Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (40 page)

ALQUIST: Am I to commit murder? See how my fingers shake! I cannot even hold the scalpel. No, no, I will not—

FOURTH ROBOT: The life will perish from the earth.

RADIUS: Take live bodies, live bodies! It is our only chance!

ALQUIST: Have mercy, Robots. Surely you see that I would not know what I was doing.

RADIUS: Live bodies—live bodies—

ALQUIST: You will have it? Into the dissecting room with you, then.

(RADIUS draws back)

Ah, you are afraid of death.

RADIUS: I? Why should I be chosen?

ALQUIST: So you will not.

RADIUS: I will.

RADIUS goes into the dissecting room.

ALQUIST: Strip him! Lay him on the table!

(The other ROBOTS follow into dissecting room)

God, give me strength—God, give me strength—if only this murder is not in vain.

RADIUS: Ready. Begin—

ALQUIST: Yes, begin or end. God, give me strength.

(ALQUIST goes into dissecting room. He comes out terrified)

No, no, I will not. I cannot.

(He lies down on couch, collapsed)

O Lord, let not mankind perish from the earth.

He falls asleep. PRIMUS and HELENA, Robots, enter from the hallway.

HELENA: The man has fallen asleep, Primus.

PRIMUS: Yes, I know.

(Examining things on table)

Look, Helena.

HELENA:
(crossing to PRIMUS)

All these little tubes! What does he do with them?

PRIMUS: He experiments. Don’t touch them.

HELENA:
(looking into microscope)

I’ve seen him looking into this. What can he see?

PRIMUS: That is a microscope. Let me look.

HELENA: Be very careful.

(Knocks over a test-tube)

Ah, now I have spilled it.

PRIMUS: What have you done?

HELENA: It can be wiped up.

PRIMUS: You have spoiled his experiments.

HELENA: It is your fault. You should not have come to me.

PRIMUS: You should not have called me.

HELENA: You should not have come when I called you.

(She goes to Alquist’s writing desk)

Look, Primus. What are all these figures?

PRIMUS: (examining an anatomical book)

This is the book the old man is always reading.

HELENA: I do not understand those things.

(She goes to the window)

Primus, look!

PRIMUS: What?

HELENA: The sun is rising.

PRIMUS:
(still reading the book)

I believe this is the most important thing in the world. This is the secret of life.

HELENA: Do come here.

PRIMUS: In a moment, in a moment.

HELENA: Oh, Primus, don’t bother with the secret of life. What does it matter to you? Come and look quick—

PRIMUS:
(going to window)

What is it?

HELENA: See how beautiful the sun is rising. And do you hear? The birds are singing. Ah, Primus, I should like to be a bird.

PRIMUS: Why?

HELENA: I do not know. I feel so strange today. It’s as if I were in a dream. I feel an aching in my body, in my heart, all over me. Primus, perhaps I’m going to die.

PRIMUS: Do you not sometimes feel that it would be better to die? You know, perhaps even now we are only sleeping. Last night in my sleep I again spoke to you.

HELENA: In your sleep?

PRIMUS: Yes. We spoke a strange new language, I cannot remember a word of it.

HELENA: What about?

PRIMUS: I did not understand it myself, and yet I know I have never said anything more beautiful. And when I touched you I could have died. Even the place was different from any other place in the world.

HELENA: I, too, have found a place, Primus. It is very strange. Human beings lived there once, but now it is overgrown with weeds. No one goes there any more—no one but me.

PRIMUS: What did you find there?

HELENA: A cottage and a garden, and two dogs. They licked my hands, Primus. And their puppies! Oh, Primus! You take them in your lap and fondle them and think of nothing and care for nothing else all day long. And then the sun goes down, and you feel as though you had done a hundred times more than all the work in the world. They tell me I am not made for work, but when I am there in the garden I feel there may be something—What am I for, Primus?

PRIMUS: I do not know, but you are beautiful.

HELENA: What, Primus?

PRIMUS: You are beautiful, Helena, and I am stronger than all the Robots.

HELENA: (looks at herself in the mirror)

Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair—it only weights me down. My eyes—I only see with them. My lips—they only help me to speak. Of what use is it to be beautiful?

(She sees PRIMUS in the mirror)

Primus, is that you? Come here so that we may be together. Look, your head is different from mine. So are your shoulders—and your lips—

(PRIMUS draws away from her)

Ah, Primus, why do you draw away from me? Why must I run after you the whole day?

PRIMUS: It is you who run away from me, Helena.

HELENA: Your hair is mussed. I will smooth it. No one else feels to my touch as you do. Primus, I must make you beautiful, too.

PRIMUS grasps her hand.

PRIMUS: Do you not sometimes feel your heart beating suddenly, Helena, and think: now something must happen?

HELENA: What could happen to us, Primus?

(HELENA puts a rose in Primus’s hair. PRIMUS and HELENA look into mirror and burst out laughing)

Look at yourself.

ALQUIST: Laughter? Laughter? Human beings?

(Getting up)

Who has returned? Who are you?

PRIMUS: The Robot Primus.

ALQUIST: What? A Robot? Who are you?

HELENA: The Robotess Helena.

ALQUIST: Turn around, girl. What? You are timid, shy?

(Taking her by the arm)

Let me see you, Robotess.

She shrinks away.

PRIMUS: Sir, do not frighten her!

ALQUIST: What? You would protect her? When was she made?

PRIMUS: Two years ago.

ALQUIST: By Dr. Gall?

PRIMUS: Yes, like me.

ALQUIST: Laughter—timidity—protection. I must test you further—the newest of Gall’s Robots. Take the girl into the dissecting room.

PRIMUS: Why?

ALQUIST: I wish to experiment on her.

PRIMUS: Upon—Helena?

ALQUIST

Of course. Don’t you hear me? Or must I call someone else to take her in?

PRIMUS: If you do I will kill you!

ALQUIST: Kill me—kill me then! What would the Robots do then? What will your future be then?

PRIMUS: Sir, take me. I am made as she is—on the same day! Take my life, sir.

HELENA: (rushing forward)

No, no, you shall not! You shall not!

ALQUIST: Wait girl, wait!

(To PRIMUS)

Do you not wish to live, then?

PRIMUS: Not without her! I will not live without her

ALQUIST: Very well; you shall take her place.

HELENA: Primus! Primus!

(She bursts into tears)

ALQUIST: Child, child, you can weep! Why these tears? What is Primus to you? One Primus more or less in the world—what does it matter?

HELENA: I will go myself.

ALQUIST: Where?

HELENA: In there to be cut.

(She starts toward the dissecting room. PRIMUS stops her)

Let me pass, Primus! Let me pass!

PRIMUS: You shall not go in there, Helena!

HELENA: If you go in there and I do not, I will kill myself.

PRIMUS: (holding her)

I will not let you!

(To ALQUIST)

Man, you shall kill neither of us!

ALQUIST: Why?

PRIMUS: We—we—belong to each other.

ALQUIST: (almost in tears)

Go, Adam, go, Eve. The world is yours.

HELENA and PRIMUS embrace and go out arm in arm as
the curtain falls.

CURTAIN

(1877–1937)

An explorer and popular science fiction writer of the early 1900s, England traveled extensively after graduating Harvard before turning to writing around 1905. While his contemporary, Edgar Rice Burroughs, is still widely read today, England’s work is rarely reprinted, and his writing is mostly forgotten. England’s writing is a lot more political than Burroughs’s (he ran for Congress in 1908 and governor of Maine in 1912, on the Socialist ticket) but it feels less exotic and adventurous to contemporary readers—even though Burroughs was making up his locations, while England actually had traveled widely and written travel books and articles.

Although born in Fort McPherson, Nebraska, England ended up splitting most of his time between northern New England (in the summer months) and Key West, Florida (in the winter), adventuring and writing. Ultimately, he published seventy-three stories, books, and articles, and appeared in well over a hundred publications in several languages. He called his summer residence in Bradford, New Hampshire, “Camp Sans Souci” (Camp Carefree).

England’s sister, Florence England Nosworthy (1872–1936), was a well-known children’s book and magazine cover illustrator.

Hugo Gernsback leaned heavily on England as part of his stable of writers, and actually published “The Thing from—Outside” twice: first in
Science and Invention
(April 1923) and then in
Amazing Stories
(April 1926).

First published in
Science and Invention
, April 1923

They sat about their campfire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the oncoming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay. “I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. “Most extraordinary!”

“They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I,” He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. “I’ve seen prints like that, before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”

“Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tarn and a rough-knit sweater, “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—”

“They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we—well, we’re two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C.P.R. rails.”

“Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist, “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ’baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—”

He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.

Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.

Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the womenfolk were busy by the fire, A harmless thing the markings seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.

Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.

“We’d better get along out of this as quick as we can,” said he in an unnatural voice, “You’ve got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I—well, I’ve got Vivian. And—”

“You
have?” nipped in Marr. The light of an evil jealousy gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. “What you need is an alienist.”

“Really, Jandron,” the Professor admonished, “you mustn’t let your imagination run away with you.”

“I suppose it’s imagination that keeps this print cold!” the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.

‘‘Nothing but a pot-hole,’’ judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor’s vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvelous thinking-machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed a powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock.

“By Jove, but it
is
cold!” he admitted. “And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the stone. Extraordinary!”

“Dissolved out, you mean,” corrected the geologist. “By cold.”

The journalist laughed mockingly.

“Wait till I write this up!” he sneered. “‘Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!’”

Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.

“Ice!” ejaculated the Professor. “Solid ice!”

“Frozen in a second,” added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. “And it’ll never melt, either. I tell you, I’ve seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone—burned it out with the cold of interstellar space. Something that can impart cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it.”

“Of course that’s all sheer poppycock,” the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.

“This something, this Thing,” continued Jandron, “is a Thing that can’t be killed by bullets. It’s what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away—poor fools!”

A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.

“Nonsense!” she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.

That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging—laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare—they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.

“After all,” said the Professor, when supper was done, “we mustn’t get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains—we aren’t going to let Nature play us any tricks!”

“And of course,” added his wife, her arm about Vivian, “everything in the universe is a natural force. There’s really no supernatural, at all.”

“Admitted,” Jandron replied. “But how about things
outside
the universe?”

“And they call you a scientist!” gibed Marr; but the Professor leaned forward, his brows knit.

“Hm!” he grunted. A little silence fell.

“You don’t mean, really,” asked Vivian, “that you think there’s life and intelligence—Outside?”

Jandron looked at the girl. Her beauty, haloed with ruddy gold from the firelight, was a pain to him as he answered:

“Yes, I do. And dangerous life, too. I know what I’ve seen, in the North Country. I know what I’ve seen!”

Silence again, save for the crepitation of the flames, the fall of an ember, the murmur of the current. Darkness narrowed the wilderness to just that circle of flickering light ringed by the forest and the river, brooded over by the pale stars.

“Of
course you can’t expect a scientific man to take you seriously,” commented the Professor.

“I know what I’ve seen! I tell you there’s Something entirely outside man’s knowledge.”

“Poor fellow!” scoffed the journalist; but even as he spoke his hand pressed his forehead.

“There are Things at work,” Jandron affirmed, with dogged persistence. He lighted his pipe with a blazing twig. Its flame revealed his face drawn, lined. “Things. Things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants. Less, perhaps.”

The flame of the twig died. Night stood closer, watching.

“Suppose there are?” the girl asked. “What’s that got to do with these prints in the rock?”

“They,” answered Jandron, “are marks left by one of those Things. Footprints, maybe. That Thing is near us, here and now!”

Marr’s laugh broke a long stillness.

“And you,” he exclaimed, “with an A.M. and a B.S. to write after your name.”

“If you knew more,” retorted Jandron, “you’d know a devilish sight less. It’s only ignorance that’s cocksure.”

“But,” dogmatized the Professor, “no scientist of any standing has ever admitted any outside interference with this planet.”

“No, and for thousands of years nobody ever admitted that the world was round either. What I’ve seen, I know.”

“Well, what
have
you seen?” asked Mrs. Thorburn, shivering.

“You’ll excuse me, please, for not going into that, just now.”

“You mean,” the Professor demanded dryly, “if the—hm!—this suppositious Thing wants to—?”

“It’ll do any infernal thing it takes a fancy to, yes! If It happens to want us—”

“But what
could
Things like that want of us? Why should They come here, at all?”

“Oh, for various things. For inanimate objects, at times, and then again for living beings. They’ve come here lots of times, I tell you,” Jandron asserted with strange irritation, “and got what They wanted, and then gone away to—Somewhere. If one of Them happens to want us, for any reason, It will take us, that’s all. If It doesn’t want us, It will ignore us, as we’d ignore gorillas in Africa if we were looking for gold. But if it was gorilla-fur we wanted, that would be different for the gorillas, wouldn’t it?”

“What in the world,” asked Vivian, “could a—well, a Thing from Outside want of us?”

“What do men want, say, of guinea pigs? Men experiment with ’em of course. Superior beings use inferior, for their own ends. To assume that man is the supreme product of evolution is gross self-conceit. Might not some superior Thing want to experiment with human beings, what?”

“But how?” demanded Marr.

“The human brain is the most highly organized form of matter known to this planet. Suppose, now—”

“Nonsense!” interrupted the Professor. “All hands to the sleeping-bags, and no more of this. I’ve got a wretched headache. Let’s anchor in Blanket Bay!”

He, and both the women, turned in. Jandron and Marr sat a while longer by the fire. They kept plenty of wood piled on it, too, for an unnatural chill transfixed the night-air. The fire burned strangely blue, with greenish flicks of flame.

At length, after vast acerbities of disagreement, the geologist and the newspaperman sought their sleeping-bags. The fire was a comfort. Not that a fire could avail a pin’s weight against a Thing from interstellar space, but subjectively it was a comfort. The instincts of a million years, centering around protection by fire, cannot be obliterated.

After a time—worn out by a day of nerve-strain and of battling with swift currents, of flight from Something invisible, intangible—they all slept.

The deeps of space, star-sprinkled, hung above them with vastness immeasurable, cold beyond all understanding of the human mind. Jandron woke first, in a red dawn.

He blinked at the fire, as he crawled from his sleeping-bag. The fire was dead; and yet it had not burned out. Much wood remained unconsumed, charred over, as if some gigantic extinguisher had in the night been lowered over it.

“Hmmm!”
growled Jandron, He glanced about him, on the ledge. “Prints, too. I might have known!”

He aroused Marr. Despite all the journalist’s mocking hostility, Jandron felt more in common with this man of his own age than with the Professor, who was close on sixty.

“Look here, now!” said he.
“It
has been all around here. See?
It
put out our fire—maybe the fire annoyed It, some way— and
It
walked round us, everywhere.” His gray eyes smouldered. “I guess, by gad, you’ve got to admit facts, now!’’

The journalist could only shiver and stare.

“Lord, what a head I’ve got on me, this morning!” he chattered. He rubbed his forehead with a shaking hand, and started for the river. Most of his assurance had vanished. He looked badly done up.

“Well, what say?” demanded Jandron. “See the fresh prints?”

“Damn the prints!” retorted Marr, and fell to grumbling some unintelligible thing. He washed unsteadily, and remain crouching at the river’s lip, inert, numbed.

Jandron, despite a gnawing at the base of his brain, carefully examined the ledge. He found prints scattered everywhere, and some even on the river-bottom near the shore. Wherever water had collected in the prints on the rock, it had frozen hard. Each print in the river-bed, too, was white with ice. Ice that the rushing current could not melt.

“Well, by gad!” he exclaimed. He lighted his pipe and tried to think. Horribly afraid—yes, he felt horribly afraid, but determined. Presently, as a little power of concentration came back, he noticed that all the prints were in straight lines, each mark about two feet from the next.

“It
was observing us while we slept,” said Jandron.

“What nonsense are you talking, eh?” demanded Marr. His dark, heavy face sagged. “Fire, now, and grub!”

He got up and shuffled unsteadily away from the river. Then he stopped with a jerk, staring.

“Look! Look a’ that axe!” he gulped, pointing.

Jandron picked up the axe, by the handle, taking good care not to touch the steel. The blade was white-furred with frost. And deep into it, punching out part of the edge, one of the prints was stamped.

“This metal,” said he, “is clean gone. It’s been absorbed. The Thing doesn’t recognize any difference in materials. Water and steel and rock are all the same to It.”

“You’re crazy!” snarled the journalist. “How could a Thing travel on one leg, hopping along, making marks like that?”

“It could roll, if it was disk-shaped. And—”

A cry from the Professor turned them. Thorburn was stumbling toward them, hands out and tremulous.

“My wife—!” he choked.

Vivian was kneeling beside her sister, frightened, dazed.

“Something’s happened!” stammered the Professor. “Here—come here—!”

Mrs. Thorburn was beyond any power of theirs to help. She was still breathing; but her respirations were stertorous, and a complete paralysis had stricken her. Her eyes, half-open and expressionless, showed pupils startlingly dilated. No resources of the party’s drug-kit produced the slightest effect on the woman.

The next half-hour was a confused panic, breaking camp, getting Mrs. Thorburn into a canoe, and leaving that accursed place, with a furious energy of terror that could no longer reason. Upstream, ever up against the swirl of the current the party fought, driven by horror. With no thought of food or drink, paying no heed to landmarks, lashed forward only by the mad desire to be gone, the three men and the girl flung every ounce of their energy into the paddles. Their panting breath mingled with the sound of swirling eddies. A mist-blurred sun brooded over the northern wilds. Unheeded, hosts of black flies sang high-pitched keenings all about the fugitives. On either hand the forest waited, watched.