Girls for the Slime God

"Orgy of sex in print" were Words uttered not long ago by an elderly educator who was denouncing, of all things, current science-fiction. Avoiding, for the nonce, the question of what's wrong with an orgy of sex in print (other than its being a poor second-best for an orgy of sex in the flesh), this fragment of the educator's jeremiad must have caused considerable scratching of heads on the part of science-fiction addicts under thirty, or in the neighborhood of thirty, or in the Congressional District of thirty. Everyone knows that science-fiction today is about as prurient as a thesis on quantum mechanics. Just this year, Kingsley Amis, in his survey of science-fiction, New Maps of Hell, want on record as deploring the puritanical tone of the genre and honing for a few stories in which Topic A might raise its lovely head.

What the elderly educator was probably remembering was the science-fiction of the Thighful Thirties. In those days, a lot of s-f magazines wer pretty broad minded, if only pictorially,and any pretty broad who ventured beyond the Earth's gravitational field could expect to meet a choice of fates, all more colorful than death. That era is long gone, but some of us still remember the Thirties, fondly, as The Golden Age of Space Travel. The s-f magazines, back then, weren't called Galaxy and If and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. They were called – near as we can recollect – things like Shocking Solar(continued on page 80)Slime God (continued from page 71) Stories and Horrible Atom Tales, and the covers, unlike the mechanistic covers of today, throbbed with life, blushed with the pink of fair flesh. The stories always seemed to have titles like Girls for the Slime God, and one or more of the girls involved customarily loosened the straps of her golden space tunic, letting it slide down her ripe golden body, past the golden curve of her hips and the soft golden flesh of her thighs, then turned to the hero, her full golden breasts quivering with emotion, and asked if hestill believed she had the sacred Martian moonstone on her – all by page three at the latest. A dozen pages later in this issue of the hypotheticalFearsome Future Fiction, in another story,Men for the Slime Goddess, a different lass would be impelled to loosen the straps of her silver space tunic, letting it slide down her ripe creamy body, past the white curve of her hips and the soft ivory flesh of her thighs, turning to our hero finally, her full alabaster breasts quivering with anticipation (any resemblance among stories was not accidental – at half-a-cent a word, writershad to take short cuts).

A quivering bosom was no novel sight for a Thirties s-f hero. Space Girls expressed most of their emotions through their pectoral muscles. Bosoms swayed, trembled, heaved, shivered, danced or pouted according to their owners' moods. In fact, if a hero in those days had been a little more observant and had carried a tape measure, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble. When he opened an air lock and a gorgeous stowaway fell out, uniform ripping, it usually took him five or six pages to find out whether she was a Venusian spy or not, whereas the reader knew at once. If her torn uniform revealed pouting young breasts, she was OK – probably someone's kid sister. If she had eager, straining breasts, she was the heroine. But a girl with proud, arrogant breasts was definitely a spy – while a ripe, full bosom meant she was a Pirate Queen and all hell would soon break loose.

In case Kingsley Amis is beginning to distrust our memories of yesterday's Space Girls, it might be wise to eschew the vague and hypothetical and come up with a few living specimens. Why rely on memory – poor frail human thing – when second-hand magazine dealers can, for a price, confirm our hazy recollections? Sample, please, a passage from The Angel from Hell, which a dust-swathed December 1939 issue ofMarvel Science Storieshas yielded:

He saw an eerie being. A winged woman! Or was she a woman? Her body was a woman's...the sweet curves of it were shiny with a yellow velvet down.The breasts were firm round golden bowls, quivering to the effort of her wings. And he wanted her. He forgot all her strangeness, and saw only the golden breasts, the alluring contours...He thirsted for the feel of her golden body in his arms. He made a groping movement toward her...

Yes, this was the era of the racy pulps – when lusty BEMs(Bug Eyed Monsters) lurked on every asteroid, and many a lad reached adolescence believing that M.D. and M.Sc. meant Mad Doctor and Mad Scientist. Space travel may have been primitive in those days – but few of today's s-f heroes can match the sheer virility of the old Space Captains. Maybe they weren't nimble-witted, and it's true that they moved chiefly by involuntary reflex action – but they were men who thought nothing of blasting a path through Saturnian Space Pirates with no more equipment than a riveted space cruiser, smoking rocket tubes, and a hot navigator (38-24-38).When one of those boys brought his battle-scarred ship in for a landing on Jupiter he was tired, and it wasn't just from the fighting.

His navigator had a rough time, too; lacking radar or Univac, she had to feel her way cautiously around the Solar System. Meanwhile the hero was using the same technique on her, with less caution.

It's about time somebody paid belated tribute to the voluptuous young females who pioneered the Solar System via the old pulps. Despite all hazards (penicillin had yet to be discovered) they poured into space in their faceless thousands. (It's possible they had faces, of course, but pulp authors seldom bothered to describe the girls above the neck.) Girls shipped out as navigators, space-reporters, astro-geologists, stowaways, proud-and-rich-daughters-of-the-owner-of-the-space-line-taking-their-first-trip-into-space, Pirate Queens, or just plain – well, unplain – crew, members.

It took guts. Life for a Space Girl in those days was no bed of galactic roses. To begin with, their uniforms were defective. You'd think a metal-fabric bikini would be pretty durable. Not so. Two days out from Earth, the ship would lurch to avoid a meteor, and the girlwould be catapulted across the cabin into the hero's lap to the sound of ripping fabric. From this point on she was ninety-eight-percent exposed to cosmic rays, the hero, and any stowaway villains.

And there was little purpose in her finding a fresh uniform. For even on pioneer flights, when girls still wore sturdy terrestrial garments, a complete outfit averaged little more than 1.5 pages in space – and in the heat of action the half-life of any garment could be measured in sentence-fragments. Any efficiency expert worth his salt would have ordered all Space Girls to strip to the skin hours before countdown. It would have saved untold time and effort later.

Consider the heart-breaking (and futile) attempts of space-journalist Lorna Rand to shield herself from the hot eyes and sweaty palms of Space Captain Shawn, the hero of a 1938Marvelyarn, The Avengers of Space,Even before the good ship Eagle takes off, an accidentplayed havoc with the girl's dress, ripping it nearly off her slim body. For a second Shawn felt the warm firmness of her half-bared bosom against his cheek... his pulse beat faster at the touch of his hands upon her rounded, vibrant body... her milky thighs gleamed whitely...

His throat was dry. His heart was pounding like a trip hammer.

(Space Captains in the 1930s suffered grievously from attacks of dry throat, pounding heart and moist palms. The equivalent syndrome in Space Girls included icy spinal tremors and – obversely – hot breath.)

Involuntarily Lorna shrank a little... lifted her hands in a protective gesture...

Fortunately for Lorna, the hero's attention is distracted by the need for a fast take-off (conspirators are stuffing dynamite under the Eagle's tail fins). But even with the ship spaceborne, she has to wait four pages before the hero grudgingly finds her a khaki shirt and slacks. And as for privacy – –

At the door he turned, involuntarily.... The girl had slipped off the tattered remnants of her dress and was nude save for flimsy underthings. The pale cones of her breasts swayed as she bent over, slipping a slim foot into the trousers. Shawn was trembling a little, his muscles weak as water. The girl was a vision of loveliness, rousing all the passion in him. He stared fascinated at her supple form, took a half-step forward ... his palms moist with sweat.

Lorna, surprisingly, manages to keep clad until the Eagle lands on Mars, where Shawn and his crew encounter a chilly reception. Lorn, however, is greeted with considerable warmth, and it isn't long before Martians and reader alike can admire her rounded breasts and the lithe curves of her young body revealed in utter nudity!

With some difficulty, Lorna manages to dress herself in a Martian kirtle. But there is worse to come: she has the BEMs to contend with. TheBEMsthat roamed space in the old pulp magazines remain a source of constant fascination to the scholar.BEMscame in a wide variety of styles. The elite resembled Technicolor lobsters suffering from ele- (continued on page 144)Slime Godcontinued from page 80)phantiasis; others were more like grinning octopi with fur. All BEMs had three things in common, however: a pair of large, saucer-like eyes (the better to leer with, my dear), an unaccountable fondness for human females, and a dexterity at removing feminine apparel that many a terrestrial bachelor would envy.

On some planets a girl couldn't take ten steps from the rocket ship without being in the clutches of a BEM. If she happened to be an expendable girl (i.e., not the heroine), the BEM might devour her on the spot – afterwards hanging around to pick his teeth and menace the hero's girl. More sophisticated BEMs (or BEMs lucky enough to catch the heroine first lunge) had other designs. Standard drill for a BEM in such cases was to first remove any remaining shreds of clothing from the struggling heroine, then drag her screaming toward his lair. The BEM was doing the screaming, of course; Space Girls, being plucky through and through, confined themselves to an occasional hysterical shriek. Meanwhile the hero followed in close, if bungling, pursuit.

Lorna's first BEM is a teratological baroque that had been spawned by no sane world, a wrinkled, leathery gigantic horror seven feet tall. It had three short, stumpy legs, ending in clawed hoofs, and a bifurcated appendage hung down like a tail from the back. One of the heads was the size of a large melon, with an elongated muzzle and tusks. The other head was worse... a flaccid, hideous snout, a single glazed eye, fringed by pinkish hairs, and a wrinkled patch of fungus-like stuff crowning the skull.

Baroque or not, it knows what it wants. It came forward to where Lorna stood... shrieking hysterically, she was cradled in the monster's embrace. Talons ripped blindly at Lorna's body, tearing the kirtle away in rags.

It takes the hero little more than a page to dispose of both the BEM and a city full of Martians. And. in outer space once again, Lorna indulges in her near-pathological compulsion to put on clothes. It's hard to see why. Less than a page later she's on Titan where, a few feet from the ship, she encounters another batch of BEMs – fantastic creatures... half as tall as a man, with blunt muzzles, long-fingered hands that seemed almost human, and tails that were atrophied and vestigial. They ran instead of hopping... And within seconds they are running, instead of hopping, after our heroine, cold eyes intent upon her. jaws agape. How to delay them? Lorna isn't fazed for an instant. Her few days in space have taught her not only cunning but astounding agility: Swiftly the girl ripped open her shirt, slipped it off, still running, let it fall to the ground. She dared a quick look, and exultation flamed within her. The monsters were pausing to sniff at the discarded garment, fingering it with their anthropoid hands. But the dinosaurs came after her again, hissing. Lorna slipped out of her slacks, let them fall from rounded hips, down the slim lengths of her legs...

Could any 1960 Space Girl with a doctorate from MIT do that while running the hundred-yard dash? Nay – ours has become an over-specialized age. Lorna, meanwhile, is still sprinting and stripping when she collides head-on with a snake-man who, swinging her lightly under his arm, hurried into the depths of the forest.

It takes the hero (who is being harassed by giant tentacled serpents) some three pages to catch up with her. And by that time her undergarments had been brutally ripped away, and the avid eyes of the snake-men were intent on the naked beauty of her body.

The snake-men are disposed of with little difficulty by setting them on fire. But a greater menace remains: Breathing hoarsely, Shawn held the girl, his mouth avid on hers. Beneath his hands he could feel the satiny smoothness of her skin. the lyric curve of her hips. His throat felt dust-filled (the old trouble), his heart was hammering in his ribs. Shawn's arms tightened spasmodically about her supple form...

Is there no escape from the hero? Yes! From the cloudless purple sky raced a torpedo shaped ship. Sun-golden, the atmosphere screaming in its wake. It dropped down toward the clearing. A porthole gaped in its side. And from the golden ship poured – monsters!

Soon Lorna, with no clothes left to discard. is being pursued at flank speed by mounds of flesh, shapeless, transparent, sliding like jellyfish over the ground.

But Shawn, too, is running. Will the amoeba-BEMs catch her – or will she fall into the clutches of the hero? It matters little; the chase is the thing, and at least Lorna has temporarily eluded the spasmodically tightening arms of Space Captain Shawn.

Suffice it to say that the early Space Captains usually managed to let fly with disintegrators or fists long before the poor BEMs had a chance to complete their passes. Since the BEMs had a chance to complete their passes. Since the BEMs frequently had more brains and personality than the hero, many readers resented this bitterly.

BEMs flourished and underwent limitless refinement during this fruitful period. Witness the high degree of biological sophistication in this BEM from another story in that, same 1938 issue of Marvel:

As Stone turned he saw a frightful and incredible form ... the very atoms of the creature's body had been insanely warped, and in the change had come sheer horror. A huge cylindrical head set on humped broad shoulders, from which spread great wings of thin metal. The monster's flesh shimmered with changing colors. Gigantic glowing eyes watched Stone, flicked past him to the girl... a taloned claw darted out, pulled her close. The girl's gown was ripped into shreds... the monster's face came down, nuzzling the girl's bare throat...

As important as the anatomical complexity is the motivational drive: the true BEM would rather nuzzle the heroine than battle the hero. Which may explain why Stone (who volunteered for the job) needs no more than his bare hands to subdue it – though the task takes a little time: Smash and rip and tear, with sick horror mounting slowly within Stone. Could the thing be invulnerable? Could he even hurt it? He can and does – and one more BEM dies unrequited.

It may well be asked why Stone was such a chump as to get into a messy situation like this. And the answer throws much light on the grim man-versus-BEM struggle that marked the end of the Thirties. Stone, who wants only to return to earth, is talked into doing the job by a girl named Marsay-laya. She explains that the local BEM is despoiling her planet and terrorizing her people. Stone couldn't care less. She resorts to threats:

Green eyes mocked him. "You must obey me. You cannot do otherwise..."

"That so?" Stone grunted. "I don't see why I should fight this beast of yours. I owe you nothing."...

The green eyes grew baleful. "I can cause you great pain ... you fool! Now – will you obey?"

"Go to the devil," Stone snarled...

Quickly her hands went up, slipping the emerald-green gown from her shoulders. It rippled down past the ivory globes of her breasts, the flat smoothness of her stomach, the delicate contours of her thighs, to fall in a crumpled ring about her feet. And then Marsay-laya was in his arms, her breasts cushioned against his chest, her white form clinging to him ... his hands slipped down, caressing a body that was like flame.

She whispered, "Will you slay the beast for such a reward?"

Sanity came coldly to Stone. He said hoarsely, "No!"

Not until Marsaylaya discloses that the BEM is after her does Stone agree to intercede. Chivalry? Hardly – in view of Marsaylaya's humiliating failure to seduce. The truth seems to be that, by the close of the Thirties, the unwritten code of Space Captains was "Separate the BEMs from the girls. Keep the BEMs from getting any girls to nuzzle or devour and they'll wither away."

It was a strategy that worked only too well. By the end of the decade only BEMs who had the good fortune to capture a Pirate Queen had any hope of holding onto their victims. But Pirate Queens were well worth holding. Unlike other Space Girls, Pirate Queens (the term is a generic one, and includes High Priestesses and Amazon Despots) had things pretty much their own way until the last page. They playfully slaughtered passengers on space liners, jealously tortured the heroine and forcefully seduced the hero.

After a manly struggle for his virtue the hero usually cooperated. One reason was that the heroine (sans uniform) was most likely being dangled over a tub of acid or a small volcano. A better reason was that Pirate Queens had 44-inch bosoms and the dispositions of hyperthyroid nymphos, which made cooperation simple and not unpleasant. The heroine might believe his flimsy excuses about allaying the Pirate Queen's suspicions, but we readers knew what he'd been allaying.

For a typical case history, we must turn once again to the teeming pages of Marvel Science Stories, this time the November 1938 number, and perhaps by now it is beginning to dawn on you – as it is on us – that all our examples seem to be pouring from this single red-blooded periodical. Have our memories, then, deceived us? Were girls and slime gods limited to that one magazine? The answer is a qualified yes. The covers of most of the Thirties' science-fiction pulps did indeed display the rosy flesh and shredded blouses we remember so well, but the stories within were usually spare of sexual sparkle. Bluenoses like our friend the elderly educator were always judging the books by their covers, which was unjust, or were forever confusing and equating science-fiction magazines with sexy pulps in other genres – Dime Detective, Horror Stories, the whole line of Spicies, etc. – which was plain lousy research. No, fellow-fond-rememberers, even in the Thirties, science-fiction sex was only a cover come-on-with the formidable (and, strangely, short-lived) Marvel providing almost the only exceptions. It is back to Marvel then, we must go, and to one Kent Mason – hero of The Time Trap – who is trying vainly to reason with a High Priestess named Yana. She's whispering:

"Since I became a priestess – I have not known – love..." Suddenly her arms were about Mason's neck, her hot breath against his cheek as she strained against him. Mad torrents of passion seemed unleashed in the priestess. Mason tried to free himself. The girl drew back, her face hardening. "No? Remember – you have not freed the white girl yet. If I should summon aid – – "

Shrugging, Mason bent his head ... the moist inferno of her mouth quickened his pulses ... the priestess was the hot soul of flame.

It should not be inferred that Space Captains didn't struggle hard to preserve their virtue – some resisted to the point of idiocy. Mason, for example, has already twice fought off Nirvor – the Silver Priestess – like a silver statue, exquisitely moulded...

She whispered, "I grow tired of wisdom. I am – woman!" She lifted pale hands to her throat, unbuckled the clasp that held the robe. It slipped down rustling to her feet. She stepped forward: her feet. She stepped forward: her bare arms went around Mason's neck.

Setting his jaw, he tore them free, thrust the woman back...

This show of prudery results in the heroine's being dumped into a Centaur BEM's pit (watery orbs avidly dwelt on the girl's nudity) and being pursued by plant-BEMs (the tentacles of the monsters reached out, deftly removing the girl's clothing.) Since Mason had to go to an extraordinary amount of trouble and effort to retrieve her, his submission to Yana constitues a realistic conservation of energy.

The Pirate Queens, alas, always got theirs in the end – and nastily, too. Some fell into their own acid vats, others were sucked into Saturnian quicksand. Nirvor, the Silver Priestess, was cooked by a heat ray – while Yana, shrieking lustily, vanished into the maw of a giant BEM. In view of the moist infernos and surging flames most Pirate Queens carried around, it is more than probable that a sudden surge of passion or rage resulted in some exploding spontaneously. Perhaps this was the cause of the tragic death of Warrior Queen Boada (War-Lords of the Moon, 1939. Planet Stories) who, less than a page after her hour of triumph ("You did not expect to see me here, but I serve the destiny of the Moon!") exploded in a sheet of flame under confused circumstances. It is natural that returning Space Captains should attribute such accidents to their own prowess.

Nor were all BEMs content to devour the Pirate Queens they captured. Just what they did instead was seldom described. But it must have been something imaginative, since the heroine (who by this time had already lamped some unnerving sights) always turned away in horror, her firm breasts quivering as a shudder ran through her.

• • •

Why did this era die? The slaughter of the BEM herds and the high mortality rate of Pirate Queens is only one answer. The chances are that the lusty pulps had by then already long outlived their time. Science had begun to overtake (though not outstrip) fiction – and many readers decided there was more excitement to be found in relativity or cybernetics than in the arms of a Pirate Queen, no matter how moist her inferno. Old magazines changed their policies, new and more serious-minded ones sprang up. A few weary BEMs lingered on into the Forties, as did a few dozen jaded Pirate Queens – but the old passion was gone; soon they had only enough strength to pose for cover illustrations.

It wasn't long before, when you picked up an s-f magazine and read a line like "Beautiful, isn't she? You can ride her to Sirius and back without a single navigational error ..." you knew with a dull certainty that the hero was talking about a photon beam guide – not his navigator. For the strong-mus-cled, dim-witted Space Captains – even with their clever and shapely navigators to guide them – were ill-equipped to survive in an age of nuclear fission and anti-gravity. Like the dinosaur, who had to rely on his tail for brainpower, they lumbered into extinction.

And although educators elderly and otherwise are continually warning us against the dangers of a one-sided education in science, we no longer have the well-rounded, full-bodied science-fiction we once had. Sociologists and electronics engineers now roam the planets where Pirate Queens once gloried and drank deep. And heavy-footed lady physicists stamp their boots over the tombs of BEMs, but cannot break their sleep.

All of which is undoubtedly Progress – but not nearly as much fun. And every now and then one finds one's memory slipping back to a strangely Keatsian tableau on Titan – "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? /What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?" – where, eternally frozen, a pride of giant amoebas plus a hero pursue the still unravished Lorna; and keats had words for her, too; "For ever warm and still to be enjoyed /For ever panting, and for ever young."