The Slaver - Part 3 - One Out of Nine Hundred Ain't Bad

Lorin pokes a nearby captive who hasn't done anything worth mentioning since the start of the story, and when pressed the other man grunts that the baddies took Dana "a while ago" before sliding back into apathetic despair.  Our hero doesn't berate this unhelpful informant, however, which is good because it'd be awfully hypocritical considering how much time Lorin has spent moping.  Instead Lorin pulls on his chains with all his strength, feels them shift, and succeeds in working out a kink in the restraints, utterly failing to break free.

If at first you don't succeed, try it again while screaming your lungs out.  Several other captives, "glad to break the silence of this place," join Lorin in howling like monkeys and rattling their chains, until a door opens and some guards come out to tell them to knock it off.  In Lurgese.  Which only Lorin, "taught against some day of victory the tongue of the conqueror," can understand, but they don't know that until he starts yelling back in the same language.  Stupid, but not too different from a tourist in another country repeating what he says loudly and slowly in hopes that another person will suddenly understand English.

Lorin does not shut up, but dares the guards to come over and make him, insults their mommas, and then demands that they shoot him because he knows he has the "spacard" and would rather die now than later.  They shoot him, the end.

No, of course the guards aren't that competent.  They almost shoot him, but they get a look at the slave's "unnatural brilliance of eye and the grayness of the cheeks" and decide to bring in a (drunk) doctor to check on Lorin instead.  Our hero had been hoping to lure his captors within striking distance of his chains, but instead they actually take him out of the hold and escort him into the vessel's small, stinky infirmary to see if he really does have "spacard," evidently some sort of space illness "which had swept more than one ship into aimless orbits in space."

The author at least admits that a better-run ship would have checked for and possibly inoculated against "spacard" at the start of the voyage, an important lesson that he completely failed to remember when he wrote the Ole Doc Methuselah stories five years later.  I mean, losing an entire cargo of slaves to a pathogen is one thing, but accidentally bringing a plague to your homeworld would just be terrible for business.

Anyway, three guards bring Lorin into the infirmary, the doctor tells them to get him down on the table for an examination, and though the goons are leery of potentially getting the "spacard," which does not sound any less ridiculous after typing it out four times, they get in close to manhandle our hero.  At which point said hero promptly lays into them with the chains wrapped around his wrists.  Cue a non-Hubbard action sequence.

A gun came up and the wielder's face turned into a red spatter.  The medico squealed and then fell, his hands plucking at his head in lessening strength.  The third sailor would have run had he been between Kree and the door.  He was not.  His gun was smashed from his hand.  The horror of the slave's appearance and the death which had struck the others numbed the remaining man's mind.  He thought about his gun, but not soon enough.  The chain caught him against the bulkhead, and for two or three seconds he stood there.

Remarkable, isn't it?  The protagonist just killed four bad guys, all in a single paragraph, and without a single exclamation point.  There were no incredible acrobatics or anything involved in the struggle, just the brute force of metal bashing in heads.  Excuse me, three bad guys are dead, the last is still struggling on the floor, propping himself up on an elbow, and now Lorin's coming over and - well, now he's four for four.  Not bad for someone who spent the last indeterminate time period chained up and ill from his wounds.

With all his opponents down, Lorin proceeds to loot the bodies, grabbing all the guards' pistols and strapping the spares to his waist.  It's not like one man can use four pistols at once, right?  Then he takes a drink from a convenient flagon of water and eats some "condensed food" he finds stored in the infirmary... ewww.  I mean, if we're optimistic and assume that it is food and not a can of medical waste, would you really want to eat anything found in a drunken, sloppy doctor's work area?  

Following this questionable decision, Lorin decides that he really needs to take one of the guard's jackets and caps, and also takes a razor and some soap because he's getting pretty fuzzy.  I guess if he happens upon a mirror and sink during his desperate escape from servitude, he'll take a moment to clean himself up.  Priorities and all that.

Escape sequence start.  Lorin moves into a long and open corridor, spies a ladder leading up and a guard at the top facing the other way.  Sneak attack pistol-whip to the back of the head followed by a finishing strike, then he struggles to stuff the body behind a hatch and out of sight, but the bad guy is just too big and a boot sticks out.  Our hero does his best and moves on to the next level.

Now, this is all taking place in the Gaffgon, a slave galleon big enough to carry hundreds of people, but still able to land on and take off from a planet without any problems.  But as we see when Lorin explores the new part of the ship, it also has a boat deck for all the "spaceboats."  Not skiffs or atmospheric craft to assist in a slave raid, we saw all the slavers operating on foot, and these things aren't simple escape pods either.  Oh, and the spaceboats are all stored in "bulges which jutted into the ship to preserve its streamline," because aerodynamics are so important for this wallowing space barge.

It's a good thing Lorin was taught the language of his enemies and the rudiments of space flight, because he's able to break into one boat, look over its control panel, and conclude that he can probably fly it.  But it's not time to escape just yet, there's still a damsel in distress to un-stress.  Lorin passes through a dormitory and another slave hold before finding a ladder to the bridge.  But just as he peeks into the top deck, alarm "gongs" begin to sound - someone noticed that boot sticking out from behind a bulkhead, or found that the doctor's stash had been raided.

As Lorin watches, a bleeding Captain Shapadin bursts from his cabin, demanding to know what's going on and ordering someone to stand guard over "that hellcat!"  As Voris rushes to check out the Number 3 hold and a bridge officer returns to his "tubes" ...really?  Going back to the tubes?  Even after we started with a nice, sensible viewscreen?  I'm not mad, Hubbard, I'm just disappointed.

The tubes prove distracting enough that Lorin is able to creep into the captain's cabin undetected, where he finds a bruised but unbowed Dana backed against a table, holding her dress together with one hand.

And then she saw Kree and recognized him.  Her body started and her face flooded with incredulity.  And then a mist swam before her eyes and she stumbled toward him.

It's amazing how a male protagonist is able to suck away any sort of agency from a female character in a story like this.  Dana was doing fine up until now, she was snarking about a stupid prince even after she got captured, she was defiant when Lorin was moping, she was even holding off the slaver captain while Lorin was eating powdered dingbat and stealing a razor.  But now that the story's hero is here, she doesn't have to do anything.  Lorin takes her by the hand, says "Come on!" and drags her behind as they escape.  He doesn't even give her a spare pistol.

A sailor steps into the cabin, and immediately gets shot between the eyes.  Lorin runs into the bridge, shoots the officer on watch before he can react, and then uses "flame cartridges" to smash up the vessel's engine and fire controls.  Dana contributes by screaming "Look out!" so Lorin can dodge a... well, I'm not sure.  We've mentioned flame cartridges, but these weapons don't spurt fire on people like a flamethrower, Lorin's victims have all been "shot."  Presumably they're some sort of energy weapon like your standard sci-fi blaster, except in a moment a near-miss will kick up a chunk of metal, which suggests a solid projectile.

Anyway, Lorin dodges the "shot" and blasts another mook before resuming the exciting escape.  Except it's so exciting that he takes a wrong turn and drags Dana to the wrong side of the boat deck.  He hasn't inspected any of these ships here or picked out which one he intends to escape on, and rather than wasting time by checking if any are spaceworthy, it's much better to spend time blundering through rooms to reach the other side of the ship.  They cut through a pantry and dislodge some servant who runs off screaming before our hero can murder him, and then reach a little armory of sorts with two riot guns left behind.  But Lorin isn't familiar with these weapons and doesn't know if he can reload them, so he sticks with the pistols on his belt.  Dana of course shows no interest in acquiring a weapon to defend herself with - why does she need one with this hero around?

Through that door is the starboard boating deck with that one dingy Lorin looked over, its hatch still open and waiting.  But we can't let this story end without a Boss Fight, so Voris Shapadin and a squad of nameless henchmen pick that moment to stumble upon the escapees.  Lorin stuffs Dana into cover before getting into a firefight, and there's an attempt at drama from our hero's limited ammunition - he's down to his last gun, which has ten shots remaining.  And I'm not going to try to go back and figure out how many flame-bullets these things had and how many Lorin's fired over the course of the story.  Ten shots?  Sounds good, author.

Since this is a standard action story with a standard action hero, the battle's outcome is never in doubt.  Lorin and Dana are able to carefully make their way to the boat's hatch, step by step, as "Cartridge by cartridge" Lorin picks off foes.  The last bullet, of course, goes into Captain Shapadin's... well, he's hit and goes down, don't sweat the specifics, or decide for yourself where the flame-bullet went.  The villain is slain, hurrah.

The heroes duck into the spaceboat, Lorin pounds the "jet buttons," the outer doors open and suddenly the little craft is accelerating so fast that it blinds the escapees.  A few moments later Lorin reduces speed and starts working out how to use the "jet helm," then looks around.  The Gaffgon is gone, but one star in the void is bigger than all the others, and our hero can see a planet orbiting it.

Kree became aware of the girl beside him.  Her wonderously blue eyes were fixed upon him as though she were hypnotized.

And then, as though she herself had only begun to believe it, she said "You... I... escaped!"

It's not actually stated whether this nearby planet is Earth, though.  If it is, this raises some questions about exactly how much time has passed on the slave ship, how fast it was going, and how the hell it hoped to make the trip between the Sol System and wherever Lurga is without everyone aboard dying of old age, to say nothing of running out of air.  If it isn't, this raises the amusing possibility of our heroes triumphantly landing on what turns out to be Lurga itself.

He was getting his equilibrium back now.  He grinned at her.  She dropped her glance in humility and leaned a little closer to him.

"I... I'm sorry for what-"

"Sorry?" said Kree.  "Sorry for what?"

Good question.  Dana's comments towards him in the cargo hold weren't exactly pleasant, but it's hard to blame her for laughing at the thought of some stuck-up feudal lord having to share a lowly fate with a humble peasant.  And she already earned good karma from tending to his wounds.

"But you... are a... a very brave and-"  She looked at him mistily.

"Brave?  Why," said Kree with an offhand wave of his arm, "why, of course I'm brave.  I am Kree Lorin.  Kree Lorin of Falcon's Nest."

And a dumbass.

Lorin manages to dupe some even stupider guards into putting him in a position where he can escape, then he subdues them, frees himself, and grabs a handful of guns.  Then he stuffs his extra weapons down his pants and goes all Bruce Willis on the rest of the bad guys.

There were three hundred other people in that cargo hold.  One of at least three cargo holds.  Potentially about a thousand other slaves, other people, were on that ship.  And it didn't occur to our hero to free any of them, hand them his extra weapons, lead a proper uprising.  For the slavers to hold out against those odds they'd have to be well-armed, organized, and have a solid amount of manpower, none of which we saw as one twerp was able to blast through whatever resistance the Lurgese put up.  But instead Lorin was concerned solely with saving himself and that hot chick who hates him, and didn't spare another thought for anyone else sitting in chains in the bowels of the ship.

And not only did he fail to free anyone else, Lorin smashed the ship's controls.  Disabled its weapons, so that even if the slaves managed to free themselves, they'd be helpless against another vessel.  Disabled its engine controls, so even if the slaves took over the Gaffgon, they could only fly along its current course until they all expired in the void or smashed into something.  Their only hope would be if anyone had the mechanical skill to fix a spaceship and knowledge of how to operate a Lurgese vessel, which as we've seen is something rare and restricted to nobles like Lorin.

But other than that, good job, Kree Lorin, you rescued the girl and can now return to your kingdom or whatever Falcon's Nest is.  Except it's just been depopulated by alien slavers, so there goes your economic support and manpower in case of war, thus breaking your feudal power base.  All this is assuming the nearby planet is Earth, and the "spaceboat" can get there a lot faster than the Gaffgon can get away from it, because there can't be much air on that thing.  And did you take the time to pack any food or water?

Well, he did pack that razor.  At least he'll be a clean-shaven corpse.


Back to Part Two

The Slaver - Part 2 - The Slave

Let's meet our hero, or I suppose re-meet, because we've already seen him battered to unconsciousness.

Deep in the reeking hold of the Gaffgon, where darkness and misery and stench caught in the throat to strangle, Kree Lorin of Falcon's Nest came slowly to his senses and struggled to rise.  But chains clanked to jeer his effort and pulled him down again.  Stupidly he felt for his knife, then fumbled on the floor about him for his gun.  The loss of the two served to speed returning sensibility.

I'd say Kree Lorin is a step up from Ginger Cranston, but Falcon's Nest?  Wasn't that the name of Hitler's retreat?  No, excuse me, that was Eagle's Nest, totally different.  Definitely nothing to raise an eyebrow over, no matter how many blond heroes the author writes about, or how racist he may seem, or how authoritarian his heroes' methods are.

Lorin looks around, and is just able to make out "two tiers of captives" in the slave ship's hold.  Evidently all hundred and fifty captives were shoved in the same vast chamber, which is lit by a whopping three light bulbs - wait, hold on.  Two pages ago it was a line of 150 people being herded onto the Gaffgon, now it's

Here were at least three hundred human beings reduced to the last depths of degradation and despair, reduced even below the point of whimpering, as though they recognized already the finality of their fate, as though they knew that only two-thirds of them would reach Lurga alive and that half of those who remained would sweat out their lives in the factories and on the fields of that planet in the first two years of their captivity.

Guess the Lurgans picked up some other prisoners when we weren't looking.

So we've got a rehash of that wonderful chapter of human history, the Atlantic slave trade, complete with a big chunk of the prisoners dying en route to their new lives of servitude, just with the outrageous role reversal of honkies in the cargo hold.  And like "The Great Secret" it's a story idea that falls apart when you transplant it to a sci-fi setting.  Flying between worlds is a bit more complicated and expensive than floating a wooden construct across an ocean, you need to make sure you've got not just enough food and water to keep your crew and cargo alive, but also air and fuel.  So given the increased initial investment in an interplanetary slave raid, wouldn't it make sense to try to maximize your return by keeping as many future slaves alive as possible?

Also, why do the Lurgans need manual labor on their homeworld?  The Atlantic slave trade was about supplying workers for cash crops in the European empires' overseas colonies, they had plenty of peasants and lower-class workers to do manual labor back home.  Yeah, you had to pay them wages, but you didn't have to pay for housing and food, either, and they were less likely to strangle you in your sleep with their manacles.  So is there some catastrophic manpower shortage in this empire powerful enough to oppress other civilizations in this way?  And where's the automation?  Right now humanity hasn't gone further than the moon in our spaceships, and we're already worried about robots taking all the assembly-line jobs.  Unless these captives are all highly-skilled technicians, what can they do in an advanced, spacefaring empire that couldn't be accomplished with cheap, obedient machines?

Maybe I'm giving these guys too much credit.  Maybe it's another case of a civilization skipping key Industrial Age techs as they rush for a Space Race victory.

Anyway, Lorin spends about a page in absolute denial, imagining himself coming home to the family stronghold with the partridges he bagged in hand, a "lackey" taking off his spurs as Lorin tells his father about his hunt, and then there'd be the big celebration for his 21st birthday.  He's too upper class to be a slave, dammit!  And he's not just an aristocrat, he's a trained warrior!

He, Kree Lorin, was a soldier!  His father had fought in those last devastating wars.  He himself had been trained to the rifle and grenade.  And in anticipation of yet other battles and revolts, he had been made to study the tongue of the Lurga Empire, the structure of spaceships, the rudiments of that vast complexity which was military and mechanical science in the year of the Defeat Thirty-nine.

He has, in other words, all the knowledge and skills that will justify his successful escape at the end of the story.

Once Earth had had its fleets to scourge the blackness of outer space.  Once Earth had been a proud mistress of great empire, not a vassal planet led willfully into decay by the conquerors.  He, Kree Lorin, had been brought up a soldier against the day of revolt-

Man, why's everyone got to be out to build themselves an empire?  What's wrong with a democratic federation of worlds or an interplanetary confederation of equals?  You really need to belong to a state that can subjugate others in order for you to feel good about yourself?  Looking at you, Putin's Russia.

Oh, and I guess the raid took place on planet Earth, reduced to a pre-Industrial feudal society after a devastating defeat at the hands of an alien empire.  Well, I say alien, but the slavers aren't even referred to as Lurgans, that name is conjecture on my part.  Instead the narration just refers to them as "sailors" or "guards," and there's no description of them that makes them sound different from humans (or any description at all, really).  The illustration accompanying this story depicts Captain Voris as a fat guy with a heavy beard and hairy arms, the same size and shape as the line of prisoners passing before him.  "Voris Shapadin" doesn't sound any less human than "Kree Lorin," his rank was "feldcapal" which sounds like a mangling of the British rank of "field corporal," so for all we know the Lurgans or Lurgese or whatever come from a former human colony that has risen up to turn the tables on its former imperial master.

Man, this is the Saturnian situation from "Space Can" all over again, except these guys don't even have pointy heads.  And I'm once again more interested in the backstory and implications of this conflict than whatever the protagonist is doing in the story.

Lorin's monologuing is cut off by choking despair, but before he can wallow in self-pity for too long, an amused voice recognizes him as Kree Lorin, and laughs that he's now in the hold of a slave ship.  It's the defiant girl from the start of the story, and as Lorin stares at her,

He knew her now.  The peasant girl of Palmerton.  The peasant girl he had seized off the dusty road, lifting her saddle-high to attempt a kiss upon her lovely mouth.  His own cheek stung for an instant in memory.

Oh goodie, one of those aristocrats.  Man, why can't society ever slide back into feudalism while still retaining some degree of gender equality, or at least a modicum of respect for women?

Yes, this was she, Dana of Palmerton, whom he had afterward tried to bring to Falcon's Nest by bribing her slut of a mother.  Dana of Palmerton, who would rather live in a corncrib a free woman than a pampered slavey in mighty Falcon's Nest!

Wow.  Imagine that.  Someone not liking the idea of being a slave.

Dana can't stop laughing - as a lowly commoner she was "made for a slave," but being in chains next to Kree Lorin, "the young hawk of Falcon's Nest," is just too delicious.  And the only reason Lorin doesn't strike her is because he's still too tired and beaten to muster the effort.

I'll give this to Hubbard - he is a pro at making the reader hate his characters.  We've only been with Lorin for three pages, and I already don't care whether he lives or dies, and would be entirely satisfied with him getting sucked out a hull breach.

Dana at least is gracious enough to come to his side when Lorin slumps in defeat, and uses some precious water from her cup and a rag torn from her dress to clean his injuries.  Granted, she keeps a "detached disdain" during her ministrations, but Lorin puts up with it because of how much better his wounds feel.  He doesn't actually thank her or anything, but not hitting her probably counts as a good deed, right?  We have to work our way up to baseline human decency, here.

Lorin takes some more shocks, first when he feels the ship lift off and take flight, then again when he realizes something.

He, Kree Lorin of Falcon's Nest, had been accustomed to obedience from the people of the province.  Just how or why he had never bothered to reason.  He had not questioned his right until now that he was robbed of it.  She, Dana of Palmerton, had a better command of the situation than he.  She was therefore higher, somehow, than he.  She, suddenly, was the superior being.

Ah, see, it's not just an "dramatic escape from slavery" narrative, it's also a "haughty aristocrat learns to respect his inferiors" sort of dealie.  Action and character development, who could ask for more?

Our hero tries to reassure himself by repeating "I'm Kree Lorin, from Falcon's Nest," but the words seem meaningless even to him, and so we pass into a misery-based timeskip.

Air was too precious to be changed.  Water was too scarce to be wasted.

So all the slaves died of oxygen deprivation?  That seems to go against the captain's objective of selling them for a profit, but whatever.

And capsule food, a thing to which these people were not used, accelerated their enfeeblement.

I do believe this is the only time in a Hubbard story that I've seen him mention 'condensed' future food like The Jetsons' food pills.

Such stress pressed down their perceptions, and they might have been a week in space or a year for all they could recall.  At first they had sometimes talked, sometimes there had been at attempt at song.  But now no talk and certainly no song could be found in them.

The bad guy Voris makes an appearance to pick out the eight prisoners who are dying and need to be chucked before they waste any more air.  Our hero Lorin is too depressed to react, though the scrappy Dana at least throws a pannikin at a guard (ooh, real hoity-toity way of saying 'cup,' Hubbard).  Instead Lorin reflects on his family's arrangement with the peasants of Falcon's Nest, how they forced tribute from them in exchange for promises of protection, an arrangement that hardly endeared his family to their subjects.  And now he's left a life without filth and suffering for an existence as a slave, and so on, and so forth.

The only interruption from the monotony of the voyage is when the bad guys search all the prisoners for knives, after finding one on a dying captive... wow, really?  Didn't do that at the very start?  Didn't run your slaves through a metal detector?  Typical Hubbard villains.  Well, when they do that, Dana strikes out at the sailor pawing her, which makes Captain Voris laugh, but also pay her special attention.

And so it is that the next time Lorin comes out of his funk, he realizes that things have changed.  His wounds don't hurt, it's like he's thinking clearly for the first time in ages, and he finds that the chains and shackles next to him are empty.

Yep, it's not just an "escape from slavery" story, or a "proud noble learns humility" story, Lorin also needs to hurry to save his love interest (i.e. the only female in the story) from an "I have you now, my pretty" situation.

At least it's a Hubbard character trying to prevent a rape this time.


Back to Part One

Forward to Part Three

The Slaver - Part 1 - All Your Cornfield Is Belong to Us

These will be the only six pages of the story that actually focus on the titular slaver.  Since the majority of the tale is about the adventures of one of said slaver's human cargo, I can't help but wonder whether it would have been better to call it "The Slave."

Voris Shapadin heard the shot and lurched back in his chair in surprise, staring at the port and holding the leg of a chicken halfway between table and beard.

Here's why you have to be careful when choosing words.  We all know a "chicken leg" to be a common term to describe a piece of cooked poultry.  "Leg of a chicken" ought to be an equivalent term, but the fact nobody puts that on a restaurant menu means that there's an element of doubt over whether what this guy is eating was ever cooked.  It's the difference between someone eating a steak and someone chewing on a hunk of bovine muscles.

Somewhere in the Gaffgon footbeats pounded toward a gun. The insect-stained face of the intership communicator panel lit and the scarred visage of the navigator flickered there.

"Party returning to the ship, sir."

No idea what "insect-stained" means, whether the crewman is some sort of bug creature, he's having an allergic reaction to some space bug, or some space bug has sprayed him with juices.  But I'm thrilled that these guys are using little TV screens to talk to each other instead of yelling into tubes that will carry their echoing voice through the ship.  Evdently Hubbard's understanding of spaceship design evolved after he wrote "Space Can" a couple of-

Wait, this came out in June 1942, a month before "Space Can" was published?  Huh.  I guess "Space Can" was "hard" sci-fi, an attempt to envision realistic space combat (that was hit-and-miss), whereas "The Slaver" is a pretty run-of-the-mill adventure story in a sci-fi setting.  Or maybe one's near-future and the other's supposed to be science fantasy.  Whatever.

Voris yanked the napkin from his fat neck and snatched up the rusty helmet he wore in preference to a peaked cap.  The helmet had ray burns on it and the strap was rotted half through with sweat; it made Voris feel important because it was an officer's field helmet and he had never been higher than a feldcapl in the Outer War.  When he stood up, bits of food rolled off his lap, bouncing from bulge to bulge and finally to the decayed spring carpet.

Whaddya know, a villain who happens to be an overweight slob.  Do you think this trope is less common these days because readers are more sophisticated and don't judge characters on outward appearances, or because writers don't want to upset potential audiences during America's obesity crisis?

Voris is handed a gunbelt by a "fever-flattened servant"(?) and climbs the "treacherously greasy ladder" to the bridge and joins some crewmen in looking out the "half-open dodger."  And this is a bit absurd.  A dodger is the canopy that keeps the weather and spray off the guy at the wheel of a boat, a compromise between the need for the helmsman to see where he's going and a desire not to get soggy.  A spaceship should not need one, because any civilization able to build a voidworthy vessel should have a better way for the pilot to steer than putting him on the top of the boat.

It's weird - going from this to "Space Can," Hubbard took a step forward when he put the Menace's bridge in the ship's well-protected interior, then stumbled backward by including those shouting tubes in a setting with suit-to-suit radios.

The optimistic take is that Hubbard is using the wrong word again, and the characters are really gathered around an airlock or something.  But this only begs the question of why the ship's main entrance is right next to the bridge, especially if that ship plans on taking on and unloading cargo that may not want to be aboard it.

The author spends a full paragraph describing how the navigator looks and what kind of sweater and jacket he's wearing, which is a wasted effort because as far as I can tell the guy disappears from the story after our POV switches in a few pages.  And yet this unnecessary detail doesn't clear up the mystery of the "insect-stained" description of the navigator, either - we're told the guy is disfigured from a nasty burn that left one eye an empty socket, but I don't know where the insects come into play.  Maybe "insect" is space slang for ship fires or flame-shooting weapons?

Anyway, bug-face and Voris and a quartermaster who does not warrant a half-page description all try to figure out what's going on.  The Gaffgon, "a dreary pile of corrosion," has landed in the middle of a cornfield on the pastoral world of... um.  Well, the main thing about this planet is that Voris hates it because of how different it is from the "craggy peaks and ice rivers" of his homeworld of Lurga, but it is a good place to raid due to how little resistance the natives can muster.

Except now there's gunshots that don't sound like any of the traders' firearms.  As Voris and the others watch, a "small being" carrying a "black object" comes running out of the shrubs and into the cornrows, pursued closely by a squad of slavers that breaks up and surrounds their victim.  Yet the being's attitude (which Voris can pick up on from the ship) is that of "frenzied defiance," and he jabs that thing at one slaver to unleash a "stab of thunder" that launches his victim backwards.

This is weird.  The slavers have guns, they know what firearms are.  The natives, we'll later learn, also have rifles.  There shouldn't be any confusion over what this guy is using to defend himself unless it's some sort of weapon more advanced than the ones Voris is familiar with, but the technology discrepancy seems to be in favor of the slavers, not their victims.  If this is some sort of weird lightning-shooting artifact, the story doesn't explain it, and when the POV switches to the guy using it he only refers to it as a "gun."  So the conclusion that makes the most sense is that this is some bog-standard lead-slinger being fired, but the author chose such flowery language to describe it that it comes across as a more fantastic weapon than it actually is, even when everyone in the story should be able to identify it as something mundane.

Anyway.  Voris yells at the capture team to just shoot the guy, but the morons decide to rush in with rifle butts and subdue him by mobbing him, losing another man in the charge.  This is a bad deal to start with, since a single slave is only worth "twenty weights," and things only get worse when the party brings their captive in and Voris gets a look at him.

The captive was young, and though he was bloodied by the gun butts, he was seen to be of regular features.  His body was slender, which was not a good sign, for he would not be ableto stand up under a great deal of hard labor.  He was blond.  He was an aristocrat.  He was, Voris decided immediately, no good whatever.

He was, in other words, a Hubbard Protagonist.  Blond, handsome, young, upper-class, and fully capable of fighting his way through a ship full of slavers to reclaim his freedom.  Oops, spoilers.

Voris is so annoyed he can't even find words to chew out his stupid flunkies, orders them into the ship with a jerk of his head, and doesn't feel better after kicking the unconscious captive around a bit.  Then it's time to herd the other prisoners in, a line of 150 captives chosen for their strength or suggested skill as craftsmen, if male, and "form and face" if female.  Lurga pays well for good-looking humans, you see.  The sad parade has to step over the unconscious protagonist still sprawled out on the floor at the top of the gangway, and only one blue-eyed woman is willful enough to glare at Voris as she's led aboard - though she also seems to recognize the beaten-down protagonist too.  This will probably be important later.

This display of negative emotions actually puts Voris in a good mood, enough so that he's only slightly annoyed when the spotting agent comes by to request his fee.  And then, without so much as a break in the paragraphs, our story switches focus away from the slaver to follow this significant slave, which is where we'll pick up next time.

Random note - the Gaffgon cooked that cornfield it landed in with its "retarding blasts" (don't laugh).  See, "her propulsion was accomplished" - good grief Hubbard - "with the old vent principle, and the small jets which made her look like a scaled monster had also made her filthy with farillium soot."  From this detail, we know Hubbard is capable of technobabble, it just isn't as interesting as when he tries to explain his doodads.  Or as funny.

Forward to Part 2

The Beast - Part 4 - The Most Dangerous Game

You know, I can't help but feel like this setup is at least a little like Predator.  And this led me to imagine some hypothetical adaptation of "The Beast" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which would mean that an iconic, heavily-accented action movie star would have the role of "Ginger Cranston" on his filmography.  That would be an interesting world to live in.

Armed and mentally prepared for the ultimate battle, Cranston steps out of his tent to find that the village chief has stopped rolling around in the mud, and left the unopened bottle of whatever sitting in the muck.  This may have been meant to chastise the Earthling for offering the bottle in the first place, but Cranston doesn't feel chastised, or indeed much of anything.

For perhaps an hour, even a day, nothing could touch him, neither sadness nor triumph.  He was still within himself, waiting for a thing he knew would come, a thing much greater than shame or sorrow.  He had chosen his death, for he had found it to be within his realm of choice and having chosen it he was dead.  It mattered little what happened now.  It mattered much that da juju would end.  But it did not matter emotionally.  It was a clear concern, undiluted by self.

This is one of those paragraphs that looks impressive when you skim it and falls apart when you examine it closely.  "He had chosen his death," so "having chosen it he was dead."  Masterful.

Cranston leaves the village, marching "quietly" through the muck and up a hill, where he knows he'll be highly visible against Venus' murky skies.  There he waits for a time, looking down on the thick jungle surrounding him.  While studying the forest canopy, he suddenly realizes "for the first time that gray was not the color there as he had always supposed but drab green, rust red, dark blue and smoky yellow.  It was a little thing to notice but it seemed important."  And that's understandable, it's not uncommon for all those strikingly different colors to form a sort of gray blur that can only be properly discerned when one has accepted the inevitability of death.

Eventually the sun goes down and darkness descends upon the alien jungle, and Cranston marches into the forest proper, occasionally stopping to adjust his clothing or smoke his pipe.  He's not bothering to hide his tracks, and he doesn't care that he's passing under low-hanging branches.  If you haven't figured it out yet, Cranston wants to be found - "he was within the role of the hunted, not that of the hunter."  Though I suppose you could argue that using yourself as bait to try to lure your quarry out of hiding is just another form of hunting, but semantics.

So one minute Cranston's sitting there smoking, his gun leaning against a nearby tree, and the next

It happened suddenly, silently, efficiently.  The vine-woven net dropped soundlessly over his head, slithered to his feet, and then with swift ferocity, yanked tight and brought him with a crash into the mud!

There was a scurrying about him as though something leaped up and down, darted back and forth to swiftly study the situation so as to require a minimum of effort in the final kill.

Which is kind of undermined by the amount of spastic hopping about going on before that final kill.

Cranston tries to draw his pistol but can't move the right arm, so he clamps down a panicked scream, pulls out his belt knife, and starts sawing at the vines entrapping him.  He's only half freed before the Beast attacks, assaulting him first with its "foul animal smell" and then with those bayonet-like claws that rip through his jacket and into Cranston's flank.  Oddly enough, this doesn't break through our hero's ribcage and collapse his lung, so maybe they're really short, blunt bayonet-like claws.

Despite his scratches, Cranston's able to jab back with his knife and "felt it saw vainly into the thing."  I would not use the verb 'saw,' which implies a back-and-forth motion, to describe a blade going into something meaty once before said meaty something jerks back with a "scream," taking the knife with it.  Nor would I describe the attack with the adverb "vainly" when it clearly did something to the target.

Cranston's able to use this opportunity to scramble to his feet, only for the Beast to strike him "like a battering ram with force enough to smash in his ribs."  Again, he's able to breathe and such after this terrible attack, so his ribs clearly remain unsmashed.  But I guess comparing an attack to a blow from a siege engine is more exciting than talking about a shove that caused light bruising.

On his knees, Cranston finally draws his pistol, but the Beast kicks it out of his grasp.  But in doing so...

A cold piece of metal banged Cranston in the mouth and he snatched hungrily for the haft of his flesh-imbedded knife. Slippery as his fingers were, he retained it, drew it forth. He kicked out with his feet and then drove the keen steel deep into the body of the thing!

First, "flesh-imbedded?"  Word better, Hubbard.  Second, the first time I read this sequence, I interpreted it as Cranston kicking the knife even deeper into the Beast.  Might prefer that to what actually happened.

However the attack went, it's enough to do in Cranston's enemy - the Beast shudders, weakly claws the air, and then falls to make a "threshing, rattling sound" as it expires.  Cranston recovers his gun and moves over to the motionless shape in the mud, then pulls out a "torch" to shine a beam of light - wait, you had a flashlight this whole time?  Then why'd you need Ambu's lantern?  Why were you reliant on native torchbearers for light during that ambush at the beginning of the story?

Bleh.  Anyway, Cranston finally gets a good look at this thing, this Beast, this devil, da juju.  And now we learn why Cranston wasn't allowed to properly see his nemesis at any point before this, because Hubbard isn't just doing a safari story on an alien planet.

Maybe you suspected it earlier.  Sure, Hubbard never quite described what was attacking Cranston before, almost like he was setting up a dramatic reveal for later, but then again he made no effort to describe what the native Venusians looked like beyond them being blue and shorter than Cranston.  But the presence of a crashed spaceship probably deserved more than a paragraph mentioning that it existed, which the characters in the story almost deliberately do not dwell upon.  And then there was the nature of the "Beast" itself, a surprisingly intelligent ambush predator able to build deadfalls and snares, a creature that even knew when another hunter would stop when it detected a trap.  An animal with courage, cunning, and above all, the ability to reason.  A "devil" unlike any of Venus' native wildlife, but which had been on the planet since at least Cranston's arrival.

Ginger knelt and unfastened the straps of the frayed, worn, leatherlike suit that clothed the corpse and laboriously turned it over.  Metal-tipped space gloves clicked as the arms flopped against each other.  There was an almost illegible trace of lettering on the back, fouled with mud and blood, torn in spots.  "SP---E SHII----" it said, before a gouge tore out the ship's name.  Below, "Spacepo-----Lowry, U----A."

It stank with dried and rotted blood and meat of long-gone kills, and the unwashed body of its occupant.

We can only pray the Beast removed its spacesuit when it had to take a dump.

But yeah, bam!  The monster was Man all along!  Hope you were wearing a helmet before your mind got blown so hard it shot up out the top of your skull, or else there's gray matter all over your ceiling.  And that's hard to get out with standard household cleaners.

Ginger turned it back and looked again at the face.  Identification was hopeless.  The disastrous landing had gouged and torn the face half away; there was a deep dent in the forehead where the skull had been broken inward, and an angry, seamed and cross-seamed welt told of slow healing without the slightest rudiments of attention.

Well that's oddly uplifting.  We might have had a psychotic Scooby-Doo scenario with some lunatic dressing up like a monster so he could hunt some blues, but it was severe head trauma that made a monster out of this poor fellow.  Or rather very specific head trauma that wiped out his morals but kept whatever parts of the brain help you set traps, turning some civilian freighter crewman into "A ruthless, pure animal - with all the cunning of human intelligence still left in the damaged brain."

I'd like to point out that H. P. Lovecraft did something like this in 1918, though he first wrote "The Beast in the Cave" as early as 1904, and in his case it wasn't brain damage but isolation that turned a man into a monster.  From this we might describe Lovecraft as the more pessimistic author, someone who felt that people could descend into savagery and barbarism simply by being exposed to horrors or deprived of wholesome influence, while Hubbard would be an optimist who thought it took something drastic to turn someone into a psycho.  But having read Mission Earth, I don't think this would be accurate at all.

Let's wrap this up.  Cranston, having identified his attacker at last, simply stands up and walks back to the village, leaving the body for some natives to bring back later.  He's not sick with horror after coming face-to-face with this beast that was once a man, or disgusted that he had to kill a human being in self-defense.  Nah, he's good.

Ginger swung along the trail in the long, easy strides of a huntsman of standing.  There were bruises, and certain scratches that twinged a bit, but that sort of damage was of no importance.  The great thing was - a thing Ginger now scarcely realized - that he had recaptured that quite intangible reality that had been stolen from him.

"Certain scratches," huh?  Those would be from the wounds caused by those "sabers this thing had for claws," those talons "like a set of bayonets" which turned out to be nothing more than metal-tipped (space-)gloves.  Way to undermine your hero's accomplishment by making him a baby who exaggerates scratches into stabbing wounds, Hubbard.

But that's "The Beast," a tale about 'man versus nature' that turns out to be 'man versus man,' with a 'man versus himself' angle that gets resolved when that man kills something.  Parts of it are almost competently written, most of it is not.  The story doesn't do anything we haven't seen done before by better authors, and the most interesting thing about it is the background for the setting, which of course the story does not address.

Hubbard at his best, sadly.


Back to Part 3

The Beast - Part 3 - Fun Times on Venus

And now for the long build-up to the final, dramatic confrontation between man and... some sort of squishy clawed thing?

The giant trees stood an infinity into the sky, tops lost in the gray dark of swirling vapors.  Great tendrils of fog crept ghostily, low past the trunks, to blot with their evil odor of sulphur and rot what visibility the faint light might have permitted.  It was an atmosphere in which men unconsciously speak in whispers and look cautiously around each bend before venturing farther along the trail.

It's enough to make you wonder what about the planet made humans want to conquer it.  A bunch of sweltering jungles with stupid wildlife and stinky fog?  Ugh, the blues can keep it.

A bunch of native beaters spot da juju's tracks about two klicks out from the village, and "they added to it the usual blue exaggeration" that the beast was certainly wounded from the savage asskicking it inflicted upon the Great White Hunter the other day.  So Cranston gets the join the party and hopefully find and put the thing down once and for all.

The expedition sets out, passing by a crashed "space liner" that the villagers have been looting for scrap metal, a site that the author curiously spends little time describing, and which Cranston similarly shows little interest in.  The narration explains that the wrecked ship is "to be avoided since its dryness offered refuge to snakes."  Snakes, guys.  Let's keep our distance.

Cranston is still sick and shaken from his ordeal, scarred physically and mentally, and not at all acting like the confident generic big game hunter he should be.

His back was cringing away from the thing it had experienced and as the minutes went the feeling increased.  At each or any instant he expected to have upon him once again the shock of attack, from behind, fraught with agony and terror.  He tried to sweep it from him.  He tried to reassure himself by inspecting low-hanging limbs under which they passed; but the memory was there.  He told himself that if it did happen he would not scream.  He would whirl and begin to shoot.  He would smash the thing against a tree trunk and shatter it with flame and copper.

I guess flame guns use copper cartridges?  Also, just how badly is Cranston wounded, herr author?  There's not so much as a break in the paragraphs between Cranston going to bed with the lights on and the description of the foggy jungles, so we can only assume that it's the day after the attack.  We're told that the wounds "burned," but they don't seem to be hampering our hero's ability to move, and he's not quietly sweating with the agony that every breath of air brings to his battered ribs.  Saber-claws or not, that Beast didn't seem to do more than scratch the guy.

Ambu's worried about his boss, and comes over even though he's unsure how to comfort this big slab of vanilla, and can only make small talk over how hot it is.  But then some of the other Venusians call out that they've found tracks in the mud in the middle of a clearing: two claw marks, two footprints, and two claw marks again.  Cranston judges their depth and reasons that the monster can't weigh more than three hundred pounds.  But something about the whole thing is off.

A prickle of knowing went up the back of Ginger's spine. These tracks were perfect. They had been placed in a spot where they would retain their impressions. And from here they led away into the trees; but to this place they did not exist.

Clever devil, isn't it?  Also, what part of the spine is the back, the part facing outside a person or the part inside with the squishy bits?

Cranston orders some of the natives to "Get on the track of it," and I'm wondering why they need this guy.  It's the blues who keep finding the juju's footprints and are now the ones working out which way it went, while Cranston just follows his guides.  So I can't help but feel that all the Great White Hunter brings to the party is his gun.  Maybe we could cut out the middleman and send the Venusians some weapons to defend themselves with - oh that's right, hostilities only ended a few decades ago.  Wouldn't want to arm our colonial subjects, would we?

Bleh.  Our hero has to really exert himself to keep up with the natives, and all the while he's brooding.

He told himself that the fever made him this way, but he had had fever before.  Deep within he knew that the beast had a thing which belonged to Ginger, a thing which Ginger had never imagined would be stolen.  And until he met that beast and killed that beast, he would not recover his own.

I Want My Courage Back, by Ginger Cranston.  He does take some comfort that there's no low-hanging branches over this part of the jungle, the trees are thin enough for light to come through, and the ground is solid if concealed by "masses of rot."  But just when Cranston is starting to feel better about the situation, there's a "swishing, swooping sound and a scream from Ambu!"

The poor bastard stepped in "a cunningly manufactured sling, not unlike a rabbit snare," and was yanked thirty feet up to smash his brains out against a tree trunk.  Rest in peace, buddy; you had meaningful conversation with the protagonist for a page or two before getting offed halfway through the story.  Cranston stares up at his henchman's body for a few moments before ordering him cut down "in a controlled voice," and then the sad little procession gets to return to the village in defeat, toting a corpse.

Now it's made clear that time is passing, that Cranston's face is growing more lined and hollow-eyed with each day, as he's able to feign less confidence when giving commands.  Seven members of his hunting party are killed as we fast forward through the story, until one morning Cranston wakes up to find that the remaining five have fled.  Worse, the villagers have lost all faith in the "great white hunter," and when Cranston orders the chief to provide him with trackers, the Venusian makes a big deal about inspecting a pegunt rooting through the muck, or a nearby tree.

"I said trackers!" said Ginger Cranston.

The chief scratched himself and began to sidle away, still without meeting the eyes of the white man.

Ginger struck out and the chief crumpled into a muddy, moaning pile.

"TRACKERS!" said Ginger.

The chief turned his face into the slime and whimpered.

The only good news is that Cranston has enough decency to be ashamed of himself after his outburst and returns to his tent.  He realizes he's weeping, he can hear the chief in the mud still wailing, he doesn't recognize the person in the mirror and would smash it if he didn't feel so dreadfully tired, etc.  He does work up enough energy to go back outside, apologize to the little chieftain and leave a bottle of an undefined liquid in the mud next to the Venusian, and then Cranston returns to his tent to stare at his muddy boots. At least until he freaks out at the slithering sound of his tent flap being moved by the wind.

And then Cranston goes all Hamlet on us for over a page.

He was nauseated and for seconds the feeling of claws digging into his back would not abate.  He struggled with his pent sanity, sought nervously for the key of control which, more and more, was ever beyond the reach of mental fingers.  

Though I don't remember Shakespeare writing about "mental fingers."

The scream died unvoiced, the gun slipped to the bunk and lay there with its muzzle like a fixed, accusing eye.  Hypnotically, Ginger Cranston looked at that muzzle.  It threw a twenty-millimeter slug and would tear half a head from a Mamodon bull; the bullet came out when the trigger was pressed, came out with a roar of savage flame, came out with oblivion as its command.  Limply Ginger regarded it.  He knew very little about death, he a hunter who should have known so much.

And yes, this stuff I'm quoting is all one big rambling paragraph.

Was death a quiet and untroubled sleep which went on forever or was death a passing to another existence?  Would the wings of death carry something that was really Ginger Cranston out of this compound, away from these trees, this fog, this constant rain, this... this beast?  

At the very least it might end this story a few pages early.

Cranston spends another half page contemplating suicide, wondering whether "Death was a final conclusion - or was it a beginning?" and having a sort of out-of-body experience as he dispassionately examines his life.  When he finally snaps out of it, our hero has come to a decision, and buckles on his "flame pistol," grabs a knife, puts on his swamp mask, picks up his gun and loads a fresh magazine.

Yep, we're going devil hunting.  Which is certainly more dramatic and dignified than juju hunting.  Tune in next time for the final battle between man and vague, slimy juju-beast.

...You know, I don't think Cranston has so much as spared a thought for Ambu since the guy bought it.  And reading ahead, the name doesn't appear at any point in the remainder of the story.  Nice to know the loyal Venusian's death had such an impact on our hero.  Hell, it's not even clear whether Ambu was counted among the seven dead members of Cranston's hunting party, if he was set apart from those nameless extras.


Back to Part 2

Forward to Part 4

The Beast - Part 2 - The Baddest of Jujus

Hope you enjoyed those three pages of action and excitement, because there's not any more of that until the end of the story.  Now Hubbard's gonna build dread or drama or something for the next dozen pages.

So those blue-skinned aliens whose proper name isn't important enough for our narrator to relay haul Cranston's bushwhacked ass to their village, and... oh?  Huh.  Well, Cranston fell asleep at some point.  I know, I know, last we saw he was lying on the riverbank, "trying to find strength enough to scan the space around him in search of the beast," but he evidently nodded off without the author bothering to tell us.  Anyway, he wakes up in a dramatic fashion.  Or rather his awakening is described in a dramatic fashion.

Ginger Cranston woke slowly into the oppressive odor of a blue village from the tangled terror of his dreams.  The heated ink of the Venusian night eddied through his tent, clung clammily to his face, smothered the native fires which burned across the clearing.  Ginger Cranston woke into a new sensation, a feeling of loss, and for a little while could not bring organization into thought.  It was hard for him to bring back the successive shocks which had placed him here, helpless in this bed, and he began to know things which had never occurred to him that it would be important to know.

"Organization into thought," sheesh.

As he organizes his thoughts, or thoughts his organizes, Cranston reflects that he'd always been a brave man, one of the hunters hired by an unspecified government to clear out the Venusian wildlife threatening settlements and crops.  Granted, he can't have been too brave because said wildlife consists of "many-tonned brutes," all "ponderous and stupid," so he's pretty much the equivalent of those "hunters" who nearly eradicated the bison back when the West was being settled.  But the important thing is that Cranston's feeling fear for the first time in a while.  Getting ambushed from behind twice in one night and mauled like that has left him physically battered and emotionally scarred.

He had lost his courage.

In its place was a sick nausea.

Better that than an angry rage, or a sad sorrow.

When you're feeling down, when you've never been so defeated, when your courage and confidence have been replaced with dread and doubt, there's no better remedy than to yell for your favorite colonial subject.

"Ambu!" he yelled.

A Venusian of wary step and worried eyes slunk into the tent.  Ambu had done his bungling best with these wounds, hurling the offer of help back into the teeth of the village doctor - a person who preferred a ghost rattle to a bottle of iodine.  Ambu was of uncertain age, uncertain bearing.  He was half in and half out of two worlds - that of the whites in Yorkville on the coast, that of the blues in the somber depths of this continent.  He believed in ghosts.  But he knew that iodine prevented infection.  He belonged to a white, had been indifferently schooled by the whites.  But he was a blue.

I do take some comfort that while once again an unsuspecting civilization has fallen victim to the Curse of the White Men, at least it isn't a case of some people of color inflicting the same misfortune they suffered upon someone else.

So here's Ambu, the only Venusian with anything close to characterization.  Don't expect him to play a big part in the story, though, he's just here to be a spokesman for the superstitious savages.  Otherwise, who would Cranston talk to?  None of the other blues have names, and the Beast doesn't seem one for conversation.

Ambu's wary of the strange relief in Cranston's eyes when he brings a lantern into the tent, but when asked tells his... I'm going to go with "boss" instead of taking the author at his word and assuming Ambu is a slave.  Anyway, Ambu knows who's to blame for the attack.

"Devils," said Ambu.

"Nonsense," said Ginger in careful carelessness.

Dammit, I actually like that "careful carelessness" bit.  It's those rare nuggets of potential that make Hubbard's many failings all the more lamentable.

Ambu repeats his assertion that the ambush was the work of some devil, because the lead trackers in the procession fell into a trap, a pit of sharpened stakes camouflaged by a flimsy roof of mud and branches.  Both he and Cranston know the blues don't have a tradition of building such traps, and also that "There have been no hostile blues for thirty years or more."  I hope that means some of the Venusians stood up to the invading honkies, even if they weren't successful in staving off subjugation.  Cranston, the seasoned hunter that he is, misidentifies this pit trap as a "deadfall trap," which are simple traps like a rock or tree trunk propped up by a stick that falls on their victims if that stick gets dislodged.  But he's had a rough day, so let's cut him a bit of slack.

Ambu certainly does - Cranston asks for "a drink," and the Venusian knows enough about great white hunters to understand that Cranston is asking for alcohol, even though the guy only hits the hard stuff during social calls and bouts of illness.

"Very cold tonight," said Ambu, sweating.

"Very cold," said Ginger, drinking quickly.

There, again, did you see it?  A fleeting glimpse of competence, something that describes a relationship between characters without using a cumbersome paragraph filled with delusions of eloquence.

While drinking some liquid courage, Cranston reflects that Venus doesn't have smaller, faster predators like lynxes or leopards, just big, lumbering oafs whose biggest threat is their clumsiness.  Ambu points out that this monster knew when "Lord Ginger" would halt, and was waiting in a tree directly over that spot, so the ambush couldn't be the work of one of Venus' simple native creatures.

"No beast," said Ambu with rare conviction for him.  "Probably devil.  No doubt devil.  Forest devil.  Drink again, Lord Ginger?"

I guess it's nice to know that Mission Earth wasn't the start of Hubbard's "woods ___" approach to mythology.

This devil is in fact the same juju that Cranston was asked to come hunt, and no sooner does Ambu explain this than a new, "tired and hopeless voice" calls at the tent flap.  Despite his weariness and over Ambu's protests, Cranston allows what turns out to be a village chief to come in and meet with him.  The unenthusiastic greeting and response that follows either shows how emotionally exhausted the participants are, or indicates just how long the Venusian natives have been oppressed by a bunch of pale fellows with superior weapons.

"Greetings to the white lord," said the chief tiredly.  "He lives and the village Tohyvo is happy that he lives.  The white hunter is great and his fame is mighty.  He comes and all things flee in horror before him.  The blues beat

Mother of crap they don't even use their own name for themselves.  They're just a people defined by their skin tone being inferior to people of another skin tone.

their heads against the earth in submission and hide their eyes before the dazzling brilliance of the mighty lord."  He sighed and sat upon an ammunition box.

"Greetings to the star of his people," said Ginger mechanically.  "His name carries the storms of his wrath across the jungle and his power is as the raging torrent.  A flash of his glance is the lightning across the storm."  He took a cup of liquor from Ambu and handed it to the dispirited, sodden little chief.

Pretty violent imagery for the head of a people who don't use pit traps.  Chief No Name Given explains that the juju who sucker-punched Cranston has killed all his best warriors and stolen women and children from the village, descending from the trees and disappearing into the darkness.  This monster uses pit traps in some ambushes, but at other times leaps upon its victims from behind and tears them to pieces, or even steals their spears and knives to use against them.  Cranston tries to assure Chief Notimportant that the next time he meets the beast it will be the one to fall, but the alien's polite agreement doesn't match his despairing demeanor, and he leaves the tent.

Ambu motions towards Cranston's "radiophone" and suggests calling Yorkville for backup, and though he comes close to agreeing, Cranston ultimately refuses as a point of pride, looking "at the radio case like a desert-stranded man might gaze thirstily at a cup of water before he did the incredible thing of pouring it out on the ground."  I guess what the author is saying here is that Cranston is suicidally stupid.

The hunter smiles at Ambu and confidently says all he needs is a good night's sleep, but briefly panics when it looks like the alien is about to take the light out with him - "leave the lantern there, Ambu.  I... I have some notes to take."

So the rest of the story will follow Cranston trying to get his groove back before his rematch with the Beast.  I'm more interested in the story Hubbard indirectly alludes to but doesn't explore.

See, this is pretty much a safari tale with sci-fi trappings, and since those stories always have native guides and porters following Sir Nigel Killington the Third as he adds more unsuspecting animals to the endangered species list, "The Beast" has a bunch of unsophisticated blue aliens around to fill that role, as Hubbard's way of putting a sci-fi twist on things.  But oh, the questions this situation raises!

Why are humans colonizing Venus?  We're never told about any resources or exotic crops or whatever that drew Earth's interest, so presumably we're there for living space, implying that Earth is finally full and places like Siberia and Canada have been completely settled.  Maybe the idea of humans not colonizing a habitable planet is simply unthinkable.

Why are humans subjugating the native Venusians?  I'm fairly sure there were critics of colonialism and empire-building even when this story was penned, so this narrative either suggests that such critics were ultimately ignored, or we decided that imperialism was only evil when done against other humans.  But what was the need, if humans seem to be sticking the coastal cities for the moment?  Why didn't anyone stick up for the natives and give them diplomatic recognition, let them introduce themselves without figuratively kowtowing before Mighty Whitey?

Why does it take a white male lead to deal with Venus' predator problems?  Why aren't the people who have lived with these creatures for all their lives any good at keeping their populations under control?  Why aren't Venusians receiving bounties for their help in playing pest control?  Or do they object to such wholesale slaughter just to make things easier for the invaders?

And here's the big one, what are the odds that an alien civilization uses the same word for supernatural behavior that used in West African religions?  Is it a mind-boggling case of parallel evolution?  Did some traditional Nigerians make it to Venus and passed on their religious beliefs, or at least gave the natives some loan words?  Or was the story's author such a hack that he thought he could get away with this?

We could be reading an account of the colonization of another world, where the mistakes from a dark period of human history are repeated again on a new set of victims.  Alas, instead we have to feign interest in whether Ginger Cranston will work up the nerve to zap a monster with his ray gun.


Back to Part 1

Forward to Part 3

The Beast - Part 1 - Mud-Wrestling on Another Planet

Let's start the new year with a safari, of sorts.

"The Great Secret" was Hubbard's attempt to blow our minds with an ironic morality lesson recovered from a lost civilization, an archaeologist's parable clumsily transplanted to outer space.  "Space Can" was Hubbard's attempt to imagine the future of space combat, which turned out surprisingly similar to contemporary naval combat.  And now here's "The Beast," a story where the hunter becomes the hunted in a dark and godless wilderness, with the catch is that the story takes place on another planet. 

The crash and the scream which reverberated through the stinking gloom of the Venusian night brought Ginger Cranston to a startled halt upon the trail, held there for an instant by the swirl of panicked blues which made up the safari of the white hunter.

Yeah, we're on Venus.  Specifically Old Venus, a world of lush jungles under hazy skies, not Real Venus, which is frequently compared to Hell in terms of hospitality and terrain.  In fairness, this story was first published in October 1942, a decade or two before we learned about Venus' smothering acidic atmosphere and superheated surface conditions.  I mean, for Hubbard to have known what another planet was really like, he'd have to have been some kind of psychic supergenius able to project his mind to explore the cosmos and unlock the secrets of the universe.

You may also notice some good ol' fashioned race dynamics in play here, with a Great White Hunter surrounded by a bunch of colored primitives.  We'll get more into this later.  Also, a Ginger Cranston sounds like something I wouldn't order at a bar.

Something had happened to the head of the line, something sudden, inexplicable in this foggy blackness.

Should've switched to infrared.  Or what, you're hunting something on an alien world and you didn't bring along your helmet with multiple vision modes?  Don't tell me you left behind your cloaking device, shoulder-mounted plasmacaster, and self-destruct system too!

Ginger Cranston did not long remain motionless, for the blues had dumped their packages and had vanished, leaving the narrow trail, which wandered aimlessly through the giant trees, clear of men.

Or blues.

He took one step forward, gun balanced at ready in the crook of his arm, and then the thing happened to him which would make his life a nightmare.

 L. Ron Hubbard wrote a story about him.

What follows is not a proper Hubbard Action Sequence, this story evidently dates from when the author could write in paragraphs, and didn't end every sentence with an exclamation point.  But something tackles... er, the narration goes with "Ginger," but I think I'll call him Cranston.  Anyway, something hits our protagonist with "a fury and a savageness" that sends him sprawling onto the Venusian mud, then this attacker proceeds to "claw and rake and beat at him with a singleness of intent which would have no ending short of death."  I haven't gotten into many fights, so I haven't developed the fine martial senses that would let me know when someone is only trying to beat me half to death, or is just lightly stabbing me.

Again, it's dark, and those cowardly blues have all dropped their torches, so Cranston can't get a good look at what's trying to maul him.  The most he can tell is that it's covered in some sort of slimy fur that makes it hard to grapple with, and its stench is so horrendous that Cranston can smell it through the filters of his "swamp mask."  Why he needs such a mask isn't really explained, and he tears it off without suffocating or anything, so Venus has a human-friendly atmosphere in this story.  Maybe its swamps are stinky?  I refuse to believe that the mask is to protect against alien illnesses, because Hubbard had Ole Doc Methuselah spontaneously picnicking on strange planets with nary a care in the world, and that story came several years after this one.

Also, Hubbard describes this beast as being armed with claws like "sabers," not sabres, so maybe this was written before he picked up an affection for lorries and other Britishisms.  I noticed this because my first impulse was to go with sabre, and then I had to stop and reflect on how often I'd complained about Hubbard not calling a truck a truck, that bloody sod.

Cranston is able to kick the monster off him, then scrabbles for his gun in the mud, fails to find it, and then rips off that swamp mask like I said he would, though I'm not sure why that's the logical next step after failing to find a weapon.  It was dark with the mask on, and it's still dark with the mask off, so it doesn't seem to help much.  All he can do is listen to the monster's "snarling grunts" as it prepares for another lunge.

Something in the unexpectedness of the attack, something in the ferocity of this beast, shook Ginger's courage, a courage which was a byword where hunters gathered.  For a moment he could think of nothing but trying to escape this death which would again be upon him in an instant.

Yeah, I can appreciate that you're trying to hype this killing machine as death incarnate, Hubbard, but it doesn't really work to suggest that someone can be attacked by certain death more than once.  A bit of an oxymoron, you know?

He whirled and fumbled his way through the trees.  If he could find some place where he could make a stand, if he could grasp a precious instant to get out and unclasp his knife-

Then this story would be over twenty pages early.

Cranston abruptly notices the sound of roaring water, and since he "knew this continent better than to go so far off a trail" ...wow.  A whole continent so similar in terrain that you can make such an impressive blanket statement.  Anyway, he knows that he can't go any farther, so he resolves to make a stand, drawing his knife and gathering "his courage about him like armor."  Even though he still can't see anything but the vague shape of trees, Cranston can sense his attacker lurking just two yards away, so if he's careful, maybe he could

It struck.  It struck him from behind with a strength which brought them crashing into the mud and branches.  One cruel paw was crooked to feel out with its sabers the eyes of its victim, the others scored Ginger's back and side.

Cranston's prepared enough to bring a swamp mask, but not any body armor?  Well, later we're learn that Venus' predators tend to be slothful and clumsy and not really a threat, so this isn't as big an oversight as it might seem.

As it is, Cranston is left "Rolling in red agony, strong beyond any past strength," which is a cumbersome way to say that the adrenaline surge is kicking in.  He tries to slam his attacker between himself and a tree, but only succeeds in falling over a cliff into a raging river, which at least has the upside of separating him from his attacker.  Venus' waters are described as a "thick syrup" (roaring, fast-moving syrup?) that gags Cranston when he plunges deep into them, then "seared his throat."  We might wonder that this is some liquid methane or whatever, something exotic and alien, but since there's no lasting effects from this immersion and the author doesn't point anything out, it's probably safe to assume this is just water.  Syrupy Venusian swamp water, but water nonetheless.

Cranston loses any sense of what's up or down, but luckily a friendly whirlpool, after it slams him into a rock, ejects him from the water - it literally "flung him out."  He's able to crawl out of the (really fierce!) "stream" and then lies along the shore, stunned, aching, deaf from the roaring waters, feebly failing to muster the energy to even lift his head and look out in case his attacker comes to finish him off.

For two hours.

Look, it was really traumatic, alright?  And that Venusian syrup water is gross.

Two hours later the frightened blues, grouped in a hollow ring for security, found the white hunter by the river and placed him in a sling.  One of the trackers nervously examined a nearby track and then cried, "Da juju!  Da juju!"  Hastily the carriers lifted the sling and bore its inert burden back to the trail and along it to the village which had been Ginger Cranston's goal.

Hoo boy.  We'll get into that "juju" next time.  Still, awfully nice of those cowardly, inferior (blue-)colored folk to come back for their great white hunter.  And nice of that juju-monster to not eat any of them.

Forward to Part 2