Amazing Stories: Giant 35th Anniversary Issue (Amazing Stories Classics) Read online

  "In the unused cells of your brain lie impressed inherited racial memories that go back to your remotest ancestors. By our mental power of command we shall make those buried memories temporarily dominant and vivid in your mind.

  "You will experience the same sensations, see the same scenes, that your remote ancestors of millions of years ago saw. And we, here around you, can read your mind as we now do, and so see what you are seeing, looking into the past of this planet.

  "There is no danger. Physically you will remain standing here but mentally you will leap back across the ages. We shall first push your mind back to a time approximating that when our colonists came to this world, to see what happened to them."

  NO SOONER had this thought impinged on Woodin's mind than the starlit scene around him, the humped masses of the Arctarians, suddenly vanished and his consciousness seemed whirling through gray mist.

  He knew that physically he was not moving yet mentally he had a sense of terrific velocity of motion. It was as though his mind was whirling across unthinkable gulfs, his brain expanding.

  Then abruptly the gray mists cleared. A strange new scene took hazy form inside Woodin's mind.

  It was a scene that he sensed, not saw. By other senses than sight did it present itself to his mind, yet it was none the less real and vivid.

  He looked with those strange senses upon a strange earth, a world of gray seas and harsh continents of rock without any speck of life upon them. The skies were heavily clouded and rain fell continually.

  Down upon that world Wood-in felt himself dropping with a host of weird companions. They were each an amorphous, glistening, single-celled mass, with a dark nucleus at its center. They were Arctarians and Woodin knew that he was an Arctarian, and that he had come with the others a long way through space toward this world.

  They landed in hosts upon the harsh and lifeless planet. They exerted their mentalities and by sheer telekinetic force of mental energy they altered the material world to suit them. They reared great structures and cities, cities that were not of matter but of thought. Weird cities built of crystallized mental energy.

  Woodin could not comprehend a millionth of the activities he sensed going on in those alien Arctarian cities of thought. He realized a vast ordered mass of inquiry, investigation, experiment and communication, but all beyond his present human mind in motives and achievement. Abruptly all dissolved in gray mists again.

  The mists cleared almost at once and now Woodin looked on another scene. It was later in time, this one. And now Woodin saw that time had worked strange changes upon the hosts of Arctarians, of which he still was one.

  They had changed from unicellular to multicellular beings. And they were no longer all the same. Some were sessile, fixed in one spot, others mobile. Some betrayed a tendency toward the water, others toward the land. Something had changed the bodily form on the Arctarians as generations passed, branching them out in different lines.

  This strange degeneration of their bodies had been accompanied by a kindred degeneration of their minds. Woodin sensed that. In the thought-cities the ordered process of search for knowledge and power had become confused, chaotic. And the thought-cities themselves were vanishing, the Arctarians having no longer sufficient mental energy to maintain them.

  The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration in them. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!

  That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor, whose mind he looked through, had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians' multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.

  THE LAST of the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creeping and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.

  They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously-degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin's mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.

  Woodin's mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration had made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scaled and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.

  Even these incredibly-changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their ancestor's mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians far on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.

  There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals, the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone farther. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants.

  And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plains in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.

  And then a last picture filled Woodin's brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.

  The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained even by the apes before them.

  And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forbears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations and hemispheres. In the madness of their degeneracy they slaughtered each other until earth ran with their blood.

  They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of the mad. And in their progressive insanity they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.

  They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated product, of the ancient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.

  WOODIN came suddenly to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.

  Dazed, reeling from the tremendous and awful vision that has passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.

  The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin's mind.

  "So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.

  "This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race's bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them degenerate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result."

  The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, "But what can we do now?"

  "There is nothing we can do," uttered their leader solemnly. "This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.

  "Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of hor
ror and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are."

  Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly.

  "It isn't true!" he cried. "It's all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren't the product of downward devolution, we're the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn't want to live, I wouldn't want to live, if that other tale was true. It can't be true!

  The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind.

  It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loathing.

  "Come, my brothers," the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. "There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world.

  "Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is a poisoned world, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down.

  "Come! We return to our own sun."

  The Arctarian leader's humped shape flattened, assumed a disklike form, then rose smoothly upward into the air.

  The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at them, glistening dots lifting rapidly in to the starlight.

  He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist furiously, insanely up at the shining, receding dots.

  "Come back, damn you" he screamed. "Come back and tell me it's a lie!

  "It must be a lie—it must—"

  There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the star-lit sky. The darkness was brooding and intense around Woodin.

  He screamed up again into the night but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze, fell on the pistol in Ross' hand. 'He seized it with a hoarse cry.

  The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp crack, that reverberated a moment and then died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.

  JOHN CARTER AND THE GIANT OF MARS

  By Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Illustrated by J. Allen St. John

  THE most popular and widely read author in the world in the "Roaring Twenties" was not Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway or T. S. Eliot, but a wonderous dreamer named Edgar Rice Burroughs. This universal appeal derived originally from his creation of Tarzan, whose exploits in the movies, radio, and comic strips, as well as books, has given his name a place in many languages, and many cultures.

  However, Edgar Rice Burroughs' first reputation was created not by Tarzan but through the appeal of John Carter, an earthman transplanted to Mars. His heroic adventures on the dried sea bottoms and ancient cities of the Red Planet provided escape that charmed millions. Had Burroughs never thought of Tarzan, he still would have gained an immense audience and enjoyed a good living recounting the enthralling experiences of John Carter.

  While Burroughs lived he maintained his own book publishing company which was sustained solely through the sale of his own titles. Each year he systematically issued a number of his novels, treating with equal reverence his tales of Tarzan, Mars, Venus, the earth's core or some off-beat novelty he had turned his mind to.

  Eventually the reader was certain that every major effort of Burroughs would be preserved in hard covers. This sense of entertainment security was abruptly shattered when Burroughs died in March, 1950. This ended the publishing activities of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. of Tarzana, Calif. A number of his marvelous adventures, unpublished in hard covers, became collector's items as the years passed. Among those stories was "John Carter and the Giant of Mars," published in Amazing Stories of Jan., 1939. This story is unique, for despite its short length it is complete in itself. Usually Burroughs' novelets were written with the idea of combining them into a complete novel.

  Burroughs played a vital role in the establishment of Amazing Stories when "The Land That Time Forgot," generally regarded as one of his finest efforts, was reprinted during the first year of the magazine's publication. This attracted many of his devotees to the world's first science fiction magazine. Acknowledging the fabulous popularity of Burroughs, Amazing Stories' founder, Hugo Gernsback, commissioned a new novel, "The Master Mind of Mars" for the proposed Amazing Stories ANNUAL in 1927. Burroughs' name was printed on the cover in letters larger than the magazine's title. The result was a near sellout, and the ANNUAL was made a, quarterly!

  During the last years of his life, the only magazines to which Edgar Rice Burroughs regularly contributed were Amazing Stories and its companion, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. The very last book he ever published, "Llana of Gathol," in 1948, appeared first as a series of novelets in Amazing Stories. It is regarded by many of his fans as the finest of his Mars novels.

  "John Carter and the Giant of Mars" marked the return of Burroughs to the pages of Amazing Stories after an absence of almost 14 years. Editor Ray Palmer, who had lured him back, knew how to introduce him: ". . . Here he is again. John Carter of Virginia, the most famous earthman of all science fiction, the one and only Warlord of Mars... . And with him come all the old, beloved characters you've come to know and love. Dejah Thoris, the incomparable; Tars Tarkas, that savage yet tender Jeddak of the Tharks; Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Jeddaks; Kantos Kan, Admiral of the Fleet; in addition to the new characters, Joog, the giant, and Pew Mogel, most horrible creation of Ras Thavas, master of synthesis.

  "Now you can shudder once more at the roar of the banth, great many-legged lion of Mars; chill to the scream of the great white apes; ride again on the giant thoats across the dead sea bottoms of an ancient world; prowl through the ghostly ruins of dead cities beneath the two hurtling Barsoomian moons; struggle across the great Toonalian Marshes; fight side by side with the brave red warriors of Helium; hurtle through the thin air of Mars on the airships of the Barsoomian ray."

  All the elements he described above are combined in this typical story by an author who had few equals in the art of creating escape from the galling tyranny of space and time.

  ONE

  ABDUCTION

  THE moons of Mars looked down upon a giant Martian thoat as it raced silently over the soft mossy ground. Eight powerful legs carried the creature forward in great, leaping strides.

  The path of the mighty beast was guided telepathically by the two people who sat in a huge saddle that was cinched to the thoat's broad back.

  It was the custom of Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, to ride forth weekly to inspect part of her grandfather's vast farming and industrial kingdom.

  Her journey to the farm lands wound through the lonely Helium Forest where grow the huge trees that furnish much of the lumber supply to the civilized nations of Mars.

  Dawn was just breaking in the eastern Martian sky, and the jungle was dark and still damp with the evening dew. The gloom of the forest made Dejah Thoris thankful for the presence of her companion, who rode in the saddle in front of her. Her hands rested on his broad, bronze shoulders, and the feel of those smooth, supple muscles gave her a little thrill of confidence. One of his hands rested on the jewel-encrusted hilt of his great long sword and he sat his saddle very straight, for he was the mightiest warrior on Mars.

  John Carter turned to gaze at the lovely face of his princess. "Frightened, Dejah Thoris?" he asked.

  "Never, when I am with my chieftain," Dejah Thoris smiled.

  "But what of the forest monsters, the arboks?"

  "Grandfather has had them all removed. On the last trip, my guard killed the only tree reptile I've ever seen."

  Suddenly Dejah Thoris gasped, clutched vainly at John Carter to regain her balance. The mighty thoat lurched heavily to the mossy ground. The riders catapulted over his head. In an instant the two had regained their feet; but the thoat lay very still.

  Carter jerked his long sword from its scabbard and motioned Dejah Thoris to stay at his back.

  The silence of the forest was abruptly shatte
red by an uncanny roar directly above them.

  "An arbok!" Dejah Thoris cried.

  The tree reptile launched itself straight for the hated man-things. Carter lifted his sword and swung quickly to one side, drawing the monster's attention away from Dejah Thoris, who crouched behind the fallen thoat.

  The earthman's first thrust sliced harmlessly through the beast's outer skin. A huge claw knocked him off balance, and he found himself lying on the ground with the great fangs at his throat.

  "Dejah Thoris, get the atom gun from the thoat's back," Carter called hoarsely to the girl. There was no answer.

  Calling upon every ounce of his great strength, Carter drove his sword into the arbok's neck. The creature shuddered. A stream of blood gushed from the wound. The man wriggled from under the dead body and sprang to his feet.

  "Dejah Thoris! Dejah Thoris!"

  Wildly Carter searched the ground and trees surrounding the dead thoat and arbok. There was no sign of Dejah Thoris. She had utterly vanished.

  A shaft of light from the rising sun filtering through the foliage glistened on an object at the earthman's feet. Carter picked up a large shell, a shell recently ejected from a silent atom gun.

  Springing to the dead thoat, he examined the saddle trappings. The atom gun that he had told Dejah Thoris to fire was still in its leather boot!

  The earthman stooped beside the dead thoat's head. There was a tiny, bloody hole through its skull. That shot and the charging arbok had been part of a well conceived plan to abduct Dejah Thoris, and kill him!

  But Dejah Thoris—how had she disappeared so quickly, so completely?

  Grimly, Carter set off at a run back to the forest toward Helium.

  Noon found the earthman in a private audience chamber of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium, grandfather of Dejah Thoris.

  The old jeddak was worried. He thrust a rough piece of parchment into John Carter's hand. Crude, bold letters were inscribed upon the parchment; and as Carter scanned the note his eyes burned with anger. It read: