Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Had I not, a short time before, read, in an American newspaper, an article describing this extraordinary project for linking Europe with the New World by means of two gigantic submarines tubes? An inventor had claimed to have accomplished the task; and that inventor, Colonel Pierce, I had before me.

  In thought I realized the newspaper article.

  Complaisantly the journalist entered into the details of the enterprise. He stated that more than 3,000 miles of iron tubes, weighing over 13,000,000 tons, were required, with the number of ships necessary, for the transport of this material--200 ships of 2,000 tons, each making thirty-three voyages. He described this Armada of science bearing the steel to two special vessels, on board of which the ends of the tubes were joined to each other, and incased in a triple netting of iron, the whole covered with a resinous preparation to preserve it from the action of the seawater.

  Coming at once to the question of working, he filled the tubes--transformed into a sort of pea-shooter of interminable length--with a series of carriages, to be carried with their travellers by powerful currents of air, in the same way that despatches are conveyed pneumatically round Paris.

  A parallel with the railways closed the article, and the author enumerated with enthusiasm the advantages of the new and audacious system. According to him, there would be, in passing through these tubes, a suppression of all nervous trepidation, thanks to the interior surface being of finely polished steel; equality of temperature secured by means of currents of air, by which the heat could be modified according to the seasons; incredibly low fares, owing to the cheapness of construction and working expenses--forgetting, or waving aside, all considerations of the question of gravitation and of wear and tear.

  All that now came back to my mind.

  So, then, this "Utopia" had become a reality, and these two cylinders of iron at my feet passed thence under the Atlantic and reached to the coast of England!

  In spite of the evidence, I could not bring myself to believe in the thing having been done. That the tubes had been laid I could not doubt; but that men could travel by this route--never!

  "Was it not impossible even to obtain a current of air of that length?"--I expressed that opinion aloud.

  "Quite easy, on the contrary!" protested Colonel Pierce; "to obtain it, all that is required is a great number of steam fans similar to those used in blast furnaces. The air is driven by them with a force which is practically unlimited, propelling it at the speed of 1,800 kilometres an hour--almost that of a cannon-ball!--so that our carriages with their travellers, in the space of two hours and forty minutes, accomplish the journey between Boston and Liverpool."

  "Eighteen hundred kilometres an hour!" I exclaimed.

  "Not one less. And what extraordinary consequences arise from such a rate of speed! The time at Liverpool being four hours and forty minutes in advance of ours, a traveller starting from Boston at nine o'clock in the morning, arrives in England at 3.53 in the afternoon. Isn't that a journey quickly made? In another sense, on the contrary, our trains, in this latitude, gain over the sun more than 900 kilometres an hour, beating that planet hand over hand: quitting Liverpool at noon, for example, the traveller will reach the station where we now are at thirty-four minutes past nine in the morning--that is to say, earlier than he started! Ha! Ha! I don't think one can travel quicker than that!"

  I did not know what to think. Was I talking with a madman?--or must I credit these fabulous theories, in spite of the objections which rose in my mind?

  "Very well, so be it!" I said. "I will admit that travellers may take this madbrained route, and that you can obtain this incredible speed. But, when you have got this speed, how do you check it? When you come to a stop, everything must be shattered to pieces!"

  "Not at all," replied the Colonel, shrugging his shoulders. "Between our tubes--one for the out, the other for the home journey--consequently worked by currents going in opposite directions--a communication exists at every joint. When a train is approaching, an electric spark advertises us of the fact; left to itself, the train would continue its course by reason of the speed it had acquired; but, simply by the turning of a handle, we are able to let in the opposing current of compressed air from the parallel tube, and, little by little, reduce to nothing the final shock or stopping. But what is the use of all these explanations? Would not a trial be a hundred timesbetter?"

  And, without waiting for an answer to his questions, the Colonel pulled sharply a bright brass knob projecting from the side of one of the tubes: a panel slid smoothly in its grooves, and in the opening left by its removal I perceived a row of seats, on each of which two persons might sit comfortably side by side.

  "The carriage!" exclaimed the Colonel. "Come in."

  I followed him without offering any objection, and the panel immediately slid back into its place.

  By the light of an electric lamp in the roof I carefully examined the carriage I was in.

  Nothing could be more simple: a long cylinder, comfortably upholstered, along which some fifty arm-chairs, in pairs, were ranged in twenty-five parallel ranks. At either end a valve regulated the atmospheric pressure, that at the farther end allowing breathable air to enter the carriage, that in front allowing for the discharge of any excess beyond a normal pressure.

  After spending a few moments on this examination, I became impatient.

  "Well," I said, "are we not going to start?"

  "Going to start?" cried the Colonel. "We have started!"

  Started--like that--without the least jerk, was it possible? I listened attentively, trying to detect a sound of some kind that might have guided me.

  If we had really started--if the Colonel had not deceived me in talking of a speed of eighteen hundred kilometres an hour--we must already be far from any land, under the sea; above our heads the huge, foam-crested waves; even at that moment, perhaps taking it for a monstrous sea-serpent of an unknown kind--whales were battering with their powerful tails our long, iron prison!

  But I heard nothing but a dull rumble, produced, no doubt, by the passage of our carriage, and, plunged in boundless astonishment, unable to believe in the reality of all that had happened to me, I sat silently, allowing the time to pass.

  At the end of about an hour, a sense of freshness upon my forehead suddenly aroused me from the torpor into which I had sunk by degrees.

  I raised my hand to my brow: it was moist.

  Moist! Why was that? Had the tube burst under pressure of the waters--a pressure which could not but be formidable, since it increases at the rate of "an atmosphere" every ten metres of depth? Had the ocean broken in upon us?

  Fear seized upon me. Terrified, I tried to call out--and--and I found myself in my garden, generously sprinkled by a driving rain, the big drops of which had awakened me. I had simply fallen asleep while reading the article devoted by an American journalist to the fantastic projects of Colonel Pierce--who, also, I much fear, has only dreamed.

  CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

  Writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. Gilman was a writer and social activist during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She had a difficult childhood. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins was a relative of well-known and influential Beecher family, including the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. But he abandoned the family, leaving Charlotte's mother to raise two children on her own. Gilman moved around a lot as a result and her education suffered greatly for it.

  Marriage and Inspiration

  Gilman married artist Charles Stetson in 1884. The couple had a daughter named Katherine. Sometime during her decade-long marriage to Stetson, Gilman experienced a severe depression and underwent a series of unusual treatments for it. This experience is believed to have inspired her best-known short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892).

  Women's Rights Activism

  While she is best known for her fiction, Gilman was also a successful lecturer and intellectual. One of her greatest
works of nonfiction, Women and Economics, was published in 1898. A feminist, she called for women to gain economic independence, and the work helped cement her standing as a social theorist. It was even used as a textbook at one time. Other important nonfiction works followed, such as The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) and Does a Man Support His Wife? (1915).

  Along with writing books, Charlotte Perkins Gilman established The Forerunner, a magazine that allowed her to express her ideas on women's issues and on social reform. It was published from 1909 to 1916 and included essays, opinion pieces, fiction, poetry and excerpts from novels.

  Suicide

  In 1900, Gilman had married for the second time. She wed her cousin George Gilman, and the two stayed together until his death in 1934. The next year she discovered that she had inoperable breast cancer. Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide on August 17, 1935.

  The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

  Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman (Jane) whose physician husband (John) has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of a house he has rented for the summer. She is forbidden from working and has to hide her journal from him, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency," a diagnosis common to women in that period. The windows of the room are barred, and there is a gate across the top of the stairs, allowing her husband to control her access to the rest of the house.

  The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

  In the end, she imagines there are women creeping around behind the patterns of the wallpaper and comes to believe she is one of them. She locks herself in the room, now the only place she feels safe, refusing to leave when the summer rental is up. "For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."

  It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

  A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

  Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

  Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

  John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

  John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

  John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.

  You see he does not believe I am sick!

  And what can one do?

  If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

  My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

  So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.

  Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

  Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

  But what is one to do?

  I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

  I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

  So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

  The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

  There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

  There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.

  There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

  That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

  I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.

  I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

  But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

  I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.

  He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.

  He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

  I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

  He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

  It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

  The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

  One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

  It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

  The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

  It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

  No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

  There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

  We have been h
ere two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

  I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

  John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

  I am glad my case is not serious!

  But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

  John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him.

  Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

  I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

  Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things.

  It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

  And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.

  I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!

  At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

  He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

  "You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental."

  "Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."

  Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.