Devolution

Edmond Hamilton Devolution

Introduction

Edmond Hamilton was one of the most prolific and popular authors of science fiction before the Golden Age. His first professionally published story appeared in 1926 in Weird Tales, and it was in this magazine that he first made his reputation, writing a low-tech hybrid of science fiction and fantasy dubbed the 'weird scientific' tale. Hamilton's stories are fast-oaced and action-packed, cast with heroic scientists and space explorers and featuring menaces of such colossal proportions-evolution gone awry, interstellar invasion, planets on collision courses-that fans nicknamed him 'World Wrecker Hamilton.' Some of Hamilton's best work from these years was collected in 1936 in The Horror on the Asteroid, one of the earliest appearances of pulp science fiction in book form. Standout works from this period include The Time Raiders, a time-travel tale about a crack army of top soldiers assembled from different eras to fight a threat to civilization, and the stories of the Interstellar Patrol, collected as Crashing Suns and Outside the Universe, about a pangalactic space brigade that protects galactic civilization from nonstop challenges to its existence. Hamilton's renown as a writer of thrilling space opera earned him the slot to write most of the lead novels for the science fiction hero pulp Captain Future, under his own name and the pseudonym Brett Sterling, and his affiliation with this magazine eventually earned him work writing for the Superman comics. He also wrote detective fiction and occasionally, under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson, tales of straight horror, some of which have been collected in The Vampire Master. Hamilton was one of the few early writers to adapt to the changing demands of science fiction in the years after World War II. His novels The Haunted Stars, A Yank at Valhalla, The Star Kings, and City at the World's End are notable for their fully drawn characterizations and focus on human moods and motives. Some of his best short fiction from this time appears in What's It Like Out There? His Starwolf novels, Weapon from Beyond, The Closed World, and World of the Starwolves, are ranked as some of the best space operas of the postwar years.

Edmond Hamilton Devolution

Ross had ordinarily the most even of tempers, but four days of canoe travel in the wilds of North Quebec had begun to rasp it. On this, their fourth stop on the bank of the river to camp for the night, he lost control and for a few moments stood and spoke to his two companions in blistering terms.

His black eyes snapped and his darkly unshaven handsome young face worked as he spoke. The two biologists listened to him without reply at first. Gray's blond young countenance was indignant but Woodin, the older biologist, just listened impassively with his gray eyes level on Ross's angry face.

When Ross stopped for breath, Woodin's calm voice struck in. 'Are you finished?'

Ross gulped as though about to resume his tirade, then abruptly got hold of himself. 'Yes, I'm finished,' he said sullenly.

'Then listen to me,' said Woodin, like a middle-aged father admonishing a sulky child.

'You're working yourself up for nothing. Neither Gray nor I have made one complaint yet. Neither of us has once said that we disbelieve what you told us.'

'You haven't said you disbelieve, no!' Ross exclaimed with anger suddenly re- flaring. 'But don't you suppose I can tell what you're thinking?

'You think I told you a fairy story about the things I saw from my plane, don't you? You think I dragged you two up here on the wildest wild-goose chase, to look for incredible creatures that could never have existed. You believe that, don't you?'

'Oh, damn these mosquitoes!' said Gray, slapping viciously at his neck and staring with unfriendly eyes at the aviator.

Woodin took command. 'We'll go over this after we've made camp. Jim, get out the dufflebags. Ross, will you rustle firewood?'

They both glared at him and at each other, but grudgingly they obeyed. The tension eased for the time.

By the time darkness fell on the little riverside clearing, the canoe was drawn up on the bank, their trim little balloon-silk tent had been erected, and a fire crackled in front of it. Gray fed the fire with fat knots of pine while Woodin cooked over it coffee, hot cakes, and the inevitable bacon.

The firelight wavered feebly up toward the tall trunks of giant hemlocks that walled the little clearing on three sides. It lit up their three khaki-clad, stained figures and the irregular white block of the tent. It gleamed out there on the riffles of the McNorton, chuckling softly as it flowed on toward the Little Whale.

They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.

Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.

'All right,' he said, 'now we'll settle this argument we were having.'

Ross looked a little shamefaced. 'I guess I got too hot about it,' he said subduedly. Then added, 'But all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me.'

Woodin shook his head calmly. 'No, we don't, Ross. When you told us that you'd seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you.

'If we hadn't, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?'

'I know, I know,' said the aviator unsatisfiedly. 'You think I saw something queer and you're taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after.

'But you don't believe what I've told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don't you?'

For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. 'After all, Ross,' he said indirectly, 'one's eyes can play tricks when you're only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up.'

'Glimpsing them?' echoed Ross. 'I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.

'It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking south in a hurry for I'd been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson's Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars.'Then, down there in a clearing by the river, I saw something glisten and saw- the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I stared down at them.

'They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them and when I saw them they were gliding across that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.

'Then they disappeared under the trees. If there'd been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles, I'd have landed and looked for them, but there wasn't and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come up here by canoe to search for them. But I don't think now you've ever fully believed me.'

Woodin looked thoughtfully into the fire. 'I think you saw something queer, all right, some queer form of life. That's why I was willing to come up on this search.

'But things such as you describe, jelly-like, translucent, gliding over the ground like that-there's been nothing