Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  It is also a painted newspaper of the greatest interest. The news appears there in the flesh and bone. The most secret vitriolizations are revealed there in all their horror.

  A simple flick of the thumb on button number 4334, for instance, and the vultugraph of Borneo, abruptly allied with the same station’s colorofix, instantly reproduces in Electricmann’s study what is happening in an absolutely virgin or recently married forest, where a monkey spree is being troubled by the protests of a tiger disturbed in its siesta.

  By pressing button no. 22, however—two little ducks, as Bingo callers say—Josuah Electricmann can follow the monkey blow-out with one of the Parisian students during “Happy Hour.”

  Electricmann invents while eating lunch, or eats lunch while inventing. Nothing is easier. At meal-times, he places a tube in his esophagus, without leaving his desk, and through the orifice of the tube he threads a chaplet of pearls of all kinds of extracts: beef grog, concentrated beefsteak, vegetable essences, cheese pills, wine capsules, solidified coffee aroma, etc., etc.—all products patented in Paris, London, Philadelphia and Vienna.

  While he ingurgitates and swallows, he dictates inventions to his scribograph, a mechanical secretary, never ill and always smiling.

  The scribograph, one of the discoveries that does the greatest honor to Josuah, is a fortunate graft of the stylocurse and the phonograph. The scribograph, the cradle and point of departure of the galvanomaster, writes, draws, paints, sculpts, counts shirts, arranges books on bookshelves, reupholsters old umbrellas—in short, night and day, it plays the role of the henceforth-redundant individual who, in rich families, was primarily occupied in paying court to the demoiselle of the house.

  It is a veritable treasure! Two hundred francs with nickel pins, a hundred and fifty in copper.

  Having eaten well, like Jacquot, the honorable Josuah Electricmann consults, by applying it to his pulse, his medicofere, an electric physician with a mobile dial, and if the pointer indicates seventy-five degrees—which is to say, a perfect equilibrium of the faculties—the great scientist gives thanks to God with the aid of a very curious Theotelegram, which permits one to pray even while exercising on a trapeze. It renders great service to protestant acrobats throughout the territory of the United States.

  Thanks having been given, he gives a flick of the thumb to button no. 1027, which brings forth a reading by the poetogene, combined with the vaporistroph, of one of the most remarkable passages by one of our best authors.

  A month ago, as he was activating the chemification of his lunch with a strong dose of Vichy pastilles, manufactured in Chicago by the threadworms of which one no longer hears talk in Europe—another coup mounted by the cod merchants who want to annihilate the consumption of ham!—while Monsieur Electricmann’s digestive apparatus was performing its function, the proprietor of that apparatus felt a very particular kind of void, or vacancy, in the region of the heart.

  That vacancy, or void, was produced by the banal effect on the reverdisant nature of the luminary, so old-fashioned nowadays and which few people any longer venerate, known by the name of the Sun.

  In a word, Spring was renascent (old style).

  Incited by that circumstance, Monsieur Electricmann, addressing his scribograph, exclaimed:

  “The damnation of Cromwell be upon me and on you, but it’s true—I’ve completely forgotten to think about perpetuating my race. I need to get married while inventing. What shall I do? Reply.”

  The scribograph replied, with its bizarre voice, in which the acerbic grating of goose-quills and iron and the obscure hoarseness of an indisposed ventriloquist are mingled:

  “Press buttons 4 and 8; switch off current; return to button 4; press pedal 3603; adapt radiometer; press 6, 29, 33. Ring no. 39; switch off current. Fix 1-6034-24-110. The way is open.”

  Such is the formula, it appears, to obtain, with the apparatus of the prodigious Josuah, a marriage uniting all conveniences.

  For ten minutes, there was an infernal manipulation. Nothing was heard but resonating buzzers and alarm bells ringing madly.

  It was a matter of combining, of connecting up to one another, the vultugraph, the phonograph, the telephone, the colorofix, the poetogene, the scribograph, the medicofere, the auriculophile and an infinity of the marvelous Electricmann’s other inventions.

  During the operation, while still inventing, he savored the odor of a delicious fig, which one of his machines, the autocigarofume, paraded under his nose. At the same time, a capillophobe, a barber powered by pulverized chloroform vapor, shaved the American man of genius dexterously.

  A quarter of an hour later, without having left his study, Electricmann knew the hair-color, surname and forenames, the sound of the voice, the weight, the number of pulsations, the tastes, the state of hygiene, the talents, the age, the strength, the tendencies, the moral resistance, the aspirations, the shoe-size, the waist-measurement, the knowledge and the odor of every unmarried woman in the five continents of the world who was already dreaming of a union with a man as practical as him.

  He had even telegrammed the moon and the stars, those pale candles.

  The moon opened her eyes.

  She opened them with even greater astonishment when, for three nights running, she perceived gigantic advertisements in the sky, visible everywhere in the universe: advertisements projected by means of brushes of intense galvanic colored light invented by Electricmann.

  Those advertisements requested a wife for the famous inventor from the United States, and concluded uniformly with the specification: “No round shoulders!”

  The required woman was found and married the day before yesterday. In three hours, the affair was done and dusted.

  They were married, of course, by telegraph; the spouse lives in Greenland.

  The witnesses, old and dear friends of the groom, one of whom lives in Australia, another in Romainville, the third in Tehran and the last in the Transvaal among the Boers, were alerted by telegram, and while a pastor duly alerted by the same agent, without ceasing to work in his garden, confided the words necessary in such circumstances to the telephone, the fortunate husband laid down the foundations of his future and world-changing latest invention, the household galvanomaster, as he pronounced the sacramental “I do.”

  And in the evening. . . .

  There was a snag.

  Electricmann did not have the time to go and see his wife in Greenland, and it was not for a semester that her parents thought that they would be able to send her to him, even by employing the most rapid means of high-speed land and sea travel.

  Oh, if only the Aeroveloce—which is to say, Josuah’s express balloon—had been finished, everything would have gone smoothly; but alas, the aeroveloce was not yet finished.

  So, keenly annoyed by the forced delay to which his marriage plan was subject, the celebrated Electricmann is seeking, at the present moment, while continuing work on his household galvanomaster, a means of collecting the Greenlandian orange-blossom without disturbing himself.

  It is whispered in the United States that Josuah Electricmann will regard himself as dishonored, and that he would commit suicide by volatilization, if he does not succeed in inventing an apparatus indispensable to men of science, which has already been baptized, in his mind, with the name of the amouradistanceophone.

  * * *

  1 Molière’s memoirs refer to a public dissection that he attended in 1650, in which the cadaver’s organs appeared to be the wrong way round, the heart being “inclined to the right side.”

  THE CHILD OF THE PHALANSTERY

  GRANT ALLEN

  Grant Allen (1848–1899) was a British writer and socialist activist who became briefly notorious when he published the best-selling novel The Woman Who Did (1895) attacking the institution of marriage. In the same year he published The British Barbarians, in which a time-traveling social anthropologist visits Victorian London in order to study the primitive mores of its citizens. He had previously writte
n several short scientific romances, reprinted along with other materials in Strange Stories (1884).

  “The Child of the Phalanstery” remains the most interesting of Allen’s short stories, not only because the issue that it addresses—eugenics—still remains controversial but because of its oblique rhetorical strategy, which challenges the reader to make a judgment without indicating too forcefully the direction in which the author’s own sympathies lie. The idea of the “phalanstery” had been popularized early in the century by the French utopian writer Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who proposed it as a model for the collectivization of social and economic life in a socialist society, although Allen’s version seems markedly different in several respects from Fourier’s; its inhabitants embrace a “religion of humanity” reminiscent of the one popularized by the latter’s contemporary August Comte.

  “Poor little thing,” said my strong-minded friend compassionately. “Just look at her! Clubfooted. What a misery to herself and others! In a well-organized state of society, you know, such poor wee cripples as that would be quietly put out of their misery while they were still babies.”

  “Let me think,” said I, “how that would work out in actual practice. I’m not so sure, after all, that we should be altogether the better or the happier for it.” They sat together in a corner of the beautiful phalanstery garden, Olive and Clarence, on the marble seat that overhung the mossy dell where the streamlet danced and bickered among its pebbly stickles; they sat there, hand in hand, in lovers’ guise, and felt their two bosoms beating and thrilling in some strange, sweet fashion, just like two foolish unregenerate young people of the old antisocial prephalansteric days.

  Perhaps it was the leaven of their unenlightened ancestors still leavening by heredity the whole lump; perhaps it was the inspiration of the calm soft August evening and the delicate afterglow of the setting sun; perhaps it was the deep heart of man and woman vibrating still as of yore in human sympathy, and stirred to its innermost recesses by the unutterable breath of human emotion. But at any rate, there they sat, the beautiful strong man in his shapely chiton, and the dainty fair girl in her long white robe with the dark green embroidered border, looking far into the fathomless depths of one another’s eyes, in a silence sweeter and more eloquent than many words. It was Olive’s tenth-day holiday from her share in the maidens’ household duty of the community; and Clarence, by arrangement with his friend Germain, had made exchange for his own decade (which fell on Plato) to this quiet Milton evening, that he might wander through the park and gardens with his chosen love, and speak his full mind to her now without reserve.

  “If only the phalanstery will give its consent, Clarence,” Olive said at last with a little sigh, releasing her hand from his, and gathering up the folds of her stole from the marble flooring of the seat; “if only the phalanstery will give its consent! but I have my doubts about it. Is it quite right? Have we chosen quite wisely? Will the hierarch and the elder brothers think I am strong enough and fit enough for the duties of the task? It is no light matter, we know, to enter into bonds with one another for the responsibilities of fatherhood and motherhood. I sometimes feel—forgive me, Clarence—but I sometimes feel as if I were allowing my own heart and my own wishes to guide me too exclusively in this solemn question: thinking too much about you and me, about ourselves (which is only an enlarged form of selfishness after all), and too little about the future good of the community and—and—” blushing a little, for women will be women even in a phalanstery—“and of the precious lives we may be the means of adding to it. You remember, Clarence, what the hierarch said, that we ought to think least and last of our own feelings, first and foremost of the progressive evolution of universal humanity.”

  “I remember, darling,” Clarence answered, leaning over towards her tenderly; “I remember well, and in my own way, so far as a man can (for we men haven’t the moral earnestness of you women, I’m afraid, Olive), I try to act up to it. But, dearest, I think our fears are greater than they need be; you must recollect that humanity requires for its higher development tenderness, and truth, and love, and all the softer qualities, as well as strength and manliness; and if you are a trifle less strong than most of our sisters here, you seem to me at least (and I really believe to the hierarch and to the elder brothers too) to make up for it, and more than make up for it, in your sweet and lovable inner nature. The men of the future mustn’t all be cast in one unvarying stereotyped mold; we must have a little of all good types combined, in order to make a perfect phalanstery.”

  Olive sighed again. “I don’t know,” she said pensively. “I don’t feel sure. I hope I am doing right. In my aspirations every evening I have desired light on this matter, and have earnestly hoped that I was not being misled by my own feelings; for, oh, Clarence, I do love you so dearly, so truly, so absorbingly, that I half fear my love may be taking me unwittingly astray. I try to curb it; I try to think of it all as the hierarch tells us we ought to; but in my own heart I sometimes almost fear that I may be lapsing into the idolatrous love of the old days, when people married and were given in marriage, and thought only of the gratification of their own personal emotions and affections, and nothing of the ultimate good of humanity. Oh, Clarence, don’t hate me and despise me for it; don’t turn upon me and scold me; but I love you, I love you, I love you; oh, I’m afraid I love you almost idolatrously!”

  Clarence lifted her small white hand slowly to his lips, with that natural air of chivalrous respect which came so easily to the young men of the phalanstery, and kissed it twice over fervidly with quiet reverence. “Let us go into the music room, Olive dearest,” he said as he rose; “you are too sad tonight. You shall play me that sweet piece of Marian’s that you love so much; and that will quiet you, darling, from thinking too earnestly about this serious matter.”

  *

  Next day, when Clarence had finished his daily spell of work in the fruit-garden (he was the third under-gardener to the community), he went up to his own study, and wrote out a little notice in due form to be posted at dinner-time on the refectory door: “Clarence and Olive ask leave of the phalanstery to enter with one another into free contract of holy matrimony.” His pen trembled a little in his own hand as he framed that familiar set of words (strange that he had read it so often with so little emotion, and wrote it now with so much: we men are so selfish!) but he fixed it boldly with four small brass nails on the regulation notice-board, and waited, not without a certain quiet confidence, for the final result of the communal council.

  “Aha!” said the hierarch to himself with a kindly smile, as he passed into the refectory at dinner-time that day, “has it come to that, then? Well, well, I thought as much; I felt sure it would. A good girl, Olive; a true, earnest, lovable girl; and she has chosen wisely, too; for Clarence is the very man to balance her own character as man’s and wife’s should do.

  “Whether Clarence has done well in selecting her is another matter. For my own part, I had rather hoped she would join the celibate sisters, and have taken some nurse duty or the sick and the children. It’s her natural function in life, the work she’s best fitted for; and I should have liked to see her take to it. But after all, the business of the phalanstery is not to decide vicariously for its individual members—not to thwart their natural harmless inclinations and wishes; on the contrary, we ought to allow every man and girl the fullest liberty to follow their own personal taste and judgment in every possible matter.

  “Our power of interference as a community, I’ve always felt and said, should only extend to the prevention of obviously wrong and immoral acts, such as marriage with a person in ill-health, or of inferior mental power, or with a distinctly bad or insubordinate temper. Things of that sort, of course, are as clearly wicked as idling in work hours or marriage with a first cousin. Olive’s health, however, isn’t really bad, nothing more than a very slight feebleness of constitution, as constitutions go with us; and Eustace, who has attended her medically from her babyhoo
d (what a dear crowing little thing she used to be in the nursery to be sure) tells me that she’s perfectly fitted for the duties of her proposed situation.

  “Ah well, ah well; I’ve no doubt they’ll be perfectly happy; and the wishes of the whole phalanstery will go with them, in any case, that’s certain.”

  Everybody knew that whatever the hierarch said or thought was pretty sure to be approved by the unanimous voice of the entire community. Not that he was at all a dictatorial or dogmatic old man; quite the contrary; but his gentle kindly way had its full weight with the brothers; and his intimate acquaintance, through the exercise of his spiritual functions, with the inmost thoughts and ideas of every individual member, man or woman, made him a safe guide in all difficult or delicate questions, as to what the decision of the council ought to be.

  So when, on the first Cosmos, the elder brothers assembled to transact phalansteric business, and the hierarch put in Clarence’s request with the simple phrase, “In my opinion, there is no reasonable objection,” the community at once gave in its adhesion, and formal notice was posted an hour later on the refectory door, “The phalanstery approves the proposition of Clarence and Olive, and wishes all happiness to them and to humanity from the sacred union they now contemplate.”

  “You see, dearest,” Clarence said, kissing her lips for the first time (as unwritten law demanded), now that the seal of the community had been placed upon their choice, “you see, there can’t be any harm in our contract, for the elder brothers all approve it.”

  Olive smiled and sighed from the very bottom of her heart, and clung to her lover as the ivy clings to a strong supporting oak-tree. “Darling,” she murmured in his ear, “if I have you to comfort me, I shall not be afraid, and we will try our best to work together for the advancement and the good of divine humanity.”

  Four decades later, on a bright Cosmos morning in September, those two stood up beside one another before the altar of humanity, and heard with a thrill the voice of the hierarch uttering that solemn declaration, “In the name of the Past, and of the Present, and of the Future, I hereby admit you, Clarence and Olive, into the holy society of Fathers and Mothers, of the United Avondale Phalanstery, in trust for humanity, whose stewards you are. May you so use and enhance the good gifts you have received from your ancestors that you may hand them on, untarnished and increased, to the bodies and minds of our furthest descendants.”