Nor was it just that people didn’t read science fiction. A person might not read detective stories or Westerns and yet not laugh at those who did. Science fiction reading, however, elicited laughter. “Do you really read that crazy stuff?” was the question.
Science fiction was escape literature, you see. It was more quintessentially escape than any other form of popular reading was, because it escaped you right out of this world. It seemed there was something contemptible about escape.
In that connection, though, I always remember “The Man Who Awoke,” by Laurence Manning, which appeared in the March 1933 Wonder Stories.
* * * *
THE MAN WHO AWOKE
by Laurence Manning
It was in all the newspapers for the entire month of September. Reports came in from such out-of-the-way places as Venezuela and Monte Carlo: “MISSING BANKER FOUND.” But such reports always proved false. The disappearance of Norman Winters was at last given up as one of those mysteries that can only be solved by the great detectives Time and Chance. His description was broadcast from one end of the civilized world to the other: Five feet eleven inches tall; brown hair; grayish dark eyes; aquiline nose; fair complexion; age forty-six; hobbies: history and biology; distinguishing marks: a small mole set at the corner of the right nostril.
His son could spare little time for search, for just a month before his disappearance Winters had practically retired from active affairs and left their direction to his son’s capable hands. There was no clue as to motive, for he had absolutely no enemies and possessed a great deal of money with which to indulge his dilettante scientific hobbies.
By October only the highly paid detective bureau that his son employed gave the vanished man any further thought. Snow came early that year in the Westchester suburb where the Winters estate lay and it covered the ground with a blanket of white. In the hills across the Hudson the bears had hibernated and lay sleeping under their earthen and icy blanket.
In the pond on the estate the frogs had vanished from sight and lay hidden in the mud at the bottom—a very miracle in suspended animation for biologists to puzzle over. The world went on about its winter business and gave up the vanished banker for lost. The frogs might have given them a clue—or the bears.
But even stranger than these was the real hiding place of Norman Winters. Fifty feet beneath the frozen earth he lay in a hollow chamber a dozen feet across. He was curled up on soft eiderdown piled five feet deep and his eyes were shut in the darkness of absolute night and in utter quiet. During October his heart beat slowly and gently and his breast, had there been light to see by, might have been observed to rise and fall very slightly. By November these signs of life no longer existed in the motionless figure.
The weeks sped by and the snow melted. The bears came hungrily out of winter quarters and set about restoring their wasted tissues. The frogs made the first warm nights of spring melodious to nature-lovers and hideous to light sleepers.
But Norman Winters did not rise from his sleep with these vernal harbingers. Still—deathly still—lay his body and the features were waxy white. There was no decay and the flesh was clean and fresh. No frost penetrated to this great depth; but the chamber was much warmer than this mere statement would indicate. Definite warmth came from a closed box in one corner and had come from it all the winter. From the top of the chamber wall a heavy leaden pipe came through the wall from the living rock beyond and led down to this closed box. Another similar pipe led out from it and down through the floor. Above the box was a dial like a clockface in appearance. Figures on it read in thousands from one to one hundred and a hand pointed to slightly below the two thousand mark.
Two platinum wires ran from the box over to the still figure on its piled couch and ended in golden bands—one around one wrist and one circling the opposite ankle. By his side stood a cabinet of carved stone—shut and mysterious as anything in that chamber. But no light was here to see by, only darkness; the black of eternal night; the groping stifling darkness of the tomb. Here was no cheering life-giving radiation of any land. The unchanging leaden metal sealed in the air from which the dust had settled completely, as it never does on the surface of our world, and had left it as pure and motionless as crystal—and as lifeless. For without change and motion there can be no life. A faint odor remained in the atmosphere of some disinfectant, as though not even bacteria had been permitted to exist in this place of death.
* * * *
At the end of a month Vincent Winters (the son of the missing man) made a thorough examination of all the facts and possible clues that the detectives had brought to light bearing upon his father’s disappearance. They amounted to very little. On a Friday, September 8th, his father had spent the day on his estate; he had dinner alone, read awhile in the library, had written a letter or two and retired to his bedroom early. The next morning he had failed to put in an appearance for breakfast and Dibbs the butler, after investigating, reported that his bed had not been slept in. The servants had, of course, all been minutely questioned even though their characters were such as almost to preclude suspicion. One only—and he the oldest and most loyal of them all—had acted and spoken in answer to questions in a fashion that aroused the curiosity of Vincent Winters. This man was Carstairs, the gardener—a tall ungainly Englishman with a long sad-looking face. He had been for twelve years in the employ of Mr. Winters.
On Friday night, about midnight, he had been seen entering his cottage with two shovels over his shoulder—itself, perhaps, not an incriminating circumstance, but his explanation lacked credibility: he had, he said, been digging in the garden.
“But why two shovels, Carstairs?” asked Vincent for the hundredth time and received the same unvarying answer: “I’d mislaid one shovel earlier in the day and went and got another. Then I found the first as I started home.”
Vincent rose to his feet restlessly.
“Come,” he said, “show me the place you were digging.”
And Carstairs paled slightly and shook his head.
“What, man! You refuse?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Vincent. Yes, I must refuse to show you . . . that.”
There were a few moments of silence in the room. Vincent sighed.
“Well, Carstairs, you leave me no choice. You are almost an institution on this place; my boyhood memories of the estate are full of pictures of you. But I shall have to turn you over to the police just the same,” and he stared with hardening eyes at the old servitor.
The man started visibly and opened his mouth as if to speak, but closed it again with true British obstinacy. Not until Vincent had turned and picked up the telephone did he speak.
“Stop, Mr. Vincent.”
Vincent turned in his chair to look at him, the receiver in his hand.
“I cannot show you the place I was digging, for Mr. Winters ordered me not to show it to anyone.”
“You surely don’t expect me to believe that!”
“You will still insist?”
“Most assuredly!”
“Then I have no choice. In case it were absolutely necessary to do so, I was to tell you these words. ‘Steubenaur on Metabolism.’”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“I was not informed, sir.”
“You mean my father told you to say that if you were suspected of his ... er ... of being connected with his disappearance?”
The gardener nodded without speaking.
* * * *
“H’m . . . sounds like the name of a book . . .” and Vincent went into the library and consulted the neatly arranged card catalog. There was the book, right enough, an old brown leather volume in the biological section. As Vincent opened it wonderingly an envelope fell out and onto the floor.
He pounced upon this and found it addressed to himself in his father’s handwriting. With trembling anxious fingers he opened and read:
“My dear son:
“It would be better, perhaps, if you were never to r
ead this. But it is a necessary precaution. Carstairs may in some unforseen way be connected with my disappearance. I anticipate this possibility because it is true. He has in very fact helped me disappear and at my own orders. He obeyed these orders with tears and expostulation and was to the very end just what he has always been—a good and devoted servant. Please see that he is never in want.
“The discovery and investigation of the so-called ‘cosmic’ rays was of the greatest interest to us biologists, my son. Life is a chemical reaction consisting fundamentally in the constant, tireless breaking up of organic molecules and their continual replacement by fresh structures formed from the substance of the food we eat. Lifeless matter is comparatively changeless. A diamond crystal, for instance, is composed of molecules which do not break up readily. There is no change—no life—going on in it. Organic molecules and cells are termed ‘unstable,’ but why they should be so was neither properly understood nor explained until cosmic rays were discovered. Then we suspected the truth: The bombardment of living tissue by these minute high-speed particles caused that constant changing of detail which we term ‘life.’
“Can you guess now the nature of my experiment? For three years I worked on my idea. Herkimer of Johns Hopkins helped me with the drug I shall use and Mortimer of Harvard worked out my ray-screen requirements. But neither one knew what my purpose might be in the investigations. Radiation cannot penetrate six feet of lead buried far beneath the ground. During the past year I have constructed, with Carstairs’ help, just such a shielded chamber on my estate. Tonight I shall descend into it and Carstairs shall fill in the earth over the tunnel entrance and plant sod over the earth so that it can never be found.
“Down in my lead-walled room I shall drink my special drug and fall into a coma which would on the surface of the earth last (at most) a few hours. But down there, shielded from all change, I shall never wake until I am again subjected to radiation. A powerful X-ray bulb is connected and set in the wall and upon the elapse of my alloted time this will light, operated by the power generated from a subterranean stream I have piped through my chamber.
“The X-ray radiation will, I hope, awaken me from my long sleep and I shall arise and climb up through the tunnel to the world above. And I shall see with these two eyes the glory of the world that is to be when Mankind has risen on the steppingstones of science to its great destiny.
“Do not try to find me! You will marry and forget me in your new interests. As you know, I have turned over to you my entire wealth. You wondered why at the time. Now you know. By all means marry. Have healthy children. I shall see your descendants in the future, I hope, although I travel very far in time: One hundred and twenty generations will have lived and died when I awaken and the Winters blood will have had time to spread throughout the entire world.
“Oh my son, I can hardly wait! It is nine o’clock now and I must get started upon my adventure! The call is stronger than the ties of blood. When I awaken you will have been dead three thousand years, Vincent. I shall never see you again. Farewell, my son! Farewell!”
* * * *
And so the disappearance of Norman Winters passed into minor history. The detective agency made its final report and received its last check with regret. Vincent Winters married the next year and took up his residence upon his father’s estate. Carstairs aged rapidly and was provided with strong young assistants to carry on the work of the place. He approached Vincent one day, years later, and made the request that he might be buried on the estate at the foot of the mound covered with hemlock and rhododendrons. Vincent laughed at the suggestion and assured him that he would live many a year yet, but the old gardener was dead within a year and Vincent had the tomb dug rather deeper than is usual, peering often over the shoulder of the laborer into the depth of the grave. But he saw nothing there except earth and stones. He erected a heavy flat slab of reinforced concrete on the spot.
“Most peculiar, if you ask me,” said old Dibbs to the housekeeper. “It’s almost as if Mr. Vincent wanted Carstairs’ stone to last a thousand years. Why, they cut the letters six inches deep in it!”
In due time Vincent Winters himself died and was buried beside the gardener at his earnest request. There remained no one on the earth who remembered Norman Winters.
* * * *
CHAPTER II
Awakening—in What Year?
It was night and great blue sheets of flame lit the sky with a ghastly glare. Suddenly a blinding flash enveloped him—he felt a million shooting pains in every limb—he was lying on the ground helpless and suffering —he fell into a brief unconsciousness.
A dozen times he awakened and each time he shrieked with the pain in his whole body and opened his eyes upon a small room lit by a penetrating blue electric bulb. Numberless times he tried to move his right hand to shield his eyes but found he could not force his muscles to obey his will. Days must have passed, as he lay there, with sweat dotting his brow with the effort, and finally one day his hand moved up slowly. He lay a full minute recovering. He did not know where he was. Then from the depths of infinity a little memory came into his dulled brain; a memory with a nameless joy in it. And slowly his surroundings struck new meaning and a vast thrill coursed through him. He was awake! Had he succeeded? Was he really alive in the distant future?
He lay quiet a moment letting the great fact of his awakening sink in. His eyes turned to the stone cabinet beside his couch. Slowly his hand reached out and pulled softly at the handle and a compartment on the level of his face revealed two bottles of yellowish liquor. With gasping effort he reached one and dragged it over to him, succeeding in spilling a little of its contents but also in getting a mouthful which he swallowed. Then he lay quietly a full half hour, eyes purposefully shut and lips tightly pressed together in the agony of awakened animation, while the medicine he had taken coursed through his veins like fire and set nerves a-tingling in arms and legs and (finally) in very fingertips and toes.
When he again opened his eyes he was weak but otherwise normal. The stone cabinet now yielded concentrated meat lozenges from a metal box and he partook very sparingly from the second bottle of liquid. Then he swung his legs down from the eiderdown couch, now tight-compressed from its original five feet to a bare two feet of depth by his age-long weight, and crossed the chamber to the clock.
“Five thousand!” he read breathlessly, clasping his thin hands together in delight. But could it be true? He must get outside! He reached down to a valve in the leaden piping and filled a glass tumbler with cold water which he drank greedily and refilled and drank again. He looked about curiously to note the changes time had produced on his chamber, but he had planned well and little or nothing had deteriorated.
The lead pipe was coated with a few tiny cracks in its surface and particles of white dust lay in them, where the cold water had gathered the moisture of the air by condensation. But this could not have been helped, for the stream of water through this pipe was all that kept the tiny generator turning—that made possible the heated chamber and the final blaze of the specially constructed X-ray lamp that now filled his whole being with its life-restoring radiations.
Winters removed the cover from the power box and examined the motor and generator with great care. The chromium metal parts and the jewelled bearings showed no slightest sign of wear. Did that mean that only a few years had elapsed? He doubted his clock’s accuracy. He replaced the covering and brushed off his hands, for everything was coated with dusty sediment. Next, Winters examined the heat elements and placed a glass container of water upon them to heat. With more of his meat concentrate he made a hot soup and drank it thankfully.
Now he went eagerly to the door in the lead wall and pulled at the locking lever. It resisted and he pulled harder, finally exerting all the strength he had in the effort. It was useless. The door was immovable! He leaned against it a moment, panting, then stooped and scrutinized the door-jamb. With a chill of dread he observed that the leaden chamberwall had become
coated at the crack with a fine white dust. It had rusted the door into place! Had he awakened only to die here like a rat in a trap?
In his weakened condition he felt despair creep over his body and mind helplessly. He again sank back on his couch and stared desperately at the door. It was hours before the simple solution to his difficulties occurred to him. The locking lever—of course! It was of stainless steel and held to the door only by one bolt. A matter of a dozen turns loosened the nut on this bolt and the lever came away freely in his hands.
With this bar of stout metal as a crowbar he easily pried into the soft lead wall beside the door-jamb and, obtaining a fulcrum, put his frail weight on the end of the lever. The door gave inward an inch! In a few minutes his efforts were rewarded. The door groaned protestingly as it swung open and Winters looked up the ancient stone steps, half-lit by the room’s illumination. But in the open doorway a chill draft blew on his ragged and time-tattered garments and he went back to the chamber and commenced unscrewing a circular cover set into the wall.
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 47