A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Mrs. Trevor: Now that was really dreadful.

  Dr. Renington: So I thought, Mrs. Trevor, for it nearly ended our friendship.

  Mrs. Trevor: But then, what are such annoyances compared with the unpleasantness of having servants with eyes, ears and tongues forever about one? Why, domestic privacy must have been impossible under such conditions.

  Professor: Doubtless it was, but people were forced to endure an evil for which they could find no cure. These civilized barbarians prided themselves, too, on having subjugated the horse to their uses. You know they employed those animals, to draw vehicles, and they even rode upon their backs.

  Mrs. Trevor: Yes, I have read about that. At what time did they get an idea of using electric propellers like ours?

  Professor: About A.D. 2450. You have, of course, seen the models and drawings at the Antiquarian Rooms, illustrating the ancient horse?

  Miss Trevor: Yes, we were there last week. It seems almost incredible, but I suppose that they actually went about in those queer vehicles, with the horses attached.

  Dr. Renington: Beyond a doubt, Miss Clara. What ancient history have you been reading lately, may I ask?

  Miss Trevor: Oh, it isn’t a history, not even a treatise on history, Dr. Renington. But one day when I was looking over the books at the Antiquarian Rooms, I got hold of the queerest volume! It was poked away in a dusty corner, as if no one cared for it, and it was called the “Centennial Record.” I brought it home, and Edith and I have been dipping into it ever since. It gives an account of a great festival, held in the year 1876 in this country, at which all the inhabitants of the country came together to pay their devotions to that great bird they worshiped—the American eagle, I think.

  Dr. Renington: Oh, no, Miss Clara, you are wrong there—the ancient Americans were not idolaters, and they never worshiped the eagle. Doubtless the barbarous spelling of your old book has led you astray; but the Professor can tell you the object of that great gathering better than I can. What was it, Professor?

  Professor: It was certainly not a religious festival—it was only one of a series of bazaars, or gigantic fairs, which were considered to advance the arts and sciences, and were held in various countries of Europe during the latter half of this same century of which we have been speaking. Nothing more than that.

  Mrs. Trevor: Well, all these things are very interesting to know, but I am really glad when I think that I was not born in such a stupid age.

  Miss Trevor: Yes indeed! we have a great deal to be thankful for when we consider how uncomfortable life must have been with such bare surroundings.

  Mrs. Trevor: I wanted to ask if they had no balloon traveling at all in those days? Surely I have read of balloons in the history of ancient America, although I am not sure of the date.

  Professor: You are right; they were partially known before the year 1900, but so defective and imperfect was that knowledge that they were regarded as playthings, rather than useful and necessary conveyances. Of course, there were some adventurous spirits who made balloon voyages, and astonished all beholders with their temerity; but the balloon was not utilized until the close of the twenty-sixth century, almost the twenty-seventh.

  Mrs. Trevor: What a pity, for it is certainly a most charming mode of traveling, far superior to that gloomy tunnel, if one wishes to cross the ocean.

  Dr. Renington: I differ from you there. I vastly prefer the tunnel, and then the time you save is quite a consideration. You know that the express trains are making the through trip now in thirty hours.

  Mrs. Trevor: Well, the balloons only take forty-eight, and that is fast enough for me. Besides, I am always so fearful while in the tunnel that the lights will be exhausted, and then imagine the darkness! I should die of fright in such a case.

  Professor: No danger of that, Mrs. Trevor. The company send an extra supply of light put up in the most convenient jars you ever saw, with every train. In fact, I found the light too intense for me, and was obliged to turn it off several times to rest my eyes.

  Mrs. Trevor: Still, I think I shall travel by balloon; I feel so much safer.

  Miss Trevor: Edith, you are a real coward. What would you have done if you had been obliged to cross in a steamship, with the great waves buffeting you on every side, and threatening to swallow up vessel and passengers?

  Mrs. Trevor: Why, I should have staid at home, I suppose, rather than encounter such horrors.

  Professor: Excuse me, ladies, if I remind Renington that we are engaged to dine with an old friend in Charleston this evening, and the day is already far spent. But I had something for you, Miss Clara, (taking some tiny packages from his coat pocket) which I know you will enjoy. I did not see you at the opera last evening, so I brought you a few of the gems. This aria from the second act is especially fine, and bids fair to be very popular.

  Miss Trevor: Oh, thank you, how kind you were to remember me! I was so anxious to go last night, as it was the first representation, but it was quite impossible. However, this is very consoling. Suppose we open the aria you mentioned and enjoy it now. Will you unseal it, please?

  Professor: Certainly.

  (Professor takes up one of the small packages and carefully breaks the seal. Immediately a charming soprano voice executes a difficult aria. All listen attentively. The voice ceases.)

  Miss Trevor: How charming! I am so much indebted to you. Now I want to ask a favor of which this music reminds me, although my request has nothing to do with operas. Won’t you give me your last speech before the Historical Society? The package Edith purchased was not good—some of the sentences were quite inaudible, and we were so disappointed about it.

  Professor: It will give me great pleasure to bring you a new one; but where did you get yours? I ask because I suppose the copyist must have used a defective apparatus, and I want to inquire into it.

  Mrs. Trevor: I bought it where I go for all our lecture and music packages, at the new bazaar; but I think I shall have to change—they have sold me a number of defective things lately.

  Professor: Such carelessness is inexcusable, Not only every word, but every inflection of the voice can, and should be given with perfect distinctness. I should advise you to go to Trevelyan’s in future. But now I must say good morning. Come, Renington.

  (The gentlemen make their adieux. Mrs. Trevor touches the small silver knob again, the large doors slide open, and the arm chairs once more appear rising out of the floor. The visitors take their seats, and the chairs descend into the lower hall. There a mechanical footman hands them their hats and overcoats, and opens the door for them. They seal themselves in small elegant vehicles of peculiar style, press a button for a moment, then lean back, comfortably, and are whirled rapidly away.)

  Upstairs Mrs. Trevor remarks: Suppose we have the lights now, Clara; it is getting too dark to see.

  (Miss Trevor moves toward a table on which stands an exquisite vase. She raises the cover, and at once the apartment is filled with a soft sunshiny radiance. Enter mechanical footman with newspaper, which he places on the table and retires.)

  PROFESSOR VEHR’S ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENT

  Robert Duncan Milne

  “The magic of the nineteenth century!” I exclaimed. “The term is so variously employed that it becomes necessary for me to know how you apply it before we can comprehend each other exactly.”

  “Well,” responded Ashley, “I take it to mean the production of phenomena by natural means, which nevertheless seem supernatural, or beyond the present scope of applied science.”

  “As, for instance?” I inquired.

  “Well, as, for instance, the faculty of intercommunication between persons separated by immense distances without the medium, say, of a tangible, physical telegraphic wire.”

  “But, in that case,” I remarked, “and granting, for the sake of argument, that the intercommunication you describe might be carried on without the medium of a wire, how would you explain it?”

  “By supposing,” returned Ashley,
“the existence of a real and actual medium whereby communications can be transmitted, though such medium is imperceptible to our ordinary senses, and cannot be weighed or measured by ordinary scientific instruments.”

  “But what reason have you,” I objected, “for presuming the existence of any such medium at all?”

  “The very best reason,” he answered; “the actual experience of the past.”

  “You do not mean that you, personally, have communicated with—in short, transmitted messages to, and received messages from—distant persons without the use of ordinary telegraphic wires?” I asked.

  “There is nothing so extraordinary in that. You must surely have witnessed the application of that law in the case of clairvoyants and trance mediums.”

  “Ah!” returned I. “But we were not talking of clairvoyants and trance mediums. Phenomena like these can be referred to a purely mental source. We were talking, I thought, of a real and actual medium, which could be proved to be such.”

  “Certainly; proved by results. Inferentially, that is to say, though the laws of its working still remain secret,” replied my friend.

  “I should like to witness such results myself,” I said.

  “You can do so by coming with me this evening,” replied Ashley.

  So it was agreed upon between the young physician, in whose room I then was, and myself, that we should meet again that evening at a certain spot, and afterward proceed to investigate the phenomena we had been talking about.

  “And the fair Julia?” I remarked, inquiringly, changing the subject.

  A shade passed over my friend’s countenance as I made this remark. The lady I had referred to was his betrothed, and it required no great amount of observation on my part to perceive that in mentioning her name I had touched a tender cord, and so forebore to prosecute the subject, though entitled by intimacy with both to feel an interest in their mutual relations.

  “It is this very matter which troubles me just now,” replied my friend, uneasily. “Her letters have latterly been growing less frequent, and I fancy I can detect also a change of style. Her phrases seem less endearing than formerly. It would seem as though a shadow had sprung up between us. You know how I love her, and I am racked with apprehension when I think she is so far away, and exposed to I know not what estranging influences.”

  “Where are the family now?” I asked, as since the Radcliffes had left San Francisco, some six months before, they had, as I knew, been traveling in Europe, though I was unacquainted with their present location.

  “That is what I do not know,” replied Ashley, in tremulous tones. “They were in New York two weeks ago, and since then I have had no letter from Julia, though hitherto she has never missed a week without writing.”

  Julia Radcliffe, the affianced bride of Gerald Ashley, was a charming, sympathetic, and impressionable girl of nineteen summers, the only daughter of one of San Francisco’s representative businessmen, who had been traveling with his family, and was now on his return home. Knowing the extent of my friend’s affection for the lady, I felt sincere sympathy for him in his present condition.

  Presently an idea struck me. Why should not my friend make use of the mode of communication he had just been explaining to me, and thus obtain the information he stood so sadly in need of? If it really possessed the virtue he expressed such confidence in, surely the present was the time to prove it, and I immediately made the suggestion.

  “The very thing I had in my mind,” he returned, in answer to my observation “when I asked you to accompany me this evening. Professor Vehr is no ordinary scientist, I assure you. Some of the phenomena he produces are of the most extraordinary and startling character.”

  “Professor Vehr!” I exclaimed, in surprise. “Do you mean Professor Vehr of the Palace Hotel? I have already witnessed some of his remarkable experiments,” recalling an episode in which a magic mirror had figured, some few months before. “I will willingly accompany you.”

  Two hours later found us in the professor’s apartments in the Palace Hotel, where we were cordially welcomed.

  “You have repeated your visit,” he said, “with a view to further investigate the occult. Good. I shall be happy to oblige you—the more so as I have myself been pursuing the investigations, and have arrived at even more subtile elucidations of the energies conserved in the fluid we call electricity than those which you witnessed in the case of the mirror. There this phenomenon was confined to the reproduction of optical effects, with a certain reaction on the substantial forms of which the figures on the mirror were the simulacra. Now I am able to exert an actual physical control over the voices as well as the minds of distant persons themselves, so as, if necessary, to even transport them from place to place.”

  “I was struck with the last observation of the professor, and with the resemblance of its claim to that of the adepts of the Oriental Theosophy, and so intimated.

  “It is quite true,” he said, “that this formulation of the energy I have just hinted at is, in effect, the same as that controlled by the theosophists. It may be, also, that, in one sense, they have arrived at that more complete mastery over nature where the mere effort of mind and will is able to produce effects which I can only obtain in natural corollaries of laws which the world at large possesses. Still, even granting that such is the case, my mode of procedure for obtaining my results does not entail those penalties for their abuse to which explorers into the realms of the occult under purely physical conditions are exposed. There are, however, penalties equally terrible for failure to observe the substantial condition of scientific law—penalties which threaten absolute annihilation of individual identity, so far as the material person or ego can be annihilated”—and so saying, the professor turned toward the alcove which had been the scene of the experiment with the mirror.

  It can readily be conceived that, while impressed with the deliberate enunciation and careful phraseology of the professor, I was somewhat at a loss to trace their application to a phenomenon which I had not yet witnessed, strongly tinctured as they were with that transcendental flavor which, while it whets the curiosity, tends rather to obscure than elucidate the subject on which it treats. I was not, therefore, sorry when I saw that our host was busying himself with the arrangement of some apparatus in the alcove, to which Ashley and myself now directed our attention, and waited.

  The object which particularly arrested our attention was an immense glass bell, of something the shape and size of a diving-bell, which occupied the centre of the alcove. This bell rested, in an inverted position, upon a solid slab of plate-glass, touching its edges upon every side. It reminded one, shall I say, of the receiver of a gigantic air-pump more than anything else. The capacity of this immense bell was, evidently, many hundred gallons, being, as nearly as I can judge, some five feet high by as many in diameter. Another peculiarity which I noted was that it was coated, to a height of about two feet from its base, with some shining opaque metallic substance; and as a metal rod depended from its apex about the same distance into its interior, while its upper end projected about a foot above the bell, I had no difficulty in connecting the apparatus before me with some branch of electricity, as the whole bore a marked resemblance to the known characteristics of a Leyden jar—that reservoir of static electricity whose scientific qualities are too well known to require further description. One other feature was deserving of notice—namely, that through one side of the bell projected the ends of what looked like ordinary telegraphic wires, terminating in those metal handles with which all who have experimented with the induction coil shock battery are familiar.

  The professor walked leisurely round the bell, inspecting the metallic coating minutely, as likewise the wires which projected through the sides. Having apparently satisfied himself of the fitness of the apparatus before him, he turned to Ashley and said:

  “I received your letter regarding the lady, and shall be happy to assist you, so far as I can, in your search for information, and perh
aps, in a still more hazardous experiment, if it becomes necessary, and if you have courage enough to undertake it The first step, however, will be to ascertain the lady’s present position and surroundings.”

  So saying the professor led the way to the glass bell, which he proceeded to raise from the floor, by means of a rope passing round a drum and through a pulley overhead. After raising it about four feet, he kept it in position by adjusting a ratchet on the drum, and, placing a chair upon the glass slab, requested Ashley to seat himself thereon. Ashley did so, and the professor then put into each of his hands one of the handles terminating the wires which ran through the side of the bell. These wires I now saw ran to the outer wall of the apartment, where they disappeared.

  “They are,” explained the professor, “merely private connections with our ordinary public telegraph wires. They are, however, under certain conditions, rendered peculiarly sensitive to currents which would be powerless to affect ordinary telegraphic instruments in any manner whatever.” Thus saying he loosened the ratchet on the drum, and proceeded to let the glass bell descend till it completely covered Ashley, enclosing him as if in a vase, its edges resting on the glass slab on which his chair was set.

  “There is, as you see,” explained the professor, in answer, as it were, to an unspoken idea, “no danger of asphyxiation, as the holes through which the side wires and the top rod pass, are by no means tight, this condition not being essential to the success of the experiment.”

  He then proceded to take cautiously from a glass jar at one side of the alcove, the end of a piece of thick rubber tubing, a wire at the end of which he attached to a hook on the metallic coating of a bell; and then, from a second glass jar in another corner, a similar piece of tubing, the end of which, by standing on a chair he connected with the end of the rod which projected upward from the apex of the bell. I noticed that these latter india-rubber-coated wires ran out into the street like the simple telegraph wires first mentioned. I noticed, too, that they looked peculiarly similar to the rubber-coated wires used for conveying the fluid which feeds the electric lights in streets and public buildings.