"The Demons of Darkside."
By Leigh Brackett (1915-78; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; the IMDb HERE; and TV Tropes HERE).
First appearance: Startling Stories, January 1941.
Illustrator uncredited.
Reprinted in Science Fiction Yearbook, No. 3 (1969) (today's text).
Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).
Short story (11 pages).
(Note: Text very faded but legible.)
"They were all going to die, here in the dark and the whispers."
ONCE again we have the age-old situation of an individual, usually a man, who's innocent of a crime but of necessity is on the run from the law (certainly Alfred Hitchcock liked the idea). Barry knows he's innocent, as is his lady love Alice, but proving it is just about impossible since the only person who could clear them is missing and presumed dead. To make matters worse, the solution to Barry's problem lies in a planet that seems to drive men insane. Theseus may have had the Minotaur to contend with, but, unlike Barry, he never had to struggle with "demons" that could leave him with a broken mind . . .
Low tech:
The spaceships in our story don't seem to have any kind of radar, which is understandable since, at the time, radar was still a highly classified military program. (Wikipedia HERE.)
Typos: "McDougal"; "MacDougall"; "MacDaugal's"; "a burtal desire".
Main characters:
~ Barry Garth ("As for himself, he was no diamond-studded hero. He wanted to live"), Alice Webster ("Not all the population of this rotten sinkhole put together added up to Alice Webster"), Wilsey Stevens ("He had woven an unbreakable chain of evidence around them"), Sandy MacDougal ("Ye've the kind of guts I like, lad. Sorry I can’t help ye"), Brent ("I'm going for what you were, before you lost your nerve"), and Akal ("He heard Akal’s thought rhythms, heavy with greed and hate, but most of all, greed").
References:
- "The slow Venusian dusk cloaked the single shoddy street. The fever-mists crawled up out of the swamp, and some faraway scaly beast sent up a hissing scream. Blue mud reeked and squelched under Garth’s boots":
Leigh Brackett opts for the "Venus as a swamp" version. What a difference eight decades make. See Wikipedia (HERE) and (HERE).
- According to the ISFDb's "Leigh Brackett's Solar System" list (HERE), our author romped through the then-known Solar System, setting stories in or on Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and Jupiter, with Mars being her favorite venue.
- "Darkside" [on Mercury] "was one of the impenetrable mysteries of the System. No one knew what existed under the blanket of everlasting shadow and freakish magnetic currents—except that men who went there never came back!":
Eighty-four years on, we know a lot more about Mercury than Brackett and contemporary scientists did (HERE), but for a while there the fictionalized Mercury offered a rich field to play in for SF authors (HERE):
"Fictional depictions of Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System, have gone through three distinct phases. Before much was known about the planet, it received scant attention. Later, when it was incorrectly believed that it was tidally locked with the Sun creating a permanent dayside and nightside" [that's the situation in Brackett's tale], "stories mainly focused on the conditions of the two sides and the narrow region of permanent twilight between. Since that misconception was dispelled in the 1960s, the planet has again received less attention from fiction writers, and stories have largely concentrated on the harsh environmental conditions that come from the planet's proximity to the Sun."
- "I wasn’t cut out for a smuggler, nor a damned tramp salvage pirate!":
"Space Pirates is a science fiction trope that just won't go away. The image of pirate freebooters on the high seas is just too romantic for words, science fiction writers can't resist. Alas, in a scientifically accurate world, they are more or less impossible, much like space fighters and for similar reasons. There ain't no stealth in space, so it is practically impossible for a fat space galleon to be surprised in mid trip by a sinister space corsair flying the Jolly Roger. Or a rude surprise for a space merchant ship whose trajectory passes too near the Somali Asteroids for that matter. It would be several orders of magnitude easier for the 'piracy' to take the form of grand theft from the merchant's warehouses on the ground." (Atomic Rockets HERE.)
- "Yttrium":
This same element turned up in "The Sheriff of Thorium Gulch" (HERE).
- "You call us crystals. We're carbon, as you are, but static. We came into being with this planet and we'll go out of being with it. We neither die nor change. But we can’t build up vibration of the proper frequency to enter your conscious minds." (See Atomic Rockets HERE.)
- "the vibrations of your subconscious minds, which seem to be a storehouse for impulses not permitted in your conscious minds":
"Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered conscious-ness." (Wikipedia HERE and HERE.)
Resources:
- A much less serious treatment of space piracy is Jame McConnell's "Grandma Perkins and the Space Pirates" (HERE).
- Another Leigh Brackett story that we've examined in more detail is "Last Call from Sector 9G" (HERE).
The bottom line:
Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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