A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  I was strangely stirred, and said to myself: ‘To think that it is a mere human being who does this unimaginable miracle —turns winter into summer, night into day, storm into calm, gives the freedom of the great globe to a prisoner in his cell, and the sun in his naked splendor to a man dying in Egyptian darkness!”

  I was listening.

  “What light! what brilliancy! what radiance! . . . This is Peking?”

  “Yes.”

  “The time?’

  “Mid-afternoon.”

  “What is the great crowd for, and in such gorgeous costumes? What masses and masses of rich color and barbaric magnificence! And how they flash and glow and burn in the flooding sunlight! What is the occasion of it all?”

  “The coronation of our new emperor—the Czar.”

  “But I thought that that was to take place yesterday.” “This is yesterday—to you.”

  “Certainly it is. But my mind is confused, these days; there are reasons for it. . . . Is this the beginning of the procession?”

  “Oh, no; it began to move an hour ago.”

  “Is there much more of it still to come?”

  “Two hours of it. Why do you sigh?”

  “Because I should like to see it all.”

  “And why can’t you?”

  “I have to go—presently.”

  “You have an engagement?”

  After a pause, softly: “Yes.” After another pause: “Who are these in the splendid pavilion?”

  “The imperial family, and visiting royalties from here and there and yonder in the earth.”

  “And who are those in the adjoining pavilions to the right and left?”

  “Ambassadors and their families and suites to the right; unofficial foreigners to the left.”

  “If you will be so good, I—”

  Boom! That distant bell again, tolling the half-hour faintly through the tempest of wind and sleet. The door opened, and the governor and the mother and child entered—the woman in widow’s weeds! She fell upon her husband’s breast

  in a passion of sobs, and I—I could not stay; I could not bear it. I went into the bedchamber, and closed the door. I sat there waiting—waiting;—waiting, and listening to the rattling sashes and the blustering of the storm. After what seemed a long, long time, I heard a rustle and movement in the parlor, and knew that the clergyman and the sheriff and the guard were come. There was some low-voiced talking; then a hush; then a prayer, with a sound of sobbing; presently, footfalls—the departure for the gallows; then the child’s happy voice: “Don’t cry now, mama, when we’ve got papa again, and taking him home.”

  The door closed; they were gone. I was ashamed: I was the only friend of the dying man that had no spirit, no courage. I stepped into the room, and said I would be a man and would follow. But we are made as we are made, and we cannot help it. I did not go.

  I fidgeted about the room nervously, and presently went to the window, and softly raised it—-drawn by that dread fascination which the terrible and the awful exert—and looked down upon the courtyard. By the garish light of the electric lamps I saw the little group of privileged witnesses, the wife crying on her uncle’s breast, the condemned man standing on the scaffold with the halter around his neck, his arms strapped to his body, the black cap on his head, the sheriff at his side with his hand on the drop, the clergyman in front of him with bare head and his book in his hand. “/ am the resurrection and the life—”

  I turned away. I could not listen; I could not look. I did not know whither to go or what to do. Mechanically, and without knowing it, I put my eye to that strange instrument, and there was Peking and the Czar’s procession! The next moment I was leaning out of the window, gasping, suffocating, trying to speak, but dumb from the very imminence of the necessity of speaking. The preacher could speak, but I, who had such need of words—

  “And may God have mercy upon your soul. Amen ”

  The sheriff drew down the black cap, and laid his hand upon the lever. I got my voice.

  “Stop, for God’s sake! The man is innocent. Come here and see Szczepanik face to face!”

  Hardly three minutes later the governor had my place at the window, and was saying:

  “Strike off his bonds and set him free!”

  Three minutes later all were in the parlor again. The reader will imagine the scene; I have no need to describe it. It was a sort of mad orgy of joy.

  A messenger carried word to Szczepanik in the pavilion, and one could see the distressed amazement dawn in his face as he listened to the tale. Then he came to his end of the line, and talked with Clayton and the governor and the others; and the wife poured out her gratitude upon him for saving her husband’s life, and in her deep thankfulness she kissed him at twelve thousand miles’ range.

  The telelectrophonoscopes of the globe were put to service now, and for many hours the kings and queens of many realms (with here and there a reporter) talked with Szczepanik, and praised him; and -the few scientific societies which had not already made him an honorary member conferred that grace upon him.

  How had he come to disappear from among us? It was easily explained. He had not grown used to being a world-famous person, and had been forced to break away from the lionizing that was robbing him of all privacy and repose. So he grew a beard, put on colored glasses, disguised himself a little in other ways, then took a fictitious name, and went off to wander about the earth in peace.

  Such is the tale of the drama which began with an inconsequential quarrel in Vienna in the spring of 1898, and came near ending as a tragedy in the spring of 1904.

  MARK TWAIN.

  CHICAGO, April 5, 1904.

  To-day, by a clipper of the Electric Line, and the latter’s Electric Railway connections, arrived an envelop from Vienna, for Captain Clayton, containing an English farthing. The receiver of it was a good deal moved. He called up Vienna, and stood face to face with Mr. K., and said:

  “I do not need to say anything; you can see it all in my face. My wife has the farthing. Do not be afraid—she will not throw it away.”

  M.T.

  CHICAGO, April 23, 1904. Now that the after developments of the Clayton case have run their course and reached a finish, I will sum them up. Clayton’s romantic escape from a shameful death steeped all

  this region in an enchantment of wonder and joy—during the proverbial nine days. Then the sobering process followed, and men began to take thought, and to say: “But a man was killed, and Clayton killed him.” Others replied: “That is true: we have been overlooking that important detail; we have been led away by excitement.”

  The feeling soon became general that Clayton ought to be tried again. Measures were taken accordingly, and the proper representations conveyed to Washington; for in America, under the new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899, second trials are not State affairs, but national, and must be tried by the most august body in the land—the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices were therefore summoned to sit in Chicago. The session was held day before yesterday, and was opened with the usual impressive formalities, the nine judges appearing in their black robes, and the new chief justice (Lemaitre) presiding. In opening the case, the chief justice said:

  “It is my opinion that this matter is quite simple. The prisoner at the bar was charged with murdering the man Szczepanik; he was tried for murdering the man Szczepanik; he was fairly tried, and justly condemned and sentenced to death for murdering the man Szczepanik. It turns out that the man Szczepanik was not murdered at all. By the decision of the French courts in the Dreyfus matter, it is established beyond cavil or question that the decisions of courts are permanent and cannot be revised. We are obliged to respect and adopt this precedent. It is upon precedents that the enduring edifice of jurisprudence is reared. The prisoner at the bar has been fairly and righteously condemned to death for the murder of the man Szczepanik, and, in my opinion, there is but one course to pursue in the matter: he must be hanged.”

&nb
sp; Mr. Justice Crawford said:

  “But, your Excellency, he was pardoned on the scaffold for that.”

  “The pardon is not valid, and cannot stand, because he was pardoned for killing a man whom he had not killed. A man cannot be pardoned for a crime which he has not committed; it would be an absurdity.” .

  “But, your Excellency, he did kill a man.”

  “That is an extraneous detail; we have nothing to do with it. The court cannot take up this crime until the prisoner has expiated the other one.”

  Mr. Justice Halleck said:

  “If we order his execution, your Excellency, we shall bring about a miscarriage of justice; for the governor will pardon him again.”

  “He will not have the power. He cannot pardon a man for a crime which he has not committed. As I observed before, it would be an absurdity.”

  After a consultation, Mr. Justice Wadsworth said: “Several of us have arrived at the conclusion, your Excellency, that it would be an error to hang the prisoner for killing Szczepanik, but only for killing the other man, since it is proven that he did not kill Szczepanik.”

  “On the contrary, it is proved that he did kill Szczepanik. By the French precedent, it is plain that we must abide by the finding of the court.”

  “But Szczepanik is still alive.”

  “So is Dreyfus.”

  In the end it was found impossible to ignore or get around the French precedent. There could be but one result: Clayton was delivered over to the executioner. It made an immense excitement; the State rose as one man and clamored for Clayton’s pardon and retrial. The governor issued the pardon, but the Supreme Court was in duty bound to annul it, and did so, and poor Clayton was hanged yesterday. The city is draped in black, and, indeed, the like may be said of the State. All America is vocal with scorn of “French justice,” and of the malignant little soldiers who invented it and inflicted it upon the other Christian lands.

  The stories of Jules Verne are among those which cannot be properly appreciated unless the reader first comes to them at a certain age. If you are past twenty and have not yet read Verne, I pity you: your opportunity is lost.

  In an article called "The Watery Wonders of Captain Nemo,” Theodore L. Thomas has written:

  Years after reading the novel, people remember things from it that are not there. . . . Recently, a United States Patent Office official received an interesting inquiry. Was it true that a patent examiner had rejected the patent application of an inventor of a new periscope because of the periscope described by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? Well, the fact is that Verne is totally silent on the subject of periscopes in the novel; the Nautilus had no periscope. Another misremembered description concerns the storage batteries used aboard the Nautilus. There are none. . . . The novel leaves readers with the impression that it is a storehouse of advanced technology, and the impression grows as the reader ages.

  Verne's method, in fact, was to deluge his reader with vague generalities and with page upon page of science ripped bodily out of textbooks: but he did know how to tell a fascinating story. Here, for proof, is the episode of the walk on the ocean floor, from Twenty Thousand Leagues (1870).

  A selection from

  TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA

  BY JULES VERNE

  At the Captain’s call two of the ship’s crew came to help us to dress in these heavy and impervious clothes, made of India rubber without seam, and constructed expressly to resist considerable pressure. One would have thought it a suit of armor, both supple and resisting. This formed trousers and waistcoat. The trousers were finished off with thick boots, weighted with heavy leaden soles. The texture of the waistcoat was held together by bands of copper, which crossed the chest, protecting it from the great pressure of the water, and leaving the lungs free to act; the sleeves ended in gloves, which in no way restrained the movement of the hands. There was a vast difference noticeable between these consummate apparatuses and the old cork breastplates, jackets and other contrivances in vogue during the eighteenth century.

  Captain Nemo and one of his companions (a sort of Hercules, who must have possessed great strength), Conseil and myself were soon enveloped in the dresses. There remained nothing more to be done but enclose our heads in the metal box. But before proceeding to this operation, I asked the Captain’s permission to examine the guns we were to carry.

  One of the Nautilus men gave me a simple gun, the butt end of which, made of steel, hollow in the center, was rather large. It served as a reservoir for compressed air, which a valve, worked by a spring, allowed to escape into a metal tube. A box of projectiles, in a groove in the thickness of the butt end, contained about twenty of these electric balls, which, by means of a spring, were forced into the barrel of the gun. As soon as one shot was fired, another was ready.

  “Captain Nemo,” said I, “this arm is perfect, and easily handled; I ask only to be allowed to try it. But how shall we gain the bottom of the sea?”

  “At this moment, Professor, the Nautilus is stranded in five fathoms, and we have nothing to do but to start.”

  “But how shall we get off?”

  “You shall see.”

  Captain Nemo thrust his head into the helmet, Conseil and I did the same, not without hearing an ironical “Good sport!” from the Canadian. The upper part of our dress terminated in a copper collar, upon which was screwed the metal helmet. Three holes, protected by thick glass, allowed us to see in all directions, by simply turning our heads in the interior of the headdress. As soon as it was in position, the Rouquayrol apparatus on our backs began to act; and, for my part, I could breathe with ease.

  With the Ruhmkorff lamp hanging from my belt, and the gun in my hand, I was ready to set out. But to speak the truth, imprisoned in these heavy garments and glued to the deck by my leaden soles, it was impossible for me to take a step.

  But this state of things was provided for. I felt myself being pushed into a little room next to the wardrobe room. My companions followed, towed along in the same way. I heard a watertight door, furnished with stopper plates, close upon us, and we were wrapped in profound darkness.

  After some minutes, a loud hissing was heard. I felt the cold mount my feet to my chest. Evidently from some part of the vessel they had, by means of a tap, given entrance to the

  water, which was invading us, and with which the room was soon filled. A second door cut in the side of the Nautilus then opened. We saw a faint light. In another instant our feet trod the bottom of the sea.

  And now, how can I retrace the impression left upon me by that walk under the waters? Words are impotent to relate such wonders! Captain Nemo walked in front, his companion followed some steps behind. Conseil and I remained near each other, as if an exchange of words had been possible through our metallic cases. I no longer felt the weight of my clothing, or of my shoes, of my reservoir of air or my thick helmet, in the midst of which my head rattled like an almond in its shell.

  The light, which lit the soil thirty feet below the surface of the ocean, astonished me by its power. The solar rays shone through the watery mass easily and dissipated all color, and I clearly distinguished objects at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards. Beyond that the tints darkened into fine gradations of ultramarine and faded into vague obscurity. Truly this water which surrounded me was but another air denser than the terrestrial atmosphere, but almost as transparent. Above me was the calm surface of the sea.

  We were walking on fine, even sand, not wrinkled as on a flat shore, which retains the impression of the billows. This dazzling carpet, really a reflector, repelled the rays of the sun with wonderful intensity, which accounted for the vibration which penetrated every atom of liquid. Shall I be believed when I say that, at the depth of thirty feet, I could see as if I were in broad daylight?

  For a quarter of an hour I trod on this sand sown with the impalpable dust of shells. The hull of the Nautilus, resembling a long shoal, disappeared by degrees; but its lanter
n, when darkness should overtake us in the waters, would help to guide us on board by its distinct rays.

  . . . The ground was still on the incline; its declivity seemed to be getting greater and to be leading us to greater depths. It must have been about three o’clock when we reached a narrow valley, between high perpendicular walls, situated about seventy-five fathoms deep. Thanks to the perfection of our apparatus, we were forty-five fathoms below the limit which nature seems to have imposed on man as to his submarine excursion?.

  I say seventy-five fathoms, though I had no instrument

  by which to judge the distance. But I knew that even in the clearest waters the solar rays could not penetrate farther. And accordingly the darkness deepened. At ten paces not an object was visible. I was groping my way, when I suddenly saw a brilliant white light. Captain Nemo had just put his electric apparatus into use; his companion did the same, and Conseil and I followed their example. By turning a screw I established a communication between the wire and the spiral glass, and the sea, lit by our four lanterns, was illuminated for a circle of thirty-six yards.

  Captain Nemo was still plunging into the dark depths of the forest, whose trees were getting scarcer at every step. I noticed that vegetable life disappeared sooner than animal life. The medusae had already abandoned the arid soil, from which a great number of animals, zoophytes, articulata, molluscs, and fishes still obtained sustenance.

  As we walked, I thought the light of our Ruhmkorff apparatus could not fail to draw some inhabitant from its dark couch. But if they did approach us, they at least kept at a respectful distance from the hunters. Several times I saw Captain Nemo stop, put his gun to his shoulder and after some moments drop it and walk on. At last, after about four hours, this marvelous excursion came to an end. A wall of superb rocks in an imposing mass rose before us, a heap of gigantic blocks, an enormous, steep granite shore, forming dark grottoes, but presenting no practicable slope; it was the prop of the Island of Crespo. It was the earth! Captain Nemo stopped suddenly. A gesture of his brought us all to a halt, and, however desirous I might be to scale the wall, I was obliged to stop. Here ended Captain Nemo’s domains. And he would not go beyond them. Farther on was a portion of the globe he might not trample upon.