Scientific Romance

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Scientific Romance Page 23

by Brian Stableford


  Opening my case of instruments, I took out my petrochronologue and applied it to the worn and scratched surface of the rock. The indicator at once pointed to K 59 xpc 1/2! At this astonishing result I was nearly overcome by excitement; the last erosions of the ice-masses upon this vestige of a stupendous mountain range which they had worn away, had been made as recently as the year 1945! Hastily applying my nymograph, I found that the name of this particular mountain at the time when it began to be enveloped in the mass of ice moving down from the north, was “Pike’s Peak.” Other observations with other instruments showed that at that time the country circumjacent to it had been inhabited by a partly civilized race of people known as Galoots, the name of their capital city being Denver.

  That evening at the hour of 23 I set up my aerial isochronophone2 and reported to his gracious Majesty the Akhoond as follows:

  “Sire: I have the honor to report that I have made a startling discovery. The primeval region into which I have penetrated, as I informed you yesterday—the ichthyosaurus belt—was peopled by tribes considerably advanced in some of the arts almost within historic times: in 1920. They were exterminated by a glacial period not exceeding one hundred and twenty-five years in duration. Your Majesty can conceive the magnitude and violence of the natural forces which overwhelmed their country with moving sheets of ice not less than 5,000 coprets in thickness, grinding down every eminence, destroying (of course) all animal and vegetable life and leaving the region a fathomless bog of detritus. Out of this vast sea of mud Nature has had to evolve a new creation, beginning de novo, with her lowest forms.

  “It has long been known, Your Majesty, that the region east of the Ultimate Hills, between them and the Wintry Sea, was once the seat of an ancient civilization, some scraps and shreds of whose history, arts and literature have been wafted to us across the gulf of time; but it was reserved for your gracious Majesty, through me, your humble and unworthy instrument, to ascertain the astonishing fact that these were a pre-glacial people—that between them and us stands, as it were, a wall of impenetrable ice. That all local records of this unfortunate race have perished your Majesty needs not to be told: we can supplement our present imperfect knowledge of them by instrumental observation only.”

  To this message I received the following extraordinary reply:

  “All right—another bottle of—ice goes: push on—this cheese is too—spare no effort to—hand me those nuts—learn all you can—damn you!”

  His most gracious Majesty was being served with dessert, and served badly.

  I now resolved to go directly north toward the source of the ice-flow and investigate its cause, but examining my barometer found that I was more than 8,000 coprets below the sea level; the moving ice had not only ground down the face of the country, planing off the eminences and filling the depressions, but its enormous weight had caused the earth’s crust to sag, and with the lessening of the weight from evaporation it had not recovered.

  I had no desire to continue in this depression, as I should in going north, for I should find nothing but lakes, marshes and ferneries, infested with the same primitive and monstrous forms of life. So I continued my course eastward and soon had the satisfaction of meeting the sluggish current of such streams as I encountered in my way. By vigorous use of the new double-distance telepode, which enables the wearer to step eighty surindas instead of forty, as with the instrument in popular use, I was soon again at a considerable elevation above the sea level and nearly 200 prastams from “Pike’s Peak.” A little farther along the water courses began to flow to the eastward.

  The flora and fauna had again altered in character, and now began to grow sparse; the soil was thin and arid. And in a week I found myself in a region absolutely destitute of organic life and without a vestige of soil. All was barren rock. The surface for hundreds of prastams, as I continued my advance, was nearly level, with a slight dip to the eastward. The rock was singularly striated, the scratches arranged concentrically and in helicoidal curves. This circumstance puzzled me and I resolved to take some more instrumental observations, bitterly regretting my improvidence in not availing myself of the Akhoond’s permission to bring with me such apparatus and assistants as would have given me knowledge vastly more copious and accurate than I could acquire with my simple pocket appliances.

  I need not here go into the details of my observations with such instruments as I had, nor into the calculations of which these observations were the basic data. Suffice it that after two months’ labor I reported the results to his Majesty in Sanf Rachisco in the words following:

  “Sire: It is my high privilege to apprise you of my arrival on the western slope of a mighty depression running through the center of the continent north and south, formerly known as the Mississippi valley. It was once the seat of a thriving and prosperous population known as the Pukes, but is now a vast expanse of bare rock, from which every particle of soil and everything movable, including people, animals and vegetation, have been lifted by terrific cyclones and scattered afar, falling in other lands and at sea in the form of what was called meteoric dust.

  “I find that these terrible phenomena began to occur about the year 1860,3 and lasted, with increasing frequency and power, through a century, culminating about the middle of that glacial period which saw the extinction of the Galoots and their neighboring tribes. There was, of course, a close connection between the two malefic phenomena, both, doubtless, being due to the same cause, which I have been unable to trace. A cyclone, I venture to remind your gracious Majesty, is a mighty whirlwind, accompanied by the most startling meteorological phenomena, such as electrical disturbances, floods of falling water, darkness and so forth. It moves with great speed, sucking up everything and reducing it to powder. In many days’ journey I have not found a square copret of the country that did not suffer a visitation. If any human being escaped he must speedily have perished from starvation. For some twenty centuries the Pukes have been an extinct race, and their country a desolation in which no living thing can dwell, unless, like me, it is supplied with Dr. Blobob’s Condensed Life-pills.”

  The Akhoond replied that he was pleased to feel the most poignant grief for the fate of the unfortunate Pukes, and if I should by chance find the ancient king of the country I was to do my best to revive him with the patent resuscitator and present him with the assurances of his Majesty’s distinguished consideration; but as the politoscope showed that the nation had been a republic I gave myself no trouble in the matter.

  My next report was made six months later and was in substance this:

  “Sire: I address your Majesty from a point 43 coprets vertically above the site of the famous ancient city of Buffalo, once the capital of a powerful nation called the Smugwumps. I can approach no nearer because of the hardness of the snow, which is very firmly packed. For hundreds of prastams in every direction, and for thousands to the north and west, the land is covered with this substance, which, as your Majesty is doubtless aware, is extremely cold to the touch, but by application of sufficient heat can be turned into water. It falls from the heavens, and is believed by the learned among your Majesty’s subjects to have a sidereal origin.

  “The Smugwumps were a hardy and intelligent race, but they entertained the vain delusion that they could subdue Nature. Their year was divided into two seasons: summer and winter, the former warm, the latter cold. About the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to my archaethermograph, the summers began to grow shorter and hotter, the winters longer and colder. At every point in their country, and every day in the year, when they had not the hottest weather ever known in that place, they had the coldest. When they were not dying by hundreds from sunstroke they were dying by thousands from frost. But these heroic and devoted people struggled on, believing that they were becoming acclimated faster than the climate was becoming insupportable. Those called away on business were even afflicted by nostalgia, and with a fatal infatuation returned to grill or freeze, according to the sea
son of their arrival. Finally there was no summer at all, though the last flash of heat slew several millions and set most of their cities afire, and winter reigned eternal.

  “The Smugwumps were now keenly sensible of the perils environing them, and, abandoning their homes, endeavored to reach their kindred, the Californians, on the western side of the continent in what is now your Majesty’s ever blessed realm. But it was too late: the snow, growing deeper and deeper day by day, besieged them in their towns and dwellings, and they were unable to escape. The last one of them perished about the year 1943, and may God have mercy on his fool soul!”

  To this dispatch the Akhoond replied that it was the royal opinion that the Smugwumps were served very well right.

  Some weeks later I reported thus:

  “Sire: The country which your Majesty’s munificence is enabling your devoted servant to explore extends southward and southwestward from Smugwumpia many hundreds of prastams, its eastern and southern borders being the Wintry Sea and the Fiery Gulf, respectively. The population in ancient times was composed of Whites and Blacks in about equal number and of about equal moral worth—at least that is the record on the dial of my ethnograph when set for the twentieth century and given a southern exposure. The Whites were called Crackers and the Blacks known as Coons.

  “I find here none of the barrenness and desolation characterizing the land of the ancient Pukes, and the climate is not so rigorous and thrilling as that of the country of the late Smugwumps. It is, indeed, rather agreeable in point of temperature, and the soil being fertile exceedingly, the whole land is covered with a dense and rank vegetation. I have yet to find a square smig of it that is open ground, or one that is not the lair of some savage beast, the haunt of some venomous reptile, or the roost of some offensive bird. Crackers and Coons alike are long extinct, and these are their successors.

  “Nothing could be more forbidding and unwholesome than these interminable jungles, with their horrible wealth of organic life in its most objectionable forms. By repeated observations with the necrohistoriograph I find that the inhabitants of this country, who had always been more or less dead, were wholly extirpated contemporaneously with the disastrous events which swept away the Galoots, the Pukes and the Smugwumps. The agency of their effacement was an endemic order known as yellow fever.

  “The ravages of this frightful disease were of frequent recurrence, every point of the country being a center of infection, but in some seasons it was worse than others. Once in every half-century at first, and afterward every year4 it broke out somewhere and swept over wide areas with such fatal effect that there were not enough of the living to plunder the dead; but at the first frost it would subside. During the ensuing two or three months of immunity the stupid survivors returned to the infected homes from which they had fled and were ready for the next outbreak.

  “Emigration would have saved them all, but although the Californians (over whose happy and prosperous descendants your Majesty has the goodness to reign) invited them again and again to their beautiful land, where sickness and death were hardly known, they would not go, and by the year 1946 the last one of them, may it please your gracious Majesty, was dead and damned.”

  Having spoken into the transmitter of the aerial isochronophone at the usual hour of 23 o’clock I applied the receiver to my ear, confidently expecting the customary commendation. Imagine my astonishment and dismay when my master’s well-remembered voice was heard in utterance of the most awful imprecations on me and my work, followed by appalling threats against my life!

  The Akhoond had changed his dinner-time to five hours later and I had been speaking into the ears of an empty stomach.

  * * *

  1 The line is from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.” (1849).

  2 The author added a footnote to the story when it was reprinted: “This satire was published in the San Francisco Examiner many years before the invention of wireless telegraphy; so I retain my own name for the instrument. A.B.”

  3 1860 was the year of a bad drought in the Great Plains, associated with dust storms that grew increasingly common thereafter, culminating (although Bierce could not know it) in the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

  4 Author’s note in the book version: “At one time it was foolishly believed that the disease had been eradicated by slapping the mosquitoes that were thought to produce it; but a few years later it broke out with greater violence than ever before, although the mosquitoes had left the country.”

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELATIVE EXISTENCES

  FRANK R. STOCKTON

  Frank R. Stockton (1834–1902) was a lawyer, by profession, who dabbled in painting for many years before changing tack and becoming a casually prolific writer of popular fiction, much of it for younger readers and most of it in a humorous vein, although his two long scientific romances, the future war story The Great War Syndicate (1889) and the Vernian adventure story The Great Stone of Sardis (1898) are exceptions.

  “The Philosophy of Relative Existences,” first published in the August 1892 issue of The Century Magazine and reprinted in The Watchmaker’s Wife and Other Stories (1893), is also atypically earnest, and has an extra dimension of interest because of its unusual narrative strategy, presenting itself as a “ghost story” although it is actually an account of transtemporal vision and communication; as such, it raises some of the issues, in a carefully modest fashion, that were subsequently to become central concerns of the science-fictional subgenre of “time paradox stories.”

  In a certain summer, not long gone, my friend Bentley and I found ourselves in a little hamlet which overlooked a placid valley, through which a river gently moved, winding its way through green stretches until it turned the end of a line of low hills and was lost to view. Beyond this river, far away, but visible from the door of the cottage where we dwelt, there lay a city. Through the mists which floated over the valley we could see the outlines of steeples and tall roofs; and buildings of a character which indicated thrift and business stretched themselves down to the opposite edge of the river. The more distant parts of the city, evidently a small one, lost themselves in the hazy summer atmosphere.

  Bentley was young, fair-haired, and a poet; I was a philosopher, or trying to be one. We were good friends, and had come down into this peaceful region to work together. Although we had fled from the bustle and distractions of the town, the appearance in this rural region of a city, which, so far as we could observe, exerted no influence on the quiet character of the valley in which it lay, aroused our interest. No craft plied up and down the river; there were no bridges from shore to shore; there were none of those scattered and half-squalid habitations which generally are found on the outskirts of a city; there came to us no distant sound of bells; and not the smallest wreath of smoke rose from any of the buildings.

  In answer to our inquiries our landlord told us that the city over the river had been built by one man, who was a visionary, and who had a great deal more money than common sense. “It’s not as big a town as you would think, sirs,” he said, “because the general mistiness of things in this valley makes them look larger than they are. Those hills, for instance, when you get to them are not as high as they look to be from here. But the town is big enough, and a good deal too big; for it ruined its builder and owner, who when he came to die had not money enough left to put up a decent tombstone at the head of his grave. He had a queer idea that he would like to have his town all finished before anybody lived in it, and so he kept on working and spending money year after year and year after year until the city was done and he had not a cent left.

  “During all the time that the place was building hundreds of people came from time to time to buy houses, or to hire them, but he would not listen to anything of the kind. No one must live in the town until it was all done. Even his workmen were obliged to go away at night to lodge. It is a town, sirs, I am told, in which nobody has slept for even a night. There are streets there, and places of business, and chu
rches, and public halls, and everything that a town full of inhabitants could need; but it is all empty and deserted, and has been so as far back as I can remember, and I came to this region when I was a little boy.”

  “And is there no one to guard the place?” we asked; “no one to protect it from wandering vagrants who might choose to take possession of the buildings?”

  “There are not many vagrants in this part of the country,” he said, “and if there were they would not go over to that city. It is haunted.”

  “By what?” we asked.

  “Well, sirs, I can scarcely tell you; queer beings that are not flesh and blood, and that is all I know about it. A good many people living hereabouts have visited that place once in their lives, but I know of no one who has gone there a second time.”

  “And travelers,” I said, “are they not excited by curiosity to explore that strange uninhabited city?”

  “Oh yes,” our host replied; “almost all visitors to the valley go over to that queer city—generally in small parties, for it is not a place in which one wishes to walk about alone. Sometimes they see things and sometimes they don’t. But I never knew any man or woman to show a fancy for living there, although it is a very good town.”

  This was said at supper-time, and, as it was the period of full moon, Bentley and I decided that we would visit the haunted city that evening. Our host endeavored to dissuade us, saying that no one ever went over there at night; but as we were not to be deterred he told us where we would find his small boat tied to a stake on the river-bank.

  We soon crossed the river, and landed at a broad but low stone pier, at the land end of which a line of tall grasses waved in the gentle night wind as if they were sentinels warning us from entering the silent city. We pushed through these, and walked up a street, fairly wide and so well paved that we noticed none of the weeds and other growths which generally denote desertion or little use.

 

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