A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Now she parts the curtain. She takes the cord. It is red, just like the cord in my window. She ties a noose and hangs the cord on the hook in the window cross—bar.

  She sits down and smiles.

  No. Fear is no longer what I feel. Rather, it is a sort of oppressive terror which I would not want to avoid for anything in the world. Its grip is irresistible, profoundly cruel, and voluptuous in its attraction.

  I could go to the window, and do what she wants me to do, but I wait. I struggle. I resist though I feel a mounting fascination that becomes more intense each minute.

  Here I am once more. Rashly, I went to the window where I did what Clarimonda wanted. I took the cord, tied a noose, and hung it on the hook . . .

  Now, I want to see nothing else-except to stare at this paper. Because if I look. I know what she will do . . . now . . . at the sixth hour of the last day of the week. If I see her, I will have to do what she wants. Have to . . .

  I won’t see her . . .

  I laugh. Loudly. No. I’m not laughing. Something is laughing in me, and I know why. It is because of my . . . I won’t . . .

  I won’t, and yet I know very well that I have to . . . have to look at her. I must . . . must . . . and then . . . all that follows.

  If I still wait, it is only to prolong this exquisite torture. Yes, that’s it. This breathless anguish is my supreme delight. I write quickly, quickly . . . just so I can continue to sit here; so I can attenuate these seconds of pain.

  Again, terror. Again. I know that I will look toward her. That I will stand up. That I will hang myself.

  That doesn’t frighten me. That is beautiful . . . even precious.

  There is something else. What will happen afterwards? I don’t know, but since my torment is so delicious. I feel . . . feel that something horrible must follow.

  Think . . . think . . . Write something. Anything at all . . . to keep from looking toward her . . .

  My name . . . Richard Bracquemont. Richard Bracquemont . . . Richard Bracquemont . . .

  Richard . . .

  I can’t . . . go on. I must . . . no . . . no . . . must look at her . . . Richard Bracquemont . . . no . . . no more . . . Richard . . . Richard Bracque—

  The inspector of the ninth precinct, after repeated and vain efforts to telephone Richard, arrived at the Hotel Stevens at 6:05. He found the body of the student Richard Bracquemont hanging from the cross-bar of the window in room #7, in the same position as each of his three predecessors.

  The expression on the student’s face, however, was different, reflecting an appalling fear.

  Bracquemont’s eyes were wide open and bulging from their sockets. His lips were drawn into a rictus, and his jaws were clamped together. A huge black spider whose body was dotted with purple spots lay crushed and nearly bitten in two between his teeth.

  On the table, there lay the student’s journal. The inspector read it and went immediately to investigate the house across the street. What he learned was that the second floor of that building had not been lived in for many months.

  THE EARTHQUAKE OF THE YEAR 2300

  Ivan Strannik

  TIME, 2300 A.D.

  SCENE, a fifty-first story room bedecked with flowers. Telephones and a score of similar contrivances are attached to the walls. A woman, three hundred years of age but looking not more than sixty, is seated in an arm chair, musing. There is a knock at the window. She does not stir. There is another knock.

  A VOICE—Open in the name of the Civic Council!

  The aged woman touches an electric button; the window opens wide. A young woman enters with a whirr of her long, white wings. She alights in the middle of the room, her wings still spread. Pressing with her hand an apparatus resembling a jeweled corselet which adorns her bosom, she causes the wings to close up and fall in graceful lines about her body.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Madame, I am the Inspectress of Departures. Like everyone in this city, you have been warned by the Council that an earthquake is imminent. All the citizens have been ordered to withdraw while Paris folds over on its hinges and waits, hugging the ground, for the perturbed earth to grow calm. All the other rooms in this building are deserted; the occupants have transported elsewhere the treasures which minister to human life and joy. And you remain here motionless. For what are you waiting? Today is to witness a great triumph of science. The earth will quake; but science has foreseen it, and the disturbance will pass without doing any damage to industry and without destroying a single life.

  By what inconceivable inadvertence did you hoist over your window the signal of an individual departure, when your great age should have induced you to take the aerial omnibus? Besides, you show no signs of moving. You do not stir. Time is passing. I am afraid that even with a strong dose of radiomic acid you can hardly manipulate your wings well enough to fly alone out of the city to a region unthreatened by the seismic disturbances. Strange, strange! After an existence of three hundred years, when it is no longer possible for you to die except by carelessness, you risk your life in this fashion!

  THE AGED WOMAN—I have not been careless. I intentionally put out a false signal.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—What?

  THE AGED WOMAN—I do not care to go away; that is all.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Do you mean that you are mocking the Civic Council? You are not free to quit life in this manner!

  THE AGED WOMAN—Leave me! Leave me, old woman that I am!

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—I know that you are three hundred years old. You are a survival from that barbarous epoch which propriety forbids us to mention. Nevertheless, persons of your age, like the rest of us, belong to the city. Your longevity is an important phenomenon which our scientists are utilizing. You are a sort of perpetual experiment by which science profits. Metchnikoff is still living at 454 years of age. He applied to himself, before you, the system now obligatory, of which he was the inventor. The Civic Council reposes confidence in all the citizens whose intellectual faculties are intact, and it has reposed confidence in you. But obedience on the part of the individual, a complete submission to the laws of the general organism, is necessary and logical. Rebellion is a crime, because it is an absurdity. I am going to change your signal, madame: you will go in the balloon which the Council has assigned to “the aged.” Otherwise, I shall be obliged to report you.

  THE AGED WOMAN—Impossible! It is too late: you would not have time to go to the Council Chamber, and it is useless for you to try to manipulate the electric signals. I have cut the wires which connect me with the rest of the city, the wires which condemned me to the surveillance and despotism of this automatic society. This room in which we are, is now isolated—a forgotten island in the tumultuous sea of life. I have broken the motor, I have put everything out of order, and I have become again, by my own will, a creature free to declare myself weary, and free to die.

  The young woman slowly makes a tour of the room, testing the various pieces of apparatus, all of which fail to work. Her features are drawn with anger.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—This is absurd! Your dwelling instead of being, for the Council and its agents, luminous with your acts, sonorous with your thoughts, is now nothing but a black box in which science is powerless. Did not the Inspector of Reason call yesterday to give you the prescribed potion which allays iniosyncrasies, stifles capricious fancies, and produces civic unanimity? You must have been neglected and it is to this omission that the scandal of an individual in revolt is due.

  THE AGED WOMAN—No, no, the inspector came. But, crafty as we old people become through experience, I managed to outwit him.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Horrible! I shall fly to the public telephone, I shall summon help. You must be saved in spite of yourself!

  THE AGED WOMAN—Too late! Look at this watch. In a few minutes—twelve exactly, if the computations of your scientists are correct—the earth will quake. The city is thoroughly prepared, it is true, to meet the dangers of this shock. But you are isolated from everything here, and
the only thing left for you to do, if you prize your life, is to flee. The garrulous machines, the tattling conduits, the indiscreet mirrors are now useless.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—I desire to snatch you from the jaws of death!

  THE AGED WOMAN—Can it be that you pity me?

  THE YOUNG WOMAN, blushing—Pity!

  THE AGED WOMAN—Yes, I know the word is an impropriety. It shocks you. It was a sublime word, once. You are so well trained, so carefully endowed and equipped, that neither kindness nor charity have any excuse for existence among you; the more you are dependent on one another, the more you are strangers to one another. Pity, courtesy, and love were of my time!

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Love exists yet, madam. Love has survived your youth. It is one of the joys of our happy city. Yesterday, at the first glimmer of dawn, I flew away with great sweeps of my white wings through the imponderable air. In and out of the free spaces, I floated. I came to the shore of the sea and alighted on a cliff. I watched the white gulls at play. I felt myself as puissant and supple as they. A man had followed my capricious flight, a man with laughing eyes and iridescent wings. I let him love me.

  THE AGED WOMAN—Who was he?

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—What matters his name? Does he know mine?

  THE AGED WOMAN—If, long ago—very, very long ago—my daughter had spoken as you have just spoken, I should have wished her dead.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Yes, long ago; in the time when there were rich and poor, when beauty was not bestowed equally on all beings, when women were slaves, docile under the brutality of their husbands, but treacherous and ready to bite the hand that mastered them.

  THE AGED WOMAN—Ready to bind up the wounds, you mean.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Ridiculous task! It was prevention that was needed, not bandaging. Today, everything is sane and strong; everything is beautiful. The prejudice of modesty has disappeared along with other human follies.

  THE AGED WOMAN—My daughter was modest.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Your daughter? A child of your bearing? And you took care of her? How clumsy your old-fashioned ways were! How much time and strength and pleasure you wasted! At thirty, like all the other women of this city, I shall accomplish my maternal service. I shall have two admirable children, first a son and then a daughter, who will be brought into the world in accordance with the latest dictates of science. I shall have done my duty to society with patience and art. Then I shall return to my delicious and magnificent existence, my individual and varied existence, changing according to my caprice, and yet ordered and perfect; to music and dancing, to flights through the empyrean, to races on golden skates over marble courses, to love, to pride in myself!

  THE AGED WOMAN—But the children, the little children?

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—Alas! in this room, in which, by your perfidious cunning, we are cut off from the community, your intellect is weakening. Let me give you a revivifying pill. The children? Why, I shall do ten minutes of easy work every day in the public nursery where are reared all the children, mine and those of the others. Why! The pill-box is empty!

  THE AGED WOMAN—Yes, it is empty. I know it.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN, in a tone of anguish—Oh what shall I do? Where can I find help? My strength too is ebbing. And your hair is whitening! The wrinkles that seam your face increase and deepen! Help me, madam! I am going to faint! The city is empty now: I shall find nothing to restore me! By this time I should be far from here. My wings are leaden. Help me; find me the stimulant which will carry me on my way! We are alone, abandoned, like two savages, far away from our tutelary science! (She looks out of the window.) Ah I hear the voice of human beings. But they are black as crows. They are flying toward us.

  THE AGED WOMAN—They are not coming to succor you whom the mere mention of pity has just offended! It is to me that these black-winged beings are coming—my husband, my daughter and my son.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—A family! What! You have kept up your family life in this city of new civilization, here where each lives for himself and for all but not for a certain few? Great care was taken to disperse the families when the city was organized into a modern collectivity; but you, crafty as human beings were of yore, gathered together again and restored your family in violation of the law. Ignoble conspiracy! In this city where there are no more secret thoughts, you have clung to the old hypocrisy. What do you propose to do? To flee together, to escape from us and to resume your ancient existence, far away in a land of obscurantism?

  Three black-winged creatures enter by the window. The oldest of them, a man of apparently about seventy years, goes quickly forward and takes the old woman in his arms. The others gather around them.

  THE OLD MAN—Enough of this life without pain, without fatigue, and without kindness! Since our useless hearts are dead, since no one now cares for tenderness and the blessing of tears, since no suffering demands our care, we desire only to escape from the empire of force; we wish to die!

  A slight shock shakes the room.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN—But I do not wish to die!

  The old woman rises to her feet; she, also, has big, black wings.

  THE AGED WOMAN—The city is going to fold over; these bold houses are going to sink into the streets of the old city whence this one emerged. The springs of the colossal machine are about to be set in operation. To the young woman. Is no white gull, no beautiful bird, coming to save you?

  THE OLD MAN—Let us save her! In dying, let us show pity! Self-forgetfulness in the presence of misfortune shall glorify our death. Let us be that which we were long, long ago, when, in our feeble bosoms, veritable hearts did beat. Just now we were eager to die without pain; we had arranged with selfish craft a secret flight to the refuge where sleep our despised ancestors; and we had each of us hidden in a ring a single pill which would supply us with sufficient force to float thither and to alight gently with our pinions spread. Young woman, you who desire to live, take them all. They will enable you to rejoin the other inhabitants of this city. We shall be broken in pieces in the terrible cataclysm, but we shall die like heroes of that forgotten time when heroism was not despised!

  They hand the young woman their pills. She swallows them eagerly. Her strength returns. She tries her wings, spreads them and dies away.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN, departing—Lunatics unfit to live have given me back to life!

  She disappears. The four blackwinged creatures shelter one another with their feebly-fluttering wings. There is a general crash. Above the city, folded upon itself like piles of merchandise in a warehouse, emerge the two towers of Notre-Dame.

  THE FIVE SENSES

  Edith Nesbit

  PROFESSOR BOYD THOMPSON’S services to the cause of science are usually spoken of as inestimable, and so indeed they probably are, since in science, as in the rest of life, one thing leads to another, and you never know where anything is going to stop. At any rate, inestimable or not, they are world-renowned, and he with them. The discoveries which he gave to his time are a matter of common knowledge among biological experts, and the sudden ending of his experimental activities caused a few days’ wonder in even lay circles. Quite unintelligent people told each other that it seemed a pity, and persons on omnibuses exchanged commonplaces starred with his name.

  But the real meaning and cause of that ending have been studiously hidden, as well as the events which immediately preceded it. A veil has been drawn over all the things that people would have liked to know, and it is only now that circumstances so arrange themselves as to make it possible to tell the whole story. I propose to avail myself of this possibility.

  It will serve no purpose for me to explain how the necessary knowledge came into my possession; but I will say that the story was only in part pieced together by me. Another hand is responsible for much of the detail and for a certain occasional emotionalism which is, I believe, wholly foreign to my own style. In my original statement of the following facts I dealt fully, as I am, I may say without immodesty, qualified to do, with all the
scientific points of the narrative. But these details were judged, unwisely as I think, to be needless to the expert, and unintelligible to the ordinary reader, and have therefore been struck out; the merest hints have been left as necessary links in the story. This appears to me to destroy most of its interest, but I admit that the elisions are perhaps justified. I have no desire to assist or encourage callow students in such experiments as those by which Professor Boyd Thompson brought his scientific career to an end.

  Incredible as it may appear, Professor Boyd Thompson was once a little boy who wore white embroidered frocks and blue sashes; in that state he caught flies and pulled off their wings to find out how they flew. He did not find out, and Lucilla, his little girl-cousin, also in white frocks, cried over the dead, dismembered flies, and buried them in little paper coffins. Later, he wore a holland blouse with a belt of leather, and watched the development of tadpoles in a tin bath in the stable yard. A microscope was, on his eighth birthday, presented to him by an affluent uncle. The uncle showed him how to surprise the secrets of a drop of pond water, which, limpid to the eye, confessed under the microscope to a whole cosmogony of strenuous and undesirable careers. At the age of ten, Arthur Boyd Thompson was sent to a private school, its Headmaster an acolyte of Science, who esteemed himself to be a high priest of Huxley and Tyndal, a devotee of Darwin. Thence to the choice of medicine as a profession was, when the choice was insisted on by the elder Boyd Thompson, a short, plain step. Inorganic chemistry failed to charm, and under the cloak of Medicine and Surgery the growing fever of scientific curiosity could be sated on bodies other than the cloak-wearer’s. He became a medical student and an enthusiast for vivisection.

  The bow of Apollo was not always bent. In a rest-interval, the summer vacation, to be exact, he met again the cousin—second, once removed—Lucilla, and loved her. They were betrothed. It was a long, bright summer full of sunshine, garden-parties, picnics, archery—a decaying amusement—and croquet, then coming to its own. He exulted in the distinction already crescent in his career, but some half-formed wholly unconscious desire to shine with increased lustre in the eyes of the beloved caused him to invite, for the holiday’s ultimate week, a fellow student, one who knew and could testify to the quality of the laurels already encircling the head of the young scientist. The friend came, testified, and in a vibrating interview under the lime-trees of Lucilla’s people’s garden, Mr Boyd Thompson learned that Lucilla never could, never would, love or marry a vivisectionist.