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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  And Danny did. He pulled himself together, and set his teeth as if it were a compact with powers of evil, and rode straight through without turning a hair, or disturbing either horse or rider. Once more the Y-ray was triumphant.

  But about Judge Brant the air was blue. It would take a very round sum of money to recoup the losses of those few moments. I disliked to have St. Angel hear him; but it was all in the day’s work.

  The day had, not been to Judge Brant’s mind, as at last he bent his steps to the club. As he went it occurred to me to try upon him the larger ray of displacement, and I slipped down the back of his collar the wafer I had ready. He would not at once feel its action, but in the warmth either of walking or dining, its properties should be lively for nearly an hour. I had curiosity to see if the current worked not only through all substances, but through all sorts and conditions.

  “I should prefer a better pursuit,” said St. Angel, as we reached the street. “Is there not something ignoble in it?”

  “In another case. Here it is necessary to hound the criminal, to see the man entirely. A game not to be played too often, for there is work to be done before establishing the counteracting currents that may ensure reserves and privacies to people. To-night let us go to the club with Judge Brant, and then I will back to my cell.”

  As you may suppose, Brant was a man neither of imagination nor humor. As you have seen, he was hard and cruel, priding himself on being a good hater, which in his contention meant indulgence of a preternaturally vindictive temper when prudence allowed. With more cunning than ability, he had achieved some success in his profession, and he secured admission to a good club, recently crowning his efforts, when most of the influential members were absent, by getting himself made one of its governors.

  It would be impossible to find a greater contrast to this wretch than in St. Angel—a man of delicate imagination and pure fancy, tender to the child on the street, the fly on the wall; all his atmosphere that of kindness. Gently born, but too finely bred, his physical resistance was so slight that his immunity lay in not being attacked. His clean, fair skin, his brilliant eyes, spoke of health, but the fragility of frame did not speak of strength. Yet St. Angel’s life was the active principle of good; his neighborhood was purification.

  I was revolving these things while we followed Judge Brant, when I saw him pause in an agitated manner, like one startled out of sleep. A quick shiver ran over his strong frame; he turned red and pale, then with a shrug went on. The displacement had occurred. He was now on the plane of invisibility, and we must have a care ourselves.

  Wholly unconscious of any change, the man pursued his way. The street was as usual. There was the boy who always waited for him with the extra but to-night was oblivious; and failing to get his attention the Judge walked on. A shower that had been threatening began to fall, the sprinkle becoming a downpour, with umbrellas spread and people hurrying. The Judge hailed a car; but the motorman was as blind as the newsboy. The shower stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but he went on some paces before perceiving that he was perfectly dry, for as he shut and shook his umbrella not a drop fell, and as he took off his hat and looked at it, not an atom of moisture was to be found there. Evidently bewildered, and looking about shamefacedly, I fancied I could hear him saying, with his usual oaths, “I must be deucedly overwrought, or this is some blue devilment.”

  As the Judge took his accustomed seat in the warm and brilliantly lighted room, and picking up the evening paper, looked over the columns, the familiar every-day affair quieting his nerves so that he could have persuaded himself he had been half asleep as he walked, he was startled by the voice, not four feet away, of one of the old officers who made the Kings County their resort. Something had ruffled the doughty hero. “By the Lord Harry, sir,” he was saying in unmodulated tones, “I should like to know what this club is coming to when you can spring on it the election of such a man as this Brant! Judge? What’s he Judge of? Beat his wife, too, didn’t he? The governors used to be gentlemen!”

  “But you know, General,” said his vis-a-vis, “I think no more of him than you do; but when a man lives at the Club—”

  “Lives here!” burst in the other angrily. “He hasn’t anywhere else to live! Is there a decent house in town open to him? Well, thank goodness, I’ve somewhere else to go before he comes in! The sight of him gives me a fit of the gout!” And the General stumped out stormily.

  “Old boy seems upset!” said some one not far away. “But he’s right. It was sheer impudence in the fellow to put up his name.”

  I could see Brant grow white and gray with anger, as surprised and outraged, wondering what it meant—if the General intended insult—if Scarsdale—but no, apparently they had not seen him. The contemptuous words rankled; the sweat stood on his forehead.

  Had not the moment been serious, there were a thousand tricks to play. But the potency of the polarization was subsiding and in a short time the normal molecular plane would be re-established. It was there that I made my mistake. I should not have allowed him to depolarize so soon. I should have kept him bewildered and foodless till famished and weak. Instead, as ion by ion the effect of the ray decreased, his shape grew vague and misty, and then one and another man there rubbed his eyes, for Judge Brant was sitting in his chair and a waiter was hastening towards him.

  It had all happened in a few minutes. Plainly the Judge understood nothing of the circumstances. He was dazed, but he must put the best face on it; and he ordered his dinner and a pony of brandy, eating like a hungry animal.

  He rose, after a time, refreshed, invigorated, and all himself. Choosing a cigar, he went into another room, seeking a choice lounging place, where for a while he could enjoy his ease and wonder if anything worse than a bad dream had befallen. As for the General’s explosion, it did not signify; he was conscious of such opinion; he was overliving it; he would be expelling the old cock yet for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.

  Meanwhile, St. Angel, tiring of the affair, and weary, had gone into this room, and in an arm-chair by the hearth was awaiting me—the intrusive quality of my observations not at all to his mind. He had eaten nothing all day, and was somewhat faint. He had closed his eyes, and perhaps fallen into a light doze when he must have been waked by the impact of Brant’s powerful frame, as the latter took what seemed to him the empty seat. I expected to see Brant at once flung across the rug by St. Angel’s natural effort in rising. Instead, Brant sank into the chair as into down pillows.

  I rushed, as quickly as I could, to seize and throw him off, “Through him! Pass through him! Come out! Come to me!” I cried. And people to-day remember that voice out of the air, in the Kings County Club.

  It seemed to me that I heard a sound, a sob, a whisper, as if one cried with a struggling sigh, “Impossible!” And with that a strange trembling convulsed Judge Brant’s great frame, he lifted his hands, he thrust out his feet, his head fell forward, he groaned gurglingly, shudder after shudder shook him as if every muscle quivered with agony or effort, the big veins started out as if every pulse were a red-hot iron. He was wrestling with something, he knew not what, something as antipathetic to him as white is to black; every nerve was concentrated in rebellion, every fiber struggled to break the spell.

  The whole affair was that of a dozen heart-beats—the attempt of the opposing molecules each to draw the other into its own orbit. The stronger physical force, the greater aggregation of atoms was prevailing.

  Thrust upward for an instant, Brant fell back into his chair exhausted, the purple color fading till his face shone fair as a girl’s, sweet and smiling as a child’s, white as the face of a risen spirit—Brant’s!

  Astounded, I seized his shoulder and whirled him about. There was no one else in the chair. I looked in every direction. There was no St. Angel to be seen. There was but one conclusion to draw—the molecules of Brant’s stronger material frame had drawn into their own plane the molecules of St. Angel’s.

  I rushed from the
place, careless if seen or unseen, howling in rage and misery. I sought my laboratory, and in a fiend’s fury depolarized myself, and I demolished every instrument, every formula, every vestige of my work. I was singed and scorched and burned, but I welcomed any pain. And I went back to prison, admitted by the officials who hardly knew what else to do. I would stay there, I thought, all my days. God grant they should be few! It would be seen that a life of imprisonment and torture were too little punishment for the ruin I had wrought.

  It was after a sleepless night, of which every moment seemed madness, that, the door of my cell opening, I saw St. Angel. St. Angel? God have mercy on me, no, it was Judge Brant I saw!

  He came forward, with both hands extended, a grave, imploring look on his face. “I have come,” he said, a singular sweet overtone in his voice that I had never heard before, yet which echoed like music in my memory, “to make you all the reparation in my power. I will go with you at once before the Governor, and acknowledge that I have found the diamond. I can never hope to atone for what you have suffered. But as long as I live, all that I have, all that I am, is yours!”

  There was a look of absolute sweetness on his face that for a dizzy moment made me half distraught. “We will go together,” he said. “I have to stop on the way and tell a woman whose mortgage comes due to-day that I have made a different disposition; and, do you know,” he added brightly, after an instant’s hesitation, “I think I shall help her pay it!” and he laughed gayly at the jest involved.

  “Will you say that you have known my innocence all these years?” I said sternly.

  “Is not that,” he replied, with a touching and persuasive quality of tone, “a trifle too much? Do you think this determination has been reached without a struggle? If you are set right before the world, is not something due to—Brant?”

  “If I did not know who and what you are,” I said, “I should think the soul of St. Angel had possession of you!”

  The man looked at me dreamily. “Strange!” he murmured. “I seem to have heard something like that before. However,” as if he shook off a perplexing train of thought, “all that is of no consequence. II is not who you are, but what you do. Come, my friend, don’t deny me, don’t let the good minute slip. Surely the undoing of the evil of a lifetime, the turning of that force to righteousness, is work outweighing all a prison chaplain’s—”

  My God, what had the intrusion of my incapable hands upon forbidden mysteries done!

  “Come,” he said. “We will go together. We will carry light into dark places—there are many waiting—”

  “St. Angel!” I cried, with a loud voice, “are you here?”

  And again the smile of infinite sweetness illuminated the face even as the sun shines up from the depths of a stagnant pool.

  The New Broadway Magazine

  December, 1907

  CONGEALING THE ICE TRUST

  by Capt. H. G. Bishop, U.S.A.

  READERS of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which began publication with its issue of April 1926, found a great many of the names on the title page familiar to them. There were the standby classics of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe; stars from Munsey’s pulps, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Austin Hall, Murray Leinster, and Garrett P. Serviss; but here and there among the familiar names were a few unknowns.

  Some of them were new authors who eventually appeared again, but most baffling were those who published once and in the process displayed such “savvy” of science fiction that it seemed impossible they did not possess past experience. Such an author was Capt. H. G. Bishop, USA, who in the entire history of science fiction magazines was represented by a single story, On the Martian Way, in the February 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was a tale of the future, when there was regular passenger service between Mars, Venus, and Earth, and it told of the carelessness that could cause space tragedy, the drama of those caught in a hopeless position, and the heroism and self-sacrifice that saved a spaceship from plunging into the sun.

  For 1927, taking space travel for granted and writing a story that was not about the first voyage was extremely advanced. Through the years, Capt. Bishop’s single claim to fame appeared to be that one story, until finally research in the back files of The New Broadway Magazine revealed that he was “discovered” by them and wrote science fiction and fantasy for their pages.

  In a certain sense, Congealing the Ice Trust holds kinship to the humorous stories of erratic inventors whose gimmicks always blow up in their faces at the crucial moment. However, that tie is the light touch of humor and the invention. This invention does not blow up in the face of its creator. It succeeds, to make it one of the most entertaining “world of if” stories ever. Involved is an invention for changing weather, but the reasons behind it center in an era when refrigeration was virtually unknown and when manufacturers of ice were of major importance. This is a story that could only have been completely effective when read in the gaslight era.

  JOHN G. YATES, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, was going over his daily mail. One by one he picked up each neatly slitted envelope, glanced at its contents and tossed it to his well-trained secretary with a few suggestions or a curt order.

  His expression was complacent, even genial. For only a few weeks previously the labor of many years had netted its final reward. The last vestige of opposition had been swept away, and President Yates knew that not a pound of ice, whether bestowed by an all-wise Providence or congealed by the instrumentality of man, could be garnered within five hundred miles of Greater New York without his permission, nor disposed of without contributing its tithe to the stockholders he represented.

  So he was in a particularly good humor this morning. His awakening, bath, shave and dressing had been very harmonious. His breakfast and the market reports in the morning paper had been unusually agreeable, and the trip down the Sound from Grand Neck to the Twenty-third Street anchorage surprisingly pleasant for an August day.

  Furthermore, he had at last got rid of Peters, old Peters, who had superintended the Harlem plant for the past twenty years. Confounded old bucker! Impudent enough, crank enough to tell him, John G. Yates, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, what he, Peters, thought of trusts in general and of the ice trust in particular. What business was it of Peters’ if he chose to make a hundred per cent profit or more, if he so desired? Ice was a luxury for those who could afford to pay. It was Peters’ business to make ice; John G. Yates was doing the selling. Also Peters had blown up over five hundred dollars’ worth of apparatus in some fool experiment; might blow up the plant itself some day.

  So John G. waded on through the stack of mail, interspersing his instructions with many a joke and facetious remark, at which the secretary laughed immoderately, but not with the merriment that seemed to lie in the continued smile that clung to his features as the Ice King neared the last envelope in the stack.

  Picking it up with a sigh of relief, the ice magnate extracted from it a sheet of paper covered with typewriting through which he proceeded to wade in his usual energetic manner, three lines at a time.

  Ten seconds later his feet struck the floor with a thud that rattled the office furniture, and the Ice King rose suddenly to the full majesty of his six feet one, shouting in the bull-like voice he could call forth so readily: “A hold up! A hold up! Listen.” And he read:

  New York, August 20th.

  Mr. John G. Yates,

  President, Amsterdam Ice Co.

  Dear Sir:

  After many years of study and interminable labor I have at last perfected a freezing and refrigerating apparatus which will revolutionize all existing methods in this line. The apparatus is so simple and inexpensive, both in original cost and operation as to be within reach of all, even the poorest, and of course when once placed upon the market will render practically useless and valueless all ice-houses and artificial ice-plants, as well as the means for ice distribution. My invention is based upon sc
ientific principles and is practical reality. With my Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, it is possible to take two bricks which have been lying in the sun all day and congeal a bucket of water in one minute. On a larger scale it is possible to refrigerate a portion of the earth’s surface, even on an August day. It is unnecessary to submit arguments to advise you of the effect this invention will have upon the ice trust, and for this reason I believe it no more than just to give you the first opportunity to acquire this valuable invention. Should you so elect, a complete working model of the apparatus, with descriptions and drawings, will be sent you on condition that you place $50,000 in cash under the large granite block laying north of the Woodbine road crossing, Long Island R. R., before August 23d. Failure so to do will result in the disintegration of the ice trust.

  Yours for cheap refrigeration,

  Hielo.

  “What d’ye think of it?” thundered Yates, waving the sheet at the secretary and glaring at him as though that meek individual had composed it. “The audacity! To threaten me!” he bellowed. “Tryin’ to blackmail the trust. I’ll fix him! I’ll fix him! Send Treadwell here,” Yates bellowed.

  Treadwell was the company’s chief detective, and had a reputation for cleverness in his profession.

  As a result of the interview he hid a bag of “police money” at the appointed place and kept unobtrusive guard over the locality. But the day and night of August 23d passed uneventfully, and Treadwell returned to the office on the morning of the 24th only to be suddenly haled before the president, who was stamping up and down his office, purple with rage.