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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  Treadwell took it and read:

  Dear Mr. Yates: I can’t trade my Heat Wave Synchronizer for Treadwell’s police money. Fifty thousand in coin of the Republic before the 26th or after that it will be a cold day for you. Hielo.

  “You get that blackmailer, or the trust will get a new sleuth, you mullet!” the president hurled after Treadwell, as the latter escaped through the sanctum door.

  John G. Yates was awakened on the morning of the 26th at his Grand Neck, Long Island, home by the thumping of radiators.

  He jabbed the bell for his man and fiercely demanded to know what in the name of all that was hot and holy the idiots had steam up for.

  “Well, sir,” replied the valet, “it turned cold suddenly in the night and is still so sharp this mornin’, we thought it best to warm up a little.”

  “Cold!” exclaimed Yates. “Didn’t frost, did it?”

  “A bit, sir,” answered the valet.

  “What!” John G. leaped from his bed and strode to the window, threw it up and gazed down on a bed of particularly choice plants just out of his hot-houses.

  “A little frost, eh?” he demanded. “I should say there had been a bit. Every blamed green thing is deader’n a door nail, and this the middle of August!”

  Next to the trust, the famous Yates flowers, fruits and vegetables were nearest his heart, in fact his garden was almost his sole hobby, and he was dressed and out of doors before his man could get the bath ready.

  A scene of desolation met his eye. Everything fragile and not under glass was frost-bitten beyond redemption. Even the hardy fruit-trees had suffered.

  Although the sun was shining brightly the air was still cold and frosty when he went aboard the Octopus for his trip to town, but ten minutes alter the yacht had left her dock the chill gradually dissipated, and the thermometers, which had been hovering about forty, suddenly jumped to sixty-five.

  In his mail that morning the ice magnate found a note:

  This won’t be the last of the cold days for Mr. John G. Yates, if the $50,000 isn’t forthcoming. Temperature will drop rapidly from now on.

  Treadwell was instantly despatched to Grand Neck, and returned late in the afternoon to report that the thermometers at the Yates house registered thirty-five degrees and that the temperature three miles away in every direction was above seventy.

  “Some peculiarity of the weather,” remarked the magnate thoughtfully, “but pretty darned expensive for me. You keep after that ‘Hielo,’ though, Treadwell; and mind, don’t let any of this get into the papers.”

  But there was a leak somewhere, and an enterprising Park Row reporter, who had got within half a mile of the Yates place by five o’clock the next morning stopped and rubbed his numb hands for just one second when he saw snowflakes in the air, then sprinted for the nearest telephone and sent in a story that roused dozing night editors and started an extra edition.

  By nine o’clock every New York paper had a representative at Grand Neck, and when the trust president emerged from the house, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of an overcoat, a dozen shivering men closed around him, pads and pencils in hand.

  It was not a pleasant forenoon for the Ice King. If the reporters had annoyed him excessively at Grand Neck in the early morning, they tortured him now.

  About one o’clock his wife telephoned him that the snow was six inches deep at Grand Neck and that she was leaving. He had scarcely hung up the receiver when Hicks, the heaviest and most intractable of the stockholders, called him up and announced in an ominous voice that ice trust stocks had fallen ten points in the past twenty minutes.

  This was a turn in affairs that had not occurred to Yates, and he suddenly realized that if this fool story started some of the small fry to unload, the Street would make short work of the trust. Stock which he had spent years steering into the hands of persons whom he could control would be lost forever, and anyway the balance of power, which he held, was not large. He rushed to the ticker in the corner of his office and nervously hauled the tape through his trembling fingers.

  Even as he read the last quotation of his precious stock—88—twenty points lower than it had ever been, the machine commenced to buzz again and rapidly spelled out “Amsterdam Ice offered at 85, 50 bid; offered at 80, at 78; 45 bid.” Then there was a pause while some racing news was run off and the machine began again: “Amsterdam Ice 60, 37 offered”—but John G. was now at the telephone bellowing orders to his brokers to get down there and buy right and left.

  “Take everything in sight,” he fairly shrieked and then rushed frantically to the tape again.

  “Amsterdam Ice 35, 20 offered.” The cold sweat stood out on his forehead. His trust was going to the devil if Jones and Baker, his brokers, didn’t get there and stop this thing. Then the ticker commenced again: “Amsterdam Ice, 30, 40, 50, 60.” “Thank God,” muttered Yates, dropping limply into a chair, “they got there all right.”

  But thirty minutes later both Jones and Baker came rushing into the office. A few minutes before they were on the floor old Hicks had dumped all his holdings, and buyers suddenly turned up from everywhere. Brokers who had been forcing down the price only a few moments before and fairly giving the stock away, had suddenly commenced to buy and the price had gone up to almost its old figure, when the exchange closed.

  Baker and Jones had picked up five hundred shares, but all Hicks’ holdings were gone, twenty thousand shares unaccounted for and the unknown holder was master of the trust.

  The next morning dawned clear and bright, but the rain that had fallen elsewhere on Long Island during the night had deepened the snow at the Yates place to all of two feet, and gables, trees and fences were festooned with enormous icicles. However, the thermometer was rapidly going up and the hot August sun was making inroads on the white covering with a sort of yellow joy.

  About eight o’clock Treadwell, clothes torn and face scarred and bleeding, came out of the grove in the rear of the house and hurried indoors, reappearing in a few minutes with Yates himself. A half-dozen of the men, guarding the premises, were assembled and the party waded through the snow and off into the grove behind the house.

  “You see, Mr. Yates,” Treadwell was saying, “I argued that all this cold must come from somewhere and it must needs be colder there than here at the house. So last night I hung out thermometers in all directions around the place, and blamed if I didn’t find it colder out this way than any other; so I follers it up and ‘bout daylight I located some sort of a shack out here ‘bout half a mile away. There was a light in the window and a sound like forty automobiles goin’ full tilt. I goes up toward the place. Then I hears a step behind me and I turns jes’ in time to see a feller bat me a good one side th’ head. When I comes to, I finds meself tied fast to a tree and I been nigh three hours gettin’ loose.” Then as they rounded a clump of trees: “There we are, that’s the place,” he added, pointing to an old, disused stable.

  John G. motioned to some of the men to surround the building, and they approached it gingerly; but the place was strangely silent. They forced the door and entered. The floor was covered with machinist’s tools and demolished machinery. In a conspicuous place a big envelope was tacked to the wall, bearing the address, “Mr. John G. Yates, soon to be ex-President of the Amsterdam Ice Company.”

  Yates seized it, tore it open, and read:

  My Dear Mr. Yates:—

  Unintentionally you did me a very great service in forcing me out of my position as superintendent of the Harlem plant. My inventions and improvements had already made you rich, and you did not realize that other and revolutionary appliances were practically completed. I submitted to your bullying in silence until I was absolutely sure of success. Now the worm has turned. The whole affair was pulled off, every detail of it, according to a carefully prearranged plan. The blackmail letter was written in order that it might be given to a certain newspaper reporter at the proper time, with a tip to visit Grand Neck at once. Old Hicks was told just e
nough to scare him into selling all his holdings, when my brokers knocked the bottom out of your stock, and thanks to the kind offices of my well-coached representatives on the floor of the Stock Exchange, I now hold the balance of power in the trust, and I hereby announce to you that I shall take full control of affairs at once and conduct the business according to my own ideas.

  I have organized a company to manufacture the Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, and my little ice-maker will soon be an indispensable household utensil. We can make a good profit and sell it for less than the average householder has been paying you monthly for ice.

  My invention can be made in any size required, from portable machines of pocket dimensions to big ones for hotels, breweries and so on. The logical owner of my invention is the ice trust, in fact, the Amsterdam Company could not remain in business otherwise.

  I am sure you will not censure me for the method I have adopted to convince you and the public of the value of my invention. Our stockholders wanted to advertise, in a spectacular way, so as to attract instant and wide attention, and I felt that you would wish to have your name connected with a new idea. But even if I misjudged you in this, you must acknowledge that it has been a square fight between science and capital.

  Sincerely yours,

  A. L. Peters.

  Six months later, at the Fifth Avenue Club, young Augustus Van Inghen was entertaining a few of his cronies at dinner. “Pardon my slang,” he said as a waiter placed on the table an affair of resplendent Tiffany silver resembling two chafing-dishes yoked together, “but this Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer is the smoothest article ever. Some people like their champagne hot, others like it frozen, but I like to serve mine always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I light these two alcohol lamps, so. I move this lever until the thermometer here on the little well reads 32. I place the magnum in this receptacle. I wait forty seconds. Behold, gentlemen! It is frappéd fit for a king.” And he held aloft the dark-brown bottle, its glassy exterior scintillating with frost.

  “It certainly is a wonderful invention,” said a broker in the party. “My wife, who does settlement work, tells me that the push-cart men down on Stanton Street are hawking cheap makes at fifteen cents apiece, two for a quarter.”

  “Yes,” chimed in a Harvard B.Sc., “and the principle is very simple. You gentlemen know that sound is only a vibration in the air, and that if any sound-wave is properly opposed by another wave of corresponding frequency and amplitude, even though each be very intense, absolute silence results. Well, similarly, heat is a vibration in the substance heated, and if the heat waves from any source are opposed by others from another source of equal frequency and amplitude, cold results. Not ordinary cold, but the cold of the absolute zero.”

  The Strand Magazine

  December, 1901

  LORD BEDEN’S MOTOR

  by J. B. Harris-Burland

  THIS story is one of the most remarkable in this book. It is a bona fide science fiction story and at one and the same time a ghost story. It could, with validity, be claimed by exponents of the supernatural to be one of the most unusual ghost stories ever written.

  At the same time the ghost is a “modern” specter, a product of the industrial revolution. The background of the story is the very beginning of the motoring age, which lends a flavor distinctive and unique. It belongs to the gaslight era.

  From the turn of the century through almost to 1930, John B. Harris-Burland appeared in a wide range of magazines, from the leading slicks to the lowly pulps. He wrote nonfiction as well as fiction and had a number of books published, three of them fantasy or science fiction written under the pen name of Hariss Burland. The Gold Worshippers (G. W. Dillingham, September 1906) is the best known, and deals with a very popular theme of the gaslight era, the artificial manufacture of gold. Among the many who wrote books on artificial manufacture of gold with some degree of success were A. Conan Doyle, Garrett P. Serviss, and George Allan England. He made a special impression with his short story The Blot of Ink (The Blue Book Magazine, May 1921), where a man coming out of surgery makes out the face of a murderer he has never seen in the outlines of an ink blot on the white walls. After the criminal is caught, it develops there has never been an ink blot on the wall. It was the type of story that the old Black Cat might have printed. The foregoing acknowledged, it is most likely that Harris-Burland will be longest remembered for Lord Beden’s Motor.

  A HARD man was Ralph Strang, seventh Earl of Beden, seventy years of age on his last birthday, but still upright as a dart, with hair white as snow, but with the devilry of youth still sparkling in his keen dark eyes. He was, indeed, able to follow the hounds with the best of us, and there were few men, even among the youngest and most hot-headed of our riders, who cared to follow him over all the jumps he put his horse at.

  When I first came to Upstanway as a doctor I thought it strange that so good a sportsman should be so unpopular. As a rule a man can do pretty well anything in a sporting county so long as he rides straight to hounds. But before I had been in the place a month I attended him after a fall in the hunting-field, and I saw that a man like that would be unpopular even if he gave all his goods to the poor and lived the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Not that he was harsh or even unpleasant, but he had the knack of making one feel foolish and uncomfortable, and there was something in the expression of his eyes that made one unable to look him squarely in the face. His manners, indeed, were perfect, and he retained all the old-world courtliness which seems to have been permanently abandoned by this generation, but I could not help feeling that underneath all his politeness and even hospitality lay a solid substratum of contempt.

  It was doubtless this impression which had earned him his unpopularity, for I never heard a single one of his enemies lay anything definite to his charge beyond the fact that his elder brother had died in a lunatic asylum, and that Lord Beden was in some vague way held responsible for this unfortunate event.

  But it was not until Lord Beden purchased a 12-h.p. “Napier” motorcar that the villagers really began to consider him possessed of a devil. And certainly his spirit of devilry seemed to have found a worthy plaything in that grey mass of snorting machinery, which went through the lanes like a whirlwind, enveloped in a cloud of dust, and scattering every living thing close back against the hedges as a steamer dashes the waves against the banks of a river. I had often heard people whisper that he bore a charmed life in the hunting-field, and that another and better man would have been killed years ago; and he certainly carried the same spirit of dash and foolhardiness, and also the same good fortune, into a still more dangerous pursuit.

  It was the purchase of this car that brought me into closer contact with him. I had had some experience of motors, and he was sufficiently humble to take instructions from me, and also to let me accompany him on several occasions. At first I drove the car myself, and tried to inculcate a certain amount of caution by example, but after the third lesson he knew as much about it as I did, and, resigning the steering-gear into his hands, I took my place by his side with some misgivings.

  I must confess that he handled it splendidly. The man had a wonderful nerve, and when an inch to one side or the other would probably have meant death his keen eye never made a mistake and his hand on the wheel was as steady as a rock. This inspired confidence, and although the strain on my nerves was considerable, I found after a time a certain pleasurable excitement in these rides. And it was excitement, I can tell you. No twelve miles an hour for Lord Beden, no precautionary brakes down hill, no wide curves for corners. He rode, as he did to hounds, straight and fast. Sometimes we had six inches to spare, but never more, and as often as not another half inch would have shot us both out of the car. We always seemed to come round a sharp corner on two wheels. It was certainly exhilarating. But there was something about it I did not quite like. I don’t think I was physically afraid, but I recalled certain stories about Lord Beden’s mad exploits in the hunting-field, and it almost seemed to me as though
he might be purposely riding for a fall.

  Then all at once my invitations to ride with him ceased. I thought at first that I had offended him, but I could think of no possible cause of offence; and, besides, his manner towards me had not changed in any way, and I dined with him more than once at Beden Hall, where he was as courteous and irritating as usual. However, he offered no explanation, and I certainly did not intend to ask for one. I watched him narrowly when we talked about the motor, but he made no mystery about his rides. I noticed however, that he looked older and more careworn, and that his dark eyes burned now with an almost unnatural brilliancy.

  I met him two or three times on the road when I was going my rounds in the trap, and he appeared to be driving his machine more furiously and fearlessly than ever. I was almost glad that his invitations had ceased. Strangely enough, I always encountered him on the same road, one which led straight to Oxminster, a town about twenty miles away.

  One evening, however, late in August, while I was finishing my dinner in solitude, I heard a familiar hum and rattle along the road in the distance. In less than a minute I saw the flash of bright lamps through my open window and heard the jar of a brake. Then there was a ring at the bell and Lord Beden was announced.

  “Good evening, Scott,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Lovely night, isn’t it? Would you care to come for a ride?” He looked very pale, and was covered with dust from head to foot.

  “A ride, Lord Beden?” I replied, thoughtfully. “Well, I hardly know what to say. Will you have some coffee and a cigar?”

  He nodded assent and sat down. I poured him out some coffee, and noticed that his hand shook as he raised the cup to his lips. But driving a motor-car at a rapid rate might easily produce this effect. Then I handed him a cigar and lit one myself.

  “Rather late for a ride, isn’t it?” I said, after a slight pause.