The Best Science Fiction Stories of H G Wells

by H. G. Wells

  A half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable custom. But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea.

  “He is worshipping that horrid orchid,” she told herself, and waited ten minutes. “His watch must have stopped. I will go and call him.”

  She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his name. There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hot-water pipes.

  For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.

  He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands.

  She did not understand. Then she saw from under one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

  With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and their sap dripped red.

  Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel. How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must not. She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and, after she had panted for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn’s motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.

  Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and in another minute she had released him and was dragging him away from the horror.

  He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.

  The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.

  “Bring some water!” she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies. When, with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her weeping with excitement, and with Wedderburn’s head upon her knee, wiping the blood from his face.

  “What’s the matter?” said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and closing them again at once.

  “Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Dr. Haddon at once,” she said to the odd-job man so soon as he brought the water; and added, seeing he hesitated, “I will tell you all about it when you come back.”

  Presently Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and, seeing that he was troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, “You fainted in the hothouse.”

  “And the orchid?”

  “I will see to that,” she said.

  Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told her incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. “Come to the orchid-house and see,” she said.

  The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay already withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The stem of the inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the flowers were growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets still stirred feebly, and hesitated.

  The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittingly in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn’s orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his strange adventure.

  THE NEW ACCELERATOR

  CERTAINLY, IF ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent enough.

  Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone. Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has already appeared in The Strand Magazine—I think late in 1899; but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant little detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

  As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anæsthetics he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the preparation known as Gibberne’s B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.

  “But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,” he told me nearly a year ago. “Either they increase the central energy without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want—and what, if it’s an earthly possibility, I mean to have—is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two—or even three to everybody else’s one. Eh? That’s the thing I’m after.”

  “It would tire a man,” I said.

  “Not a doubt of it. And you’d eat double or treble—and all that. But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little phial like this”—he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked his points with it—“and in this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.”

  “But is such a thing possible?”

  “I believe so. If it isn’t, I’ve
wasted my time for a year. These various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show that something of the sort . . . Even if it was only one and a half times as fast it would do.”

  “It would do,” I said.

  “If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up against you, something urgent to be done, eh?”

  “He could dose his private secretary,” I said.

  “And gain—double time. And think if you, for example, wanted to finish a book.”

  “Usually,” I said, “I wish I’d never begun ’em.”

  “Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case. Or a barrister—or a man cramming for an examination.”

  “Worth a guinea a drop,” said I, “and more—to men like that.”

  “And in a duel, again,” said Gibberne, “where it all depends on your quickness in pulling the trigger.”

  “Or in fencing,” I echoed.

  “You see,” said Gibberne, “if I get it as an all-round thing it will really do you no harm at all—except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other people’s once——”

  “I suppose,” I meditated, “in a duel—it would be fair?”

  “That’s a question for the seconds,” said Gibberne.

  I harked back further. “And you really think such a thing is possible?” I said.

  “As possible,” said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went throbbing by the window, “as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact——”

  He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his desk with the green phial. “I think I know the stuff. . . . Already I’ve got something coming.” The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental work unless things were very near the end. “And it may be, it may be—I shouldn’t be surprised—it may even do the thing at a greater rate than twice.”

  “It will be rather a big thing,” I hazarded.

  “It will be, I think, rather a big thing.”

  But I don’t think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all that.

  I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. “The New Accelerator” he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial account. “It’s a good thing,” said Gibberne, “a tremendous thing. I know I’m giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all very well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff for, say, ten years. I don’t see why all the fun in life should go to the dealers in ham.”

  My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.

  It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone—I think I was going to get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet me—I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even the swift alacrity of his step.

  “It’s done,” he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; “it’s more than done. Come up to my house and see.”

  “Really?”

  “Really!” he shouted. “Incredibly! Come up and see.”

  “And it does—twice?”

  “It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff. Taste it! Try it! It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.” He gripped my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot, went shouting with me up the hill. A whole char-à-banc-ful of people turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in chars-à-banc. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard. There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.

  “I’m not walking fast, am I?” cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace to a quick march.

  “You’ve been taking some of this stuff,” I puffed.

  “No,” he said. “At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took some last night, you know. But that is ancient history, now.”

  “And it goes twice?” I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful perspiration.

  “It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!” cried Gibberne, with a dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.

  “Phew!” said I, and followed him to the door.

  “I don’t know how many times it goes,” he said, with his latch-key in his hand.

  “And you——”

  “It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the theory of vision into a perfectly new shape! . . . Heaven knows how many thousand times. We’ll try all that after——The thing is to try the stuff now.”

  “Try the stuff?” I said, as we went along the passage.

  “Rather,” said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. “There it is in that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?”

  I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous. I was afraid. But on the other hand there is pride.

  “Well,” I haggled. “You say you’ve tried it?”

  “I’ve tried it,” he said, “and I don’t look hurt by it, do I? I don’t even look livery and I feel——”

  I sat down. “Give me the potion,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think is one of the most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take the mixture?”

  “With water,” said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

  He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy chair; his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street specialist. “It’s rum stuff, you know,” he said.

  I made a gesture with my hand.

  “I must warn you in the first place as soon as you’ve got it down to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so’s time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there’s a kind of shock to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time, if the eyes are open. Keep ’em shut.”

  “Shut,” I said. “Good!”

  “And the next thing is, keep still. Don’t begin to whack about. You may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be going several thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart, lungs, muscles, brain—everything�
��and you will hit hard without knowing it. You won’t know it, you know. You’ll feel just as you do now. Only everything in the world will seem to be going ever so many thousand times slower that it ever went before. That’s what makes it so deuced queer.”

  “Lor’,” I said. “And you mean——”

  “You’ll see,” said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced at the material on his desk. “Glasses,” he said, “water. All here. Mustn’t take too much for the first attempt.”

  The little phial glucked out its precious contents. “Don’t forget what I told you,” he said, turning the contents of the measure into a glass in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring whiskey. “Sit with the eyes tightly shut and in absolute stillness for two minutes,” he said. “Then you will hear me speak.”

  He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.

  “By-the-by,” he said, “don’t put your glass down. Keep it in your hand and rest your hand on your knee. Yes—so. And now——”

  He raised his glass.

  “The New Accelerator,” I said.

  “The New Accelerator,” he answered, and we touched glasses and drank, and instantly I closed my eyes.

  You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has taken “gas.” For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then I heard Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my eyes. There he stood as he had been standing, glass still in hand. It was empty, that was all the difference.

  “Well?” said I.

  “Nothing out of the way?”

  “Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more.”

  “Sounds?”

  “Things are still,” I said. “By Jove! yes! They are still. Except the sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things. What is it?”

  “Analysed sounds,” I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced at the window. “Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed in that way before?”