All right, world! Here it is: a summary-review of Terror on Planet Ionus, written in several installments as I made my way through the book. Spoilers abound.
TERROR ON PLANET IONUS by Allen Adler. New York: Paperback Library, April 1966. 160 pages. 50c. “This Paperback Library edition is published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy.” The book was formerly titled Mach 1. Read 9-12 Feb. 2017.
It’s long been my impression that my eye had been caught by the cover of the January 1969 paperback edition, when I was a youngster in Coos Bay, Oregon. That was enough to make it stick in my mind. I’m sure I never owned a copy or read it. A bit whimsically, I decided to try for an interlibrary loan copy, which I began to read the day after it arrived.
The chapters have no titles but are numbered, and, a bit awkwardly, some of the chapters have sections that also have no titles but are numbered. Thus, I have so far read: 1: 2, 3, 2:2, 3, 4, 5; 3:2; and 4. The first section of any chapter that has numbered sections is not numbered. I don’t remember ever seeing this kind of layout.
In the first four chapters, we meet Jeb Curtis, jet pilot, ruggedly attractive to beautiful Janis Knight, meteorologist. Jeb gets slapped for kissing the unwilling Janis. He resents having to follow orders of security officer Commander Shawn, who is “in his soft-fleshed forties” (page 8). Shawn and Curtis seem to be feuding, but Admiral Buchanan insists that Curtis is the man for the job of flying the top-secret new jet.
Curtis takes off when the time comes for a big test of the jet’s power. Suddenly the engine stops. Curtis finds himself and the Mach taken into a Grid Space Mass. “The Grid” is the name that the beautiful and tall Keesa uses to refer to herself and others aboard the clam-like space travel device. They appear in bizarre colors, e.g. “Keesa’s eyes were transparent gold and her hair was a solid platinum!” Curtis discovers that the Grid has also brought Janis aboard their weird vessel. Kalphon, another Grid person, tells Curtis that the Grid have come to save Earth from destruction from a “’wilful force, with an intelligence for evil.’” (page 48)
I had hoped for something, as I read the first few pages, with the atmosphere of a good Outer Limits teleplay, but this seems to be shaping up to be more like a typical sci-fi movie.
///Up through Chapter 7, Adler introduces us to Ionus, which is a moon of Saturn. Its surface is a wasteland. The Grid-people have names all beginning in K: Keesa, Kalphon, Kimian, the Kal. Karkong is the deadly enemy. The humans on Ionus are Jeb and Janis, so the similar-sounding names are an odd feature of the book.
Adler’s exposition seems muddled sometimes, but I gather that Karkong was an Ionian who had been transformed by his gluttonous absorption of energy; the Grid people occasionally voluntarily discharge electricity that builds up in their bodies. “’He has even devoured his own people! ….He draws the life out of all –through some kind of superpower in himself. And he grows with each feeding. He grows!’” (page 70) Karkong feeds off energy. The humans are surprised to learn that the Grid-people are unwilling to try to kill Karkong; they are shocked by the idea of killing, very reproachful of the earth people for their violence. They have for many years sent flying saucers to earth to gather information, etc. They have “films” of real Earth-violence such as the massacres during the Hungarian uprising and of a cowboy movie, etc., which they apparently also took to be real. They are shocked that people would watch such things for entertainment. The Grid-people fear that Karkong will use one of their “Masses” (a type of spaceship) and come to Earth and destroy it.
The style is often “adequate” for telling the story, but has true pulpish touches, e.g. this section of Chapter 7:
It [Karkong, I take it] was watching the two [Jeb and Janis] as they worked at the mirrors. Soon they would draw closer together and they could be taken by a single discharge. The killing force surged in its body, writhed for release. It waited, fighting itself, delaying the compulsive instinct to kill. Now! Now they were drawing closer! Soon...! Then it froze suddenly, sensing something. Something else, something alive, had just come to the surface. It could feel it, its senses drawn like a tropism. Yes! There! Another living creature standing in front of the opening. The opening leading from this depleted surface crust to the fulfillment of all craving and desire below!
The next section has this sentence: “They were led staggering from the projectile and taken into weird black as a bat’s wing tunnels” (p. 73).
Up to Chapter 10 Section 3, Jeb has returned to Earth in the Mach jet, which had been carried to Ionus and back in the Mass. Jeb tries to convince the military authorities that he has been to another planet and that a terrible monster is on its way to Earth. Jeb comes out of a bar with a woman and Karkong begins destroying the city.
In Chapter 11, the creature has moved on from San Diego and is heading for Shasta Dam. Section 2: “Karkong had left a charred, lifeless rut one hundred yards in width and six hundred miles in length… a wake of cremation and death” (p. 118).
As I’ve been reading, I’ve been thinking that I probably would have liked this book if I’d managed to buy a copy or borrow it from a friend, when I was 12 or 13.
An army colonel “lit a cigarette and puffed it contagiously. Almost everyone else followed suit” (page 130).
There’d been a meeting of representatives of major countries. Young Martin Edmur, who years for lovely Janis, had the idea of a North American power blackout to draw Karkong to one spot where perhaps alien technology could deal with him. However, the Russian advocates for nuking him act. As Martin expected, the discharge of power only makes Karkong ‘”bigger’” (p. 132).
Janis admits to Jeb that she loves him. Elsewhere, borderline insane Buchanan commits suicide by jumping out a high window.
“While hunanity [sic, with two Ns] cringed on the ignited powder keg of the earth” (p. 154), the crisis approaches.
The novel ends with Jeb and Martin, and two other crewmen, aboard the Mach to attack Karkong. Martin is killed in an accident. The Mach bombs him and weakens Karkong’s forcefield. “Karkong stood reeling on the lifeless rock of a small, barren island [in the Aleutians, I gather]. The illuminating flashes of lightning were outlining a monstrous figure over thirty feet high. It stood in the center of its shattered field and it seemed to be clawing at the lightning. The thing’s form was that of a human giant that had been burned black by its own heat. The powerful muscles of its body were partially melted so that the tendons ran like tree roots from arms to chest, from legs to groin. Even its huge hands had been seared to webs and one foot was shaped like a charred elephant’s, as though it has served as a ground for its electric discharges. It was completely hairless and its face was a black putty lump of melted flesh. An ebony, tarlike substance oozed from its depthless eye pits as it did from its twisted mouth. Over-all, Karkong looked like a huge, human-shaped pile of pitch smoldering under intense heat” (page 159).
The destruction of its field enables the Grid people in their Mass, their abhorrence of violence overcome at last, to destroy the “beast.” This done, they fly away. Jeb “saw the Grid Space Mass soar up and away. He watched it until it seemed to stop growing smaller. Then he realized that he was not seeing the Mass any more. He was staring beyond the opening clouds. He was watching a glittering star afloat in the serenely infinite heavens” – the final lines, with a poetic quality distinct from the rest of the book (page 160).
