Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  As he put the letter into the envelope there was a knock at the door, and Professor Kenyon was announced. Calvert greeted him stiffly and coldly, for he more than half guessed the errand he had come on. There had been two or three heated discussions between them of late, and Calvert knew before the Professor opened his lips that he had come to tell him that he was about to fulfill a threat that he had made a few days before. And this the Professor did tell him in a few dry, quiet words.

  “It’s no use, Professor,” he replied, “you know yourself that I am powerless, as powerless as you are. I have no means of communicating with Markovitch, and the work cannot be stopped until the appointed time. Of course I am very sorry that the effects of the experiment have been so much more serious than I anticipated. . . .”

  “But you were warned, sir!” the Professor interrupted warmly. “You were warned, and when you saw the effects coming you might have stopped. I wish to goodness that I had had nothing to do with this infernal business, for infernal it really is. You have not only sacrificed the industries and convenience of nations to your lust of wealth and power. Thousands of deaths already lie at your door. This mysterious epidemic, which is neither more nor less than electrical starvation, is spreading every day, and human science has no remedy for it. You alone hold the remedy, and yet you confess that you are powerless to apply it before a given date!

  “Who are you that you should usurp one of the functions of the Almighty?—for that is really what you are doing? I have kept your criminal secret too long, and I will keep it no longer. You have made yourself the enemy of Society, and Society still has the power to deal with you. . . .”

  “My dear Professor, that’s all nonsense, and you know it!” said Calvert, interrupting him with a contemptuous gesture. “If Society were to lock me up, it should do without electricity till I were free. If it hung me it would get none, except on Markovitch’s terms, which would be higher than mine. So you can tell your story whenever you please. Meanwhile, you’ll excuse me if I remind you that I am rather busy.”

  Just as the Professor was about to take his leave the door opened and a boy brought in an envelope deeply edged with black. Calvert turned white to the lips and his hand trembled as he took it and opened it. It was in his wife’s handwriting, and was dated five days before. He read it through with fixed, staring eyes; then he crushed it into his pocket and strode toward the telephone. He rang the bell furiously, and then started back with an oath on his lips, remembering that he had made it useless. The sound of a bell brought a clerk into the room immediately.

  “Get me a hansom at once!” he almost shouted, and the clerk vanished.

  “What is the matter? Where are you going?” asked the Professor.

  “Matter? Read that!” he said, thrusting the crumpled letter into his hand. “My little girl is dead—dead of that accursed sickness which, as you justly say, I have brought on the world, and my wife is down with it too, and may be dead by this time. This letter is five days old. My God, what have I done? What can I do? I’d give fifty thousand pounds to get a telegram to Markovitch. Curse him and his infernal scheme! If she dies I’ll go to Boothia Land and kill him! Hullo! What’s that? Lightning—by the living God—and thunder!”

  As he spoke such a flash of lightning as had never split the skies of London before flared in a huge ragged stream of flame across the zenith, and a roar of thunder such as London’s ears had never heard shook every house in the vast city to its foundation. Another and another followed in rapid succession, and all through the night and well into the next day there raged, as it was afterwards found, almost all over the Northern Hemisphere, such a thunderstorm as had never been known in the world before and never would be again.

  With it, too, came hurricanes and cyclones and deluges of rain, and when, after raging for nearly twenty-four hours, it at length ceased convulsing the atmosphere and growled itself away into silence, the first fact that came out of the chaos and desolation that it had left behind it was that the normal electrical conditions of the world had been restored—after which mankind set itself to repair the damage done by the cataclysm and went about its business in the usual way.

  The epidemic vanished instantly and Mrs. Calvert did not die.

  Nearly six months later a white-haired wreck of a man crawled into her husband’s office and said, feebly: “Don’t you know me, Mr. Calvert? I’m Markovitch, or what there is left of him.”

  “Good God, so you are!” said Calvert. “What happened to you? Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  “It’s not a long story,” said Markovitch, sitting down and beginning to speak in a thin, trembling voice. “It isn’t long but it is very bad. Everything went well at first. All succeeded as I said it would, and then, I think it was just four days before we should have stopped, it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. We must have gone too far, or by some means an accidental discharge must have taken place. The whole works suddenly burst into white flame. Everything made of metal melted like tallow. Every man in the works died instantly—burnt, you know, to a cinder. I was four or five miles away, with some others, seal shooting. We were all struck down insensible. When I came to myself I found I was the only one alive.

  “Yes, Mr. Calvert, I am the only man that has got back from Boothia alive. The works are gone. There are only some heaps of melted metal lying about on the ice. After that I don’t know what happened. I must have gone mad. It was enough to make a man mad, you know. But some Indians and Eskimos, who used to trade with us, found me wandering about, so they told me, starving and out of my mind, and they took me to the coast. There I got better and then was picked up by a whaler, and so I got home. That’s all. It was very awful, wasn’t it?”

  Then his face fell forward into his trembling hands, and Calvert saw the tears trickling between his fingers. Suddenly his body slipped gently out of the chair and on to the floor; and when Calvert tried to pick him up he was dead.

  And so the secret of the Great Experiment, so far as the world at large was concerned, never got beyond the walls of Mr. Sidney Calvert’s cozy dining room after all.

  * * *

  1 The north magnetic pole was, indeed, in the Boothia peninsula of Canada when James Clark Ross first reached it in 1831. It has shifted over time, but had not moved very far when the present story was written.

  THE MEMORY CELL

  WALTER BESANT

  Walter Besant (1836–1901) was, like Grant Allen, a journalist, historian, and social reformer who helped set the literary stage for the works of H. G. Wells and George Griffith. His futuristic fantasy The Revolt of Man (1882) is a satire of sex-role reversal whose rhetoric was misunderstood as misogynistic by many readers, while The Inner House (1888) is an interesting philosophical fantasy about the possible long-term effects of a technology of longevity.

  “The Memory Cell,” first published in an anthology For Britain’s Soldiers [in the Boer War] in 1900 and reprinted in the collection A Five Years’ Tryst and Other Stories (1902), is a further philosophical meditation on a hypothetical question, which could doubtless have been extrapolated to much greater length and complexity, but benefits from the deftly challenging terseness of its conclusion.

  When the Professor first talked to me about the thing, I confess that I paid little or no attention to his words. This was partly because he was perpetually inventing new projects, and, of course, burning to tell somebody; partly because the apparent sympathy which made me the favorite receptacle of his ideas was really assumed in order to hide a natural indolence of mind, so that I only pretended to listen; and partly because, at this time when scientific research is so constantly discovering new things any new theory seems no more impossible than, say, talking to a man at twenty miles’ distance, or hearing the living voice of a dead man, or sending letters along a wire.

  We called him the Professor, not because he lectured, or professed, or taught anything, but because he thought and talk
ed of nothing in the world but his kind of science. Other fellows, he knew, cared about trifles—art—music—letters. For him there was but one subject worthy of a man’s attention, and it was his own. He attended to it all day long in his laboratory; and, as he was a wealthy creature, he had a very noble laboratory, with machines of gruesome cunning. Anyone who would sit there and listen while he talked he rewarded with cigars quite beyond the reach of ordinary man.

  One day—it was in early summer, and a flowery spray of Gloire de Dijon was lying along the open window—I sat with him in the largest armchair procurable, lighting the best cigar in the world, mind and body perfectly at rest, and ready to let him talk for an hour.

  “There is a disease,” he began—I always heard the beginning, and sometimes the end, just the same as a sermon—“a disease—call it if you will—perhaps you prefer to call it. . . .”

  “Anything you like, Professor.”

  “A natural function of the brain, which only becomes a disease when it causes pain; a disease which has been hitherto most strangely neglected.”

  “Now you become practical, Professor. Cure diseases, if you can.”

  It was his habit never to take the slightest notice of any remark, question or criticism. He just went on. Some men didn’t like the habit. With such a cigar, however, I felt that I had no right to be affronted. Besides, he was always so full of his subject that he only wanted to relieve his mind by pouring out some of the contents. He wanted neither advice, nor criticism, nor opinion. His own judgment was enough for him.

  “The disease is universal; it is common to humanity. Everybody has it—Kaiser to scavenger. As we grow old it grows troublesome. Many quite young people suffer horribly from it. I know a man—a young man of five-and-twenty—in whom it is like a flame burning night and day within. The agony which men and women endure from this disease. . . .”

  “Is it gout?” I asked.

  “. . . Is beyond all belief. Of all diseases this is the worst, because there has been hitherto no cure for it. None has ever been attempted. Oddly enough, no one has ever thought of attempting its cure.”

  “Asthma, perhaps.”

  “And we have looked upon it as one of the Inevitables, like death or decay. Yet while we fight against these, we have never taken up arms against the other. Why? Why? It belongs to the brain. We have had some success with other functions of the brain; we can deal with cells of other kinds; why not with this? Youth is spent in mistakes; old age, for most of us, in regrets, in rages, in self-accusation. Man! there is no more terrible disaster than Memory in the whole long list.”

  He paused, looking through me but not at me. I understood that it would no longer be necessary for me to listen. Therefore I allowed my attention to wander while the Professor went on.

  “Therefore”—towards the end my thoughts always returned—“I shall not yet give my method to the world. Not, in fact, until I have demonstrated to my own complete satisfaction the fact that it is not an experiment or a theory, but a great, a practical discovery with permanent results. In other words, when I have proved that I can so deaden the Memory Cell as to produce oblivion over any proposed period, and even substitute for that period a false Memory causing happiness to the patient, then—and not till then—will I give my method to the world. We have seen already too much disappointment in premature announcements of certain methods and certain cures. Mine shall be a solid discovery or nothing.”

  Now, at these words I was more than a little startled, and repented me of wandering attention.

  “I have already,” the Professor concluded, “made certain experiments which are at least hopeful. I must tell somebody, and I have chosen you, as one whom I have already tried and proved”—he knew nothing about the wandering thoughts. “It helps one to talk over a thing, and this is, if you come to think of it, a really big thing, isn’t it now?”

  “Big thing? Man, it’s colossal! But—I say—what about Repentance? If you destroy Memory you destroy Repentance. You confirm the sinner in his sin.”

  He replied, with the simplicity which belongs to everything truly great: “I shall only render Repentance unnecessary, by destroying the only stimulus to Repentance. Nobody wants to get better who feels no pain. Now come with me.”

  He led me out of his laboratory, which stood apart from the house at one end of a long garden. At the other end stood the house: an old manor-house, partly Elizabethan, with a stone terrace running along the front, and overlooking a lawn. On the terrace stood an old man, leaning on a stick. He was poorly clad in rusty black; his face was pinched; he looked what he was—the man who had failed in life.

  “One of my experiments,” said the Professor. “He is that most hopeless of creatures, the poet whom the world will not read. I found him in poverty—which troubled him little—and tortured by the memory of a ruined life. You shall see what I have done for him.”

  He walked across the lawn and laid his hand gently on the old man’s shoulder. “So!” he said, “lost in thought, my Poet? Do you remember old triumphs—or do you dream of new?”

  “I was living in the past,” the Poet replied. “We who are old live mostly in the past. It is our chief happiness. We cease to work; the chambers of imagery are darkened; but the past remains. We do not cease to live while our name still lingers in men’s hearts.”

  We left him standing in the sunshine, his eyes limpid, and wrapt in the happiness of his false Memory.

  “Is that illusion permanent?” I asked.

  “I know not. The man is old; he has a disease which will kill him soon. I hope that he will retain the happiness I have conferred upon him to the end. You shall see, however, other cases. The first is a woman whom I found in agonies unspeakable. After a madness of years, she awoke to an understanding of what it meant: the ruin of the husband and the children deserted by her.”

  At this moment there were no signs of agonies or of any self-reproach. The lady as sitting at an open window, her hands folded, in peaceful resignation. She wore widow’s weeds, and was a lovely woman still, though no longer young, despite her stormy past.

  “Isabel,” said the Professor, “you should be in the garden this sunny day, not sitting alone with your thoughts.”

  “Oh,” she replied, with a sad smile, “how can I be alone, dear friend? I have always with me my dear children and my husband. Death cannot part us—nor can it deprive me of past happiness. I have no present; my mind is in the past or the future, with my dear ones.”

  We passed on. “And that illusion?” I asked.

  “I believe it will endure. She is at peace now. Her Memory for a period of twenty years is entirely destroyed. A false Memory takes its place. I have done this for her.”

  We entered the house. He took me into his library, a large room containing many thousands of books, wherein a young man of twenty or so was at work. He lifted a bright, intelligent face and smiled greeting.

  “Getting on, Harry?” asked the Professor. “Go on—we are not come to disturb you.”

  “I am doing very well,” he replied. “The only thing that troubles me is that I shall finish before long.”

  “Then we will find something more for you. Don’t hurry. Don’t hurry.” He pretended to consult a book, and we went out.

  “That boy,” said the Professor, “has been imprisoned for a year for embezzling his employer’s money. As usual, for the sake of a worthless girl. His life is ruined. What have I done for him? He has forgotten the girl and his employer, and the crime and the prison. He thinks he came to me from school; he is quite happy.”

  “Will his illusion last?” I asked.

  “I do not know. Perhaps. If it does not, I must find another. I shall now show you a case on which I have expended all my skill. If this case succeeds, then I shall have no doubt whatever as to my discovery.”

  He led the way along the corridor and stopped before a closed door. “This,” he said, “is a case of rescue. The three you have seen are cases of disappointmen
t or of remorse. This is one in which an innocent child has been cursed for the sins of his father. Think of everything that is abominable; exhaust your experience of human wickedness; picture all the shame and infamy that can disgrace a name, and you will still be far below the truth. With this story behind him—public property, mind—it would be impossible for the boy to enter upon any career, to belong to any profession, or even to live among respectable people; every avenue would be closed to him. It would be necessary to live in the depths. His name must be purged for three generations at least before it can hope to rise and begin again. Well, I bought the boy of his villainous father, who does not know the name of the purchaser. I have begun by destroying in his brain the whole memory of his life from the very beginning. He remembers nothing. So far we have got. I have now to reconstruct the past for him. This had to be done very carefully. He will be an orphan, and my ward; he will have no relations; his parents are dead; his father was, if you like, a traveler, who died—where?—in Patagonia, perhaps. His mother was, if you like, a Brazilian—eh?—relations unknown. His cousins—why has he no cousins? Family quarrels, I suppose. And he is my ward. You can just look in, but he must not be disturbed.”

  He opened the door. A boy of fourteen or so sat upright in a chair, his hands hanging listlessly at his side, his eyes absolutely vacant; there was nothing behind those eyes—no memory, no understanding. One shuddered at the vacancy of mind indicated by those eyes.

  With him sat a nurse, waiting upon him. “There is no change,” she said. “He sits all day like this; he never speaks, he only murmurs. I have to feed him; he knows nothing.”

  “So far,” said the Professor, “we have done very well. Look at the child, my friend. Is there any Memory there? It is gone, I hope, for good. Better to have no Memory at all than the Memory that was within him when I got hold of him. Poor lad! You shall never know that your father was the notorious Edward Algernon Stevedore, who was expelled from the Army for cheating at cards; that he is a common rogue and swindler; that he drove your mother mad with his villainies; and that he sold you, his only son, for a five-pound note. You shall have brighter recollections than these.”