Pulp Strainer I: The Beetle Horde, Pt. 1

THE TEXT: Pulp Strainer, No. 1: The Beetle Horde (Part 1) by Victor Rousseau, p. 8-31 in Astounding Stories n. 1, Vol. 1, 1930 (available for free here)

 SUMMARY: Members of an Antarctic expedition, following in the footsteps of a previous, failed expedition that left a member behind, discover the remains of a giant-ass beetle.  Two members, intent on discovering more giant-ass beetle bits, get caught in a storm, crash their plane, and fall into the subterranean world of the hollow earth.  There, they find primitive (but blonde) humans, giant arthropods, and a madman bent on destroying the Surface World!

PULPY GOODNESS: needlessly convoluted expository science-speak ganked completely from encyclopedias; Men of Science™; cackling mad scientist; a cave-lady; giant-ass bugs.

RACISM: Fairly subdued.  There are “primitive” people living n the hollow earth, but nothing too grim.

SEXISM: Nothing TOO awful.  Haidia is a noble savage lady that immediately falls in love with Dodd; however, she is at least a tough girl counterpart to Dodd’s more cerebral hero. 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Jim Dodd – bespectacled, red-headed man of science, the Antarctic expedition’s “archaeologist” who also seems to know quite a bit about paleontology, despite the fact that the two are remarkably distinct disciplines with discrete literatures all their own.  Dodd, who quarreled heatedly in the past with Bram over the fossil record of marsupials, is a man devoted to scientific truth and the pursuit of knowledge. 

Tommy Travers – Pilot, adventurer, ex-Harvard man.  Something of a playboy back in New York, he flies airplanes for the Antarctic Expedition.  A man of action!

Haidia – sexy amazonian cave-girl from the subterranean world Dodd and Travers have discovered.  She learns English quickly, but speaks it haltingly.  Falls immediately in love with Dodd.  Naturally, she’s white and blonde.

Bram – a morphine-addled madman who vanished on a previous Antarctic expedition, known as a contentious, imperious, and exacting scientist convinced of his own genius.  He turned down a Nobel Prize (awarded him for some racist theories about the origin of “Asiatic races”) because he disagreed with the winner of the Literature category.  What you’d call an asshole.  Currently a Beetle King in the subterranean world, he plans to unleash a plague of giant coleopterans on the surface world.

OUR STORY: An expedition has been mounted to the Antarctic, seeking to pierce the snowy veil of the South so that Man, his throbbing Science unbound, can determine the exact location of the magnetic southern pole?  The reason, you ask?

It had something to do with Einstein, and something to do with terrestrial magnetism, and the variations of the south magnetic pole, and the reason therefore, and something to do with parallaxes and the precession of the equinoxes and other things, this search for the pole's exact location.

You know, fer science and shit.  Ask Einstein, nerd.  Regardless, this sort of egghead stuff doesn’t interest Tommy Travers, Adventurer!  He’s the expedition’s pilot, and he and his pal Dodd (an “archaeologist”), are flying back into camp after a hard day explorin’ the shit out of the South Pole. 

Disembarking from their plane, Travers and Dodd produce the fruits of their day’s labor for the rest of the Expedition to see: a giant-ass beetle carapace.  

Even the least scientific minded of the party gasped in amazement at what Dodd had. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous beetle. As a matter of fact, it was an insect, for it had the three sections that characterize this class, but it was merely the shell of one. Between four and five feet in height, when Dodd stood it on end, it could now be seen to consist of the hard exterior substance of some huge, unknown coleopter.

They done gone and found a big ass beetle, which, for some reason, Dodd identifies as having come from some Tertiary strata (~post dinosaurs, a period now-er-days ranging from 66 million years ago to about 2.5 million years ago).  Anyway, he’s all excited, because OF COURSE big ass bugs means that there were doubtless a whole bunch of big ass animals running around the Antarctic in the geological past.  Dodd wants to search for more, but has to overcome the disdain of the expedition’s astronomer.  People don’t give a shit about dramatic reinterpretations of life’s history on Earth, he argues; what people REALLY want are careful measurements of the heavens so people can check Einstein’s math. 

However, after a bit of discussion, Dodd and Travers convince the Head of the expedition that it’ll be worth their while to spend a little bit of time checking it out.  After all, they point out, their beetle was found near where a previous expedition had left a man behind, the Brilliant but Troubled Bram, a Scientist of Some Note.  Bram, who is an asshole and a morphine addict, had vanished into the southern icy wastes, but Dodd reckons that the beetles where what convinced the jerk to stick around while everybody else went home.  He hopes that Bram might have left some notes in a cairn (like you do), and wants to find them along with more giant-ass beetles.  Dodd even muses upon his own history with Bram; apparently he and the hop-head had a little disagreement in the literature regarding some fossils. 

They bed down for the night, and in the morning, Tommy Travers and his Science Buddy Dodd head out, after noting that the weather is looking a little rough.  SURELY that will have no impact on the story.

They buzz around a bit, but as they draw nearer their goal a tremendous storm blows up, and they lose control of the plane.  As the storm builds, the snow turns to slush, then rain and mist…it’s getting warmer!  Then, just as they start to lose control of the plane, they spot an enormous, seemingly bottomless hole in the South Pole, dun Dun DUN!

They fly into the hole, because why wouldn’t you, but they suddenly lose oxygen and crash.  Whoops!

The next chapter in the Saga begins with Tommy groggily regaining consciousness.  He finds himself laying on a heap of sand, a little ways from the wreckage of their plane.  It’s warm, too, far too warm for the arctic furs he’s got on.  Dodd is nowhere to be seen.

Looking around, Tommy is startled by something big shuffling around in the sand nearby.  He watches, horrified, as a three-foot shrimp pops its head up out of the sand, spooking the hell of Travers.  He gets to watch a giant, man-sized beetle molt its carapace.  That’s all good and well; giant arthropods are this stories “weird” component, so it’s good that we get to see em in action a little bit.  But man cannot live of giant shrimp alone; bring on the Girl!

Travers watches as a woman approaches the edge of the sand flats.  At first, he assumes that she’s wrapped in some kind of weird sarong thing, but then he realizes that she’s actually wearing her hair, which is a pretty bonkers visual, when you think about it.  She’s wrapped herself up in her blonde, Rapunzelian locks, which is crazy.  She tiptoes about the sand for a bit, then:

Suddenly, with lightning-like rapidity, her arms shot out, her hands began tunneling in the sand. With a cry of triumph she pulled out the shrimp Tommy had seen, or another like it, and, stripping it off the shell, began devouring it with evident relish.

Tommy, red-blooded New Yorker that he is, can’t help but approach her.  She looks up, and it turns out that she’s got a weird nictitating membrane over her eyes.  Subtext is that the natives are kind odd, if the live-shrimp-eating-and-hair-dress thing didn’t signal that clear enough for you.

Doubtless recognizing a Harvard man, she hops up and comes towards him, evidently blinded by the dim light of the deep valley.  She comes up close to Tommy, which lets him get a good look at her:

His outstretched hand touched hers. It was unquestionably a woman's hand he held, delicately warm, with exquisitely moulded fingers, in whose touch there seemed to be, for the girl, some tactile impression of him.

Again that membrane was drawn back from the girl's pupils for a fleeting flash. Tommy saw two eyes of intense black, their color contrasting curiously with the flaxen color of her hair and her white skin, almost the tint of an albino's. Those eyes had surveyed him, and appeared satisfied that he was one of her kind. She could not have seen very much in that almost instantaneous flash of vision. Queer, that membrane—as if she had been used to living in the dark, as if the full light of the day was unbearable!

An old guy, similarly hair-suited, creeps out to get him a shrimp, and Lady Godiva goes to join him.  That’s fine, but now it’s time for some Giant Arthropod Action again!

And in the midst of it a flood came pouring from the hole—a flood of living beetles, covering the ground in fifteen-foot leaps as they dashed at the two.

To his horror, Tommy saw Jimmy Dodd among them, wrapped in his fur coat like a mummy, and being pushed and rolled forward like a football.

For a moment Tommy hesitated, torn between his solicitude for Jim Dodd and that for the girl. Then, as the foremost of the monsters bounded to her side, he ran between them. The vicious jaws snapped within six inches of Tommy's face, with a force that would have carried away an ear, or shredded the cheek, if they had met.

So, Old Man and Cave Girl are just trying to enjoy the quivering flesh of their raw shrimp meal, when a pile of beetles charge them, mandibles clashing etc etc.  In their mad rush to eat up the Cave People, the bugs are also pushing the still unconscious form of Dodd in front of them.  Travers, like all true Harvard Graduates, knows he has to Do Something!

Dude literally punches a beetle in the noggin, like in the cover picture above, which knocks it out.  In their mad bloodlust, the other beetles turn on their stricken comrade and chomp it up, letting Travers and Dodd share a moment of “What the fuck is going on!?” before they, and the cave people, get herded up by the Beetles and pushed into a dark hole.  THEN:

Suddenly the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet. He struggled, cried out, and felt himself descending through the air.

For a full half-minute he went downward at a speed that constricted his throat so that he could hardly draw breath. Then, just as he had nerved himself for the imminent crash, the speed of his descent was checked. In another moment he found that he was slowing to a standstill in mid-air.

He was beginning to float backward—upward. But the wall of moving shells, pushing against him, forced him on, downward, and yet apparently against the force of gravitation.

Then of a sudden Tommy was aware of a dim light all about him. His feet touched earth and grass as softly as a thistledown alighting.

He found himself seated in the same dim light upon red grass, and staring into Jimmy's face.

So, just to give it away, the valley they crashed into is connected to the Hollow Earth, and when they fall down into the subterranean depth, the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation lifts them back up and against the inner edge of the crust, which, of course, is entirely 100% accurate and very very sciency.

Ol’ Travers wakes up, and he and Dodd and a bunch of cave folk, including the Blonde and the Old Man, have been herded by a bunch of beetles into a little clearing, carpeted in red grass.  There’re luminous vegetables too, that lend a dim glow to the scene.  Dodd gets a chance to wax rhapsodic about deep sea color schemes and whatnot, and then drops in some completely spur of the moment hypothesizing about the origins of all the weird ass stuff they’ve seen:

"The grass is red because there's no sunlight to produce chlorophyll. The inhabitants of the deep sea are red or black, almost invariably. In the case of the humans, they've become bleached. My belief is that that man and woman we saw, and those"—he pointed to the vague forms of human beings, who moved across the grass, gathering something—"are survivors of the primitive race that still exists as the Australians. Undoubtedly one of the branches of the human stock originated in antarctica at a time when it enjoyed a tropical temperature, and was the land bridge between Australia and South America.

"And the—beetles?" asked Tommy.

"Ah, they go back to the days when nature was in a more grandiose mood!" replied the archaeologist enthusiastically. "That's the most wonderful discovery of the ages. The world will go crazy over them when we bring back the first living specimens to the zoological parks of the great cities.

Good science-ing there, Dodd.

Dodd and Travers hang with the cave folks.  They try to eat a cave apple they pick from a tree, but the Blonde Cave Lady knocks it out of their hand in disgust, and jams a shrimp down Dodd’s throat.  Their meetcute is broken up, however, by the arrival of a big ol’ Boss Beetle and his Beetle Honor Guard.  

I guess now might be a good time to reflect on Beetles, and the threats a giant one would pose.  Excepting the problems of respiration and structural integrity an giant exoskeletone-ed critter would have, are these big beetles really that menacing?  I mean, sure, swarms of things are bad, and there are apparently lots and lots of these giant beetles, but I don’t think beetles are particularly dangerous, you know?  I mean, they’ve got no stingers, no poisons or toxins.  I suppose Lady Bugs are pretty mercilessly predaceous, at least against fairly sedentary aphids and whatnot, but I don’t really think of beetles rushing around in a fury of chitin and legs, rending their prey limb from limb.  I guess these giant Beetles have just carved out a new niche for themselves as the top predators of the subterranean world.

Big ol’ King Beetle shows up, and some of his guard beetles scuttle forward and bring Dodd and Travers before their Sovereign Lord and Master who, in a shocking twist, turns out to not be a beetle at all!  In fact, it’s a man dressed as a Beetle, wearing a molted shell!

It was light enough for Tommy to see the face of the ruler of the hellish swarm. And it required all his powers of will to keep from collapsing from sheer horror at what he saw.

For, despite the close-fitting shell, the face of the beetle king was the face of a man—a white man!

Jim Dodd's shriek rang out above the shrilling of the beetle-legs, "Bram! It's you, it's you! My God, it's you, Bram!"

That’s right!  In a shocking twist you never would have seen coming from the ridiculous amounts of awkward expository dialogue preceding it, the morphine-addled nutjob Bram is apparently the ruler of the Giant Beetles!  As mentioned, he’s wearing a beetle carapace like a coat, and evidences some ability to communicate with and control the beetles.  This is all secondary, however, mere prelude to the development of the best bit of ridiculous “yank-some-words-from-an-encyclopedia” dialogue ever:

A sneering chuckle broke from Bram's lips. "Yes, it's me, James Dodd," he answered. "I'm a little surprised to see you here, Dodd, but I'm mighty glad. Still insane upon the subject of fossil monotremes, I suppose?[…]

"Yes, still insane," answered Dodd bitterly. "Insane enough to go on believing that the polyprotodontia and the dasyuridae, which includes the peramelidae, or bandicoots, and the banded ant-eaters, or myrmecobidae, are not to be found in fossil form, for the excellent reason that they were not represented before the Upper Cretaceous period.”

"You lie! You lie!" screamed Bram. "I have shown to all the world that phascalotherium, amphitherium, amblotherium, spalacotherium, and many other orders are to be found in the Upper Jurassic rocks of England, Wyoming, and other places. You—you are the man who denied the existence of the nototherium, of the marsupial lion, in pleistocene deposits! You denied that the dasyuridae can be traced back beyond the pleistocene. And you stand there and lie to me, when you are at my mercy!”

You’ll forgive the gratuitous excerptations, but that is absolutely the best thing ever.  You’ll remember that Dodd and Bram had battled it out in the literature a ways back, a tidbit dropped earlier in the story, before Travers and Dodd had fallen through the hole in the pole and watched a blonde lady eat a giant shrimp.  I mean, come on, how can you not be utterly, wonderfully charmed by that bit of insanity?  You find yourself dragged before the King of The Giant Beetles, who turns out to be a guy you know, and the first thing you do is start an argument about mammalian biostratigraphy.  And the silliness is exacerbated by the goofy combination of expert shop-talk (peramelidae) with explanatory asides (…the banded ant-eaters).  You can only hope they talk like that all the time about everything ever (“I’d appreciate a glass, an amorphous solid predominantly composed of silica, of water, or dihydrogen monoxide”).  I think that we can read something into this disagreement, but we’ll get back to that later on.

Of course, Travers thinks maybe Dodd ought not be antagonizing the insane Beetle King, and tries to get his pal to ixnay on the ientificscay isagreementday.  But Dodd will have none of it, you hear me?  NONE OF IT:

But Dodd, whose eyes were glaring, said a sublime thing: "I have given my life to science, and I will never deny my master!”

Sublime indeed.  But such are the wonders of bandicoot phylogeny to inspire such devotion.

Of course, you ain’t gonna let some punk-ass kid knock your carefully constructed phylogenetic analyses.  Bram does the obvious thing and tackles Dodd, and they wrestle while the beetles watch impassively.  Travers separates the two of them from their little nerd scrum, accidently tipping Bram over and onto his, at which point the assembled beetles freak the fuck out and rush him! 

Turns out that the beetles, like all good bugs, are pretty much robots, and they’ve got a big ol’ autonomic response to seeing one of their own on its back or injured: they gonna eat him.  They can’t help it; they’re just bugs, programmed to eat and breed.  Luckily, Travers gets Bram up and onto his feet before the beetles can rend him limb from insane limb, which stops them in their tracks.  Then Bram flicks his bic, and the light of it drives back the beetles.

So, to recap: beetles gonna eat, and they particularly while chow down on a beetle that is injured or on its back immobile, AND fire bad.

Poor ol’ Dodd got himself fucked up pretty good in the fight, however, acquiring a gash in his throat from a rock when he fell.  Bram, mollified, pops a pill (Don’t Do Drugs, Kids) and whistles up some Beetle help to bring Dodd back to his chambers for healing.  At this point, the story see fit to tell us that Bram, having just used the lighter to drive off his blood-maddened beetle guards, dropped the lighter and promptly forgot about it, allowing Travers to scoop it up.  That’s some good writing there, chief.

They flutter back to Bram’s fortress of solitude, which turns out to be a cavern, lit and warmed by rushing gouts of flame erupting from a natural petroleum spring.  The Beetles don’t like the heat or fire, and the spring is part of Bram’s power over them.  They unload the patient, Bram pops some more drugs, and brings some fruit for them to munch one while Dodd recuperates. 

Turns out that “Submundia” is facing a pretty dire food shortage, mostly as a result of the ecological dynamics of the place; the Beetles are the top of the food chain, but they go through a boom-and-bust population cycle related to the availability of their primary prey, the blonde cave folk.  The Blondies, like retirees on a cruise, refuse to eat any fruits or vegetables, preferring shrimp for their meals, which is straining their own population dynamics as well.  Turns out the beetles are due for another big hatch soon, which Bram seems pretty excited about.  Dodd rouses himself enough to ask if he can get that big blonde cave girl to be his nurse, which Bram agrees to, then everybody takes a nap.

Resting and recuperating for some time afterwards, Dodd and Travers get to know Haidia the cave Girl a little better. 

That Haidia was in love with Dodd in quite a human way was evident. To please the girl, both Dodd and Tommy had learned to eat the raw shrimps, which, being bloodless, were really no worse than oysters, and had a flavor half-way between shrimp and crawfish. To please the men, Haidia tried not to shudder when she saw them devouring the breadfruit and nectarines of which Bram always had a plentiful supply. Bram was solicitous in his inquiries for Dodd's health.

A touching scene of domesticity.

Anyway, they realize that Bram is waiting around for Dodd to get better before putting a proposition of some sort to them; as such, Dodd decides to fake paralysis, giving them more time to think up a plan of escape, although if you ask ME, I imagine he’s just hoping for more Haida-administered sponge-baths. 

Haidia even learns English, through the power of Narrative Necessity:

Her brain, which had probably developed certain faculties in different proportions from those of the upper human race, had registered every word that either of the two men had ever spoken, and remembered it. As soon as Dodd ascertained this, he began to instruct her, and, with her abnormal faculties of memory, it was not long before she could talk quite intelligently. The obstacle that had stood between them was swept away. She became one of themselves.

This lets Haidia share the history of the subterranean world with Travers and Dodd which is, of course, suitably dire and chaotic. 

Seems that the Beetle Swarms are pretty much top dogs in the Underworld, and where there are swarms there’s not much else; the beetles seem particularly fond of chowing down on blonde cave folk, so that there weren’t many humans left.  When Bram showed up and took over the Beetles, he instituted a breeding program whereby the most “prolific” people were used as cattle stock to feed the beetles.  That had averted their extinction for a while, but a new swarm was due to hatch any day now, and there ain’t anything like enough Aryan Cave People to feed these new beetles.

Then, Haidia pulls a lizard out from between her boobs.

The girl, with a shudder, put her hand to her bosom, and brought out a little bright-eyed lizard.

"The old man you saw with me, who is one of our wise elders, has told our people that these things feed upon the beetle larvae," she said. "We are putting them secretly into the nests. But what can a few lizards do against millions." She looked up. "In the earth above us, the beetle larvae extend for miles, in a solid mass," she said. "When they come out as beetles, it will be the end of all of us.”

This sounds like a job for two Ivy-League White Dudes!  They decide they gotta boogey, but there are only two ways out of Bram’s cavern apartment: flying away on a beetle, which is how they got there in the first place, or over a spooky bridge that spans the petroleum spring. 

Bram shows up, eyes mad with morphine and his love of marsupial fossils, and takes Travers and Dodd out to show him the Beetle Fields.  Miles and miles of grubs, getting hungry.  The upswing is, they’re going to hatch soon, and eat up all the remaining people in the subterranean world.

"Any day now the entire swarm will emerge," cried Bram. "How many moultings they undergo before they undergo the finished state, I do not know, but already, as you see, they are prepared for the battle of life. They emerge ravenous. That beetle will fall upon the man-herds and devour a full grown man, unless the guards destroy it."

He raised his arms with the gesture of an ancient prophet. "Woe to the human race," he cried, "the wretched ape spawn that has cast out its teachers and persecuted those who sought to raise it to higher things!”

He’s just pissed he didn’t get tenure; I hear ya man, it’s rough out there. 

 Bram goes full Mad Scientist Mode, explaining how he, Lord of the Beetles, has a plan to unleash their destructive gluttony on the Surface World, killing of the weak surface people and allowing him to remake civilization in his own image, presumably one that relies heavily on his particular pet theories about the evolutionary significance and stratigraphic occurrence of certain marsupial fossils from the Mesozoic.

In an odd twist, Bram plans to straight up kill all the humans, replacing them with beetles, but he wants Travers and Dodd to help him (for some reason), such that the continuity of Man’s Achievements can be preserved for the beetles.  Who the hell knows that means, but here’s my best guess: Bram makes some comments about the superiority of insects over humans, all that “purity of purpose” shit that Bilbo was talking about aboard the Nostromo in Alien.  I gather that Bram expects to slaughter the apes so that the Beetles will inherit the earth, eventually evolving a civilization.  That’s why he wants to preserve Humanity’s records and science, to help out the future beetles (I suppose). 

It is important to remember that Bram has been doing a LOT of drugs.  Maybe he’s just having a bad trip on a combination of Haldane and sour pills, who knows?

Dodd and he inevitably clash, first over the goddamn marsupial fossil record again, then over Man’s Place In Nature, with Dodd coming down firmly on the side of a Great Chain of Being.

“Listen to me," bawled Dodd, advancing with waving arms. "Once and for all, let me tell you that your deductions are all based upon fallacious premises. No, I will not shut up, Tom Travers! You want me to aid your damned beetles in the destruction of humanity! I tell you that your phascalotherium, amphitherium, and all the rest of them, including the marsupial lion, are degenerate developments of the age following the pleistocene. I say the whole insect world was made to fertilize the plant world, so that it should bear fruit for human food. Man is the summit of the scale of evolution, and I will never join in any infamous scheme for his destruction.”

Moving stuff indeed.

Bram sputters and gnashes his teeth, but offers the two of them an ultimatum: Join Him, OR DIE!!!  I guess he’s afraid he’ll be lonely as the only human in a Beetle World, so that’s why he’s giving them 24 hours to think it over.  They go back, and plan to make a run for it, once the Petroleum Fire Springs dies down a bit, as it does periodically.

But, because he’s bored and didn’t think to bring some books or even a crossword puzzle, Bram shows back up before they can go, spouting off more dire threats.  He’ll feed em all to the larvae, unless they swear fealty to his Empire of the Beetle.  This is yet another chance for some Dueling scientist banter that is simply the greatest thing ever produced by humans:

"Dodd, there is no personal quarrel between us," Bram went on. Again that note of pathetic pleading came into his voice. "Give up your mad ideas. Admit that the banded ant-eater, at least, existed before the pleistocene epoch, and everything can be settled. When you see what my beetles are going to do to humanity, you'll be proud to join us. Only make a beginning. You remember the point I made in my paper, about spalacotherium in the Upper Jurassic rocks. It would convince anybody but a hardened fanatic."

"I read your paper, and I saw your so-called spalacotherium, reconstructed from what you called a jaw-bone," shouted Dodd. "That so-called jaw-bone was a lump of chalk, made porous by water, and the rest was in your imagination. Do your worst, Bram, I'll never crucify truth to save my life. And I'll laugh at your spalacotherium when your beetles are eating me.”

I’m going to rotate that “Give up your mad ideas” line into my roster, I think.

Bram, having shouted about Pleistocene fossil xenarthrans, decides he’s done for the day and leaves.  Then Haidia shows up, lugging some Beetle shells which they use to disguise themselves and sneak away over the fiery bridge.  Bram discovers their clever ruse, and tries to chase after them, but the trio of escapees finds a river and use their shells as boats to get away. 

Unfortunately, they end up in a mushroom forest where they are immediately attacked by a 15-foot Praying Mantis, fulfilling its ecological niche as a Cliffhanger Predator.

THUS ENDS PART 1!  WILL THE THREE OF THEM SURVIVE!?  WILL BRAM SUCCEED IN HIS PLAN TO EXTERIMATE ALL HUMAN LIFE ON THE PLANET!?  WHEN IS THE FIRST OCCURRENCE DATUM OF MARSUIPIALS IN THE FOSSIL RECORD, AND HOW SHOULD WE INTERPRET THE TAPHONOMIC BIAS INHERENT IN THE RECORD!?

All this, and more, will be answered next time in the thrilling conclusion of THE BEETLE HORDES!

The Astronomer