The Alien Intelligence

Not since the famous "Moon Pool" by A. Merritt, have we read such a remarkable story as the present one, by the well-known author.

_We are quite certain that this story will be one of the outstanding science fiction achievements of the year. It will be discussed and re-discussed time and again. In a way it is a little classic and stands in a place by itself._

_The author has a knack, not only to arouse your curiosity, but to keep it at a high pitch throughout the entire story, but best of all, his science while fantastic is always within the realms of possibility and there is no reason why the astounding things which he paints so vividly, could not be true, either now or in the future._

Do not, by any means, fail to read this outstanding story.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Wonder Stories July, August 1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Illustration: I fired on the instant and had the luck to shatter the vessel, splashing the liquid over his person. His purple robe was eaten away; his flesh was dyed a deep purple and partially consumed.]

CHAPTER I

The Mountain of the Moon

Before me, not half a mile away, rose the nearest ramparts of the Mountain of the Moon. It was after noon, and the red sun blazed down on the bare, undulating sandy waste with fearful intensity. The air was still and intolerably hot. Heat waves danced ceaselessly over the uneven sand. I felt the utter loneliness, the wild mystery, and the overwhelming power of the desert. The black cliffs rose cold and solid in the east--a barrier of dark menace. Pillars of black basalt, of dark hornblende, and of black obsidian rose in a precipitous wall of sharp and jagged peaks that curved back to meet the horizon. Needle-like spires rose a thousand feet, and nowhere was the escarpment less than half that high. It was with mingled awe and incipient fear that I first looked upon the Mountain of the Moon.

It was a year since I had left medical college in America to begin practise in Perth, Australia. There I had an uncle who was my sole surviving relative. My companion on the voyage had been Dr. Horace Austen, the well-known radiologist, archeologist, and explorer. He had been my dearest friend. That he was thirty years my senior, had never interfered with our comradeship. It was he who had paid most of my expenses in school. He had left me at Perth, and went on to investigate some curious ruined columns that a traveler had reported in the western part of the Great Victoria Desert. There Austen had simply vanished. He had left Kanowna, and the desert had swallowed him up. But it was his way, when working on a problem, to go into utter seclusion for months at a time.

My uncle was an ardent radio enthusiast, and it was over one of his experimental short wave sets that we picked up the remarkable message from my lost friend that led me to abandon my practise, and, heeding the call of adventure that has always been strong in those of my blood, to seek the half mythical Mountain of the Moon, in the heart of the unexplored region of the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.

The message was tantalizingly brief and hard to interpret. We picked it up five times, over a period of two weeks, always just after sunset. Evidently it was sent by one who had not recently practised his knowledge of code, and it seemed that the sender was always in a great hurry, or under a considerable nervous tension, for minor errors and omissions were frequent. The words were invariably the same. I copy them from an old notebook.

"To Winfield Fowler, physician, Perth, Australia: I, Horace Austen, am lost in an unknown new world, where alien terrors reign, that lies in a crater in the Mountain of the Moon. I implore you to come to my aid, for the sake of mankind. Bring arms, and my equipment--the Rontgen tubes and coils, and the spectrometer. Ascend ladder at west pinnacle. Find my friend Melvar, maiden of the crystal city, whom I left beyond the Silver Lake. Come, for the sake of civilization, and may whoever hears this forward it with all dispatch."