They Came From Outer Space

by Jim Wynorski (editor)

  Then he turned back to Cliff. “I am dying,” he announced simply, as if repeating his words for the Earthman. Again to his face came the faint, tired smile.

  Cliff’s tongue was locked. He just stared, hoping for light. Klaatu seemed to read his mind.

  “I see you don’t understand,” he said. “Although unlike us, Gnut has great powers. When the wing was built and the lectures began, there came to him a striking inspiration. Acting on it at once, in the night, he assembled this apparatus . . . and now he has made me again, from my voice, as recorded by your people. As you must know, a given body makes a characteristic sound.

  He constructed an apparatus which reversed the recording process, and from the given sound made the characteristic body.”

  Cliff gasped. So that was it!

  “But you needn’t die!” Cliff exclaimed suddenly, eagerly. “Your voice recording was taken when you stepped out of the ship, while you were well!

  You must let me take you to a hospital! Our doctors are very skillful!”

  Hardly perceptibly, Klaatu shook his head.

  “You still don’t understand,” he said slowly and more faintly. “Your recording had imperfections. Perhaps very slight ones, but they doom the product. A]l of Gnut’s experiments died in a few minutes, he tells me’ . .

  . and so must I.”

  Suddenly, then, Cliff understood the origin of the “experiments.” He remembered that on the day the wing was opened a Smithsonian official had lost a brief case containing film strips recording the speech of various world fauna. There, on that table, was a brief case! And the Stillwells must have been made from strips kept in the table drawer!

  But his heart was heavy. He did not want this stranger to die. Slowly there dawned on him an important idea. He explained it with growing excitement.

  “You say the recording was imperfect, and of course it was. But the cause of that lay in the use of an imperfect recording apparatus. So if Gnut, in his reversal of the process, had used exactly the same pieces of apparatus that your voice was recorded with, the imperfections could be studied, canceled out, and you’d live, and not die!”

  As the last words left his lips, Gnut whipped around like a cat and gripped him tight. A truly human excitement was shining in the metal muscles of his face.

  “Get me that apparatus!” he ordered—in clear and perfect English! He started pushing Cliff toward the door, but Klaatu raised his hand.

  “There is no hurry,” Klaatu said gently; “it is too late for me. What is your name, young man?”

  Cliff told him.

  “Stay with me to the end,” he asked. Klaatu closed his eyes and rested; then, smiling just a little, but not opening his eyes, he added: “And don’t be sad, for I shall now perhaps live again . . . and it will be due to you.

  There is no pain—“ His voice was rapidly growing weaker. Cliff, for all the questions he had, could only look on, dumb. Again Klaatu seemed to be aware of his thoughts.

  “I know,” he said feebly, “I know. We have so much to ask each other.

  About your civilization . . . and Gnut’s—“ “And yours,” said Cliff.

  “And Gnut’s,” said the gentle voice again. “Perhaps . . . some day

  .

  . .

  perhaps I will be back—“ He lay without moving. e lay so for a long time, and at last Cliff knew that he was dead. Tears came to his eyes; in only these few minutes he had come to love this man. He looked at Gnut. The robot knew, too, that he was dead, but no tears filled his red-lighted eyes; they were fixed on Cliff, and for once the young man knew what was in his mind.

  “Gnut,” he announced earnestly, as if taking a sacred oath, “I’ll get the original apparatus. I’ll get it. Every piece of it, the exact same things.”

  Without a word, Gnut conducted him to the port. He made the sounds that unlocked it. As it opened, a noisy crowd of Earthmen outside trampled each other in a sudden scramble to get out of the building.

  The wing was lighted. Cliff stepped down the ramp.

  The next two hours always in Cliff’s memory had a dreamlike quality.

  It was as if that mysterious laboratory with the peacefully sleeping dead man was the real and central part of his life, and his scene with the noisy men with whom he talked a gross and barbaric interlude. He stood not far from the ramp. He told only part of his story. He was believed. He waited quietly while all the pressure which the highest officials in the land could exert was directed toward obtaining for him the apparatus the robot had demanded.

  When it arrived, he carried it to the floor of the little vestibule behind the port. Gnut was there, as if waiting. In his arms he held the slender body of the second Klaatu. Tenderly he passed him out to Cliff, who took him without a word, as if all this had been arranged.

  It seemed to be the parting.

  Of all the things Cliff had wanted to say to Klaatu, one remained imperatively present in his mind. Now, as the green metal robot stood framed in the great green ship, he seized his chance.

  “Gnut,” he said earnestly, holding carefully the limp body in his arms, “you must do one thing for me. Listen carefully. I want you to tell your master—the master yet to come—that what happened to the first Klaatu was an accident, for which all Earth is immeasurably sorry.

  Will you do that?”

  “I have known it,” the robot answered gently.

  “But will you promise to tell your master—just those words—as soon as he is arrived?”

  “You misunderstand,” said Gnut, still gently, and quietly spoke four more words. As Cliff heard them a mist passed over his eyes and his body went numb.

  As he recovered and his eyes came back to focus he saw the great ship disappear. It just suddenly was not there any more. He fell back a step or two. In his ears, like great bells, ran Gnut’s last words.

  Never, never was he to disclose them till the day he came to die.

  “You misunderstand,” the mighty robot had said. “I am the master.”

  THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL Twentieth Century-Fox 1951

  92 minutes. Produced by Julian Blaustein; directed by Robert Wise; screenplay by Edmund H. North; director of photography, Leo Tover; art directors, Lyle Wheeler and Addison Hehr; special photographic effects by Fred Sersen; music by Bernard Herrmann; set decorations by Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter; edited by William Reynolds; makeup by Ben Nye; wardrobe direction by Charles LeMaire; Klaatu’s costume designed by Perkins Bailey; costumes designed by Travilla; sound by Arthur H.

  Kirbach and Harry M. Leonard.

  Cast Michael Rennie (Klaatu), Patricia Neal (Helen Benson), Hugh Marlowe (Tom Stevens), Sam Jaffe (Prof. Barnhardt), Billy Gray (Bobby Benson), Frances Bavier (Mrs. Barley), Lock Martin (Gort), Drew Pearson (Himself), Harry Lauter (Platoon Leader), Gabriel Heatter, H.

  V. Kaltenborn and Elmer Davis (Newscasters) .

  THE FOG HORN

  by Ray Bradbury filmed as

  THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS

  (Warner Brothers, 1953)

  When Ray Bradbury penned “The Fog Horn” for the Saturday Evening Post in 1952, he unknowingly opened Up a Pandora’s Box-full of monstrous behemoths that would be attacking theater audiences for years to come.

  His poignant tale of a giant lizard hopelessly infatuated by an inanimate lighthouse served as the springboard for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the first of many dinosaur-on-the-loose films that thrill-seeking audiences devoured during the 1950s and early 1960s.

  Although the motion picture concentrated mainly on scenes of the ten-story creature wreaking havoc in downtown Manhattan, Bradbury’s brief but effective story is depicted beautifully in a short four-minute sequence.

  Shots of the giant lizard violently caressing the shadowy stone structure capture superbly the author’s masterful blend of pathos and the bizarre.

  Part of the credit for this unusually fine segment must go to special effects wizard, Ray Harryhausen. Employing a difficult and time-co
nsuming technique called stop-motion animation, Harryhausen posed a three-foot dinosaur model, exposed a frame of film, moved the lizard replica almost imperceptibly, shot another frame, and so on.

  When run normally through a projector, the speeding film breathed lifelike movement into the reptile model.

  It took approximately seven months to complete the elaborate special effects and incorporate them into the live-action footage, which, by comparison, had been shot over a mere two-week period. Then, on June 13, 1953, The Beast struck terror in over fifteen hundred theaters across America. By the end of the summer it had earned in excess of five million dollars—more than twenty times its original production cost!

  Needless to say, giant monsters from around the globe came out of hiding for a piece of the action. Britain unleashed both The Giant Behemoth and the prehistoric Georgia, the United States had its oversize ants in Them, Italy gave us the slimy blob Caltiki, and Japan laid claim to perhaps the most enduring creature of all time, Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

  Had Ray Bradbury only known....

  THE FOG HORN

  by Ray Bradbury

  OUT THERE in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

  “It’s a lonely life, but you’re used to it now, aren’t you?” asked McDunn.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re a good talker, thank the Lord.”

  “Well, it’s your turn on land tomorrow,” he said, smiling, “to dance the ladies and drink gin.”

  “What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?”

  “On the mysteries of the sea.” McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn’t a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

  “The mysteries of the sea,” said McDunn thoughtfully. “You know, the ocean’s the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there.

  Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock’s tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship.

  Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?”

  I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

  “Oh, the sea’s full.” McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He

  had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. “For all our engines and

  so-called submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set

  foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms

  there, and know real terror. Think of it, it’s still the year

  300,000

  Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.”

  “Yes, it’s an old world.”

  “Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you .” We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there’d be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

  “Sounds like an animal, don’t it?” McDunn nodded to himself. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

  And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,” he said, studying the murk and fog, “something comes to visit the lighthouse.”

  “The swarms of fish like you said?”

  “No, this is something else. I’ve put off telling you because you might think I’m daft. But tonight’s the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar’s marked right from last year, tonight’s the night it comes. I won’t go into detail, you’ll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there.

  If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights, I won’t question or blame you. It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.”

  Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

  “One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns.

  I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”’

  The Fog Horn blew.

  “I made up that story,” said McDunn quietly, “to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes....”

  “But—“ I said.

  “Sssst!” said McDunn. “There!” He nodded out to the Deeps.

  Somethingœ was swimming toward the lighthouse tower.

  It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the raveling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, fiat and quiet, the color of gray mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-colored, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then—not a body—but more neck and more!

  The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean.

  There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I

  estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

  I don’t know what I said. I said something.
<
br />   “Steady, boy, steady,” whispered McDunn.

  “It’s impossible!” I said.

  “No, Johnny, we’re impossible. It’s like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn’t changed. It’s us and the land that’ve changed, become impossible. Us!”

  It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape.

  One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk held high and sending a message in primeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

  “It’s a dinosaur of some sort!” I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

  “Yes, one of the tribe.”

  “But they died out!”

  “No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps.

  Isn’t that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps.

  There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  “Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. Besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.”

  “But here, why does it come here?”

  The next moment I had my answer.

  The Fog Horn blew. And the monster answered.

  A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself.

  Lonely and vast and far away.

  The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

  “Now,” whispered McDunn, “do you know why it comes here?”

  I nodded.

  “All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it’s a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it’s the last of its kind. I sort of think that’s true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you’re alone, a]l alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.