The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  “ ‘Oh, come,’ I said. ‘You are not going to fill up a deer with quailshot, are you?’

  “Still he did not reply; but catching a sight of his face as he turned it slightly toward me I was struck by the intensity of his look. Then I understood that we had serious business in hand, and my first conjecture was that we had jumped a grizzly. I advanced to Morgan’s side, cocking my piece as I moved.

  “The bushes were now quiet and the sounds had ceased, but Morgan was as attentive to the place as before.

  “ ‘What is it? What the devil is it?’ I asked

  “ ‘That Damned Thing!’ he replied, without turning his head. His voice was husky and unnatural. He trembled visibly.

  “I was about to speak further, when I observed the wild oats near the place of the disturbance moving in the most inexplicable way. I can hardly describe it. It seemed as if stirred by a streak of wind, which not only bent it, but pressed it down—crushed it so that it did not rise; and this movement was slowly prolonging itself directly toward us.

  “Nothing that I had ever seen had affected me so strangely as this unfamiliar and unaccountable phenomenon, yet I am unable to recall any sense of fear. I remember—and tell it here because, singularly enough, I recollected it then—that once in looking carelessly out of an open window I momentarily mistook a small tree close at hand for one of a group of larger trees at a little distance away. It looked the same size as the others, but being more distinctly and sharply defined in mass and detail seemed out of harmony with them. It was a mere falsification of the law of aerial perspective, but it startled, almost terrified me. We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a warning of unthinkable calamity. So now the apparently causeless movement of the herbage and the slow, undeviating approach of the line of disturbance were distinctly disquieting. My companion appeared actually frightened, and I could hardly credit my senses when I saw him suddenly throw his gun to his shoulder and fire both barrels at the agitated grain! Before the smoke of the discharge had cleared away I heard a loud savage cry—a scream like that of a wild animal—and flinging his gun upon the ground Morgan sprang away and ran swiftly from the spot. At the same instant I was thrown violently to the ground by the impact of something unseen in the smoke—some soft, heavy substance that seemed thrown against me with great force.

  “Before I could get upon my feet and recover my gun, which seemed to have been struck from my hands, I heard Morgan crying out as if in mortal agony, and mingling with his cries were such hoarse, savage sounds as one hears from fighting dogs. Inexpressibly terrified, I struggled to my feet and looked in the direction of Morgan’s retreat; and may Heaven in mercy spare me from another sight like that! At a distance of less than thirty yards was my friend, down upon one knee, his head thrown back at a frightful angle, hatless, his long hair in disorder and his whole body in violent movement from side to side, backward and forward. His right arm was lifted and seemed to lack the hand—at least, I could see none. The other arm was invisible. At times, as my memory now reports this extraordinary scene, I could discern but a part of his body; it was as if he had been partly blotted out—I cannot otherwise express it—then a shifting of his position would bring it all into view again.

  “All this must have occurred within a few seconds, yet in that time Morgan assumed all the postures of a determined wrestler vanquished by superior weight and strength. I saw nothing but him, and him not always distinctly. During the entire incident his shouts and curses were heard, as if through an enveloping uproar of such sounds of rage and fury as I had never heard from the throat of man or brute!

  “For a moment only I stood irresolute, then throwing down my gun I ran forward to my friend’s assistance. I had a vague belief that he was suffering from a fit, or some form of convulsion. Before I could reach his side he was down and quiet. All sounds had ceased, but with a feeling of such terror as even these awful events had not inspired I now saw again the mysterious movement of the wild oats, prolonging itself from the trampled area about the prostrate man toward the edge of a wood. It was only when it had reached the wood that I was able to withdraw my eyes and look at my companion. He was dead.”

  CHAPTER III

  A MAN THOUGH NAKED MAY BE IN RAGS

  The coroner rose from his seat and stood beside the dead man. Lifting an edge of the sheet he pulled it away, exposing the entire body, altogether naked and showing in the candlelight a clay-like yellow. It had, however, broad maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful lacerations; the skin was torn in strips and shreds.

  The coroner moved round to the end of the table and undid a silk handkerchief which had been passed under the chin and knotted on the top of the head. When the handkerchief was drawn away it exposed what had been the throat. Some of the jurors who had risen to get a better view repented their curiosity and turned away their faces. Witness Harker went to the open window and leaned out across the sill, faint and sick. Dropping the handkerchief upon the dead man’s neck the coroner stepped to an angle of the room and from a pile of clothing produced one garment after another, each of which he held up a moment for inspection. All were torn, and stiff with blood. The jurors did not make a closer inspection. They seemed rather uninterested. They had, in truth, seen all this before; the only thing that was new to them being Harker’s testimony.

  “Gentlemen,” the coroner said, “we have no more evidence, I think. Your duty has been already explained to you; if there is nothing you wish to ask you may go outside and consider your verdict.”

  The foreman rose—a tall, bearded man of sixty, coarsely clad.

  “I shall like to ask one question, Mr. Coroner,” he said. “What asylum did this yer last witness escape from?”

  “Mr. Harker,” said the coroner gravely and tranquilly, “from what asylum did you last escape?”

  Harker flushed crimson again, but said nothing, and the seven jurors rose and solemnly filed out of the cabin.

  “If you have done insulting me, sir,” said Harker, as soon as he and the officer were left alone with the dead man, “I suppose I am at liberty to go?”

  “Yes.”

  Harker started to leave, but paused, with his hand on the door latch. The habit of his profession was strong in him—stronger than his sense of personal dignity. He turned about and said:

  “The book that you have there—I recognize it as Morgan’s diary. You seemed greatly interested in it; you read in it while I was testifying. May I see it? The public would like—”

  “The book will cut no figure in this matter,” replied the official, slipping it into his coat pocket; “all the entries in it were made before the writer’s death.”

  As Harker passed out of the house the jury re-entered and stood about the table, on which the now covered corpse showed under the sheet with sharp definition. The foreman seated himself near the candle, produced from his breast pocket a pencil and scrap of paper and wrote rather laboriously the following verdict, which with various degrees of effort all signed:

  “We, the jury, do find that the remains come to their death at the hands of a mountain lion, but some of us thinks, all the same, they had fits.”

  CHAPTER IV

  AN EXPLANATION FROM THE TOMB

  In the diary of the late Hugh Morgan are certain interesting entries having, possibly, a scientific value as suggestions. At the inquest upon his body the book was not put in evidence; possibly the coroner thought it not worth while to confuse the jury. The date of the first of the entries mentioned cannot be ascertained; the upper part of the leaf is torn away; the part of the entry remaining follows:

  “. . . would run in a half-circle, keeping his head turned always toward the centre, and again he would stand still, barking furiously. At last he ran away into the brush as fast as he could go. I thought at
first that he had gone mad, but on returning to the house found no other alteration in his manner than what was obviously due to fear of punishment.

  “Can a dog see with his nose? Do odours impress some cerebral centre with images of the thing that emitted them? . . .

  “Sept. 2.—Looking at the stars last night as they rose above the crest of the ridge east of the house, I observed them successively disappear—from left to right. Each was eclipsed but an instant, and only a few at the same time, but along the entire length of the ridge all that were within a degree or two of the crest were blotted out. It was as if something had passed along between me and them; but I could not see it, and the stars were not thick enough to define its outline. Ugh! don’t like this.” . . .

  Several weeks’ entries are missing, three leaves being torn from the book.

  “Sept. 27.—It has been about here again—I find evidences of its presence every day. I watched again all last night in the same cover, gun in hand, double-charged with buckshot. In the morning the fresh footprints were there, as before. Yet I would have sworn that I did not sleep—indeed, I hardly sleep at all. It is terrible, insupportable! If these amazing experiences are real I shall go mad; if they are fanciful I am mad already.

  “Oct. 3.—I shall not go—it shall not drive me away. No, this is my house, my land. God hates a coward. . . .

  “Oct. 5.—I can stand it no longer; I have invited Harker to pass a few weeks with me—he has a level head. I can judge from his manner if he thinks me mad.

  “Oct. 7.—I have the solution of the mystery; it came to me last night—suddenly, as by revelation. How simple—how terribly simple!

  “There are sounds that we cannot hear. At either end of the scale are notes that stir no chord of that imperfect instrument, the human ear. They are too high or too grave. I have observed a flock of blackbirds occupying an entire tree-top—the tops of several trees and all in full song. Suddenly—in a moment—at absolutely the same instant—all spring into the air and fly away. How? They could not all see one another—whole tree-tops intervened. At no point could a leader have been visible to all. There must have been a signal of warning or command, high and shrill above the din, but by me unheard. I have observed, too, the same simultaneous flight when all were silent, among not only blackbirds, but other birds—quail, for example, widely separated by bushes—even on opposite sides of a hill.

  “It is known to seamen that a school of whales basking or sporting on the surface of the ocean, miles apart, with the convexity of the earth between, will sometimes dive at the same instant—all gone out of sight in a moment. The signal has been sounded—too grave for the ear of the sailor at the masthead and his comrades on the deck—who nevertheless feel its vibrations in the ship as the stones of a cathedral are stirred by the bass of the organ.

  “As with sounds, so with colours. At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as ‘actinic’ rays. They represent colours—integral colours in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real ‘chromatic scale.’ I am not mad; there are colours that we cannot see.

  “And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a colour!”

  A Flying Start

  As the twentieth century got into its first decade, the impact of technology on people’s lives was becoming increasingly clear, and perceptive authors were recognizing not only the change-producing power of technology but also the fact that the process of change had just begun. But even the most perceptive sometimes overlooked the obvious.

  The internal-combustion automobile had been invented by Karl Benz in 1885; it was improved by Gottlieb Daimler and manufactured in the United States in the 1890s by a variety of men, including Henry Ford. But few authors, if any, foresaw the surprising ways in which the automobile would reshape the Western world and the lives of its citizens, particularly in the United States.

  The airplane was a different matter. The realization of humanity’s long dream to fly like the birds was so dramatic that at least a few farsighted authors were able to perceive its impact. Oddly, they were more impressed by Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s dirigible than the Wright brothers’ airplane, and for seemingly good reasons.

  Jules Verne, on the other hand, chose the airplane. In Robur the Conqueror (1886), Robur says, “The future of aviation belongs to the aeronef [airplane] and not the aerostat [airship]. Verne, however, did not foresee the improvements that would be made on the crude experiments with powered airships that had been in progress since 1784 and resulted in a manned flight in France in 1852. Robur’s aeronef, incidentally, was lifted, like a helicopter, by seventy-four screws mounted on thirty-seven uprights and propelled by horizontal screws at front and rear driven by electricity.

  What happened in the real world was that the dirigible not only predated the airplane by three years but it was more immediately successful. The first rigid zeppelin was flown in 1900; it was used for passenger service in Germany between 1910 and 1914, and widely employed for military purposes in the early days of World War I. The Wright brothers’ flight in 1903, on the other hand, was ignored by the press, mostly because of widespread skepticism about the practicability of heavier-than-aircraft. A contract for one airplane was not signed by the U.S. government until 1908. As a consequence, the full development of the airplane was delayed until the latter part of World War I, and the airplane did not come into its own as a passenger carrier until the thirties. The dramatic end of the German zeppelin Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 also ended the dirigible as an aircraft. Ironically, the dirigible is superior to the airplane for many purposes, including the hauling of freight, and may yet regain a place in some future overall transportation system.

  It is not surprising, then, that H. G. Wells, writing in 1908, should pick the dirigible as the aircraft of the future in his The War in the Air; what was surprising was his prophetic vision of the impact of aircraft on warfare. But Wells was not the first author to note the influence of aircraft on human existence.

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), born in Bombay, India, attended school in England, returned to India as a journalist as some of his books began to be printed, and finally came back to England in 1889, to win fame as a poet and fiction writer, and eventually England’s first Nobel Prize for literature. His first books were Departmental Ditties (1886) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), which he would follow with Barrack Room Ballads (1890, 1892), and a series of novels and short stories that included the two Jungle Books (1894, 1895), Captains Courageous (1897), Stalkey and Co. (1899), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and Kim (1901).

  Among his many short stories were several that might be classified as fantasies with an element of scientific explanation, such as “Wireless,” “The Mark of the Beast,” and “The Finest Story in the World.” But two stories were clearly science fiction and clearly foreshadowed the science fiction of the late thirties and forties, “With the Night Mail” (1905) and “Easy as A.B.C.” (1912).

  Kipling saw in the dirigible the possibility of major changes in people’s lives, involving the greater interconnectedness of the world once time and space were foreshortened, and the necessity to control this new method of transportation. He envisioned an Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) whose influence would grow to encompass almost every aspect of existence. “Easy as A.B.C.” is a kind of sequel to “With the Night Mail,” in which the A.B.C. goes to extreme lengths, including painful lights and sounds (which might be considered foreshadowings of lasers and supersonics), to bring rebellious districts back under control and keep communications open.

  In these two stories Kipling used many of the science-fiction techniques that would slowly be rediscovered later, mostly after John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories in 1937. They included, as Campbell put it, writing stories “that would be published in a magazine of the twenty-fifth century,” that is, the use of new words,
including slang, as would naturally happen in the future; the omission of explanations that would not be natural to the storyteller of that future time; and the invention of an entire new future world that would enter the story only as corroborative detail.

  What Kipling did in these two stories would not be done as well again until Robert A. Heinlein began writing science fiction in 1939.

  With the Night Mail

  BY RUDYARD KIPLING

  A STORY OF 2000 A.D.

  At nine o’clock of a gusty winter night I stood on the lower stages of the G.P.O. outward mail towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec in “Postal Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed”; and the Postmaster-General himself countersigned the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those on the despatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted Continental mail. The bags lay packed close as herrings in the long grey underbodies which our G.P.O. still calls “coaches.” Five such coaches were filled as I watched, and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars.

  From the despatching-caisson I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official—Mr. L. L. Geary, Second Despatcher of the Western Route—to the Captains’ Room (this wakes an echo of old romance), where the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of “162”—Captain Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. The one is small and dark; the other large and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L. V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh—that fathomless abstraction of eyes habitually turned through naked space.

  On the notice-board in the Captains’ Room, the pulsing arrows of some twenty indicators register, degree by geographical degree, the progress of as many homeward-bound packets. The word “Cape” rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little bell which in pigeon-fanciers’ lofts notifies the return of a homer.