That shallow youth Giovanni Guasconti found himself as facilely and superficially in love with one baleful beauty as with the other—indeed, with yet greater ease on this second occasion, since he had been wondering, ever since he knew himself to be a victim of the Rappaccini method, how he was to discharge the normal impulses of youth upon a living object.
All the wedding guests agreed that never had there been a more handsome couple nor a more splendid wedding, even though the bride’s father eccentrically enjoined the use of masks by all—through which, however, all could still faintly perceive the dulcet and balsamous breath of the pair.
Laura and Giovanni were, though the term was not yet in vogue, the guinea pigs of Dr. Rappaccini. They were also young and eager and Mediterranean, and like guinea pigs they bred—if not indeed like hurkles.
After a quarter of a millennium had passed, in the first half of the twentieth century, the pure Rappaccini-Guasconti strain (under a score of advisable pseudonyms) had spread throughout the earth in such numbers that the problem of integration with ordinary, unscented, non-lethal humanity was an acute one. During the eighteenth century the women had passed unnoticed by attaching breath-filters to their face masks; in the nineteenth, the men had inserted filters in their beards. But the barefaced twentieth century posed a dilemma: Live in undesired obscurity, or risk killing off the rest of the race.
The dilemma was solved by a Rappaccini in whom Dr. Giacomo’s brilliance was reborn. Ordinary humanity had always shown a liking for the sweet Rappaccini breath, which was dulcet in contagion. The twentieth century possessed the means of converting this liking into envy and hunger: the power of advertising.
The device succeeded by its own momentum; once it was launched, few Rappaccinis needed to participate in the campaign to make people despise their own living exhalations (as they had already learned to detest their sweat and certain areas of their hair) and to long instead for venomous fragrance. But it did of course take a Rappaccini to introduce, after several decades of preparation, the final touch: Dr. Giacomo’s secret ingredient, derived from plants, which had altered Beatrice and Giovanni and Laura, known to its discoverer as chiorojile and now modernized as chlorophyll.
Today, in this late twenty-first century, we are all balsamous products of the Rappaccini method. The normal population was simply converted, without its knowledge and without undue loss of life (despite minor unexplained epidemics, unexpected failures of medicines, ungrounded charges of germ warfare), by its advertising-induced absorption of the key Rappaccini ingredient. We are harmless to each other, we adorn the very air we respire, and we do not use our time machines beyond 1950.
The first visit of our time travelers was to London in the fall of 1664, a date familiar to readers of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It needed but a few more such visits, particularly those to the fourteenth century and the descent upon the camp of Sennacherib, to cause the World Senate of Scientists to pass stringent laws fixing a chronokinetic barrier at 1950.
This brief report is submitted for what guidance it may provide in the current WSS debate upon travel beyond the already sterile planets of this solar system.
Khartoum: A Prose Limerick
The last man and the last woman on Earth sat on the edge of the last bed.
Somewhere the Arcturians were watching them, gloating over having found at last two specimens, and with marked sexual differences. But both were inured by now to this benevolent scrutiny.
The figure in the shaggy tweeds stirred restlessly. “You’re pretty,” the gruff voice rasped as one hand went out to touch a silk-sheathed knee. “The Arcturians did O.K. by me.”
The improbably jutting breasts rose and fell rapidly. “I like you, too,” the pouting lips admitted. “And of course we are going to have all kinds of fun . . . But when it comes to Perpetuating the Race—well, I’m afraid the Arcturians are in for an awful shock,” he giggled as he reached in, detached one improbably jutting breast, and playfully tossed it to his companion.
The powerful masculine hands half fondled the conical object, then embarrassedly discarded it. The lean rangy body rose from the bed and began shedding the tweed coat. “It’s against all my principles and probably yours; but it’s been a long time and at least it’ll be a novelty . . . I guess,” she grunted as she freed her own quite probable breasts from their overtight bra, “the Arcturians knew what they were doing after all.”
A Shape in Time
Temporal Agent L-3H is always delectable in any shape; that’s why the Bureau employs her on marriage-prevention assignments.
But this time, as she reported to my desk, she was also dejected. “I’m a failure, Chief,” she said. “He ran away—from me. The first man in twenty-five centuries. . .”
“Don’t take it so seriously,” I said. She was more than just another Agent to me; I was the man who’d discovered her talents. “We may be able to figure out what went wrong and approach it on another time line.”
“But I’m no good.” Her body went scrawny and sagging. Sometimes I wonder how people expressed their emotions before mutation gave us somatic control.
“Now there,” I said, expanding my flesh to radiate confidence, “just tell me what happened. We know from the dial readings that the Machine got you to London in 1880—”
“To prevent the marriage of Edwin Sullivan to Angelina Gilbert,” she grimaced. “Time knows why.”
I sighed. I was always patient with her. “Because that marriage joined two sets of genes which in the course of three generations would produce—”
Suddenly she gave me one of her old grins, with the left eyebrow up. “I’ve never understood the time-results of an assignment yet, and don’t try to teach me now. Marriage-prevention’s fun enough on its own. And I thought it was going to be extra good this time. Edwin’s beard was red and this long, and I haven’t had a beard in five trips. But something went— The worst of it is, it went wrong when I was naked.”
I was incredulous, and said so.
“I don’t think even you really understand this, Chief. Because you are a man—” her half-smile complimented me by putting the italics of memory under man “—and men never have understood it. But the fact is that what men want naked, in any century, in any country, is what they’re used to seeing clothed, if you follow me. Oh, there are always some women who have to pad themselves out or pull themselves in, but the really popular ones are built to fit their clothes. Look at what they used to call feelthy peectures; any time, any place, the girls that are supposed to be exciting have the same silhouette naked as the fashion demands clothed. Improbable though it seems.”
“L!” I gasped. She had suddenly changed so completely that there was hardly more than one clue that I was not looking at a boy.
“See?” she said. “That’s the way I had to make myself when you sent me to the 1920s. And the assignment worked; this was what men wanted. And then, when you sent me to 1957 . . .”
I ducked out of the way as two monstrous mammae shot out at me. “I hadn’t quite realized—” I began to confess.
“Or the time I had that job in sixteenth-century Germany.”
“Now you look pregnant!”
“They all did. Maybe they were. Or when I was in Greece, all waist and hips . . . But all of these worked. I prevented marriages and improved the genetic time-flow. Only with Edwin . . .”
She was back in her own delectable shape, and I was able to give her a look of encouraging affection.
“I’ll skip the build-up,” she said. “I managed to meet Edwin, and I gave him this . . .” I nodded; how well I remembered this and its effects. “He began calling on me and taking me to theaters, and I knew it needed just one more step for him to forget all about that silly pink-and-white Angelina.”
“Go on,” I urged.
“He took the step, all right. He invited me to dinner in a private room at a discreet restaurant—all red plush and mirrors and a screen in front of the couch. And
he ordered oysters and truffles and all that superstitious ritual. The beard was even better than I’d hoped: crisp and teasing, ticklish and . . .” She looked at me speculatively, and I regretted that we’ve bred out facial follicles beyond even somatic control. “When he started to undress me—and how much trouble that was in 1880!—he was delighted with this.”
She had changed from the waist up, and I had to admit that this was possibly more accurate than these. They were as large as the startling 1957 version, but molded together as almost one solid pectoral mass.
“Then he took off my skirts and . . .” L-3H was as near to tears as I had ever known her. “Then he . . . ran. Right out of the restaurant. I would’ve had to pay the check if I hadn’t telekinned the Machine to bring me back to now. And I’ll bet he ran right to that Angelina and made arrangements to start mixing genes and I’ve ruined everything for you.”
I looked at her new form below the waist. It was indeed extraordinary and hardly to my taste, but it seemed correct. I checked the pictures again in the Sullivan dossier. Yes, absolutely.
I consoled and absolved her. “My dear L, you are—Time help me!—perfectly and exactly a desirable woman of 1880. The failure must be due to some slip on the part of the chronopsychist who researched Edwin. You’re still a credit to the bureau, Agent L-3H!—and now, let’s celebrate. No, don’t change back. Leave it that way. I’m curious as to the effects of—what was the word they used for it in 1880?—of a woman’s bustle.”
Summer’s Cloud
Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
Without our special wonder?
—Macbeth, act III, scene 4
Walter Hancock was not superstitious. He said so to his wife when they walked on either side of a post on their way from the little Italian pension to the railway station. And he said so to his table companion at dinner that evening, when he had drunk a glass more than usual to prove that he was a bachelor for the night. This, of course, was why he had spilled the salt—or perhaps it was because his table companion spoke with a strange accent and wore a low-necked gown. He could not decide which intrigued him the more, and took another glass of wine to find out. He decided upon the gown, or at least . . . Well, yes—the gown.
Giuseppe, proprietor of the pension, looked surprised and not altogether pleased when Mr. Hancock danced with his table companion after dinner. The proprietor was talking excitedly with his wife Maria when the two guests came off the balcony out of the Italian moonlight. Maria passed near to them and looked at Mr. Hancock very closely. Especially at his throat.
Giuseppe was still displeased when Mr. Hancock ordered brandy. But Mr. Hancock was very well pleased indeed when the brandy came. The growth of his familiarity with his companion’s accent kept even pace with the alcoholic dulling of his perceptions, so that her speech still remained vague but fascinating. The movements of the dance had made her other fascination much more clear to him.
It was in the dark hall that she told him she would leave her door open. He was not quite sure of what she said, but the welcome which his lips and hands received reassured him.
Nor was his assurance shaken when he met Maria at the head of the stairs. But he was puzzled. Even his slight knowledge of Italian sufficed to make clear that she was delivering a physical warning, not a moral reprimand. The morals of her lodgers were none of her affair, she kept saying; or were the repetitions merely within his brain? That was nonsense, but it was what she said. At least he thought so; la morta was “death,” wasn’t it?
He was still puzzled when she went away, and looked curiously at the little gold cross which she had pressed into his hand with such urgent instructions.
Giuseppe and Maria were not puzzled when Mr. Hancock’s companion was not in her room the next morning. She was, in fact, nowhere in the pension; and Giuseppe advanced the theory, with which Maria agreed, that she was nowhere in Italy.
They were only slightly puzzled when they found Mr. Hancock’s body on her bed. There were no clothes outside his flesh, and no blood inside. Nor was there a trace of blood anywhere in the room.
Although they jointly resolved that even her liberal payments could not induce them to accept Mr. Hancock’s companion as a guest again, Maria’s conscience felt clear when she found the small gold cross in the hall where Mr. Hancock had obviously tossed it in scorn.
You see, he was not superstitious.
The Tenderizers
It was the Pernod, of course. It must have been the Pernod.
Much though I have come to love that greenish-milky potable gold, I am forced to put the responsibility upon the Pernod, or to believe.
Let me first make it clear (to myself) that I am not writing this to tell it to anyone, and above all not for sale and publication. I am simply setting this down to make it all clear to myself (hypocrite lecteur) and above all to convince myself that it was the Pernod.
Not when I was drinking the Pernod, certainly. Not there in the bright promenade deck bar with the colored lights behind the bottles and the bartenders playing cribbage with each other between orders and a ship’s officer and a girl trying to pick out singable show tunes on the piano. But the Pernod was (well, then, the Pernods were) in me later on that isolated deck in the thick fog when the voice that I should not have recognized.
To be sure, there had been queer moments before on the trip—that trip so nicely combining tourism with occasional business with editors and publishers in such a manner as to satisfy the Internal Revenue Service.
There was that room far down in the Paris Opera—Charles Garnier’s masterpiece—which so surpasses in opulence and eeriness even The Phantom of the Opera. A room that I stumbled on, that nobody seemed to visit during intermissions, a big small room that would have seemed a ballroom in a lesser edifice, where some of the walls were walls and some were mirrors. And I walked toward a mirror and saw myself advancing toward myself and then realized that this could be no mirror. The advancing man resembled me strongly; but I was in a tourist’s ordinary best dark suit and he was in white tie and tails, with a suggestion of the past (la belle epoque? Garnier’s Second Empire?) in his ruffled shirt and elegant sash. I moved toward him, smiling to acknowledge our odd resemblance; and then I was facing myself and it was a mirror and the bell rang and in the second intermission I could not find that room.
And there was that moment in the Wakefield Tower, that part of the Tower of London which houses the Regalia of the Kings and Queens of England. I was marveling at the Stars of Africa and realizing for the first time the true magic of diamonds (which exists in those that only potentates may own) when I felt the beads of a rosary gliding between my fingers. I knew a piercing pain, and as I all but lost consciousness, I heard a grating croak of which I could make out only the words . aspiring blood . . .” Then I was calmly looking at diamonds again and stepping back to read the plaque stating that tradition says that here the devout Henry VI was slain at his orisons in fourteen blankty-blank. With my ears still feeling the rasp of the words which Shakespeare attributed to his murderer, I prayed for his gentle soul.
And these episodes were without Pernod (brandy at the Opera, tea at the Tower), but there is no denying the Pernod (the Pernods) when I visited, late at night, the sports deck of R.M.S. Queen Anne in mid-Atlantic.
The deck was deserted. I like the open decks at night, in any weather save the most drenching; but the average passenger (wisely? I now wonder) huddles by the bar or the dance orchestra or the coffee-and-sandwiches or the bingo.
The deck and I were the nucleus of a cocoon of fog, opaque and almost colorless—white, one might say, in contrast to the soiled fog/smog of a city, but more of an intensely dense absence of color. Absence of form, absence of movement—a nothing that tightly enswathed.
We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson, I thought, recalling with a pleasant shudder some of the tales by that master of horror of the sea.
I settled mys
elf in a deck chair. Even with my eyes closed I could sense the fog pressing in, ever narrowing the limits of my little universe.
My first awareness of the other was through my nose. A lifetime of respiratory illnesses has left me with a deficient sense of smell normally roused only by, say, a fine cognac; but this was a smell that even I could notice. Prosaically, it suggested to me a badly refrigerated fish-market—which would have been horror enough for H. P. Lovecraft, who found (almost comically, I once thought) something profoundly horrible in the very notion of fish.
“We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson,” said a voice that I almost recognized.
I could not see him clearly, though he was sitting in the next deck chair. I started to say, “You took the words—”
“—From the same source as you,” he concluded. “They used Hodgson. He was one of the first of us. Still the best, perhaps, on the sea, though I had my own touch in the air.”
“Ev!” I exclaimed, and turned to him with that warmth one feels toward a colleague who is a genuine professional.
You will remember Everard Wykeham. (And to whom am I speaking? Hypocrite ecrivain . . .) Wrote a little for Weird Tales back in the Lovecraft days, then went to England and developed quite a reputation in the Strand and British Argosy. Much good general fiction, including Buchanesque adventure, but what one particularly recalls (and so vividly!) are his horror stories, perfect capsules of grisly suggestion, mostly dealing with the unsuspected and chilling implications, psychological and metaphysical, of man’s flight in the air. It was true: in the domain of the horror story, the air was Wykeham’s as the sea was Hodgson’s; and rarely had I flown without a twinge of grue as I recalled one or another of the Wykeham stories collected as The Arrow That Flies.
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