Selected Stories of H. G. Wells (15 page)

All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr. Bessel’s mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant, and he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried to and fro in his ineffectual excitement innumerable spirits of that world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went upon his glorious career.

For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the earth, or whether they were closed for ever in death against return. That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness on the earth.

At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such disembodied silent creatures had gathered, and thrusting through them he saw below a brightly lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her portraits to be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the pineal eye in the brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful; sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on talking and writing with one hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the crowding shadows of men about him, and a great multitude of the shadow spirits of that shadow-land, were all striving and thrusting to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one gained her brain or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing of her hand changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused for the most part; now a fragment of one soul’s message, and now a fragment of another’s, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the spirit of vain desire. Then Mr. Bessel understood that she spoke for the spirit that had touched her, and he began to struggle very furiously towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at that time he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went away to find what had happened meanwhile to his body.

For a long time he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street, writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry because his time had been so short and because of the pain—making violent movements and casting his body about.

And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room where the
séance
was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the
séance
should presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the
séance
was almost over only made Mr. Bessel the more earnest, and he struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he gained the woman’s brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil spirits about him had thrust Mr. Bessel away from her, and for all the rest of the
séance
he could regain her no more.

So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed, writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr. Bessel entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did so, the silence—the brooding silence—ended; he heard the tumult of traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that is the shadow of our world—the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual desire and the shadows of lost men—vanished clean away.

He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found. And in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim damp place in which he lay; in spite of the tears—wrung from him by his physical distress—his heart was full of gladness to know that he was nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.

PART TWO

TECHNOLOGICAL AND PREDICTIVE SCIENCE FICTION

INTRODUCTION

People who don’t know what science fiction is tend to think science fiction is about the future—technologies that don’t exist (yet) and awful cataclysms that haven’t happened (yet). Some of it is. But I don’t recommend using it as a guide to the future. I’d look hard at the (yet).

Writers of science fiction predicted robots that would do house-work, but didn’t foresee the computer till they were writing their stories on it. They predicted that we’d be colonizing alien planets by now, but not that we’d have so much trouble just getting to Mars.

The rate of technological invention long ago outstripped the ability of the artist to keep up. Engineers are supposed to be restricted by hard realities, but actually they’re free to invent anything the laws of math, physics, and biology allow, which is, after all, a lot. Their minds can fly. They can defy gravity. Storytellers are supposed to be irresponsible, fancy-free; and indeed they may flout the laws of physics, but not the laws of art. They can’t defy gravitas. Their inventions are bound to and bounded by the limitations of common experience, ordinary understanding, and human emotion. The kind of thing the real cyberheads disparagingly call wetware. Wetware is clumsy stuff, muddy and intractable, but it’s the only stuff you can make stories out of.

Wells was writing his “futuristic” tales before the twentieth century got going, when technology hadn’t run so far ahead of the writer— when, indeed, the writer could run ahead of the technology. Three of the five stories in this section are exactly that, the writer telling the engineers where they’re going to go. These stories, like many of Jules Verne’s, are genuinely predictive.

Since about the time it got called science fiction—the late 1920s— science fiction has not, in fact, been able to predict anything much at all. What science fiction can do and does do is offer not predictions but warnings, speculations, and alternatives.

Much of the strength of Wells’s predictive visions lies there: as warnings, as visions of power out of control, as dreams of Armageddon. “The Argonauts of the Air” was published in 1895, eight years before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. It tells of the first trial of a flying machine—the word
aeroplane
or
airplane
wasn’t current then.

The preparations, the machinery, the flight are splendidly, starkly imagined. Although the author speaks of the conquest of the air as being perhaps “costlier than the greatest war,” his mood is adventurous, hopeful. Man will fly: it is only a matter of time. Less time, possibly, than he expected.

“In the Abyss” was written decades before William Beebe went that first half-mile down in his bathysphere. The details of the imagined technology are explicit and convincing, as is the descent into the depths of the sea. What the explorer of the abyss discovers there is a little less plausible. Though explained in the finest deadpan fakescientific lingo (“descendants like ourselves of the great Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age”), the creatures of the deep belong to Wells’s cheerfully spooky mode. I doubt he really thought we’d meet them.

“The Star” is the purest example of a kind of story that has been written on its model ever since. Nothing fantastic or implausible: a perfectly possible event. No protagonists, no individual experience. A little necessary scientific jargon, then simple description, immense in scope, rapid in pace, of catastrophe approaching the whole earth. And a few final paragraphs of wry and unexpected summing-up. Wells wrote it in 1897. I doubt its brevity and intensity have been equaled.

He included “The Star” in his 1913 selection of his own short stories, but omitted the “Argonauts of the Air,” “In the Abyss,” and the next story here, “The Land Ironclads.” He could not have imagined how poignant his predictions, both on the nail and amiss, might seem to people a hundred years later.

“The Land Ironclads,” published in 1903, demands some imaginative repositioning on the part of the reader. It’s not easy to pretend the First World War won’t happen for ten years yet, and that the word
tank
means nothing but a container for liquids. It may take a little mental stretch to see what the argument about “Manhood
Versus
Machinery” meant—and means.

The last story in this section, “A Dream of Armageddon”— technological, predictive, terrible—a story about air war—was written in 1901. Still two years to go before Kitty Hawk. And the whole twentieth century and all its wars to come. Here the engineering and the visionary imaginations merge into something approaching prophecy.

Wells now has the words
aeroplane
and
propellor,
though the things did not exist (yet).

But war existed.

He tells his tale as a dream recounted by a chance acquaintance to the narrator, thus doubly distancing the emotional, almost hysterical story, which is weirdly complicated by the narrator’s trivial questions, by interruptions from the dreamer’s memories of the waking world, and by the narrator’s awareness of all that is going on around the conversation. “A Dream of Armageddon” is a troubled, troubling story, half out of control, not easy to get out of your head.

THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR

One saw Monson’s Flying-Machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the South-Western main line or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park,—to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles. From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part hidden by a hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West. Monson had taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was said) rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments. The results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When some five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves at Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.

Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would see a white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides and bars, and hear the further stays, nettings, and buffers snap, creak, and groan with the impact of the blow. Then there would be an efflorescence of black-set white-rimmed faces along the sides of the train, and the morning papers would be neglected for a vigorous discussion of the possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever said by any chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo of season-ticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the fathers and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric, standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some bilious child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the swift transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward against the guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute, and excellent for conversation; yet, all the same, it was but flying in leading-strings, and most of those who witnessed it scarcely counted its flight as flying. More of a switchback it seemed to the run of the folk.

Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions of the press at first. But possibly he, even, had formed but a poor idea of the time it would take before the tactics of flying were mastered, the swift assured adjustment of the big soaring shape to every gust and chance movement of the air; nor had he clearly reckoned the money this prolonged struggle against gravitation would cost him. And he was not so pachydermatous as he seemed. Secretly he had his periodical bundles of cuttings sent him by Romeike, he had his periodical reminders from his banker; and if he did not mind the initial ridicule and scepticism, he felt the growing neglect as the months went by and the money dribbled away. Time was when Monson had sent the enterprising journalist, keen after readable matter, empty from his gates. But when the enterprising journalist ceased from troubling, Monson was anything but satisfied in his heart of hearts. Still day by day the work went on, and the multitudinous subtle difficulties of the steering diminished in number. Day by day, too, the money trickled away, until his balance was no longer a matter of hundreds of thousands, but of tens. And at last came an anniversary.

Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date on Woodhouse’s calendar.

“It was five years ago today that we began,” he said to Woodhouse suddenly.

“Is it?” said Woodhouse.

“It’s the alterations play the devil with us,” said Monson, biting a paper-fastener.

The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table before him as he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener into the waste-paper basket and drummed with his fingers. “These alterations! Will the mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us all this patching and experimenting? Five years—learning by rule of thumb, when one might think that it was possible to calculate the whole thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I might have hired three senior wranglers for life. But they’d only have developed some beautifully useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been, Woodhouse!”

“These mouldings will take three weeks,” said Woodhouse. “At special prices.”

“Three weeks!” said Monson, and sat drumming.

“Three weeks certain,” said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no good as a comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a bar.

Monson stopped drumming, and began to bite his finger-nails, staring the while at Woodhouse’s head.

“How long have they been calling this Monson’s Folly?” he said suddenly.

“
Oh!
Year or so,” said Woodhouse carelessly, without looking up.

Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The stout iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of the machine was made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by the upper edge of the window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red painted and ornate with rows of bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty scenery towards Esher. A train went gliding noiselessly across the middle distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of the workmen overhead. Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows of the carriages. He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at a blowfly that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.

“What’s up?” said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.

“I’m about sick of this.”

Woodhouse scratched his cheek. “Oh!” he said, after an assimilating pause. He pushed the drawing away from him.

“Here these fools . . . I’m trying to conquer a new element—trying to do a thing that will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an intelligent interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call me and my appliances names.”

“Asses!” said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.

The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. “I’m about sick of it, Woodhouse, anyhow,” he said, after a pause.

Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.

“There’s nothing for it but patience, I suppose,” said Monson, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ve started. I’ve made my bed, and I’ve got to lie on it. I can’t go back. I’ll see it through, and spend every penny I have and every penny I can borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse, I’m infernally sick of it, all the same. If I’d paid a tenth part of the money towards some political greaser’s expenses—I’d have been a baronet before this.”

Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression he always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on the table. Monson stared at him for a minute.

“Oh,
damn
!” said Monson suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the room.

Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute. Then he sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had evidently upset Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get on with. It was the way with every amateur who had anything to do with engineering—wanted everything finished at once. But Monson had usually the patience of the expert. Odd he was so irritable. Nice and round that aluminium rod did look now! Woodhouse threw back his head, and put it, first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of shading better.

“Mr. Woodhouse,” said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his head in at the door.

“Hullo!” said Woodhouse, without turning round.

“Nothing happened, sir?” said Hooper.

“Happened?” said Woodhouse.

“The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader.”

“Oh!” said Woodhouse.

“It ain’t like him, sir.”

“No?”

“And I was thinking perhaps—”

“Don’t think,” said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.

Hooper knew Woodhouse, and he shut the door suddenly with a vicious slam. Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes, and then made an ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil. Abruptly he desisted, pitched that old, tried, and stumpy servitor across the room, got up, stretched himself, and followed Hooper.

He looked ruffled—it was visible to every workman he met. When a millionaire who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ quite a little army of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of the undertaking, there is almost invariably a certain amount of mental friction in the ranks of the little army he employs. And even before he indicates his intentions there are speculations and murmurs, a watching of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew before the day was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper ruffled. A workman’s wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided to keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress. So far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.

Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even that palled upon him, and he rode off the grounds, to every one’s relief there, and through the lanes south-eastward, to the infinite tribulation of his house steward at Cheam.

And the immediate cause of it all, the little grain of annoyance that had suddenly precipitated all this discontent with his life-work was— these trivial things that direct all our great decisions!—half a dozen ill-considered remarks made by a pretty girl, prettily dressed, with a beautiful voice and something more than prettiness in her soft-grey eyes. And of these half-dozen remarks, two words especially— “Monson’s Folly.” She had felt she was behaving charmingly to Monson; she reflected the next day how exceptionally effective she had been, and no one would have been more amazed than she, had she learned the effect she had left on Monson’s mind. I hope, considering everything, that she never knew.

“How are you getting on with your flying-machine?” she asked. (“I wonder if I shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that,” thought Monson.) “It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?” (“Thinks I’m afraid.”) “Jorgon is going to play presently; have you heard him before?” (“My mania being attended to, we turn to rational conversation.”) Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of conversation, ending with—“You must let me know when your flying-machine is finished, Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a ticket.” (“One would think I was still playing inventions in the nursery.”) But the bitterest thing she said was not meant for Monson’s ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was always conscientiously brilliant. “I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of nothing, positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you know, all his workmen call that place of his ‘Monson’s Folly’? He is quite impossible. It is really very, very sad. I always regard him myself in the light of sunken treasure—the Lost Millionaire, you know.”

She was pretty and well educated,—indeed, she had written an epigrammatic novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical. She summarised what the world thought of the man who was working sanely, steadily, and surely towards a more tremendous revolution in the appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching alteration in the ways of humanity than has ever been effected since history began. They did not even take him seriously. In a little while he would be proverbial. “I
must
fly now,” he said on his way home, smarting with a sense of absolute social failure. “I must fly soon. If it doesn’t come off soon, by God! I shall run amuck.”

He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl’s voice and the expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousands pounds’ worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the wound deadly.

It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Malden, Morden, and Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments.

Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder, obedient to a whim of Monson’s, was picking out the aluminium bars with gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded now with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an ant-hill of workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.

“I’ll
come,
” said Woodhouse. “I’ll come right enough. But I tell you it’s infernally foolhardy. If only you would give another year—”

“I tell you I won’t. I tell you the thing works. I’ve given years enough—”

“It’s not that,” said Woodhouse. “We’re all right with the machine. But it’s the steering—”

“Haven’t I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards, through this squirrel’s cage? If the thing steers true here, it will steer true all across England. It’s just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse. We could have gone a year ago. And besides—”

“Well?” said Woodhouse.

“The money!” snapped Monson over his shoulder.

“Hang it! I never thought of the money,” said Woodhouse, and then, speaking now in a very different tone to that with which he had said the words before, he repeated, “I’ll come. Trust me.”

Monson turned suddenly, and saw all that Woodhouse had not the dexterity to say, shining on his sunset-lit face. He looked for a moment, then impulsively extended his hand. “Thanks,” he said.