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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  The appearance of the leaders, or foremen scavenger ants, as if to ask, “Anything else, sir?” was the signal the work was done. The sharp clicks on Frank’s metallic call that meant “To quarters,” would bring them all back into the tin suitcase, tired but satisfied with the consciousness of good work well done.

  But all this only leads up to the crux and climax of Dodge’s efforts in formicid culture—his evolving of the famous hybrid hyperborean ant, a new variety of the crossed Megalomyrmex septentrionalis with Termes lucifugus. The resultant variety was the most docile and intelligent ant of all, a beneficial insect that would have destroyed the boll weevil and saved incalculable millions to the planter and the cotton factor, had not fate intervened.

  Like all discoveries destined to benefit mankind, the great purpose for which the hybrid hyperborean ant was evolved was ascertained by chance. The hybrid hyperboreans were Frank’s favorites, even above the lobster ant—bred for its edibility—and the scavenger ant, that blessing to the housewife. Frank had evolved the hybrid hyperborean, as he called it, by mating and crossing his best strains. The hybrid hyperborean was a sleek and graceful fellow, almost an inch in length.

  One day in passing through his flower garden, Frank had noticed upon a small peach tree a tent or cluster of the caterpillar of the brown-tailed moth. He had plucked it off, intending to burn it, when the thought struck him that perhaps here was insect food at hand for his ants. He bore the branch with the caterpillar cobweb or tent with him into the Antery.

  The lobster ants refused it emphatically. A long diet on dead fish and chopped clams had perhaps vitiated their appetite for that kind of food. Even the scavenger ants hesitated as if asking whether the caterpillars were a gift or an assignment.æ

  But not so the hybrid hyperboreans. They devoured them ravenously. And from that time on, Frank used the hybrid hyperborean ants as destroyers of caterpillars, moth clusters, and San Jose scale on his own place and in the neighborhood.

  Reading about this time of the ruinous ravages of the boll weevil in Texas, Frank sent to a friend of his in the devastated cotton belt for a large quantity of the ruined cotton plants covered with the cocoons and pupæ of the pest. As he opened the box containing the infected cotton plants, the very presence of their destined prey seemed to excite all the hybrid hyperboreans in the Antery. They rushed from all quarters, the champing of their mandibles being plainly discernible.

  As Frank advanced toward them holding the cotton plants, the hybrid hyperborean ants jumped up in the air to a height of fully two feet, seized upon the boll weevils, and devoured them instantly. By this time, the very box that held the rest of the plants was pierced in ten thousand places so that it crumbled to powder. Without harming a fiber of such of the cotton as the boll weevil had spared, or touching a leaf or twig of the plants, the hybrid hyperborean ants destroyed in the twinkling of an eye every boll weevil of the thousands with which the plants were thickly covered.

  The idea struck Frank like a flash that not only was the killer of the scourge of the cotton field found at last, but that in time the hybrid hyperborean ants would develop their embryonic jumping faculties so that, with the boll weevil wiped out, they could destroy, upon the jump as it were, the Western grasshopper plagues.

  That night the originator of the edible lobster ant, the sanitary scavenger ant, and best of all, the hybrid hyperborean ant—the found-at-last destroyer of the boll weevil pest—wrote to the Department of Agriculture in Washington the news that was to cause hope to spring renewed in Southern hearts.

  A courteous but somewhat skeptical reply was received from the head of the Entomological Bureau, Professor Twombley Jenks. But Mr. Dodge was neither to be denied nor discouraged. He sent half a hundred hybrid hyperborean ants to Washington, and the moment Professor Twombley Jenks brought these into contact with the boll weevils he had at the Entomological Bureau for experimental purposes, my friend’s contentions were proved.

  Now the hybrid hyperboreans, having had a second feeding of boll weevil, refused to eat anything else, and they starved to death while awaiting the arrival of more of their positively preferred diet from Texas —although, as my friend Dodge said, it is possible they missed the tropical scenery of Ant Hills and perished of nostalgia.

  Scientists and government investigators, however, are slow to reach assumed conclusions. Professor Twombley Jenks was interested but not wholly convinced. An interminable correspondence now ensued, and poor Frank wavered so much between high hopes and most depressing despair that here began the nervous tendency that was to find its climax in collapse when the great final misfortune overwhelmed and struck him down.

  At last the second supply of weevil-infected cotton plants arrived in Washington, and passed through all the mazes of circumlocution, delaying detail and governmental red tape. Frank was at last advised, through letter 3096-B, form 181827, to send a dozen more gross of hybrid hyperborean ants. He did so.

  The Secretary of Agriculture, the Washington newspaper correspondents, and Whitelaw Reid’s ex-social secretary were all present when they arrived. The hybrid hyperborean ants attacked the boll weevils so fiercely and so murderously that Whitelaw Reid’s ex-social secretary fainted at the sight, and the experiment ended in some confusion. The Washington papers, of course, played up the society aspect of the affair, giving two columns to the account of the swooning of the ex-social secretary who was the White House cotillion leader during that administration. They also printed his pictures, one taken before he fainted, and one afterwards, but both showing him in correct evening attire.

  The Washington correspondents of the New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco papers all followed the example of Samuel Blythe of the New York World, who set the fashion that session of Congress of treating all events transpiring at the capital in a humorous light. Thus it was that in one paragraph they described the hybrid hyperborean ants as lighting on to the boll weevils like magazine editors on to second-night seats at the theaters. But the great news that a White House cotillion leader had swooned at the same time, because some coarse person had eaten all the macaroons, was given the first page, right column position in even the metropolitan papers. And the greatest epoch in entomology, the fact that the hybrid hyperborean ant had been discovered to be the speedy destroyer of the boll weevil, was thus passed almost unnoticed.

  After Professor Twombley Jenks had recovered from his agitation over the prostration of the White House’s favorite cotillion leader, and that gentleman was able to sit up and partake of his usual afternoon tea with watercress sandwiches, my friend Dodge was again communicated with and assured, in the usual cold and formal official verbiage, that there was no doubt as to the efficacy of the hybrid hyperborean ant in eliminating the boll weevil as a factor in the cotton’s crop’s destruction.

  Mr. Dodge was further informed, after three months’ correspondence, that following certain experiments to be conducted by Professor Twombley Jenks in person at Ant Hill, the government would award him $10,000, and Congress would be urged to vote him a million dollars and a gold medal: provided said further experiments were equally successful upon a large scale and a practical test bore them out.

  Mr. Dodge was likewise advised that to secure even the preliminary $10,000, and to place Professor Twombley Jenks in a position to make the practical tests in the cotton fields of Texas, a supply of a billion hybrid hyperborean ants would be necessary, possibly more, as Professor Jenks had not yet figured out by integral calculus just how many thousands of the pest destroyers would be needed to the acre. The hybrid hyperborean ants must also be guaranteed to stand the Texas scenery, and have no homesick qualms or yearns for the painted jungle backdrops of the late musical melange “All Girls and Glitter,” or “Old King Kafoozelum,” or “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” and other canvas vistas of comic opera jungle-land saved from the storehouse to make Ant Hill homey for the transplanted equatorial formicidæ.

  Frank Dodge, however, was jubila
nt. He gave an ant-bake to the Niagara Hose of Pelham, the Neptune and Relief Hose of New Rochelle, and the Millionaire’s Fire Company of Larchmont, selecting a Saturday for the ant-bake when the millionaires of the Larchmont Fire Company would have a half-holiday from Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and the Siegel-Cooper stores, and could get home on the 1:33 train.

  This ant-bake cleared the Antery of all the lobster ants. Frank then distributed the scavenger ants generously among the actors’ boarding houses around Seventh Avenue, from Thirty-eighth to Fiftieth Streets, and farmed out the rest to Costar, the Insecticide King on Sixth Avenue, so that he could turn his attention solely to increasing the flocks of hybrid hyperboreans. He kept these quiet and unmolested, supplied them with all the boll weevils he could get shipped to him, and let nature take its course.

  Race suicide has no part or portion in the social life of the hybrid hyperborean ant, and with a nervous glee that bordered almost on hysteria, my poor friend Dodge saw his Antery soon contain two billion of the docile and intelligent hybrid hyperboreans, always his favorite of the thoroughbred formicidæ. And thus the eventful day drew near that was to bring Professor Twombley Jenks, of the Entomological Bureau, Department of Agriculture, to Ant Hills, Westchester County, New York.

  Had not “Robinson’s Regal Railroad Shows” raised its tents in nearby Mount Vernon that fateful day, my poor friend would now be a millionaire, the acclaimed benefactor of the farmer and the planter, the wearer of a medal from Congress, and the most popular man in America, instead of hiding in the Bermudas as he is to-day, as discredited, though most unjustly so, as Dr. Cook.

  “Robinson’s Regal Railroad Shows” raised at daybreak its dingy round-tops on the vacant lots adjoining the koumyss factory in Mount Vernon. A high wind tore to tatters the gaudy banners that told the wonders of the greatest zoological congress ever gathered beneath canvas, together with the pictured representations of the rarest pathological specimens, or human curios—”The Blue-Faced Boy,” “The Four-Legged Girl,” “The Lion-Faced Lady,” and “Bosco the Snake Eater, Who Eats ‘Em Alive! He Bites Their Heads Off! He Grovels in a Den of Loathsome Reptiles! An Exhibit for the Educated and a Show for the Sensitive and the Refined.” So read the precious banners that had been destroyed.

  An agonized appeal over the telephone to Frank Dodge, scene painter, came from old man Robinson himself. He couldn’t come? Frank Dodge couldn’t come? Would he desert a friend, an old friend, in his hour of need?

  Frank looked at his watch, hesitated, and was lost. He would come over to repaint the banners, after telephoning for his assistants at his New York scenic studio to come out. He himself would lay out the work, but he must be back at Ant Hills by noon, as Professor Twombley Jenks would arrive on the 2:22 to experiment with the hybrid hyperborean ants and the boll weevil pest.

  Mr. Dodge hired an auto and started for Mount Vernon, not heeding that his tamest hybrid hyperborean ants were clinging to him in myriads. I was with him at the time, and unfortunately called his attention to the fact. Shouting for the head ant-keeper to leave the gate open, as the hybrid hyperborean ants had developed the homing instinct since being fed boll weevils and would not now voluntarily leave or stay away from their feeding grounds, Frank began to brush off the ants, which promptly started to crawl back over the road toward the Antery. He was not rid of the last ones until we had reached the circus grounds and the damaged menagerie tent and banners.

  In a few hours Frank had order out of chaos. Nothing occurred to mar or delay the work of restoring the gaudy banners that depicted the fauna in the animal tent or the human freaks in the side show, save a little excitement over the escape of some animals from a cage that had been overturned and broken by the wind. When it was stated that the animals that escaped were some South African specimens not dangerous unless annoyed, several keepers were sent after them, and Frank kept on quietly directing his men who had arrived from New York within an hour of being ‘phoned for. Had Frank known what animals those were that escaped he would not have whistled so gayly, and better had I presented a real revolver to his head than the “pocket pistol” I handed him to take a liquid shot from—for I was told but gave no heed.

  We returned a little late from the banner restorations, for Frank was not the one to leave an old friend in distress until he saw that distress alleviated.

  “That old boy, Twombley Jenks, will be hollering for me, I’ll bet,” said Frank laughingly, as we neared Ant Hills.

  He spoke truer than he knew. As we reached Ant Hills the shrill cries of a querulous-voiced old man rang upon our ears together with hoarse curses that Frank knew at once emanated from his head ant-keeper, the only assistant that day on the place.

  Springing from the vehicle, Frank dashed through the still open high screen gates.

  What a scene of destruction met his eye. The tropic back-drops were torn to tatters; the glass-panel winter quarters were shattered and sundered; the grass mats and artificial palms were rent and scattered; and up in the two tallest and strongest palms left standing were the battered and ragged figures of Professor Twombley Jenks and Lars Swenson, late head ant-keeper of the hybrid hyperboreans. Below them, champing at the bases of the two great artificial palms that swayed and tottered dangerously before their onslaughts, were two swollen but enraged gigantic ant-eating aardvarks, the great ant-bears of Africa. They were the animals that had escaped, the harmless animals unless annoyed!

  It was all plain now. The escaping aardvarks, or ant-bears, had followed the trail of the homing ants all the way along the road, and in through the open doors of the very citadel of my poor friend’s golden hopes.

  Into Ant Hills came the great ant-bears, driving their capacious snouts among the two billion docile and intelligent hybrid hyperboreans that were to exterminate the boll weevil scourge from the cotton fields and make the fair South smile again!

  But where were the hybrid hyperborean ants? One glance at the still enraged Orycteropus capensis answered that horrific question. The giant aardvarks, or great ant-bears, were harmless unless annoyed. The efforts made by Professor Twombley Jenks and Lars Swenson, head ant-keeper, to save the hybrid hyperboreans had evidently annoyed them.

  My poor friend Dodge went raving mad. In the ebullitions of his super-Berserker rage he fell upon the two aardvarks, or great ant-bears of Africa, and seizing one in each hand held them in the air until they starved to death.

  And nobody will believe that, either.

  When my poor friend was conscious again, and the brain fever that had wasted him for weeks had passed, I whispered to him hopefully: “Cheer up, old man, we’ll start all over.”

  But he raised a thin wan hand and shrilly screamed: “Never again!”

  Anyway, the report Professor Twombley Jenks made of the final experiments (Agr. Dept. Bulletin 398764) ended forever any hope of further government recognition of experiments to destroy the boll weevil with the docile and intelligent hybrid hyperborean ant. Besides, not a single one of these succulent (to them) insects survived the ravenous onslaughts of the giant aardvarks, the Orycteropus capensis, or great ant-bears of Africa.

  Scientific Crime

  and Detection

  A little box proves to be a weapon of death that leaves no clue in a murder mystery involving baffling scientific methods conjured up by authors L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace for Where the Air Quivered, The Strand Magazine, December 1895. The illustrator signed himself Tiffard.

  The Strand Magazine

  December, 1898

  WHERE THE AIR QUIVERED

  by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace

  WHERE the Air Quivered is an early example of the employment of scientific invention for the purposes of crime, usually a device that never existed or did not exist at the time the story was published. Later, this would evolve into the scientific detective stories of Edwin Balmer and William B. McHarg concerning Luther Trant, and Arthur B. Reeve’s tales involving Craig Kennedy, both employing devices that had not yet been built o
r used for the purposes of crime detection. It can be seen that the fascination of such stories did not rest in the crime itself, but in the mental exercise of deciding whether such a machine could really be built, and if so, whether it could accomplish its purpose.

  Fundamentally, L. T. Meade, whose real name was Mrs. Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, was a specialist in wholesome tales for teenage girls. She literally had scores of such books published, both in the United States and England, most on a literary level only slightly above The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale. Until her death in 1914, the quantity of the stories testified to a popularity that must have ranked her as one of the most widely-read authors of juveniles prior to World War I.

  Somehow The Strand Magazine got her to writing mystery stories and tales of medical problems involving detective work which were not only adult but highly unusual and imaginative. Among her early books was Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (G. Newnes, 1894). A second volume with the same title continued the series and was also published in 1894, both books in collaboration with Clifford Halifax. All of the stories in those two books had previously run in The Strand. She also had published three books of mystery with Robert Eustace, all previously appearing in The Strand. Therefore, the story that follows was well in accord with her secondary writing interests.

  Her collaborator on this story, Robert Eustace, was the pen name of Eustace Rawlins, whose contribution to the story that follows is difficult to determine, since Mrs. Meade frequently wrote murder mysteries on her own. He may, in this specific story, have helped supply the Near Eastern background, since he was credited with a novel, The Hidden Treasures of Egypt, “a romance compiled and adapted from the records of Pthomes.”