A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  I may as well state here that I took the opportunity later on to revisit the National Museum, and there I read the following from the original specification of the Founder:

  “It is considered that the abolition of sex is the only sure means of preventing those crimes and wickednesses prevalent in the old world which we have abandoned. The new race of humans shall therefore be adapted after the manner of certain elementary protoplasms of the deep seas, who produce their young by severing portions of their organisms, so that each severed portion becomes in turn a perfect creature. Analogously our descendants shall produce their offspring, not by severing portions of their person, but by producing eggs, each of which shall be perfect of itself and capable of being hatched at the will of the community, or destroyed if of bad proportions, either physically or mentally. This is for the betterment of the race and the sure prevention of the disease misnamed love by the class of madmen known as poets. But in order that the intellectual emotion or union of the spirit—which but rarely existed among the old humans—shall be fostered amongst us, the new race shall still possess the characteristics of men and women.”

  When I returned I was met by the battered relic who had taken my watch. He held out a very fine violin and informed me that Miss Clarice desired my presence in the music-room. I followed him into a large domed hall, furnished, to my astonishment, quite after the style of a modern drawing-room. Clarice was seated at a piano. She greeted me with a smile.

  “I did not know you were musical,” she said. “I should like to hear you play.”

  I did my best, and was pleased to observe the effect. Her eyes became dreamy-looking and she gazed at me with an expression of delighted admiration.

  “Why, you are infinitely superior to Tennyson!” she exclaimed, as I finished a selection from “The Mikado.”

  We discussed music for some time, and she proved herself no mean performer on the piano. Suddenly she sighed.

  “Mr Merrick, I want to confide in you.”

  I bowed.

  “I feel that our great ancestor made a dreadful mistake in altering us as he did. I have read many of your books and it seems to me that you are much happier than we are.”

  She clasped her hands and a far-away look came into her beautiful eyes.

  “You do not know so much, of course, but there is more variety in your lives. Sometimes I wish I were an ordinary woman such as your great authors describe. I feel so much like a machine—and we live such clockwork kind of lives—everything is settled for us by the Adapters, of whom my father is, as you know, the Chief. I wonder if—”

  She paused and looked at me doubtfully.

  “You have never seen me in my proper shape?”

  I lied. I said I was quite satisfied to see her as she was and I had never seen her otherwise than beautiful.

  “Yes—but if you saw me in my shell with my face expanded you would hate the sight of me—I have noticed that you can hardly suppress your horror of the people here.”

  “I find it difficult to get accustomed to them,” I replied.

  “I know, and I know you are frightened about something. Tell me, has my father made any suggestion to you about operating on you?”

  I told her of the conversation I had overheard between her father and Fairbairn.

  “It is as I suspected,” she said. “My father has no feelings at all—he is the embodiment of science, and would sacrifice anything for its sake. But listen—there are others besides myself who are opposed to the Adapters. It is true I do not know of anyone else who has ventured to think the Founder was wrong, and I have never spoken my thoughts to anyone before. I will prevent this horrible thing he wants to do to you. He dare not do it openly without the consent of the Council, and I know enough of the members to insure their refusal to agree. He might try to do it without their knowledge, but not if the whole thing was made public. So have no fear—oh ! it is awful. I must go to my room.”

  “What is it?” I asked, alarmed at the sudden change in her expression.

  “I have to go back to my own form—you do not know how hard it is to keep like this for long.” She held out her hand to me. I kissed it. The next instant I was alone.

  I did not see her again until the next morning, when the relic again led me to the music-room.

  “I have seen Mr Tennyson and several others,” she began abruptly. “Your case will be discussed in the Council to-day. I think you are safe, but Mr Tennyson is jealous of you. He regards me as his affinity and I hate him, except when I am in my own true shape; then I seem to alter. I don’t know why or how, but it is so, and it is horrible. Oh, how I wish I were a real woman and—tell me, do I look as nice as the women you used to know?”

  “You are a thousand times more beautiful than anyone I ever knew,” I said fervently.

  She looked at me for a long time in silence.

  “There is something I have thought of,” she said.

  “If my father can turn you into one of us, as he thinks he can, would it not be possible to turn me back into a woman such as I appear to be now?”

  “Can I believe my ears?” said a terrible voice behind us—it was her father.

  “Clarice,” he said, “I have suspected you for some time. I had misgivings when I selected you as being fit for hatching twenty-four years ago. There was something abnormal about you even then, and your passion for masquerading as a prehistoric woman since you grew up has filled me with grave anxiety. You have deeply sinned in your thoughts and must expiate them. As for you—” he added, turning to me with a look of cold-blooded ferocity, “your case shall be settled to-night.”

  “You shall not carry out your abominable ideas on Mr Merrick,” cried his daughter. “I have told the Council.”

  “What!” he thundered. “Stand still!” He made some rapid passes before her face. She seemed to writhe for a few minutes, and to fight against the influence he exerted. Then, before my agonised eyes, she fell into a shapeless heap on the ground.

  Her father looked malignantly at her; then, calmly ringing the bell, which was answered by the relic –

  “Fetch her shell,” he said.

  The relic departed, and returned rolling a shell in front of him.

  “Get in,” he commanded.

  My poor, shapeless love crawled feebly along the floor and flopped into the casing. “Not before him,” she wailed.

  “Get up,” was the stern reply.

  She languidly thrust forth three legs and three arms. Her face now filled the opening in the end of the shell. She looked despairingly at me, great tears pouring from her eyes.

  “Remember,” he said, “you cannot leave your shell for twenty days. Now go to your room.”

  She withdrew her legs and arms, and rolled slowly and sadly from the room.

  “You abused my kindness,” he said to me coldly, “by encouraging my daughter in her disgraceful imaginings. Pending the decision by the Council to-morrow, you will be confined in your room.”

  My thoughts were not pleasant ones that night. At daybreak Tennyson appeared.

  “It’s all up with you, Monty,” he said. “I’ve been beating up the sentimentalists, but they seem pretty indifferent about you. Most of them haven’t even heard of you. However, I’ve got one point in your favour. You’ll be allowed to speak in your own defence, and I am requested to bring you before the Council.”

  I started to thank him, but he interrupted me.

  “Don’t thank me—I don’t care a cast-off shell whether you die or live. I’m simply obliging Clarice, who seems to have taken a crazy fancy to you. I shall come for you in two hours’ time.”

  He had hardly been gone two minutes when the door again opened and the Chief Adapter entered, followed by Fairbairn and two other younger barrels.

  Fairbairn eyed me curiously for a few minutes and then said to the Chief:

  “I doubt if he will stand it, you know.”

  “It is hardly of consequence whether he does or not,” was th
e reply. “I am resolved to make the attempt. Bring him along.”

  I was seized by the two younger creatures, and carried, in spite of my struggles, out of the room and along several inclines until we arrived at the laboratory where I had first come to my senses.

  An ominous array of instruments lay exposed to view on a bench, and a pungent odour of anæsthetics filled the apartment.

  They released me for a moment, when in sheer desperation I made a plunge forward, snatched up a formidable-looking knife or lancet, and put myself in a position of defence.

  “Seize him,” cried the Chief.

  There was a whirl of arms and tentacles. I fought for my life and slashed right and left at my tormentors. So furious was my onslaught that they drew back in alarm. I had actually severed one of their arms—there being no bone to stop the thrust. Then I felt a murderous desire to slay them all, and I sprang straight at the Chief Adapter, who barely succeeded in avoiding me. He began to make passes in the air, but they had no effect, for I was for the moment a madman. I possessed myself of a long sickle-shaped blade, and aimed a terrific sweeping cut at Fairbairn, who jumped right out of his shell and slithered along the floor to the doorway, out of which he crept, undulating like a serpent.

  “Quick—the current!” shouted the Chief to the one of his assistants who was unhurt, pointing to a button in the wall, but taking care to keep out of my reach himself. I ran in the same direction myself and the younger monstrosity fled at my approach.

  “Come on, all of you!” I shouted. “I’ll let you see how an American can die!”

  The Chief was evidently nonplussed, and what the upshot would have been I do not know—but just as I was preparing for a final onslaught—Tennyson, followed by a number of others, burst into the room. One of them—evidently someone in authority—called out:

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Do you permit an innocent stranger to be dissected alive in your country?” I shouted.

  He turned to the Chief –

  “So you’ve been trying your abominable experiments again. Is not this the man of whom you spoke?” he added to Tennyson, pointing at me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Merrick—I think you said his name was—Mr Merrick, you will be good enough to accompany us to the Council Hall. Fairbairn, I am astonished that you should lend your countenance to the Chief Adapter, who has already been warned against these practices. You, sir,” he added to the latter, “will explain your proceedings before the Council.”

  He led the way out of the room. Tennyson ranged himself alongside me and the Chief and Fairbairn followed, the rest of the crowd bringing up the rear. I had dropped the sickle, but the knife I secreted in my breast pocket. We walked all the way and I noticed that the stranger was treated with the greatest respect by all whom we encountered. They all joined in the procession until there must have been over a hundred of all shapes and diameters gravely walking with a curious half hop, half run, to which they were evidently not accustomed. It appeared to be from some sense of etiquette that they did not roll.

  Tennyson told me as we went along that the stranger was the President of the country, and that I could think myself lucky he had taken the matter up. He had but just returned from a secret visit to Paris, where he had been studying the latest developments in aeroplanes.

  I was taken into the Main Hall that I had already seen, and placed in a kind of dock erected temporarily—so Tennyson said—for my particular benefit.

  The ensuring proceedings were singularly informal, and so far as I could see, free from the atmosphere of law which overwhelms a stranger in the English Law Courts.

  The President ordered the Chief Adapter to give his account of what had happened. Somewhat to my surprise he did this without seeking to minimise in the slightest degree his share, in which he actually seemed to take considerable pride.

  “As you are aware, I have for some time past endeavoured to procure the means of demonstrating my discovery relative to suspended animation,” he said, “and the specimen Merrick, who owes his existence to my skill, would have had the inestimable honour of being the means of proving in his own person the certainty of my method. I intended to benefit him by my special method of development, and there is little doubt that he would have been physically, if not quite mentally, one of us before I had done with him. The operation would not have lasted longer than twenty days, when he would not have been distinguishable in general appearance from any of the inhabitants of this country. Now, I represent to you, sir,” he added, addressing the President directly, “that there is no crime in what I have declared on oath.”

  The President merely requested me to confirm or deny the truth of the Chief’s statements. I admitted that there was nothing I could deny.

  “Why, then, were you endeavouring to kill him?”

  “Kill him!” I said, “I was defending myself. Do you think I wanted to be operated on for his amusement? Besides, he forgot that he wanted to do it out of revenge because his daughter didn’t agree—”

  The Chief Adapter interrupted:

  “My daughter should be left out of this discussion.”

  “No,” said the President, “let us hear the whole story.”

  I thereupon told him my account of the Chief’s anger with Clarice, and how he had threatened me when she told him that she had informed the Council.

  The Chief Adapter sprang off his butt-end, and waved his tentacles furiously in my direction.

  “The abominable monkey leaves me no alternative but to state in public that which for my own honour and the honour of this whole nation I would have buried in oblivion. This object has dared to raise his eyes towards my daughter—let him deny it if he can—and she, to her shame and mine, has not repulsed him. Nay, she has even expressed a desire to become as one of those half-developed creatures of the old world—she has scorned her birthright.”

  He had got so far when his voice was drowned by a terrific roar of fury from all those present. Cries of “Kill! kill! kill!” in a series of stunning shouts rent the atmosphere. Even the President’s glance in my direction seemed to be that of a wild beast. There was a rush in my direction, when he raised his arms and commanded silence.

  “You are fully exonerated and have the sympathy of us all,” he said to the Chief, “but let us not be carried away by our righteous anger at the enormity of which this man has been guilty. We must remember that he cannot in his ignorance realise his guilt. Let him therefore be deported immediately. We cannot consent to your experiment, Adapter. Give him fourteen days’ provisions and set him where he may be picked up. That is my word.”

  I was immediately seized and conveyed from the hall. Not a single friendly countenance could I espy. Tennyson in particular was making the most diabolical faces at me. Those who carried me seemed to think I was contaminating them by my touch. I was placed in a roller and they were about to start when the President and the Chief came up and stopped them.

  I felt a cold hand pressed on my forehead and a piercing pain passed through my head.

  “He will remember nothing of the locality now,” said the Chief Adapter.

  The roller started, but at a funeral pace, and I perceived that an enormous crowd were following—every eye was fixed upon me with a baleful glare. Only the guard by which I was surrounded held them in check.

  Fierce yells of hatred and derision were raised. The journey was over interminable winding paths, overhanging precipices of enormous depth, down which I looked in a vain endeavour to distinguish the bottom. At last the roller stopped, and I was ordered to descend.

  All about me were a mob of savage faces glaring from their barrels, and pointing their extended fingers stretched to their utmost length in the direction of a winding stream which formed the boundary to the glade. Beyond me was a huge mass of boulders forming the approach to an iron ring of mountains.

  “Go—you are expelled,” cried the President. “You have grossly abused our hospitality. You m
ay thank fate that you leave with your life. Do not attempt to linger in this vicinity.” It all seemed so much like a dream, from which I felt I should awaken presently—but when I looked back I suddenly caught sight of my poor Clarice. She was standing at the bottom step of the tunnel, a little white hand was extended towards me in a mute gesture of farewell . . .

  I walked for days through barren paths in the burning sun, resting at night in any shelter of the rocks that presented itself, and now I only await the end.

  FRIEND ISLAND

  Francis Stevens

  It was upon the waterfront that I first met her, in one of the shabby little tea shops frequented by able sailoresses of the poorer type. The uptown, glittering resorts of the Lady Aviators’ Union were not for such as she.

  Stern of feature, bronzed by wind and sun, her age could only be guessed, but I surmised at once that in her I beheld a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines—a true sea-woman of that elder time when woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized. When, to emphasize their victory, women in all ranks were sterner than today’s need demands.

  The spruce, smiling young maidens—engine-women and stokers of the great aluminum rollers, but despite their profession, very neat in gold-braided blue knickers and boleros—these looked askance at the hard-faced relic of a harsher day, as they passed in and out of the shop.

  I, however, brazenly ignoring similar glances at myself, a mere male intruding on the haunts of the world’s ruling sex, drew a chair up beside the veteran. I ordered a full pot of tea, two cups and a plate of macaroons, and put on my most ingratiating air. Possibly my unconcealed admiration and interest were wiles not exercised in vain. Or the macaroons and tea, both excellent, may have loosened the old sea-woman’s tongue. At any rate, under cautious questioning, she had soon launched upon a series of reminiscences well beyond my hopes for color and variety.

  “When I was a lass,” quoth the sea-woman, after a time, “there was none of this high-flying, gilt-edged, leather-stocking luxury about the sea. We sailed by the power of our oil and gasoline. If they failed on us, like as not ’twas the rubber ring and the rolling wave for ours.”