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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  All the insolence died out of Tito’s face. His knees bowed, a cold dew came out over the ghastly green of his features. From the shaking of his limbs he might have fared disastrously with ague.

  “The trees,” he stammered, “the trees, señor! There is danger from snakes, and—and from many things. There are other places—”

  “If this place was safe last night it is safe to-day,” Scarlett said, grimly. “I have quite made up my mind.”

  Tito fought no longer. He fell forward on his knees, he howled for mercy, till Scarlett fairly kicked him up again.

  “Make a clean breast of it,” he said, “or take the consequences. You know perfectly well that we have found you out, scoundrel.”

  Tito’s story came in gasps. He wanted to get rid of the Americans. He was jealous. Besides, under the Americanos would Cuba be any better off? By no means and assuredly not. Therefore it was the duty of every good Cuban to destroy the Americanos where possible.

  “A nice lot to fight for,” Scarlett muttered. “Get to the point.”

  Hastened to the point by a liberal application of stout shoe-leather, Tito made plenary confession. The señor himself had suggested death by medium of the devil’s poppies. More than one predatory plant-hunter had been lured to his destruction in the same way. The skeleton hung on the tree was a Dutchman who had walked into the clutch of the purple terror innocently. And Pierre Anton had done the same. The suckers of the devil’s poppy only came down at night to gather moisture; in the day they were coiled up like a spring. And anything that they touched they killed. Tito had watched more than one bird or small beast crushed and mauled by these cruel spines with their fringe of purple blossoms.

  “How do you get the blooms?” Scarlett asked.

  “That is easy,” Tito replied. “In the daytime I moisten the ground under the trees. Then the suckers unfold, drawn by the water. Once the suckers unfold one cuts several of them off with long knives. There is danger, of course, but not if one is careful.”

  “I’ll not trouble the devil’s poppy any further at present,” said Scarlett, “but I shall trouble you to accompany me to my destination as a prisoner.”

  Tito’s eyes dilated.

  “They will not shoot me?” he asked, hoarsely.

  “I don’t know,” Scarlett replied. “They may hang you instead. At any rate, I shall be bitterly disappointed if they don’t end you one way or the other. Whichever operation it is, I can look forward to it with perfect equanimity.”

  The Argosy

  August, 1905

  PROFESSOR JONKIN’S CANNIBAL PLANT

  by Howard R. Garis

  PROFESSOR Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant is beyond doubt the most delightful spoof on the man-eating-plant theme in science fiction. If it were submitted today as a new work, it would instantly be purchased as a satiric gem.

  Oddly enough, its author, Howard Roger Garis, is best known for his “Bedtime Stories” about Uncle Wiggily, the rheumatic old rabbit with the full-dress suit, along with a retinue of ducks, an old-lady muskrat, an alligator, a villainous fox, and a full cast of “humanized” woodland creatures.

  Before his death on November 6, 1962, in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-nine, Garis had written an estimated 15,000 short stories about his rabbit character. At the height of their popularity they were syndicated daily in papers here and abroad, and the best of them were collected into seventy-five books. In addition, scores of games (many invented by Garis), toys, and other products have used the name “Uncle Wiggily” or one of the characters from the series.

  Virtually buried under this mass of bedtime tales were Garis’s stories published in The Argosy. The following series eventually included such intriguing titles as Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees, Quick Transit by Beanstalk, Ltd., and His Winged Elephant. These stories followed the vogue of the era for poking fun at strange new inventions and their inventors.

  Though the dime novels of “invention” science fiction may have inspired the horseplay which Garis helped develop into a trend, it also served as the prototype for a far more significant and influential series. Just at about the time the dime novels were succumbing to the pulp magazines, Edward Stratemeyer, one of the greatest of boys’ novel writers, started a syndicate in which he produced low-priced, hardcover books aimed at youngsters and teenagers. The most successful of all his series (which included The Rover Hoys, The Motor Hoys, The Hobhsey Twins, and Bomba the Jungle Boy) was that featuring the young inventor, Tom Swift.

  In each story Tom Swift would acquire or invent a new vehicle or device and the stories featured such advanced ideas as the manufacture of diamonds from carbon, a photo telephone, chemicals for extinguishing fires from the air, a gigantic magnet for raising sunken submarines, or a device for seeing through walls.

  Howard R. Garis wrote the first thirty-five of the Tom Swift stories, under the house name of Victor Appleton, making him one of the most influential science fiction writers that ever lived, since that first series eventually sold 20,000,000 copies.

  Garis’s son Roger, also a writer, in his biography, My Father Was Uncle Wiggily (McGraw-Hill, 1966), claimed that his father had written titles in The Great Marvel Series, also originated by The Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate and predating Tom Swift. One that he seems certain of is Through Space to Mars (1910), in which a radioactive material called Cardite is discovered on the Red Planet and brought back to Earth. Garis had earlier written Isle of Black Fire, a book concerning a search for radium in the South Seas, so there was a familiarity with radioactivity.

  Just before Garis died in 1962, he had partially finished the first book of a new juvenile series based on space exploration. The record seems to show that Howard R. Garis was a lifelong writer of science fiction, who remained anonymous, despite the exercise of a vast influence on the minds of millions.

  AFTER Professor Jeptha Jonkin had, by skilful grafting and care, succeeded in raising a single tree that produced, at different seasons, apples, oranges, pineapples, figs, cocoanuts, and peaches, it might have been supposed he would rest from his scientific labors. But Professor Jonkin was not that kind of a man.

  He was continually striving to grow something new in the plant world. So it was no surprise to Bradley Adams, when calling on his friend the professor one afternoon, to find that scientist busy in his large conservatory.

  “What are you up to now?” asked Adams. “Trying to make a rosebush produce violets, or a honeysuckle vine bring forth pumpkins?”

  “Neither,” replied Professor Jonkin a little stiffly, for he resented Adams’ playful tone. “Not that either of those things would be difficult. But look at that.”

  He pointed to a small plant with bright, glossy green leaves mottled with red spots. The thing was growing in a large earthen pot.

  It bore three flowers, about the size of morning glories, and not unlike that blossom in shape, save, near the top, there was a sort of lid, similar to the flap observed on a jack-in-the-pulpit plant.

  “Look down one of those flowers,” went on the professor, and Adams, wondering what was to come, did so.

  He saw within a small tube, lined with fine, hair-like filaments, which seemed to be in motion. And the shaft or tube went down to the bottom of the morning-glory-shaped part of the flower. At the lower extremity was a little clear liquid.

  “Kind of a queer blossom. What is it?” asked Adams.

  “That,” said the professor with a note of pride in his voice, “is a specimen of the Sarracenia Nepenthis.”

  “What’s that? French for sunflower, or Latin for sweet pea?” asked Adams irreverently.

  “It is Latin for pitcher plant,” responded the professor, drawing himself up to his full height of five feet three. “One of the most interesting of the South American flora.”

  “The name fits it pretty well,” observed Adams. “I see there’s water at the bottom. I suppose this isn’t the pitcher that went to the well too often.”

  “The Sa
rracenia Nepenthis is a most wonderful plant,” went on the professor in his lecture voice, not heeding Adams’ joking remarks. “It belongs to what Darwin calls the carnivorous family of flowers, and other varieties of the same species are the Dionaea Muscipula, or Venus Fly-trap, the Darlingtonia, the Pinguicula and Aldrovandra, as well as—”

  “Hold on, professor,” pleaded Adams. “I’ll take the rest on faith. Tell me about this pitcher plant, sounds interesting.”

  “It is interesting,” said Professor Jonkin. “It eats insects.”

  “Eats insects?”

  “Certainly. Watch.”

  The professor opened a small wire cage lying on a shelf and took from it several flies. These he liberated close to the queer plant.

  The insects buzzed about a few seconds, dazed with their sudden liberty.

  Then they began slowly to circle in the vicinity of the strange flowers. Nearer and nearer the blossoms they came, attracted by some subtle perfume, as well as by a sweet syrup that was on the edge of the petals, put there by nature for the very purpose of drawing hapless insects into the trap.

  The flies settled down, some on the petals of all three blooms. Then a curious thing happened.

  The little hair-like filaments in the tube within the petals suddenly reached out and wound themselves about the insects feeding on the sweet stuff, which seemed to intoxicate them. In an instant the flies were pulled to the top of the flower shaft by a contraction of the hairs, and then they went tumbling down the tube into the miniature pond below, where they were drowned after a brief struggle. Their crawling back was prevented by spines growing with points down, as the wires in some rat-traps are fastened.

  Meanwhile the cover of the plant closed down.

  “Why, it’s a regular fly-trap, isn’t it?” remarked Adams, much surprised.

  “It is,” replied the professor. “The plant lives off the insects it captures. It absorbs them, digests them, and, when it is hungry again, catches more.”

  “Where’d you get such an uncanny thing?” asked Adams, moving away from the plant as if he feared it might take a sample bite out of him.

  “A friend sent it to me from Brazil.”

  “But you’re not going to keep it, I hope.”

  “I certainly am,” rejoined Professor Jonkin.

  “Maybe you’re going to train it to come to the table and eat like a human being,” suggested Adams, with a laugh that nettled the professor.

  “I wouldn’t have to train it much to induce it to be polite,” snapped back the owner of the pitcher plant.

  And then, seeing that his jokes were not relished, Adams assumed an interest he did not feel, and listened to a long dissertation on botany in general and carnivorous plants in particular.

  He would much rather have been eating some of the queer hybrid fruits the professor raised. He pleaded an engagement when he saw an opening in the talk, and went away.

  It was some months after that before he saw the professor again. The botanist was busy in his conservatory in the meantime, and the gardener he hired to do rough work noticed that his master spent much time in that part of the glass house where the pitcher plant was growing.

  For Professor Jonkin had become so much interested in his latest acquisition that he seemed to think of nothing else. His plan for increasing strawberries to the size of peaches was abandoned for a time, as was his pet scheme of raising apples without any core.

  The gardener wondered what there was about the South American blossoms to require such close attention.

  One day he thought he would find out, and he started to enter that part of the conservatory where the pitcher plant was growing. Professor Jonkin halted him before he had stepped inside and sternly bade him never to appear there again.

  As the gardener, crestfallen, moved away after a glimpse into the forbidden region he muttered:

  “My, that plant has certainly grown! And I wonder what the professor was doing so close to it. Looked as if he was feeding the thing.”

  As the days went by the conduct of Professor Jonkin became more and more curious. He scarcely left the southern end of the conservatory, save at night, when he entered his house to sleep.

  He was a bachelor, and had no family cares to trouble him, so he could spend all his time among his plants. But hitherto he had divided his attention among his many experiments in the floral kingdom.

  Now he was always with his mysterious pitcher plant. He even had his meals sent into the green-house.

  “Be you keepin’ boarders?” asked the butcher boy of the gardener one day, passing on his return to the store, his empty basket on his arm.

  “No. Why?”

  “The professor is orderin’ so much meat lately. I thought you had company.”

  “No, there’s only us two. Mr. Adams used to come to dinner once in a while, but not lately.”

  “Then you an’ the professor must have big appetites.”

  ‘What makes you think so?”

  “The number of beefsteaks you eat.”

  “Number of beefsteaks? Why, my lad, the professor and I are both vegetarians.”

  “What’s them?”

  “We neither of us eat a bit of meat. We don’t believe it’s healthy.”

  “Then what becomes of the three big porterhouse steaks I deliver to the professor in the green-house every day?”

  “Porterhouse steaks?” questioned the gardener, amazed.

  “Do you feed ‘em to the dog?”

  “We don’t keep a dog.”

  But the butcher boy questioned no further, for he saw a chum and hastened off to join him.

  “Three porterhouse steaks a day!” mused the gardener, shaking his head. “I do hope the professor has not ceased to be a vegetarian. Yet it looks mighty suspicious. And he’s doing it on the sly, too, for there’s been no meat cooked in the house, of that I’m sure.”

  And the gardener, sorely puzzled over the mystery, went off, shaking his head more solemnly than before.

  He resolved to have a look in the place the professor guarded so carefully. He tried the door when he was sure his master was in another part of the conservatory, but it was locked, and no key the gardener had would unfasten it.

  A month after the gardener had heard of the porterhouse steaks, Adams happened to drop in to see the professor again.

  “He’s in with the Sarracenia Nepenthis,” said the gardener in answer to the visitor’s inquiry. “But I doubt if he will let you enter.”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “Because he’s become mighty close-mouthed of late over that pitcher plant.”

  “Oh, I guess he’ll see me,” remarked Adams confidently, and he knocked on the door that shut off the locked section of the green-house from the main portion.

  “Who’s there?” called the professor.

  “Adams.”

  “Oh,” in a more conciliatory tone. “I was just wishing you’d come along. I have something to show you.”

  Professor Jonkin opened the door, and the sight that met Adams’ gaze startled him.

  The only plant in that part of the conservatory was a single specimen of the Sarracenia Nepenthis. Yet it had attained such enormous proportions that at first Adams thought he must be dreaming.

  “What do. you think of that for an achievement in science?” asked the professor proudly.

  “Do you mean to say that is the small, fly-catching plant your friend sent you from Brazil?”

  “The same.”

  “But—but—”

  “But how it’s grown, that’s what you want to say, isn’t it?”

  “It is. How did you do it?”

  “By dieting the blossoms.”

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean feeding them. Listen. I reasoned that if a small blossom of the plant would thrive on a few insects, by giving it larger meals I might get a bigger plant. So I made my plans.

  “First I cut off all but one blossom, so that the strength of the plant would
nourish that alone. Then I made out a bill of fare. I began feeding it on chopped beef. The plant took to it like a puppy. It seemed to beg for more. From chopped meat I went to small pieces, cut up. I could fairly see the blossom increase in size. From that I went to choice mutton chops, and, after a week of them, with the plant becoming more gigantic all the while, I increased its meals to a porterhouse steak a day. And now—”

  The professor paused to contemplate his botanical work.

  “Well, now?” questioned Adams.

  “Now,” went on the professor proudly, “my pitcher plant takes three big beefsteaks every day—one for breakfast, one for dinner, and one for supper. And see the result.”

  Adams gazed at the immense plant. From a growth about as big as an Easter lily it had increased until the top was near the roof of the greenhouse, twenty-five feet above.

  About fifteen feet up, or ten feet from the top, there branched out a great flower, about eight feet long and three feet across the bell-shaped mouth, which except for the cap or cover, was not unlike the opening of an immense morning glory.

  The flower was heavy, and the stalk on which it grew was not strong enough to support it upright. So a rude scaffolding had been constructed of wood and boards, and on a frame the flower was held upright.

  In order to see it to better advantage, and also that he might feed it, the professor had a ladder by which he could ascend to a small platform in front of the bell-shaped mouth of the blossom.

  “It is time to give my pet its meal,” he announced, as if he were speaking of some favorite horse. “Want to come up and watch it eat?”

  “No, thank you,” responded Adams. “It’s too uncanny.”

  The professor took a large steak, one of the three which the butcher boy had left that day. Holding it in his hand, he climbed up the ladder and was soon on the platform in front of the plant.

  Adams watched him curiously. The professor leaned over to toss the steak into the yawning mouth of the flower.

  Suddenly Adams saw him totter, throw his arms wildly in the air, and then, as if drawn by some overpowering force, he fell forward, lost his balance, and toppled into the maw of the pitcher plant!