What to see on
vulcan

For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World...

dangerous trees on vulcan

...Kah made a sign of warning a little later, and they halted.

"We are near the evil ones' citadel," he whispered.  "But the screaming trees will instantly give warning unless we are careful."

Captain Future saw ahead of them an extensive forest of the strange trees, their big leaves hanging limp.

"Walk as softly and slowly as you can," Kah was warning.  "Any sudden movement will set the trees in uproar."

He led the way into the weird forest, moving on tiptoe... 

Captain Future thought he understood now, that the weird trees were so highly sensitive to vibrations of the ground that such vibrations set off their hideous clamor...

Edmond Hamilton, Outlaw World (1945)

>>  Guess The World

a vista on small, dense vulcan

...she told me about the weird, dog-like creatures.  The male, exuding a scent - if you could call it that - a vapor which in the air bursts into spontaneous combustion as it combines with the atmospheric oxygen.

How long we ran through what proved to be a maze of passages in the honey-combed ground, I have no idea.  Several Earth miles, doubtless.  Several times we stopped to rest, with the breezes tossing about us as I listened, tense, to be sure the Orgs were not coming.  Then at last we emerged; and at the rocky exit I stood staring, amazed.

...From where we stood the ground sloped down so that we were looking out over the top of a wide spread of lush, tangled forest.  Weird jungle, rank and wild with spindly trees of of fantastic shapes, heavy with pods and exotic flowers and tangled with masses of vines.  Beyond it, far ahead of us there seemed a line of little metal mountains at the horizon; and to the left an Earth-mile or so away, the forest was broken to disclose a winding thread of little river.  It shone phosphorescent green in the half light.  The storm was over now, but still the colors lingered in the cloud sky - a glorious palette of rainbow hues up there that tinted the forest-top...

Ray Cummings, The Flame Breathers (Planet Stories, March 1943)

>>  Guess The World - Open

fatal attraction of the hot side of vulcan

the Baimers surround the Earthmen

…I lay in my dark bark-tent during the sleep-period later on, and a monstrous thought was growing in my head, entangling my soft brain in sinuous, intangible tentacles.  I could not evict it.  It stayed.  It drummed at me, this thought:  To the Rim, in the Sixth Brightness, you will now go.  Toward your destiny, toward where the Light Giants cavort, on the Edge of the Molten Land.

Go! In the Sixth Brightness!

On that insidious thought I was drugged to sleep – and wakened hours later with Will’s cry blasting in my ear.

“Sid!  Sid!  You have to get up – they’re leaving us!”

I was on my feet, my brain crystallizing into cold, calculating thought.  I dressed in my whipcords, pulled my heavy shirt on, then faced Will…

“I know,” I told him grimly.  “And by the Lord, they have to be stopped.  They’re on their way to – hell…”

The sky was a madhouse of light.  It was the Sixth Brightness.

I looked up Oro Tarkid, but already he was moving off, at the head of his tribespeople.  The village was folded up, gone as if it had never existed, and there were nothing but carts, and solemn-faced Baimers, moving with giant pace off toward the brightest, fieriest spot on the horizon.

“Oro Tarkid!” I yelled, panting beside his giant stride.

He looked down at me from his great height, and it seemed as if for a moment he had to puzzle out who I was…

“The Time has come,” he said gently.  “We must go now.  Thus it has been for seventeen years of our time.  Always we move – toward the Rim.”  He paused, looked at the Rim, and I thought I saw a deadly fear twist his flat face.  But it passed…

He did not look at me, but at the Rim.  The titanic glory of those Sun-gorged flames seemed to light his countenance with a spiritual, inner well-being.

He raised his massive arm, shook it like a crusader.

“We shall go,” his voice thundered out in a paean of triumph.  “We go – to our destiny!”

I could keep up with him no longer.  I dropped behind.  I fell to a sitting position, sobbing in great breaths of air, consumed with a rage that burned as fierce as the Hell toward which they were moving.  I sat there, and watched them move off, swiftly, diminishing toward a great spume of cascading light on the Rim…

Ross Rocklynne, The Bubble Dwellers (Planet Stories, Fall 1945)

>>  Guess The World - Open

a swarm of electric beings on vulcan

Out of the silence, a vast rumbling sound rose like magnified thunder. Mark saw Carston fumble with his radio-phone then peer all about into the haze.

"Blitzees coming!" he yelled into his instrument.

Everyone stopped. Mark followed Carston's line of sight, but he couldn't see a thing.

"Swarm coming from the left!" Carston yelled again.

The Commander moved hurriedly along the line. "Lie down everyone, face to the left! Upend your sleds and if you value your lives, stay behind them!"

For a second all was confusion as the men flung themselves to the powdery soil; then a metal barrier sprang up as the sleds came end to end. Still nothing could be seen.

Suddenly then they came. The air was blue from crackling sparks as dozens of the Blitzees struck the sleds with the impact of bullets. A sound like the humming of millions of hornets was in their ears, as the greater part of the swarm passed overhead. Mark had a confused vision of electric blue streaks that writhed and zig-zagged, landed and leaped again, propelling themselves blindly. As suddenly as it had come, the danger was over.

The men arose somewhat shakily.  The ground around them was strewn with the snake-like Blitzees.  Mark picked one up and found it to be metallic, about five inches in length, transparent blue in color.  The head was triangular, eyeless; along its back Mark felt a thin, wiry sort of filament!

“They’re like living bolts of electricity,” Carston told him.  “They seem to short-circuit themselves when they strike the sleds.”  The caravan continued. 

Hours later they arrived at their destination, a small rise in the terrain before them, covered with glittering crystals in huge, boulder-like clumps.  The sides of the little hill was [sic] composed of the same ore, apparently in limitless amount.

But as if guarding it against them, rows of reddy-glowing Vulcs stood motionless, elephantine,  facing them.  Mark couldn’t tell whether they were friendly or hostile.  To him there was no expression to be seen on those fluid heads…

Albert dePina and Henry Hasse, Alcatraz of the Starways (Planet Stories, May 1943)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

forced labour on vulcan

THEY were outside then and Luke essayed a deep breath, a breath that was chokingly acrid in his throat.

"Waugh!" he coughed, and spat. One of the guards laughed.

Any foul epithet that might have formed on Fenton's lips was forgotten in the sight that met his eyes. A barren and rugged terrain stretched out from the landing stage, a land utterly desolate of vegetation and incapable of supporting life. Pockmarked with craters and seamed with yawning fissures from which dense vapors curled, it was seemingly devoid of habitation. And the scene was visible only in the lurid half light of flame-shot mists that hung low over all. In the all too near distance, awesomely vast and ruddy columns of fire rose and fell with monotonous regularity. For the first time, Luke experienced something of the superstitious fear exhibited by even the most hardened criminals when faced with a term at Vulcan's Workshop. That term, to them, meant horror and misery, torture and swift death. And he, too, was ready to believe it now.

He was prodded down an incline that led from the landing stage to the rocks below. The guards from the ethership, he saw, remained behind on the platform and there were new guards awaiting him below. Husky fellows, these were, in strange bulky clothing and armed with the highest powered dart guns. The other prisoners from the vessel were already down there, a huddled and frightened mass—a squashed pile, almost—silent now and watchful of their jailers.

Harl Vincent, Vulcan's Workshop (Astounding, June 1932)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

fast growth on vulcan

As they approached, Vulcan filled their window, a great smooth curve, its blue color lightening to green. Norman switched off the counteractive and cut in the landing rockets.

When Keren's exotic perfume entered the room again, the land below was a map of verdant plains, rolling mountains and glassy seas. Quickly it swelled to jungle and flashing water and, with a champagne tingle in his blood, Norman dropped toward an open well of meadow in the trees.

His excitement, however, was tinged with sadness. Johnny should be here now. They had dropped upon a score of unknown worlds together. Now he landed without his partner, in a last-hope venture to save that partner's life.

The green vegetation was a colorful contrast against the bright yellow of dead grass. They would have to be careful about fire, Norman knew. He'd seen that thick grass on other Sun-tropical worlds; it burned fast as gunpowder.

This close to the Sun, Vulcan probably had a constant wind. The gravity seemed approximately the same as Earth's. He plugged in the spectroscope to test the air and as he glanced out the window at the intake valve a slow chill trickled down his back.

It wasn't only the wind moving the grass outside. The grass was growing.

Dorothy and Keren came to the window. As they watched, the grass beside the hull rose two inches.

Carl Selwyn, The Citadel of Death (Planet Stories, Fall 1944)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

trace of a buried citadel on vulcan

…They crossed the end of that blackened strip, Curt and Otho hastening over the hot rocks, Grag plodding stolidly, Simon gliding ahead.

Before them the fern jungle rose into barren olive-colored hills, growing dark as the dusk deepened.  Almost at once Newton noticed something on the slope of the nearest hill.  It was a raw lumpy scar where a landslide had recently occurred.

“Simon, look at that landslide!  Notice anything?”

The Brain hovered, his lens-eyes surveying the dusky hillside.  “Yes, the outline.  Definitely unnatural.”

Otho and Grag were staring now, too.  “I don’t see anything unnatural about it,” boomed the metal giant.

“It covers a building that stood on that hillside,” Newton informed him.  “Look at the symmetry of it, even masked by soil – the contral cupola, the two wings.”

Otho’s bright eyes flashed.  “The citadel Carlin mentioned?”

“Perhaps.  Let’s have a look.”

They moved on.  In a brief time they were climbing the slope to that great lumpy scar of new soil.

Newton looked back down at the jungle.  No one had followed them out of it onto the bare slope.  The giant ferns stretched far away and he could catch the tawny gleam of Yellow Lake in the distant dusk…

Edmond Hamilton, Children of the Sun (Startling Stories, May 1950)

>>  Guess The World - Fifth Series

glowing life on vulcan

IT WAS as though they stood upon a great, smoothly-curved mountain top.

Overhead showed the black of space’s night, with the hard glow of all the myriad stars, like spangles sewn haphazard in strings and clusters upon black velvet. At twenty degrees from zenith glowed the little orb of Venus, a silver farthing shedding soft white light upon them, and farther away and almost overhead the green dab that was Mother Earth. By Venus-light they made out the flat gray uniformity on which they stood and which extended around them and their craft on every hand —shaping into a smooth arc as it gained distance, without a dint or hummock to relieve. Away and away it curved, for furlongs that seemed small for the clearness of vision and lack of surface-modification, until it was lost in light. 

Light—an unbroken circle of it, pinky-red as blazing coals upon a home hearth. The mountain in space on which they seemed to stand was ringed about with that pink radiance. It was as if the sun were about to rise, no matter which way you looked—rather an unbroken ring of suns, ready to move forward and upward as one around the full sweep of the horizon.  

(...)

...“What’s that little patch of light, sir?”

“Eh?” said Jeffords, and then he, too, saw it—a moving shimmer of orange that seemed to play around their feet like a beam from a colored lamp.

FOR a moment, it paused at Paul’s toe and they made out its shape—a sort of luminous tadpole, a little oval the size of a pigeon’s egg with a vibrating steak like a tail. Then it was sliding quickly around the entire metal sole of the shoe, and finally away.

“It’s alive, intelligent,” exclaimed Jeffords. “Follow it.”

They ran, light and sure-footed on their magnetized boots, but the beam easily kept ahead, taxing their utmost powers to keep up. More moving lights seemed to break out ahead.

“Look, a whole swarm,” panted Paul, and a moment later their little guide was lost among its mates. Pausing on the edge of the bright, dancing array, the two Terrestrials stared in uncomprehending wonder.

There were scores, perhaps hundreds, of the bright little tadpoles, each moving independently of the others. Paul stooped and tried to pick up the nearest of them. It struggled under his pressing fingers, then slipped away as if greased.

“It hasn’t any substance,” reported the youth. “It’s like light, or a moving stain of color. What are they?”

“Living, intelligent beings,” repeated Jeffords, also genuinely excited. “Look at those diagrams yonder.”

He pointed. Several steps away stretched a row of rectangular figures, like sketches or geometrical designs. Each was perhaps three feet long by two wide, and each had one or more breaks in its boundaries. Through these breaks as through doors, the little tadpole-creatures flickered in and out. Carefully skirting the excited throng of beams, Paul and Jeffords approached the rectangular delineations.

Beyond the first row, they now saw, were other rows, drawn in purple, lavender, green, red—all colors, some shining as with phosphorescence, others reflecting the soft radiance of Venus overhead, still others flat and dull.

(...)

“Steady, sir,” said Paul at the same moment. “Something’s coming—something big and three-dimensional.”

Both he and Jeffords looked away across the little diagram-city. It was in the middle distance, a great moving lump like a legless elephant in size, and shining as with brick-red inner flame.

“The fire-thing,” came the quick, worried warning through the thought-interpreter. “It feeds upon our lives—we must flee. You say you are friends. Take friendly warning, then.”

Paul’s hand slid to his belt and caught the handle of his holstered automatic. His young eyes were fearless as they watched the approach of the new creature. Jeffords gazed also, the contemplatic scientist as usual.

The details of the shining shape were clearer now as it came humping and hurrying closer. It had no head or legs, unless the sheeny rippling of its underside was a succession of limb-motions too fast for eye to follow. Its bulk swelled upward, like a fiery tortoise-shell, but seemed to bend and quiver like jelly. The inner light waxed and waned as if to the pulse of a powerful heart. The glow it shed lighted up the gray, smooth plain for many yards around.

“Look,” said Paul tensely. “It’s at the other edge of the city—eating those poor little bugs!”

IT WAS. A scurrying little pool of colors showed where some of the tadpole-people had been overtaken. The front of the blister-like nemesis swelled and elongated, like the pseudopod of an amoeba. The extension wiped an end across the muddle of tiny fugitives, and they were no more.

Dennis Clive [John Russell Fearn], The Flat Folk of Vulcan (Future Fiction, November 1940)

>>  Guess The World - Fifth Series

Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
Vulcan here is just a planetoid about twenty miles in diameter, but composed of very dense matter, so the gravity is an eighth of Earth's; on the flat surface of its dark side live the intelligent two-dimensional beings, while on the sunny side live the predatory "fire-things".

Comment from Zendexor:  The idea of such a small Vulcan made me wonder whether it might after all possibly be true, that a little world might exist so close to the Sun, below the limit of detection from Earth; of course it depends on what that limit is.  So I googled "vulcanoids" and, lo and behold, a Wiki article came up.  I quote:

"The vulcanoids are a hypothetical population of asteroids that orbit the Sun in a dynamically stable zone inside the orbit of the planet Mercury. They are named after the hypothetical planet Vulcan, which was proposed on the basis of irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were later found to be explained by general relativity. So far, no vulcanoids have been discovered, and it is not yet clear whether any exist.

"If they do exist, the vulcanoids could easily evade detection because they would be very small and near the bright glare of the Sun. Due to their proximity to the Sun, searches from the ground can only be carried out during twilight or solar eclipses. Any vulcanoids must be between about 100 metres (330 ft) and 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) in diameter and are probably located in nearly circular orbits near the outer edge of the gravitationally stable zone between the Sun and Mercury."

So there you have it: a Vulcan 3.7 miles across might exist.  Rather smaller even than the 20-mile one in the story, but better than nothing.