Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  6.

  How the Smoke Held Down the Fog.

  It was on a Friday that the fog came down upon us. The weather was very fine up to the middle of November that autumn. The fog did not seem to have anything unusual about it. I have seen many worse fogs than that appeared to be. As day followed day, however, the atmosphere became denser and darker, caused, I suppose, by the increasing volume of coal-smoke poured out upon it. The peculiarity about those seven days was the intense stillness of the air. We were, although we did not know it, under an air-proof canopy, and were slowly but surely exhausting the life-giving oxygen around us, and replacing it by poisonous carbonic acid gas. Scientific men have since shown that a simple mathematical calculation might have told us exactly when the last atom of oxygen would have been consumed; but it is easy to be wise after the event. The body of the greatest mathematician in England was found in the Strand. He came that morning from Cambridge. During a fog there was always a marked increase in the death rate, and on this occasion the increase was no greater than usual until the sixth day. The newspapers on the morning of the seventh were full of startling statistics, but at the time of going to press the full significance of the alarming figures was not realized. The editorials of the morning papers on the seventh day contained no warning of the calamity that was so speedily to follow their appearance. I lived then at Ealing, a Western suburb of London, and came every morning to Cannon Street by a certain train. I had up to the sixth day experienced no inconvenience from the fog, and this was largely due, I am convinced, to the unnoticed operations of the American machine. On the fifth and sixth days Sir John did not come to the city, but he was in his office on the seventh. The door between his room and mine was closed. Shortly after ten o’clock I heard a cry in his room, followed by a heavy fall. I opened the door and saw Sir John lying face downward on the floor. Hastening toward him, I felt for the first time the deadly effect of the deoxygenized atmosphere, and before I reached him I fell first on one knee and then headlong. I realized that my senses were leaving me, and instinctively crawled back to my own room, where the oppression was at once lifted, and I stood again upon my feet, gasping. I closed the door of Sir John’s room, thinking it filled with poisonous fumes, as indeed it was. I called loudly for help, but there was no answer. On opening the door to the main office I met again what I thought was the noxious vapor. Speedily as I closed the door, I was impressed by the intense silence of the usually busy office, and saw that some of the clerks were motionless on the floor, and others sat with their heads on their desks as if asleep. Even at this awful moment I did not realize that what I saw was common to all London, and not, as I imagined, a local disaster, caused by the breaking of some carboys in our cellar. (It was filled with chemicals of every kind, of whose properties I was ignorant, dealing as I did with the accountant, and not the scientific, side of our business.) I opened the only window in my room, and again shouted for help. The street was silent and dark in the ominously still fog, and what now froze me with horror was meeting the same deadly, stifling atmosphere that was in the rooms. In falling, I brought down the window and shut out the poisonous air. Again I revived, and slowly the true state of things began to dawn upon me. I was in an oasis of oxygen. I at once surmised that the machine on my shelf was responsible for the existence of this oasis in a vast desert of deadly gas. I took down the American’s machine, fearful in moving it that I might stop its working. Taking the mouthpiece between my lips I again entered Sir John’s room, this time without feeling any ill effects. My poor master was long beyond human help. There was evidently no one alive in the building except myself. Out in the street all was silent and dark. The gas was extinguished; but here and there in shops the incandescent lights were still weirdly burning, depending as they did on accumulators, and not on direct engine power. I turned automatically toward Cannon Street station, knowing my way to it even if blindfolded, stumbling over bodies prone on the pavement, and in crossing the street I ran against a motionless bus spectral in the fog, with dead horses lying in front, and their reins dangling from the nerveless hand of a dead driver. The ghostlike passengers, equally silent, sat bolt upright, or hung over the edge-boards in attitudes horribly grotesque.

  7.

  The Train with Its Trail of the Dead.

  If a man’s reasoning faculties were alert at such a time (I confess mine were dormant), he would have known there could be no trains at Cannon Street station; for if there was not enough oxygen in the air to keep a man alive, or a gas-jet alight, there would certainly not be enough to enable an engine fire to burn, even if the engineer retained sufficient energy to attend to his task. At times instinct is better than reason, and it proved so in this case. The railway, in those days, from Ealing came under the City in a deep tunnel. It would appear that in this underground passage the carbonic acid gas would first find a resting-place, on account of its weight; but such was not the fact. I imagine that a current through the tunnel brought from the outlying districts a supply of comparatively pure air that, for some minutes after the general disaster, maintained human life. Be this as it may, the long platforms of Cannon Street underground station presented a fearful spectacle. A train stood at the down platform. The electric lights burned fitfully. This platform was crowded with men, who fought each other like demons, apparently for no reason, because the train was already packed as full as it could hold. Hundreds were dead under foot, and every now and then a blast of foul air came along the tunnel, whereupon hundreds more would relax their grips and succumb. Over their bodies the survivors fought, with continually thinning ranks. It seemed to me that most of those in the standing train were dead. Sometimes a desperate body of fighters climbed over those lying in heaps, and, throwing open a carriage door, hauled out passengers already in, and took their places, gasping. Those in the train offered no resistance, and lay motionless where they were flung, or rolled helplessly under the wheels of the train. I made my way along the wall as well as I could to the engine, wondering why the train did not go. The engineer lay on the floor of his cab, and the fires were out.

  Custom is a curious thing. The struggling mob, fighting wildly for places in the carriages, were so accustomed to trains arriving and departing that it apparently occurred to none of them that the engineer was human and subject to the same atmospheric conditions as themselves. I placed the mouthpiece between his purple lips, and, holding my own breath like a submerged man, succeeded in reviving him. He said that if I gave him the machine he would take out the train as far as the steam already in the boiler would carry it. I refused to do this, but stepped on the engine with him, saying it would keep life in both of us until we got out into better air. In a surly manner he agreed to this and started the train, but he did not play fair. Each time he refused to give up the machine until I was in a fainting condition with holding in my breath, and finally he felled me to the floor of the cab. I imagine that the machine rolled off the train as I fell, and that he jumped after it. The remarkable thing is that neither of us needed the machine, for I remember that just after we started I noticed through the open iron door that the engine fire suddenly became aglow again, although at the time I was in too great a state of bewilderment and horror to understand what it meant. A western gale had sprung up—an hour too late. Even before we left Cannon Street those who still survived were comparatively safe, for one hundred and sixty-seven persons were rescued from that fearful heap of dead on the platforms, although many died within a day or two after, and others never recovered their reason. When I regained my senses after the blow dealt by the engineer, I found myself alone, and the train speeding across the Thames near Kew. I tried to stop the engine, but did not succeed. However, in experimenting, I managed to turn on the air brake, which in some degree checked the train, and lessened the impact when the crash came at Richmond terminus. I sprang off on the platform before the engine reached the terminal buffers, and saw passing me like a nightmare the ghastly train-load of the dead. Most of the doors were swin
ging open, and every compartment was jammed full, although, as I afterward learned, at each curve of the permanent way, or extra lurch of the train, bodies had fallen out all along the line. The smash at Richmond made no difference to the passengers. Besides myself, only two persons were taken alive from the train, and one of these, his clothes torn from his back in the struggle, was sent to an asylum, where he was never able to tell who he was; neither, as far as I know, did any one ever claim him.

  Pearsons Magazine

  March, 1898

  A CORNER IN LIGHTNING

  by George Griffith

  UNQUESTIONABLY the second most popular science fiction writer in England in the nineties, after H. G. Wells, was George Griffith, whose full name was George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones. It is entirely conceivable that Griffith’s science fiction outsold that of Wells in England. Born in 1858, son of a clergyman, Griffith appeared to have the wanderlust, and he claimed to have traveled around the world six times. The variety of locales for his stories would tend to substantiate this claim.

  At first a teacher and early a writer for a magazine of philosophy, The Secular Review, Griffith finally tried his hand at the short story (and poetry) for C. Arthur Pearson, magazine publisher. He scored his first big hit when Angel of the Revolution, a novel of the attempted aerial conquest of England by Russia, became a bestseller within thirty days of its book appearance in 1893. A sequel, Olga Romanoff; or, The Syren of the Skies (1894), did nearly as well, and carried the action into the future, as far as to involve communication with the planet Mars. While these were the high-water marks, he had numerous popular triumphs, most of them concerned with future war: The Outlaws of the Air (1895); The Romance of the Golden Star (1897); The Great Pirate Syndicate (1899); and the much-sought-after interplanetary, A Honeymoon in Space (1901).

  He wrote a great deal of poetry which was very prominently featured in Pearson’s Magazine with pages of illustration, some in color, and did several books on the British penal system, displaying a considerable knowledge of the subject. Vigorous and romantic historical novels and profiles of great British heroes are also among his work.

  He had a fine imagination, a reasonably good flair for characterization, and an excellent storyteller’s sense of pace, but the literary touch was lacking from his work. A Corner in Lightning may conceivably be the first story written in which cutting off all electrical current produces dire results. The great cities of the world had just reached the point where electricity for power and lighting had become an important factor; and a few years earlier this concept would have been unbelievable. Since then, it has been employed repeatedly with very dramatic impact.

  THEY had been dining for once in a way tete-a-tete, and she—that is to say, Mrs. Sidney Calvert, a bride of eighteen months’ standing—was half-lying, half-sitting in the depths of a big, cosy, saddle-bag armchair on one side of a bright fire of mixed wood and coal that was burning in one of the most improved imitations of the medieval fireplace. Her feet—very pretty little feet they were, too, and very daintily shod—were crossed, and poised on the heel of the right one at the corner of the black marble curb.

  Dinner was over. The coffee service and the liqueur case were on the table, and Mr. Sidney Calvert, a well set-up young fellow of about thirty, with a handsome, good-humoured face which a close observer would have found curiously marred by a chilly glitter in the eyes and a hardness that was something more than firmness about the mouth, was walking up and down on the opposite side of the table smoking a cigarette.

  Mrs. Calvert had just emptied her coffee cup, and as she put it down on a little three-legged console table by her side, she looked round at her husband and said:

  “Really, Sid, I must say that I can’t see why you should do it. Of course it’s a very splendid scheme and all that sort of thing, but, surely you, one of the richest men in London, are rich enough to do without it. I’m sure it’s wrong, too. What should we think if somebody managed to bottle up the atmosphere and made us pay for every breath we drew? Besides, there must surely be a good deal of risk in deliberately disturbing the economy of Nature in such a way. How are you going to get to the Pole, too, to put up your works?”

  “Well,” he said, stopping for a moment in his walk and looking thoughtfully at the lighted end of his cigarette, “in the first place, as to the geography, I must remind you that the Magnetic Pole is not the North Pole. It is in Boothia Land, British North America, some 1500 miles south of the North Pole. Then, as to the risk, of course one can’t do big things like this without taking a certain amount of it; but still, I think it will be mostly other people that will have to take it in this case.

  “Their risk, you see, will come in when they find that cables and telephones and telegraphs won’t work, and that no amount of steam-engine grinding can get up a respectable amount of electric light—when in short, all the electric plant of the world loses its value, and can’t be set going without buying supplies from the Magnetic Polar Storage Company, or, in other words, from your humble servant and the few friends that he will be graciously pleased to let in on the ground floor. But that is a risk that they can easily overcome by just paying for it. Besides, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t improve the quality of the commodity. ‘Our Extra Special Refined Lightning!’ ‘Our Triple Concentrated Essence of Electric Fluid’ and ‘Competent Thunder-Storms delivered at the Shortest Notice’ would look very nice in advertisements, wouldn’t they?”

  “Don’t you think that’s rather a frivolous way of talking about a scheme which might end in ruining one of the most important industries in the world?” she said, laughing in spite of herself at the idea of delivering thunder-storms like pounds of butter or skeins of Berlin wool.

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t argue that point with you because, you see, you will keep looking at me while you talk, and that isn’t fair. Anyhow I’m equally sure that it would be quite impossible to run any business and make money out of it on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. But, come, here’s a convenient digression for both of us. That’s the Professor, I expect.”

  “Shall I go?” she said, taking her feet off the fender.

  “Certainly not, unless you wish to,” he said; “or unless you think the scientific details are going to bore you.”

  “Oh, no, they won’t do that,” she said. “The Professor has such a perfectly charming way of putting them; and, besides, I want to know all that I can about it.”

  “Professor Kenyon, sir.”

  “Ah, good evening, Professor! So sorry you could not come to dinner.” They both said this almost simultaneously as the man of science walked in.

  “My wife and I were just discussing the ethics of this storage scheme when you came in,” he went on. “Have you anything fresh to tell us about the practical aspects of it? I’m afraid she doesn’t altogether approve of it, but as she is very anxious to hear all about it, I thought you wouldn’t mind her making one of the audience. “

  “On the contrary, I shall be delighted,” replied the Professor; “the more so as it will give me a sympathiser.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Calvert approvingly. “I think it will be a very wicked scheme if it succeeds, and a very foolish and expensive one if it fails.”

  “After which there is of course nothing more to be said,” laughed her husband, “except for the Professor to give his dispassionate opinion.”

  “Oh, it shall be dispassionate, I can assure you,” he replied, noticing a little emphasis on the word. “The ethics of the matter are no business of mine, nor have I anything to do with its commercial bearings. You have asked me merely to look at technical possibilities and scientific probabilities, and of course I don’t propose to go beyond these.”

  He took another sip at a cup of coffee that Mrs. Calvert had handed him, and went on:

  “I’ve had a long talk with Markovitch this afternoon, and I must confess that I never met a more ingenious man or one who knew as much about magnetism an
d electricity as he does. His theory that they are the celestial and terrestrial manifestations of the same force, and that what is popularly called electric fluid is developed only at the stage where they become one, is itself quite a stroke of genius, or, at least, it will be if the theory stands the test of experience. His idea of locating the storage works over the Magnetic Pole of the earth is another, and I am bound to confess that, after a very careful examination of his plans and designs, I am distinctly of the opinion that, subject to one or two reservations, he will be able to do what he contemplates.”

  “And the reservations, what are they?” asked Calvert a trifle eagerly.

  “The first is one that is absolutely necessary to make with regard to all untried schemes, and especially to such a gigantic one as this. Nature, you know, has a way of playing most unexpected pranks with people who take liberties with her. Just at the last moment, when you are on the verge of success, something that you confidently expect to happen doesn’t happen, and there you are left in the lurch. It is utterly impossible to foresee anything of this kind, but you must clearly understand that if such a thing did happen it would ruin the enterprise just when you have spent the greatest part of the money on it—that is to say, at the end and not at the beginning.”