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

by Mike Ashley

  Eve cut off the frightful power, and the black cone disappeared, leaving the room putrid with its defilement.

  “And Adam would do that to the world,” she said, her blue eyes like electric-shot icicles. “He would do it to you, John Northwood—and to me!” Her full bosom strained under the passion beneath.

  “Listen!” She raised her hand warningly. “He comes! The destroyer comes!”

  A hand was at the door. Eve reached for the lever, and, the same moment, Northwood leaned over her imploringly.

  “If Athalia is with him!” he gasped. “You will not harm her?” A wild shriek at the door, a slight scuffle, and then the doorknob was wrenched as though two were fighting over it.

  “For God’s sake, Eve!” implored Northwood. “Wait! Wait!”

  “No! She shall die, too. You love her!”

  Icy, cruel eyes cut into him, and a new-fleshed hand tried to push him aside. The door was straining open. A beloved voice shrieked. “John!”

  Eve and Northwood both leaped for the lever. Under her tender white flesh she was as strong as a man. In the midst of the struggle, her red, humid lips approached his—closer, closer. Their merest pressure would thrust him into Future Time, where the laboratory and all it contained would be but a shadow, and where he would be helpless to interfere with her terrible will.

  He saw the door open and Adam stride into the room. Behind him, lying prone in the hall where she had probably fainted, was Athalia. In a mad burst of strength he touched the lever together with Eve.

  The projector, belching forth its stinking breath of corruption swung in a mad arc over the ceiling, over the walls—and then straight at Adam.

  Then, quicker than thought, came the accident. Eve, attempting to throw Northwood off, tripped, fell half over the machine, and, with a short scream of despair, dropped into the black path of destruction.

  Northwood paused, horrified. The Death Ray was pointed at an inner wall of the room, which, even as he looked, crumbled and disappeared, bringing down upon him dust more foul than any obscenity the bowels of the earth might yield. In an instant the black cone ate through the outer parts of the building, where crashing stone and screams that were more horrible because of their shortness followed the ruin that swept far into the fair reaches of the valley.

  The paralyzing odor of decay took his breath, numbed his muscles, until, of all that huge building, the wall behind him and one small section of the room by the doorway alone remained whole. He was trying to nerve himself to reach for the lever close to that quiet formless thing still partly draped over the machine, when a faint sound in the door electrified him. At first, he dared not look, but his own name, spoken almost in a gasp, gave him courage.

  Athalia lay on the floor, apparently untouched.

  He jerked the lever violently before running to her, exultant with the knowledge that his own efforts to keep the ray from the door had saved her.

  “And you’re not hurt!” He gathered her close.

  “John! I saw it get Adam.” She pointed to a new mound of mouldy clothes on the floor. “Oh, it is hideous for me to be so glad, but he was going to destroy everything and everyone except me. He made the ray projector for that one purpose.”

  Northwood looked over the pile of putrid ruins which a few minutes ago had been a building. There was not a wall left intact.

  “His intention is accomplished, Athalia,” he said sadly. “Let’s get out before more stones fall.”

  In a moment they were in the open. An ominous stillness seemed to grip the very air—the awful silence of the polar wastes which lay not far beyond the mountains.

  “How dark it is, John!” cried Athalia. “Dark and cold!”

  “The sunshine projector!” gasped Northwood. “It must have been destroyed. Look, dearest! The golden light has disappeared.”

  “And the warm air of the valley will lift immediately. That means a polar blizzard.” She shuddered and clung closer to him. “I’ve seen Antarctic storms, John. They’re death.”

  Northwood avoided her eyes. “There’s the sun-ship. We’ll give the ruins the once over in case there are any survivors; then we’ll save ourselves.”

  Even a cursory examination of the mouldy piles of stone and dust convinced them that there could be no survivors. The ruins looked as though they had lain in those crumbling piles for centuries. Northwood, smothering his repugnance, stepped among them—among the green, slimy stones and the unspeakable revolting débris, staggering back and faint and shocked when he came upon dust that was once human.

  “God!” he groaned, hands over eyes. “We’re alone, Athalia! Alone in a charnal house. The laboratory housed the entire population, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. Needing no sleep nor food, we did not need houses. We all worked here, under Dr. Mundson’s generalship, and, lately under Adam’s, like a little band of soldiers fighting for a great cause.”

  “Let’s go to the sun-ship, dearest.”

  “But Daddy Mundson was in the library,” sobbed Athalia. “Let’s look for him a little longer.”

  Sudden remembrance came to Northwood. “No, Athalia! He left the library. I saw him go down the jungle path several minutes before I and Eve went to Adam’s laboratory.”

  “Then he might be safe!” Her eyes danced. “He might have gone to the sun-ship.”

  Shivering, she slumped against him. “Oh, John! I’m cold.”

  Her face was blue. Northwood jerked off his coat and wrapped it around her, taking the intense cold against his unprotected shoulders. The low, gray sky was rapidly darkening, and the feeble light of the sun could scarcely pierce the clouds. It was disturbing to know that even the summer temperature in the Antarctic was far below zero.

  “Come, girl,” said Northwood gravely. “Hurry! It’s snowing.”

  They started to run down the road through the narrow strip of jungle. The Death Ray had cut huge swathes in the tangle of trees and vines, and now areas of heaped débris, livid with the colors of recent decay, exhaled a mephitic humidity altogether alien to the snow that fell in soft, slow flakes. Each hesitated to voice the new fear: had the sun-ship been destroyed?

  By the time they reached the open field, the snow stung their flesh like sharp needles, but it was not yet thick enough to hide from them a hideous fact.

  The sun-ship was gone.

  It might have occupied one of several black, foul areas on the green grass, where the searching Death Ray had made the very soil putrefy, and the rocks crumble into shocking dust.

  Northwood snatched Athalia to him, too full of despair to speak. A sudden terrific flurry of snow whirled around them, and they were almost blown from their feet by the icy wind that tore over the unprotected field.

  “It won’t be long,” said Athalia faintly. “Freezing doesn’t hurt, John, dear.”

  “It isn’t fair, Athalia! There never would have been such a marriage as ours. Dr. Mundson searched the world to bring us together.”

  “For scientific experiment!” she sobbed. “I’d rather die, John. I want an old-fashioned home, a Black Age family. I want to grow old with you and leave the earth to my children. Or else I want to die here now under the kind, white blanket the snow is already spreading over us.” She drooped in his arms.

  Clinging together, they stood in the howling wind, looking at each other hungrily, as though they would snatch from death this one last picture of the other.

  Northwood’s freezing lips translated some of the futile words that crowded against them. “I love you because you are not perfect. I hate perfection!”

  “Yes. Perfection is the only hopeless state, John. That is why Adam wanted to destroy, so that he might build again.”

  They were sitting in the snow now, for they were very tired. The storm began whistling louder, as though it were only a few feet above their heads.

  “That sounds almost like the sun-ship,” said Athalia drowsily.

  “It’s only the wind. Hold your face down so it won’t stri
ke your flesh so cruelly.”

  “I’m not suffering. I’m getting warm again.” She smiled at him sleepily.

  Little icicles began to form on their clothing, and the powdery snow frosted their uncovered hair.

  Suddenly came a familiar voice: “Ach, Gott!”

  Dr. Mundson stood before them, covered with snow until he looked like a polar bear.

  “Get up!” he shouted. “Quick! To the sun-ship!”

  He seized Athalia and jerked her to her feet. She looked at him sleepily for a moment, and then threw herself at him and hugged him frantically.

  “You’re not dead?”

  Taking each by the arm, he half dragged them to the sun-ship, which had landed only a few feet away. In a few minutes he had hot brandy for them.

  While they sipped greedily, he talked, between working the sun-ship’s controls.

  “No, I wouldn’t say it was a lucky moment that drew me to the sun-ship. When I saw Eve trying to charm John, I had what you American slangists call a hunch, which sent me to the sun-ship to get it off the ground so that Adam couldn’t commandeer it. And what is a hunch but a mental penetration into the Fourth Dimension?” For a long moment, he brooded, absent-minded. “I was in the air when the black ray, which I suppose is Adam’s deviltry, began to destroy everything it touched. From a safe elevation I saw it wreck all my work.” A sudden spasm crossed his face. “I’ve flown over the entire valley. We’re the only survivors—thank God!”

  “And so at last you confess that it is not well to tamper with human life?” Northwood, warmed with hot brandy, was his old self again.

  “Oh, I have not altogether wasted my efforts. I went to elaborate pains to bring together a perfect man and a perfect woman of what Adam called our Black Age.” He smiled at them whimsically.

  “And who can say to what extent you have thus furthered natural evolution?” Northwood slipped his arm around Athalia. “Our children might be more than geniuses, Doctor!”

  Dr. Mundson nodded his huge, shaggy head gravely.

  “The true instinct of a Creature of the Light,” he declared.

  THE FLYING TEUTON

  Alice Brown (1857–1948)

  The following story is usually treated as supernatural because of its depiction of not just a ghost ship—as per The Flying Dutchman, hence the title—but an entire fleet. But on closer reading the ships aren’t ghosts at all. It’s not even that they’re just invisible but, rather like the protagonist in the earlier story, “The Ray of Displacement,” they seem to be able to pass through solid matter. The public believe it’s a curse from God, so no scientific rationale is provided, but that doesn’t stop the basic premise from having a science fiction element. What’s more, the story is set slightly in the future. It takes place after the conclusion of the First World War, but the story was first published in August 1917, over a year before the armistice and almost two years before the peace treaty was signed. So on two counts the story classifies as science fiction.

  It is perhaps Alice Brown’s best-known story, and certainly one of the most discussed in its day, hailed as that year’s best short fiction. Brown was born and raised in New Hampshire where, for a while, she was a school teacher until she could escape to Boston and become a staff writer on the Youth’s Companion. She had a long career writing novels, plays and children’s books well into her seventies. Much of her work has mystical or supernatural overtones, and the best of it was collected as The Empire of Death (2003).

  WE WERE TALKING, that night, about the year after the great war, which was also the year of the great religious awakening. A few of us had dropped into the Neo-Pacifist Club, that assemblage of old-time pacifists who, having been actually immersed in the great war, afterward set humbly about informing themselves on the subject of those passions that make the duty of defensive fighting at times a holy one, and who, having once seen Michael hurl Satan down to the abyss, actually began to suspect you’d got to do more than read Satan the beatitudes if he climbed up again. There never was anything like the eagerness of these after-the-war pacifists to study human nature in other than its sentimental aspects, to learn to predict the great waves of savagery that wreck civilization at intervals—unless there are dykes—and to plumb the heroism of those men who gave their bodies that the soul of nations might securely live. We retraced a good many steps on wide territory that night, took up and looked at things familiar we were all the better for remembering, as a man says his creed, from time to time, no matter how well he knows it; and chiefly we read over, in its different aspects, the pages of the great revival.

  This was not, it will be remembered, an increase in the authority of any church, but simply the recognition in all hearts of all peoples that God is, and that the plagues of the world spawn out of our forgetfulness that He is, and our overwhelming desire toward the things of this temporal life. Whence, in our haste, we sacrifice to the devil.

  The terms of peace had been as righteous as it is possible for hurt hearts to compass. Evil had been bound and foresight had made the path of justice plain. The nations that had borne the first attack (and with what light limbs they sprang to meet it!), they who had learned to read God in that awful unfurling of the book of life, were wonderfully ready to enter on their task of building up the house of peace.

  The United States, which had saved its skin so long that it had almost mislaid its soul, was sitting at the knees of knowledge and plainly asking to be taught.

  One amazing detail of the great revival was that there would be no industrial boycott. The men about the peace table came away from it imbued with a desire to save the peoples who had been guilty of the virtue of obedience in following false rulers, and they represented to their governments the barbarity of curbing even the commerce of those nations which had set the world ablaze. So it followed that territory and indemnities were the penalties imposed.

  Boundaries had changed—and so had governments!—but every country was to go back to its former freedom of selling goods in all quarters of the earth. In their arguments the peace delegates had used the supreme one that, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” They had fixed the terms of all the vengeance they were sure they were entitled to, fixed it soberly and sternly, too. But they did not quite see, having effectually crippled the powers of evil, that they ought also to cripple the powers of good—the desire of nations to sell their products and the work of their hands abroad. So they said, “Vengeance is mine,” but they did not go so far as to note that, judging from the centuries, God Himself would indubitably be on the spot. He would repay.

  It was in the spring of that year that a German liner, tied up since 1914, and waiting the will of the English fleet, was released and put into commission again and loaded with goods for the United States. On board her was Frank Drake, a newspaper correspondent who had, after hovering about the Peace Congress, been wandering over Germany, in a desultory fashion, to see what changes had been wrought in her by the war. And it was Drake who sat with us at the Neo-Pacifist Club that night, and was persuaded to tell a story he had, in the year after the great war, got into print, and so done incalculable service to the muse of history and incidentally made his own name to be remembered. For what he had seen hundreds of others confirmed—only he saw it first, and gave his testimony in a manner so direct as well as picturesque that it might as well have been he alone who sang that epic story.

  He was a tough, seasoned-looking man, spare, and hard as whipcord, and with an adventurer’s face—aquiline, uplifted, looking for horizons, some one said. At this point of his life he was gray-headed—yet he never would be old. We had gathered about him as near as might be, and really filled the room ’way back into the shadows. He had been talking about the supernatural events that had been inextricably mingled with facts of battle and march and countermarch, and owned himself frankly bemused by them.

  “It isn’t as if I hadn’t actually been in the war, you know. I’ve seen things. So I haven’t the slightest doubt the Fr
ench saw Angels at Mons. I haven’t the slightest doubt a fellow blown out of a trench into the next world meets so many of the other fellows that were blown there before him that it gives him that look—I’ve seen it over and over—of surprise, wonder—oh, and beauty, too, a most awful kind of beauty. Whatever they saw when they went from the trenches to—wherever it is—they were mighty well pleased to be there, and satisfied that the other fellows could get along without them. And, mind you, things lasted, too, after they got over there. I’m as sure of that as I am that I’m sitting here. The love of it all—the Vive la France! you know, the grotesque fondness for Old Blighty that made them die for her—those weren’t wiped out by getting into another atmosphere. It’s all pretty much the same, you know, there and here, only there you apparently see the causes of things and the values. And you absolutely can’t hate. You see what a damned shame it was that anybody should ever have been ignorant enough to hate.”

  “You’d say it was a world of peace?” inquired a rapt-looking saint of a man in the front row.

  “Don’t talk to me about peace—yet,” said Drake. “I’m not ‘over there’ and I haven’t got that perspective. As for Peace, too many crimes were committed in her name those last years of the war—too much cowardice, expediency, the devil and all of people wanting to save their skins and their money. Yes, I know, peace is what they’ve earned for us, those fellows in Europe, and it’s a gorgeous peace. But the word itself does take me back. It sets me swearing.

  “Yes, I’ll tell you about the ship, the Treue Königin and the first sailing from Bremen, if that’s what you want. They’d put a good deal of spectacular business into the sailing of that ship because she was the first one after John Bull tied up their navy. There were flags flying and crowds and Hochs! and altogether it was an occasion to be remembered. I knew it would be, and that’s why I was there. I rather wanted to say I was on the first free ship that sailed out of Bremen, and I hadn’t much Teutonophobia any more since Kultur had got its medicine. Besides, wasn’t the whole world chanting ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord’? and I’d begun to be awakened a little, too, in my inward parts, though I didn’t talk much about it.