Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  "Well, Dutch, how about it? Aren't you going to make me that brief little sketch of the length plan and cross-section of the Tube? I remember your sketch of it in college, and it tends to confuse me with the real changes that were made necessary when the wind-propulsion method was adopted."

  "All right, old timer. You remember that the Tube was widened at the sides in order that we could make two circular tubes side by side--one going each way."

  "I had forgotten that they were circular."

  "That is because of the pressure. A circle presents the best resistance," and picking an odd envelope from his pocket, he made the following sketch and passed it to me.

  I nodded as I recognized the cross-section.

  "Now the plan of the thing is like this," he added, putting aside his pipe and pulling a sheet of paper from the corner of his desk.

  Rapidly, with all his old accuracy, he sketched the main plan and leaned over as he handed it to me.

  "You see," he explained, picking up his pipe again, "both pumps work at one time--in fact, I should say all four, because this plan is duplicated on the English side. On both ends then, a train is gently pushed in by an electric locomotive. A car at a time goes through the gate so that there is a cushion of air between each car. The same thing happens at Liverpool. Now, when the due train comes out of the suction tube, it goes on out the gate, but the air behind it travels right on around and comes in behind the train that is leaving."

  "But how are you assured that it will not stall somewhere?"

  "It won't be likely to with pressure pumps going behind it and suction pumps pulling from in front. We can always put extra power on if necessary. Thus far the road has worked perfectly."

  "How much power do you need to send it through, under normal conditions?"

  "Our trains have been averaging about fifty tons, and for that weight we have found that a pound pressure is quite sufficient. Now, taking the tunnel's length as four thousand miles (of course it is not that long, but round figures are most convenient) and the tube width eleven and one quarter feet each and working this out we have 3,020,000 cubic feet of free air per minute or 2,904,000 cubic feet of compressed air, which would use about 70,000 horse power on the air compressor."

  "But isn't the speed rather dizzy?"

  "Not any more dizzy, Bob, than those old fashioned money-carrying machines that the department stores used to use--that is in comparison to size. The average speed is about 360 feet a second. Of course, the train is allowed to slow down toward the end of its run, even before it hits the braking machinery beyond the gate."

  "But how much pressure did you say would be put on the back of the diaphragm--I remember that each car has a flat disc on the back that fits fairly tightly to the tube ..."

  "The pressure on the back is less than seven tons. However, the disc does not fit tight. There are several leaks. For instance, the cars are as you know, run on the principle of the monorail with a guiding rail on each side. The grooves for the rails with their three rollers are in each car. There is a slight leakage of air here."

  "You used the turbo type of blower, didn't you?"

  "Had to because of the noise. We put some silencing devices on that and yet we could not kill all of the racket. However a new invention has come up that we will make use of soon now."

  * * * * *

  "But I can't understand, Dutch, why you seemed so put out when I announced my intention of going to Europe via the Tube. Why, I can remember the day when that would have tickled you to death."

  "You followed the digging of the Tube, didn't you?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "You remember the volcano and lava seams?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, I do not believe that the crack was a pressure crevice. If it had been, we were far enough below the ocean floor to have partly relieved the situation by the unusually solid building of the Tube. The tremendous shell of this new type of specially hardened metal--"

  "And the rich concrete that was used as filling! That was one job no one slipped up on. I remember how you watched it--"

  "Yet the crack has widened, Bob, since the Tube was completed."

  "How can you be certain?"

  "By the amount of water coming through the drain pipes."

  "But you said that once more it was stationary."

  "Yes, and that is the very thing that proves, I believe, the nature of the crack."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Why it isn't a crack at all, Bob. It is an earthquake fault."

  "Good heavens, you don't mean--"

  "Yes, I do. I mean that the next time the land slips our little tube will be twisted up like a piece of string, or crushed like an eggshell. That always was a rocky bit of land. I thought in going that far north, though, that we had missed the main line of activity; I mean the disturbances that had once wiped out a whole nation, if your scientists are correct."

  "Then you mean that it is only a matter of time?"

  "Yes, and I have been informed by one expert that the old volcanic activity is not dead either."

  "So that is what has stolen away your laugh?"

  "Well I am one of the engineers--and they won't suspend the service."

  "Fate has played an ugly trick on you, Dutch, and through your own dreams too. However, you have made me decide to go by the Tube."

  He took his pipe out of his mouth and stared at me.

  "Sooner or later the Tube will be through, and I have never been across. Nothing risked--a dull life. Mine has been altogether too dull. I am now most certainly going by the Tube."

  A bit of the old fire lit up his eyes.

  "Same old Bob," he grunted as I rose, and then he grasped my hand with a grin.

  "Good luck, my boy, on your journey, and may old Vulcan be out on a vacation when you pass his door."

  Thus we said good-by. I did not know then that I would never see him again--that he also took the train that night in order to make one last plea to the International Committee, and so laid down his life with the passengers for whom he had pleaded.

  It was with many conflicting thoughts, however, that I hurried to the great Terminus that fatal night, where after being ticketed, photographed and tabulated by an efficient army of clerks, I found myself in due time, being ushered to my car of the train.

  * * * * *

  For the benefit of those who have never ridden upon the famous "Flier," I could describe the cars no better than to say that coming upon them by night as I did, they looked like a gigantic, shiny worm, of strange shape, through whose tiny port-holes of heavy glass in the sides, glowed its luminous vitals.

  I was pompously shown to the front car, which very much resembled a tremendous cartridge--as did all of the other segments of this great glow-worm.

  Having dismissed the porter with a tip and the suspicion that my having the front car was the work of my friend, who was willing to give me my money's worth of thrill, and that the porter was aware of this, I stowed away my bags and started to get ready for bed. I had no sooner taken off my coat than the door was opened and an old fellow with a mass of silver hair peered in at me.

  "I beg your pardon, sir, but I understand you have engaged this car alone?"

  "Yes."

  "I can get no other accommodations tonight. You have an extra berth here and I must get to Paris tomorrow. I will pay you well--"

  I smiled.

  "Take it. I was beginning to feel lonesome, anyway."

  He bowed gravely and ordered the porter to bring in his things. I decided he was a musician. Only artists go in for such lovely hair. But he undressed in dignified silence, not casting so much as another glance in my direction, while on my part I also forgot his presence when, looking through the port-hole, I realized that the train had begun to move. Soon the drone of the propelling engines began to make itself heard. Then the train began to dip down and the steel sides of the entrance became too high for me to see over. My friend of the silver hair had already tur
ned off the light, and now I knew by the darkness that we had entered the Tube. For some time I lay awake thinking of "Dutch" and the ultimate failure of his life's dream, as he had outlined it to me, and then I sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  I was awakened by a terrible shock that hurled me up against the side of the compartment. A dull, red glow poured through the port-hole, lighting up the interior with a weird, bloody reflection. I crept painfully up to the port-hole and looked out. The strangest sight that man has ever looked upon met my eyes. The side of the wall had blown out into a gigantic cavern, and with it the rest of the cars had rolled down the bluff a tangled, twisted mass of steel. My car had almost passed by, and now it still stuck in the tube, even though the last port-hole through which I peered seemed to be suspended in air. But it was not the wrecked cars from which rose such wails of despair and agony that held my attention, but the cavern itself. For it was not really a cave, but a vast underground city whose wide, marble streets stretched away to an inferno of flame and lava. By the terrible light was lit up a great white palace with its gold-tipped scrolls, and closer to me, the golden temple of the Sun, with its tiers of lustrous yellow stairs--stairs worn by the feet of many generations.

  Above the stairs towered the great statue of a man on horseback. He was dressed in a sort of tunic, and in his uplifted arm he carried a scroll as if for the people to read. His face was turned toward me, and I marveled even in that wild moment that the unknown sculptor could have caught such an expression of appeal. I can see the high intellectual brow as if it were before me at this moment--the level, sympathetic eyes and the firm chin.

  * * * * *

  Then something moving caught my eyes, and I swear I saw a child--a living child coming from the burning city--running madly, breathlessly from a wave of glowing lava that threatened to engulf him at any moment. In spite of all the ridicule that has been showered upon me, I still declare that the child did not come from the wreckage and that he wore a tunic similar to the one of the statue and not the torn bit of a nightgown or sheet.

  He was some distance from me, but I could plainly see his expression of wild distraction as he began to climb those gleaming stairs. Strangely lustrous in the weird light, was that worn stairway of gold--gold, the ancient metal of the Sun. With the slowness of one about to faint he dragged himself up, while his breath seemed to be torn from his throat in agonizing gasps. Behind him, the glowing liquid splashed against the steps and the yellow metal of the Sun began to drip into its fiery cauldron.

  The child reached the leg of the horse and clung there.

  ... Then suddenly the whole scene began to shake as if I had been looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice of my friend as he said:

  "--an earthquake fault."

  After what seemed to me aeons of strange, buzzing noises and peculiar lights, I at last made out the objects around me as those of a hospital. Men with serious faces were watching me. I have since been told that I babbled incoherently about "saving the little fellow" and other equally incomprehensible murmurings. From them I learned that the train the other way was washed out, a tangled mass of wreckage just like my car, both terminus stations wrecked utterly, and no one found alive except myself. So, although I am to be a hopeless cripple, yet I am not sorry that the skill and untiring patience of the great English surgeon, Dr. Thompson, managed to nurse back the feeble spark of my life through all those weeks that I hung on the borderland; for if he had not, the world never would have known.

  As it is, I wonder over the events of that night as if it had not been an experience at all--but a wild weird dream. Even the gentleman with the mass of silver hair is a mystery, for he was never identified, and yet in my mind's recesses I can still hear his cultured voice asking about the extra berth, and mentioning his pressing mission to Paris. And somehow, he gives the last touch of strangeness to the events of that fatal night, and in my mind, he becomes a part of it no less than the child on the stairs, the burning inferno that lit the background, and the great statue of that unknown hero who held out his scroll for a moment in that lurid light, like a symbol from the sunken City of the Dead.

  THE END

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 24, 1899 -- the same year as Vladimir Nabokov was born. Shortly after his birth, his family relocated to Palermo, a suburb on the northern outskirts of the city named after the capital of Sicily. Although now Palermo is a well-developed area with a high cost of living, at the turn of the century it was a lower class suburb known for its vaguely seedy underclass, discordant politics, and knife-wielding compadrito, or hoodlums. A suburb containing its share of whorehouses and cabarets, it could be an often violent place where the residents danced the tango and told stories aflame with gauchos and knife fights. Although the flavor of this neighborhood was to permanently enter Borges's later writing, at the turn of the century the middle-class Borges family felt distinctly out of place. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer and a psychology teacher whose personal beliefs were founded in anarchy, and his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, was a proud woman, descended from a long line of soldiers and freedom fighters -- her mother, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, kept her house well ornamented with family artifacts such as swords, uniforms, and portraits of great freedom fighters. Borges was terribly fond of both of his parents. His father taught him philosophy, once using a chessboard to explain Zeno's paradox, and his mother, who would live to see 99, was a strong woman who would one day travel around the world with her son.

  His parents both spoke and read English, for his paternal Grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, had married an Englishwoman from Staffordshire named Francis Haslam. Although Colonel Borges was shot and killed in 1874, Grandmother Fanny was around to tell the young Jorge Luis -- "Georgie" -- many stories of the wild frontier days. Borges has often remarked that his Grandmother's dry English wit was the origin of his concise style. (In an interesting parallel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would later lay his deadpan fabulism at the feet of his own storytelling grandmother in Colombia.) She would also read him English magazines; as well as securing Mrs. Tink, another Englishwoman, as his nanny. Borges would later comment that the household was so bilingual that he was not even aware that English and Spanish were separate languages until later in his childhood.

  Borges's younger sister Norah, his junior by two years, was his only real childhood friend. Together they invented imaginary playmates -- "Quilos" and "The Windmill" -- acted out scenes from books, and spent their time roaming the labyrinthine library and the garden, two images which would find endless incarnations in his writing. During the summers they stayed in their summerhouse in Adrogu, a nearby town where the reasonably well-to-do could relax in a European setting complete with tennis courts, English-style schools, and garden mazes scented with "the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus trees." Young Georgie was also fond of the Zoo, and spent countless hours gazing at the animals, particularly the tigers -- his favorites. As he would later remark toward the end of his life: "I used to stop for a long time in front of the tiger's cage to see him pacing back and forth. I liked his natural beauty, his black stripes and his golden stripes. And now that I am blind, one single color remains for me, and it is precisely the color of the tiger, the color yellow."

  But despite his games with his sister and his relaxing summers in Adrogu, Borges has often remarked that he felt somewhat like an alien growing up. As a middle class child living in Palermo, he was essentially a bookish and terribly nearsighted child who tended to hide indoors. And yet in the manner common to all boys everywhere, in his imagination he fancied himself to be an active part of the local scenery. He established a friendship with a
local poet, his neighbor Evaristo Carriego, a reckless man who represented much of the "sentimental machismo" of Argentine tradition and would become something of a minor idol to the young dreamer. It wasn't until much later, returning to Buenos Aires after spending seven years in Europe, that Borges admitted to himself that "for years I believed I had grown up in a suburb . . . of risky streets and visible sunsets. The truth is I grew up in a garden, behind lanceolate railings, and in a library of unlimited English books." He later wrote a small book on the poet Carriego in which he reconciles the fact that his younger self was no denizen of the streets, but rather a quiet intellectual. Nevertheless, images of the compadrito, stray gauchos, and knife fights would make their occasional appearances throughout the rest of his literary career.

  He was always expected to be a writer, as his father had made several attempts, and as his blindness increased over the years, it became a tacit understanding that his son would carry on the tradition. (Of course the blindness was congenital, for Borges himself would later lose his sight as well.) He started writing at the age of six, mostly fanciful stories inspired by Cervantes. When he was nine, he translated Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" into Spanish, and effort which appeared in a local newspaper called El Pas. Since it was signed only "Jorge Borges," everyone assumed it was his father's work. After some visits to the pampa, where his mother's cousins owned a ranch on the Uruguay River, he attempted to write gaucho poems, but quickly confessed that they were a failure. But still the pampa exerted an influence on him, and in addition to learning how to swim, he stored up many images that would typically later seek a more fulfilling release in his later stories.

  In 1908 Borges began to attend school -- his father's anarchist sentiments had kept him out until now -- but he was taught nothing but Argentine nationalism. He was also dismayed at the comparatively low moral and intellectual character of the other students. Adopting an English style of dress in a predominantly anti-English school, wearing thick glasses, and already having a superior education, needless to say Borges was picked on relentlessly by the other students. Possessed by a quixotic sense of ancestral honor, he refused to back down from a fight; but unfortunately his stamina could not back up his pride and he ended up becoming more familiar with defeat than victory. Indeed, he came to loathe school, even though he excelled at it academically.