Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (42 page)

“Vivian!”
croaked Jandron, staggering away from the body. He fumbled to the bunk where the girl had lain. The bunk was quite deserted.

On the stove, in which lay half-charred wood—wood smothered as if by some noxious gas—still stood the coffee-pot. The liquid in it was frozen solid. Of Vivian and the journalist, no trace remained.

Along one of the sagging beams that supported the roof, Jandron’s horror-blasted gaze perceived a straight line of frosted prints, ring-shaped, bitten deep.

“Vivian! Vivian!”

No answer.

Shaking, sick, gray, half-blind with a horror not of this world, Jandron peered slowly round. The duffel-bag and supplies were gone. Nothing was left but that coffee-pot and the revolver at Jandron’s hip.

Jandron turned, then. A-stare, his skull feeling empty as a burst drum, he crept lamely to the door and out—out into the snow.

Snow. It came slanting down. From a gray sky it steadily filtered. The trees showed no leaf. Birches, poplars, rock-maples all stood naked. Only the conifers drooped sickly-green. In a little shallow across the river snow-lay white on the thin ice.

Ice? Snow? Rapt with terror, Jandron stared. Why, then, he must have been unconscious three or four weeks? But how—?

Suddenly, all along the upper branches of trees that edged the clearing, puffs of snow flicked down. The Geologist shuffled after two half-obliterated sets of footprints that wavered toward the landing.

His body was leaden. He wheezed, as he reached the river. The light, dim as it was, hurt his eyes. He blinked in a confusion that could just perceive one canoe was gone. He pressed a hand to his head, where an iron band seemed screwed up tight, tighter.

“Vivian! Marr! Haalloooo!”

Not even an echo. Silence clamped the world; silence, and a cold that gnawed. Everything had gone a sinister gray.

After a certain time—though time now possessed neither reality or duration—Jandron dragged himself back to the camp and stumbled in. Heedless of the staring corpse he crumpled down by the stove and tried to think, but his brain had been emptied of power. Everything blent to a gray blur. Snow kept slithering in through the roof.

“Well, why don’t you come and get me, Thing?” suddenly snarled Jandron. “Here I am. Damn you, come and get me!”

Voices. Suddenly he heard voices. Yes, somebody was outside, there. Singularly aggrieved, he got up and limped to the door. He squinted out into the gray; saw two figures down by the landing. With numb indifference he recognized the girl and Marr.

“Why should they bother me again?” he nebulously wondered. “Can’t they go away and leave me alone?” He felt peevish irritation.

Then, a modicum of reason returning, he sensed that they were arguing. Vivian, beside a canoe freshly dragged from thin ice, was pointing; Marr was gesticulating. All at once Marr snarled, turned from her, plodded with bent back toward the camp.

“But listen!” she called, her rough-knit sweater all powdered with snow.
“That’s
the way!” She gestured downstream.

“I’m not going either way!” Marr retorted. “I’m going to stay right here!” He came on, bareheaded. Snow grayed his stubble of beard; but on his head it melted as it fell, as if some fever there had raised the brain-stuff to improbable temperatures. “I’m going to stay right here, all summer.” His heavy lids sagged. Puffy and evil, his lips showed a glint of teeth. “Let me alone!”

Vivian lagged after him, kicking up the ash-like snow. With indifference, Jandron watched them. Trivial human creatures!

Suddenly Marr saw him in the doorway and stopped short. He drew his gun; he aimed at Jandron.
“You
get out!” he mouthed, “Why in —— can’t you stay dead?”

“Put that gun down, you idiot!” Jandron managed to retort.

The girl stopped and seemed trying to understand. “We can get away, if we all stick together.”

“Are you going to get out and leave me alone?” demanded the journalist, holding his gun steadily enough.

Jandron, wholly indifferent, watched the muzzle. Vague curiosity possessed him. Just what, he wondered, did it feel like to be shot?

Marr pulled the trigger.
Snap!

The cartridge missed fire. Not even powder would burn. Marr laughed, horribly, and shambled forward.

“Serves him right!” he mouthed. “He’d better not come back again!”

Jandron understood that Marr had seen him fall. But still he felt himself standing there, alive. He shuffled away from the door. No matter whether he was alive or dead, there was always Vivian to be saved.

The Journalist came to the door, paused, looked down, grunted and passed into the camp. He shut the door, Jandron heard the rotten wood bar of the latch drop. From within echoed a laugh, monstrous in its brutality.

Then, quivering, the geologist felt a touch on his arm.

“Why did you desert us like that?” he heard Vivian’s reproach. “Why?”

He turned, hardly able to see her at all.

“Listen,” he said, thickly. “I’ll admit anything. It’s all right. But just forget it, for now. We’ve got to get out of here. The Professor is dead, in there, and Marr’s gone mad and barricaded himself in there. So there’s no use staying. There’s a chance for us yet. Come along!”

He took her by the arm and tried to draw her toward the river, but she held back. The hate in her face sickened him. He shook in the grip of a mighty chill.

“Go, with—you?” she demanded.

“Yes, by God!” he retorted, in a swift blaze of anger, “or I’ll kill you where you stand.
It
shan’t get you, anyhow!”

Swiftly piercing, a greater cold smote to his inner marrows, A long row of the cup-shaped prints had just appeared in the snow beside the camp. And from these marks wafted a faint, bluish vapor of unthinkable cold.

“What are you staring at?” the girl demanded.

“Those prints! In the snow, there—see? He pointed a shaking finger.

“How can there be snow at this season?”

He could have wept for the pity of her, the love of her. On her red tarn, her tangle of rebel hair, her sweater, the snow came steadily drifting; yet there she stood before him and prated of summer. Jandron heaved himself out of a very slough of down-dragging lassitudes. He whipped himself into action.

“Summer, winter—no matter!” he flung at her. “You’re coming along with me!” He seized her arm with the brutality of desperation that must hurt, to save. And murder, too, lay in his soul. He knew that he would strangle her with his naked hands, if need were, before he would ever leave her there, for
It
to work Its horrible will upon.

“You come with me,” he mouthed, “or by the Almighty—!”

Marr’s scream in the camp whirled him toward the door. That scream rose higher, higher, even more and more piercing, just like the screams of the runaway Indian guides in what now appeared the infinitely long ago. It seemed to last hours; and always it rose, rose, as if being wrung out of a human body by some kind of agony not conceivable in this world. Higher, higher—

Then it stopped.

Jandron hurled himself against the plank door. The bar smashed; the door shivered inward.

With a cry, Jandron recoiled. He covered his eyes with a hand that quivered, claw-like.

“Go away, Vivian! Don’t come here—don’t look—”

He stumbled away, babbling.

Out of the door crept something like a man. A queer, broken, bent over thing; a thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined.

This thing—yes, it was still Marr—crouched down at one side, quivering, whimpering. It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antennae, jerkily, without significance.

All at once Jandron no longer felt afraid. He walked quite steadily to Marr, who was breathing in little gasps. From the camp issued an odor unlike anything terrestrial. A thin, grayish grease covered the sill.

Jandron caught hold of the crumpling journalist’s arm. Marr’s eyes leered, filmed, unseeing. He gave the impression of a creature whose back has been broken, whose whole essence and energy have been wrenched asunder, yet in which life somehow clings, palpitant. A creature vivisected.

Away through the snow Jandron dragged him. Marr made no resistance; just let himself be led, whining a little, palsied, rickety, shattered. The girl, her face whitely cold as the snow that fell on it, came after.

Thus they reached the landing at the river.

“Come now, let’s get away!” Jandron made shift to articulate. Marr said nothing. But when Jandron tried to bundle him into a canoe, something of the journalist revived with swift, mad hatefulness. That something lashed him into a spasm of wiry, incredibly venomous resistance. Salvers of blood and foam streaked Marr’s lips. He made horrid noises, like an animal. He howled dismally, and bit, clawed, writhed and grovelled! He tried to sink his teeth into Jandron’s leg. He fought appallingly, as men must have fought in the inconceivably remote days even before the Stone Age. And Vivian helped him. Her fury was a tiger-cat’s.

Between the pair of them, they almost did him in. They almost dragged Jandron down—and themselves, too—into the black river that ran swiftly sucking under the ice. Not till Jandron had quite flung off all vague notions and restraints of gallantry; not till he struck from the shoulder—to kill, if need were—did he best them.

He beat the pair of them unconscious, trussed them hand and foot with the painters of the canoes, rolled them into the larger canoe, and shoved off.

After that, the blankness of a measureless oblivion descended.

Only from what he was told, weeks after, in the Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal, did Jandron ever learn how and when a field-squad of Dominion Foresters had found them drifting in Lake Moosawamkeag. And that knowledge filtered slowly into his brain during a period inchoate as Iceland fogs. That Marr was dead and the girl alive—that much, at all events, was solid. He could hold to that; he could climb back, with that, to the real world again.

Jandron climbed back, came back. Time healed him, as it healed the girl. After a long, long while, they had speech together. Cautiously he sounded her wells of memory. He saw that she recalled nothing. So he told her white lies about capsized canoes and the sad death—in realistically described rapids—of all the party except herself and him.

Vivian believed. Fate, Jandron knew, was being very kind to both of them.

But Vivian could never understand in the least why her husband, not very long after marriage, asked her not to wear a wedding-ring or any ring whatever.

“Men are so queer!” covers a multitude of psychic

agonies.

Life, for Jandron—life, softened by Vivian—knit itself up into some reasonable semblance of a normal patter. But when, at lengthening intervals, memories even now awake—memories crawling amid the slime of cosmic mysteries that it is madness to approach—or when at certain times Jandron sees a ring of any sort, his heart chills with a cold that reeks of the horrors of Infinity.

And from shadows past the boundaries of our universe seem to beckon Things that, God grant, can never till the end of time be known on earth.

* * * *

Copyright © 1923 by Gernsback Publications, Inc.

Whether or not Hugo Gernsback is to be considered a positive influence on the development of science fiction depends to a large extent on one’s critical sources. Many English critics consider Gernsback a disastrous (if not a pernicious) figure, a man whose stultifying vision and lack of literary taste led to the establishment of a literature that for too many years was considered a laughingstock, that emphasized other elements than literary quality, and, perhaps worse of all, that paid the majority of its writers badly. On the other hand, American critics and historians have generally hailed Gernsback as an enormous and positive force, admitting that he was a sharp and sometimes shady businessman but nevertheless accepting implicitly that he was also a creative visionary. The Hugo Award, given annually by fans to creative endeavours in various forms of science fiction, is now global but began in America, and is named in honor of Gernsback. Nevertheless, although Gernsback is sometimes referred to as “the father of science fiction,” he most certainly did not invent the genre; numerous science fiction stories existed prior to 5 March 1926, the date on which the April issue of Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
was published.

Although he claimed late in life to have been interested in science fiction at an early age, there is little doubt that Hugo Gernsback did not enter adult life intending to promote a new literary genre. He had been born Hugo Gernsbacker in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, in 1884, and had grown up precociously interested in electricity and technology. After adolescent study in the Ecole Industrielle in Luxembourg, he studied languages in a Belgian boarding school before spending three years at the Technikum in Bingen, Germany. In 1904, at age 19, he emigrated to the United States, where he established a soon thriving mail order business selling the Telimico Wireless Radio, which he had developed: by 1910, his company employed 60 workers. When the U.S. government banned amateur transmission during World War I, always adaptable Gernsback found a way to turn a profit: he marked his radio as kits for electrical experimentation. In 1925, he founded New York radio station WRNY, and in 1928 he became a pioneer in television broadcasting, with some 2000 scanners in New York said to be receiving his images.

Gernsback had entered the world of publishing in 1908, with
Modern Electrics
, a catalogue for his radio company. It carried no fiction until in 1911, when it began the serialization of Gernsback’s own
Ralph 124C 41+
, written to show that fiction could teach science. Set in 2600 AD,
Ralph 124C 41+
is an episodic melodrama in which Ralph—one of ten superminds allowed to add the plus to their numerical (and in Ralph’s case, punning) last name—falls in love with Swiss girl Alice 212B423. In short order, he rescues her from an avalanche, from the lustful clutches of the Martian Llysanorh’, and ultimately from death itself. For all that it is episodic and (at best) weakly characterized, the story nevertheless predicts radar, microfilm and microfiche, tape recorders, television, wireless transmission of power, plant hormones, and weather control.

Following the conclusion of
Ralph 124C 41+
, Gernsback thereafter began printing fiction in each issue, discovering gradually that a readership existed for the stories that featured scientific inventions. Among his discoveries was Jacque Morgan, five of whose stories were published in late 1912 and early 1913. These stories feature one Jason Fosdick, whose inventions are simultaneously useless and come to no good end, and they are actually anti-intellectual and anti-invention, but they proved sufficiently popular that Gernsback would later reprint three of them in
Amazing Stories
.

Gernsback sold
Modern Electrics
in 1913 and started another magazine,
The Electrical Experimenter
, whose name in 1920 was changed to
Science and Invention
. It was in this magazine that the writer Clement Fezandié had some 39 stories published between 1921 and 1925. Gernsback was to continue his relationship with Fezandié, who had six original stories in
Amazing Stories
, two under his own name in the issues of June and July 1926, and four as “Henry Hugh Simmons” in 1927 and 1928. (Fezandié did not want payment for his work, thus making him very popular with the penurious Gernsback.) As with the stories by Jacque Morgan, Fezandie’s stories are actually rather out of place in the magazine, being tales of technology gone disastrously wrong. Charles S. Wolfe wrote tales of scientific detection and new inventions for The Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention: three of them were likewise reprinted, starting in June 1926. Other authors to appear in The Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention who were later reprinted in and/or contributed to Amazing Stories included G. Peyton Wertenbaker, Ray Cummings, and George Allan England. The former had but one story in Science and Invention; it was reused in the April 1926 Amazing Stories, after which Wertenbaker had five original stories in Amazing Stories. Cummings had numerous stories in Science and Invention, but only one was to be reprinted in Amazing Stories, though Cummings was to appear in other Gernsback-edited magazines such as Wonder Stories. George Allan England was a superior writer with an established career; he had one story published in Science and Invention that was likewise reused in the early Amazing Stories and had no additional original work published in Gernsback’s magazines.

The April 1926 issue of
Amazing Stories
was published by Gernsback’s Experimenter Company, and its masthead states “Extravagant Fiction Today—Cold Fact Tomorrow!” and includes a sketch of Jules Verne’s tomb. The magazine contains but six stories of what Gernsback termed “scientifiction,” none of them original to the publication. Two were by authors who were long dead: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” was first published in the American Review in December 1845, and Jules Verne’s “Off on a Comet” first appeared in 1877 as Hector Servadac. The remaining four were relatively recent reprints: the aforementioned George Allan England’s “The Thing from—Outside” was published in Science and Invention in April 1923, and G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom” appeared in the August 1923 issue of that magazine. Austin Hall’s “The Man Who Saved the Earth” was a little older, having appeared first in the 13 December 1919 All-Story, and H. G. Wells’s “The New Accelerator” was older still, being first published in the Strand Magazine of December 1901.

The April issue of
Amazing Stories
was sufficiently successful that the magazine was continued, and the May issue likewise contained six stories. For the reader who had never previously encountered fantastic fiction, three of the authors were familiar names, for they had appeared in the March issue: H. G. Wells (“The Crystal Egg”), Jules Verne (the first episode of “A Trip to the Center of the Earth” and the second part of “Off on a Comet”), and Edgar Allan Poe (“Mesmeric Revelation”). Charles C. Winn’s “The Infinite Vision” was new to the magazine—and was apparently his only published story—but it was not a new publication, having first appeared in
Science and Invention
in May 1924. The sixth story, however, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom (Sequel),” is original to
Amazing Stories
and could thus arguably be considered the first science fiction story written as such.

In acquiring original fiction by Wertenbaker, Gernsback demonstrated that he had recognized and was attempting to deal with two major problems. First, he could not continue filling the pages of the magazine with reprints, not if he hoped to see
Amazing Stories
continue, find a readership, and make a profit. An expanded readership—one interested in the as yet unidentified and largely unexplored literary genre of science fiction—would want new stories, not the stories that had been published 50 or more years earlier.

Next, the contemporary writers of the kind of story Gernsback desired—among them such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Wallace Cook, Ray Cummings, George Allan England, Murray Leinster, Talbot Mundy, and Victor Rousseau—were initially not willing to deal with him, for these writers could (and did) make more selling to other pulp magazines. It was thus essential for Gernsback to encourage and develop new writers who would be willing to work for less than established professionals, at least until they could develop sufficiently to publish elsewhere. This nevertheless proved difficult for Gernsback: the first six months of
Amazing Stories
contained thirty-eight stories, only five of which were originals, and another original story did not appear in the magazine until the issue of August 1926: M. H. Hasta’s “The Talking Brain.” So far as can be determined, this was Hasta’s only publication, and Hasta thus can hardly be said to have been one of Gernsback’s stable.

Gernsback was, however, resourceful, and though he did not realize it, he had tapped into a youthful reading audience that was less concerned about polished prose and artistic verisimilitude than it was about imaginative extrapolations and the presentation of the new and novel. For these readers, well rounded and deeply described characterizations did not matter so much as the reactions of these characters to the unexpected and unanticipated, particularly if these were rationalized by a quasi-scientific or technical vocabulary. Gernsback’s initial editorial conceit—that stories of “scientifiction” could contain a pedagogical component and inspire inventors—was rapidly ignored, though it was never renounced.

Though he is today completely forgotten, one of Gernsback’s first significant discoveries—which is to say, a writer capable of writing more than story—was a Nebraskan physician, Miles John Breuer. Starting with “The Man with the Strange Head” in the January 1927 Amazing Stories, Breuer had some 28 stories in the magazine under his own name. Equally importantly, he was willing to share his knowledge and debate scientific points through numerous letters in Amazing Stories’ letters columns, and he was willing to collaborate with new and novice writers. He collaborated with Clare Winger Harris, the first woman writer to appear in Amazing Stories, and with the young Jack Williamson. Both of these should also be considered Gernsback’s discoveries: the career of the former did not last long, though she published some 8 stories in such magazines as Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly, and Science Wonder Quarterly. Jack Williamson, however, began his career with “The Metal Man,” published in the December 1928 Amazing Stories, and he continued to publish steadily until his death, at age 98, in 2006.

No point is served by listing all of the remaining writers who first appeared in Amazing Stories as discoveries by Gernsback. None of them is a household name, unless the household is devoted to the early history of pulp magazine science fiction. Such frequent contributors to Amazing Stories as J. Harvey Haggard, Joseph W. Skidmore, Harvey Kostkos, P. Schuyler Miller, Aladra Setama (a pseudonym for Judson Reeves), Leslie F. Stone, and Edwin K. Sloat no longer attract readers, and rightly so: they were popular in their day, but their day was a long time ago. What they wrote, while not completely without interest, generally cannot be read with anything approaching enjoyment.

Nevertheless, two of the several dozen writers first to appear in Amazing Stories do merit further discussion, simply because they were among the first to write a certain kind of story. First, there was Dr. David H. Keller. A psychiatrist by training and profession, Keller used the majority of his stories to offer social commentary and to examine the results of developments and progress on the lives of individuals and society. His writings reveal extreme conservative and racial biases, however, and his fiction opposed, among other issues, feminism and racial equality. He began his association with Gernsback in February 1928, with “The Revolt of the Pedestrians,” a depiction of society some centuries after automobiles have become ubiquitous: legs have atrophied and the few surviving Pedestrians have no legal protection. As Keller’s title indicates, the Pedestrians revolt, their revolution consisting of the destruction of the electricity necessary to power the Automobilists’ cars, which leads to the wholesale deaths of the Automobilists. Gernsback did not object to Keller’s reservations about the future and was apparently unconcerned about (or did not notice) Keller’s biases. Some 48 stories by Keller appeared in science fiction magazines prior to 1937, after which he continued writing for such magazines as Weird Tales.

The second writer was E. E. Smith, Ph.D. A food chemist by training, Smith had in 1919 started a collaboration with Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of his college roommate. This collaboration, “The Skylark of Space,” was submitted to and rejected by a number of magazines before it was serialized in Amazing Stories from August—October 1928. The story begins with genius chemist Richard Seaton, who discovers a new power source when he electrifies copper and platinum. This leads him to construct a spaceship—the Skylark—without realizing that nefarious forces are working in opposition. Seaton’s mental equal, Marc DuQuesne, has been reporting on Seaton’s doings to Brookings of the Steel Trust, and DuQuesne also constructs a spaceship; it is occupied by Brookings’s secretary Margaret Spenser, who knows too much, when DuQuesne kidnaps Seaton’s girlfriend Dorothy Vaneman. When the controls on DuQuesne’s spaceship get jammed, the ship gets sent into space, across the universe, where it is captured by a dark star. Seaton and his friend Reynolds Crane are in close pursuit, however, for they have been tracking DuQuesne. The adventures continue at a breakneck speed but conclude with the Skylark’s triumphant return to Earth—and DuQuesne’s escape, to return in further episodes.