Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (121 page)

Nona turned to Grant. “Now, will you explain?”

“Certainly,” he grinned boyishly. “I simply reversed the switch that changes the current of the Gorm. I knew that it would then repel the liner out into space, as Miro was incautious enough to inform me.

“Then I figured that if instead of direct current, an alternating flow could be induced, so as to attract and repel in quick succession, enough of a disturbance would be raised in that highly unstable mixture to start fireworks. So I rigged up an automatic break in the circuit, timed it to permit us to get up enough speed from the repulsion to be safely on our way before it would start. The circuit-breaker worked and the alternating current did the rest. That island is wiped out, and so is the Gorm. There’ll be no further threat of danger to the solar system from that.”

“And Miro, what are we going to do with him?”

“Turn him over to the Service. They’ll take care of him. And now, young lady, if you have no further questions, shall I say it again?”

She smiled up at him tenderly, answering:

“If you wish.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1932 by by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

(1893–1961)

A major contributor to
Weird Tales’
early success and a key member of the Lovecract Circle, Clark Ashton Smith was known primarily as a poet, but he also wrote more than a hundred stories in one intense burst. Most of those stories were too erotic to be published in their original form, however—at least in the 1930s.

Born in Long Valley, California, Smith was a frail child (as a result of a bout of scarlet fever) but a voracious reader. Although admitted to Auburn High School, Smith did not attend and was thereafter completely self-educated, including reading the entire
Encyclopedia Britannica
and
Webster’s Unabridged English Dictionary
. Smith’s family struggled financially (his father farmed and mined for gold without much success at either and his mother sold wild fruit she picked and magazine subscriptions) but his literary talents earned him early recognition. Smith began writing stories at eleven, poetry at thirteen, and a short adventure novel at fourteen. At age seventeen, he sold stories to
The Black Cat
and
The Overland Monthly
.

An introduction to George Sterling, then a well-known poet in Northern California, helped Smith to get his first book,
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
, published in 1912. The book was a huge literary success, though less successful for Smith commercially: He only earned about $50 for the 1,000 copies the book sold. Moreover, declining health meant it was years before he could complete a follow-up, by which time he was no longer seen as a nineteen-year-old literary wonder. Nevertheless, Smith published three more books of poetry by 1925, then started writing stories for Weird Tales at the encouragement of H. P. Lovecraft, with whom he corresponded.

He remained incredibly prolific until 1937, when a series of personal tragedies shook him badly. Many of his closest friends and family died, including poet Vachel Lindsay, Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, and both his parents. From 1937 to his death in 1961, Smith wrote only about a dozen more stories, focusing instead on paintings and sculpture.

Smith had many mistresses (some of them married), but did not marry until 1954, when he was in his sixties. He had suffered a heart attack the year before, and had several strokes in 1961, before dying in his sleep.

first published in
Auburn Journal
V23 #44, (16 Aug 1923)

There is a silence in the world

Since we have said farewell;

And beauty with an alien speech

An alien tale would tell.

There is a silence in the world,

Which is not peace nor quiet:

Ever I seek to flee therefrom,

And walk the ways of riot.

But when I hear the music moan

In rooms of thronging laughter,

A tongueless demon drives me forth,

And silence follows after.

first published in
The Star-Treader and Other Poems
, 1912

A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,

Saying, “Make haste: the webs of death and birth

Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth

Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams

Thine ancient pathway of the suns,

Whose flame is part of thee;

And the deep gulfs abide coevally

Whose darkness runs

Through all thy spirit’s mystery.

Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze

Of stars wherethrough thou camest in old days;

Pierce without fear each vast

Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.

A hand strikes off the chains of Time,

A hand swings back the door of years;

Now fall earth’s bonds of gladness and of tears,

And opens the strait dream to space sublime”

II

Who rides a dream, what hand shall stay !

What eye shall note or measure mete

His passage on a purpose fleet,

The thread and weaving of his way !

It caught me from the clasping world,

And swept beyond the brink of Sense,

My soul was flung, and poised, and whirled

Like to a planet chained and hurled

With solar lightning strong and tense.

Swift as communicated rays

That leap from severed suns a gloom

Within whose waste no suns illume,

The winged dream fulfilled its ways.

Through years reversed and lit again

I followed that unending chain

Wherein the suns are links of light;

Retraced through lineal, ordered spheres

The twisting of the threads of years

In weavings wrought of noon and night;

Through stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,

Those folds that form the raiment of the soul.

III

Enkindling dawns of memory,

Each sun had radiance to relume

A sealed, disused, and darkened room

Within the soul’s immensity.

Their alien ciphers shown and lit,

I understood what each had writ

Upon my spirit’s scroll;

Again I wore mine ancient lives,

And knew the freedom and the gyves

That formed and marked my soul.

IV

I delved in each forgotten mind,

The units that had builded me,

Whose deepnesses before were blind

And formless as infinity—

Knowing again each former world—

From planet unto planet whirled

Through gulfs that mightily divide

Like to an intervital sleep.

One world I found, where souls abide

Like winds that rest upon a rose;

Thereto they creep

To loose all burden of old woes.

And one there was, a garden-close

Whose blooms are grown of ancient sin

And death the sap that wells and flows:

The spirits weep that dwelt therein.

And one I knew, where chords of pain

With stridors fill the Senses’ lyre;

And one, where Beauty’s olden chain

Is forged anew with stranger loveliness,

In flame-soft links of never-quenched desire

And ineluctable duress.

V

Where no terrestrial dreams had trod

My vision entered undismayed,

And Life her hidden realms displayed

To me as to a curious god.

Where colored suns of systems triplicate

Bestow on planets weird, ineffable,

Green light that orbs them like an outer sea,

And large auroral noons that alternate

With skies like sunset held without abate,

Life’s touch renewed incomprehensibly

The strains of mirth and grief’s harmonious spell.

Dead passions like to stars relit

Shone in the gloom of ways forgot;

Where crownless gods in darkness sit

The day was full on altars hot.

I heard—enisled in those melodic seas—

The central music of the Pleiades,

And to Alcyone my soul

Swayed with the stars that own her song’s control.

Unchallenged, glad, I trod, a revenant

In worlds Edenic longly lost;

Or dwelt in spheres that sing to those,

Through space no light has crossed,

Diverse as Hell’s mad antiphone uptossed

To Heaven’s angelic chant.

VI

What vasts the dream went out to find !

I seemed beyond the world’s recall

In gulfs where darkness is a wall

To render strong Antares blind !

In unimagined spheres I found

The sequence of my being’s round—

Some life where firstling meed of Song,

The strange imperishable leaf,

Was placed on brows that starry Grief

Had crowned, and. Pain anointed long;

Some avatar where Love

Sang like the last great star at morn

Ere the pale orb of Death filled all its sky;

Some life in fresher years unworn

Upon a world whereof

Peace was a robe like to the calms that lie

On pools aglow with latter spring:

There Time’s pellucid surface took

Clear image of all things, nor shook

Till the black cleaving of Oblivion’s wing;

Some earlier awakening

In pristine years, when giant strife

Of forces darkly whirled

First forged the thing called Life—

Hot from the furnace of the suns—

Upon the anvil of a world.

VII

Thus knew I those anterior ones

Whose lives in mine were blent;

Till, lo! my dream, that held a night

Where Rigel sends no message of his might,

Was emptied of the trodden stars,

And dwindled to the sun’s extent—

The brain’s familiar prison-bars,

And raiment of the sorrow and the mirth

Wrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.