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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  “But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”

  “They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.

  “Think of it,” she went dreamily, “for a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”

  “I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive—some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.

  “But I can’t realize it at all—this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause. “Is it real? Or have we all gone mad? It seems too much like a bad dream.”

  The rain crashed down again as he spoke, and the earth steamed, though not with the dense reek of the day. For hours the waters roared and splashed against the earth in hot billows till the streets were foaming yellow rivers, dammed by the wreck of fallen buildings.

  There was a continual rumble as earth and rock slid into the East River, and at last the Brooklyn Bridge collapsed with a thunderous crash and splash that made all Manhattan vibrate. A gigantic billow like a tidal wave swept up the river from its fall.

  The downpour slackened and ceased soon after the moon began to shed an obscured but brilliant light through the clouds.

  Presently the east commenced to grow luminous, and this time there could be no doubt as to what was coming.

  Alice crept closer to the man as the gray light rose upon the watery air.

  “Kiss me!” she whispered suddenly, throwing her arms around his neck. He could feel her trembling. “Say you love me; hold me in your arms. There is only an hour.”

  “Don’t be afraid. Try to face it bravely,” stammered Eastwood.

  “I don’t fear it—not death. But I have never lived. I have always been timid and wretched and afraid—afraid to speak—and I’ve almost wished for suffering and misery or anything rather than to be stupid and dumb and dead, the way I’ve always been.

  “I’ve never dared to tell anyone what I was, what I wanted. I’ve been afraid all my life, but I’m not afraid now. I have never lived; I have never been happy; and now we must die together!”

  It seemed to Eastwood the cry of the perishing world. He held her in his arms and kissed her wet, tremulous face that was strained to his.

  The twilight was gone before they knew it. The sky was blue already, with crimson flakes mounting to the zenith, and the heat was growing once more intense.

  “This is the end, Alice,” said Eastwood, and his voice trembled.

  She looked at him, her eyes shining with an unearthly softness and brilliancy, and turned her face to the east.

  There, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.

  Marvelous

  Inventions

  The pneumatic tubes that will propel a vehicle under the Atlantic from the United States to France at record speeds are shown illustrating Jules Verne’s little-known story An Express of the Future, The Strand Magazine, January 1895. It was but one of scores of stories anticipating advances in scientific technology. Illustrator unknown.

  The Strand Magazine

  January, 1895

  AN EXPRESS OF THE FUTURE

  by Jules Verne

  NO BIOGRAPHY or bibliography of Jules Verne makes any reference to this story, An Express of the Future, nor does it appear to have been collected in any of his books. It should be placed in the category of little-known works of science fiction by Verne. The concept, pushing a vehicle through a tube by compressed air under the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe would date the story as having been written roughly about the period in which it appeared in The Strand, January 1895.

  A friend and close collaborator of Verne’s, Andre Laurie, wrote an exciting novel titled New York to Brest in Seven Hours (Sampson, Low, 1890), which dealt with a pipeline under the Atlantic to carry oil from the United States to Europe, and showed how a man in a capsule could be shot through it in an emergency. It is quite obvious that Verne got his inspiration from Laurie.

  Verne still had several good stories left in him and his name was famous around the world, but the very year that this story appeared, his successor, H. G. Wells, would thrill the critics with The Time Machine. One thing Wells had in common with Verne was a high optimism that science would prove the salvation of man. This common ground was not to last long. As Verne lost his loved ones, aged, and grew ill, his doubts about the efficacy of science in curing the world’s problems enlarged. At the time of his death, March 24, 1905, Verne well knew that science was only a tool of men, its use completely dependent upon the inclinations of men.

  As he grew older, H. G. Wells, too, fell in line with Verne’s view. There was no more to be said about the inevitability of progress, he noted in sorrow; man must make his own salvation.

  “TAKE care!” cried my conductor, “there’s a step!”

  Safely descending the step thus indicated to me, I entered a vast room, illuminated by blinding electric reflectors, the sound of our feet alone breaking the solitude and silence of the place.

  Where was I? What had I come there to do? Who was my mysterious guide? Questions unanswered. A long walk in the night, iron doors opened and reclosed with a clang, stairs descending, it seemed to me, deep into the earth—that is all I could remember. I had, however, no time for thinking.

  “No doubt you are asking yourself who I am?” said my guide: “Colonel Pierce, at your service. Where are you? In America, at Boston—in a station.”

  “A station?”

  “Yes, the starting-point of the ‘Boston to Liverpool Pneumatic Tubes Company.’“

  And, with an explanatory gesture, the Colonel pointed out to me two long iron cylinders, about a metre and a half in diameter, lying upon the ground a few paces off.

  I looked at these two cylinders, ending on the right in a mass of masonry, and closed on the left with heavy metallic caps, from which a cluster of tubes were carried up to the roof; and suddenly I comprehended the purpose of all this.

  Had I not, a short time before, read, in an American newspaper, an article describing this extraordinary project for linking Europe with the New World by means of two gigantic submarines tubes? An inventor had claimed to have accomplished the task; and that inventor, Colonel Pierce, I had before me.

  In thought I realized the newspaper article,

  Complaisantly the journalist entered into the details of the enterprise. He stated that more than 3,000 miles of iron tubes, weighing over 13,000,000 tons, were required, with the number of ships necessary, for the transport of this material—200 ships of 2,000 tons, each making thirty-three voyages. He described this Armada of science bearing the steel to two special vessels, on board of which the ends of the tubes were joined to each other, and incased in a triple netting of iron, the whole covered with a resinous preparation to preserve it from the action of the seawater.

  Coming at once to the question of working, he filled the tubes—transformed into a sort of pea-shooter of interminable length—with a series of carriages, to be carried with their travellers by powerful currents of air, in the same way that despatches are conveyed pneumatically round Paris.

  A parallel with the railways closed the article, and the author enumerated with enthusiasm the advantages of the new and audacious system. According to him, there would be, in passing through these tubes, a suppression of all nervous trepidation, thanks to the interior surface being of finely polished steel; equality of temperature secured by means of currents of air, by which the heat co
uld be modified according to the seasons; incredibly low fares, owing to the cheapness of construction and working expenses—forgetting, or waving aside, all considerations of the question of gravitation and of wear and tear.

  All that now came back to my mind.

  So, then, this “Utopia” had become a reality, and these two cylinders of iron at my feet passed thence under the Atlantic and reached to the coast of England!

  In spite of the evidence, I could not bring myself to believe in the thing having been done. That the tubes had been laid I could not doubt; but that men could travel by this route—never!

  “Was it not impossible even to obtain a current of air of that length?” —I expressed that opinion aloud.

  “Quite easy, on the contrary!” protested Colonel Pierce; “to obtain it, all that is required is a great number of steam fans similar to those used in blast furnaces. The air is driven by them with a force which is practically unlimited, propelling it at the speed of 1,800 kilometres an hour—almost that of a cannon-ball!—so that our carriages with their travellers, in the space of two hours and forty minutes, accomplish the journey between Boston and Liverpool.”

  “Eighteen hundred kilometres an hour!” I exclaimed.

  “Not one less. And what extraordinary consequences arise from such a rate of speed! The time at Liverpool being four hours and forty minutes in advance of ours, a traveller starting from Boston at nine o’clock in the morning, arrives in England at 3.53 in the afternoon. Isn’t that a journey quickly made? In another sense, on the contrary, our trains, in this latitude, gain over the sun more than 900 kilometres an hour, beating that planet hand over hand: quitting Liverpool at noon, for example, the traveller will reach the station where we now are at thirty-four minutes past nine in the morning—that is to say, earlier than he started! Ha! ha! I don’t think one can travel quicker than that!”

  I did not know what to think. Was I talking with a madman?—or must I credit these fabulous theories, in spite of the objections which rose in my mind?

  “Very well, so be it!” I said. “I will admit that travellers may take this mad-brained route, and that you can obtain this incredible speed. But, when you have got this speed, how do you check it? When you come to a stop, everything must be shattered to pieces!”

  “Not at all,” replied the Colonel, shrugging his shoulders. “Between our tubes—one for the out; the other for the home journey—consequently worked by currents going in opposite directions—a communication exists at every joint. When a train is approaching, an electric spark advertises us of the fact; left to itself, the train would continue its course by reason of the speed it had acquired; but, simply by the turning of a handle, we are able to let in the opposing current of compressed air from the parallel tube, and, little by little, reduce to nothing the final shock or stopping. But what is the use of all these explanations? Would not a trial be a hundred times better?”

  And, without waiting for an answer to his questions, the Colonel pulled sharply a bright brass knob projecting from the side of one of the tubes: a panel slid smoothly in its grooves, and in the opening left by its removal I perceived a row of seats, on each of which two persons might sit comfortably side by side.

  “The carriage!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Come in.”

  I followed him without offering any objection, and the panel immediately slid back into its place.

  By the light of an electric lamp in the roof I carefully examined the carriage I was in.

  Nothing could be more simple: a long cylinder, comfortably upholstered, along which some fifty arm-chairs, in pairs, were ranged in twenty-five parallel ranks. At either end a valve regulated the atmospheric pressure, that at the farther end allowing breathable air to enter the carriage, that in front allowing for the discharge of any excess beyond a normal pressure.

  After spending a few moments on this examination, I became impatient.

  “Well,” I said, “are we not going to start?”

  “Going to start?” cried the Colonel. “We have started!”

  Started—like that—without the least jerk, was it possible? I listened attentively, trying to detect a sound of some kind that might have guided me.

  If we had really started—if the Colonel had not deceived me in talking of a speed of eighteen hundred kilometres an hour—we must already be far from any land, under the sea; above our heads the huge, foam-crested waves; even at that moment, perhaps—taking it for a monstrous sea-serpent of an unknown kind—whales were battering with their powerful tails our long, iron prison!

  But I heard nothing but a dull rumble, produced, no doubt, by the passage of our carriage, and, plunged in boundless astonishment, unable to believe in the reality of all that had happened to me, I sat silently, allowing the time to pass.

  At the end of about an hour a sense of freshness upon my forehead suddenly aroused me from the torpor into which I had sunk by degrees.

  I raised my hand to my brow: it was moist.

  Moist! Why was that? Had the tube burst under pressure of the waters —a pressure which could not but be formidable, since it increases at the rate of “an atmosphere” every ten metres of depth? Had the ocean broken in upon us?

  Fear seized upon me. Terrified, I tried to call out—and—and I found myself in my garden, generously sprinkled by a driving rain, the big drops of which had awakened me. I had simply fallen asleep while reading the article devoted by an American journalist to the fantastic projects of Colonel Pierce—who also, I much fear, has only dreamed.

  The Metropolitan Magazine

  October, 1903

  THE RAY OF DISPLACEMENT

  by Harriet Prescott Spofford

  WOMEN writers are relatively scarce in science fiction. It is predominantly a man’s literature, and because so little of it appears in the big-circulation women’s magazines, few of the numerous feminine authors attempt it. This contribution by Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford is all the more unusual, inasmuch as she was sixty-eight years old when she wrote it.

  Born in Calais, Maine, in 1835, Harriet Spofford had a successful novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost, published in 1860 when she was only twenty-five. A writer of verse, essays, and short stories, she was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Her great output was said to have been spurred by family responsibilities. In the later part of the century she was considered at least important enough to be praised by William Dean Howells and damned by Henry James.

  She was criticized for the lavishness of her prose, but this short story displays little of that, moving without prelude right into its subject and pursuing it undeviatingly to its climax. This is one of the earliest and one of the finest stories done on the theme of humans passing through solid matter. Memorable stories in recent times in a similar vein have been The Mole Pirate by Murray Leinster (Astounding Stories, November 1934), where machinery as well as men are equipped to perform this feat; Exit by Wilson Tucker (Astonishing Stories, April 1943), in which an imprisoned man teaches himself the method; and the translation of The Man Who Walked Through Walls by the French author Marcel Ay me, which appeared in a magazine as distinguished as Harper’s in the early 1950s.

  Where did a woman of Miss Spofford’s age dig up so outlandish a notion? Well, here the moralizing as well as the method very strongly indicates the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was not averse to an occasional bit of science fiction and who was considered quite respectable reading for a genteel woman of Miss Spofford’s standing.

  The Metropolitan Magazine in which the story appeared was one of the great periodicals of the time, and in 1903 it was still on the way up. It had started in 1895 as the equivalent of that era’s “girlie” magazines, publishing photos of as many nude statues and nude portraits as it could find, and then gradually going respectable, featuring contributions by Arthur Brisbane, Theodore Dreiser, John D. Rockefeller, and J. S. Fletcher, as well as a well-balanced selection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photographic album sections
in each issue. While the cover and layout of later issues appeared to cater mostly to women, the contents were of general interest.

  “We should have to reach the Infinite to arrive at the Impossible

  IT WOULD interest none but students should I recite the circumstances of the discovery. Prosecuting my usual researches, I seemed rather to have stumbled on this tremendous thing than to have evolved it from formulae.

  Of course, you already know that all molecules, all atoms, are separated from each other by spaces perhaps as great, when compared relatively, as those which separate the members of the stellar universe. And when by my Y-ray I could so far increase these spaces that I could pass one solid body through another, owing to the differing situation of their atoms, I felt no disembodied spirit had wider, freer range than I. Until my discovery was made public my power over the material universe was practically unlimited.

  Le Sage’s theory concerning ultra-mundane corpuscles was rejected because corpuscles could not pass through solids. But here were corpuscles passing through solids. As I proceeded, I found that at the displacement of one one-billionth of a centimeter the object capable of passing through another was still visible, owing to the refraction of the air, and had the power of communicating its polarization; and that at two one-billionths the object became invisible, but that at either displacement the subject, if a person, could see into the present plane; and all movement and direction were voluntary. I further found my Y-ray could so polarize a substance that its touch in turn temporarily polarized anything with which it came in contact, a negative current moving atoms to the left, and a positive to the right of the present plane.

  My first experience with this new principle would have made a less determined man drop the affair. Brant had been by way of dropping into my office and laboratory when in town. As I afterwards recalled, he showed a signal interest in certain toxicological experiments. “Man alive!” I had said to him once, “let those crystals alone! A single one of them will send you where you never see the sun!” I was uncertain if he brushed one off the slab. He did not return for some months. His wife, as I heard afterwards, had a long and baffling illness in the meantime, divorcing him on her recovery; and he had remained out of sight, at last leaving his native place for the great city. He had come in now, plausibly to ask my opinion of a stone—a diamond of unusual size and water.