by Mike Ashley
They swayed together; their arms were about each other; their lips met in the last kiss. While their faces were yet very near, Alwyn’s disengaged right hand touched a tiny white button that was embedded in the padding of the interior.
There was an instantaneous flash of light and roar of sound, and the man and woman in the second sphere were startled by the sudden glare and concussion of it, as their metal shell drove upwards through the cloud of elemental dust that was all that remained of the first Red Sphere and its occupants.
The silence and clear darkness that had been round them a moment before, had returned when they recovered their balance; and in that silence and clear darkness, the man and woman who had not been chosen passed out into the abyss of the Beyond, ignorant of the cause and meaning of that strange explosion in the air, and knew that they were alone in Space, bound they knew not whither.
THE PLUNGE
George Allan England
Although the last story saw the end of the world, I chose to finish with this story, partly because it has all the standard images of steampunk, but also because it has an almost “into-the-sunset” ending.
Its author, George Allan England (1877-1936), was one of the pioneers of science fiction in the pulps, a contemporary of Edgar Rice Burroughs who also sold fiction to Hugo Gernsback, the publisher of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He is best remembered for his trilogy which takes its name from the first book, Darkness and Dawn (1912), set a thousand years hence when civilisation has been all but wiped from the face of the Earth following some uncertain catastrophe. The two main protagonists have survived into the future through suspended animation but now they awaken to discover a world struggling to recover. Other novels of note include The Empire in the Air (1914), in which Earth is threatened by beings from another dimension and The Golden Blight (1912), in which a scientist holds the world to ransom in the hope of ending war.
Compared to the above the following is a rather more simple story of airships, near disaster and heroics. — M.A.
I
WITH A SIGH, the girl let both hands fall into her lap. The book she had been listlessly reading escaped from her gloved fingers — fur-gloved, even as she herself was wrapped in furs. Though the month was June, and the stupendous aero-liner Imperatrice had only half an hour before demagnetized its electromagnetic disks and cleared from the Pacific Transport towers at Honolulu, the thin, cold atmosphere of more than two miles aloft nipped keenly.
The girl leaned back in her deck-chair, with the glow of the auroral induction lamp above her, and gazed a trifle wistfully across the aft concourse, out beyond the rail through the clear blackness of the night. Far, very far astern a dull reddish gleam on the horizon — a gleam that faded even as she watched it — bespoke the fires of Mauna Loa smoldering against the sky.
Hungrily dark, below silvery cloud-masses on which the vivid whiteness of the full moon dazzled a mile beneath the liner as she roared on her appointed way, the Pacific rolled in terrible immensity. Across the deck, rhythmically swinging as the ship swayed and dipped along the Trades, sharply black shadows of the rail and of the stanchions supporting the upper deck cut the aluminum plates. The sky, a jetty void, sparkled with myriads of white spatters of flame. Lights and shadows contrasted with cold hardness on the passengers walking the decks or grouped along the rail. Through the perfect silence of the upper air, the gleaming Imperatrice, with suction-turbines shrilly whining, with hurricane-shields whistling in the empty dark, hurled herself at three hundred miles an hour toward Nagasaki, still nine hours’ run to nor’-west by west.
Tired and melancholy, the girl looked with indifferent eyes at the voyagers muffled in their furs, some strolling idly about, some leaning on the rail, some with night-glasses searching out the abyss or aimed at the splendor of the moon. The thought of Japan roused a slight, momentary interest in her world-wearied heart. Yes, the loom of the blue-pearly haze that marked its coasts at dawn, or the vertical shafts of radiance, by night, shooting to mid-heaven from the Nippon Republic’s aero-lighthouses, to guide the pilots peering from the hooded bull’s-eyes of the conning tower — these still possessed a certain lure for her. Yet only a little, for after so many trips afar what real novelty could anywhere remain?
“Dear, dear, what a tedious old world this has become!” She yawned behind her glove. “I ought to have been born in the days when things really happened — the old days of real life — the days when people didn’t have to content themselves with merely reading of adventure!”
She settled back still farther in her chair, listened to the zooning of the wind amid the wires and taut cables, and let her gaze wander over the many rows of life-preservers hanging under the deck roof, each a combination antigravity turbine and vacuum-belt. The glow, above, now more clearly lighted up her face. One could see that the girl was just a trifle pale, with wondering and contemplative gray eyes rather far apart; with tawny hair parted at one side and drawn away from broad brows; with full yet delicate lips, passionately red.
For a moment she lay there, lulled by the threnody of the gale, the shuddering vibration of the tremendous hull driven by its ion-motors, the sibilant hissing of the air-intakes as the vacuum chambers adjusted their lift to the needs of the ship.
“A tedious old world, indeed!” She repeated, closing her eyes with resignation; while the vast fabric of the liner, paced by the racing moon that fled before, roared westward, ever westward, swift and terrible upon the wings of night.
II
THE scraping of a chair at her side aroused her. She turned her head and looked. A line of annoyance drew between her brows. To be interrupted by the intrusion of a stranger, just when she had been feeling most comfortably pessimistic, was annoying.
She was about to resume her meditation when something in the newcomer’s face arrested her attention. Though it was shaded by a cap of silver fox-skin, she seemed to have recognized him. He looked undeniably familiar.
She studied him a moment. He seemed a man no longer young, nor yet old — a man “between two ages,” as the French say; forty perhaps. The wrinkles at the corner of his eyes bespoke observation, world-wisdom, sagacity, tempered by a saving sense of humor. His mouth, holding a pipe, showed strong lips; his chin was molded on lines that might perhaps, be just a little hard.
The girl appraised him with spurred interest. Indubitably a large man, well above the six feet that the human male now averaged, not even his heavy furs could conceal a certain lithe strength distinctive in an age of physical ease. Her eyes fell on his right hand, which was bare; a big hand, white, powerful, yet with fingers that bespoke the artist. He wore a single ring of dull gold; an unsymmetrical pattern — an eagle, one wing furled, one spread, with marvelously carven feathers. The eagle’s eye was fashioned of a diamond; its claw grasped another. A strange ring, thought the girl. A ring that somehow singularly befitted that white, virile hand.
She leaned back again, piqued at herself for the interest she had felt. The book in her lap slid off; it slapped the deck sharply. Stooping, the man removed the pipe from his mouth. He picked up the book and glanced at it. With an odd smile, he looked at her — and then she knew him.
“Norford Hale!” She exclaimed involuntarily, angry at the quickening of her heart, the burning of her cheek.
“Why, you’re my Romney girl!” Said he. “How did you know me?”
“Oh, I’ve known you for years and years,” she answered, seemingly without knowing just what she was saying. “Everybody does, I fancy. You are Norford Hale, aren’t you?”
He nodded, smiling still; and now she noted his sun-tanned face and steady eyes.
“I can’t deny it — Romney,” said he.
“Why do you call me that?” She demanded. “How on earth can you know my nickname, the name my friends all call me?”
“’Who could help it? I’ve had more than a few pictures of you, cut from magazines, these last few years. Who doesn’t know Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton?
You must be a reincarnation of her, or something of that sort. At any rate, I’ve long been calling you my Romney girl. You don’t know it, but you were the heroine of my ‘Nights on Parnassus.’ Romney reminds one of gypsies and all that, too; I’ve always fancied you a wanderer, an unconventional, outdoor, woodsy kind of girl-are you?”
“Please don’t let’s get personal, on two minutes” acquaintance,” she remarked, rather severely.
“I beg you a thousand pardons!” He returned, with just a tinge of mockery that by no means escaped her. He held out the book. “Allow me to give back my latest — and worst piece of modern materialism.”
“It is bad,” she agreed, taking the book. “It’s nearly put me to sleep several times. I call it my soporific.”
He laughed heartily, showing fine teeth.
“Romney,” said he, “you’re the first frank and truthful human being I’ve met in years. My next book shall certainly be built about you.”
“Not if it’s going to be like this one!” She protested. “Jamais! ‘Why do you write this way, when you can write so very differently if you want to? Why do you do it?”
“Why? Because I must,” he explained. “The public demands it. Publishers are slaves of the public, and I am a slave of the publishers. That makes me a slave raised to the nth power. This kind of thing is only a symptom of a world gone into fatty degeneration as a result of a gross surfeit of creature comforts. Shall I knock out my pipe?”
“No, you needn’t. Father smokes from morning till night, and doesn’t even use cartridges. Still sticks to the untidy old habits of his grandfather and insists that loose tobacco is the only thing in the world, for him. I’m used to it. The only way you can really please me will be to stop your terrific materialism. Why not give us another pure romance of the old days — the days when there was adventure in the world, and romance? The period, say, of 1900 to 1925? Another book, for instance, like The Quarry or Llewellyn?”
He shook his head and for a moment kept silence, then drew at his pipe. It was dead. He slipped a fresh cartridge into it, pressed the knurl that set the rim glowing, and puffed the tobacco to ignition.
“Another book like those?” He queried. “Impossible! All that’s dead now, and has been these twenty years past. The modern world isn’t a romantic world, that’s all. Fifty-odd years ago, at the time of the final war, or even thirty, when the United Republics were still fledglings, some romance still survived. But since then — ”
Eloquently he blew a lance of smoke into the sheltered air of the ‘tween-decks.
“You see,” he added, “now that there’s no war, no poverty, no crime, no misery, no peril, no accident, no struggle any more, to try men’s souls, all the exciting elements of romance have disappeared. When there hasn’t been a fatal accident of any moment either on land or sea or in the air, for a decade or two, you can imagine the state of dull complacency into which the world has relapsed. It’s magnificent of course, but it’s fatal to the state of mind that my particular brand of labor needs as a culture-medium.”
He made a gesture of impatience, frowning with displeasure.
“Literature has grown as dull as life itself!” He exclaimed. “The world of other times used to look forward to the actuality of to-day as to a wonderful ideal, never realizing that it was just the uncertainty and danger and cruelty of life that gave birth to powerful situations and real literature. Men were real men in those days; women were real women. Today we’re all a flock of tame, colorless, self-satisfied nonentities. All the zest of life, all the big, powerful, primitive emotions are dead and gone, forever — and exit all excitement, all tension, all romance!”
The girl, leaning forward, looked at him with sudden enthusiasm.
“My own thought, to a T!” She agreed. “Only, I’ve never formulated it before, or tried to express it. I’m awfully glad you see things as I do, and understand. If I’d found you conventional, self-satisfied, smug, you don’t know how you’d have disillusioned me, or how sadly you’d have destroyed an ideal — ”
“An ideal?”
“I mean,” she parried hastily, ‘’I’d have been terribly disappointed. You and I both view the world from the same angle, that’s evident. A world surrounded by every safeguard and choked with material comfort — why, it’s a dead world! What could be more stagnating than perfection? What more deadly than secure monotony? I’ve wished all my life — oh, how I’ve wished! — That I might have lived in the old days when life meant struggle and achievement, when there were obstacles to overcome and sufferings to conquer, when at least a little of the primitive was left in men and women, and when romance meant more than a vague memory!”
Silence, a moment, between them, while the man smoked and seemed to weigh her words. Suddenly she spoke.
“Why write at all?” She demanded. “In your capacity as a surgeon you’re of inestimable value to the world. The whole world knows you that way. Why not abandon your other work, which you’ve no heart in any more? Why drift with the tide and follow the dull, modem current of materialism?”
He cast a strange glance at her. For a minute the woman and the man looked into each other’s eyes. Then suddenly:
“You’re really Jeanne Hargreaves’?” He demanded.
“Yes. Why?”
“How strange that I should meet you thus!” He commented, ignoring her question. “So you’re Linwood Hargreaves’ daughter, eh?”
“Yes. I’m on my way to meet him now, in Osaka.”
The man kept silent. He pushed back his cap a little, and ran his fingers through his hair, still more black than gray.
“Let’s walk a bit,” he suggested. “The night’s too fine for us to miss it, sitting back here in a corner.”
She agreed. Together, in silence under the soft glow of the lights, they paced the deck, a turn or two; a deck reminding one more of a city street, so numerous the throng was, than of anything ever seen in the old days of surface navigation. A confused murmur of speech blurred the air, fused with the throbbing of powerful electrocons. Here and there the glower of burning tobacco and its grateful odor told of one habit, at least, which not even half a century of the New Order had been able to eliminate.
They paused, presently, by the rail just abaft the kinetogram office, and looked out over the world of cloud and sea, which under the moonlight seemed to hollow upward like a vast cup, its rim fading into inchoate vagueness. Far overhead, the black bulge of the vacuum-chambers blotted out the vivid pinpricks of the stars. The creak and strain of struts and braces vaguely recalled sea-vessels of former times, Beyond the gale-breaks the outlines of whose vast out-riggers loomed against the sky, a 300-mile-an-hour hurricane was raging terrible beyond all words — a hurricane lashed into being by the hurtling trajectory of the ship herself, as she cleft the night — but on deck only a mild breeze was loitering.
A faint cloud-wrack immensely high, now and then slightly tarnished the moon. A mile or more below, as Jeanne and the novelist bent over the rail, they saw the shadow of the Imperatrice that skimmed at terrifying speed across the shining fields of vapor — fields that, gapped here and there, showed the black abysses of the ocean spinning backward, ever backward, toward the east.
Very far away to northward, a fine, slim spear of white light stabbed upward through the night. On the horizon, quiverings of radiance reached out, felt into the void, leaped and died-tenuous arms of illumination shot upward from the great aerial centre at Port Howard, on Lisiansky Island. The woman and the man kept a moment’s silence, peering into the stupendous gulf of emptiness that rushed away beneath them:
Hale spoke first.
“In the old days,” said he, blowing a trail of smoke, “even this commonplace scene, in itself, would have been considered romantic and exciting. Writers would have reveled in it and artists would have portrayed it. What an easy time they had, in those days, when there were still really new things in the world to describe! It seems hard to realize, doesn’t it, that an aerial
trip around the world was once something to talk about and make ‘copy’ out of?”
“Just imagine!” Jeanne commented.
“And now — ”
“Of course. Now that China and India and Thibet are weekend excursions, on tourist schedules, what can be left to wonder at or be romantic about?” He stifled a yawn, with difficulty. “Not one uncivilized or semi-civilized place in the whole world — even the very Esquimaux and Patagonians sophisticated and selling postcards — bah! In these days of motive power drawn from the sun or from polar currents streaming to it, these days of synthetic foods, etheric energies, and all-embracing mechanism, what part is left for the personal equation?
“Civilization? Ugh! I detest it! I’d give a year of my life — five years — for a touch of the real, the raw, the primitive! Life has become as dull as men and women themselves. Are there any real women in the world to-day? “I’ve never met one. That’s why I’ve never married — ”
He gestured outward with his hand, despairingly. She smiled with certain bitterness.
“Real women?” The girl exclaimed. “Show me a real man first! Extinct! I’ve always thought so; but until tonight I’ve always been too polite to say so. Somehow, with you, politeness and subterfuge seem as stupidly unreal as all the rest of this super-civilization. I wonder, now — ”
A sudden flare of light, far outshining the moon, interrupted her speech. The brilliance flooded the whole sky, dazzled upon the spinning clouds below, and for a second glared with noonday radiance. Every minutest detail of the ship stood out in startling relief.
A wailing, screeching note cleft the high air, grew swiftly louder as the light brightened, then ended in a thunderous crash that shook the liner from lookout to extremest rudder-plane.
Then, instantly, the light glared below. The novelist, leaning over the rail as the staggered liner heeled sickeningly far to port, saw a swift streak of bluish flame — flame that roared, that coruscated — plunge like a rocket into the enveloping fleeciness of the clouds, and vanish.
