The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction

by Mike Ashley (Editor)

  I saw emotions, all right. Emotions without restraint, emotions unfettered by taboos, emotions uncontrolled by ideals. Sometimes I became frightened and all my skill in manipulating emotions was needed. At other times they became perhaps a little too Hollywood, even for Hollywood. I trained them into more ideal patterns.

  I will say this for the Arcturans. They learned – fast. The crowd of puppets to the newborn babes, to the boisterous boys and girls to the moody and unpredictable youths, to the matured and balanced men and women. I watched the metamorphosis take place over the period of weeks.

  I did more.

  All that human beings had ever hoped to be, the brilliant, the idealistic, the great in heart, I made of these. My little 145 I.Q. became a moron’s level. The dreams of the greatness of man which I had known became the vaguest wisps of fog before the reality which these achieved.

  My plan was working.

  Full formed, they were almost like gods. And training these things into them, I trained their own traits out. One point I found we had in common. They were activated by logic, logic carried to heights of which I had never dreamed. Yet my poor and halting logic found point of contact.

  They realized at last that if they let their own life force and motivation remain active they would carry the aura of strangeness to defeat their purpose. I worried, when they accepted this. I felt perhaps they were laying a trap for me, as I did for them. Then I realized that I had not taught them deceit.

  And it was logical, to them, that they follow my training completely. Reversing the position, placing myself upon their planet, trying to become like them, I must of necessity follow my instructor without question. What else could they do?

  At first they saw no strangeness that I should assist them to destroy my race. In their logic the Arcturan was most fit to survive, therefore he should survive. The human was less fit, therefore he should perish.

  I taught them the emotion of compassion. And when they began to mature their human thought and emotion, and their intellect was blended and shaded by such emotion, at last they understood my dilemma.

  There was irony in that. From my own kind I could expect no understanding. From the invaders I received sympathy and compassion. They understand at last my traitorous action to buy a few more years for Man.

  Yet their Arcturan logic still prevailed. They wept with me, but there could be no change of plan. The plan was fixed, they were merely instruments by which it was to be carried out.

  Yet, through their compassion, I did get the plan modified.

  This was the conversation which revealed that modification. Einar Johnson, who as the most fully developed had been my constant companion, said to me one day, “To all intents and purposes we have become human beings.” He looked at me and smiled with fondness, “You have said it is so, and it must be so. For we begin to realize what a great and glorious thing a human is.”

  The light of nobility shone from him like an aura as he told me this, “Without human bodies, and without the emotion-intelligence equation which you call soul, our home planet cannot begin to grasp the growth we have achieved. We know now that we will never return to our own form, for by doing that we would lose what we have gained.

  “Our people are logical, and they must of necessity accept our recommendation, as long as it does not abandon the plan entirely. We have reported what we have learned, and it is conceived that both our races can inhabit the Universe side by side.

  “There will be no more migration from our planet to yours. We will remain, and we will multiply, and we will live in honor, such as you have taught us, among you. In time perhaps we may achieve the greatness which all humans now have.

  “And we will assist the human kind to find their destiny among the stars as we have done.”

  I bowed my head and wept. For I knew that I had won.

  Four months had gone. I returned to my own neighborhood. On the corner Hallahan left the traffic to shift for itself while he came over to me with the question, “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been sick,” I said.

  “You look it,” he said frankly. “Take care of yourself, man. Hey – Lookit that fool messing up traffic.” He was gone, blowing his whistle in a temper.

  I climbed the stairs. They still needed repainting as much as ever. From time to time I had been able to mail money to Margie, and she had kept the rent and telephone paid. The sign was still on my door. My key opened the lock.

  The waiting room had that musty, they’ve-gone-away look about it. The janitor had kept the windows tightly closed and there was no freshness in the air. I half hoped to see Margie sitting at her desk, but I knew there was no purpose to it. When a girl is being paid for her time and has nothing to do, the beach is a nice place to spend it.

  There was dust on my chair, and I sank down into it without bothering about the seat of my pants. I buried my head in my arms and I looked into the human soul.

  Now the whole thing hinged on that skill. I know human beings. I know them as well as anyone in the world, and far better than most.

  I looked into the past and I saw a review of the great and fine and noble and divine torn and burned and crucified by man.

  Yet my only hope of saving my race was to build these qualities, the fine, the noble, the splendid, into these thirty beings. To create the illusion that all men were likewise great. No less power could have gained the boom of equality for man with them.

  I look into the future. I see them, one by one, destroyed. I gave them no defense. They are totally unprepared to meet man as he genuinely is – and they are incapable of understanding.

  For these things which man purports to admire the most – the noble, the brilliant, the splendid – these are the very things he cannot tolerate when he finds them.

  Defenseless, because they cannot comprehend, these thirty will go down beneath the ravening fury of rending and destroying man always displays whenever he meets his ideal face to face.

  I bury my head in my hands.

  What have I done?

  Two Apocalyptic Classics: Finis

  Frank Lillie Pollock

  I wanted to include in this anthology one or two really old stories that demonstrated not only that science fiction has been around a long time but also that writers of a hundred years ago were writing at their cutting edge. The progress in science and technology was every bit as amazing to the Victorians as recent progress has been to us and it was this that gave added impetus to the growth of science fiction during the 1890s, pioneered by writers like H.G. Wells, George Griffith and Grant Allen. The fear of progress had also inspired a number of “end of the world” stories – in fact they’d been around already for a century. The manic-depressive Cousin de Grainville had written The Last Man as early as 1806. In “The Star” (1897), H.G. Wells tells how the Earth narrowly survives conflict with a heavenly body, whilst in The Time Machine (1895) he describes a desolate scene in the far distant future when the sun has cooled and most life is extinct. The famous French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, combined these two ideas in Omega (1897) where the Earth survives a near collision with a comet but in the distant future cools and dies. This thinking was thus very prevalent around the start of the last century and doubtless influenced the following two stories.

  Frank Lillie Pollock (1876–1957) is pretty much forgotten these days and if he’s remembered for anything it’s for this story, which was published in the American pulp magazine The Argosy in June 1906. He was a Canadian writer who produced a number of offtrail stories and maybe someday he’ll be rediscovered.

  “I’m getting tired,” complained Davis, lounging in the window of the Physics Building, “and sleepy. It’s after eleven o’clock. This makes the fourth night I’ve sat up to see your new star, and it’ll be the last. Why, the thing was billed to appear three weeks ago.”

  “Are you tired, Miss Wardour?” asked Eastwood, and the girl glanced up with a quick flush and a negative murmur.

  Eastw
ood made the reflection anew that she was certainly painfully shy. She was almost as plain as she was shy, though her hair had an unusual beauty of its own, fine as silk and colored like palest flame.

  Probably she had brains; Eastwood had seen her reading some extremely “deep” books, but she seemed to have no amusements, few interests. She worked daily at the Art Students’ League, and boarded where he did, and he had thus come to ask her with the Davises to watch for the new star from the laboratory windows on the Heights.

  “Do you really think that it’s worth while to wait any longer, professor?” inquired Mrs Davis, concealing a yawn.

  Eastwood was somewhat annoyed by the continued failure of the star to show itself, and he hated to be called “professor,” being only an assistant professor of physics.

  “I don’t know,” he answered somewhat curtly. “This is the twelfth night that I have waited for it. Of course, it would have been a mathematical miracle if astronomers should have solved such a problem exactly, though they’ve been figuring on it for a quarter of a century.”

  The new Physics Building of Columbia University was about twelve stories high. The physics laboratory occupied the ninth and tenth floors, with the astronomical rooms above it, an arrangement which would have been impossible before the invention of the oil vibration cushion, which practically isolated the instrument-rooms from the Earth.

  Eastwood had arranged a small telescope at the window, and below them spread the illuminated map of Greater New York, sending up a faintly musical roar. All the streets were crowded, as they had been every night since the fifth of the month, when the great new star, or sun, was expected to come into view.

  Some error had been made in the calculations, though, as Eastwood said, astronomers had been figuring on them for twenty-five years.

  It was, in fact, nearly forty years since Professor Adolphe Bernier first announced his theory of a limited universe at the International Congress of Sciences in Paris, where it was counted as little more than a masterpiece of imagination.

  Professor Bernier did not believe that the universe was infinite. Somewhere, he argued, the universe must have a center, which is the pivot for its revolution.

  The moon revolves around the Earth, the planetary system revolves about the sun, the solar system revolves about one of the fixed stars, and this whole system in its turn undoubtedly revolves around some distant point. But this sort of progression must stop somewhere.

  Somewhere there must be a central sun, a vast incandescent body which does not move at all. And as a sun is always larger and hotter than its satellites, therefore the body at the center of the universe must be of an immensity and temperature beyond anything known or imagined.

  It was objected that this hypothetical body should then be large enough to be visible from Earth, and Professor Bernier replied that some day it undoubtedly would be visible. Its light had simply not yet had time to reach the Earth.

  The passage of light from the nearest of the fixed stars is a matter of three years, and there must be many stars so distant that their rays have not yet reached us. The great central sun must be so inconceivably remote that perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should burst upon the solar system.

  All this was contemptuously classed as “newspaper science,” till the extraordinary mathematical revival a little after the middle of the twentieth century afforded the means of verifying it.

  Following the new theorems discovered by Professor Burnside, of Princeton, and elaborated by Dr Taneka, of Tokyo, astronomers succeeded in calculating the art of the sun’s movements through space, and its ratio to the orbit of its satellites. With this as a basis, it was possible to follow the widening circles, the consecutive systems of the heavenly bodies and their rotations.

  The theory of Professor Bernier was justified. It was demonstrated that there really was a gigantic mass of incandescent matter, which, whether the central point of the universe or not, appeared to be without motion.

  The weight and distance of this new sun were approximately calculated, and, the speed of light being known, it was an easy matter to reckon when its rays would reach the Earth.

  It was then estimated that the approaching rays would arrive at the Earth in twenty-six years, and that was twenty-six years ago. Three weeks had passed since the date when the new heavenly body was expected to become visible, and it had not yet appeared.

  Popular interest had risen to a high pitch, stimulated by innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, and the streets were nightly thronged with excited crowds armed with opera-glass and star maps, while at every corner a telescope man had planted his tripod instrument at a nickel a look.

  Similar scenes were taking place in every civilized city on the globe.

  It was generally supposed that the new luminary would appear in size about midway between Venus and the moon. Better informed persons expected something like the sun, and a syndicate quietly leased large areas on the coast of Greenland in anticipation of a great rise in temperature and a northward movement in population.

  Even the business situation was appreciably affected by the public uncertainty and excitement. There was a decline in stocks, and a minor religious sect boldly prophesied the end of the world.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” said Davis, looking at his watch again. “Are you ready to go, Grace? By the way, isn’t it getting warmer?”

  It had been a sharp February day, but the temperature was certainly rising. Water was dripping from the roofs, and from the icicles that fringed the window ledges, as if a warm wave had suddenly arrived.

  “What’s that light?” suddenly asked Alice Wardour, who was lingering by the open window.

  “It must be moonrise,” said Eastwood, though the illumination of the horizon was almost like daybreak.

  Davis abandoned his intention of leaving, and they watched the east grow pale and flushed till at last a brilliant white disc heaved itself above the horizon.

  It resembled the full moon, but as if trebled in luster, and the streets grew almost as light as by day.

  “Good heavens, that must be the new star, after all!” said Davis in an awed voice.

  “No, it’s only the moon. This is the hour and minute for her rising,” answered Eastwood, who had grasped the cause of the phenomenon. “But the new sun must have appeared on the other side of the Earth. Its light is what makes the moon so brilliant. It will rise here just as the sun does, no telling how soon. It must be brighter than was expected – and maybe hotter,” he added with a vague uneasiness.

  “Isn’t it getting very warm in here?” said Mrs. Davis, loosening her jacket. “Couldn’t you turn off some of the heat?”

  Eastwood turned it all off, for, in spite of the open window, the room was really growing uncomfortably close. But the warmth appeared to come from without; it was like a warm spring evening, and the icicles cornices.

  For half an hour they leaned from the windows with but desultory conversation, and below them the streets were black with people and whitened with upturned faces. The brilliant moon rose higher, and the mildness of the night sensibly increased.

  It was after midnight when Eastwood first noticed the reddish flush tinging the clouds low in the east, and he pointed it out to his companions.

  “That must be it at last,” he exclaimed, with a thrill of vibrating excitement at what he was going to see, a cosmic event unprecedented in intensity.

  The brightness waxed rapidly.

  “By Jove, see it redden!” Davis ejaculated. “It’s getting lighter than day – and hot! Whew!”

  The whole eastern sky glowed with a deepening pink that extended half round the horizon. Sparrows chirped from the roofs, and it looked as if the disc of the unknown star might at any moment be expected to lift above the Atlantic, but it delayed long.

  The heavens continued to burn with myriad hues, gathering at last to a fiery furnace glow on the sky line.

  Mrs Davis suddenly
screamed. An American flag blowing freely from its staff on the roof of the tall building had all at once burst into flame.

  Low in the east lay a long streak of intense fire which broadened as they squinted with watering eyes. It was as if the edge of the world had been heated to whiteness.

  The brilliant moon faded to a feathery white film in the glare. There was a confused outcry from the observatory overhead, and a crash of something being broken, and as the strange new sunlight fell through the window the onlookers leaped back as if a blast furnace had been opened before them.

  The glass cracked and fell inward. Something like the sun, but magnified fifty times in size and hotness, was rising out of the sea. An iron instrument-table by the window began to smoke with an acrid smell of varnish.

  “What the devil is this, Eastwood?” shouted Davis accusingly.

  From the streets rose a sudden, enormous wail of fright and pain, the outcry of a million throats at once, and the roar of a stampede followed. The pavements were choked with struggling, panic-stricken people in the fierce glare, and above the din arose the clanging rush of fire-engines and trucks.

  Smoke began to rise from several points below Central Park, and two or three church chimes pealed crazily.

  The observers from overhead came running down the stairs with a thunderous trampling, for the elevator man had deserted his post.

  “Here, we’ve got to get out of this,” shouted Davis, seizing his wife by the arm and hustling her toward the door. “This place’ll be on fire directly.”

  “Hold on. You can’t go down into that crush on the street,” Eastwood cried, trying to prevent him.

  But Davis broke away and raced down the stairs, half carrying his terrified wife. Eastwood got his back against the door in time to prevent Alice from following them.

  “There’s nothing in this building that will burn, Miss Wardour,” he said as calmly as he could. “We had better stay here for the present. It would be sure death to get involved in that stampede below. Just listen to it.”