The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (Dover Thrift Editions) Page 20

  “I didn’t hardly question that conviction at all. Somehow, living there alone so long, perhaps my natural womanly intuition was stronger than ever before or since, and so I knowed. Then I went and pulled poor Nelson Smith’s board off from the tree and tossed it away for the tide to carry off. That there board was an insult to my island!”

  The sea-woman paused, and her eyes had a far-away look. It seemed as if I and perhaps even the macaroons and tea were quite forgotten.

  “Why did you think that?” I asked, to bring her back. “How could an island be insulted?”

  She started, passed her hand across her eyes, and hastily poured another cup of tea.

  “Because,” she said at last, poising a macaroon in mid-air, “because that island—that particular island that I had landed on— had a heart!

  “When I was gay, it was bright and cheerful. It was glad when I come, and it treated me right until I got that grouchy it had to mope from sympathy. It loved me like a friend. When I flung a rock at that poor little drenched monkey critter, it backed up my act with an anger like the wrath o’ God, and killed its own child to please me! But it got right cheery the minute I seen the wrongness of my ways. Nelson Smith had no business to say, ‘This island ain’t just right,’ for it was a righter place than ever I seen elsewhere. When I cast away that lying board, all the birds begun to sing like mad. The green milk-coconuts fell right and left. Only the monkeys seemed kind o’ sad like still, and no wonder. You see, their own mother, the island, had rounded on one o’ them for my sake!

  “After that I was right careful and considerate. I named the island Anita, not knowing her right name, or if she had any. Anita was a pretty name, and it sounded kind of South Sea like. Anita and me got along real well together from that day on. It was some strain to be always gay and singing around like a dear duck of a canary bird, but I done my best. Still, for all the love and gratitude I bore Anita, the company of an island, however sympathetic, ain’t quite enough for a human being. I still got lonesome, and there was even days when I couldn’t keep the clouds clear out of the sky, though I will say we had no more tornadoes.

  “I think the island understood and tried to help me with all the bounty and good cheer the poor thing possessed. None the less my heart give a wonderful big leap when one day I seen a blot on the horizon. It drawed nearer and nearer, until at last I could make out its nature.”

  “A ship, of course,” said I, “and were you rescued?”

  “ ’Tweren’t a ship, neither,” denied the sea-woman somewhat impatiently. “Can’t you let me spin this yarn without no more remarks and fool questions? This thing what was bearing down so fast with the incoming tide was neither more nor less than another island!

  “You may well look startled. I was startled myself. Much more so than you, likely. I didn’t know then what you, with your book-learning, very likely know now—that islands sometimes float. Their underparts being a tangled-up mess of roots and old vines that new stuff’s growed over, they sometimes break away from the mainland in a brisk gale and go off for a voyage, calm as a old-fashioned, eight-funnel steamer. This one was uncommon large, being as much as two miles, maybe, from shore to shore. It had its palm trees and its live things, just like my own Anita, and I’ve sometimes wondered if this drifting piece hadn’t really been a part of my island once—just its daughter like, as you might say.

  “Be that, however, as it might be, no sooner did the floating piece get within hailing distance than I hears a human holler and there was a man dancing up and down on the shore like he was plumb crazy. Next minute he had plunged into the narrow strip of water between us and in a few minutes had swum to where I stood.

  “Yes, of course it was none other than Nelson Smith!

  “I knowed that the minute I set eyes on him. He had the very look of not having no better sense than the man what wrote that board and then nearly committed suicide trying to get away from the best island in all the oceans. Glad enough he was to get back, though, for the coconuts was running very short on the floater what had rescued him, and the turtle eggs wasn’t worth mentioning. Being short of grub is the surest way I know to cure a man’s fear of the unknown.”

  “Well, to make a long story short, Nelson Smith told me he was a aeronauter. In them days to be an aeronauter was not the same as to be an aviatress is now. There was dangers in the air, and dangers in the sea, and he had met with both. His gas tank had leaked and he had dropped into the water close by Anita. A case or two of provisions was all he could save from the total wreck.

  “Now, as you might guess, I was crazy enough to find out what had scared this Nelson Smith into trying to swim the Pacific. He told me a story that seemed to fit pretty well with mine, only when it come to the scary part he shut up like a clam, that aggravating way some men have. I give it up at last for just man-foolishness, and we begun to scheme to get away.

  “Anita moped some while we talked it over. I realized how she must be feeling, so I explained to her that it was right needful for us to get with our kind again. If we stayed with her we should probably quarrel like cats, and maybe even kill each other out of pure human cussedness. She cheered up considerable after that, and even, I thought, got a little anxious to have us leave. At any rate, when we begun to provision up the little floater, which we had anchored to the big island by a cable of twisted bark, the green nuts fell all over the ground, and Nelson found more turtle nests in a day than I had in weeks.

  “During them days I really got fond of Nelson Smith. He was a companionable body, and brave, or he wouldn’t have been a professional aeronauter, a job that was rightly thought tough enough for a woman, let alone a man. Though he was not so well educated as me, at least he was quiet and modest about what he did know, not like some men, boasting most where there is least to brag of.

  “Indeed, I misdoubt if Nelson and me would not have quit the sea and the air together and set up housekeeping in some quiet little town up in New England, maybe, after we had got away, if it had not been for what happened when we went. I never, let me say, was so deceived in any man before nor since. The thing taught me a lesson and I never was fooled again.

  “We was all ready to go, and then one morning, like a parting gift from Anita, come a soft and favoring wind. Nelson and I run down the beach together, for we didn’t want our floater to blow off and leave us. As we was running, our arms full of coconuts, Nelson Smith, stubbed his bare toe on a sharp rock, and down he went. I hadn’t noticed, and was going on.

  “But sudden the ground begun to shake under my feet, and the air was full of a queer, grinding, groaning sound, like the very earth was in pain.

  “I turned around sharp. There sat Nelson, holding his bleeding toe in both fists and giving vent to such awful words as no decent sea-going lady would ever speak nor hear to!

  “ ‘Stop it, stop it!’ I shrieked at him, but ’twas too late.

  “Island or no island, Anita was a lady, too! She had a gentle heart, but she knowed how to behave when she was insulted.

  “With one terrible, great roar a spout of smoke and flame belched up out o’ the heart of Anita’s crater hill a full mile into the air!

  “I guess Nelson stopped swearing. He couldn’t have heard himself, anyways. Anita was talking now with tongues of flame and such roars as would have bespoke the raging protest of a continent.

  “I grabbed that fool man by the hand and run him down to the water. We had to swim good and hard to catch up with our only hope, the floater. No bark rope could hold her against the stiff breeze that was now blowing, and she had broke her cable. By the time we scrambled aboard great rocks was falling right and left. We couldn’t see each other for a while for the clouds of fine gray ash.

  “It seemed like Anita was that mad she was flinging stones after us, and truly I believe that such was her intention. I didn’t blame her, neither!

  “Lucky for us the wind was strong and we was soon out of range.

  “ ‘So!’ says I to Nelso
n, after I’d got most of the ashes out of my mouth, and shook my hair clear of cinders. ‘So, that was the reason you up and left sudden when you was there before! You aggravated that island till the poor thing druv you out!’

  “ ‘Well,’ says he, and not so meek as I’d have admired to see him, ‘how could I know the darn island was a lady?’

  “ ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ says I. ‘You should have knowed it by her ladylike behavior!’

  “ ‘Is volcanoes and slingin’ hot rocks ladylike?’ he says. ‘Is snakes ladylike? T’other time I cut my thumb on a tin can, I cussed a little bit. Say—just a li’l’ bit! An’ what comes at me out o’ all the caves, and out o’ every crack in the rocks, and out o’ the very spring o’ water where I’d been drinkin’? Why snakes! Snakes, if you please, big, little, green, red and sky-blue-scarlet! What’d I do? Jumped in the water, of course. Why wouldn’t I? I’d ruther swim and drown than be stung or swallowed to death. But how was I t’ know the snakes come outta the rocks because I cussed?’

  “ ‘You, couldn’t,’ I agrees, sarcastic. ‘Some folks never knows a lady till she up and whangs ’em over the head with a brick. A real, gentle, kind-like warning, them snakes were, which you would not heed! Take shame to yourself, Nelly,’ says I, right stern, ‘that a decent little island like Anita can’t associate with you peaceable, but you must hurt her sacredest feelings with language no lady would stand by to hear!’

  “I never did see Anita again. She may have blew herself right out of the ocean in her just wrath at the vulgar, disgustin’ language of Nelson Smith. I don’t know. We was took off the floater at last, and I lost track of Nelson just as quick as I could when we was landed at Frisco.

  “He had taught me a lesson. A man is just full of mannishness, and the best of ’em ain’t good enough for a lady to sacrifice her sensibilities to put up with.

  “Nelson Smith, he seemed to feel real bad when he learned I was not for him, and then he apologized. But apologies weren’t no use to me. I could never abide him, after the way he went and talked right in the presence of me and my poor, sweet lady friend, Anita!”

  Now I am well versed in the lore of the sea in all ages. Through mists of time I have enviously eyed wild voyagings of sea rovers who roved and spun their yarns before the stronger sex came into its own, and ousted man from his heroic pedestal. I have followed—across the printed page—the wanderings of Odysseus. Before Gulliver I have burned the incense of tranced attention; and with reverent awe considered the history of one Munchausen, a baron. But alas, these were only men!

  In what field is not woman our subtle superior?

  Meekly I bowed my head, and when my eyes dared lift again, the ancient mariness had departed, leaving me to sorrow for my surpassed and outdone idols. Also with a bill for macaroons and tea of such incredible proportions that in comparison therewith I found it easy to believe her story!

  THE ARTIFICIAL MAN

  Clare Winger Harris (1891–1968)

  Clare Winger Harris has the distinction of being the first woman contributor to the world’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. She was a housewife raising three children when she sold her first story, “A Runaway World,” to Weird Tales, where it appeared in July 1926. It was a remarkable debut. It built on the popular idea that a solar system is like an atom with the planets like subatomic particles and that some greater cosmic being starts manipulating the planets. She entered a story contest run by Amazing Stories coming in third with “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” published in June 1927. A little more down to Earth, so to speak, it dealt with Martians who, needing water, start to draw it away from Earth. Harris would write eleven stories in all during the years 1926 to 1930 before she laid down her pen. All of them were later collected as Away from the Here and Now (1947).

  Although it doesn’t use the word, the following story is amongst the first to consider the idea of an augmented human, or cyborg.

  IN THE ANNALS of surgery no case has ever left quite as horrible an impression upon the public as did that of George Gregory, a student of Austin College. Young Gregory was equally proficient in scholastic and athletic work, having been for two years captain of the football team, and for one year a marked success in intercollegiate debates. No student of the senior class of Austin or Decker will ever forget his masterful arguments as he upheld the affirmative in the question:—“Resolved that bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.” Gregory gave every promise of being one of the masterful minds of the age; and if masterful in this instance means dominating, he was that—and more. Alas that his brilliant mentality was destined to degradation through the physical body—but that is my story.

  It was the Thanksgiving game that proved the beginning of George’s downfall. Warned by friends that he would be wise to desist from the more dangerous physical sports, he laughingly— though with unquestionable sincerity—referred to the context of his famous debate, declaring that a correct mental attitude toward life—he had this point down to a mathematical correctness—rendered physical disasters impossible. His sincerity in believing this was laudable, and so far his credence had stood him in good stead. No one who saw his well-proportioned six-foot figure making its way through the opponents’ lines, could doubt that the science of thinking rightly was favorably exemplified in young Gregory.

  But can thinking be an exact science? Before the close of that Thanksgiving game George was carried unconscious from the field, and in two days his right leg was amputated just below the hip.

  During the days of his convalescence two bedside visitors brightened the weary hours spent upon the hospital cot. They were David Bell, a medical student, and Rosalind Nelson, the girl whom George had loved since his freshman year.

  “I say, Rosalind,” he ventured one day as she sat by his bedside. “It’s too bad to think of you ever being tied up to a cripple. I’m willing to step aside—can’t do it gracefully of course with only one leg—but I mean it, my dear girl. You don’t want only part of a husband!”

  Rosalind smiled affectionately. “George, don’t think for a minute that it matters to me. You’re still you, and I love you dear. Can’t you believe that? The loss of a bodily member doesn’t alter your identity.”

  “That’s just what gets me,” responded her lover with a puzzled frown. “I have always believed, and do now, that the mental and physical are so closely related as to be inseparable. I think it is Browning who says, ‘We know not whether soul helps body more than body helps soul.’ They develop together, and if either is injured the other is harmed. Losing part of my body has made me lose part of my soul. I’m not what I was. My mental attitude has changed as a result of this abominable catastrophe. I’m no longer so confident. I feel myself slipping and I—oh it is unbearable!”

  Rosalind endeavored to the best of her ability to reassure the unfortunate man, but he sank into a despondent mood, and seeing that her efforts at cheering him were unavailing, she arose and left him.

  In the outer hall she met Bell on his way to visit the sick man. He noticed her troubled mien and asked if George were not so well today.

  “Yes, David,” she replied, a quiver in her voice, “the wound is healing nicely, but he is so morose. He has a notion—oh how can I tell it—a sort of feeling that some of his mental poise and confidence have gone with his lost limb. You will soon be a graduate physician, won’t you assure him that his fears are groundless?”

  “I don’t know but that his case is one for the minister or psychologist rather than the medical man,” answered Bell. “His physical wound is healing, but it seems his mental wound is not. However, I will do my best, not only for your sake, Rosalind, but because I am interested in the happiness of my old college chum.”

  Rosalind smiled her gratitude and turned abruptly away to hide the tears that she had held back as long as possible.

  Five months passed, and with the aid of a crutch George made excellent headway in overcoming the difficulties of locomoti
on. If David and Rosalind noticed a subtle change in the disposition and character of their mutual friend, they made no further reference to it.

  A Transformation

  At length came a day when in the company of both of these faithful friends George Gregory announced his intention of using an artificial limb instead of a crutch. His sweetheart voiced immediate remonstrance.

  “No, George, I’d rather see you walking with the visible aid of a crutch than to think of your using an artificial leg. Somehow it seems like hypocrisy, a kind of appearing to be what you aren’t. I know my idea is poorly expressed, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

  A peculiar light came into Gregory’s eyes, a light that neither friend had ever seen there before. He straightened visibly, almost without the aid of his crutch.

  “I’ll walk yet as well as any one and maybe it will give me back my mental confidence. My mind shall triumph over my body as well as it ever did!”

  The artificial leg was duly applied to the hip stump, and it really was amazing to observe the rapidity with which Gregory mastered the art of using it proficiently. Anyone unacquainted with his deformity would never have realized that he did not possess two normal legs.

  And then came the automobile accident a week before the time set for the Nelson-Gregory nuptials. How George Gregory’s car was struck by an on coming truck, reduced to a junk-heap, and George thrown into a ditch, so that one arm was finally caused to be amputated, never will be known, for George had always been a careful driver. Even with his artificial leg he declared he had no difficulty in putting on the brake. The fall had, as was proved later, caused also internal injuries so that some of the bodily organs did not function properly.