A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  He looked at her long and earnestly, and all at once it came to him that she was beautiful. It struck him as strange: that pinched look about the features that he had noticed an hour ago was gone now. The mouth was soft, the rounded chin curved as if in life. Almost there seemed a little bloom upon the pale, cold cheeks.

  With a heavy sigh he turned away, and, leaning his arm upon the mantelshelf, gave himself up as prey to miserable thought. The fire had died out long ago, and the morning was cold and raw, and from under the ill-fitting door a little harsh wind was rushing.

  What was to be done? The Professor would have to see a doctor, even if the medical man were brought in without his knowledge. Would it be possible to remove the – that girl, and arrange for her removal to … To where? Again, he lost himself in a sea of agonised doubt and uncertainty.

  He fell back upon all the old methods of concealing dead bodies he had ever heard of, but everything seemed impossible. What fools all those others must have been! Well, he could give himself up and explain matters; but then the Professor – to have his great discovery derided and held up to ridicule! The old man’s look, as he saw it a little while ago, seemed to forbid any betrayal of his defeat. Great heavens! what was to be done?

  He drew himself up with a heavy sigh, and turned to go back to the inner room to see if the Professor was still sleeping. As he went he tried to avoid glancing at the couch where the dead form lay, but when he got close, some force stronger than his will compelled him to look at it. And as he looked he felt turned into stone. He seemed frozen to the spot on which he stood; his eyes refused to remove themselves from what they saw.

  Staring like one benumbed, he told himself at last that he was going mad. How otherwise could he see this thing? Sweat broke out on his forehead, and a cry escaped him.

  The corpse was looking at him!

  Very intently, too, and as if surprised or trying to remember. Her large eyes seemed singularly brilliant, and for a while the only thing living about her. But all at once, as though memory had returned, she sprang to her feet and stood, strong, and utterly without support, and questioned him with those eyes silently but eloquently. The queerest thing about it all to Wyndham was that, instead of being enfeebled by the strange draught she had drunk, she looked younger, more vigorous, and altogether another person from the forlorn, poor child of eight hours ago; the drug had, beyond doubt, a property that even the Professor had never dreamt of; it gave not only rest, but renewed health and life to those who drank it.

  Seeing Wyndham did not or could not speak, she did.

  ‘I am alive – alive!’ she cried, with young and happy exultation. Where was the desire for death that lay so heavily on her only a few hours ago? Her voice rang through the room fresh and clear, filling it with music of a hope renewed, and so penetrating that it even pierced into the room beyond. And as it reached it, another cry broke forth – a cry this time old and feeble.

  Wyndham rushed to answer it. The Professor was sitting up in bed, a mere wreck, but with expectation on every feature. He was trembling visibly. Wyndham knelt down beside him, and took his hand in his.

  ‘That girl from last night … She lives, sir. Your experiment has not failed, after all.’

  The Professor silenced him by a gesture. He was evidently in the midst of a quick calculation now.

  ‘The hour she woke?’ he asked presently, with such a vigorous ring in his tone that Wyndham rose to his feet astonished.

  ‘Two minutes ago.’

  ‘Hah!’ The Professor went back to his calculations. Presently a shout broke from him. ‘I see it now!’ he cried victoriously. ‘I see where the mistake lay! Fool that I was not to have seen it before! It was a miscalculation, but one easy to be rectified. An hour or two will do it. Here, help me up, Paul.’

  ‘But Professor, you must rest; you—’

  ‘Not another moment, not one, I tell you!’ cried the Professor furiously. He lunged out of bed. ‘This thing must be seen to at once. What time can any man be sure of, that he should waste it? The discovery must be assured. And what time have I—’

  He fell forward; he had fainted.

  The doctors, when they came, could do nothing for him. The Professor, though hardly an old man, had so burnt out his candle at both ends that all the science in Europe could not have kept him alive for another twenty-four hours. A spice of gruesome mirth seemed to fall into the situation when their declaration was laid bare and one thought of the great discovery.

  ‘Why doesn’t she speak now?’ asked the Professor. ‘They said she was dead.’

  ‘Who was dead?’ asked Wyndham.

  The Professor had not known Wyndham’s voice the first time, but now he did, and he turned and looked at him; and presently consciousness once more grew within his eyes.

  ‘It is you, boy. And where is she?’

  ‘She? The girl, you mean?’

  ‘You are a good boy. But your Greek, boy, your Greek is bad … You must mend – you must mend—’

  His dying eyes tried to take the old stern look as they rested on Wyndham, the look he used to give the boy when his Greek or his Latin verses were hardly up to the mark, but presently it changed and softened into a wider light. ‘The boy’, in the last of all moments, was forgotten for the love that was strongest of all.

  ‘She was very like my wife,’ he gasped faintly, and fell back and died.

  With a heavy heart Wyndham, assisted by a physician of great note, had gone through the Professor’s papers. There were few of them, and with regard to the experiment only a few useless notes here and there, principally written on the backs of envelopes. There was nothing that could be used. The Professor, it seemed, had been in the habit of writing on his brain, and on that only. There was nothing left wherewith to carry on the great discovery.

  Wyndham abandoned his search with a sigh. There was no doubt now that the wonderful experiment was lost to all time.

  An Advance Sheet

  JANE BARLOW (1898)

  Sci-fi has thrived on the philosophical

  problems inherent in the potential

  existence of intelligent life on other

  planets. In the novel History of a World

  of Immortals Without a God (1891),

  written either by Jane Barlow or her

  father (or both, in collaboration) under

  the pseudonym Antares Skorpios, the

  forbidding immensity of outer space is

  conquered by the mysterious powers

  of the human mind, and a philosophical

  puzzle is answered – but at a terrible

  cost. This story follows a similar thread,

  but instead of a misanthropic Earthman

  inflicting his nihilism on a peaceful alien

  civilisation, here the psychic voyage

  reveals the terrible truth to a hapless

  human dreamer.

  MANY YEARS AGO, I lived for some time in the neighbourhood of a private lunatic asylum, kept by my old fellow-student, Dr Warden, and, having always been disposed to specialise in the subject of mental disease, I often visited and studied the various cases placed under his charge. In one among these, that of a patient whom I will call John Lynn, I came to feel a peculiar interest. He was a young man of about twenty-five, of pleasant looks and manners, and to a superficial observer apparently quite free from any symptoms of his malady. His intellectual powers were far above the average, and had been highly trained; in fact, the strain of preparing for a brilliantly successful university examination had proved the cause of a brain fever, followed by a long period of depression, culminating in more than one determined attempt at suicide, which had made it necessary to place him under surveillance.

  When I first met him, he had spent six months at Greystones House, and was, in Dr Warden’s opinion, making satisfactory progress towards complete recovery. His mind seemed to be gradually regaining its balance, and the only unfavourable feature in his case was his strong taste for abs
truse metaphysical studies, which he could not be prevented from occasionally indulging. But a spell of Kant and Hartmann, Comte and Hamilton, was so invariably followed by a retrograde period of excitement and dejection, that Dr Warden and I tried very hard to keep his thoughts from those pernicious volumes, and quite often we succeeded. My acquaintance with him was several months old, when, one fine mid-summer day, I called at Greystones House after an unusually long absence of a week or more.

  The main object of my visit was to borrow a book from John Lynn, and accordingly, after a short conversation with Dr Warden, I asked whether I could see him. ‘Oh, certainly,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m afraid, though, that you won’t find him over-flourishing. He’s been at that confounded stuff, Skleegel and Ficty and Skuppenhoor’ – my friend is no German scholar, and his eccentric pronunciation seemed to accentuate his scorn – ‘hammer and tongs ever since last Monday, and you know what that means. Today, however, he was talking about you at luncheon, which I thought rather a good sign; so perhaps he may come round this time without much trouble.’

  Having reached John Lynn’s apartments, however, I did not share the Doctor’s optimism. For though he appeared composed and collected – epithets which, indeed, always sound a warning note – there was a restlessness in the young man’s glance, and a repressed enthusiasm in his tone. Moreover, I found it quite impossible to steer our conversation out of the channel in which his thoughts were setting – the atomic theory. I did my best for some time, but to no purpose at all. The atoms and molecules drifted into everything, through the most improbable crevices, like the dust of an Australian whirlwind. They got into sport, and politics, and parochial gossip, and the latest novel of the season. So at length, abandoning the struggle, I resolved to let him say his say, and the consequence was that, after some half-hour’s discourse, which I will not tempt the reader to skip, I found myself meekly assenting to the propositions of the infinitude of the material universe, and the aggregation and vibration of innumerable homogeneous atoms as the origin of all things, from matter to emotion, from the four-inch brick to the poet’s dream of the Unknown.

  ‘Now, what has always struck me as strange,’ quoth John Lynn, who at this point leaned forward towards me, and held me with a glittering eye (which to my mind sub-consciously suggested sedatives), ‘what strikes me as strange is the manner in which scientists practically ignore an exceedingly important implication of the theory – one, too, that has been pointed out very distinctly by Lucretius, not to go farther back. I refer to the fact that such a limitless atomic universe necessarily involves the existence, the simultaneous existence, of innumerable solar systems absolutely similar to our own, each repeating it in every detail, from the willow-leaves in the sun to the petals on that geranium-plant in the window, while in each of them history has been identically the same, from the condensation of gaseous nebulae down to stock prices in London at noon today. A minute’s rational reflection shows that the admission is inevitable. Even if the requisite combination doesn’t occur more than once in a tract of a billion trillion quintillions of square miles, what’s that, even squared and cubed, when we have infinite space to draw upon?

  ‘But, of course, this isn’t all. For it follows from the same considerations that we must recognise the present existence, not only of inconceivably numerous Earths contemporaneous with our own, but also of as many more, older and younger, now exhibiting each successive state, past and future, through which ours has already proceeded, or at which it is destined to arrive. For example, there are some still in the Palaeolithic period, and others where our ancestors are driving their cattle westward over the Asiatic steppes. The battle of Marathon’s going on in one set, and Shakespeare’s writing Hamlet in another. Here they’ve just finished the general election of eighteen hundred and ninety-something, and here they’re in the middle of the next big European war, and here they’re beginning to get over the effects of the submergence of Africa, and the resurrection of Atlantis – and so on to infinity. To make a more personal application, there’s a series of Earths where you at the present moment are playing marbles in a bib, and another where people are coming back from my funeral.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said, in a studiously bored way, ‘perhaps these speculations may be interesting enough. But what do they all come to? It seems to me quite easy to understand why scientists ignore them. They’ve so much more promising material on hand. Why should they waste their time over such hopeless hypotheses – or facts, whichever you like?’

  ‘Then, conceding them to be facts, you consider that they can have no practical significance for science?’ said John Lynn, with a kind of triumph in his tone.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ I replied. ‘Supposing that this world is merely one in a crop, all as much alike as the cabbages in a row, and supposing that I am merely one in a bushel of Tom Harlowes, what’s the odds so long as these doubles – or rather infinitibles – are kept separate by those massive distances? If they were to run into each other, I grant that the effect might be slightly confusing and monotonous, but it seems that this is just not possible.’

  ‘But I believe you’re quite mistaken there, Dr Harlowe,’ he said, still with the suppressed eagerness of a speaker who is clearing the approaches to a sensational disclosure; ‘or would you think a fact had no scientific value, if it went a long way towards accounting for those mysterious phenomena of clairvoyance? For, if what I’ve said is factually true, the explanation is simply this: the clairvoyant has somehow got a glimpse into one of these facsimile worlds, which happens to be a few years ahead of ours in point of time, and has seen how things are going on there.’

  ‘Really, my good fellow,’ I interposed, ‘considering the billions and quintillions of miles which you were talking about just now, the explanation is hardly as “simple” as you say it is.’

  ‘It’s still a better one than any that has hitherto been put forward,’ he persisted, with unabated confidence. ‘Why, nowadays, there’s surely no great difficulty in imagining very summary methods of dealing with space. Contrast it with the other difficulty of supposing somebody to have seen something which actually does not exist, and you’ll see that the two are altogether disparate. In short, the whole thing seems clear enough to me on a priori grounds; but, no doubt, that may partly be because I am to a certain extent independent of them, as I’ve lately had an opportunity of visiting a planet which differs from this one solely in having had a small start of it – five years, I should say, or thereabouts.’

  Knowing that to reinforce a delusion is always dangerous, I asked, ‘What on earth do you mean, Lynn? Am I to understand that you are meditating a trifling excursion through the depths of space, or has it already come off?’

  ‘It has,’ he answered.

  ‘May I ask when?’ I asked, with elaborate sarcasm.

  ‘Yesterday. I’d like to give you an account of it – and if you’d take a cigar, perhaps you’d look less like a preposterous know-it-all. You really don’t on the present occasion, and it is absurd, not to say exasperating,’ quoth John Lynn, handing me the case, with a good-humoured laugh. I took one, feeling somewhat perplexed at his cheerfulness, as his attacks had hitherto been invariably attended by despondency and gloom; and he resumed his statement as follows:

  ‘It happened yesterday morning. I was sitting up here, reading a bit of De Natura Rerum, when suddenly I discovered that I was really standing in a very sandy lane, and looking over a low gate into a sort of lawn or pleasure-grounds. Before you say it, I hadn’t fallen asleep. The lawn ran up a slope to the back of a house, all gables, and queer-shaped windows, and tall chimney-stacks, covered with ivy and other creepers – clematis, I think. At any rate, there were sheets of white blossom against the dark green. It’s a place I never saw before, that I’m certain of; there are some points about it that I’d have been likely to remember if I had. For instance, the long semi-circular flights of turf steps to left and right, and the flower-beds cut out of the grass between them
into the shape of little ships and boats, a whole fleet, with sails and oars and flags, which struck me as a quaint device. Then in one corner there was a huge puzzle-monkey nearly blocking up a turnstile in the bank; I remember thinking it might be awkward for anyone coming that way in the dark. Looking back down the lane, which was only a few yards of cart-track, there were the beach and the sea close by; a flattish shore with the sand-hills, covered with bent and furze, zig-zagging in and out nearer to and farther from high-water mark. There are miles of that sort of thing along the east coast, and, as a matter of fact, I ultimately found out that it can have been no great distance from Lowestoft – from what corresponds with our Lowestoft, of course, I mean.

  ‘And I may observe that I never have been in that part of the world, at least, not nearer than Norwich.

  ‘Well, as you may suppose, such an abrupt change of scene is a rather startling experience; and I must frankly confess that I haven’t the wildest idea how it happened—’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said I.

  ‘But the strange feeling wore off before long, and I began to make observations. As for the time of day, one could see by the shadows and dew on the grass that it was morning, a much earlier hour than it had been here, and the trees and flowers showed that it was early summer. Nobody was visible about the place, but I heard the scraping of a rake upon gravel somewhere near. I set out to find this unseen gardener, and I framed several questions ingeniously designed to extract as much information as possible without betraying my own state of bewildered ignorance.

  ‘But when I tried to carry out this plan, it proved impossible. The gate at which I stood was unlatched and the banks on either hand were low and easily scalable, but I could not reach those pleasure-grounds. My attempts to do so were repulsed, in a manner which I am totally unable to describe; some strange force, invisible and irresistible as gravity, arrested every movement in that direction, almost before it had been telegraphed from brain to muscle. A few experiments revealed that while I could proceed unchecked to right or left along the shore, I was absolutely prohibited from taking a single step farther inland. I discovered that the water’s edge did not bring me to the end of my tether, but naturally, I did not investigate how far into the sea I could go.