Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  Smithson rose to his feet. A tremor ran through the immense hall like a strange breeze. It was the fever of joy. People held their breath.

  The scientist opened his mouth. There was an incredible silence, as if there were not a single one among the forty thousand people there who was not already counting on their relative eternity.

  “Messieurs et Mesdames,” he said, in excellent French, “I thank you for the welcome that you have given me, which far surpasses my humble merit. . . .”

  And, continuing in that fashion, he responded to the compliments and flatteries that had been lavished upon him. He was eloquent, gracious and exquisite in his turn—but about his secret, there was not a word. The session ended without his having made any promise. Anger and disappointment might perhaps have been about to provoke some regrettable manifestation, and disquieting murmurs were already rumbling among certain groups.

  Fortunately, skillful clamors of the lower orders circulated the suggestion that Smithson could not decently explain the affair to such an audience. Who could tell how long it might take him? Besides which, it was probably one of the most arduous problems of esoteric science, and no one would understand it. It was necessary to wait.

  They did not, however, renounce the quest to make him confess. And as all the maneuvers had proved vain, they took advantage of a further celebration of which he was the hero to put him brutally in the necessity of replying. This time, he consented to do so.

  “What you are asking,” he said, “would be a hundred times worse than the death from which you want to be liberated. Take the trouble to look around you. By prolonging life you would be perpetuating vice, moral suffering, nameless unhappiness. Believe me, since I am the only man in a position to enlighten you on the matter, indefinite life—which is almost good as it is—would be a cruel torture. I won’t tell you that a person would become blasé about everything and would become, after two or three hundred years, a stranger in the midst of younger generations, as old people between ninety and a hundred already are in many cases. That is obvious. But think about what one would become in the midst of unforgiving hatreds. Imagine what ingratitude alone would make of the unfortunate. If I could speak, you would know that I am a frightful example of that—but let’s pass on

  “Can you see drunkards, gamblers and malefactors renewing their crimes and infamies incessantly, sowing dolor and despair around them for centuries? Imagine certain spouses bound together forever—what am I saying, forever? Where are those who could live together for a hundred and fifty years? Once again, God has made things well. If I had not been frightened by what I foresaw, do you think that I would have hesitated for a moment to make my fellows happy, for whom I have toiled with such courage and obstinacy? Interrogate all those who are listening to me and ask them whether they would be delighted if three-quarters of their friends were immortal, and listen to their reply. And their relatives—that would be something else entirely.

  “Oh, you can be sure that I’ve been on the point of saying everything a hundred times over, for the sake of a little peace—but a hundred times over, too, a secret voice had encouraged me to silence, and I have persisted in it. War, theft, pillage, and internecine massacres are formidable evils. It would not require two centuries, I repeat—and this is perhaps the hundredth time—for humankind, overcrowded, to arrive at those extremities, for want of room on this little round ball that is narrower than perhaps you believe.”

  He spoke thus for another hour, and concluded by saying: “If I gave in, Messieurs, in a very short time, there would be no maledictions that would not be heaped upon my name and my person.”

  This time, there was an explosion of fury. The sage Yankee was insulted publicly. Newspapers published abominable diatribes against him. His caricature could be seen at every street-corner, accompanied by wounding captions.

  “It’s a practical joke,” said the most earnest individuals, “and he hasn’t lived for as long as people say. The Americans have deceived us in order to poke fun at Europe. If he had the power of which he boasts, would he hesitate? We ought to expel him shamefully.”

  And they provoked one another to lose their heads. It would not have taken much to pass from insults to acts of violence. Oh, if they had known how near the man, shaken in his resistance, had come to revealing everything! But when he saw that overflow of rage, he contented himself with shrugging his shoulders and murmuring: “There couldn’t be any better justification of my resistance.”

  Before leaving Paris, he had the generosity to make a further gift to humankind, in the form of an inoffensive substance that suppressed almost all pain in all cases of physical suffering. After which he set off for America, and returned to his fatherland, where he was received almost as an enemy.

  There, objurgations degenerated into insults. He and his wife were obliged to go into hiding, so to speak. Their dear children and their adorable grandchildren were subjected to base persecution.

  Poor Smithson, desolate, sometimes said to his wife: “Who knows whether I might not be wrong. I have a strong temptation to give them what they want, and so much the worse for them.”

  One day, he saw one of his great-grand-daughters arrive at the Red House, carrying her only son in her arms, devoured by fever. She threw herself down at his knees, in tears, begging him, imploring him to save her child. Eventually she lay down at his feet, affirming that she would not get up again unless he rendered life to the suffering child.

  How could he resist such a plea? He gave in. Smithson made the child drink a few drops of a golden liquid—and the mother, mad with joy, saw the fruit of her loins returned to life. . . .

  From that moment on, the perpetual scientist became less obstinate in his intransigence. The second centenary of his discovery of weather control drew near. He began to debate with himself as to whether, on that occasion, he ought not to yield.

  That did not prevent him from contriving new marvels.

  Thanks to the progress he made in telescopy, the great American brought the planets so close that it was possible to confirm the plurality of inhabited worlds. He pushed his irrefutable demonstrations far enough to establish that the worlds nearer to the sun sheltered beings more intelligent and more civilized than those of distant worlds. He was able to boast of establishing communication between Mars, Mercury and Earth.

  But all that left people cold; they still wanted to know the great secret.

  “That’s not what we’re asking of you.”

  In the meantime, he imagined a thousand improvements. He made a garden of the entire Earth. Unfortunately, humankind was no better. There were always further demands on the part of the human species. In many places, now, civil discord broke out in the matter of the weather. Some wanted rain, others serene skies. They tore one another limb from limb over that. On the other hand, nations had rapidly transformed aeroplanes into weapons of war. Frightful aerial battles took place in which the victors and the vanquished alike were almost certain to perish. These events caused him to despair. Extreme civilization seemed to be bringing humankind ever closer to black barbarism.

  Human beings were scarcely obliged to work, technology having substituted for manual labor almost everywhere, but they were no happier. Everyone had too much time to think, to criticize, to desire enviously. The poor in spirit wanted to rise to the highest rank. The vicious demanded to share out the world to the detriment of the humble and the peaceful.

  And yet, Smithson was still waiting for the great celebration that he assumed would be offered him in order to give his fellows the supreme benefit. . . .

  This time, however, there was no question of any such thing. The Americans, like everyone else, redoubled their acrimony against the scientist. At the moment when he was counting on a triumphant ovation, there was an upsurge of insults and sarcasm. With bloody unanimity, as if they had been driven by blind destiny, people competed in dragging him into ignominy. It went as far as threats. His house was besieged. Inventions were demanded
of him to meet all needs, and the satisfaction of all whims.

  “How right I was!” he said, frightened.

  And on 24 June 2100, when only three people came to compliment him on his anniversary, Smithson and his wife decided that they would stop drinking the elixir of life.

  Within two days they aged through all the time that they had stolen from nature, and died disillusioned, without regret.

  * * *

  1 The Galerie des Machines, a huge pavilion made of iron, steel and glass, was originally constructed as the Palais des Machines for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. When the exhibition ended, however, it was allowed to remain in place; it was used again for the 1900 Exposition, and then became a velodrome, but was eventually demolished in 1910.

  THE STAR

  H. G. WELLS

  H. G. Wells (1866–1946) became, as the general introduction explains and details, the definitive model of British scientific romance, mapping the scope of its themes in the articles, short stories and novels he published between 1893 and 1901; the work in question was also influential in America and France, although writers in both those nations adapted his inspiration to their own context and purposes. Although Wells then focused his efforts on becoming a “serious” writer intent on not only mapping the likely course of the future but tempting to influence it politically, it is for his early scientific romances that he is principally remembered, and in them that his genius principally resides.

  “The Star,” first published in the Christmas number of The Graphic, dated 1897, although actually published in December 1896, is not typical of the usual narrative method of Wells’s short fiction, adopting a more distanced viewpoint in order to address a theme similar to that of Poe’s “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion.” The story is, however, a stylishly laconic tour de force, and one of the key works of the genre.

  It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the moon of the planet Neptune,1 the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

  Few people without a training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more substantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed the gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it.

  On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duhaine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been.

  Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, laborers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen—and out at sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!

  Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disk, an hour after the day had come. And where science had not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

  And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together, and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune, it was, had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marveled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marveled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pygmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.

  And when it next rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. “It is larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.

  “It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!”

  And voice after voice repeated, “It is nearer,” and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is nearer.” Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realization, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.” It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. “It is nearer.” Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest
they did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very clever people must be to find out things like that!”

  Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves—looking skyward: “It has need to be nearer, for the night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all the same.”

  “What is the new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead.

  The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flower of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said, with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this—!

  “Do we come in the way? I wonder—”

  The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watchers of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered. “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

  The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star.