Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  “I mean that I think it is confined to Manhattan Island,” said the Professor. “I have made a study of this island for the past fifteen years and in my opinion it is one of the most wonderful geological formations in the world. When some millions of years ago the bottom of the Laurentian Lake rose and spilled out all its waters, the torrent that came rushing south formed the Hudson, carved the Palisades and scoured out the Hackensack Valley. What is now Manhattan Island was then the seaward spur of the range that goes up through Westchester; but in that flood the insecure base of these hills was washed out and the stable summit of the isolated ridge which we call Manhattan settled down like a plate on soft butter. It might have stayed so for as many ages as it had already stood, but for two causes. Through the soft foundation run ridges of rock—and on such a ridge rests the lower part of the island. And at 125th Street is a fault—you know what that is—a weakness of rock. I knew always of that fault at 125th Street. I knew that if the strain came, and if the fault should break, the island would tip and tilt as though a man had laid his hand heavily upon one side of the plate.”

  Dalton spoke as a man in a nightmare, ready to believe in any strange fantasy: “But what has broken it—where is the strain?”

  “Ah, they could not have believed it—our ancestors! Like Babel we have built. Who thought that we little things could have made an island, a whole island tilt? But we have massed on its end those buildings— twenty stories of steel, thirty stories, forty stories—that is the hand of man on the edge of the plate. Do you see now?”

  “But when will the tilting stop? It can go only so far!”

  “Ach, that is the question! When the island has slid from its base, it may slide on until the tallest tower we have is below the sea. And if it starts one tidal wave! But let that come, and we shall tip and slide to extinction.” He paused here. “The richest tract of ground on the planet —gone, all gone—unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless I am right in my other surmise—and that is a dim hope. I have maintained always there is another fault across the lower island near Cortlandt Street. Salvation may lie in the weakness of that fault!”

  At this moment there came one of the periodic shocks. It seemed heavier than the others, but more even. There was no vicious twisting and rasping in it, only a gentle, steady heave. The car stopped with a jerk that threw Dalton and the Professor in a heap on the floor. When they had scrambled to their feet they found that the conductor and motor-man had deserted the car and that on the downtown track ahead was a long blockade of other deserted cars. On the other track cars raced uptown, crowded with white-faced passengers. On the streets were throngs trudging north. The panic march had shifted from southward to northward. And presently Dalton began to resolve the hurrying crowds into their elements, to observe this or that incongruity of dress and behavior, to take mental notes for the story which might never be written: A man wearing an ulster over his pajamas and carrying a French horn; a woman dragging a bureau; a child crying alone; three men carrying from the doorway of a wreck something covered with a sheet. A figure sitting on a fire plug, his face buried in his hands, attracted him longer; for this one wore the official badge of the Fire Department. Dalton stopped to touch him on the shoulder and ask for news. The fireman lifted his face; he was weeping. “No water!” he gasped; and he buried his face again.

  A little runabout had come up the street before them and slowed down to a stop. A popping noise came from its engines. The youthful, bareheaded driver, showing in all his motions the panic which had sent him fleeing away from the fall of a city toward the open fields, jumped down, seized the crank, and turned it violently. Leaping back into the seat, he pulled the clutch. The machine bounded forward a few feet and stopped again. At that moment, a great touring car came through the growing procession of vehicles making northward. The young driver of the runabout signaled with both arms; these were friends, apparently, for the touring car slowed down, took him aboard, and whirled off. Dalton shook himself.

  “Gee! Here’s a chance,” he said. “What do we care for cars? I can run this machine—there’s nothing wrong but a stopped feed pipe, I guess.” Under the daze which overlaid his senses, Dalton felt his instincts running calm, matter-of-fact. Going to the stalled machine he cut off the tank, unscrewed a section of the feed pipe, blew into it, squinted through it against the bright side of the heavens. “That’s all!” he exclaimed. “A clogged feed pipe and a bad case of rattles!” He set the feed pipe back in place, tickled the carburetor, and cranked up the machine. It reverberated full power. “Now to steal a ride!”

  Professor Herman had squeezed himself into the left-hand seat before he lifted his eyebrows and inquired: “South?”

  Dalton nodded solemnly: “To see it through!” The Professor patted his shoulder. And they two, the only human beings, it seemed, who, knowing that terror and peril lay that way, turned toward the point where the prow of Manhattan was drooping as though it would bury itself in the Bay. They drove south, recklessly, along Amsterdam Avenue.

  Indeed, as they traveled on past blocks of damaged buildings, past blocks which stood a-tilt and intact, it occurred to Dalton to marvel at the instinct which drove the crowds northward. He and the Professor alone knew the meaning of this calamity—and he himself was only half convinced. Save for those who burrowed in their homes, or fought the sporadic fires, the drift was north, away from the seaward point of the island—always north. The procession, bizarre, outlandish, moved without seeming consciousness of danger or calamity. That was the fearful and chilling thing about it—or would have been had Dalton been susceptible to fear or chill. There was none of the whirl or burr of the accustomed city crowd. Sound itself seemed as dazed as mind. Twice he was aware, by the sudden acceleration of motion in the machine under him, by the rattle of buildings falling at a distance, by the sudden stoppage of movement among the people, that the slipping had continued. After the second of these shocks, the Professor said:

  “It is a gulf now—that crack at 125th Street. Will that lower fault hold—will it hold!” That was the only word spoken in their passage, except a sharp direction now and then as they turned east or west to avoid the blocks where the pile of fallen bricks and mortar barred the way.

  At Fifty-ninth Street, indeed, they had to make a long detour westward to avoid a fire which stretched across Broadway east and west. At Tenth Avenue they found passage, turned toward Broadway again at Thirtieth Street, and struck another fire. So they zigzagged toward the open space of Union Square, and came out suddenly upon a huddled crowd whose clamors had been reaching them indistinctly for blocks. It lay like a flock of uneasy blackbirds over the whole greensward. Presently, as Dalton slowed down and stopped the machine for very wonder of the sight, the crowd resolved itself into its elements—group on group of men and women and children sitting on bundles, pathetically clinging to their belongings till the last; an ambulance, centering a circle of prostrate figures and guarded by a squad of policemen; a fringe of buzzing, pushing, gesticulating men.

  As Dalton looked, some commotion agitated the crowd on the side farthest from them; it manifested itself in a buzzing, sprinkled with shouts. Then two shots; and immediately the police who held the line at the corner nearest them closed up at a word of command and trotted wearily toward the disturbance.

  And then the earth heaved again.

  Dalton gripped the clutch in instinctive fear that he would be pitched out of the machine A roar sounded in his ears; he saw the face of a tall building on the Broadway side tilt, tilt—and fall. All his senses went out in the crash as the mass met the pavement. He came to himself in a thick, white vapor. By instinct, he fumbled for the reverse to back away. The machine did not respond. All he felt for a moment was irritation that the machine should trick him. Memory returned with a flash—he had stopped the engine—he must get out and crank up. He set his feet on earth. They held firm.

  And then the crowd struck. A great Hun, charging in t
he van, saw this vehicle of civilization. Russian and Pole and Italian tumbled after him toward it. Dalton wriggled away; he caught sight of the Professor scrambling from the other side. Without a word they fell in beside each other; without a word they trudged south. A policeman, his blue coat speckled white with mortar, stopped them. Dalton showed his reporter’s card.

  “You’re a fool if you go on south,” said the policeman. “The bridges are gone!” His voice broke. “The bridges are gone!”

  Dalton pushed on past him. But this human speech opened his mind to a languid curiosity. “Why are we keeping on?” he asked the Professor.

  “Well, let them think so,” he continued, “I’m on the job.”

  “That is true and good,” said the Professor. “Moreover, when you have feared all, there is nothing more to fear! We know, we two.” He threw a gesture back toward the huddled crowd in Union Square. “What if they die sooner or later? We keep on for duty—we see salvation or the destruction of all!”

  And presently, out of their nightmare, their confusion of fires and barricades and falling walls avoided, their recurrent stupors when the earth heaved, they were before a great building on Broadway. Its shell remained intact; the work of an honest builder held it firm. Here the Professor stopped, and out came one of his Germanic bursts.

  “The end or salvation is near!” he said. “How can we see better than from up there?”

  Dalton looked up along its fourteen stories. The submerged half of his mind, which had directed hands and limbs and speech, told him how foolish it was, this proposal. The other half, which seemed to govern now, was indifferent. And up the stairs they trudged and panted and trudged on. At the top story, Professor Herman smashed his great bulk against a door. It gave. The windows looked south. Herman threw himself into an office chair and panted; but his eyes searched the horizon. The fires were mostly behind them. Still, a column of smoke which was becoming a cloud rose from the tenement quarter of the lower West Side. Before them lay the mighty skyscrapers, massed like Genii’s palaces —great beyond the imagination of man. The Professor dragged Dalton to a window.

  “Look!” he shouted, pointing southward with a vibrating finger. “Look at that congregation of mighty skyscrapers that crowds the lower end of the island. That mountain range of masonry with its towering peaks of copper and its titanic ribs of steel; that mass of millions of tons that has been superimposed on the fragile extremity of the island; that gigantic, horrific mass has broken down one of the outpost foundations of Manhattan and the island is tilting to its destruction!”

  “My God!” whimpered Dalton. “Do you mean that the whole blamed thing will plunge down into the bay at that end and up into the air in Harlem, and then crack to pieces and we’ll all go with it?”

  “Yes,” cried the Professor. “It is the end! It is the end—unless that further point breaks off at the Cortlandt Street fault and plunges to its own destruction. So watch the cataclysm, fill your eyes with the awful wonder of the spectacle. We are seeing that of which we shall never speak again. My young and so-strangely-met-with friend, let us take hands and die like men.”

  “Will it all be over soon?” whispered Dalton, as he clutched the Professor’s free hand. “Gee! but I would like to have said good-bye to mother and Lil.”

  “One more such vibration,” shouted the Professor, as the roof crackled and leaped above them, and a high-pitched roar of dismay came from the streets below. “One more! Then perdition for us all! One more—unless the saving something happens—And God of Mercy, that something is happening! Look! Look!” he cried, his voice running up into a high falsetto shriek. “Look, my boy, look! The lower fault has broken!”

  And Dalton, following the quavery line of the Professor’s pointing finger with his own staring eyes, saw that huge mass of skyscrapers with their cyclopean walls, their glistening summits and their deep canyons of shade, quiver and rock and slide and topple into the harbor! Up leaped a monster tidal wave that pared off the docks on both sides of the island, that swamped the huge transatlantic steamers and that swept in over the city to the base of the building on which Herman and Dalton stood and watched the horror below.

  But as they watched, the waters rolled back, carrying their dreadful burden of dead and debris; one huge tremor ran through the earth from north to south as the island settled back to its level. And Manhattan was saved!

  The Argosy

  June, 1906

  FINIS

  by Frank Lillie Pollack

  THE story Finis will probably stand as Frank Lillie Pollack’s major claim to fame. Its concerted effectiveness and maturity for the era in which it was published is something to marvel at. An end-of-the-world story, it tells of two people, a man and a woman, who wait alone through the night in a New York skyscraper, knowing they will die at dawn as the rays of a central cosmic sun, which have been on their way to earth for millions of years, dissolve the planet into gas. How they react to this foreknowledge is the entire story, and it is a magnificent one. Originally published in The Argosy, June 1906, it was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, May June 1940, and in Fantastic Novels, July 1948. It was collected by British anthologist Kurt Singer for Horror Omnibus (W. H. Allen, 1965) under the title The Last Dawn, probably taken from its memorable last line.

  So strong was the effect of this story on its readership at the time it was published, that Edward A. Start wrote for the March 1907 issue of The Red Book a story titled The Last Sunset, which depicts the mood of the world and a man and woman as they watch the sun set for the last time before the earth is plunged into eternal night and never-ending cold.

  Pollack had written science fiction before. His Crimson Blight, a story of an old eccentric who invents a heat ray to strike down visitors in a resort town, appeared in The Argosy (May 1905), and he would write it again, in the form of The World Wrecker, a short novel of men who discover how to make gold artificially (The Cavalier, November 1908).

  The World Wrecker was actually written for publication in The Scrap Book, edited by sometime science fiction writer Perley Poore Sheehan. The story was shifted to the newly created The Cavalier, which was first published in October 1908, when there was an abrupt change in the revolutionary policy of what may well have been the most unusual magazine in American publishing history, The Scrap Book. T his magazine, whose first issue was dated March 1906, was published by Frank A. Munsey, who had also issued The Argosy and The All-Story Magazine. It gave the reader 200 pages for 10 cents and its policy was to run almost anything, fiction and fact, new and reprints. In the first issue’s introduction Munsey told readers they would find “biography, review, philosophy, science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird and the mystical.” The magazine was every bit as diverse and as good as he promised, but it didn’t sell.

  With the July 1907 issue, The Scrap Book appeared as two simultaneously-issued magazines, published monthly, selling for two for 25 cents. One magazine was 100 per cent articles and features, copiously illustrated on coated stock. The other was 100 per cent fiction on book paper with no illustrations. The nonfiction magazine ran 180 pages and the fiction magazine 160. Two different covers were printed on the individual magazines and the same date and volume number. Either one of them was worth 25 cents. The newsdealer would not sell you one magazine; you had to pay the full price whether you took one or both. The idea was to permit two people to read the magazine at the same time. The one most interested in articles could take that section, and the one who preferred fiction could settle down with the other portion.

  This policy continued until the September 1908 issue. In October of that year Munsey issued a new magazine of fiction titled The Cavalier which continued publishing the three unfinished serials from The Scrap Book. The Scrap Book then ran as a single monthly 10-cent magazine of fact and fiction with over a hundred illustrations every issue, each one in color.

  To do justice to this strange publication would require an entire article, but during its l
ife it frequently published tales of the supernatural and science fiction, both reprints and originals. The early fantasies were predominantly revivals, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce, E. Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Daniel Defoe. As time went by it began to print new science fiction stories, among them The Sky Pirate by Garrett P. Serviss (1909), a novel of air piracy in the future which has never been reissued; The House of Transformation by George Allan England (1909), a novel of an ape invested with the intelligence of a man, and The Radium Terrors by A. Dorrington (1911), a tale of intrigue and the illicit uses of the then little-known radioactive substance, radium, one of the few novels from this publication later to be reprinted in book form (Doubleday, Page, 1912).

  “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.

  Eastwood made the reflection anew that she certainly was 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.