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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  I discovered later that the fall had jammed the gyroscope on the pivot so that the gyroscope could not revolve without revolving the whole hat, and as the hat was firmly suctioned to Walsingham, the hat could not revolve without revolving Walsingham. For an instant Walsingham revolved away from us down the walk, and Anne gave a great cry; but almost at that moment Walsingham regained the upright and began to revolve rapidly. The icy walk offered no purchase for his feet, and this was indeed lucky; for if it had, his head would have continued to revolve none the less, and the effect would have been fatal.

  I estimated that Walsingham was revolving at a rate of perhaps fifteen hundred revolutions a minute, and it was some minutes before my wife was able so far to recover from the shock of seeing her prospective son-in-law whirl thus as to ask me to stop him. My first impulse was to do so, but my long training as a hatter had made me a careful, thoughtful man, and I gently pushed my wife back.

  “My dear,” I said, “let us pause and consider this case. Here we have Walsingham revolving rapidly. He is revolving in one of the only two directions in which he can revolve—the direction in which he revolved on the Mule Reverser, or the opposite direction. If it is the opposite direction all is well, for he will be unwound in a few hours, if his neck is not wrung in the meantime. If it is in the same direction it is no use to stop him now, for by this time he will be in such a condition of reeling and staggering that we would not have him as a son-in-law on any terms. I propose, therefore, to let him spin here for a few hours, when he will have had a full recovery or be permanently too dizzy for any use.”

  My wife, and Anne too, saw the wisdom of this course, and as it was very miserable weather outside we all withdrew to my parlor, from the window of which we could watch Walsingham revolve. Occasionally, when he seemed about to revolve off the walk, I went out and pushed him on again.

  I figure that by six o’clock in the morning he would be sufficiently revolved—provided he was revolving in the right direction—and at midnight I sent my wife and Ann to bed. I fear Anne slept but little that night, for she must have had a lover’s natural anxiety as to how all was to turn out.

  At six in the morning I called Anne and my wife, and we went into the yard to stop Walsingham, and it was not until I had carefully walked down the porch steps that it came to me that I had no way of stopping him whatever. To add to my dismay I knew that when the sun arose the thin ice would melt, and as Walsingham’s feet could no longer slip easily, he would in all probability be wrenched in two, a most unsatisfactory condition for a son-in-law.

  But while I was standing in dismay love found a way, as love always will, and Anne rushed to the cellar and brought out the stepladder and the ice pick. Placing the stepladder close to Walsingham she climbed it, and holding the point of the ice pick at the exact center of the top of the hat she pushed down. In a moment a sizzling noise told us that she had bored a hole in the hat, letting the vacuum escape, and the hat flew from Walsingham’s head.

  Slower and slower he revolved, until he stood quite still, and then, without a reel or a stagger he walked up to me and grasped my hand, while tears told me the thanks he could not utter. He had revolved in the right direction! He was cured!

  Hampton’s Magazine

  December, 1910

  THE HYBRID HYPERBOREAN ANT

  by Roy L. McCardell

  ROY Larcom McCardell was one of the truly smart and sophisticated writers of the turn of the century. He cultivated a light, clever turn of the phrase and always gave the impression of knowing what went on behind the scenes.

  This was in part due to an intimate knowledge of the Broadway theater, reflected in books which brought him attention: Conversations of a Chorus Girl (Street & Smith, 1903) and The Show Girl and Her Friends (Street & Smith, 1904). As early as 1899 he attracted notice with The Wage Slaves of New York (Dillingham), and as recently as 1930 Farrar & Rinehart would publish his book My Aunt Angie.

  His writing and his outlook reflected the times, giving him immediate status but no permanence. The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant was an exception for though actually an off-shot of the humorous invention story, it is based on biology rather than mechanics and written with style and gusto.

  There is in this story, despite its high humor and farcical nature, an element of understanding about the grass-roots exploitation of new developments. Roy McCardell’s super-ants could find a constructive place in the world if they had actually been bred. They would have fitted superbly into the economy and filled many basic needs. Unlike the biological creations of many science fiction stories, which tend to develop into monsters and whose extermination is the entire point of the story, the elimination of hyperborean ants has a note of tragedy, because they were so potentially useful.

  The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant does not stand alone in biological “invention.” It is quite evident that Howard R. Garis’ Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees (The Argosy, March 1906), with his idea of crossing a lightning bug with a bee so that it will have the light to work at night and make twice as much honey, fits perfectly into the same category.

  All of which underscores that, after the turn of the century, the humorous-inventor story had subdivisions of mechanics and biology with “artistic” standards of their own.

  NOW that my friend and neighbor, D. Frank Dodge, has gone to the Bermudas for rest and recreation, I feel it is only fair, both to him and myself, to tell the whole truth of the strange results of his remarkable experiments with the family formicidœ, of which so much has been hinted at but of which so few of the real facts are known.

  “They will not believe you, old man,” said Frank to me, as I bade him good bye, whilst his man-servant tucked his rug around him, placed a cushion under his head, and made comfortable the worn, wan fellow, plucky still though he had lost the great fight of his life.

  “They will not believe you,” he repeated. “Let the heathen rave, I mean rage. It will all die out and be forgotten and they will stop bothering you, now that I have gone away.”

  But they haven’t stopped bothering me. Hardly a day passes but that I receive fool letters from pseudo-savants, nature fakirs and would-be humorists, or am held up by vacuous commuting acquaintances and made the butt of the dreary wit of the smoking car about “Your friend’s ant farm.”

  And, to make matters short, that is what Frank Dodge had—an ant, a n t, farm. But for an accident, but for the merest chance, he would be hailed to-day as the saviour of the Southern planter, as a benefactor to mankind and a Burbank of beneficial insect life; instead of being a nervous wreck slowly coming back to health and strength in the far Bermudas, a man anguished at the thought of his lifework swept away— stung still by the recollection of the jeers of the vapid, cackling mob that might even now be hailing him as the greatest man of his time. And here was I, his friend, left behind to share in the crackling jocosities that greet his name when, had not one thing happened, an incident turned to a tragedy, he might be feted and famous and I be shining in his reflected glory.

  So I will tell it. I will tell it truthfully, simply, plainly—for even the obloquy of fools becomes in time unbearable. Dear old Frank shall be set aright, and the world shall judge whether it were best to laugh or cry at the misfortune that overtook him at the moment that fame and fortune were within his grasp.

  It all began when I received the appended letter from my old friend.

  That is, it began for me. With Frank it was the end in sight, after years of ceaseless effort, expense and experiment. Here is the letter.

  D. FRANK DODGE

  IMPORTER AND BREEDER OF ANTS

  The Largest Importer of Ants in America. Scavenger and Hybrid Hyperborean Ants Always on Hand. Special Rates to the Trade.

  Ant Hills, Westchester Co., N. Y.

  August 23, 1909.

  Dear Mac: Come out to Ant Hills to-morrow. Efforts crowned with success. No doubt about proving every claim I have ever made for my hybrid hyperborean ants. The work of my scavenger ants y
ou know. Agricultural Department of Washington pays $10,000 for two million hybrid hyperborean ants for Texas. Prof. Twombley Jenks, F.N.H.S. (Fellow Natural History Society) will be here to take charge of them and proceed with them south. If what I claim, and you know they are and more, Government will award a million dollars and a gold medal. I’m as nervous as a cat. Come stand by me now in the hour of success as you have always done in the weary days of trial and defeat. Trap will meet you at station. As always.

  D. FRANK DODGE.

  The 9:27 train saw me aboard, and in due time I was alighting at Pelham and driving over with Frank’s man in the trap to Ant Hills, Frank’s farm and experimental station.

  The whole six acres of Ant Hills, as many will remember, was surrounded with a high wire fence of fine fly screen, reinforced with half-inch steel cable. Tangle-foot flypaper tacked along the supporting scantling rail at the top marked “No Thoroughfare” for Frank’s busy insect friends.

  A wait for a moment to close one great fly screen door behind me, before the inner one was opened, a space Frank facetiously termed “the ante-room.” And then I was on my friend’s domains, famous Ant Hills, the home of his ants “and other relations,” as the poor fellow used to say, and the breeding place of his edible lobster ant, his most useful scavenger ant, and the even more remarkable hybrid hyperborean ant, This last was the intelligent and docile insect that Frank’s patience and genius had originated to maintain cotton in its Kingship, and our beloved Southland as the King’s greatest realm in the world!

  Ant Hills was familiar to me, but for the benefit of those who have heard of the place only as a gigantic hoax or joke that reacted upon its alleged perpetrator, I will briefly describe it.

  Frank’s neat bungalow, “Antlers,” with its trim privet hedges and garden of old-fashioned flowers, all surrounded by a step-overable moat filled with viscid tar—to keep out visiting ants—was in the foreground, occupying with its private grounds about an acre. The rest of the screened farm was given over to the Antery.

  The visitor would have rubbed his eyes to see the bizarre surroundings behind the bungalow. The first things that engaged the attention were huge sets of painted canvas backgrounds representing tropical and jungle scenes. A tangle of theatrical grass mats and imitation palms and tropic plants, all of a rank and poisonous green color, occupied the foreground. There was method in this seeming madness, as Frank had long ago explained to me. The equatorial and sub-tropical ants, especially the larger ants from the Antilles, and the African termites, or true Termes lucifugus, for many years had died as soon as imported. My friend’s experiments were thus at times at a standstill, although he had imported tropic timber, insects and fruits for the expatriated ants to feed upon. Yet the ants had lain in lethargic heaps and refused to eat or exercise.

  After trying everything to aid in simulating in another clime their sunny homes, from phonographs imitating tropic sounds to placing them in heated sands, my friend at last decided that the equatorial and African ants were homesick for their own far tropic scenes.

  As is well known, and has been constantly stated in the slurred and garbled accounts printed of his experiments, Dodge is a theatrical scene painter. It was through his success at his profession that he was enabled to make the vast amount of money he expended on his experiments with ants—experiments that covered twenty years.

  The idea of the ants being homesick almost seemed ridiculous, but my friend Dodge was not to be deterred in ascertaining if it were so or not. He secured vast stretches of canvas and had laboriously painted two tropic scenes, when the failure of “The King of the Cannibal Islands” and several other comic operas of its kind gave him opportunity to secure tropical scenery sufficient for his needs at slight cost. And Frank’s seemingly ridiculous idea was the correct solution. The tropical ants had been pining for jungle scenes.

  In homelike surroundings, with the painted tangle of the rookh before their eyes and the practical tangle of grass mats and artificial palms around them, the next importation of equatorial ants set briskly and even blithely to work, and reared ant hills twenty feet in height. It was as though they said, “Here are we home,” for they burrowed so extensively that Frank was put to the expense of sinking a concrete wall ten feet deep all around the now rightly named Ant Hills.

  The visitor might also have marked the vast glass hothouses, the winter quarters of Dodge’s insect friends, to which on the first indication of cool nights in September they would follow him at the sound of the clicked call he used, a crackling metallic instrument such as elevator starters signal with in big office buildings. Ants, as we all know, are the most intelligent of insects. They soon learned the sound of the call and the varied significance of the different signals Frank sounded upon it, from “First call to breakfast” to “Taps.” The call to winter quarters was simply the prolongation of the call, “Follow me.”

  Much confusion was occasioned later when a plague of crickets came down upon the farm, and millions of the first hybrid hyperboreans, as well as many of the useful if not as valuable scavenger ants, died from exhaustion trying to obey the sounds. The trained and domesticated ants, such as Frank had at Ant Hills, were all faithful and obedient mites. So they rushed continuously as the crickets made their constant and confusing calls—sounds made by their master, so the ants thought. This was the first disaster of the last days of Ant Hills, and led up to the final and irreparable tragedy of which I will tell anon.

  Once in their winter quarters, the smaller-sized and more portable tropic scenery being brought in to make the place homelike, the ants passed the winter industriously caring for their cows or aphides; an almost human husbandry to which all formicidœ are partial, as any natural history will tell you.

  I will not go into the various details of my friend Dodge’s experiments, or of how he endeavored to raise honey ants for the local markets. But despite several orders for them for freak dinners, and having them put on the menu at the Waldorf Astoria and the Cafe des Beaux Arts for one season, Frank found them less appealing to New York appetites than escargots, or snails, have been. For the snails, at least, have expatriated Frenchmen and art students to call for them at Martin’s or Mouquin’s. And yet American visitors, especially New Yorkers, traveling in Mexico, will eat the succulent honey ant sold by the measure in the Mexican markets and even notoriety-desiring Pittsburgers and other nouveaux riches have them sent from our sister republic to be served at sensational banquets.

  But that is not all. To show the superiority of those he had raised, Frank had Mexican honey ants sent him, sealed, turned them over to a well-known analytical laboratory, and proved conclusively that the ones shipped from below the Rio Grande were grossly adulterated with glucose, and were also preserved from fermentation by one-tenth of one per cent of benzoate of soda.

  To those who do not know of the honey ant, I may state that any work on entomology will explain that it is a fermicid of the genus Myrmecocystus melliger, one form of worker which receives and stores in its abdomen the honey gathered by other workers until it is round and distended with honey and almost as large as a small grape.

  As regards the weird stories that my friend Dodge had bred, by large type-selection and certain stimulating foods, a species of ant as big as a house dog, that is pure hyperbole—unless we consider that it could be likened in size to a very small sort of house dog.

  The fact is that Frank, before he saw the practical use of the hybrid hyperborean ant in destroying the boll weevil pest—there, the secret is out!—had a wild idea that the edible Giantigascutus, or lobster ant as he called the largest variety he originated and bred, might be of great value in taking the place of the fast-disappearing lobster as a viand for epicures.

  To this end, he bred them from varieties that assumed an almost lobsterlike appearance, but through some strange freak of nature the ants that grew to the size of lobsters, and almost lobster-like in appearance, lost their pinchers. It was the demand for claws when the lobster ant w
as served that precluded them from ever becoming a successful substitute for the popular and costly crustacean. The red color of the cooked lobster was easily simulated in the case of the lobster ant by an application of aniline dye.

  It was the clawless lobster ant that caused Mr. Thomas Sharkey, the sailor-saloonkeeper-gladiator, to make his famous mot when the waiter explained that the lobsters got to fighting and this one had lost its claws. Mr. Sharkey regarded the cooked lobster ant before him dubiously, and said, gruffly: “Well, take this one away and bring me the winner.”

  After that, Mr. Thomas Shanley and other Broadway restaurateurs refused to further endeavor to substitute the lobster ant for the real Homarus cimericanus, or true soubrette food.

  It was about this time, when my friend Dodge could be seen going from restaurant to hotel carrying a special-sized lobster ant in a shawl strap, that the rumor concerning his sanity first began to be bruited abroad—rumors as cruel as they were unjust. For Frank Dodge, humble savant and scientist, would have been a benefactor to mankind to rank with Benner, Harvey, Fulton, Burbank, any or all who have done mankind beneficial service beyond mundane comprehension or earthly reward. Here also is a fitting place to dignify with denial the slander that Frank Dodge was in the habit of grinding up red ants and selling them as “antchovy paste.”

  It was his scavenger ants that first turned my friend Dodge’s thoughts to making what had been simply a hobby something of great practical benefit. His scavenger ants, as all the good housewives of Pelham and New Rochelle will testify, were unequalled as sanitary aids in the home. Manager Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria; George Rector of the Cafe Madrid; Proprietor Regan of the Knickerbocker Hotel; all will tell you that so far as his scavenger ants were concerned, Frank Dodge was a man who should have been encouraged instead of jeered at and disheartened.

  Hearing of a plague of moths, roaches or mice, or of stopped drain pipes from the kitchen sink, Frank Dodge, as a friendly service and also to keep his scavenger ants in training, would appear on the scene with a tin dress suitcase filled with the little workers for health and sanitation. All he would ask was an indemnity bond that no hot or even cold water be turned on while his insect sanitary corps were in the drains. At his clicking command, uGo to it,” they would march in myriads and legions down cracks and crevices or through the sink strainer holes, and busy themselves until their work was fully done.