Both of my companions agreed on the wisdom of this suggestion, each throwing himself down on his particular tufted mattress-like rug. For a long time, however, sleep would not come to me. I lay awake wondering to what weird civilizations this man from the unknown was carrying us. To what destinations were we ultimately bound? What adventures awaited us on the morrow? How long would we stay on this world with its colored suns—and after that—what?

  The first thing that I noticed after I had awakened was the glow of the colored suns upon the silver luminosity of the walls. A green light blended into lavender and then purple was followed by orange in unending splendor.

  I sat up and drank in the cubistic beauty of the crystal palace under these changing rays. When I stirred, Jim immediately sat up and called out, “How are these for stage effects? If I could transport them to Broadway, we’d both be rich.”

  But my laugh that followed this apparently thoughtless remark died in my throat.

  “Come now. I’m sorry. No gloomy thoughts today.”

  I nodded with a smile, walking over toward the walls. As usual, this movement on our part was the signal for the luminosity to die out, but this time the light which shone through from the colored suns was even more intense than the silver which up to now had seemed to act as a screen.

  Suddenly Kepling’s voice sounded softly behind us.

  “Look toward the prow of the ship.”

  We turned our faces upward almost simultaneously, and gasped to see the disc of a planet swinging between us and the star-spangled blackness of space. It was tinted green and orange—one side of a mountain chain being of a greenish hue and the other a reddish-orange.

  “What about the pressure?” Jim asked anxiously.

  The cultured voice droned a low reply that might have been part of a classroom lecture.

  “The size of the body is close to that of our own Earth and so the pressure is about right, while it is far enough from its suns to give a very pleasant temperature.”

  “What did I say about our ghost-like friend?”

  “Was it you who said it?” I teased Jim. We hadn’t completely overcome our earthly habit of annoying each other’s peace of mind, even with the ever-present example of gentle manners we had in the old professor.

  “I didn’t believe that our host would knowingly lead us into danger,” Kepling put in innocently. “Concerning the contents of the atmosphere, however, we can only take a chance.”

  “I am only waiting for the opportunity to take it,” Jim grinned.

  “Don’t be so sure about the chance,” I nodded. “It looks very much as if our engineer has decided to give the planet the go-by.”

  Indeed, the disc was rapidly swinging toward our stern. Kepling watched for a few moments in silence and then smiled.

  “He is turning the ship around. In other words, he is going to lower us stern first upon the planet.”

  “But what is the idea, Doc?”

  “He probably has noted our interest and intends to allow us unobstructed observation.”

  After a moment it was quite plain that this was indeed just what was happening. As the great globe rushed up toward us, lit by its sinking green and rising orange sun, we kneeled down and finally threw ourselves prone upon the floor as the mountain chains took more definite form. Kepling was the first to point out the vast moon-like craters that dotted the face of the planet and lifted jagged crags skyward from the level of what appeared to be a dead plain.

  “Evidently very little water,” the astronomer commented tersely.

  “The seas do appear to be dried up—very much like the state on the moon,” Jim agreed.

  The green sun had dropped from sight when at last we decided that the light patches on the mountaintops were snow. It was an orange world that we now rapidly lowered ourselves upon, hovering sometimes and again seeming to waver along sideways as if seeking a particular spot which the engineer had admired during a previous visit. Jim was the first one to suggest this possibility, and once the idea was planted, it grew upon us.

  We finally passed a part of the wildly mountainous country that began to be lit by the blue sun on one side and the orange on the other. At this point the ship ceased to waver and began to drop rapidly toward the mountains, landing with a scarcely perceptible jar on a level plateau that was just opposite a tremendous talon-like range of peaks. The little plateau upon which we found ourselves seemed to be itself the peak of a mountain, though not as high as the chain opposite—nor could we look down the other side, for another glance showed us that our resting place was not quite the top, but a small ridge had to be climbed first. For a moment now, we rested in shadow, but it was a weird twilight, the greenish tint lingering in the heavens only as a kind of afterglow, giving the effect of strangeness which I have sometimes noted on Earth, after a wild storm has momentarily torn a cleft in the clouds for the zodiacal light to peer through.

  Then as we stood there by the glass walls, our specter-like host floated down toward us from the shimmering upper drapes, and pointing with one of his lustrous tentacles, he called our attention to an open doorway, through which a cool breeze sprang into the ship.

  Jim was the first one through, landing in the moss-like growth of the plateau with one long jump. I followed. Bounding along like a puppy that has been held in confinement, he ran with long leaps and jumps toward the edge of the cliff, where he stopped and waved like a maniac. I caught up with him with such a leap that I almost went over the cliff, while the white-haired figure of the scientist followed with more dignity. But when I looked down into the valley, the unearthly character of this moonscape left me gasping.

  Imagine, if you can, a range of huge silt mountains from which ever-tumbling veils of snow and rock dropped intermittently into a gorge four times deeper than the Grand Canyon with a dull roar. It seemed as I stood there that I was gazing upon a staircase for giants leading down to a bottomless pit of half-fluid mud, and then over it all that weirdly changing sky and finally the first gleams of the blue sun, as it climbed through a knife-slashed pass.

  I was still looking in awestruck silence when Kepling’s voice murmured, “I believe that the scene on the other side just over the ridge is perhaps equally interesting!”

  “How can it be?” Jim gasped.

  “Such is the judgment of our host at any rate. He pointed up that way but you two rushed off too vigorously to even notice his instructions.”

  “Well, we can go up there, but Doc, just look at that pit.”

  “The region is evidently still volcanic,” Kepling mused, picking up a rock.

  “Some push certainly heaved up those mountains. But look at that swamp,” Jim persisted.

  Kepling nodded thoughtfully.

  “I bet it’s full of funny-looking monsters,” I laughed.

  “Not so funny close up,” Jim interrupted. “But let’s take that look at the other side. Personally, I feel like getting some exercise. The only trouble with space travel is that there are so few stopovers and those are so far apart!”

  So with Jim leading the way, we climbed up the rocks leading toward the ridge. Once over the top, however, our leader did a war dance to convince us of his approval of the view, while I turned and smiled at Kepling. The old scientist waved away my offer of assistance, and I, too, leaped over the intervening rocks, where I stopped and slumped down with awestruck eyes. For yawning below us was the cavernous depths of a vast crater where a molten lake boiled and bubbled—the living lava splashing up with livid spurts of hellish splendor in the glowing pit—miles below us. Across from us the opposite walls of the crater were outlined blackly against a carmine sky, the sinking rays of the setting orange sun giving the appearance of a huge conflagration raging down the unseen slopes of the other side, which, having swept through the crater, had left this lake of glowing embers behind.

  Overhead the sky was turning a reddish-purple, while over to one side a huge purplish moon, half-ruby and half-blue, was rising.

  Kepling stopped for a moment on top and then stepped over to the very edge and looked down. I was just admiring the old scientist’s nice sense of balance when I heard him give a sharp cry, saw him throw his body around as if to catch himself, and then go plunging down through the darkness toward that glowing pit. I started to my feet in horror when a sudden convulsion of the rocks made me look down. Imagine my terror to realize that what we had mistaken for a ridge of rocks in our delight at the scene before us was a sleeping dragon—a huge armored creature that had been taking a nap on the crater’s rim. Kepling had been standing on the thing’s back, and therefore had been the first to fall as it moved. So perfectly matched to the rocks had been his protective coloring that we had not noticed him!

  I leapt to his tail, intending to then jump to some lava projections and try to get a glimpse of the old professor before the monster turned on me, but I was too slow. He swished his tail, hurling me unceremoniously into space whence I dashed helplessly against some rocks and started to slide down the cliffs toward that red, bubbling horror. Miraculously, I don’t know how, I kept my senses, digging my heels and fingers into the earth to stop me and clutching what plants I could grasp. At last I caught a gnarled plant growing at the very edge of the long drop into the cauldron. There I swung between the lava cliff and the burning lake, with only one toehold with which to climb back.

  When at last, shivering and perspiring, I finally pulled myself up and lay limply on the black rock, a wail and a roar sent my eyes back to the monster.

  Something was being pulverized into nothingness under the maddened stamps of the great beast, whose gleaming red eyes did not note that a new menace flew through the air at him until it was too late, and a silvery-gleaming, flower-like creature with shimmering tentacles lit upon his back like a giant insect of some terrible, malignant type. With a roar of agony that reverberated from cliff to cliff through that glowing crater, the great animal leaped into the air and headed straight for me—maddened into frenzy by the stinging thing that he could not shake off. Each leap shook the whole mountain as those tons of animal flesh crashed to earth.

  Then, suddenly, with a more ominous roar, I felt the whole cliff tremble, and leaped back just as the entire face of the mountain gave way, carrying with its rush of rocks, like a struggling ant, the brown dragon and the silver thing that still clung to its quivering flanks like a phosphorescent flower …

  For a moment I was too much concerned with racing the breaking rocks on the top of the slide to catch more than a glance of the dragon that roiled under the thunder of the avalanche, but after the dust had at last cleared away from the freshly glowing lava lake, I sat down on the tip of the rim and stared with unseeing eyes into the cauldron.

  Behind me, with its glass walls glittering in the rising rays of the blue sun, the palace-ship, which Jim had nicknamed “the Temple of the Stars,” stood peacefully, waiting for the gleaming master, which would never return. Before me, the ruby color of the cauldron changed subtly through all the shades of lavender to purple as the blue sun climbed higher and the orange sun deepened its glow to the red of a deep garnet. Before me, a few loosened rocks still bounded hollowly down the cliffs …

  Of my companions who had accompanied me over the rim in such high spirits, not a shred remained to tell that they had ever lived. Indeed, seated here upon a giant crater—like a gnat that surveys a mountain gorge—to what end had I struggled so madly to preserve my life, doomed as I was to die on this wild, weird world—or in case I did learn the secret of the ship’s propulsion and fuel—then to wander through space forever alone—the last living creature of my kind?

  “Bob Hunt! Will you wake up, or shall I have to carry you out of here?” I heard Jim’s voice asking impatiently. I opened my eyes suddenly, looking in consternation from the streak of yellow sunshine that was lazily streaming over the classroom floor, back to the very amused eyes of Dr. Kepling.

  “But I thought …”

  “Never mind what you thought! Come on and get moving!”

  “But Jim! We’re still on Earth! And our sun … why, it’s all right! It’s normal—isn’t it?”

  A deep horselaugh greeted this statement from the vicinity of the doorway, where a number of amused students were lingering.

  “Make a fool of yourself if you wish—but count me out!” Jim snapped starting toward the door.

  I picked up my books sheepishly and followed him, apparently deaf to a number of wisecracks that were hurled at me. Only when we were nearing the house did he deign to notice me.

  “You picked out one of the most interesting lectures of the year to sleep on, you poor nut.”

  “I know—it was about Nova Persei.”

  “Oh, you did hear some of it, did you?”

  “Of course I did.” Then after a moment, “You know, Jim, I have a funny hunch that those condensations were the remains of planets which were consumed by the wave of fire which the main sun threw off when it exploded.”

  “Sleep all through a lecture and then presume to know something about it, eh? Well, Mr. Would-Be Scientist, get this—the collision theories fit the facts of Nova Persei better than the explosion theory.”

  After that I subsided. Only in front of the house, I laid a hand on his arm.

  “Are you still too peeved to play our usual set of tennis this afternoon?”

  “Sorry, old sleepyhead, but I have that calculus quiz coming off this afternoon.”

  “Oh, the questions—no one stole them?”

  “Well, aren’t you just brimming over with the most amazing ideas? Who would be fool enough to steal calculus questions?” Then with a laugh—“Say, boy, I only wish that I could answer that dumb question in the affirmative—but there is no such luck.”

  [Author’s note: I realize that there are inconsistencies in this dream of Bob Turner’s, but who has ever heard of an entirely consistent dream?]

  C(ATHERINE) L(UCILLE) MOORE (1911–87) was an American writer who authored and coauthored more than seventy-five stories in SF magazines between 1932 and 1956. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1911 and “picked up an early love of reading from her mother” (Bloom 141). Moore was particularly fond of SF and fantasy, especially the John Carter and Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Elliot 46). As a literature student at Indiana University, Moore contributed frequently to the Vagabond, a student-run magazine, and fellow contributors praised her as “the most promising prose writer who has been at Indiana for some time” (Liptak, “Many”). Eventually, the Great Depression forced her to exchange college for business school and then to pursue work as “the secretary to the vice president of the Fletcher Trust Co.,” a bank in downtown Indianapolis (Davin, Pioneers 77). Moore rediscovered SF in 1931 when she came across a copy of Amazing during a lunch break. It wasn’t long before she published her first story, “Shambleau,” in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales under the name C. L. Moore. According to Moore, “I used the initials, ‘C. L.,’ simply because I didn’t want it to be known at the bank that I had an extra source of income,” something that could have led to the termination of her employment during the Depression (Elliot 47).

  In the 1940s, Moore became one of the few women to make her living from SF writing. Her success was enhanced by her partnership with Henry Kuttner, a fellow genre author who “wrote a fan letter to Mr. C. L. Moore,” only to learn that Moore was a woman (Bloom 141). The correspondence between Moore and Kuttner led to both an artistic and a romantic collaboration. The couple published their first coauthored story, “Quest of the Starstone,” in the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales. After marrying in 1940, they “decided to write on a full-time basis,” combining their earnings and making just “enough to get by” (Elliot 46). Living in Los Angeles and writing under their own names as well as pseudonyms, including Lawrence O’Donnell and Lewis Padgett, Moore and Kuttner greatly increased their output and, through shrewd negotiations with various SF editors, also increased the amount they were paid for their stories. When word rates for SF authors began to stagnate in the 1950s, Moore and Kuttner attended the University of Southern California, where they completed their degrees before taking on work as scriptwriters for Warner Brothers. After Kuttner’s death in 1958, Moore continued working for Warner until 1963, when she married Reggie Thomas and retired from professional writing.

  Unlike many other early SF authors, Moore was never lost from SF history. Even after she quit writing she was a regular participant in the Tom and Terri Pinckard SF literary salon, whose members included A. E. Van Vogt, Robert Bloch, Larry Niven, and Norman Spinrad. In 1973 the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society honored her with a Forry Award, and four years later she received a Count Dracula Society Award for Literature. In 1981 Moore won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Gandalf Grand Master Award, thereby becoming the eighth and final Grand Master of Fantasy. She was nominated as a Grand Master of Science Fiction, but her husband asked that the nomination be withdrawn due to Moore’s advanced Alzheimer’s disease. In 1998 she was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and in 2004 she and Kuttner received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

  Moore’s stories for Weird Tales in the 1930s proved to be some of the most highly regarded the magazine ever published. This is particularly true of “Shambleau.” Legend has it that the editor, Farnsworth Wright, “closed Weird Tales’ offices for the day in celebration” upon reading Moore’s story (Liptak, “Many”). In the May 1937 issue of his magazine, Wright noted that “Shambleau” was one of the most important discoveries he had ever made, and, in a letter printed a few pages later, a reader named David Beams enthused that Moore’s tale “was equal to Edgar Allen Poe at his best” (638). The appeal of “Shambleau” to Weird Tales readers seems relatively straightforward. The multi-genre magazine specialized in bizarre SF stories that explored the dark side of the engineering paradigm central to both SF and the greater American imagination at that time. Following, as it does, the misadventures of a human adventurer whose attempt to rescue a Martian damsel in distress goes disastrously awry, “Shambleau” warns readers that the dream of human control over the material world is, at best, just that—a dream that will inevitably be undone by the complexities of a vast and potentially hostile universe.