Albert N. Wilmarth and the Outer Ones

Albert N. Wilmarth’s contact with the Outside Beings is defined by a sharp divide between the vast experience they offer and the menace he senses in their presence. First approached through a mechanical voice speaking for a brain separated from its body, he is invited to join an alliance that promises travel beyond ordinary human limits. Later, hearing the beings in Henry Wentworth Akeley’s farmhouse, Wilmarth cannot reconcile their supposed friendliness with the authority, secrecy, and uncanny activity surrounding him. His changing response turns curiosity into suspicion and makes escape seem urgent.

Contact Through a Mechanical Voice

Wilmarth’s first direct address from an apparent ally of the Outside Beings comes through a machine fitted with tubes and a sound box. Its voice is loud, metallic, and deliberately unexpressive, but its precise, attentive speech convinces him that an intelligent speaker is present and observing him. The contrast matters: the voice sounds lifeless, yet it addresses Wilmarth personally and knows of his correspondence with Akeley.

The speaker identifies himself as a human being whose brain is in a cylinder, while his body rests under vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half away. He says that he sees, hears, and speaks through electronic devices. For Wilmarth, this makes contact with the Outside Beings more than an account of distant creatures: the speaker describes a human presence divided between a protected body and a mechanically mediated brain.

The voice also claims that it first met the beings in the Himalayas and has helped them in various ways. In return, they have given the speaker experiences few people could imagine. Wilmarth is thus presented with an alliance that crosses the boundary between human and alien, although the account comes from the machine itself and is not independently verified in the scene.

The Offer of Cosmic Experience

The speaker gives the alliance a striking scale: it claims to have visited thirty-seven celestial bodies, including planets, dark stars, and less definable objects, as well as eight bodies beyond the galaxy and two beyond the curved cosmos of space and time. It insists these journeys have caused no harm. The means, it says, are the beings’ highly refined brain extractions, which are so unlike crude surgery that the speaker rejects that comparison. With the brain removed, the body does not age; the brain itself is virtually immortal, sustained by mechanical faculties and occasional changes of preserving fluid.

This account makes the invitation both intellectual and bodily. The visitors are said to want people of knowledge, and the speaker appeals directly to Wilmarth’s interest in strangeness and folklore. It promises that the Outside Beings can show him abysses that most people know only through uninformed speculation. Travel with Akeley and the speaker is presented not as a threat but as a rare opportunity for discovery.

The speaker further describes the transition as painless and claims that a mechanised mode of sensation can be enjoyable. When the electrodes are disconnected, the traveller supposedly falls asleep into unusually vivid and fantastic dreams. It expects Akeley to accompany it on a journey the following week and thinks Noyes may join them as well, identifying Noyes as a longtime member of the group and linking him to a voice on the record Akeley sent Wilmarth. The invitation therefore reveals a network of human associates, but it does not resolve how much Wilmarth can trust either the speaker or those named in its account.

The Voices in Akeley’s Farmhouse

Later that night, Wilmarth hears several speakers in the study below his room. Two voices are unmistakably the Outside Beings’ characteristic buzzing, familiar from the phonograph record; a third is a mechanical utterance-machine associated with a brain in a cylinder. He also distinguishes the rustic speech of an unknown man and Noyes’s smooth Bostonian voice. The familiar mechanical sound returns, but its presence does not prove that the same intelligence is speaking: Wilmarth recognizes that any brain connected to the same speech-producing apparatus might sound alike.

The sounds extend beyond speech. Wilmarth hears shuffling and scratching, and movement that suggests the room contains more living beings than the few speakers he can identify. Some footfalls have a loose, hard clatter, which he struggles to compare to anything familiar. He cannot see the beings responsible and does not attempt to settle their appearance. The encounter is therefore built from partial sensory evidence: identifiable voices and noises imply a gathering whose participants remain largely unseen.

Wilmarth cannot make out a continuous conversation. Names, including Akeley’s and his own, rise through the floor, but their significance is lost without context. He refuses to turn the fragments into definite conclusions. Even so, the gathering feels to him like a malign and blasphemous conclave, a feeling that conflicts with Akeley’s assurances of the Outside Beings’ friendliness. He hears an apparent difference in the speakers’ positions: one buzzing voice sounds authoritative, while the mechanical voice seems subordinate and pleading; Noyes sounds conciliatory. These impressions intensify the mystery without revealing what the group is deciding.

From Unease to Distrust

After the voices cease, Wilmarth remains awake, dressed, and armed, but initially cannot act. He knows the Outside Beings have been admitted to the farmhouse and can imagine that their arrival might simply have surprised Akeley. Yet the fragmentary speech has made him fear that something is wrong, even though he cannot identify a specific threat. The peaceful snoring below, which seems to confirm that Akeley is resting, does not dispel the suspicion.

Wilmarth begins to question whether Akeley has been deceived and used as bait to draw him into the hills through the letters, photographs, and phonograph record. He wonders whether the beings intend to destroy them because they have learned too much, and whether some hidden presence tried to drug him through the acrid coffee he refused. These remain suspicions rather than established facts. Their force comes from the sudden change he perceives between Akeley’s earlier and later letters, and from the disparity between Akeley’s assurances and the scene Wilmarth has overheard.

His response also changes his view of Akeley. A momentary dislike that arose during their evening conversation gives way to solidarity: Wilmarth sees his host as possibly compromised and in a position much like his own. He resolves to wake Akeley and get them out before morning, offering to supply the will to break away if Akeley cannot. If necessary, he considers leaving alone in Akeley’s Ford and taking it to a garage in Brattleboro. At the point covered here, this is a plan, not a completed escape. The relationship between Wilmarth and the Outside Beings has nevertheless reached a decisive turn: their promise of painless travel and cosmic knowledge can no longer outweigh his fear that apparent welcome conceals danger.