Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  Modestly, he savored his triumph. He welcomed with frank cordiality a deputation of notables and students who wished to congratulate him.

  “My God, my friends, I had a good idea, that is all. Your gratitude is sweeter than any reward.”

  Even Krankwein came to pay him a visit. “Well, my dear colleague,” he said, sourly, “you’re a great man now! Admit, though, that you were lucky. If Frau Bakermann hadn’t received her Dahomey carpet, there wouldn’t have been any koussmi-koussmi in Brunnwald, and you wouldn’t be so proud.”

  In all the countries of Europe, a subscription was organized to erect a statue to Bakermann. Several millions were amassed in less than a day, and the committee decided that the statue in question, ten meters tall, should overlook the public square in Brunnwald.

  In spite of his glory, however, Bakermann has no vanity or mad pride. He has resumed his cherished research in his beloved laboratory, and he is working away there doggedly. He no longer has any fear of the infernal chamber. It is open day and night, and any curiosity-seekers can go in.

  In the evenings, he returns to the tavern. Thanks to mortifulgurans, no one now prevents him from drinking tankards to his heart’s content, so he prolongs his partying with Cesar Pück and Rodolphe Müller until dawn. He certainly has the right to give himself a good time now and again, after such terrible anguish and such a service rendered to humankind.

  But there is no perfect, irreproachable happiness in this world. Professor Hermann Bakermann still has one great annoyance: he regrets the term mortifulgurans, and every time the name koussmi-koussmi is pronounced in front of him, he pulls a face—for he knows full well that koussmi-koussmi does not exist, and that a wrong has been done to the microbe made and reinforced by him.

  Nevertheless, he finds some consolation in trying to make a better mortifulgurans, more vigorous, more invincible than the first, whose irresistible effects no electricity, nor any medication, known or unknown, will be able to combat.

  * * *

  1 When this story was written, the terms “virus” and “bacillus” were considered interchangeable, no fundamental distinction yet being possible between different types of “microbe.”

  IN THE YEAR TEN THOUSAND

  EDGAR FAWCETT

  Edgar Fawcett (1847–1904) was a prolific American writer who made several notable contributions to scientific romance, most importantly the novella “Solarion” (1889), about a dog with artificially-enhanced intelligence, and the novel The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895), which is interesting not merely for the far-reaching cosmic voyage undertaken by the hero of the novel but for its preface, which offers a kind of manifesto for a genre of “realistic romances” from which the traditional supernatural is banished and the perspectives of modern science employed as a source of imaginative speculation instead.

  None of Fawcett’s prose scientific romances is short enough to include here, but he was also a prolific poet, and often rhapsodized about scientific ideas and discoveries. “In the Year Ten Thousand,” from Songs of Doubt and Dream (1890), is a rare example of poetic drama set in the future, which was ground-breaking in its day.

  (Two citizens meet in the square of the vast city,

  Manattia, ages ago called New York.)

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  Welcome. Whence come you?

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  I? The morn was hot;

  With wife and babes I took the first air-boat

  For polar lands. While huge Manattia baked

  Below these August ardors, we could hear

  Our steps creak shrill on sense-packed snows, or see

  The icy bulks of towering bergs flash green

  In the sick Arctic light.

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  Refreshment, sure?

  How close all countries of the world are knit

  By those electric air-boats that to-day

  Seem part no less of life than hands or feet!

  To think that in the earlier centuries

  Men knew this planet swept about her sun,

  And men had learned that myriad other globes

  Likewise were sweeping round their myriad suns,

  Yet dreamed not of the etheric force that makes

  One might of motion rule the universe;

  Or, if they dreamed of such hid force, were weak

  To grasp it as are gnats to swim a sea.

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  They dreamed of it; nay, more, if chronicles

  Err not, they worshiped it and named it God.

  We name it Nature and it worships us;

  A monstrous difference! . . . This light fountain plays

  Cool in its porphyry basin; shall we sit

  On this carved couch of stone and hear the winds

  Rouse in the elms melodious prophecies

  Of a more temperate morrow?

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  As you will. (They sit.)

  Watch how those lovely shudderings of the leaves

  Make the stars dance like fire-flies in their gloms.

  It is a lordly park.

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  In truth it is.

  And lordliest this of all America’s

  Great ancient cities; yet they do aver

  That once ’twas fairly steeped in hideousness.

  The homes of men were wrought with scorn of art,

  And all those fantasies of sculpture loved

  By us they deemed a vanity. I have seen

  Pictures of their grim dwellings in a book

  At our chief library, the pile that hoards

  Twelve million volumes. Horrors past a doubt

  Were these dull squat abodes that huddled close

  One to another, row on dreary row,

  With scarce a hint of our fine frontages,

  Towers, gardens, galleries, terraces and courts.

  They must indeed have been a sluggard race,

  Those ancestors we spring from. It is hard

  To dream our beautiful Manattia rose

  From such uncouth beginnings.

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  You forget

  The city in their dim years, as records tell,

  Was but a tongue of island—that lean strip

  Of territory in which to-day we set

  Our palaces of ease for them that age

  Or bodily illness incapacitates.

  Then, too, these quaint barbarians were split up

  In factions of the so-named rich and poor.

  The rich held leagues of land, the poor were shorn

  Of right in any . . . I speak from vague report;

  Perchance I am wrong. Manattia’s ancient name

  Escapes me, even, and I would not re-learn

  Its coarse tough sound. In those remoter times

  Churches abounded, dedicated to creeds

  Of various title, yet the city itself

  Swarmed with thieves, murderers, people base of act,

  So that the church and prison, side by side,

  Rose in the common street, foes hot of feud.

  Yet neither conquering . . . Strange it seems, all this

  To us, who know the idiocy of sin,

  With neither church or prison for its proof.

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  I, too, have heard of lawless days like these,

  Though some historians would contend, I think,

  That fable is at the root of all events

  Writ of past our fourth chiliad—as, indeed,

  The story of how a man could rise in wealth

  Above his fellows by the state unchid,

  And from the amassment of possessions reap

  Honor, not odium, while on every side

  Multitudes hungered; or of how disease,

  If consciously transmitted to the child

  By his begetter, was not crime; or how

  Woman was held inferior to the man,

  Not ably an equal; how some lives were cursedr />
  With strain of toil from youth to age, while some

  Drowsed in unpunished sloth, work being not then

  The duty and pride of every soul, as now,

  Nor barriered firm, as now, against fatigue

  With zeal sole-used for general thrift, and crowned

  By individual leisure’s boons of calm.

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  You draw from shadowy legend, yet we know

  That once our race was despicably sunk

  In darkness like to this crude savagery,

  Howe’er the piteous features of its lot

  Have rightly gleamed to us through mists of time.

  From grosser types we have risen by grades of change

  To what we are; this incontestably

  We clutch as truth; but I, for my own part,

  Find weightiest cause of wonder when I note

  That even as late as our five thousandth year

  (Though fifty millionth were it aptlier termed!)

  Asia, America, Europe, Africa,

  Australia, all, were one wild battle of tongues,

  Not spoke, as every earthly land speaks now,

  The same clear universal language. Think

  What misery of confusion must have reigned!

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Nay, you forget that then humanity

  Was not the brotherhood it since has grown.

  Ah, fools! it makes one loth to half believe

  They could have parceled our fair world like this

  Out into aerate hates and called each hate

  A nation, with the wolf of war to prowl

  Demon-eyed at the boundary-line of each.

  Happy are we, by sweet vast union joined,

  Not grouped in droves like beasts that gnash their fangs

  And neighbor beasts—we, while new epochs dawn,

  Animal yet above all animalism,

  Rising toward some serene discerned ideal

  Of progress, ever rising, faltering not

  By one least pause of retrogression!

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  Still

  We die . . . we die! . . .

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Invariably; but death

  Brings not the anguish it of old would bring

  To those that died before us. Rest and peace

  Attend it, no reluctance, tremor or pain.

  Long heed of laws fed vitally from health

  Has made our needs as pangless as our births.

  The imperial gifts of science gave prevailed

  So splendidly with our mortality

  That death is but a natural falling asleep,

  Involuntary and tranquil.

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  True, but time

  Has ever stained our heaven with its dark threat.

  Not death, but life, contains the unwillingness

  To pass from earth, and science in vain hath sought

  An answer to the eternal questions—Whence,

  Whither, and For What Purpose? All we gain

  Still melts to loss; we build our hope from dream,

  Our joy upon illusion, our victory

  Upon defeat . . . Hark how those long winds flute

  There in the dusky foliage of the park.

  Such voices, murmuring large below the night,

  Seem ever to my fancy as if they told

  The inscrutability of destiny,

  The blank futility of all search—perchance

  The irony of that nothingness which lies

  Beyond its hardiest effort.

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Hush! these words

  Are chaff that even the winds whereof you prate

  Should whirl as dry leaves to the oblivion

  Their levity doth tempt! Already in way

  That might seems miracle of less firm through fact,

  Hath science plucked from nature lore whose worth

  Madness alone dares doubt. As yet, I allow,

  With all her grandeur of accomplishment

  She hath not pierced beyond matter; but who knows

  The hour apocalyptic when her eyes

  May flash with tidings from infinitude?

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  Then, if she solves the enigma of the world

  And steeps in sun all swathed in night till now,

  Pushing that knowledge from whose gradual gain

  Our thirst hath drunk so deeply, till she cleaves

  Finality with it, and at last lays bare

  The absolute—then, brother and friend, I ask

  May she not tell us that we merely die,

  That immortality is a myth of sense,

  That God . . .?

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Your voice breaks . . . let me clasp your hand!

  Well, well, so be it, if so she tells. At least

  We live our lives out duteously till death,

  We on this one mean orb, whose radiant mates

  Throb swarming in the heaven our glance may roam.

  Whatever message may be brought to us,

  Or to the generations following us,

  Let this one thought burn rich with self-content:

  We live our lives duteously till death.

  (A silence.)

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  ’Tis a grand thought, but it is not enough!

  In spite of all our world hath been and done,

  Its glorious evolution from the low

  Sheer to the lofty, I, individual I,

  As an entity and a personality,

  Desire, long, yearn . . .

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Nay, brother, you alone!

  Are there not millions like you?

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  Pardon me!

  (After another long silence.)

  What subtler music those winds whisper now! . . .

  ’Tis even as if they had forsworn to breathe

  Despair, and dreamed, however dubiously.

  Of some faint hope! . . .

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  I had forgot. That news

  The astronomers predicted for tonight! . . .

  They promised that the inhabitants of Mars

  At last would give intelligible sign

  To thousands who await it here on earth.

  FIRST MANATTIAN

  I too had quite forgot; so many a time

  Failure has cheated quest! Yet still, they say,

  Tonight at last brings triumph. If it does,

  History will blaze with it.

  SECOND MANATTIAN

  Let us go forth

  Into the great square. All the academies

  That line it now must tremble with suspense.

  THE REVOLT OF THE MACHINES

  ÉMILE GOUDEAU

  Émile Goudeau (1849–1906) was a French journalist famous as the founder of a Bohemian literary club known as the Hydropathes, launched in 1878, and soon notorious for its binge-drinking. Goudeau disbanded it briefly when its membership became too large and tumultuous, but was persuaded in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis to use his cabaret Le Chat Noir as a new base, and it then became the headquarters of the Parisian literary avant garde. Several of the club’s inner circle, including Charles Cros, Edmond Haraucort, Jean Richepin, and Alphonse Allais, made significant and appropriately flamboyant contributions to the burgeoning genre of scientific romance.

  “La Révolte des machines,” which appeared in Livre populaire in 1891, was not the first story on that theme, having been preceded by the climactic section of Comte Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883), and it was certainly not the last; an identically titled story by Han Ryner appeared in 1896. It is, however, a particularly neat and uncompromisingly extravagant extrapolation of the idea.

  Dr. Pastoureaux, aided by a very skillful old workman named Jean Bertrand, had invented a machine that revolutionized the scientific world. That machine was animate, almost capable of thought, almost ca
pable of will, and sensitive: a kind of animal in iron. There is no need here to go into overly complicated technical details, which would be a waste of time. Let it suffice to know that with a series of platinum containers, penetrated by phosphoric acid, the scientist had found a means to give a kind of soul to fixed or locomotive machines; and that the new entity would be able to act in the fashion of a metal bull or a steel elephant.

  It is necessary to add that, although the scientist became increasingly enthusiastic about his work, old Jean Bertrand, who was diabolically superstitious, gradually became frightened on perceiving that sudden evocation of intelligence in something primordially dead. In addition, the comrades of the factory, who were assiduous followers of public meetings, were all sternly opposed to machines that serve as the slaves of capitalism and tyrants of the worker.

  It was the eve of the inauguration of the masterpiece.

  For the first time, the machine had been equipped with all its organs, and external sensations reached it distinctly. It understood that, in spite of the shackles that still retained it, solid limbs were fitted to its young being, and that it would soon be able to translate into external movement that which it experienced internally.

  This is what it heard:

  “Were you at the public meeting yesterday?” said one voice.

  “I should think so, old man,” replied a blacksmith, a kind of Hercules with bare muscular arms. Bizarrely illuminated by the gas-jets of the workshop, his face, black with dust, only left visible in the gloom the whites of his two large eyes, in which vivacity replaced intelligence. “Yes, I was there; I even spoke against the machines, against the monsters that our arms fabricate, and which, one day, will give infamous capitalism the opportunity, so long sought, to suppress our arms. We’re the ones forging the weapons with which bourgeois society will batter us. When the sated, the rotten and the weak have a heap of facile clockwork devices like these to set in motion”—his arm made a circular motion—“our account will soon be settled. We who are living at the present moment eat by procreating the tools of our definitive expulsion from the world. Hola! No need to make children for them to be lackeys of the bourgeoisie!”

  Listening with all its auditory valves to this diatribe, the machine, intelligent but as yet naïve, sighed with pity. It wondered whether it was a good thing that it should be born to render these brave workers miserable in this way.