spent most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California, living in the small cabin built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith. He hated the provincialism of the small town life but rarely left Auburn until he married late in life.

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the Big Three writers for the magazine Weird Tales. The other two were Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

The Eldritch Dark website has much more information on these various stories as well as Smith himself.

Visitors has 4 illustrations.

Files:

1. CASmith-Visitors.epub

Excerpt: The Immortals of Mercury

Chapter I

CLIFF HOWARD’S first sensation, as he came back to consciousness, was one of well-nigh insufferable heat. It seemed to beat upon him from all sides—a furnace-like blast that lay upon his face, limbs and body with the heaviness of molten metal. Then, before he had opened his eyes, he became aware of a … light that smote upon his lids, turning them to flame-red curtains. His eyeballs ached from the intense radiation; every nerve of his being withered from that out-pouring sea of incalescence; and there was a dull throbbing in his scalp that might have been either headache induced by the heat, or the pain of a recent blow.

He recalled, very dimly, that there had been an expedition— somewhere—in which he had taken part; but his efforts to remember the details were momentarily distracted by new and inexplicable sensations. He felt now, that he was moving swiftly, borne on something that pitched and bounded against a high wind that seared his face like the breath of hell.

He opened his eyes, and was almost blinded. He found himself staring at a weird white heaven where blown columns of steam went floating by like spectral genii. Just below the rim of his vision there was something vast and incandescent toward which, instinctively, he feared to turn. Suddenly he knew what it was, and began to realize his situation.

He recalled the ramble he had taken alone, amid the weird and scrubby jungles of the twilight zone of Mercury—that narrow belt, warm and vaporous, lying beneath the broiling deserts— on which an enormous sun glared perpetually—and the heaped and mountainous glaciers of the planet’s nightward side.

He had not gone far from the rocketship—a mile at most, toward the sulphurous, fuming afterglow of the sun, now wholly hidden by the planet’s libration. Johnson, the head of that first scientific expedition to Mercury, had warned him against these solitary excursions; but Howard, a professional botanist, had been eager to hasten his investigations of the unknown world, in which they had now sojourned for a week of terrestrial time.

Contrary to expectation, they had found a low, thin, breathable atmosphere, fed by the melting of ice in the variable twilight belt—air that was drawn continually in high winds toward the sun—where the wearing of special equipment was necessary.

Howard had not anticipated any danger; for the shy, animal-like natives had shown no hostility and had fled from the earth-men whenever approached. The other life-forms, so far as had been determined, were of low, insensitive types, often semi-vegetative, and easily avoided when poisonous or carnivorous. Even the huge, ugly, salamander-like reptiles that seemed to roam at will from the twilight zone to the scalding deserts beneath an eternal day, were seemingly quite inoffensive.

Howard had been examining a queer, unfamiliar growth resembling a large truffle, which he had found in an open space among the pale, poddy, wind-bowed shrubs. The growth, when he touched it, had displayed signs of sluggish animation and had started to conceal itself, burrowing into the boggy soil. He was prodding the thing with the sponge-like branch of a dead shrub, and was wondering how to classify it when, looking up, he had found himself surrounded by the Mercutian savages. They had stolen upon him noiselessly from the semi-fungoid thickets; but he was not alarmed at first, thinking merely that they had begun to overcome their shyness and show their barbaric curiosity.

They were gnarled and dwarfish creatures, who walked partially erect at most times, but ran upon all fours when frightened. The earthmen had named them the Dlukus, because of the clucking sounds resembling this word that they often made. Their skins were heavily scaled, like those of reptiles and their small, protruding eyes appeared to be covered at all times with a sort of thin film.

Anything ghastlier or more repulsive than these beings could hardly have been found on the inner planets. But when they closed in upon Howard, walking with a forward crouch and clucking incessantly, he had taken their approach for a sort of overture and had neglected to draw his tonanite pistol. He saw that they were carrying rough pieces of some blackish mineral, and had surmised, from the way in which their webbed hands were held toward him, that they were bringing him a gift or peace-offering.

THEIR savage faces were inscrutable; and they had drawn very close before he was disillusioned as to their intent. Then, without warning, in a cool, orderly manner, they had begun to assail him with the fragments of the mineral they carried. He had fought them; but his resistance had been cut short by a violent blow from behind, which had sent him reeling into oblivion.

All this he remembered clearly enough; but there must have been an indefinite blank, following his lapse into insensibility. What, he wondered, had happened during this interim? and where was he going? Was he a captive among the Dlukus? The glaring light and scorching heat could mean only one thing— that he had been carried into the sunward lands of Mercury. That incandescent thing toward which he dared not look was the sun itself, looming in a vast arc above the horizon.

He tried to sit up, but succeeded merely in raising his head a little. He saw that there were leathery thongs about his chest, arms and legs, binding him tightly to some mobile surface that seemed to heave and pant beneath him. Slewing his head to one side, he found that this surface was horny, round and reticulated. It was like something he had seen.

Then, with a start of horror, he recognized it. He was bound, Mazeppa-like, to the back of one of those salamandrine monsters to which the earth-scientists had given the name of “heat-lizards.” These creatures were large as crocodiles, but possessed longer legs than any terrestrial saurian. Their thick hides were apparently, to an amazing extent, non-conductors of heat, and served to insulate them against temperatures that would have parboiled any other known form of life.

Howard’s consternation, as he realized his plight and his probable fate, was mingled with a passing surprise. He felt sure that the Dlukus had bound him to the monster’s back, and wondered that beings so low in the evolutionary scale would have intelligence enough to know the use of thongs. Their act showed a certain power of calculation, as well as a devilish cruelty. It was obvious that they had abandoned him deliberately to an awful doom.

However, he had little time for reflection. The heat-lizard with an indescribable darting and running motion went swiftly onward into the dreadful hell of writhing steam and heated rock. The great ball of intolerable whiteness seemed to rise higher and to pour its beams upon him like the flood of an opened furnace. The horny mail of the monster was like a hot gridiron beneath him, scorching through his clothes; and his wrists and neck and ankles were seared by the tough leather cords as he struggled madly and uselessly against them.

Turning his head from side to side, he saw dimly the horned rocks that leaned toward him through curtains of hellish mist. His head swam deliriously and the very blood seemed to simmer in his veins. He lapsed at intervals into deadly faintness: a black shroud seemed to fall upon him, but his vague senses were still oppressed by the overpowering, searing radiation.

Excerpt From: Clark Ashton Smith. “Visitors – Five Stories.”