Outside Beings

The Outside Beings are an alien presence whose contact with humanity is mediated by strange voices, brain-preserving technology, and the testimony of human collaborators. They offer knowledge and journeys beyond ordinary human experience, yet the narrator encounters them chiefly through signs that resist verification: metallic speech from a machine, buzzing voices behind a closed door, and unsettling evidence that a familiar human appearance may have been reproduced. The gap between the beings’ assurances and the narrator’s fear gives their apparent alliance its menace.

Contact and Human Allies

The account of the Outside Beings’ activities reaches Albert N. Wilmarth through a mechanical speaker connected to a brain cylinder. The speaker identifies itself as human and describes its body as resting under vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, while its brain communicates through the apparatus. It says it first met the visitors in the Himalayas and has since helped them in various ways; in return, they have provided experiences unavailable to most people. These are the speaker’s claims, delivered through an unmistakably mechanical voice, rather than facts Wilmarth can independently confirm at the time.

The relationship is presented as an alliance, not simply an encounter between hostile strangers and frightened witnesses. The speaker says the visitors seek people of knowledge and want to show them places that human beings otherwise know only through conjecture. It also identifies Noyes, Wilmarth’s guide, as a longtime member of their circle, and links him to one of the voices on a phonograph record sent by Henry Wentworth Akeley. Noyes’s presence makes the network of cooperation more immediate: Wilmarth has not merely heard about the visitors but has been brought into their company by someone who has apparently served them for years.

Bodies, Machines, and Travel

The visitors’ most consequential power in the account is their ability to separate a human brain from its body. The speaker describes the process as so skillful that calling it surgery would be inadequate, and says that a brain can remain active in a cylinder while its original body is kept under treatment. According to this testimony, the body does not age while the brain is absent; the brain itself can be sustained through occasional changes to its preserving fluid. The prospect is therefore not merely survival in a new environment, but a radical division of human identity between organic body and maintained brain.

The speaker claims to have travelled on thirty-seven celestial bodies, including planets, dark stars, and less definable objects. Eight, it says, lie outside the speaker’s galaxy, and two beyond the curved cosmos of space and time. These travels are described as having done the speaker no harm. The brain cylinder and its connected speech apparatus make such journeys imaginable within the account: the human traveller need not carry an ordinary living body into places beyond familiar human limits. The speaker says it expects to cross the void again in a week and hopes Henry Wentworth Akeley will accompany it.

This extraordinary offer is framed as an invitation to Wilmarth as well. The speaker appeals to his interest in strangeness and folklore, promises that the transitions are painless, and describes sensation in a wholly mechanised state as something that can be enjoyed. When the electrodes are disconnected, it says, the traveller falls asleep into vivid, fantastic dreams. That reassurance makes the proposal sound almost hospitable; at the same time, it shows how completely the promised experience depends on surrendering ordinary bodily life to unfamiliar technology.

Voices and Uncertainty

Later, in the farmhouse, Wilmarth hears several people speaking in the study below. Two voices are unmistakably the Outside Beings’ buzzing form of communication, the same general sound he associates with the earlier phonograph record. They differ in pitch, accent, and tempo, so the sound does not indicate a single speaker or a uniform voice. A third voice belongs to a mechanical speech machine connected to one of the brains in a cylinder. Wilmarth initially considers whether it is the same intelligence that addressed him before, then recognizes that the shared machinery itself could account for the voice’s metallic, lifeless quality. The apparatus makes a speaker audible while obscuring the identity of the mind behind it.

The conversation also contains two human voices: one belonging to an unknown, apparently rustic man, and the other to Noyes. Their presence alongside the alien buzzing and mechanical speech places human collaborators, the Outside Beings, and brain-cylinder technology in the same hidden gathering. Yet Wilmarth hears only fragments and cannot use the voices to establish what the group intends. The scene supplies evidence of contact and coordination, not a full account of the beings’ purposes.

The Threat of an Unreadable Alliance

The narrator’s later interpretation of the visitors’ presence remains fearful rather than conclusive. After leaving Brattleboro, he resolves never to return to Vermont and comes to regard the wild hills as an outpost of a cosmic race. He connects the newly glimpsed planet Pluto with Yuggoth, but this is his own increasingly ominous interpretation, not a demonstrated explanation of the visitors’ plans. He fears that their apparent interest in Earth may precede a policy harmful to its inhabitants, while admitting uncertainty about what they want.

The objects left in the empty chair deepen that uncertainty. Wilmarth finds three ingenious constructions, fitted with metallic clamps, whose purpose he cannot safely determine. He hopes they are wax likenesses, but fears that they are the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley, reproduced in minute detail. Their presence supports the possibility of disguise or substitution without establishing who made them or exactly how they were used. The Outside Beings thus remain difficult to separate from the machinery, voices, and human bodies through which they appear. Their offer of exploration promises an immense enlargement of experience; the unresolved question is whether a human being can accept that offer without losing the very identity that makes the journey meaningful.