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

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

“Of course you didn’t get him,” Yates snarled. “You dunderhead! Read that! Some more of his confounded impudence, the blackmailing rascal!” he cried, shaking a paper at Treadwell.

  Treadwell took it and read:

  Dear Mr. Yates: I can’t trade my Heat Wave Synchronizer for Treadwell’s police money. Fifty thousand in coin of the Republic before the 26th or after that it will be a cold day for you. Hielo.

  “You get that blackmailer, or the trust will get a new sleuth, you mullet!” the president hurled after Treadwell, as the latter escaped through the sanctum door.

  John G. Yates was awakened on the morning of the 26th at his Grand Neck, Long Island, home by the thumping of radiators.

  He jabbed the bell for his man and fiercely demanded to know what in the name of all that was hot and holy the idiots had steam up for.

  “Well, sir,” replied the valet, “it turned cold suddenly in the night and is still so sharp this mornin’, we thought it best to warm up a little.”

  “Cold!” exclaimed Yates. “Didn’t frost, did it?”

  “A bit, sir,” answered the valet.

  “What!” John G. leaped from his bed and strode to the window, threw it up and gazed down on a bed of particularly choice plants just out of his hot-houses.

  “A little frost, eh?” he demanded. “I should say there had been a bit. Every blamed green thing is deader’n a door nail, and this the middle of August!”

  Next to the trust, the famous Yates flowers, fruits and vegetables were nearest his heart, in fact his garden was almost his sole hobby, and he was dressed and out of doors before his man could get the bath ready.

  A scene of desolation met his eye. Everything fragile and not under glass was frost-bitten beyond redemption. Even the hardy fruit-trees had suffered.

  Although the sun was shining brightly the air was still cold and frosty when he went aboard the Octopus for his trip to town, but ten minutes alter the yacht had left her dock the chill gradually dissipated, and the thermometers, which had been hovering about forty, suddenly jumped to sixty-five.

  In his mail that morning the ice magnate found a note:

  This won’t be the last of the cold days for Mr. John G. Yates, if the $50,000 isn’t forthcoming. Temperature will drop rapidly from now on.

  Treadwell was instantly despatched to Grand Neck, and returned late in the afternoon to report that the thermometers at the Yates house registered thirty-five degrees and that the temperature three miles away in every direction was above seventy.

  “Some peculiarity of the weather,” remarked the magnate thoughtfully, “but pretty darned expensive for me. You keep after that ‘Hielo,’ though, Treadwell; and mind, don’t let any of this get into the papers.”

  But there was a leak somewhere, and an enterprising Park Row reporter, who had got within half a mile of the Yates place by five o’clock the next morning stopped and rubbed his numb hands for just one second when he saw snowflakes in the air, then sprinted for the nearest telephone and sent in a story that roused dozing night editors and started an extra edition.

  By nine o’clock every New York paper had a representative at Grand Neck, and when the trust president emerged from the house, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of an overcoat, a dozen shivering men closed around him, pads and pencils in hand.

  It was not a pleasant forenoon for the Ice King. If the reporters had annoyed him excessively at Grand Neck in the early morning, they tortured him now.

  About one o’clock his wife telephoned him that the snow was six inches deep at Grand Neck and that she was leaving. He had scarcely hung up the receiver when Hicks, the heaviest and most intractable of the stockholders, called him up and announced in an ominous voice that ice trust stocks had fallen ten points in the past twenty minutes.

  This was a turn in affairs that had not occurred to Yates, and he suddenly realized that if this fool story started some of the small fry to unload, the Street would make short work of the trust. Stock which he had spent years steering into the hands of persons whom he could control would be lost forever, and anyway the balance of power, which he held, was not large. He rushed to the ticker in the corner of his office and nervously hauled the tape through his trembling fingers.

  Even as he read the last quotation of his precious stock—88—twenty points lower than it had ever been, the machine commenced to buzz again and rapidly spelled out “Amsterdam Ice offered at 85, 50 bid; offered at 80, at 78; 45 bid.” Then there was a pause while some racing news was run off and the machine began again: “Amsterdam Ice 60, 37 offered”—but John G. was now at the telephone bellowing orders to his brokers to get down there and buy right and left.

  “Take everything in sight,” he fairly shrieked and then rushed frantically to the tape again.

  “Amsterdam Ice 35, 20 offered.” The cold sweat stood out on his forehead. His trust was going to the devil if Jones and Baker, his brokers, didn’t get there and stop this thing. Then the ticker commenced again: “Amsterdam Ice, 30, 40, 50, 60.” “Thank God,” muttered Yates, dropping limply into a chair, “they got there all right.”

  But thirty minutes later both Jones and Baker came rushing into the office. A few minutes before they were on the floor old Hicks had dumped all his holdings, and buyers suddenly turned up from everywhere. Brokers who had been forcing down the price only a few moments before and fairly giving the stock away, had suddenly commenced to buy and the price had gone up to almost its old figure, when the exchange closed.

  Baker and Jones had picked up five hundred shares, but all Hicks’ holdings were gone, twenty thousand shares unaccounted for and the unknown holder was master of the trust.

  The next morning dawned clear and bright, but the rain that had fallen elsewhere on Long Island during the night had deepened the snow at the Yates place to all of two feet, and gables, trees and fences were festooned with enormous icicles. However, the thermometer was rapidly going up and the hot August sun was making inroads on the white covering with a sort of yellow joy.

  About eight o’clock Treadwell, clothes torn and face scarred and bleeding, came out of the grove in the rear of the house and hurried indoors, reappearing in a few minutes with Yates himself. A half-dozen of the men, guarding the premises, were assembled and the party waded through the snow and off into the grove behind the house.

  “You see, Mr. Yates,” Treadwell was saying, “I argued that all this cold must come from somewhere and it must needs be colder there than here at the house. So last night I hung out thermometers in all directions around the place, and blamed if I didn’t find it colder out this way than any other; so I follers it up and ‘bout daylight I located some sort of a shack out here ‘bout half a mile away. There was a light in the window and a sound like forty automobiles goin’ full tilt. I goes up toward the place. Then I hears a step behind me and I turns jes’ in time to see a feller bat me a good one side th’ head. When I comes to, I finds meself tied fast to a tree and I been nigh three hours gettin’ loose.” Then as they rounded a clump of trees: “There we are, that’s the place,” he added, pointing to an old, disused stable.

  John G. motioned to some of the men to surround the building, and they approached it gingerly; but the place was strangely silent. They forced the door and entered. The floor was covered with machinist’s tools and demolished machinery. In a conspicuous place a big envelope was tacked to the wall, bearing the address, “Mr. John G. Yates, soon to be ex-President of the Amsterdam Ice Company.”

  Yates seized it, tore it open, and read:

  My Dear Mr. Yates:—

  Unintentionally you did me a very great service in forcing me out of my position as superintendent of the Harlem plant. My inventions and improvements had already made you rich, and you did not realize that other and revolutionary appliances were practically completed. I submitted to your bullying in silence until I was absolutely sure of success. Now the worm has turned. The whole affair was pulled off, every detail of it, according to a carefully prearranged
plan. The blackmail letter was written in order that it might be given to a certain newspaper reporter at the proper time, with a tip to visit Grand Neck at once. Old Hicks was told just enough to scare him into selling all his holdings, when my brokers knocked the bottom out of your stock, and thanks to the kind offices of my well-coached representatives on the floor of the Stock Exchange, I now hold the balance of power in the trust, and I hereby announce to you that I shall take full control of affairs at once and conduct the business according to my own ideas.

  I have organized a company to manufacture the Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, and my little ice-maker will soon be an indispensable household utensil. We can make a good profit and sell it for less than the average householder has been paying you monthly for ice.

  My invention can be made in any size required, from portable machines of pocket dimensions to big ones for hotels, breweries and so on. The logical owner of my invention is the ice trust, in fact, the Amsterdam Company could not remain in business otherwise.

  I am sure you will not censure me for the method I have adopted to convince you and the public of the value of my invention. Our stockholders wanted to advertise, in a spectacular way, so as to attract instant and wide attention, and I felt that you would wish to have your name connected with a new idea. But even if I misjudged you in this, you must acknowledge that it has been a square fight between science and capital.

  Sincerely yours,

  A. L. Peters.

  Six months later, at the Fifth Avenue Club, young Augustus Van Inghen was entertaining a few of his cronies at dinner. “Pardon my slang,” he said as a waiter placed on the table an affair of resplendent Tiffany silver resembling two chafing-dishes yoked together, “but this Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer is the smoothest article ever. Some people like their champagne hot, others like it frozen, but I like to serve mine always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I light these two alcohol lamps, so. I move this lever until the thermometer here on the little well reads 32. I place the magnum in this receptacle. I wait forty seconds. Behold, gentlemen! It is frappéd fit for a king.” And he held aloft the dark-brown bottle, its glassy exterior scintillating with frost.

  “It certainly is a wonderful invention,” said a broker in the party. “My wife, who does settlement work, tells me that the push-cart men down on Stanton Street are hawking cheap makes at fifteen cents apiece, two for a quarter.”

  “Yes,” chimed in a Harvard B.Sc., “and the principle is very simple. You gentlemen know that sound is only a vibration in the air, and that if any sound-wave is properly opposed by another wave of corresponding frequency and amplitude, even though each be very intense, absolute silence results. Well, similarly, heat is a vibration in the substance heated, and if the heat waves from any source are opposed by others from another source of equal frequency and amplitude, cold results. Not ordinary cold, but the cold of the absolute zero.”

  The New Broadway Magazine

  December, 1907

  CONGEALING THE ICE TRUST

  by Capt. H. G. Bishop, U.S.A.

  READERS of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which began publication with its issue of April 1926, found a great many of the names on the title page familiar to them. There were the standby classics of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe; stars from Munsey’s pulps, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Austin Hall, Murray Leinster, and Garrett P. Serviss; but here and there among the familiar names were a few unknowns.

  Some of them were new authors who eventually appeared again, but most baffling were those who published once and in the process displayed such “savvy” of science fiction that it seemed impossible they did not possess past experience. Such an author was Capt. H. G. Bishop, USA, who in the entire history of science fiction magazines was represented by a single story, On the Martian Way, in the February 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was a tale of the future, when there was regular passenger service between Mars, Venus, and Earth, and it told of the carelessness that could cause space tragedy, the drama of those caught in a hopeless position, and the heroism and self-sacrifice that saved a spaceship from plunging into the sun.

  For 1927, taking space travel for granted and writing a story that was not about the first voyage was extremely advanced. Through the years, Capt. Bishop’s single claim to fame appeared to be that one story, until finally research in the back files of The New Broadway Magazine revealed that he was “discovered” by them and wrote science fiction and fantasy for their pages.

  In a certain sense, Congealing the Ice Trust holds kinship to the humorous stories of erratic inventors whose gimmicks always blow up in their faces at the crucial moment. However, that tie is the light touch of humor and the invention. This invention does not blow up in the face of its creator. It succeeds, to make it one of the most entertaining “world of if” stories ever. Involved is an invention for changing weather, but the reasons behind it center in an era when refrigeration was virtually unknown and when manufacturers of ice were of major importance. This is a story that could only have been completely effective when read in the gaslight era.

  JOHN G. YATES, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, was going over his daily mail. One by one he picked up each neatly slitted envelope, glanced at its contents and tossed it to his well-trained secretary with a few suggestions or a curt order.

  His expression was complacent, even genial. For only a few weeks previously the labor of many years had netted its final reward. The last vestige of opposition had been swept away, and President Yates knew that not a pound of ice, whether bestowed by an all-wise Providence or congealed by the instrumentality of man, could be garnered within five hundred miles of Greater New York without his permission, nor disposed of without contributing its tithe to the stockholders he represented.

  So he was in a particularly good humor this morning. His awakening, bath, shave and dressing had been very harmonious. His breakfast and the market reports in the morning paper had been unusually agreeable, and the trip down the Sound from Grand Neck to the Twenty-third Street anchorage surprisingly pleasant for an August day.

  Furthermore, he had at last got rid of Peters, old Peters, who had superintended the Harlem plant for the past twenty years. Confounded old bucker! Impudent enough, crank enough to tell him, John G. Yates, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, what he, Peters, thought of trusts in general and of the ice trust in particular. What business was it of Peters’ if he chose to make a hundred per cent profit or more, if he so desired? Ice was a luxury for those who could afford to pay. It was Peters’ business to make ice; John G. Yates was doing the selling. Also Peters had blown up over five hundred dollars’ worth of apparatus in some fool experiment; might blow up the plant itself some day.

  So John G. waded on through the stack of mail, interspersing his instructions with many a joke and facetious remark, at which the secretary laughed immoderately, but not with the merriment that seemed to lie in the continued smile that clung to his features as the Ice King neared the last envelope in the stack.

  Picking it up with a sigh of relief, the ice magnate extracted from it a sheet of paper covered with typewriting through which he proceeded to wade in his usual energetic manner, three lines at a time.

  Ten seconds later his feet struck the floor with a thud that rattled the office furniture, and the Ice King rose suddenly to the full majesty of his six feet one, shouting in the bull-like voice he could call forth so readily: “A hold up! A hold up! Listen.” And he read:

  New York, August 20th.

  Mr. John G. Yates,

  President, Amsterdam Ice Co.

  Dear Sir:

  After many years of study and interminable labor I have at last perfected a freezing and refrigerating apparatus which will revolutionize all existing methods in this line. The apparatus is so simple and inexpensive, both in original cost and operation as to be within reach of all, even the poorest, and of course when once placed upon the market will render practically u
seless and valueless all ice-houses and artificial ice-plants, as well as the means for ice distribution. My invention is based upon scientific principles and is practical reality. With my Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, it is possible to take two bricks which have been lying in the sun all day and congeal a bucket of water in one minute. On a larger scale it is possible to refrigerate a portion of the earth’s surface, even on an August day. It is unnecessary to submit arguments to advise you of the effect this invention will have upon the ice trust, and for this reason I believe it no more than just to give you the first opportunity to acquire this valuable invention. Should you so elect, a complete working model of the apparatus, with descriptions and drawings, will be sent you on condition that you place $50,000 in cash under the large granite block laying north of the Woodbine road crossing, Long Island R. R., before August 23d. Failure so to do will result in the disintegration of the ice trust.

  Yours for cheap refrigeration,

  Hielo.

  “What d’ye think of it?” thundered Yates, waving the sheet at the secretary and glaring at him as though that meek individual had composed it. “The audacity! To threaten me!” he bellowed. “Tryin’ to blackmail the trust. I’ll fix him! I’ll fix him! Send Treadwell here,” Yates bellowed.

  Treadwell was the company’s chief detective, and had a reputation for cleverness in his profession.

  As a result of the interview he hid a bag of “police money” at the appointed place and kept unobtrusive guard over the locality. But the day and night of August 23d passed uneventfully, and Treadwell returned to the office on the morning of the 24th only to be suddenly haled before the president, who was stamping up and down his office, purple with rage.

  “Of course you didn’t get him,” Yates snarled. “You dunderhead! Read that! Some more of his confounded impudence, the blackmailing rascal!” he cried, shaking a paper at Treadwell.