A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

‘Goodnight, sir,’ said the model man.

  The next words the model man opened his lips to speak were breathed into the night tube of the nearest doctor.

  ‘My master, Professor Boyd Thompson; could you come round at once, sir. I’m afraid it’s very serious.’

  It was half past six when the nearest doctor—Jones was his unimportant name—stooped over the lifeless body of the Professor.

  He shook his head as he stood up and looked round the private laboratory on whose floor the body lay.

  ‘His researches are over,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s dead. Been dead some hours. When did you find him?’

  ‘I went to call my master as usual,’ said Parker; ‘he rises at six, summer and winter, sir. He was not in his room, and the bed had not been slept in. So I came in here, sir. It is not unusual for my master to work all night when he has been very interested in his experiments, and then he likes his coffee at six.’

  ‘I see,’ said Doctor Jones. ‘Well, you’d better rouse the house and fetch his own doctor. It’s heart failure, of course, but I daresay he’d like to sign the certificate himself.’

  ‘Can nothing be done?’ said Parker, much affected.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dr Jones. ‘It’s the common lot. You’ll have to look out for another situation.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Parker; ‘he told me only last night what I was to do in case of anything happening to him. I wonder if he had any idea?’

  ‘Some premonition, perhaps,’ the doctor corrected.

  The funeral was a very quiet one. So the late Professor Boyd Thompson had decreed in his will. He had arranged all details. The body was to be clothed in flannel, placed in an open coffin covered only with a linen sheet, and laid in the family mausoleum, a moss-grown building in the midst of a little park which surrounded Boyd Grange, the birthplace of the Boyd Thompsons. A little property in Sussex it was. The Professor sometimes went there for weekends. He had left this property to Lucilla, with a last love-letter, in which he begged her to give his body the hospitality of the death-house, now hers with the rest of the estate. To Parker he left an annuity of two hundred pounds, on the condition that he should visit and enter the mausoleum once in every twenty-four hours for fourteen days after the funeral.

  To this end the late Professor’s solicitor decided that Parker had better reside at Boyd Grange for the said fortnight, and Parker, whose nerves seemed to be shaken, petitioned for company. This made easy the arrangement which the solicitor desired to make—of a witness to the carrying out by Parker of the provisions of the dead man’s will. The solicitor’s clerk was quite good company, and arm in arm with him Parker paid his first visit to the mausoleum. The little building stands in a glade of evergreen oaks. The trees are old and thick, and the narrow door is deep in shadow even on the sunniest day. Parker went to the mausoleum, peered through its square grating, but he did not go in. Instead, he listened, and his ears were full of silence.

  ‘He’s dead, right enough,’ he said, with a doubtful glance at his companion.

  ‘You ought to go in, oughtn’t you?’ said the solicitor’s clerk;

  ‘Go in yourself if you like, Mr Pollack,’ said Parker, suddenly angry; ‘anyone who likes can go in, but it won’t be me. If he was alive, it ‘ud be different. I’d have done anything for him. But I ain’t going in among all them dead and mouldering Thompsons. See? If we both say I did, it’ll be just the same as me doing it.’

  ‘So it will,’ said the solicitor’s clerk; ‘but where do I come in?’

  Parker explained to him where he came in, to their mutual consent.

  ‘Right you are,’ said the clerk; ‘on those terms I’m fly. And if we both say you did it, we needn’t come to the beastly place again,’ he added, shivering and glancing over his shoulder at the door with the grating.

  ‘No more we need,’ said Parker.

  Behind the bars of the narrow door lay deeper shadows than those of the ilexes outside. And in the blackest of the shadow lay a man whose every sense was intensified as though by a magic potion. For when the Professor swallowed the five variants of his great discovery, each acted as he had expected it to act. But the union of the five vehicles conveying the drug to the nerves, which served his five senses, had paralysed every muscle. His hearing, taste, touch, scent, and sight were intensified a thousandfold—as they had been in the individual experiments—but the man who felt all this exaggerated increase of sensation was powerless as a cat under kurali. He could not raise a finger, stir an eyelash. More, he could not breathe, nor did his body advise him of any need of breathing. And he had lain thus immobile and felt his body slowly grow cold, had heard in thunder the voices of Parker and the doctor, had felt the enormous hands of those who made his death-toilet, had smelt intolerably the camphor and lavender that they laid round him in the narrow, black bed; had tasted the mingled flavours of the drug and its five mediums; and, in an ecstasy of magnified sensation, had made the lonely train journey which coffins make, and known himself carried into the mausoleum and left there alone. And every sense was intensified, even his sense of time, so that it seemed to him that he had lain there for many years. And the effect of the drugs showed no sign of any diminution or reaction. Why had he not left directions for the injection of the antidote? It was one of those slips which wreck campaigns, cause the discovery of hidden crimes. It was a slip, and he had made it. He had thought of death, but in all the results he had anticipated death’s semblance had found no place. Well, he had made his bed, and he must lie on it. This narrow bed, whose scent of clean oak and French polish was distinct among the musty, intolerable odours of the charnel house.

  It was perhaps twenty hours that he had lain there, powerless, immobile, listening to the sounds of unexplained movements about him, when he felt with joy, almost like delirium, a faint quivering in the eyelids.

  They had closed his eyes, and till now, they had remained closed. Now, with an effort as of one who lifts a grave-stone, he raised his eyelids. They closed again quickly, for the roof of the vault, at which he gazed earnestly, was alive with monsters; spiders, earwigs, crawling beetles, and flies, far too small to have been perceived by normal eyes, spread giant forms over him. He closed his eyes and shuddered. It felt like a shudder, but no one who had stood beside him could have noted any movement.

  It was then that Parker came—and went.

  Professor Boyd Thompson heard Parker’s words, and lay listening to the thunder of Parker’s retreating feet. He tried to move—to call out. But he could not. He lay there helpless, and somehow he thought of the dark end of the laboratory, where the assistant before leaving had turned out the electric lights.

  He had nothing but his thoughts. He thought how he would lie there, and die there. The place was sequestered; no one passed that way. Parker had failed him, and the end was not hard to picture. He might recover all his faculties, might be able to get up, able to scream, to shout, to tear at the bars. The bars were strong, and Parker would not come again. Well, he would try to face with a decent bravery whatever had to be faced.

  Time, measureless, spread round. It seemed as though someone had stopped all the clocks in the world, as though he were not in time but in eternity. Only by the waxing and waning light he knew of the night and the day.

  His brain was weary with the effort to move, to speak, to cry out. He lay, informed with something like despair—or fortitude. And then Parker came again. And this time a key grated in the lock. The Professor noted with rapture that it sounded no louder than a key should sound, turned in a lock that was rusty. Nor was the voice other than he had been used to hear it, when he was man alive and Parker’s master. And –

  ‘You can go in, of course, if you wish it, miss,’ said Parker disapprovingly; ‘but it’s not what I should advise myself. For me it’s different,’ he added, on a sudden instinct of self-preservation; ‘I’ve got to go in. Every day for a fortnight,’ he added, pitying himself.

  ‘I will go in, thank you,’ said a vo
ice. ‘Yes, give me the candle, please. And you need not wait. I will lock the door when I come out.’ Thus the voice spoke. And the voice was Lucilla’s.

  In all his life the Professor had never feared death or its trappings. Neither its physical repulsiveness, nor the supernatural terrors which cling about it, had he either understood or tolerated. But now, in one little instant, he did understand.

  He heard Lucilla come in. A light held near him shone warm and red through his closed eyelids. And he knew that he had only to unclose those eyelids to see her face bending over him. And he could unclose them. Yet he would not. He lay there, still and straight in his coffin, and life swept through him in waves of returning power. Yet he lay like death. For he said, or something in him said:

  ‘She believes me dead. If I open my eyes it will be like a dead man looking at her. If I move it will be a dead man moving under her eyes. People have gone mad for less. Lie still, lie still,’ he told himself; ‘take any risks yourself. There must be none for her.’

  She had taken the candle away, set it down somewhere at a distance, and now she was kneeling beside him and her hand was under his head. He knew he could raise his arm and clasp her—and Parker would come back perhaps, when she did not return to the house, come back to find a man in grave-clothes, clasping a mad woman. He lay still. Then her kisses and tears fell on his face, and she murmured broken words of love and longing. But he lay still. At any cost he must lie still. Even at the cost of his own sanity, his own life. And the warmth of her hand under his head, her face against his, her kisses, her tears, set his blood flowing evenly and strongly. Her other arm lay on his breast, softly pressing over his heart. He would not move. He would be strong. If he were to be saved, it must be by some other way, not this.

  Suddenly tears and kisses ceased; her every breath seemed to have stopped with these. She had drawn away from him. She spoke. Her voice came from above him. She was standing up.

  ‘Arthur!’ she said. ‘Arthur!’ Then he opened his eyes, the narrowest chink. But he could not see her. Only he knew she was moving towards the door. There had been a new quality in her tone, a thrill of fear, or hope was it? or at least of uncertainty? Should he move; should he speak? He dared not. He knew too well the fear that the normal human being has of death and the grave, the fear transcending love, transcending reason. Her voice was further away now. She was by the door. She was leaving him. If he let her go, it was an end of hope for him. If he did not let her go, an end, perhaps, of reason, for her. No.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe . . . I believe you can hear me. I’m going to get a doctor. If you can speak, speak to me.’

  Her speaking ended, cut off short as a cord is cut by a knife. He did not speak. He lay in conscious, forced rigidity.

  ‘Speak if you can,’ she implored, ‘just one word!’

  Then he said, very faintly, very distinctly, in a voice that seemed to come from a great way off, ‘Lucilla!’

  And at the word she screamed aloud pitifully, and leaped for the entrance; and he heard the rustle of her crape in the narrow door. Then he opened his eyes wide, and raised himself on his elbow. Very weak he was, and trembling exceedingly. To his ears her scream held the note of madness. Vainly he had refrained. Selfishly he had yielded. The cold band of a mortal faintness clutched at his heart.

  ‘I don’t want to live now,’ he told himself, and fell back in the straight bed.

  Her arms were round him.

  ‘I’m going to get help,’ she said, her lips to his ear; ‘brandy and things. Only I came back. I didn’t want you to think I was frightened. Oh, my dear! Thank God, thank God!’ He felt her kisses even through the swooning mist that swirled about him. Had she really fled in terror? He never knew. He knew that she had come back to him.

  That is the real, true, and authentic narrative of the events which caused Professor Boyd Thompson to abandon a brilliant career, to promise anything that Lucilla might demand, and to devote himself entirely to a gentlemanly and unprofitable farming, and to his wife. From the point of view of the scientific world it is a sad ending to much promise, but at any rate there are two happy people hand in hand at the story’s ending.

  There is no doubt that for several years Professor Boyd Thompson had had enough of science, and, by a natural revulsion, flung himself into the full tide of commonplace sentiment. But genius, like youth, cannot be denied. And I, for one, am doubtful whether the Professor’s renunciation of research will be a lasting one. Already I have heard whispers of a laboratory which is being built on the house, beyond the billiard-room.

  But I am inclined to believe the rumours which assert that, for the future, his research will take the form of extending paths already well trodden; that he will refrain from experiments with unknown drugs, and those dreadful researches which tend to merge the chemist and biologist in the alchemist and the magician. And he certainly does not intend to experiment further on the nerves of any living thing, even his own. The Professor had already done enough work to make the reputation of half-a-dozen ordinary scientists. He may be pardoned if he rests on his laurels, entwining them, to some extent, with roses.

  The bottle containing the drug from the South Seas was knocked down on the day of his death and swept up in bits by the laboratory boy. It is a curious fact that the Professor has wholly forgotten the formulae of his experiment, which so nearly was his last. This is a great satisfaction to his wife, and possibly to the Professor. But of this I cannot be sure; the scientific spirit survives much.

  To the unscientific reader the strangest part of this story will perhaps be the fact that Parker is still with his old master, a wonderful example of the perfect butler. Professor Boyd Thompson was able to forgive Parker because he understood him. And he learned to understand Parker in those moments of agony, when his keen intellect and his awakened heart taught him, through his love for Lucilla, the depth of that gulf of fear which lies between the quick and the dead.

  THE NEW HUMANS

  B. Vallance

  (A letter explaining how the strange manuscript came to be discovered.)

  DEAR BERTRAM,

  You remember I promised in my last letter to send you that extraordinary diary, which was found by one of the natives in the Sevilla Pass, just before we came on to the 100 miles of desert, which gave me such a doing. I have managed to decipher pretty nearly the whole of it, although the writing is very faint and almost illegible in places.

  I wish now I had read it on the spot, as I suspect the poor devil who wrote it must have died very shortly afterwards, and his bones are probably whitening in the desert near by. I might have discovered something from his clothes, if I had found him.

  I inclose my copy of the manuscript. You know the old tag about “there being more things in heaven and on earth.” You can believe what you like.

  Yours,

  C.

  (The strange manuscript found in the Sevilla Pass.)

  I no longer wonder at the fear expressed by the Indians of this country. Anyone, less strong-minded than myself, would have become insane after seeing and experiencing what I have. If it were not that I am stranded here in this forsaken spot I should almost think I had dreamed a kind of mad dream.

  If help does not reach me by to-morrow I shall start across the desert, but first I will write an account of what has happened and leave it here on the track, where surely some traveller will spy it out. I cannot give definite particulars of the locality of No-man’sland. The Adapters obliterated my memory on that point. All I can say is that I have been climbing and descending for what seems years. I have lost all sense of time and space.

  I had been travelling in Uganda for several months, when the accident occurred. My native guides had resolutely refused to accompany me any further, saying that I was too near the Devils’ Country. Consequently I had gone on alone, leaving them to guard the camp. I had ten days’ provisions with me, meaning to push on for five days and then return. On the fourth day I had reach
ed a great altitude. It was bitterly cold and I was greatly fatigued. I determined, however, to reach the top of the range before turning back. There was a short, steep ascent before me, which meant hard climbing. About halfway up I stuck my alpenstock into a cleft on the rock, intending to use it as a lever to mount to the top of a huge boulder, resting on the side of a narrow path with a sheer descent to the valley. Just as I put my weight on the staff, my foot slipped; the alpenstock broke off short in my hand and I rolled sideways off the track. I clutched wildly at a huge cactus which tore the skin from my fingers. Then came a series of fearful bumps, followed by a violent blow in the back, whereat I lost consciousness.

  When I opened my eyes I was lying on what I afterwards knew to be an operating table in a laboratory, but quite different to those in use in the United States. I was, in fact, suspended from underneath a platform, held there by a force which I can only describe as the complement of the action of gravity. A large and kindly face was looking gravely at me, out of what I first took to be the end of a barrel.

  “So you have regained your normality,” it said smilingly.

  “Where am I?” I asked. “And what in Heaven’s name are you?”

  “I am the Chief Adapter,” said the face. “You have just been revivified by our System No. 37.”

  “I fell down a precipice,” I began.

  “You did—and fractured your cervical vertebra; and both legs. I had almost given you up, owing to having inadvertently misplaced your femoral artery; but you are quite recovered now, and your nervous system has been carefully restored by the Patticoe treatment.”

  While the face was speaking, I had been staring at it with ever increasing bewilderment. Its words and appearance, together with my own situation—hanging up against a platform like a fly on a ceiling—caused a buzzing in my head. This he no doubt perceived, for an arm, which I had not seen before, shot out from the barrel and touched a button at my side. Whereupon the table turned noiselessly over with me upon it.