MANY people have asked me how I came to write “The Swordsman of Mars,” “The Outlaws of Mars,” and “The Planet of Peril,” and have wondered why the character of Dr. Morgan appears in all of them. “It was all right for the first story,” one reader complained, “but it begins to get a bit thick the third time. I hope you’re not going to do it again.” Another thought that Dr. Morgan really belonged in the series, but that there wasn’t enough of him; I should justify his continuance by having him play a more important role in the plot.
As an author, I agree with both of these critics. Dr. Morgan either should have been dropped, or should have a more active and vital role; and I certainly would have taken one of these alternatives in the second novel, “Outlaws of Mars,” were this series really my own to work out as I pleased.
You see, while the name “Dr. Morgan” is fictitious, the character is not. It was quite by accident that I literally dropped in on him one day while deer-hunting in the mountains. It was a cloudy day, and I lost my bearings. I’d been foolish enough to forget my compass, so I climbed the highest prominence to orient myself.
If you have ever met me, you will know that these were not tremendous mountains. Now that I’m letting you in on a long-kept secret, I must confess to further deception. If you will re-read the opening chapters of the preceding books, you will see that while I’ve given the impression that Dr. Morgan’s retreat was amidst high mountains, I’ve never said anything definite about the height. There were high enough for my own purposes of sport and exercise, and Dr. Morgan’s purposes of isolation, but you may have been led to overestimate their eminence.
I had all but reached the summit I was approaching, when my feet suddenly slipped from under me. Gun and all, I crashed through something which felt and sounded like glass, and struck a hard, concrete floor. My right leg crumpled under me, and all went black.
When I regained consciousness I thought I was in a hospital, for two men in white garments were working over me.
The younger man I took to be an interne. The other was indeed a doctor, as I was to learn. He was of gigantic stature, but well-proportioned and athletic, and of most striking appearance. His forehead was far higher than any other I had ever seen, bulging outward so that his shaggy eyebrows, which grew completely together above the bridge of his aquiline nose, half concealed his small, glittering, beady eyes. His close-cropped, sharply pointed beard, in which a few gray hairs were in evidence, proclaimed him as probably past middle age.
When he had finished bandaging my fractured leg, which throbbed unmercifully, he dismissed his assistant, called me by name, and introduced himself. I am not yet free to divulge his true identity, so I shall continue to call him “Dr. Morgan.”
“What hospital is this,” I asked, “and how did you find me?”
“You are not in a hospital,” he replied in his booming bass voice, “but still on the mountain in my retreat. My men are now replacing the skylight through which you fell.”
For nearly a month I convalesced in the secret, perfectly-camouflaged observatory. When he learned that I was an author (he had learned my name from the mundane process of looking through my wallet) he asked permission to question me under hypnosis, promising to explain when he had finished, and assuring me that I need not worry about anything he would ask me.
There are some human beings who inspire you with trust almost upon first sight. Dr. Morgan was such a person. I agreed; and I learned later that, had he not been trustworthy, it would have been very easy for him to have tricked me into agreement. Actually, he would not have done it without my full consent, honestly gained.
“I must ask your forgiveness,” he said, after the session. “While my impression of you was that you were both honest and reliable, I had to be sure that you did not have particular character weaknesses through which you could be easily led to betray confidences you really meant to keep. I have some material which would be ideal for the sort of stories you write, but it is vital that certain aspects of what you will learn do not become public knowledge. Without these, few readers will suspect that what you will write is anything but very imaginative romance, and those few will not be able to ascertain more without facts which I now am confident you won’t reveal.”
He stroked his beard. “I could, of course, with your consent, doubly insure security by putting you under hypnotic inhibition—you would not remember what you were not supposed to reveal. But this is a risky process, not one hundred percent certain, and might have undesirable side-effects upon you.”
“I’ll go along with your judgment on this,” I told him.
In the days that followed I learned about Dr. Morgan’s studies of parapsychology, particularly in telepathy. I had done some reading in this line myself, so knew something of the general theory—that the communication of thoughts or ideas or moods from one mind to another without the use of any physical medium whatever was not influenced or hampered by either time or space.
Dr. Morgan had worked on telepathy for many years in his spare time, when he was in practice; but on his retirement, he tried a different track. “I had to amend the theory,” he explained. “I decided that it would be necessary to build a device which would pick up and amplify thought waves. And even this would have failed had my machine not caught the waves projected by another machine, which another man had built to amplify and project them.”
Now I had been a devotee of imaginative fiction for many years, and had often thought of turning my hand to writing it. I prided myself on having a better than usual imagination; yet, I did not think of the implications of the theory of telepathy when Dr. Morgan told me that the man who built the thought-projector was on Mars. While I deferred to no one in my fondness for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stories of John Carter and others on Barsoom, I was well aware of the fact that what we knew of the planet Mars made his wonderful civilization on that planet quite impossible. I said as much, going into facts and figures.
“Of course, we won’t really know for sure about the exact conditions there unless we land on Mars. But still we know enough to make Burroughs’s Mars probability zero,” I concluded.
Dr. Morgan nodded. “Entirely correct,” he said. “There is no such civilization on Mars.”
He then explained his own incredulity when his machine picked up the thoughts of a man who identified himself as a human being—one Lal Vak, a Martian scientist and psychologist. But Lal Vak was no less incredulous when Dr. Morgan identified himself as a human being and scientist of Earth. For Lal Vak was certain that there could be no human civilization on Earth, and cited facts and figures to prove it.
And that was the clue. Both Dr. Morgan and Lal Vak were correct. Neither man could possibly exist on the world he claimed to inhabit—if both were living in the same area of space-time. But Lal Vak’s description of Earth was a valid description of the third planet from the sun as it existed millions of years ago.
“I have read many weird and fantastic stories,” Dr. Morgan said, “as have you. Some of them have given me a most eerie feeling—but nothing to compare with my feelings upon talking with a man who has been dead millions of years, of whose civilization there may now linger not so much as a single trace.”
This was the beginning. Dr. Morgan brought me several thick typewritten manuscripts which he had bound separately, and I read therein the stories of Harry Thorne, of Morgan’s own nephew, Jerry, and of Robert Grandon. Thus I learned that Lal Vak was the contemporary of a Venusian named Vorn Vangal and that a human civilization had also existed on Venus at this time.
With the aid of Lal Vak, Dr. Morgan had effected transfer of personalities between two Martians and two Earthmen, whose physical and brain-pattern make-up were similar enough to permit such exchange. Through a means which I am still barred from describing in detail, it was possible for Dr. Morgan to keep in rapport with his emissaries on Mars—providing they co-operated. The first man broke contact, and turned out to be a disasterously wrong choice. Thus, Harry Thorne was sent to Mars, to exchange consciousness with a Martian whose body was holding the personality of Frank Boyd, criminal Earthman.
From Vorn Vangal, Dr. Morgan learned the construction and operation of a space-time vehicle, propelled by telekinesis. It was by means of this vehicle that Morgan’s nephew, Jerry, went to Mars physically. But something went wrong on the return trip—Dr. Morgan had tried to bring the vehicle back to Earth and his own time, empty, for use to transport an Earthman to Venus later—and the vehicle was lost.
“It might have been possible to build another,” Dr. Morgan told me, after I had finished reading about the adventures of his nephew, “but Vorn Vangal and I decided that it would be simpler to use the personality-exchange system, if we could find an Earthman or two who could qualify.” He pointed to the other two manuscripts which I was yet to read. “These tell of what happened to the two I sent to Venus: Robert Grandon and Rorgen Takkor.”
“Rorgen Takkor—but he’s on Mars,” I protested. “He’s the Zovil of Xancibar . . . Did something go wrong? A break-up between him and Neva . . . ?”
Dr. Morgan smiled. “No, no, my friend—Harry Thorne is on Mars in the body of Rorgen Takkor. The man who was my assistant for many years, called Harry Thorne, is Rorgen Takkor.” He coughed slightly. “Of course, he is now known as Prince Zinlo of Venus.”
I smiled. “If we can consider millions of years in the past as ‘now.’”
“I am still in contact with him, as with the others who are ‘still’ alive . . . At any rate, Rorgen Takkor asked me if he could go to Venus; he was getting tired of Earth, and of course he could not return to Mars. He was fascinated with what Vorn Vangal told me of the Venusian civilization and was sure he’d feel more at home there, however strange it might be. I’d say it would be roughly analogous to the case of a crusader from 12th Century England transported and settled down into a remote part of Islam, where there was not and probably never would be direct contact with his native civilization.”
So “Harry Thorne,” and an Earthman named Robert Grandon went to Venus.
Here were four distinct stories, and Dr. Morgan went over them with me, indicating what parts of them might be used for novels, and what had best not be related in detail, or omitted entirely.
I have told you the story of Robert Grandon in “The Planet of Peril,” and those of you who have read it will recall that Harry Thorne and Grandon met in the closing episodes of the story. You may remember that Grandon asked Thorne to tell him of his adventures between the time of Thorne’s arrival on Venus and this meeting, as it was plain that much had happened and that the other man had found his place and the woman of his heart’s desire. Before Thorne could tell the story, they were interrupted by announcements that their airship had arrived at Vernia’s capital.
Actually, the record shows that Thorne did tell his story to Grandon later, during the visit—although like nothing in the detail present in Dr. Morgan’s records. But it was impossible to give even so brief an outline in this place. It had no bearing on the story of Robert Grandon and his rise on Venus, his winning of Vernia, and the defeat and death of the traitor, Prince Destho. I decided to omit it entirely, leaving it for another novel.
So now I offer you the story of Harry Thorne—and, with your permission, I shall stop calling him “Harry Thorne.” This is the story of Rorgen Takkor’s adventures on Venus, Rorgen Takkor, born on Mars, transferred to Earth for a decade, and finally finding his career and place on Venus.
The Author.