First published in
Science Wonder Stories August 1929
First appearance, August 1929 |
Some of these stories
succeed despite their slightly corny and old fashioned ways. The
stagey monologues, the weird willingness to self-experiment, the slab
of mad science that justifies some arbitrary set of so-called
scientific laws rules for the protagonists to fall foul of or all now
the corniest of SF cliches. But sometimes it all works – Out of theSub Universe and The Machine of Ardathia are both pretty good.
When it doesn’t work,
though, when the story’s po-faced and static, the quaint
temporality of the writing shows through. It doesn’t help that this
is a classic idiot story.
The tone is set by the
opening paragraph.
‘Herbery Zulerich was a big, heavy-framed man with a tangled mop of shaggy hair which lay back from his sloping forehead and clustered about the collar of his dark coat. His nose was big and prominent, swelling like a huge peak upon his face, and his mouth was a deep-lined canyon between the peak of his nose and bulge of his chin.
It paints a picture of
the kind of over-the-top character you might see in a silent movie –
all dramatic haircut and expressionistic make up, the sort of
character played by Conrad Veidt or Lon Chaney.
Here it is again, in 1950. |
He’s a classic mad
scientist with a ‘formidable array of test tubes and retorts’ in
his well-equipped laboratory.He’s been
experimenting with ‘uni-cellular organisms’ and discovered that
they don’t act like inorganic matter. ‘They did not resemble any
known chemicals, for they reacted as individuals and not as mere
materials.’
This unedifying insight
leads him to develop a formula that extends life indefinitely but
leaves the recipient entirely inert. He tests the process on a rat
and by accident spills soda down the rat’s mouth, which brings the
rat to life! It scampers around, revivified but with its physical
processes apparently halted. Naturally, Old Zulerich's next step is to give it a
try himself. He gets a glass of soda ready and takes his magical
formula. Alas, before he can get to his soda, though, he’s frozen in
place!
He could have set up
some contrivance to release soda a after certain amount of time. He
could have taken a mouthful of soda with the medicine. He could have
had a friend over to hand him a glass of soda. He could have written
down what he was doing so when he was found and ended up –
inevitably – in a musuem, someone might have had a chance of
figuring out what was wrong.
But he didn’t do any
of that and instead he stands in various dusty corners through the
centuries, attracting
And again, in 1968. |
Themes: Immortality,
the terrible price of science, vastness (the gulfs of time),
misanthropy.
Note: I confess to swiping these images from the entry on D D Sharp on this excellent blog.
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