The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Mike Ashley

  “Now come and see the Leyden jar mothers,” said Dr. Mundson. “We do not wait for the child to be born to start our work.”

  He took Northwood to a laboratory crowded with strange apparatus, where young men and women worked. Northwood knew instantly that these people, although unusually handsome and strong, were not of Adam’s generation. None of them had the look of newness which marked those who had grown up under the Life Ray.

  “They are the perfect couples whom I combed the world to find,” said the scientist. “From their eugenic marriages sprang the first children that passed through the laboratory. I had hoped,” he hesitated and looked sideways at Northwood, “I had dreamed of having the children of you and Athalia to help strengthen the New Race.”

  A wave of sudden disgust passed over Northwood.

  “Thanks,” he said tartly. “When I marry Athalia, I intend to have an old-fashioned home and a Black Age family. I don’t relish having my children turned into—experiments.”

  “But wait until you see all the wonders of the laboratory! That is why I am showing you all this.”

  Northwood drew his handkerchief and mopped his brow. “It sickens me, Doctor! The more I see, the more pity I have for Adam—and the less I blame him for his rebellion and his desire to kill and to rule. Heavens! What a terrible thing you have done, experimenting with human life.”

  “Nonsense! Can you say that all life—all matter—is not the result of scientific experiment? Can you?” His black gaze made Northwood uncomfortable. “Buck up, young friend, for now I am going to show you a marvelous improvement on Nature’s bungling ways—the Leyden jar mother.” He raised his voice and called, “Lilith!”

  The woman whom they had met on the field came forward.

  “May we take a peep at Lona’s twins?” asked the scientist.

  “They are about ready to go to the growing dome, are they not?”

  “In five more minutes,” said the woman. “Come see.”

  She lifted one of the black velvet curtains that lined an entire side of the laboratory and thereby disclosed a globular jar of glass and metal, connected by wires to a dynamo. Above the jar was a Life Ray projector. Lilith slid aside a metal portion of the jar, disclosing through the glass underneath the squirming, kicking body of a baby, resting on a bed of soft, spongy substance, to which it was connected by the navel cord.

  “The Leyden jar mother,” said Dr. Mundson. “It is the dream of us scientists realized. The human mother’s body does nothing but nourish and protect her unborn child, a job which science can do better. And so, in New Eden, we take the young embryo and place it in the Leyden jar mother, where the Life Ray, electricity, and chemical food shortens the period of gestation to a few days.”

  At that moment a bell under the Leyden jar began to ring. Dr. Mundson uncovered the jar and lifted out the child, a beautiful, perfectly formed boy, who began to cry lustily.

  “Here is one baby who’ll never be kissed,” he said. “He’ll be nourished chemically, and, at the end of the week, will no longer be a baby. If you are patient, you can actually see the processes of development taking place under the Life Ray, for babies develop very fast.”

  Northwood buried his face in his hands. “Lord! This is awful. No childhood; no mother to mould his mind! No parents to watch over him, to give him their tender care!”

  “Awful, fiddlesticks! Come see how children get their education, how they learn to use their hands and feet so they need not pass through the awkwardness of childhood.”

  He led Northwood to a magnificent building whose façade of white marble was as simply beautiful as a Greek temple. The side walls, built almost entirely of glass, permitted the synthetic sunshine to sweep from end to end. They first entered a library, where youths and young girls poured over books of all kinds. Their manner of reading mystified Northwood. With a single sweep of the eye, they seemed to devour a page, and then turned to the next. He stepped closer to peer over the shoulder of a beautiful girl. She was reading “Euclid’s Elements of Geometry,” in Latin, and she turned the pages as swiftly as the other girl occupying her table, who was devouring “Paradise Lost.”

  Dr. Mundson whispered to him: “If you do not believe that Ruth here is getting her Euclid, which she probably never saw before today, examine her from the book; that is, if you are a good enough Latin scholar.”

  Ruth stopped her reading to talk to him, and, in a few minutes, had completely dumbfounded him with her pedantic replies, which fell from lips as luscious and unformed as an infant’s.

  “Now,” said Dr. Mundson, “test Rachael on her Milton. As far as she has read, she should not misquote a line, and her comments will probably prove her scholarly appreciation of Milton.”

  Word for word, Rachael was able to give him “Paradise Lost” from memory, except the last four pages, which she had not read. Then, taking the book from him, she swept her eyes over these pages, returned the book to him, and quoted copiously and correctly.

  Dr. Mundson gloated triumphantly over his astonishment.

  “There, my friend. Could you now be satisfied with old-fashioned children who spend long, expensive years in getting an education? Of course, your children will not have the perfect brains of these, yet, developed under the Life Ray, they should have splendid mentality.

  “These children, through selective breeding, have brains that make everlasting records instantly. A page in a book, once seen, is indelibly retained by them, and understood. The same is true of a lecture, of an explanation given by a teacher, of even idle conversation. Any man or woman in this room should be able to repeat the most trivial conversation days old.”

  “But what of the arts, Dr. Mundson? Surely even your super-men and women cannot instantly learn to paint a masterpiece or to guide their fingers and their brains through the intricacies of a difficult musical composition.”

  “No?” His dark eyes glowed. “Come see!”

  Before they entered another wing of the building, they heard a violin being played masterfully.

  Dr. Mundson paused at the door.

  “So that you may understand what you shall see, let me remind you that the nerve impulses and the coordinating means in the human body are purely electrical. The world has not yet accepted my theory, but it will. Under superman’s system of education, the instantaneous records made on the brain give immediate skill to the acting parts of the body. Accordingly, musicians are made over night.”

  He threw open the door. Under a Life Ray projector, a beautiful, Juno-esque woman was playing a violin. Facing her, and with eyes fastened to hers, stood a young man, whose arms and slender fingers mimicked every motion she made. Presently she stopped playing and handed the violin to him. In her own masterly manner, he repeated the score she had played.

  “That is Eve,” whispered Dr. Mundson. “I had selected her as Adam’s wife. But he does not want her, the most brilliant woman of the New Race.”

  Northwood gave the woman an appraising look. “Who wants a perfect woman? I don’t blame Adam for preferring Athalia. But how is she teaching her pupil?”

  “Through thought vibration, which these perfect people have developed until they can record permanently the radioactive waves of the brains of others.”

  Eve turned, caught Northwood’s eyes in her magnetic blue gaze, and smiled as only a goddess can smile upon a mortal she has marked as her own. She came toward him with outflung hands.

  “So you have come!” Her vibrant contralto voice, like Adam’s, held the birdlike, broken tremulo of a young child’s. “I have been waiting for you, John Northwood.”

  Her eyes, as blue and icy as Adam’s, lingered long on him, until he flinched from their steely magnetism. She slipped her arm through his and drew him gently but firmly from the room, while Dr. Mundson stood gaping after them.

  They were on a flagged terrace arched with roses of gigantic size, which sent forth billows of sensuous fragrance. Eve led him to a white marble seat piled with silk cushions,
on which she reclined her superb body, while she regarded him from narrowed lids.

  “I saw your picture that he televisioned to Athalia,” she said. “What a botch Dr. Mundson has made of his mating.” Her laugh rippled like falling water. “I want you, John Northwood!”

  Northwood started and blushed furiously. Smile dimples broke around her red, humid lips.

  “Ah, you’re old-fashioned!”

  Her large, beautiful hand, fleshed more tenderly than any woman’s hand he had ever seen, went out to him appealingly. “I can bring you amorous delight that your Athalia never could offer in her few years of youth. And I’ll never grow old, John Northwood.”

  She came closer until he could feel the fragrant warmth of her tawny, ribbon bound hair pulse against his face. In sudden panic he drew back.

  “But I am pledged to Athalia!” tumbled from him. “It is all a dreadful mistake, Eve. You and Adam were created for each other.”

  “Hush!” The lightning that flashed from her blue eyes changed her from seductress to angry goddess. “Created for each other! Who wants a made-to-measure lover?”

  The luscious lips trembled slightly, and into the vivid eyes crept a suspicion of moisture. Eternal Eve’s weapons! Northwood’s handsome face relaxed with pity.

  “I want you, John Northwood,” she continued shamelessly.

  “Our love will be sublime.” She leaned heavily against him, and her lips were like a blood red flower pressed against white satin. “Come, beloved, kiss me!”

  Northwood gasped and turned his head. “Don’t, Eve!”

  “But a kiss from me will set you apart from all your generation, John Northwood, and you shall understand what no man of the Black Age could possibly fathom.”

  Her hair had partly fallen from its ribbon bandage and poured its fragrant gold against his shoulder.

  “For God’s sake, don’t tempt me!” he groaned. “What do you mean?”

  “That mental and physical and spiritual contact with me will temporarily give you, a three-dimension creature, the power of the new sense, which your race will not have for fifty thousand years.”

  White-lipped and trembling, he demanded: “Explain!”

  Eve smiled. “Have you not guessed that Adam has developed an additional sense? You’ve seen him vanish. He and I have the sixth sense of Time Perception—the new sense which enables us to penetrate what you of the Black Age call the Fourth Dimension. Even you whose mentalities are framed by three dimensions have this sixth sense instinct. Your very religion is based on it, for you believe that in another life you shall step into Time, or, as you call it, eternity.” She leaned closer so that her hair brushed his cheek. “What is eternity, John Northwood? Is it not keeping forever ahead of the Destroyer? The future is eternal, for it is never reached. Adam and I, through our new sense which comprehends Time and Space, can vanish by stepping a few seconds into the future, the Fourth Dimension of Space. Death can never reach us, not even accidental death, unless that which causes death could also slip into the future, which is not yet possible.”

  “But if the Fourth Dimension is future Time, why can one in the third dimension feel the touch of an unseen presence in the Fourth Dimension—hear his voice, even?”

  “Thought vibration. The touch is not really felt nor the voice heard: they are only imagined. The radioactive waves of the brain of even you Black Age people are swift enough to bridge Space and Time. And it is the mind that carries us beyond the third dimension.”

  Her red mouth reached closer to him, her blue eyes touched hidden forces that slept in remote cells of his being. “You are going into Eternal Time, John Northwood, Eternity without beginning or end. You understand? You feel it? Comprehend it? Now for the contact—kiss me!”

  Northwood had seen Athalia vanish under Adam’s kiss. Suddenly, in one mad burst of understanding, he leaned over to his magnificent temptress.

  For a split second he felt the sweet pressure of baby-soft lips, and then the atoms of his body seemed to fly asunder. Black chaos held him for a frightful moment before he felt sanity return.

  He was back on the terrace again, with Eve by his side. They were standing now. The world about him looked the same, yet there was a subtle change in everything.

  Eve laughed softly. “It is puzzling, isn’t it? You’re seeing everything as in a mirror. What was left before is now right. Only you and I are real. All else is but a vision, a dream. For now, you and I are existing one minute in future time, or, more simply, we are in the Fourth Dimension. To everything in the third dimension, we are invisible. Let me show you that Dr. Mundson cannot see you.”

  They went back to the room beyond the terrace. Dr. Mundson was not present.

  “There he goes down the jungle path,” said Eve, looking out a window. She laughed. “Poor old fellow. The children of his genius are worrying him.”

  They were standing in the recess formed by a bay window. Eve picked up his hand and laid it against her face, giving him the full, blasting glory of her smiling blue eyes.

  Northwood, looking away miserably, uttered a low cry. Coming over the field beyond were Adam and Athalia. By the trimming on the blue dress she wore, he could see that she was still in the Fourth Dimension, for he did not see her as a mirror image.

  A look of fear leaped to Eve’s face. She clutched Northwood’s arm, trembling.

  “I don’t want Adam to see that I have passed you beyond,” she gasped. “We are existing but one minute in the future. Always Adam and I have feared to pass too far beyond the sweetness of reality. But now, so that Adam may not see us, we shall step five minutes into what-is-yet-to-be. And even he, with all his power, cannot see into a future that is more distant than that in which he exists.”

  She raised her humid lips to his. “Come, beloved.”

  Northwood kissed her. Again came the moment of confusion, of the awful vacancy that was like death, and then he found himself and Eve in the laboratory, following Adam and Athalia down a long corridor. Athalia was crying and pleading frantically with Adam. Once she stopped and threw herself at his feet in a gesture of dramatic supplication, arms outflung, streaming eyes wide open with fear.

  Adam stooped and lifted her gently and continued on his way, supporting her against his side.

  Eve dug her fingers into Northwood’s arm. Horror contorted her face, horror mixed with rage.

  “My mind hears what he is saying, understands the vile plan he has made, John Northwood. He is on his way to his laboratory to destroy not only you and most of these in New Eden, but me as well. He wants only Athalia.”

  Striding forward like an avenging goddess, she pulled Northwood after her.

  “Hurry!” she whispered. “Remember, you and I are five minutes in the future, and Adam is only one. We are witnessing what will occur four minutes from now. We yet have time to reach the laboratory before him and be ready for him when he enters. And because he will have to go back to Present Time to do his work of destruction, I will be able to destroy him. Ah!”

  Fierce joy burned in her flashing blue eyes, and her slender nostrils quivered delicately. Northwood, peeping at her in horror, knew that no mercy could be expected of her. And when she stopped at a certain door and inserted a key, he remembered Athalia. What if she should enter with Adam in Present Time?

  They were inside Adam’s laboratory, a huge apartment filled with queer apparatus and cages of live animals. The room was a strange paradox. Part of the equipment, the walls, and the floor was glistening with newness, and part was mouldering with extreme age. The powers of disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring certain spots of the room. Here, in the midst of bright marble, was a section of wall that seemed as old as the pyramids. The surface of the stone had an appalling mouldiness, as though it had been lifted from an ancient graveyard where it had lain in the festering ground for unwholesome centuries.

  Between cracks in this stained and decayed section of stone grew fetid moss that quivered with the
microscopic organisms that infest age-rotten places. Sections of the flooring and woodwork also reeked with mustiness. In one dark, webby corner of the room lay a pile of bleached bones, still tinted with the ghastly grays and pinks of putrefaction. Northwood, overwhelmingly nauseated, withdrew his eyes from the bones, only to see, in another corner, a pile of worm-eaten clothing that lay on the floor in the outline of a man.

  Faint with the reek of ancient mustiness, Northwood retreated to the door, dizzy and staggering.

  “It sickens you,” said Eve, “and it sickens me also, for death and decay are not pleasant. Yet Nature, left to herself, reduces all to this. Every grave that has yawned to receive its prey hides corruption no less shocking. Nature’s forces of creation and destruction forever work in partnership. Never satisfied with her composition, she destroys and starts again, building, building towards the ultimate of perfection. Thus, it is natural that if Dr. Mundson isolated the Life Ray, Nature’s supreme force of compensation, isolation of the Death Ray should closely follow. Adam, thirsting for power, has succeeded. A few sweeps of his unholy ray of decomposition will undo all Dr. Mundson’s work in this valley and reduce it to a stinking holocaust of destruction. And the time for his striking has come!”

  She seized his face and drew it toward her. “Quick!” she said. “We’ll have to go back to the third dimension. I could leave you safe in the fourth, but if anything should happen to me, you would be stranded forever in future time.”

  She kissed his lips. In a moment, he was back in the old familiar world, where right is right and left is left. Again the subtle change wrought by Eve’s magic lips had taken place.

  Eve went to a machine standing in a corner of the room. “Come here and get behind me, John Northwood. I want to test it before he enters.”

  Northwood stood behind her shoulder.

  “Now watch!” she ordered. “I shall turn it on one of those cages of guinea pigs over there.”

  She swung the projector around, pointed it at the cage of small, squealing animals, and threw a lever. Instantly a cone of black mephitis shot forth, a loathsome, bituminous stream of putrefaction that reeked of the grave and the cesspool, of the utmost reaches of decay before the dust accepts the disintegrated atoms. The first touch of seething, pitchy destruction brought screams of sudden agony from the guinea pigs, but the screams were cut short as the little animals fell in shocking, instant decay. The very cage which imprisoned them shriveled and retreated from the hellish, devouring breath that struck its noisome rot into the heart of the wood and the metal, reducing both to revolting ruin.