“Ah—only the sick oyster produces nacre,” he said, and they all gaped at him. What sort of beginning for a speech was that? “Or do I have the wrong creature?” Albert asked weakly.
“Eurema doesn’t look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn’t her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”
Everybody was watching him with pained expression.
“Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme! But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there are none of us defectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”
“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end to it? People will understand.”
“Of course I’m unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or Celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn’t devised by a hale man.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.
“Know you,” said Albert, “that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cattle who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes a new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous. Hey, you know the woman who said, ‘My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.’”
Everybody gazed at him in stupor.
“That’s the first joke I ever made,” Albert said lamely. “My joke-making machine makes them a lot better than I do.” He paused and gaped, and gulped a big breath. “Dolts!” he croaked out fiercely then. “What will you do for dolts when the last of us is gone? How will you survive without us?”
Albert had finished. He gaped and forgot to close his mouth. They led him back to his seat. His publicity machine explained that Albert was tired from overwork, and then that machine passed around copies of the speech that Albert was supposed to have given.
It had been an unfortunate episode. How noisome it is that the innovators are never great men, and that the great men are never good for anything but just being great men.
* * *
In that year decree went forth from Caesar that a census of the whole country should be taken. The decree was from Cesare Panebianco, the president of the country. It was the decimal year proper for the census, and there was nothing unusual about the decree. Certain provisions, however, were made for taking a census of the drifters and decrepits who were usually missed, to examine them and to see why they were so. It was in the course of this that Albert was picked up. If any man ever looked like a drifter and decrepit, it was Albert.
Albert was herded in with other derelicts, set down at a table, and asked tortuous questions. As:
“What is your name?”
He almost muffed that one, but he rallied and answered, “Albert.”
“What time is it by that clock?”
They had him in his old weak spot. Which hand was which? He gaped and didn’t answer.
“Can you read?” they asked him.
“Not without my—” Albert began. “I don’t have with me my—No, I can’t read very well by myself.”
“Try.”
They gave him a paper to mark up with true and false questions. Albert marked them all true, believing that he would have half of them right. But they were all false. The regularized people are partial to falsehood. Then they gave him a supply-the-word test on proverbs.
“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the best policy” didn’t mean a thing to him. He couldn’t remember the names of the companies that he had his own policies with.
“A _ _ _ _ _ _ in time saves nine” contained more mathematics than Albert could handle. “There appear to be six unknowns,” he told himself, “and only one positive value, nine. The equating verb ‘saves’ is a vague one. I cannot solve this equation. I am not even sure that it is an equation. If only I had with me my—”
But he hadn’t any of his gadgets or machines with him. He was on his own. He left half a dozen other proverb fill-ins blank. Then he saw a chance to recoup. Nobody is so dumb as not to know one answer if enough questions are asked.
“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the mother of invention,” it said.
“Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”
But they marked him wrong on that one too. He had missed every answer to every test. They began to fix him a ticket to a progressive booby hatch where he might learn to do something with his hands, his head being hopeless.
A couple of Albert’s urbane machines came down and got him out of it. They explained that, while he was a drifter and a derelict, yet he was a rich drifter and derelict, and that he was even a man of some note.
“He doesn’t look it, but he really is—pardon our laughter—a man of some importance,” one of the fine machines explained. “He has to be told to close his mouth after he has yawned, but for all that he is the winner of the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy. We will be responsible for him.”
* * *
Albert was miserable as his fine machines took him out, especially when they asked that he walk three or four steps behind them and not seem to be with them. They gave him some pretty rough banter and turned him into a squirming worm of a man. Albert left them and went to a little hide-out he kept.
“I’ll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can’t do it myself, though. I’ll have to have it done.”
He set to work building a device in his hide-out.
“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you’d come here and start building something.”
“Building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I’m too yellow to do it myself.”
“Boss, I got a hunch there’s something better to do. Let’s have some fun.”
“Don’t believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”
“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”
“It’s a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They’re at the top of the heap. They’ve won it all and arranged it all neatly. There’s no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that you’re seeing it wrong. You’ve got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”
“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That’s the way of it, though, now that I look closer.
“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let’s tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”
“We’ll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We’ll call it the Turning of the Worm. We’ll have fun, Hunchy. We’ll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”
* * *
The Twenty-First Century began on this rather odd note.
; Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies
Introduction by Kelly Robson
I live in the future.
In 1978, when “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” was first published, I was ten years old. My family lived in the forest-fire-prone foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in the echo path of wolf howls and coyote yips. That close to the mountains, radio signals aren’t reliable. Aside from the telephone, our only connection to the outside world was the TV. And oh boy, did we love it.
We had one channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC’s programming wasn’t particularly inspiring—mostly homegrown shows like The Beachcombers and Front Page Challenge, with a few American shows like M.A.S.H. scattered like jewels across prime time. We were always disappointed when the shows went into repeats because we had no alternative. But we were kids. We would watch anything. My brother earned the nickname pattern-watcher because when the channel got knocked off the air, he would literally stare at the static pattern.
I would too, from time to time. Occasionally, if I stared long enough, I’d see things in there.
“Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies” is an alternate history of television. The narrator is an unnamed historian (probably amateur) who describes the television shows produced by Aurelian Bentley in 1873. These selenium “slow light” dramas are transmitted to television receivers that will repeat anything they receive. Thrillingly, because of the quirks of slow light, the more the receivers repeat the dramas, the better they become. They evolve and grow. The picture becomes clearer. The once-silent productions begin to develop sound. They also develop metacommentary, breaking the fourth wall and letting us into the inner workings of The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley.
What a thrilling science fictional concept. My brothers and sisters and I would have embraced this technology in 1978. We would have watched those “slow light” dramas until they became so real we could have walked into their world.
This is Lafferty at his most delightful, playing with words and images to build a multilayered story within a story (within a story) that seems real despite its stylized, melodramatic trappings. I try to forgive Lafferty the use of troubling racial epithets (should I?) even though they throw me out of the story (in 1978, no, there was no excuse), because he touches my world to his. Lafferty makes me remember my entertainment-starved youth, where we would have done anything for a TV show that changed and even got better in repeat. And he makes me appreciate anew the wonder of this future I live in, where I carry in my pocket a receiver that will bring me, at a moment’s notice, all the television anyone could ever want.
Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies
Even today, the “invention” of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the phototube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow’s television was very poor due to the “slow light” characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.
Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley. And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.
It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first “invent” television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer “slow light” context. And the first of those “slow light” or selenium (“moonshine”) dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873.
The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever caveman did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.
Bentley’s television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today’s terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.
The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the “slow light” dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and persons coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.
The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene-powered model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old sets are ever properly identified and become collectors’ items, the price on them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to serve as that.
We bought the master projector for twenty-six dollars. We told the owner of that monster that it was a chicken incubator. The thirteen dramas in their canisters we had for thirty-nine dollars total. We had to add formaldehyde to activate the dramas, however, and we had to add it to both the projector and the receiver; the formaldehyde itself came to fifty-two dollars. I discovered soon that the canisters with their dramas were not really needed, nor was the master projector. The receiver itself would repeat everything that it had ever received. Still and all, it was money well spent.
The kerosene burner activated a small dynamo that imposed an electrical grid on the selenium matrix and awakened the memories of the dramas.
There was, however, an oddity in all the playbacks. The film-fix of the receiver continued to receive impressions so that every time a “slow light” drama is presented it is different, because of the feedback. The resolution of the pictures improves with use and is now much clearer and more enjoyable than originally.
The librettos of the first twelve of the thirteen Bentley dramas are not good, not nearly as good as the librettos of the Jessy Polk and the Samuel J. Perry dramas later in the decade. Aurelian Bentley was not a literary man; he was not even a completely literate man. His genius had many gaping holes in it. But he was a passionately dramatic man, and these dramas which he himself devised and directed have a great sweep and action to them. And even the librettos from which he worked are valuable for one reason. They tell us, though sometimes rather ineptly and vaguely, what the dramas themselves are all about. Without these outlines, we would have no idea in the world of the meaning of the powerful dramas.
There was an unreality, a “ghostliness,” about all the dramas, as though they were made by sewer light underground; or as if they were made by poor quality moonlight. Remember that the element selenium (the metal that is not a metal), the chemical basis of the dramas, is named from Selene, the moon.
Bentley did not use “moving pictures” of quickly succeeding frames to capture and transmit his live presenta
tion dramas. Although Muybridge was in fact working on the zoopraxiscope (the first “moving picture” device) at that very time, his still incomplete work was not known to Aurelian Bentley. Samuel J. Perry and Gifford Hudgeons did use “moving picture” techniques for their primitive television dramas later in the decade; but Bentley, fortunately perhaps, did not. Each of Bentley’s thirty-minute live dramas, however it appeared for the first time in the first television receiver, was recorded in one single matrix or frame: and, thereafter, that picture took on a life and growth of its own. It was to some extent independent of sequence (an effect that has been attempted and failed of in several of the other arts); and it had a free way with time and space generally. This is part of the “ghostliness” of the dramas, and it is a large part of their power and charm. Each drama was one evolving moment outside of time and space (though mostly the scenes were in New York City and the Barrens of New Jersey).
Of course there was no sound in these early Bentley dramas, but let us not go too far astray with that particular “of course.” “Slow sound” as well as “slow light” is a characteristic of selenium response, and we will soon see that sound did in fact creep into some of the dramas after much replaying. Whether their total effects were accidental or by design, these early television dramas were absolutely unique.
The thirteen “slow light” dramas produced by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873 (the thirteenth of them, the mysterious Pettifoggers of Philadelphia, lacks Bentley’s “Seal of Production,” and indeed it was done after his death: and yet he appears as a major character in it) were these:
1. The Perils of Patience, a Damnable Chase. In this, Clarinda Calliope, who was possibly one of the greatest actresses of American or world drama, played the part of Patience Palmer in the title role. Leslie Whitemansion played the role of Simon Legree. Kirbac Fouet played the part of “the Whip,” a sinister character. X. Paul McCoffin played the role of “the Embalmer.” Jaime del Diablo played “the Jesuit,” one of the most menacing roles in all drama. Torres Malgre played “the Slaver,” who carried the forged certificate showing that Patience had a shadow of black blood and so might be returned to slavery on San Croix. Inspiro Spectralski played “the Panther” (Is he a Man? Is he a Ghost?), who is the embodiment of an evil that is perhaps from beyond the world. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the part of “the Guardian,” who is really a false guardian.
The Best of R. A. Lafferty Page 15
