SteampubkPrime

by Mike Ashley

  He got out his papers again and once more went minutely through the maze of figures and formulae with which the sheets were covered. Then, when the sound of slow, deep breathing told him that Princeps was asleep, he opened the trap-door in the floor and counted the unexhausted cylinders of gas. When he had finished, he said to himself in a whisper-

  “Barely enough to get them home, even with the best of luck; but still enough to prove that it is possible to make a journey through the centre of the earth from Pole to Pole. At least, that will be done and proved — and Karl Haffkin will live for ever.”

  There was the light of martyrdom in his eyes as he looked for the last time at the dial. Then he unscrewed the circular window from the bottom of the car, lowered himself through it, hung for a moment to the edge with his hands, and let go.

  When Princeps and Brenda woke after several hours’ sleep, they were astonished to find the windows of the car glowing with a strange, brilliant light — the light of the Northern Aurora. Princeps got out, saying: “Hurrah, Professor! We’ve got there! Daylight at last!”

  But there was no Professor, and only the open trap-door and the window hanging on its hinges below told how an almost priceless life had been heroically sacrificed to make the way of life longer for two who had only just begun to tread it together through the golden gates of the Garden of Love.

  But Karl Haffkin’s martyrdom meant even more than this. Without it, the great experiment must have failed, and three lives would have been lost instead of one; and so he chose to die the lesser death so that his comrades on that marvellous voyage might live out their own lives to Nature’s limit, and that he himself might live forever on the roll of honour which is emblazoned with the names of the noblest of all martyrs — those who have given their lives to prove that Truth is true.

  IN THE DEEP OF TIME

  George Parsons Lathrop

  From the conquest of the North Pole to the conquest of space. Space travel has been a fundamental part of science fiction from the very earliest days, but it became particularly prominent in the public consciousness during the 1890s because of the close opposition of Mars. Attention had been drawn to Mars in 1877 when Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to see canali, or channels. The idea that there may be life on Mars grasped the public imagination and this was encouraged by the American astronomer Perceval Lowell. He wrote three books on the subject, Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Of course H. G. Wells had already taken the public imagination much further in The War of the Worlds (1898) which merged the public appetite for the future war novel with the idea of Earth being invaded by the technologically superior but morally merciless Martians.

  The following story was written before War of the Worlds and, for that matter, before Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), with which it has much in common. It’s not impossible that the story gave Wells some ideas because he may well have read it when it ran in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1897, to which Wells also contributed. The story includes such ideas as automated factories, synthetic fabrics, suspended animation and the classic science fiction concept of antigravity. George Parsons Lathrop credited Thomas Edison with providing the technical ideas for the story. Lathrop had interviewed Edison a few years earlier, writing “Talks with Edison” for Harper’s Magazine (February 1890).

  George Parsons Lathrop (1851-1898) was an American novelist, editor and scholar. He was also the son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, having married Hawthorne’s daughter Rose in 1871. It was not an entirely happy marriage and they separated in 1895. That was just before this story was written and I wonder whether some of the narrator’s romantic anguish may reflect Lathrop’s own. Writers should be grateful to Lathrop as he founded the American Copyright League in 1883 which helped secure international copyright law. — M.A.

  This story is the result of conversations with Thomas A. Edison, the substance of which he afterwards put into the form of notes written for my use. His suggestions as to inventions and changed mechanical, industrial, and social conditions in the future, here embodied, I understand to be simply hints as to what might possibly be accomplished. Mr. Edison assumes no further responsibility for them. For the story itself I alone am responsible.

  — GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP

  I.

  “VIVIFICATED”

  NEAR THE CLOSE of the nineteenth century the Society of Futurity was formed for scientific experiment on a colossal scale. There was a considerable number of associates, all of whom were bound to secrecy, and these supplied a large endowment fund. To make their obligations of reticence the more sure, the secrets of the society were not told to them, after all, but were preserved by a small head committee known as The Three.

  The Three were to be perpetuated in each generation by successors appointed by the first Three. Of the original trio, the famous inventor Gladwin was one, and he found in Gerald Bemis, a young friend of his, a willing subject for a vital test — nothing less than the attempt to suspend his life for two or three centuries and return to consciousness and activity after that interval. It was an old idea, but it had never been carried out except in imagination and in impossible books. Gladwin, however, thought he had now solved the problem, and was anxious to try his solution.

  Bemis was a stalwart, handsome fellow, full of life, with a gay smile ever ready to brighten his lips, and with short auburn curls a-dance on his broad, frank forehead. He was highly educated, and an enthusiast in matters of science. But what came still more to the point, he had suffered a reverse in love, and fancied that he could take no further personal interest in the present life. Suicide was alien to his temperament as well as to his strong natural and religious instincts and faith. But “vivification,” as Gladwin’s new process was called, would relieve him from conscious existence now, and also make him a pioneer of the human race in advancing into another generation beyond, while still retaining membership in his own generation.

  “It is done,” he exclaimed to Gladwin. “I agree to be vivificated!”

  Yet, after the decision had been made, he underwent severe struggles. Now that he was to part from the world for so long a time, the living, moving, human creatures whom he saw upon the streets, in clubs and hotels, at receptions, at fashionable dinners, or at the theatres — so charged with intense interest in their daily affairs, ambitions, and ideas — appealed to him in a new way. “Stay with us!” They all seemed to be saying to him, though their lips moved not. “You are one of us! Don’t go! Don’t leave us! Take your share of human experience while you are here among us, and can be sure of it!”

  The trial was hard indeed. But he persisted; although “Life prolonged without the old companionships,” he admitted, “is little different from death.”

  When the appointed day came, and he went out to Gladwin’s high-walled laboratory in a woody solitude near New York, to be sealed up for futurity, contemporaneous life began to dwindle in his view. The crowds he saw in passing, his acquaintance, friends, relatives — even Eva Pryor, whom he had loved so ardently but in vain — all shrank in their proportions until they seemed nothing more than the diminutive and automatic busy reflections of reality in the kinetoscope. With this changed and dreamy mood upon him, there came to him a feeling that he, also, had been reduced to pigmy size, in his own mental vision. Considering the extraordinary ordeal through which he was about to pass, such a sense of his-own littleness and insignificance was restful and encouraging. Calmly, therefore, he lay down upon the couch prepared for him in a secret and well-guarded alcove of the laboratory, robed in a simple garment of linen, which was dressed, bleached, sterilized, and scrupulously clean.

  Gladwin gave him chloroform until he became unconscious. Then a solution of the lately discovered compound, Tetrethylcylonammon, was injected under his skin. This gradually reduced his heart’s action and his respiration to zero.

  When, under its influence, all movement had ceased and his animation was entirely suspended, he was
placed in a large glass cylinder twice the length of his body and lying in a horizontal position.

  A powerful antiseptic, Mortimicrobium — Gladwin’s discovery was now injected into his veins. It was a liquid that destroyed all organisms not proper to the body or essential to life, and prevented decomposition. The cylinder of glass was then filled with highly antiseptized air — so that no germs could come to life within it — and, by a number of wind-urged gas flames, the end of the tube was fused, drawn to a point and hermetically sealed. Thereupon the whole cylinder, with Bemis reposing in it, was coated several times with collodion, which made a tough, transparent surface and would prevent the ingress of air if tire glass happened to crack or break.

  So enclosed, as though in a huge cocoon, Bemis was left in the alcove, which was kept heated night and day at an even temperature of ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

  There he lay in that fragile case for years, for generations, until three centuries were completed. All the millions of the earth died and disappeared, and new millions took their places. Tempests broke above him, calm weather shone upon his resting-place; the seasons rose, smiled, frowned, went their way amid the roar of winds or blur of snow, and dissolved one into another in unvarying succession; but Bemis never stirred within his chrysalis. Governments changed, wars thundered about him, the race progressed or retrograded. Still Bemis slept on, without breath or motion.

  Would he ever awake? Would his soul go abroad again upon the earth conscious, in human form? That was for the Three in office now, at the end of the twenty-second century, to ascertain.

  II.

  HOW THEY TALKED WITH THE PLANET MARS

  The Three at this time were Graemantle, Wraithe, and Stanifex — worthy successors of the first committee. The society had met with almost endless difficulties in conserving even a portion of the old laboratory and Bemis’s glassy life-coffin through all the changes of the troubled centuries. But they had triumphed by means of their wealth, shrewdness, tact, and patience. Graemantle, who — owing to the advances made in the saving-up of vitality — had reached the age of one hundred and forty-two, and was regarded as being in the prime of life, was the senior; Wraithe kept the records of the past; and Stanifex was a twenty-second century Conservative, whose function it was to doubt and question everything. The task of awaking Bemis and again inducting him into activity fell to Graemantle, and was performed successfully, notwithstanding the skepticism of Stanifex and the adverse precedents of Wraithe.

  But it so happened that at the hour appointed for the rousing of the vivificated man, most important news had come from the north-west, which admitted of no dallying. Communication had been reopened with Mars, and the result was expected to be of vital moment. Graemantle had only time to welcome Bemis to what was practically a new world before starting for Wisconsin.

  “But Gladwin — where is he? Where is Eva Pryor?” Demanded Bemis, starting up and rubbing his eyes instinctively, although his sight was clear and he felt amazingly refreshed and awake.

  “Gladwin died several lifetimes ago,” said Wraithe. “As for Eva Pryor — ”

  “Come!” Broke in Graemantle. “There is no time to lose over recollections of your infancy. You had better go along with me. It will be a good way to get an idea at once of the new condition of the earth.”

  So, barely stopping to clothe him in soft silken garments, and to give him a draught of concentrated liquid food that seemed to make up instantly for the missing nourishment of centuries, he led him to an air-cutter. A short flight in this conveyance bore them over the woods from the retirement of the half-ruined laboratory to an electric railway, where they bounded as though by magic on to an electric train moving at a dizzy speed. The rest of the journey Bemis scarcely realized, beyond a sensation of being swept along as though with the whiz of a cyclonic wind. When this ceased they were in Wisconsin, and stepped off into a “walking balloon,” which proceeded with long strides of its aluminum legs over a slant of a steep upland.

  Here, in Wisconsin, is the Penokee Range of mountains, chiefly remarkable for its belt of iron are, forty-three miles in length, unbroken and very magnetic. This deposit, averaging 3oo feet in width, extends to an unknown, unfathomed depth. It was over the magnetic ridge that they were now stalking. As Graemantle explained: “It contains more iron than all the other deposits of the United States combined; but owing to the large admixture of silicon with the ore, it has never been utilized.

  “It occurred to us that we might convert the whole Penokee iron deposit into a gigantic magnet by winding wire around it. The Society of Futurity wanted to talk with other planets; and to do this we must produce on earth magnetic disturbances of great and decided violence. We must produce them periodically too, so that by their force and their definite order of recurrence they would send a shock through vast distances, and compel the attention of dwellers on another sphere. Then they might respond with similar movements, which we could record on our magnetometers; and so we could start a conversation.

  “Look at that cleft in the range, right under us.” He added suddenly. That’s Penokee Gap; and there’s our station, with an engine of five thousand horsepower. “See those telegraph-poles?”

  Bemis looked, and beheld poles stationed like dumb sentries along the mountainsides as far as the eye could reach, carrying a great number of copper wires. “There are five hundred turns of that wire,” his new guardian went on; “and each turn is eighty-six miles in length. They encircle this whole mountain mass of iron, which is their core, and make it a colossal magnet, with which we do our planetary telegraphing.”

  Alighting at the station, they met Professor Glissman, who was in charge — a small, nervous man, with glittering eyes that made him look as though he wore a pair of sparkling spectacles, or would like to do so if his eyes had not been so bright and piercing without them. As he explained the great machine, he punctuated his remarks with a modest and amiable little cough, as though the bigness of the thing needed some apology. “Five thousand horse-power may not seem much; but the engine drives this great dynamo here, which has an armature wheel eighty feet in diameter, and the armature consists of very fine iron wire, chemically pure and slightly oxidized, over which is wound copper wire, insulated by semi-vulcanized rubber. That surface is carried round at the rate of 28,000 feet a minute. The current lasts only a second or two, but it is sufficient to bring our 500 eighty-six mile copper wires up to blood-heat. Cast your eye, please” — here Glissman coughed with humility — “on the gigantic switch at your elbow. It is moved by an electrometer, which breaks and closes the current in six hundred places simultaneously, and produces a copper arc seventy feet long.”

  Then, with a fresh glitter of his peculiar eyes, he pointed out certain leather belts perforated on a definite plan, like a Jacquard loom-card. These belts governed the motor and current controller constantly, with short intervals for return signals. “The engines and dynamo.” He said. “If worked continuously, couldn’t give more than five thousand horse-power. But we do not take electricity from the machine more than one-hundredth of the time. Hence the enormous potential energy of the fly wheel if; capable of causing a current to be sent out which, during its brief period, is equal to one hundred and eighty thousand horse-power.”

  The experiments, Bemis was told, had been going on for some eighty-five years. After fifteen years the magnetometer record of the Penokee station suddenly showed — amid the ordinary irregular motions registered on it — a faint periodic motion similar to the waves it was sending into space. Immediately Glissman — who was then a mere child of thirty-one-reduced the period for sending waves from twenty hours to twelve; and thereupon the very same signals came back from the unknown source and were recorded on the magnetometer here.

  Thus, by other variations, and by years of toil, an alphabet and a mutual language was worked out. “And at last,” Graemantle informed the newcomer, with a glow of triumph, “from the position in space which our invisible correspondents to
ld us they occupied, we learned that we were talking with the inhabitants of the planet Mars!”

  At this instant Glissman’s whole demeanor changed. “A message!” He shouted exultantly, and rushed toward the magnetometer.

  The needle trembled and moved. Bemis heard a faint “Thud! Thud!” on the telegraphic instrument.

  It was the voice of Mars talking to earth.

  The messages that now began to come slowly from that planet were spelled or thumped out by a dot-and-dash system; but Bemis could not understand them until they were translated for him by Graemantle, since they were in a language unknown to him.

  The first sentence ran: “Bronson not arrived. Must be lost.”

  Bronson, it appeared, was a daring aeronaut, who had made the attempt to fly to Mars in a newly invented “antigravitation machine,” known as the Interstellar Express. He was now some ten or twelve hours overdue.

  The reply from Penokee was: “Why do you think he is lost?”

  Mars answered: “Local meteors frequent in the path of travel. Our telescopes think he collided. Great regret in Kuro.”

  (“What’s Kuro?” Bemis asked. “Their own name for their planet,” Glissman replied.)

  From Penokee: “Shall we send off another man?”

  Answer from Mars: “Laughter in Kuro.”

  (Bemis remarked indignantly, but in an undervoice, as though the Mars people might hear him: “How can they laugh, immediately after Bronson’s death in space?” But Graemantle reminded him: “Isn’t that the way of the world? It seems to you shocking only because it comes from a distance, abruptly.”)

  Penokee: “Why laughter?”

  Mars: “Because personal communication is so useless compared with that of the abstract intellect or spirit.”