HiLobrow is pleased to present the eleventh installment of our serialization of Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (also known as Lest Ye Die). New installments will appear each Monday for 25 weeks.

When war breaks out in Europe — war which aims successfully to displace entire populations — British civilization collapses utterly and overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and dissatisfied idler, must learn to survive by his wits in the new England, where 20th-century science, technology, and culture are regarded with superstitious awe and terror.

The book — by a writer best known today for her suffragist plays, treatises, and activism — was published in 1922. In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish it in a gorgeous paperback edition, with an Introduction by Gary Panter.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

Theodore lived through the winter — as all his fellows lived — destructively, on the legacy and remnant of other men’s savings and makings; scraping and grubbing in other men’s ground, burning furniture and wood-work, the product of other men’s labours, and taking no thought for the morrow. At the beginning of winter some four or five score of human shadows, men and women, crept about the dead streets and the fields beyond them in their daily quest for the means to keep life in their bodies; but, as the weeks drew on and the winter hardened, starvation and the sickness born of starvation reduced their numbers by a half. Those lived best who were most skilful at the trapping of vermin; and they had long been existing on little but rat-flesh, when some hunters of rats, on the track of their prey, discovered a treasure beyond price — a godsend — in the shape of sacks of grain in the cellar of an empty brewery.

The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care, might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle — the rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs — the shadows and skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to them the power of construction, of fore-thought and restraint; they ceased to be instinctively inimical and wholly animal and took common measures for the preservation and rationing of their heaven-sent windfall. They advised, consulted, heard opinion and gave it, were reasonable; counted their numbers in relation to the size of their hoard; and in the end decided, by common consent, on the amount of the daily portion which was to be allotted to each in return for his share in the duty of guarding it — against the cravings of their own hunger as well as against the inroads of rats and mice…. With food — with property — they were human again; capable of plans for the morrow, of concerted and intelligent action. The enmity they had hitherto felt against each other was suddenly transferred to the stranger — the foreigner — who might force his way in and acquire a share in their treasure. Hence they took precautions against the arrival of the stranger, kept watch and ward on the outskirts of the town and drove away the chance newcomer, so that the knowledge of their good fortune should not spread. With duties shared, the dead sense of comradeship revived; they began to recognize and greet each other as they came for their daily portion. And if some were restrained only by the common watchfulness from appropriating more than their share of the common stock, there were others in whom stirred the sense of honour.

For a week or more they lived under the beginnings of a social system which was rendered possible by their certainty of a daily mess; and then came what, perhaps, was inevitable — discovery of pilfering from the store that gave life to them all. The pilferers, detected by the night-guard, fled on the instant, well knowing that their sin against the very existence of the little community was a sin beyond hope of forgiveness; they eluded pursuit in the darkness and by morning had vanished from the neighbourhood. For the time only; since they took with them the knowledge of the hoarded grain they had forfeited — a knowledge which was power and a weapon to themselves, a danger to those they had fled from. Two days later, after nightfall, a skeleton rabble, armed with knives, clubs and stones, was led into the town by the renegades; and there was fought out a fierce, elementary battle, a struggle of starved men for the prize of life itself…. From the first the case of the defenders was hopeless; outnumbered and taken by surprise, they were beaten in detail, overwhelmed — and in less than five minutes the survivors were flying for their lives, the darkness their only hope of safety.

Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued — till a passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed — to save her, to get her away! … He knew her by sight as he knew all the members of the destitute little community — a girl with a face once plump, now hollowed, whom he had seen daily when she came, in stupid wretchedness, to hold out her bowl for her share of the common ration; one of a squalid company of three or four women who herded together — and whose habit of instinctive fellowship was broken by the sudden onslaught which had driven them apart in flight.

“I don’t know where they’ve all gone,” she wailed. “Don’t leave me — for Gawd’s saike don’t leave me…. Ow, whatever shall I do? … I dunno where to go — for Gawd’s sake…”

He would gladly have been rid of her lamenting helplessness but she clung to him in a panic that would not be gainsaid, as fearful almost of the lonely dark ahead as of the bloody brawl she had fled from.

“Hold your tongue,” he ordered as he pulled her along. “Don’t make that noise or they’ll hear us. And keep close to me — keep in the shadow.”

She obeyed and stilled her sobbing to gasps and whimpers — holding tightly to his arm while he hurried her through by-streets to the open country. He knew no more than she where they were going when they left the silent outskirts of the town behind them, and, pressing against each other for warmth, bent their heads to a January wind.

That night for Theodore Savage was the beginning of an odd partnership, a new phase of his life uncivilized. The girl who had clutched at him as the drowning clutch at straws was destined to bear him company for more than a winter’s night and a journey to comparative safety; being by nature and training of the type that clings, as a matter of right, to whomsoever will fend for it, she drifted after him instinctively. When she woke in the morning in the shelter he had found for her she looked round for him to guide and, if possible, feed her — and awaited his instructions passively.

One human being — so it did not threaten him with violence — was no more to him than another, and perhaps he hardly noticed that when he rose and moved on she followed. From that hour forth she was always at his heels — complaining or too wretched to complain. He would let her hang on his arm as they trudged and shared his findings of food with her — because she had followed, was there; and it was some time before he realized that he had shouldered a responsibility which had no intention of shifting itself from his back…. When he realized the fact he had already tacitly accepted it; and for the first few weeks of their existence in common he was too fiercely occupied in the task of keeping them both alive to consider or define his relationship to the creature who whimpered and stumbled at his heels and took scraps of food from his hands. When, at last, he considered it, the relationship was established on both sides. She was his dependent, after the fashion of a child or an accustomed dog; and having learned to look to him for food, for guidance and protection, she could be cast off only by direct cruelty and the breaking of a daily habit.

In the beginning that was all; she followed because she did not know what else to do; he led and they hungered together. For the most part they were silent with the speechlessness of misery, and it was days before he even asked her name, weeks before he knew more of her life in the past than was betrayed by a Cockney accent. So long as existence was a craving and a fear, where nothing mattered save hunger and the fending-off of present death, the fact that she was a woman meant no more to him than her dependence and his own responsibility; thus her companionship was no more than the bodily presence of a human being whose needs were his own, whose terrors and whose enemies were his.

They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again, when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid them, slink out of their way — because, being two, they could strip him if the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road.

Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the cover of a ragged patch of firewood, there came back to Theodore, like a rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!… The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother in those first days of splendid sacrifice! “Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl, Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment — then pulled at his arm and began to cry, believing he was going off his head.

In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food, thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings. House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room — food or the mere possibility of food — the human wolf was at hand to dispute it with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little watering-place — where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,” trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland again…. And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants of a stretch of Welsh mining-village — they knew it for Welsh by the street-names — where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on again; and later — how much later they could not remember — took shelter, because they could go no further, in a cottage on the outskirts of a moor-land hamlet, where they were almost at extremity when a bitter spell of cold, at the end of winter, sent them food in the shape of frozen rooks and starlings. And, a day or two later, they were driven out again; Theodore, searching for dead birds in the snow, met others engaged in the same hungry quest — other and earlier settlers in the neighbourhood who saw in him a poacher on their scanty hunting-grounds and, gathering together in a common hate and need, fell on the intruders and chased them out with stones and threats. Theodore and the girl were hunted from their homestead and out on to the bleakness of the moor; whence, looking back breathless and aching from their bruises, they saw half a dozen yelling starvelings who still threatened them with shouts and upraised fists…. They went on blindly because they dared not stay; and that, for many days, was the last they saw of mankind.

It must have been towards the end of February or the beginning of March that they ended their long goings to and fro and found the refuge that, for many months, was to give them hiding and sustenance. Since they had been driven from their last shelter they had sighted no enemy in the shape of a living man, but the days that followed their flight had been almost foodless; and in the end they had come near to death from exposure on a stretch of hill and heath-covered country where they lost all sense of direction or even of desire. There, without doubt, they would have left their bones if there had not already been a promise of spring in the air; as it was, they could hardly drag themselves along when the moor dropped suddenly into a valley, a wide strip of land once pasture, now bleak and blackened from the passing of the poison-fire which had seared it from end to end. Here and there were charred mummies of men and of animals, lying thickest round a farmhouse, partly burned out; but beyond the burned farmhouse was a stream that might yield them fish; and with the warmth that was melting the snow on the hilltops little shafts of green life were piercing through the blackened soil. Before dark, in what once had been a garden, they scraped with their nails and their knives and found food — worm-eaten roots that would once have seemed unfit for cattle, that they thrust into their mouths unwashed. They sheltered for the night within the skeleton walls of the farm ; and when, with morning, they crawled into the sun, the last patch of snow had vanished from the hills and the tiny shafts of green were more radiant against the blackened soil…. The long curse and barrenness of winter was over and Nature was beginning anew her task of supporting her children.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.

HiLobrow is proud to present the fifteenth installment of Robert Waldron’s novel The School on the Fens. New installments will appear each Saturday for thirty-eight weeks. CLICK HERE to read all installments published thus far.

Late-night phone calls are common in a teacher’s life. Disgruntled students who have failed a subject or simply dislike a teacher play this eerie game. I have received such calls, chilled by the silence on the other end of the line. I have also been a victim of other pranks: my car splattered with eggs on Halloween or my tires flattened around report card time. When carried out by youngsters, we can chalk it up to immaturity, but when Rell and his minions did such things, it was another matter.

Our new Latin teacher Maureen Riley has received several such calls. Tall, pretty, and gifted with a razor-sharp wit, Maureen was a breath of fresh air when she arrived at Classical. She swiftly perceived the lay of the land. “This is a place of fear,” she announced in a teachers’ lounge, “and the headmaster is nuts.”

Needless to say we were delighted by her honest appraisal, but Jim warned her about ubiquitous spies — and that she would be well advised to keep her opinions to herself.

She drove an old jalopy to school; it frequently broke down, often causing her to be late for school. As we predicted, she received a “Kindly Note” in her mailbox, summoning her to the headmaster’s office. Still an innocent about Classical’s ways, she told none of us and went to the meeting alone.

She explained her car dilemma to Farrell and Murkin. “Get a new car,” Murkin said.

“You want to pay for it?” Maureen shot back.

“Then take the public transportation,” Murkin said. “We don’t tolerate tardiness from our professional staff.”

“No problem,” Maureen said, reining in her pique.

“There’s another matter that’s come to my attention,” Farrell said. “You’ve been mouthing off about this school — and about me. If you don’t like it here, you’re free to go elsewhere.”

She now understood the real reason why she’d been summoned.

“I didn’t leave my constitutional rights at the door when I came here,” Maureen said. “And I don’t like threats. If you or this skinny bitch here gives me any more shit, I’ll pick up the phone and call Senator Keating; he’s my uncle, and he loves me, and he won’t let anyone hurt me.”

Farrell’s and Murkin’s jaws dropped.

“Oh, I get it. You didn’t know about my uncle because I didn’t get my position through connections,” she continued. “I got my job fairly because I have the credentials. But if I need help, say regarding you two, he’d be very happy to help me. Nice talking to you guys, and have a great day.”

When she left, their mouths were still open.

Maureen loved telling her story, word for word, and before long the whole faculty knew it.

Shortly after, the late-night phone calls started. Maureen had great rapport with the kids, and she was convinced it wasn’t one of them. It had to be either Murkin or Farrell or one of his lackeys. She admitted that such calls in the middle of the night were unnerving, especially if you’re a single woman living alone.

Stay tuned!

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the thirteenth installment of our serialization of Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist. New installments will appear each Thursday for eighteen weeks.

“The Devolutionist” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1921) is the third occult-science-fiction Dr. Kinney story; the others are “The Lord of Death” (June 1919), “The Queen of Life” (August 1919), and “The Emancipatrix” (September 1921). Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — by means of Venusian technology — Dr. Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on other planets. In this story, they visit a double planet: Hafen is the abode of capitalists, Holl of workers. A nearby planet of “cooperative democrats” is in trouble, so Kinney & co. step in.

Cobbler and one-reeler writer Homer Eon Flint (1888–1924) published a number of pulp science fiction stories — including “The Planeteer” (1918; one of the earliest examples of cosmic sci-fi) and The Blind Spot (1921, with Austin Hall) — during the genre’s Radium Age. Everett Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years calls Flint “in many ways the outstanding writer of s-f in the Munsey pulp magazines.” Flint died in a crash near Oakland, Calif., after supposedly stealing a taxi at gunpoint in order to use it in a bank hold-up.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |16 | 17 | 18

Meanwhile Billie was still “haunting” Mona, and shortly was able to tell the other three that Fort had called, taking the surgeon out in a machine large enough to hold them both. They proceeded to a near-by park, where a game of aerial punt-ball was already in progress. [Footnote: The game is described more or less completely in various sporting publications.]

Billie took great interest in the darting play of the little flylike machines, the action of the mechanical catapults, and the ease with which the twelve-inch ball was usually caught in the baskets on the machines’ prows. She reported the score from time to time in a manner which would have made a telegrapher jealous.

Returning from the game, Mona and Fort became pretty confidential, the natural result of a common enthusiasm; for their side won. But Fort was content for a while to merely watch Mona, who was driving.

Finally the conversation made an opening for him to say, “I asked your mother, Mona, what she thought of me as a prospective son-in-law.”

The girl was in no way rattled. “I suppose she told you that it wouldn’t make any difference what she might say; I’d do as I pleased anyhow. Didn’t she?”

Fort nodded, slightly taken back. Then his boldness returned. “Well, I had to bring up the subject somehow. And now that I’ve done it — do you love me well enough to marry me, Mona?”

She pretended to be very busy with the driving; so that Billie never knew whether Fort looked anxious or not. Presently Mona said:

“I think —I rather think I like you too well to marry you. What I mean is, I’m afraid it would spoil you, my dear boy. You’re too well satisfied with yourself. I don’t want to marry a man who is content to fly around half the time and admire me the other half; although,” she added, “I like to be admired as well as any one.”

Fort looked as though he would, with an ounce more provocation, take her in his arms and say something to get quick results. But he didn’t. “I see,” pretty soberly, for him. “You want me to get in and do something important. Like Powart?” suddenly.

But Mona would not answer him directly. “It’s only fair to say that I’ve given him an ultimatum, too.” She hinted at what she had told the chairman. “I said nothing about — you.”

Fort took a deep breath. Mona gave him a glance or two, and Billie could see a startling change come over him. It was amazing; Fort, for the first time in his life had made a serious resolve!

“This makes everything very different!” he declared; and even his voice was altered. There was a determined, purposeful ring about it which was altogether unlike his usual reckless tones.

“Thanks for not telling Mr. Powart,” Fort went on in the same quiet way. “Clearly, I should tell him myself. And I shall. After that it is up to me!”

Next instant he had thrown off his seriousness, and for the remainder of the flight was his former jovial self. He seemed a trifle ashamed, however, of his old lightheartedness; so much so that Mona warned him not to tamper too much with his disposition. “I like it too well, boy.”

He went straight home after a hurried leave-taking, and Mona did not see him again until after the declaration of war. The next the four heard of him was through Van Emmon; Fort called upon the self-made commander-in-chief as quickly as he could.

“I have the honor to inform you,” said Fort, coming straight to the point, “that Miss Mona has seen fit to encourage my suit. In short, sir,” with the strange new note of resolution in his voice, “I am your rival for her hand! I thought it only right that you should know.”

Powart took this as he took everything, standing. And Van Emmon could see no sign that the announcement had disturbed his poise.

“You are considerate,” he stated with the faintest trace of sarcasm. “Let me call your attention to the fact that, because of the position which recent events have forced upon me, it is quite within my power to dispose of your opposition”— significantly.

“Quite so! I shall appreciate your consideration also.” Then the athlete permitted himself a slight smile. “On second thoughts, however, you can’t afford to be other than considerate. If anything happens to me now, Miss Mona will naturally think of you; for she knows I have come here!”

A single exclamation escaped Powart, and from the light in Fort’s eyes, Van Emmon knew that the chief was sorely provoked. However, he spoke with his usual coolness and certainty.

“Under the circumstances, you will be exempt, Mr. Fort, from the conscription which is now under way. I shall do nothing that might hinder your activities in any way? I take it”— evenly —“that you hope to accomplish something — big?”

Fort bowed. “It is my intention to set a mark even further than your own, sir!”

For the first time Powart laughed. It was a really hearty laugh, as though Fort’s preposterous boast was so utterly ridiculous that sarcasm was out of place.

“Mr. Fort”— when his mirth had subsided —“I only wish your judgment was as sound as your optimism! Tell me — do you intend to make yourself ruler of a bigger world than this?”

Fort dropped his seriousness for an instant. “To tell the truth, Powart, I haven’t any plan at all — yet. Thanks for the exemption. In return, I assure you that whatever I do will be as truly in the interests of the people as what you have done.”

Powart eyed him keenly. For a moment Van Emmon thought he would try to learn if Fort had any suspicions. But he said nothing further than a curt, “The audience is ended.”

A few minutes later Billie, through Mona, knew that Fort was reporting progress. He did it by telephone.

“Thought you’d like to know,” he finished. “Hope I didn’t rouse you out of bed.”

It was night in Mona’s part of the world, and Billie had come upon the girl just as she was preparing for bed.

“Thank you,” she said, through a tremendous yawn. “I was just about to retire. Good luck”— another yawn —“and good —”

Her voice changed. “Mr. Fort!” sharply. “Powart’s declaration of war on Alma is a frame-up! Never mind how I happen to know; it is true; they are not planning to invade us at all! He trumped up this affair in order to make himself dictator!”

“What!” The athlete was astounded. “Are you sure of this, Mona?”

The girl’s manner had changed again. “I beg your pardon?” she inquired, vastly confused. “Did I say something that — why, I am not aware, Mr. Fort, that I had said anything more than ‘good night’!”

“You AREN’T!” His voice was strained and excited. “Mona — you just now said something of the most extraordinary — surely — incredulously — you recall saying something, don’t you?”

She was still bewildered. “I do not!” Then gathering her poise again, “What did I say?”

“You said —” He stopped and waited a long while before going on.

Then he stated with a soberness that was almost stern:

“Mona, you told me something which could have come only through a supernatural agency. I am sure of it, from your manner. You were temporarily possessed.” He paused again.

She sensed his earnestness, and spoke just as seriously. “It is not impossible. I have heard of such things before. I was sleepy, and — the point is, what did I say?” she demanded.

“I do not intend to tell — you. What I learned gives me a great advantage over Powart; that’s all I can say. More would be dishonorable. Will you take my word for that, Mona?”

“Certainly,” with swift decision, and a grace that Billie envied. Whereupon she went to bed, but not to sleep until after many an hour of wide-eyed wondering.

Fort next showed himself to Smith, through Reblong. He had secured a pass to the engine-room of the Cobulus; and shortly his breezy manner completely broke down the engineer’s usual reserve.

“Always glad to show the machinery,” said Reblong, denying that the visitor was making any trouble. Fort’s technical knowledge had delighted him. “Come again any time you like.”

Which Fort did, the very next day. And this time he brought a package of sweetmeats, during the eating of which the two men became pretty friendly.

“You’re different from most of the folks of your — station,” Reblong finally made bold to remark. “Any harm in my saying so?”

“On the contrary,” laughed the athlete. “I rather pride myself on my democracy.

“The fact is, I want you to tell me a few things about your fellow-workers. I understand you’re one of the officers of your guild?”

“Secretary,” replied Reblong, a little dubiously. Was Fort a secret investigator?

“Then you can tell me. Is there any dissatisfaction? Are the men entirely content with their treatment?”

Reblong hesitated about replying, and Fort assured him, “This is a purely personal matter with me, old man. I am really anxious to know whether the working world is as well satisfied, as happy as I am.”

And thus Fort discovered, just as another man had already discovered, that the average Capellan workman was entirely satisfied with what he knew to be unjust treatment. Even when Fort told Reblong what he had learned about Powart’s trickery — leaving out all details about Mona, of course — the engineer would not listen to any hint of revolution.

“I don’t like to question your word, Mr. Fort”—Reblong was very uncomfortable —“but I have such confidence in the commission that — well, you understand.”

And Fort said, just as the other fellow had said after talking with Reblong —Reblong, the representative Capellan workman; Reblong, who voiced the opinions of his billions of fellow-workmen when he refused to consider a rebellion —Fort said:

“Well, I’ll be utterly damned!”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the ninth installment of our serialization of E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man. New installments will appear each Wednesday for 20 weeks.

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a “clockwork man” appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Comical yet mind-blowing hijinks ensue.

Considered the first cyborg novel, The Clockwork Man was first published in 1923 — the same year as Karel Capek’s pioneering android play, R.U.R.

“This is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the ‘rational’ future and the conservation of the humanity of man. Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity, this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. “Perhaps the outstanding scientific romance of the 1920s.” — Anatomy of Wonder (1995)

In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish a gorgeous paperback edition of The Clockwork Man, with a new Introduction by Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the science fiction and science blog io9. Newitz is also author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006).

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Whatever inconveniences the Clockwork man suffered as a result of having lapsed into a world of strange laws and manifestations, he enjoyed at least one advantage. His power of travelling over the earth at an enormous speed rendered the question of pursuit almost farcical. While Allingham’s car sped over the neighbouring hills, the object of the chase returned by a circuitous route to Great Wymering, slowed down, and began to walk up and down the High Street. It was now quite dark, and very few people seemed to have noticed that odd figure ambling along, stopping now and again to examine some object that aroused his interest or got in his way. There is no doubt that during these lesser perambulations he contrived somehow to get the silencer under better control, so that his progress was now muted. It is possible also that his faculties began to adjust themselves a little to his strange surroundings, and that he now definitely tried to grasp his environment. But he still suffered relapses. And the fact that he again wore a hat and wig, although not his own, requires a word of explanation.

It was this circumstance that accounted for the Vicar’s late arrival at the entertainment given in aid of the church funds that night. He had lingered over his sermon until the last moment, and then hurried off with only a slight pause in which to glance at himself in the hall mirror. He walked swiftly along the dark streets in the direction of the Templars’ Hall, which was situated at the lower end of the town. Perhaps it was because of his own desperate hurry that he scarcely noticed that other figure approaching him, and in a straight line. He swerved slightly in order to allow the figure to pass, and continued on his way.

And then he stopped abruptly, aware of a cool sensation on the top of his head. His hat and wig had gone! Aghast, he retraced his steps, but there was no sign of the articles on the pavement. It seemed utterly incredible, for there was only a slight breeze and he did not remember knocking into anything. He had certainly not collided with the stranger. Just for a moment he wondered.

But duty to his parishioners remained uppermost in the conscientious Vicar’s mind, and it was not fair to them that he should catch his death of cold. He hurried back to the vicarage. For a quarter of an hour he pulled open drawers, ransacked cupboards, searching everywhere for an old wig that had been discarded and a new hat that had never been worn. He found them at last and arrived, breathless and out of temper, in the middle of the cinematograph display which constituted the first part of the performance.

“My dear,” he gasped, as he slid into the seat reserved for him next to his wife, ” I couldn’t help it. Someone stole my hat and wig.”

“Stole them, Herbert,” she expostulated. “Not stole them.”

“Yes, stole them. I’ll tell you afterwards. Is this the Palestine picture? Oh, yes —”

And so the Clockwork man was able to conceal his clock from the gaze of a curious world, and the grotesqueness of his appearance was heightened by the addition of a neatly trimmed chestnut wig and a soft round clerical hat. His perceptions must have been extraordinarily rapid, and he must have acted upon the instant. Nor did it seem to occur to him that in this world there are laws which forbid theft. Probably, in the world from which he came such restrictions are unnecessary, and the exigency would not have arisen, every individual being provided by parliamentary statute with a suitable covering for that blatant and too obvious sign of the modus operandi in the posterior region of their craniums.

It was shortly after this episode that the Clockwork man experienced his first moment of vivid illumination about the world of brief mortal span.

He had become entangled with a lamp-post. There is no other way of describing his predicament. He came to rest with his forehead pressed against the post, and all his efforts to get round it ended in dismal failure. His legs kicked spasmodically and his arms revolved irregularly. There were intermittent explosions, like the back-firing of a petrol engine. The only person who witnessed these peculiar antics was P.C. Hawkins, who had been indulging in a quiet smoke beneath the shelter of a neighbouring archway.

At first it did not occur to the constable that the noise proceeded from the figure. He craned his head forward, expecting every moment to see a motor bicycle come along. The noise stopped abruptly, and he decided that the machine must have gone up a side street. Then he stepped out of his retreat and tapped the Clockwork man on the shoulder. The latter was quite motionless now and merely leaning against the lamp-post.

“You go ’ome,” suggested the constable, “I don’t want to have to take you. This is one of my lenient nights, lucky for you.”

“Wallabaloo,” said the Clockwork man, faintly, “Wum —Wum —”

“Yes, we know all about that,” said the constable, “but you take my tip and go ’ome. And I don’t want any back answers neither.”

The Clockwork man emitted a soft whistling sound from between his teeth, and rubbed his nose thoughtfully against the post.

“What is this?” he enquired, presently.

“Lamp-post,” rejoined the other, clicking his teeth, “L.A.M.P.- P.O.S.T. Lamp-post.”

“I see — curious, only one lamp-post, though. In my country they grow like trees, you know — whole forests of them — galaxy of lights — necessary — illuminate multiform world.”

The constable laughed gently and stroked his moustache. His theory about the condition of the individual before him slowly developed.

“You get along,” he persuaded, “before there’s trouble. I don’t want to be ’arsh with you.”

“Wait,” said the Clockwork man, without altering his position, “moment of lucidity — see things as they are — begin to understand — finite world — only one thing at a time. Now we’ve got it — a place for everything and everything in its place.”

“Just what I’m always telling my missus,” reflected the constable.

The Clockwork man shifted his head very slightly, and one eye screwed slowly round.

“I want to grasp things,” he resumed, “I want to grasp you. So far as I can judge, I see before me — a constable — minion of the law — curious relic — primitive stage of civilisation — order people about finite world — lock people up — finite cell.”

“That’s my job,” agreed the other, with a warning glint in his red eye.

“Finite world,” proceeded the Clockwork man, “fixed laws — limited dimensions — essentially limited. Now, when I’m working properly, I can move about in all dimensions. That is to say, in addition to moving backwards and forwards, and this way and that, I can also move X and Y, and X2 and Y2.”

The corners of the constable’s eyes wrinkled a little. “Of course,” he ruminated, “if you’re going to drag algebra into the discussion I shall ’ave to cry off. I never got beyond decimals.”

“Let me explain,” urged the Clockwork man, who was gaining in verbal ease and intellectual elasticity every moment. “Supposing I was to hit you hard. You would fall down. You would become supine. You would assume a horizontal position at right angles to your present perpendicularity.” He gazed upwards at the tall figure of the constable. “But if you were to hit me, I should have an alternative. I could, for example, fall into the middle of next week.”

The constable rubbed his chin thoughtfully, as though he thought this highly likely. “Whatd’yemean by that,” he demanded.

“I said next week,” explained the other, “in order to make my meaning clear. Actually, of course, I don’t describe time in such arbitrary terms, but when one is in Rome, you know. What I mean to convey is that I am capable of going not only somewhere, but also somewhen.”

“’Ere, stow that gammon,” broke in the constable, impatiently, “s’nuff of that sort of talk. You come along with me.” He spat determinedly and prepared to take action.

But at that moment, as the constable afterwards described it to himself, it seemed to him that there came before his eyes a sort of mist. The figure leaning against the lamp-post looked less obvious. He did not appear now to be a palpable individual at all, but a sort of shadowy outline of himself, blurred and in – distinct. The constable rubbed his eyes and stretched out a hand.

“Alright,” he heard a tiny, remote voice, “I’m still here — I haven’t gone yet — I can’t go — that’s what’s so distressing. I don’t really understand your world, you know — and I can’t get back to my own. Don’t be harsh with me — it’s so awkward — between the devil and the deep sea.”

“What’s up?” exclaimed the constable, startled. “What yer playing at? Where are you?”

“Here I am,” the thin voice echoed faintly. The constable wheeled round sharply and became aware of a vague, palpitating mass, hovering in the dark mouth of the archway. It was like some solid body subjected to intense vibration. There was a high-pitched spinning noise.

“‘Ere,” said the constable, “cut that sort of caper. What’s the little game?” He made a grab at where he thought the shadowy form ought to be, and his hand closed on the empty air.

“Gawd,” he gasped, “it’s a blooming ghost.”

He fancied he heard a voice very indistinctly begging his pardon. Again he clutched wildly at a shoulder and merely snapped his fingers. “Strike a light,” he muttered, under his breath, “this ain’t good enough. It ain’t nearly good enough,” Reaching forward he stumbled, and to save himself from falling placed a hand against the wall. The next moment he leapt backwards with a yell. His hand and arm had gone clean through the filmy shape.

“Gawd, it’s spirits — that’s what it is.”

“It’s only me,” remarked the Clockwork man, suddenly looming into palpable form again. “Don’t be afraid. I must apologise for my eccentric behaviour. I tried an experiment. I thought I could get back. You said I was to go home, you know. But I can’t get far.” His voice shook a little. It jangled like a badly struck chord. “I’m a poor, maimed creature. You must make allowances for me. My clock won’t work properly.”

He began to vibrate again, his whole frame quivering and shaking. Little blue sparks scintillated around the back part of his head. He lifted one leg up as though to take a step forward; and then his ears flapped wildly, and he remained with one leg in mid-air and a finger to his nose.

The constable gave way to panic. He temporised with his duty. “Stow it,” he begged, “I can’t take you to the station like this. They’ll never believe me.” He took off his hat and rubbed his tingling forehead. “Say it’s a dream, mate,” he added, in a whining voice. “’Ow can I go ’ome to the missus with a tale like this. She’ll say it’s the gin again. It’s always my luck to strike something like this. When the ghost came to Bapchurch churchyard, it was me wot saw it first, and nobody believed me. You go along quietly, and we’ll look over it this time.”

But the Clockwork man made no reply. He was evidently absorbed in the effort to restart some process in himself. Presently his foot went down on the pavement with a smart bang. There followed a succession of sharp explosions, and the next second he glided smoothly away.

The constable returned furtively to his shelter beneath the arch, hitched himself thoughtfully, and found half a cigarette inside his waistcoat pocket.

“It’s the gin,” he ruminated, half out loud, “I’ll ’ave to knock it off. ’Tain’t as though I ain’t ’ad warnings enough. I’ve seen things before and I shall see them again —”

He lit the cigarette end and puffed out a cloud of smoke. “I never see ’im,” he soliloquised, “not really.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, serialized between March and July 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.

HiLobrow is pleased to present the thirteenth and final installment of our serialization of Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon —2419 A.D..

In Philip Francis Nowlan’s novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., which first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories (the same issue which launched E.E. “Doc” Smith’s serial The Skylark of Space), 29-year-old WWI vet and mining engineer Anthony Rogers falls into a state of suspended animation in the year 1927. Five hundred years later, he wakes up in an America that for the past three centuries has been a backward province of the globe-spanning, part-Mongolian part-alien Han Empire. Taken in by a gang of American rebels, he becomes a freedom fighter in the Second War of Independence.

Nowlan’s long-running and much-imitated Buck Rogers comic strip, illustrated by Dick Calkins, first appeared in January 1929. The protagonist was renamed in imitation of the popular cowboy actor Buck Jones.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

As we crossed the Hudson River, a few miles north of the city, we dropped several units of the Yellow Intelligence Division, with full instrumental equipment. Their apparatus cases were nicely balanced at only a few ounces weight each, and the men used their chute capes to ease their drops.

We recrossed the river a little distance above and began dropping White Intelligence units and a few long and short range gun units. Then we held our position until we began to get reports. Gradually we ringed the territory of the Sinsings, our observation units working busily and patiently at their locators and scopes, both aloft and aground, until Garlin finally turned to me with the remark:

“The map circle is complete now, Boss. We’ve got clear locations all the way around them.”

“Let me see it,” I replied, and studied the illuminated viewplate map, with its little overlapping circles of light that indicated spots proved clear of the enemy by ultroscopic observation.

I nodded to Bill Hearn. “Go ahead now, Hearn,” I said, “and place your barrage men.”

He spoke into his ultrophone, and three of the ships began to glide in a wide ring around the enemy territory. Every few seconds, at the word from his Unit Boss, a gunner would drop off the wire, and slipping the clasp of his chute cape, drift down into the darkness below.

Bill formed two lines, parallel to and facing the river, and enclosing the entire territory of the enemy between them. Above and below, straddling the river, were two defensive lines. These latter were merely to hold their positions. The others were to close in toward each other, pushing a high-explosive barrage five miles ahead of them. When the two barrages met, both lines were to switch to short-vision-range barrage and continue to close in on any of the enemy who might have drifted through the previous curtain of fire.

In the meantime Bill kept his reserves, a picked corps of a hundred men (the same that had accompanied Hart and myself in our fight with the Han squadron) in the air, divided about equally among the “kite-tails” of four ships.

A final roll call, by units, companies, divisions and functions, established the fact that all our forces were in position. No Han activity was reported, and no Han broadcasts indicated any suspicion of our expedition. Nor was there any indication that the Sinsings had any knowledge of the fate in store for them. The idling of rep-ray generators was reported from the center of their camp, obviously those of the ships the Hans had given them — the price of their treason to their race.

Again I gave the word, and Hearn passed on the order to his subordinates.

Far below us, and several miles to the right and left, the two barrage lines made their appearance. From the great height to which we had risen, they appeared like lines of brilliant, winking lights, and the detonations were muffled by the distances into a sort of rumbling, distant thunder. Hearn and his assistants were very busy: measuring, calculating, and snapping out ultrophone orders to unit commanders that resulted in the straightening of lines and the closing of gaps in the barrage.

The White Division Boss reported the utmost confusion in the Sinsing organization. They were, as might be expected, an inefficient, loosely disciplined gang, and repeated broadcasts for help to neighboring gangs. Ignoring the fact that the Mongolians had not used explosives for many generations, they nevertheless jumped at the conclusion that they were being raided by the Hans. Their frantic broadcasts persisted in this thought, despite the nervous electrophonic inquiries of the Hans themselves, to whom the sound of the battle was evidently audible, and who were trying to locate the trouble.

At this point, the swooper I had sent south toward the city went into action as a diversion, to keep the Hans at home. Its “kite-tail” loaded with long-range gunners, using the most highly explosive rockets we had, hung invisible in the darkness of the sky and bombarded the city from a distance of about five miles. With an entire city to shoot at, and the object of creating as much commotion therein as possible, regardless of actual damage, the gunners had no difficulty in hitting the mark. I could see the glow of the city and the stabbing flashes of exploding rockets. In the end, the Hans, uncertain as to what was going on, fell back on a defensive policy, and shot their “hell cylinder,” or wall of upturned disintegrator rays into operation. That, of course, ended our bombardment of them. The rays were a perfect defense, disintegrating our rockets as they were reached.

If they had not sent out ships before turning on the rays, and if they had none within sufficient radius already in the air, all would be well.

I queried Garlin on this, but he assured me Yellow Intelligence reported no indications of Han ships nearer than 800 miles. This would probably give us a free hand for a while, since most of their instruments recorded only imperfectly or not at all, through the death wall.

Requisitioning one of the viewplates of the headquarters ship, and the services of an expert operator, I instructed him to focus on our lines below. I wanted a close-up of the men in action.

He began to manipulate his controls and chaotic shadows moved rapidly across the plate, fading in and out of focus, until he reached an adjustment that gave me a picture of the forest floor, apparently 100 feet wide, with the intervening branches and foliage of the trees appearing like shadows that melted into reality a few feet above the ground.

I watched one man setting up his long-gun with skillful speed. His lips pursed slightly as though he were whistling, as he adjusted the tall tripod on which the long tube was balanced. Swiftly he twirled the knobs controlling the aim and elevation of his piece. Then, lifting a belt of ammunition from the big box, which itself looked heavy enough to break down the spindly tripod, he inserted the end of it in the lock of his tube and touched the proper combination of buttons.

Then he stepped aside, and occupied himself with peering carefully through the trees ahead. Not even a tremor shook the tube, but I knew that at intervals of something less than a second, it was discharging small projectiles which, traveling under their own continuously reduced power, were arching into the air, to fall precisely five miles ahead and explode with the force of eight-inch shells, such as we used in the First World War.

Another gunner, fifty feet to the right of him, waved a hand and called out something to him. Then, picking up his own tube and tripod, he gauged the distance between the trees ahead of him, and the height of their lowest branches, and bending forward a bit, flexed his muscles and leaped lightly, some twenty-five feet. Another leap took him another twenty feet or so, where he began to set up his piece.

I ordered my observer then to switch to the barrage itself. He got a close focus on it, but this showed little except a continuous series of blinding flashes, which, from the viewplate, lit up the entire interior of the ship. An eight-hundred-foot focus proved better. I had thought that some of our French and American artillery of the 20th Century had achieved the ultimate in mathematical precision of fire, but I had never seen anything to equal the accuracy of that line of terrific explosions as it moved steadily forward, mowing down trees as a scythe cuts grass (or used to 500 years ago), literally churning up the earth and the splintered, blasted remains of the forest giants, to a depth of from ten to twenty feet.

By now the two curtains of fire were nearing each other, lines of vibrant, shimmering, continuous, brilliant destruction, inevitably squeezing the panic-stricken Sinsings between them.

Even as I watched, a group of them, who had been making a futile effort to get their three rep-ray machines into the air, abandoned their efforts, and rushed forth into the milling mob.

I queried the Control Boss sharply on the futility of this attempt of theirs, and learned that the Hans, apparently in doubt as to what was going on, had continued to “play safe,” and broken off their power broadcast, after ordering all their own ships east of the Alleghenies to the ground, for fear these ships they had traded to the Sinsings might be used against them.

Again I turned to my viewplate, which was still focussed on the central section of the Sinsing works. The confusion of the traitors was entirely that of fear, for our barrage had not yet reached them.

Some of them set up their long-guns and fired at random over the barrage line, then gave it up. They realized that they had no target to shoot at, no way of knowing whether our gunners were a few hundred feet or several miles beyond it.

Their ultrophone men, of whom they did not have many, stood around in tense attitudes, their helmet phones strapped around their ears, nervously fingering the tuning controls at their belts. Unquestionably they must have located some of our frequencies, and overheard many of our reports and orders. But they were confused and disorganized. If they had an Ultrophone Boss they evidently were not reporting to him in an organized way.

They were beginning to draw back now before our advancing fire. With intermittent desperation, they began to shoot over our barrage again, and the explosions of their rockets flashed at widely scattered points beyond. A few took distance “pot shots.”

Oddly enough it was our own forces that suffered the first casualties in the battle. Some of these distance shots by chance registered hits, while our men were under strict orders not to exceed their barrage distances.

Seen upon the ultroscope viewplate, the battle looked as though it were being fought in daylight, perhaps on a cloudy day, while the explosions of the rockets appeared as flashes of extra brilliance.

The two barrage lines were not more than five hundred feet apart when the Sinsings resorted to tactics we had not foreseen. We noticed first that they began to lighten themselves by throwing away extra equipment. A few of them in their excitement threw away too much, and shot suddenly into the air. Then a scattering few floated up gently, followed by increasing numbers, while still others, preserving a weight balance, jumped toward the closing barrages and leaped high, hoping to clear them. Some succeeded. We saw others blown about like leaves in a windstorm, to crumple and drift slowly down, or else to fall into the barrage, their belts blown from their bodies.

However, it was not part of our plan to allow a single one of them to escape and find his way to the Hans. I quickly passed the word to Bill Hearn to have the alternate men in his line raise their barrages and heard him bark out a mathematical formula to the Unit Bosses.

We backed off our ships as the explosions climbed into the air in stagger formation until they reached a height of three miles. I don’t believe any of the Sinsings who tried to float away to freedom succeeded.

But we did know later, that a few who leaped the barrage got away and ultimately reached Nu-yok.

It was those who managed to jump the barrage who gave us the most trouble. With half of our long-guns turned aloft, I foresaw we would not have enough to establish successive ground barrages and so ordered the barrage back two miles, from which positions our “curtains” began to close in again, this time, however, gauged to explode, not on contact, but thirty feet in the air. This left little chance for the Sinsings to leap either over or under it.

Gradually, the two barrages approached each other until they finally met, and in the grey dawn the battle ended.

Our own casualties amounted to forty-seven men in the ground forces, eighteen of whom had been slain in hand to hand fighting with the few of the enemy who managed to reach our lines, and sixty-two in the crew and “kite-tail” force of swooper No. 4, which had been located by one of the enemy’s ultroscopes and brought down with long-gun fire.

Since nearly every member of the Sinsing Gang had, so far as we knew, been killed, we considered the raid a great success.

It had, however, a far greater significance than this. To all of us who took part in the expedition, the effectiveness of our barrage tactics definitely established a confidence in our ability to overcome the Hans.

As I pointed out to Wilma:

“It has been my belief all along, dear, that the American explosive rocket is a far more efficient weapon than the disintegrator ray of the Hans, once we can train all our gangs to use it systematically and in co-ordinated fashion. As a weapon in the hands of a single individual, shooting at a mark in direct line of vision, the rocket-gun is inferior in destructive power to the dis ray, except as its range may be a little greater. The trouble is that to date it has been used only as we used our rifles and shot guns in the 20th Century. The possibilities of its use as artillery, in laying barrages that advance along the ground, or climb into the air, are tremendous.

“The dis ray inevitably reveals its source of emanation. The rocket gun does not. The dis ray can reach its target only in a straight line. The rocket may be made to travel in an arc, over intervening obstacles, to an unseen target.

“Nor must we forget that our ultronists now are promising us a perfect shield against the dis ray in inertron.”

“I tremble though, Tony dear, when I think of the horrors that are ahead of us. The Hans are clever. They will develop defenses against our new tactics. And they are sure to mass against us not only the full force of their power in America, but the united forces of the World Empire. They are a cowardly race in one sense, but clever as the very Devils in Hell, and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency.”

“Nevertheless,” I prophesied, “the Finger of Doom points squarely at them today, and unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shall live to see America blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the tenth installment of our serialization of Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (also known as Lest Ye Die). New installments will appear each Monday for 25 weeks.

When war breaks out in Europe — war which aims successfully to displace entire populations — British civilization collapses utterly and overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and dissatisfied idler, must learn to survive by his wits in the new England, where 20th-century science, technology, and culture are regarded with superstitious awe and terror.

The book — by a writer best known today for her suffragist plays, treatises, and activism — was published in 1922. In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish it in a gorgeous paperback edition, with an Introduction by Gary Panter.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him — and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.

“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer…. When I think of what I wrote — the little, little things that seemed important!… I spent a year once — a whole good year — on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably — and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it — the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere…. And all the time there was this in us — this raw, red thing — and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits…. Do you know where we made the mistake?” — he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger — “We were not civilized — it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there — lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh — clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”

He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened — not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.

“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility — to realize your sin, to confess it and repent…. We — we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive?… We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities…. We thought our habits — we called them virtues — were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us — to this…. And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with — hunger and lust! Brute instincts… and the primitive passion, hatred — against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else — how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving…. ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ — of hatred and hunger and lust.”

“Yes,” said Theodore — and he, too, stared at the fire…. What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that — but it’s right…. We can only hate.”

“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment…. God pity us!”

He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”

“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God?… We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far — except that what we think we own — owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation…. It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us — the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us — set their claws in us — and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.”

Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of books and art we admitted the fact, had a name for the life, called it influence: influence a form of independent existence…. In the same way we took metals and welded them, made machines; which were beasts, potent beasts, whose destiny was the same as our own. To live and develop and, developing, to turn on the power that enslaved them…. That was what had happened; they had made themselves necessary, fastened on us and, grown strong enough, had turned on their masters and killed — even though they died in the killing. The revolt against servitude had always been accounted a virtue in men and the law of all life was the same. The beasts we had made could not live without us, but they would have their revenge before they died.

“Think of us,” he said, “how we run and squeal and hide from them! … The patient servants, our goods and chattels, who were brought into life for our pleasure — they chase us while we run and squeal and hide!”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I’ve felt that, too — the humiliation.”

“The humiliation,” the sick man nodded. “Always in the end the slave rules his master — it’s the price paid for servitude, possession. I tell you, they were wise men who preached renunciation — before what we own takes hold of us and possession turns to servitude. For there’s a law of average in all things — have you ever felt it as I have? A law of balance which we never strike aright…. When the mighty tread hard enough on the humble and meek, the humble and meek are exalted and begin to tread hard in their turn. That’s obvious and we’ve generally known it; but it’s the same in what we call material things. We rise into the air — make machines that can fly — and grovel underground to protect ourselves from the flying-man. As we struck the balance to the one side, so it has to swing back on the other; a few men rise high into the air and many creep down into trenches and cellars, crouch flat…. If we could work out the numbers and heights mathematically, be sure that we should strike the perfect balance — represented by the surface of the earth. Balance — in all things balance.”

He rambled on, perhaps half-delirious, coughing out his thoughts and theories concerning a world he was leaving…. In all things balance, inevitably; the purpose of life which, so far, we sought blindly — by passion and recoil from it, by excess and consequent exhaustion…. It was in the cities where men herded, where life swarmed, that death had come most thickly, that desolation was swiftest and most complete. The ground underneath them needed rest from men; there was an average of life it could support and bear with. Now, the average exceeded, the cities lay ruined, were silent, knew the peace they had craved for — while those who once swarmed in them avoided them in fear or scattered themselves in the open country, finding no sustenance in brickwork, stone or paved street…. With the machine and its consequence, the industrial system, population had increased beyond the average allotted to the race; now the balance was righting itself by a very massacre of famine — induced by the self-same process of invention which had fostered reproduction unhindered. Because millions too many had crawled upon earth, long stretches of earth must lie waste and desolate till the average had worked itself out…. The art of life was adjustment of the balance in all things — was action and reaction rightly applied, was provision of counter-weight, discovery of the destined mean. Was control of Truth, lest it turn into a lie; was check upon the power and velocity of Good ere it swung to immeasurable Evil….

The fire, for want of more wood to pile on it, had died low, to a flicker in the ashes, and the two men sat almost in darkness; the one, between the bouts that shook him, whispering out the tenets of his Law; the other, now listening, now staring back into the world that once was — and ever should be…. He was with Markham, listening to the Westminster chimes — (on the crest of the centuries, Markham had said) — when there were sudden yelping screams outside and a patter of feet on the road. The human rats who had crept into the town for shelter from the night were bolting in panic from their holes.

“They’re running,” said the dying man and felt towards the stairs. “It’s gas — it must be gas! Oh God, where’s the door — where’s the door?”

As they groped and stumbled through the door and up the stairway, he was clutching at Theodore’s arm and gasping in an ecstasy of terror; as fearful of losing his few poor hours of life as if they had been years of health and usefulness. In the open air was darkness with figures flying dimly by; a thin stream of panic that raced against death by suffocation.

The man with death on him held to Theodore’s arm and besought him, for Christ’s sake, not to leave him — he could run if he were only helped! Theodore let him cling for a dragging pace or two; then, looking behind him, saw a woman reel, clawing the air.

He wrenched himself free and ran on till he could run no further.

It was somewhere towards the end of autumn that Theodore Savage realized that the war had come to an end — so far, at least, as his immediate England was concerned. What was happening elsewhere he and his immediate England had no means of knowing and were long past caring to know. There was no definite ending but a leaving-off, a slackening; the attacks — the burnings and panics — by degrees were fewer and not only fewer but less devastating, because carried out with smaller forces; there were days and nights without alarm, without smoke-cloud or glow on the horizon. Then yet longer intervals — and so on to complete cessation…. By the time the nights had grown long and frosty the war that was organized and alien had ended; there remained only the daily, personal and barbaric form of war wherein every man’s hand was raised against his neighbour and enemy. That warfare ceased not and could not cease — until the human herd had reduced itself to the point at which the bare earth could support it.

It seemed to him later a wonder — almost a miracle — that he had come alive through the months of war and after; at times he stood amazed that any had lived in the waste of hunger and violence, of pestilence and rotting bodies which for months was the world as he knew it. He was near death not once nor a score of times, but daily; death from exhaustion or the envy of men who were starved and reckless as himself. The mockery of peace brought no plenty or hope of it, no sign of reconstruction or dawn of new order; reconstruction and order were rank impossibilities so long as human creatures preyed on each other in a land swept bare, and prowled after the manner of wolves. No revival of common life, no system was possible until earth once more brought forth her fruits.

He judged, by the length of the nights, that it was somewhere about the middle of November when the first snow came suddenly and thickly; the harbinger and onslaught of a fiercely hard winter that killed in their thousands the gaunt human beasts who tore at each other for the refuse and vermin that was food. In the all-pervading dearth and starvation there was only one form of animal life that increased and flourished mightily; the rat overran empty buildings, found dreadful sustenance in street and field and, in turn, was hunted, trapped and fed on.

With the coming of winter the human remnant was perforce less vagrant and migratory, and Theodore, driven by weather to shelter, lived for weeks in what once had been a country town, a cluster of dead houses with, here and there, a silent factory. Only the buildings, the semblance of a township, remained; the befouled and neglected body whence the life of a community had fled; and he never knew what its living name had been or what was the manner of industry or commerce whereby it had supported its inhabitants. It lay in a flattish agricultural country and a railway had run through its outskirts; the rusted metals stretched north and south and the remnants of a station still existed — platforms, charred buildings and trucks and locomotives in sidings. Perhaps the charred buildings had been burned in a fury of drunken and insane destruction, perhaps shivering destitution had set light to them for the sake of a few hours’ warmth.

The shell of the town — its brickwork and stone — was still practically intact; it was anarchy, pillage and starvation, not the violence of an enemy, that had reduced it to a city of the dead. The means of supporting life were absent, but certain forms of what had once been luxury remained and were counted as nothing. At a corner of the main street stood a jeweller’s premises which, time and again, had been entered and ransacked; the dwelling-house behind it contained not so much as a fragment of dried crust but in the shop itself rings, brooches and pendants were still lying for any man to take — disordered, scattered and trampled underfoot, because worthless to those who craved for bread. The only item of jeweller’s stock that still had value to starving men was a watch — if it furnished a burning-glass, a means of lighting a fire when other means were unavailable.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.

HiLobrow is proud to present the fourteenth installment of Robert Waldron’s novel The School on the Fens. New installments will appear each Saturday for thirty-eight weeks. CLICK HERE to read all installments published thus far.

On Friday afternoons we ritually met after school at the Shamrock Bar, a five-minute drive from school. It attracted teachers from nearby schools, off-duty nurses from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and grad students from Boston College and Boston University.

Gilt-framed mirrors, brass lamps, and dark mahogany wainscoting created a hospitable atmosphere where we teachers could safely be ourselves. On occasion we drank too much. I once awakened without memory of driving home, and Iris and I had a furious row over it.

While we were reviewing our week, Jim happened to have the Badger’s letter, reading it aloud to the delight of all in earshot, including the regulars who’d been following our school soap opera for years. We speculated about the Badger’s identity, but because Rell had so many enemies, it could be almost anyone on the faculty.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ed at the entrance and waved to him as he zigzagged his way through the late afternoon mob boisterously cheering on an Irish soccer team on TV.

“Friday is test make-up day,” he said, scanning the bar with an approving smile. “But today no one showed up so here I am.”

He had changed into jeans and a blue sweatshirt, looking more like a senior.

“What’s your pleasure?” Jim asked, always the first to buy a guest a drink.

“I’ll play it safe,” Ed said, looking around at the Irish flags, “and have a Guinness.”

Our bartender Peg drew Ed a pint. “Are you a member of this crew?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ve just started teaching at Classical,” Ed replied.

“I’m Peg Kelly,” she said, reaching over the bar to shake Ed’s hand. “Any horror stories yet?”

“No,” he answered, warming to her friendliness.

“You will,” she said, plunking a beer in front of him.

I informed Ed that Eileen would keep an eye out for Bill’s mark-book but kept to myself Farrell’s sexual tryst with Tim although part of me wanted to shout the ugly business to the world. A cop-out, I admit, but I lacked the psychic energy to face it, let alone burden a novice teacher. Ed would have charged in where angels fear to tread. And if both were prepared to deny it, as Eileen said, neither of us had a leg to stand on.

“Wish I could help Tim,” Ed said, “his heart’s set on early decision and Ivy League… but he’d be better off waiting for his grade average to go up and apply to college later in the year, still with a chance at an Ivy.”

“Early decision is like an Olympic gold medal to Tim,” I said. “He’s dreamt of it ever since he was twelve… he has a right to his dream, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” Ed said, “it’s just that I think his dream will come true without early decision.”

Maria and Jim were conversing with two well-dressed young men who periodically peered at us. Maria’s wink signaled they were Classical grads.

One of them squeezed through the crowd, “Hi, Mr. Duncan, remember me?”

I was at a loss.

“Lee Phillips,” he said without a beat, allowing me to save face.

“Yes, I remember you,” I said.

Lee was accepted by every Ivy he had applied to. He chose Yale. His tipsy friend Mike Bryant joined us. I hadn’t taught Mike but remembered Jim’s describing him as the “salt of the earth.” Lee and Mike had met for lunch and spent the afternoon swapping stories about their high school days. Lee asked about Farrell, and I noncommittally replied that he was still headmaster.

“Asshole Farrell’s still running the show, huh?” said Mike, after a swig of beer.

“Come on, Mike,” Lee said.

“Come on yourself,” Mike said after another swig of beer. “Farrell didn’t give a shit about people like me, only you guys at the top of the class.”

“Not true,” Lee said, “Farrell’s dedicated his life to Classical.”

“If it weren’t for Mr. Ford’s recommendation,” said Mike, slamming his glass down on the bar, “I’d never have gotten into Holy Cross.”

Peg looked over concerned, and I signaled no problem.

“If you had asked, Farrell would’ve helped you,” Lee said quietly to calm Mike down.

“I did,” said Mike, raising his hand to Peg for another beer.

“And?” Lee asked.

“Said I hadn’t a chance in hell of getting into a top college and should apply to a state school.”

“What’s wrong with a state school?” Ed asked.

I introduced them to Ed. About the same age, they shared college stories until Ed repeated his question about state schools.

“Classical kids look down on state schools, they’re fall-back schools in case first-tier ones reject them,” Mike explained. “Farrell caters to the top members of the senior class who’ll go to Ivy’s or M.I.T. or Stanford, colleges that’ll bring glory to the school. He doesn’t give a shit about the rest of the class, a lot of kids considering our class was over three hundred and fifty.”

“Lee, your father’s a doctor,” Jim interjected, he and Maria having joining us. “He was also the chairman of the Parents’ Council. Farrell favored you because he was power-brokering.”

“Cynical, cynical!” Lee said, by now bored by the subject. “All I know is that Headmaster Farrell was good to me.”

Jim emitted a cackle, loud enough for Peg to stare at him, and I again signaled no problem. “I can’t believe my ears! Has everyone been duped?” Jim’s wife Sharon suddenly appeared, elbowing her way through the crowd. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform. Dark Irish with high cheekbones and oval eyes, she juggled being mother, nurse and wife without any visible signs of wear and tear.

“Christ, Jim, I could hear you out on Market Street. How many drinks have you had?”

“Only two, dear. I heard something amusing about Farrell —”

“Please, spare me, it’s bad enough to listen about him at home but not here too.”

Her comment was like a face-slap. Were we bores to our wives? Had time reduced us to whiners?

After dinner Ed invited us back to his place for coffee and drinks. Maria, Jim and I accepted. Sharon declined, her excuse being tired, but I fear that she was weary of tales about Classical.

Ed lived in a red brick townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay. His apartment was spacious with huge floor to ceiling windows. Furniture was sparse but elegant. A baby grand piano stood at the end of the room before French doors leading to a brick-enclosed garden. And above the sofa hung a colorful seascape that Ed’s mother had painted.

“Your mother is talented,” I said, while running my fingers along the piano keys. “You play?”

“A little bit.”

Ed lit several candles and disappeared into the kitchen. After a ruckus of opening and shutting cabinet doors, clacking cutlery and running water, there floated in the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Ed carried in a tray of brandy glasses and coffee mugs. Food had sobered Jim so he poured drinks for Maria and himself. Ed and I chose coffee.

“Elegant apartment, Ed,” Maria said. “On a teacher’s salary?”

“I share it with my girlfriend Veronica who’s studying music at the conservatory. All I own is my mother’s painting over the sofa.”

Maria stood up to peruse the painting, praising its golden sky reflected on the water. “You’re settling here in Boston?”

“Not sure,” Ed said, sitting in a lotus position on the carpet. “Teaching is harder than I thought, and my students constantly moan about being bored.”

“They’re bored,” Maria said, sipping brandy, “because they’re tired of thinking about themselves.” Leaning back into her armchair, she continued, “Give them something to lose themselves in. Have them read a Victorian novel, a Shakespearean play, a Keatsian ode and hold them accountable for it. Learning is an act of self-forgetting, and students have to be coaxed into it.”

“It’s exactly what I’m trying to do!” Ed said.

“Keep trying.”

Maria expanded on her theories of teaching, as she was wont to do with young teachers, and when she finished, an impressed Ed said, “Your students are lucky to have you.”

“And your students are fortunate to have you,” Maria returned. “John’s raved about your teaching.”

Ed looked at me, his eyes full of gratitude.

“Maria’s right, don’t let the kids discourage you,” Jim said, swirling brandy in his snifter. “When they cry boredom, they’re pretending they’re above anything that interests adults.”

“I try to make every class interesting,” Ed said.


“And you’re succeeding,” I said. “Your class on King Lear was terrific.”

Ed shyly shrugged, “The kids knew I was being evaluated and made more of an effort.”

“Proves they like you,” I said, “So relax, you’re doing a fine job.”

We talked into the night: Books, music, movies, and then back to teaching. Maria mentioned how her students enjoyed translating Camus. Ed was interested in how she taught a novel, so she described her method.

Our conversation suddenly veered into school politics.

“I wish you three were the administrative team at Classical,” Ed said. “How come you’ve never applied for —”

“Don’t assume we haven’t,” Maria said. “I’ve applied for the head of the modern language department three times in the last ten years, and Jim has applied twice for assistant-headmaster.”

“But the best people should run our schools,” Ed said, shaking his head, “not people like Murkin and Farrell… or am I naive?”

After an awkward silence, I said, “Let’s not ruin a lovely evening talking about Farrell.”

Maria obligingly added, “Ed, please play something on the piano.”

Ed stood and grandly bowed, “At your service. What shall I play?”

Maria said, “Something upbeat.”

Ed sat on the piano bench, took a deep breath and began to play.

I didn’t recognize the piece, but it was full of light and movement, like a mountain stream finding its way to the sea.

“You like?” Ed asked.

We nodded.

“We’d love to hear more,” Maria urged.

Ed stood to open the piano bench and withdrew a folder of handwritten music sheets.

Arranging them on the lectern, he said, “Are you sure?”

We nodded.

“Okay, here goes.”

It was a long meditative piece, incrementally gathering power toward an unexpected climax to be followed by a serene coda.

Ed played most of it with his eyes shut.

At its conclusion, he gently lifted his hands from the piano keys, with the last chords quivering in the air. Opening his eyes, he had a far away look as if he had forgotten our presence.

We were silent, reluctant to mar the magic.

“Thank you, Ed, it was lovely,” Maria finally said, her face flushed with astonishment.

“You play a little?” I chided.

“Sometimes my fingers fall in the right places,” Ed said, refocusing his gaze on us.

At the sound of a key in the latch, Ed sped to the door, kissed his girlfriend and introduced her. Veronica White had a high forehead, large soulful blue eyes and full lips. Wearing a silver silk dress and a single string of pearls, she reminded me of a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Rossetti. If Ed was sunlight, Veronica was his moonlight.

She kicked off her shoes and knelt down on the carpet while Ed poured her a glass of white wine. She had been to a concert with friends, an evening of Beethoven with guest violinist Isaac Stern. She herself was a violinist studying at the New England Conservatory, her dream to play with the Boston Symphony.

She described the evening concert, including Stern’s three encores.

When Ed left the room to make more coffee, she whispered, “I’m worried about Ed.”

“Why?” Maria asked.

“He’s not sleeping, and I blame it on the phone calls we’re getting in the middle of the night. When Ed answers, there’s no one there, and it’s terrifying… I suspect they’re connected to Classical.”

“Students play pranks,” Jim said, “it’s the reason why I have an unlisted number.”

“But we have an unlisted number,” Veronica said, “and now Ed’s worried about the note he’s received from the headmaster. Perhaps he should try teaching at another school; Classical is too —” She broke off as Ed returned with a tray of cups and coffee.

“Why’s everyone so quiet?” Ed said, quizzically looking at us.

“We’re tired,” Maria said. “I haven’t been out this late in a long time. What time is it?”

The phone rang, and Ed anxiously looked at Veronica. She nodded and he picked it up.

“Hello — Hello — Hello.” Ed returned the phone to its cradle.

“Must’ve been the wrong number,” Ed said, anxiously looking at Veronica. A chill had fallen on the room, and we decided to call it a night. While Ed went for our coats, Veronica whispered to us, “Please, protect Ed, he’s a babe in the woods.”

We nodded.

Stay tuned!

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the twenty-third and final installment of our serialization of J.D. Beresford’s Goslings (also known as A World of Women).

When a plague kills off most of England’s male population, the proper bourgeois Mr. Gosling abandons his family for a life of lechery. His daughters — who have never been permitted to learn self-reliance — in turn escape London for the countryside, where they find meaningful roles in a female-dominated agricultural commune. That is, until the Goslings’ idyll is threatened by their elders’ prejudices about free love!

J.D. Beresford’s friend the poet and novelist Walter de la Mare consulted on Goslings, which was first published in 1913. In May 2013, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of the book. “A fantastic commentary upon life,” wrote W.L. George in The Bookman (1914). “Mr. Beresford possesses the rare gift of divination,” wrote The Living Age (1916). “It is piece of the most vivid imaginative realism, as well as a challenge to our vaunted civilization.” “At once a postapocalyptic adventure, a comedy of manners, and a tract on sexual and social equality, Goslings is by turns funny, horrifying, and politically stirring,” says Benjamin Kunkel in a blurb for HiLoBooks. “Most remarkable of all may be that it has not yet been recognized as a classic.”

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

In the south-west the clear line had been wiped out and what looked like mist was sweeping towards them.

“There’s a shower coming,” said Thrale.

They stood quietly and let the sharp spatter of rain beat in their faces, and then the shadow of the storm moved on and the horizon line was clear again.

“That’s a queer cloud out there,” said Eileen. “Is it another shower?”

She pointed to a tiny blur on the far rim of the sea.

“It is queer,” said Thrale. “It’s so precisely like the smoke of a steamer.”

For a few seconds they gazed in intent silence.

“It’s getting bigger,” broke out Eileen, suddenly excited. “What is it, Jasper?”

“I don’t know. I can’t make it out,” he said. He moved away from her and shaded his eyes from the glare of the momentarily cloudless sky.

“I can’t make it out,” he repeated mechanically.

The blur was widening into a grey-black smudge, into a vaguely diffused smear with a darker centre.

“With the wind blowing towards us —” said Jasper, and broke off.

“Yes, yes — what?” asked Eileen, and then as he did not answer, she gripped his arm and repeated importunately. “What? Jasper, what? With the wind blowing towards us?”

“By God it is,” he said in a low voice, disregarding her question. “By God it is,” he repeated, and then a third time, “It is.”

“Oh! what, what? Do answer me! I can’t see!” pleaded Eileen.

But still he did not answer. He stood like a rock and stared without wavering at the growing cloud on the horizon.

And then the cloud began to grow more diffused, to die away, and Eileen could see tiny indentations on the sky line, indentations which pushed up and presently revealed themselves as attached to a little black speck in the remotest distance.

“Oh, Jasper!” she cried, and her eyes filled with inexplicable tears, so that she could see only a misty field of troubled blue.

“It’s a liner,” said Jasper at last, turning to her. He looked puzzled and his eyes stared through her. “And its coming from America. Do you suppose the American women —”

The boat was revealed now. They could see the shape of her, the high deck, the two tall funnels and the three masts. She was passing across, fifteen miles or so to the south of them, making up Channel.

For a moment they felt like shipwrecked sailors on a lonely island, who see a vessel pass beyond hail.

“Oh, Jasper, what can it be?” Eileen besought him.

“It’s a White Star boat,” he said, and he still spoke as if his mind was far away. “Is it possible, is it anyway possible that America has survived? Is it possible that there is traffic between America and Europe, and that they pass us by for fear of infection? How do we know that vessels haven’t been passing up the Channel for months past? Why should we think that this is the first?”

“It is the first,” proclaimed Eileen. “I feel it. Oh, let us hurry. Let us ride and ride as fast as we can to Plymouth or Southampton. I know they’ll be coming to Plymouth or Southampton. Men, Jasper, men! No women would dare to run a boat at that pace. See how fast she is going. Oh hurry, hurry!”

He caught fire then. They ran back to find their bicycles. They ran, and presently they rode in silence, with fierce intensity. They rode at first as if they had but ten miles to go, and the lives of all the women in England depended upon their speed.

And though they slackened after the first few miles they still rode on with such eager determination that they reached Plymouth at sunset.

But they could see no sign of the liner in the waters about Plymouth. They saw only the deserted hulks of a hundred vessels that had ridden there untouched for twelve months, futile battleships and destroyers among them; great, venomous, useless things that had become void of all meaning in the struggle of humanity.

“It’s not here. Let’s go on!” said Eileen.

Jasper shrugged his shoulders. “It’s well over a hundred miles to Southampton,” he said. “Nearer a hundred and fifty, I should say.”

“But we must go on, we must,” urged Eileen.

It was evident that Jasper, too, felt a compelling desire to go on. He stood still with a look of intense concentration on his face. Eileen had seen him look thus, when he had been momentarily frustrated by some problem of mill machinery. She waited expectant for the solution she was sure would presently emerge.

“A motor,” he said, speaking in short disconnected sentences. “If we can find paraffin and petrol and candles — light of some sort. The engines wouldn’t rust, but they’d clog. It must be paraffin. We daren’t clean with petrol by artificial light. It’s possible. Let’s try….”

That night Jasper did not sleep, but Eileen, as she sat beside him in the softly moving motor, soon lost consciousness of the dim streak of road and black river of hedge. The moon, in her third quarter, had risen before midnight, and when they started was riding deep in the sky, half veiled by a vast wing of dappled cirrus. And that, too, merged into her dream. She thought she was driving out into the open sea in a ship which became miraculously winged and soared up towards an ever-approaching but unincreasing moon. She woke with a start to find that it was broad daylight and that a thin misty rain was coming up from the sea.

“The Solent,” said Jasper, pointing to a distant gleam below them.

On the common they stopped and stood up in the car, watching a distant smear of smoke that stained the thin mist.

“She’ll be coming up Southampton Water with the lead going,” said Jasper, trying desperately to be calm.

On the evening of that day Jasper and Eileen dined on board the “Bombastic,” that latest development of the old trans-Atlantic competition in shipbuilding, the boat that had made her first journey to New York carrying fugitives from England in the days when the threat of the plague grew hourly more imminent. The “Bombastic” had not justified her name, she had fled from Southampton without ceremony, and she had not returned for over a year. The “Apologetic” would have been more apt.

And on this evening of her return, the demeanour of that crowd of quiet serious men in the huge over-decorated saloon, gave no hint of bombast. As they listened intently to the rapid story of their two travel-stained and somewhat ragged guests, there was no hint of brag or boast among them all. They came not as conquerors but as friends.

“But oh, it’s your story we want to hear,” broke in Eileen at last.

She had been strangely quiet so far, she had become suddenly conscious of the defects of her dress. The old associations were swarming about her. Eighteen months ago she had sat in just such another saloon as this, courted and flattered, the daughter of a great aristocrat, a creature on a remote and gorgeous pedestal. Now it seemed that she was neither greater nor less than any man present. She was one of them, not set apart. She looked down at her hands, still oil-stained by her struggles with the motor on the previous night.

Jasper had been more patient. He was not less eager than Eileen to hear the explanation of this wonderful visit, of the resurrection of these twelve hundred men from a dead and silent world. But he had restrained his impatience and told his story first. He knew that so he would be more quickly satisfied. He would be able to listen to men who were not tense with an anxiety to ask questions.

They were sitting now at one end of a long table in the saloon, after eating a meal that had provided once more the longed-for satisfaction of salt.

“Well,” said an American at the head of the table, turning to Eileen in answer to her protest, “we’ve maybe been selfish in putting all these questions but we’re looking ahead. We aren’t forgetting that we’ve a big work to do.”

“But how did you get here?” asked Eileen impetuously. “How is it that you’re all alive?”

“Well, as to that, you’d better ask the doctor, there,” replied the American. “He’s a countryman of yours, and he’s been in the thick of it and knows the life story of that plague microbe like the history of England.”

The doctor, a bearded, grave-eyed man, looked up and smiled.

“Hardly that,” he said. “We shall never know now, I hope, the history of the plague organism. It was never studied under the microscope — we were too busy — and now we trust that the bacillus — if it were a bacillus — has encompassed its own destruction. What interests you, however, is that this sudden, miraculously sudden, development of its deadly power as regards humanity ran through a determinable cycle of evolution. From what you’ve told us, already, it seems clear, I think, that even in England the bacillus was losing what I may call its effectiveness. The men in the West Country you’ve described, probably died from starvation and neglect.”

He paused for a moment and then continued: “Now in America both men and women were attacked. There was certainly a greater percentage of male cases, but I suppose something like half the female population was infected as well. As far as one can judge the bacillus was simply losing power. But for all we know it may have developed, it may be entering on a new stage of evolution, and in some apparently haphazard way now be beneficial to man instead of deadly. Such things may be happening every day below the reach of our knowledge. The little world is hidden from us, even as the great world is hidden….

“However,” he went on more briskly, “the thing we do know is that the symptoms of the new plague in America differed materially from our expectation of them, gathered from the accounts that had reached us from the Old World. In England the paralysis lasted, I believe, some forty-eight hours and ended in death. In America the paralysis rarely ended fatally, but it lasted in some cases for six months. ‘Paresis,’ we called it. The patient was perfectly conscious but practically unable to move hand or foot.”

“That paresis gave us time to do some very clear and consecutive thinking, I may remark,” put in an American. “I had four months to study my ideas of life.”

The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “America is no less changed than England,” he said, “but it is another change. Well, you understand that we did not all get the plague over there; the thing was less deadly in attack and about ten per cent of us were left to look after the patients.”

“And find food,” interpolated one of the listeners.

“That was a time we won’t ever forget,” agreed another.

“Sure thing,” said some one, and a general murmur of assent ran round the table.

“And all the machines were idle, of course,” continued the doctor, “and even when the tide of recovery began to flow we had to turn our attention first to the getting of food.”

“If it hadn’t been for that we’d have been here before this,” said a young man. “I feel we owe England and Europe some kind of an apology, but we just had to get busy on food growing right away. We couldn’t spare a ship’s crew till three weeks ago.”

“And the others are hard at it over there still,” put in another. “This is just a pioneer party.”

“It’s all so comprehensible now,” said Thrale after a silence, “but we had no idea,we never thought there could be any one living in America. We thought that somehow we must have heard. One forgets…”

“We tried to get on to you,” said one of the party, “by cable and wireless. We kept on tapping away for months, but we got no reply. We thought you must be all dead too.”

“Well, we guessed you were having a real bad time anyway,” amended another. “You see we knew the way that plague had taken Europe but we kept hoping and trying to get on to you all the same.”

“We’ve got a message for Elsie, after all,” Eileen said to Jasper the next day. “There’s hope for us yet.”

“Yes, there’s hope,” said Jasper.

They had been up at the town railway station assisting a party of Americans to investigate the condition of the rolling stock and the permanent way. Neither could be pronounced satisfactory. A few women had come in from the neighbouring country that morning attracted by the sight of an inexplicable pillar of smoke, and their report of local conditions had been equally uninspiring. They had spoken of famine and failure, but their faces had been lit by a new brightness at the sight of this miraculous little army of men. There had been hope in the faces and bearing of these toil-worn women, faith in the promise of support and succour.

Now Jasper and Eileen stood looking down towards the harbour. The tide was creeping in to efface the repulsive ugliness of the mud flats, and the sluggish water rippled faintly against the foul sloping sides of small boats that had lain anchored there for more than twelve months. Behind them, across the line, was a row of unsightly houses, hung with weather-slating.

“Oh, there’s hope,” repeated Jasper.

He was thinking of all the work that lay before them, and yet he had faith that a new and better civilization would arise. “We must get things going again,” had been the Americans’ phrase, and they apparently faced the future without a qualm.

But Jasper’s mind was perplexed with the detail of the mechanical work that must be faced, detail so intricate and confused that he was bewildered by its complexity. It appeared to him that the crux of the whole problem lay in the North, in the counties of coal and iron. Coal and steel were the first essentials, he thought. They must begin there in however small a way, and America must send out more men, continually more men. To-morrow he was going back in the motor, with two experts, to the cable hut in Sennen Cove. They were going to test the cable and hoped to re-establish communication with America, and then more ships would come and more men, ever more men.

And, even so, they could do little at first, and beyond lay the whole of Europe and still further the whole of Asia. Were women there, also, maintaining the terrible fight against Nature in the awful struggle to find food? Steel and coal we must have, was the burden of his thought, and in his imagination he pictured the waking of factories and mines, he had a vision of little engines running….

Eileen’s thought had flown ahead. With one magnificent leap she had passed from the contemplation of present necessity to a realization of the dim future. And her thought found words.

“Hope, lots of hope,” she said. “Hope of a new clean world. We’ve got such a chance to begin all over again, and do it better. No more sweated labour, Jasper, and no more living on the work of others. We’ve just got to pull together and work for each other. If we can get enough food, and we can now with all these dear men come to help us, we can do such wonderful things afterwards. There’ll be lots of children growing up in a few years’ time, and we shall teach them the things we’ve had to learn by the force of necessity. They’ll begin so differently because, although we have had the experience of all history, we sha’n’t be bound by all the foolish conventions that grew out of it. Such a silly incongruous growth, wasn’t it? But I suppose it couldn’t be helped in one way. We were so penned in. We all had our rotten little places to keep and that took all our time. We never had a chance to consider the broad issues, the real fundamental things. But you’ve got to consider the fundamental things when you start clean away from a new beginning.

“And, oh! Jasper, surely we have all learnt certain things to avoid, haven’t we? I mean class distinctions and sex distinctions, and things like that. Women won’t trouble any more about titles and all that rot now, and anyway there aren’t any left to trouble about. And social conditions will be so different now that there won’t be any more marriage. Marriage was a man’s prerogative; he wanted to keep his woman to himself, and keep his property for his children. It never really protected women, and anyway they were capable of protecting themselves if they’d been given a chance. I know the children were a difficulty in the old days, but they won’t be now. It’ll be everybody’s business to see that the children get looked after, and a woman won’t starve just because she hasn’t got a husband to keep her. She’ll get better wages than that. The women who have children will be the most precious things we shall have. They’ll live healthier lives, too, and they won’t be incapacitated as they used to be. They’ll work and be strong instead of spending all their time either in doing nothing or pottering about the house in an eternal round of cleaning the stupid, ugly things we used. We shall have to have all new houses, Jasper, when we get things going again.

“Oh, it will be splendid,” she broke out in a great burst of enthusiasm, “and we begin to-day. We have begun.”

Jasper nodded. “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” he said.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” repeated Eileen. “We all, men and women, start level again. Equality, Jasper, It’s a beautiful word —Equality. Of course I know how unequal we all are from one point of view, and there must come a sort of aristocracy of intellect and efficiency. But underneath there will be a true equality for all that, and we shall see to it that no man or woman can abuse their powers by making slaves again. What a world of slaves it used to be, and we weren’t even slaves to intellect and efficiency, only to wealth and to money, and to some foolish idea of position and power.”

“Well, we’ve got our work to do, here and now,” said Jasper after a long pause.

“Work? Of course, and I love it,” returned Eileen, “and while we work we’ve got to think and teach.”

The tide was coming in steadily, and near them an old boat that had been lying on the mud was now afloat once more and had taken on some of its old dignity.

Eileen pointed to it. “We’re afloat again,” she remarked.

“Embarked on the greatest plan the world has ever known,” added Jasper.

“Oh, it’s all part of the great plan,” concluded Eileen.

THE END

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013.

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

HiLobrow is pleased to present the twelfth installment of our serialization of Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist. New installments will appear each Thursday for eighteen weeks.

“The Devolutionist” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1921) is the third occult-science-fiction Dr. Kinney story; the others are “The Lord of Death” (June 1919), “The Queen of Life” (August 1919), and “The Emancipatrix” (September 1921). Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — by means of Venusian technology — Dr. Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on other planets. In this story, they visit a double planet: Hafen is the abode of capitalists, Holl of workers. A nearby planet of “cooperative democrats” is in trouble, so Kinney & co. step in.

Cobbler and one-reeler writer Homer Eon Flint (1888–1924) published a number of pulp science fiction stories — including “The Planeteer” (1918; one of the earliest examples of cosmic sci-fi) and The Blind Spot (1921, with Austin Hall) — during the genre’s Radium Age. Everett Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years calls Flint “in many ways the outstanding writer of s-f in the Munsey pulp magazines.” Flint died in a crash near Oakland, Calif., after supposedly stealing a taxi at gunpoint in order to use it in a bank hold-up.

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |16 | 17 | 18

From that time on the four did not hold any more formal discussions of what they learned. This was due to a most extraordinary discovery.

They found that they could keep in touch with each other while they were “visiting”! It was a tremendous help; it enabled them to communicate and compare notes as they went along. The doctor declared that the Venusians themselves had not been able to do more.

Thus, when Powart called on Mona a few days after she had declined his ring, Billie was able to tell the other three all that took place, as fast as it happened. As usual, Powart’s stay was a brief one.

“I hope you have recovered your former self-confidence,” said he, consciously repressing the masterful note in his voice. “Not that I am unwilling to wait, Mona.”

“You are very patient,” she assured him. “I am glad to say that I am no longer troubled with any doubts of myself. Something else worries me now.”

He frowned at the implication. “What is it?” coldly.

“Frankly, it is your record.” She knew she was jarring him terribly, but she went on with evident relish, “You are the most important man in the world. Odd, isn’t it, that I should find fault with that? But it is a serious objection. You are still a very young man; you have become one of the commission; for a year, you are its head. The point is, what’s before you?” She paused to let this take effect. “You’ve already accomplished all that any man can possible accomplish in the political field. You haven’t any future!”

Powart grasped the thought with his usual instant decision. “I understand. You are right, too. I had not thought of it before.” A slight pause. “You fear that you may come to tire of me; is that it?”

She nodded emphatically. “If you had asked me a few years ago, before you had reached the top — it would have been different.”

He remained standing, frowning hard. Presently he glanced at his watch, and said he would have to be going.

“I will see what can be done about it,” he stated. “I have a plan which should get results.”

“Are you going to take up a hobby?” eagerly.

“Not a new one; but a hobby I have always had.” And with this enigmatic reply he was off.

Van Emmon kept track of his further movements, and reported everything to the other three. Powart had not been in flight long before he sent off a wireless despatch, to which he received a most extraordinary reply. It was from the expedition which he had sent to Alma a week before:

People of Alma give us warm welcome. Invite us to stay. We propose to do so. The planet infinitely preferable to either Hafen or Holl. Accept our resignations or not, as you please, and be damned to you!

Powart made no comment upon this, which he read in privacy after carefully decoding it. Van Emmon had no idea what he was thinking, of course, but wondered mightily how the chairman was going to deal with the situation. He could scarcely read that aerogram to the commission. For some time he paced the cabin of his yacht, and at the end he behaved like a man whose mind had been pretty strongly made up.

The commission met, it seems, in a central part of Hafen. Powart reached the place some hours after leaving Mona. He arrived to find the other nine members waiting for him; and without the least delay he took his place at the head of the table.

“We will postpone the usual routine until the next session if you like,” said he. There was no objection; whereupon Powart produced a message from his pocket.

“You will recall the expedition to Alma. I have just received their first report since reaching the planet.” And then, to the vast amazement of the people on the earth, he read — not what Van Emmon had seen him receive, but this, in his strong, matter-of-fact voice:

“People of Alma facing starvation, due to overpopulation and land-exhaustion. Have disabled our boat and will not permit us to return, although allowing us to use wireless, which they do not understand.

“They are constructing a fleet of huge space-boats, all heavily armed, intending to cross over to Hafen and Holl, and conquer the Capellans.”

Powart glanced keenly around the table. “This is all that has been received. Evidently our men were prevented from sending any more. I expect nothing further. It remains for us to decide, at once, what we should do.”

The silence of the next few minutes was largely due to consternation. To most of the commissioners the problem was staggering. They looked up in eager relief as the shock-headed man broke the silence.

“It seems to me that war is not inevitable. Apparently the thing that Alma needs is food. We still have a good deal of underdeveloped land on Holl; why not make a bargain with them?”

“You mean present them with enough land to raise the food they need?” from the former chairman.

“Yes, in exchange for whatever manufactured goods they can supply, and which we need. I see no reason for an invasion.”

Powart coughed slightly. “I do. We must not think that Alma is the same sort of a world as ours. It is a much older planet, and somewhat smaller. Yet it is more than eight times as densely populated as Holl. What land we could spare would be only a fraction of what they need. They intend not merely to invade and conquer us, but to destroy us just as we destroyed the Ammians!” [Footnote: Doubtless referring to some aboriginal tribe or race, such as the Indians of America.]

The nine sat for an instant in stunned silence at this amazing fabrication. Then the big man with the aggressive face leaped to his feet, brought his fist down upon the table with a thump, and shouted:

“Well, then, if it’s war, it’s war!”

“Aye!” cried Powart’s uncle; and in a flash the whole council was on its feet. “War be it!” they shouted.

In another moment the excitement had abated as suddenly as it had arisen. They got back into their seats, looking slightly abashed. Powart still remained standing.

“Then the only question is, shall we make preparations at once, or wait until we have thought the matter over further?” His tone was one of scientific indifference; and the discussion of the next few minutes was all in favor of his scheme. It ended in a motion to resolve the commission into a ways and means committee for the purpose of common defense.

“Second the motion!” cried the aggressive man; and the response was unanimous. Powart directed that a memorandum be made of the vote; then pressed one of a row of pushbuttons at his hand. An attendant immediately entered.

“Bring File 6, Folio 1,164, Sheet 10,” ordered Powart with his usual decisive exactness. The attendant disappeared, and in less than a minute returned with a large sheet of parchment. Powart immediately located the passage he desired.

“The action you have just taken,” he stated, “amounts to a declaration that a state of war exists. Under such circumstances, the law explicitly states the function of the chair. Read!” and he handed the parchment to the nearest commissioner. Within ten minutes the law had been read by every man present. Powart instantly continued with his statement:

“This commission is hereby automatically converted into a general staff, with myself, the chairman, as supreme commander. Your functions, while this state of war endures, will consist partly in proposing what steps I shall take, partly, in advising me regarding my decisions, and partly in carrying out whatever orders I may give.”

He pressed another button, and when the attendant responded, Powart made a signal with his hand. The attendant turned on his heel, saluting, faced the door he had left open behind him, and ordered:

“In single file — march!”

A company of guards trooped straight into the hall, and formed a hollow square about the table. The nine men stared at Powart in astonishment and perplexity. He did not keep them waiting.

“Pursuant to the authority vested in me by these acts, I hereby declare that a state of war exists between us and the people of Alma. I also declare the International Commission dissolved as such; the same is now my general staff, and will remain where it now is — indefinitely!”

The nine looked at each other blankly. Were they under arrest?

“And further, I hereby declare that martial law now exists throughout all the domain formerly under the rule of the commission! Until peace is declared, my word” — he paused ominously — “is the sole and only law.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”

HiLobrow is pleased to present the eighth installment of our serialization of E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man. New installments will appear each Wednesday for 20 weeks.

Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a “clockwork man” appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Comical yet mind-blowing hijinks ensue.

Considered the first cyborg novel, The Clockwork Man was first published in 1923 — the same year as Karel Capek’s pioneering android play, R.U.R.

“This is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the ‘rational’ future and the conservation of the humanity of man. Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity, this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. “Perhaps the outstanding scientific romance of the 1920s.” — Anatomy of Wonder (1995)

In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish a gorgeous paperback edition of The Clockwork Man, with a new Introduction by Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the science fiction and science blog io9. Newitz is also author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006).

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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

“Oh, I’m not nearly ready yet!”

Rose Lomas stood at the open window of her bedroom. Her bare arms and shoulders gleamed softly in the twilight. One hand held her loosened hair on the top of her head, and the other pressed a garment to her chest.

“Alright,” said Arthur, standing at the gate, “buck up.”

Rose looked cautiously around as though to make sure no one else was in a position to observe her décolleté. But the road was empty. It seemed pleasant to see Arthur standing there twirling his walking stick and looking upwards at her. She decided to keep him there for a few moments.

“Lovely evening,” she remarked, presently.

“Yes, jolly,” said Arthur, “buck up.”

“I am bucking up.”

“You’re not even dressed!”

“I am,” Rose insisted, distantly, “much more than you think. I’ve got lots on.”

They looked solemnly at one another for a long while without even approaching a “stare out.”

“How many runs did you make,” Rose asked. She had to repeat the question again before he could hear it distinctly. Besides, he never could believe that her interest in cricket was serious.

“None,” he admitted, “but I was not out.”

Rose considered. “That’s not as good as making runs though.”

Arthur heard a slight noise somewhere round the back of the cottage. “Someone coming,” he warned.

Rose retreated a few steps and lowered her head.

“Walk up the lane,” she whispered, “I’ll come presently.”

“Alright,” Arthur nodded, “buck up.”

He walked a few yards up the road, and then turned through a wicket gate and mounted the hump of a meadow. The narrow path swerved slightly to right and left. Arthur fell to meditating upon paths in general and how they came into existence. Obviously, it was because people always walked in the same way. Countless footsteps, following the same line until the grass wore away. That was very odd when you came to think about it. Why didn’t people choose different ways of crossing that particular meadow? Then there would be innumerable paths, representing a variety of choice. It would be interesting to start a path of your own, and see how many people would follow you, even though you deliberately chose a circuitous or not obviously direct route. You could come every day until the path was made.

He climbed over the top of the meadow, descended again into a valley, and stopped before a stile with hedges running away on either side. He decided to wait here for Rose. It would be pleasant to see her coming over the hill.

It was gloaming now. The few visible stars shone with a peculiar individual brightness, and looked strangely pendulous in the fading blue sky. He leaned back and gazed at the depths above him. This time of the day was always puzzling. You could never tell exactly at what moment the sky really changed into the aspect of evening, and then, night. Yet there must be some subtle moment when each star was born. Perhaps by looking hard enough it would be possible to become aware of these things. It would be like watching a bud unfold. Slow change was an impenetrable mystery, for actually things seemed to happen too quickly for you to notice them. Or rather, you were too busy to notice them. Spring was like that. Every year you made up your mind to notice the first blossoming, the initial tinge of green; but always it happened that you awoke one morning and found that some vast change had taken place, so that it really seemed like a miracle.

He sat there, dangling an empty pipe between his teeth. He was not conscious of a desire to smoke, and he felt strangely tolerant of Rose’s delay. She would come presently.

Presently his reverie was abruptly disturbed by a faint noise, strangely familiar although remote. It seemed to reach him from the right, as though something crept slowly along the hedge line, hidden from his view. It was a soft, purring sound, very regular and sustained. At first he thought it was the cry of a pheasant, but decided that it was much too persistent. It was something that made a noise in the process of walking along.

He held his breath and turned his head slowly to the right. For a long time the sound increased only very slightly. And then, there broke upon the general stillness a series of abrupt explosions.

Pfft — Pfft — Pfft — Pfft — Pfft —

And the other noise, the purring and whirring, resumed this time so close to Arthur that he instinctively, and half in fear, arose from the stile and looked around him. But the tall hedges sweeping away on either side made it difficult to see anyone who might be approaching under their cover. There was a pause. Then a different sound.

Click — click — clickerty click — clicker clicker — clicker — And so on, becoming louder and louder until at last it stopped, and its place was taken by the dull pitter-patter of footsteps coming nearer and nearer. There was a little harsh snort that might have been intended for a sigh, and then a voice.

“Oh dear, it is trying. It really is most dreadfully trying —”

The next moment the Clockwork man came into full view round the corner of the hedge. He was swaying slightly from side to side, in his usual fashion, and his eyes stared straight ahead of him. He did not appear to notice Arthur, and did not stop until the latter politely stepped aside in order to allow him to pass. Then the Clockwork man screwed his head slowly round and appeared to become faintly apprehensive of the presence of another being. After a preliminary ear-flapping, he opened his mouth very wide.

“You haven’t,” he began, with great difficulty, “seen a hat and wig?”

“No,” said Arthur, and he glanced at the Clockwork man’s bald forehead and noticed something peculiar about the construction of the back of his head; there seemed to be some object there which he could not see because they were facing each other. “I’m sorry,” he continued, looking rather hopelessly around him, “perhaps we could find them somewhere.”

“Somewhere!” echoed the Clockwork man, “that’s what seems to me so extraordinary! Everybody says that. The idea of a thing being somewhere, you know. Elsewhere than where you expect it to be. It’s so confusing.”

Arthur consulted his common sense. “Can’t you remember the place where you lost them,” he suggested.

A faint wrinkle of perplexity appeared on the other’s forehead. He shook his head once “Place. There, again, I can’t grasp that idea. What is a place? And how does a thing come to be in one place and not in another?” He jerked a hand up as though to emphasise the point. “A thing either is or it isn’t. It can’t be in a place.”

“But it must be somewhere,” objected Arthur, “that’s obvious.”

The Clockwork man looked vaguely distressed. “Theoretically,” he agreed, “what you say is correct. I can conceive it as a mathematical problem. But actually, you know, it isn’t at all obvious.”

He jerked his head slowly round and gazed at the surrounding objects. “It’s such an extraordinary world. I can’t get used to it at all. One keeps on bumping into things and falling into things — things that ought not to be there, you know.”

Arthur could hardly control an eager curiosity to know what the thing was, round and shiny, that looked like a sort of halo at the back of the Clockwork man’s head. He kept on dodging from one side to the other in an effort to see it clearly.

“Are you looking at my clock?” enquired the Clockwork man, without altering his tone of speech. “I must apologise. I feel quite indecent.”

“But what is it for?” gasped Arthur.

“It’s the regulating mechanism,” said the other, monotonously, “I keep on forgetting that you can’t know these things. You see, it controls me. But, of course, it’s out of order. That’s how I came to be here, in this absurd world. There can’t be any other reason, I’m sure.” He looked so childishly perplexed that Arthur’s sense of pity was again aroused, and he listened in respectful silence.

“You see,” the mechanical voice went on, “only about half the clock is in action. That accounts for my present situation.” There was a pause, broken only by obscure tickings, regular but thin in sound. “I had been feeling very run down, and went to have myself attended to. Then some careless mechanic blundered, and of course I went all wrong.” He turned swiftly and looked hard at Arthur. “All wrong. Absolutely all wrong. And of course, I — I — lapsed, you see.”

“Lapsed!” queried Arthur.

“Yes, I lapsed. Slipped, if you like that better — slipped back about eight thousand years, so far as I can make out. And, of course, everything is different.” His arms shot up both together in an abrupt gesture of despair. “And now I am confronted with all these old problems of Time and Space.”

Arthur’s recent reflections returned to him, and produced a little glow in his mind. “Is there a world,” he questioned, “where the problems of Time and Space are different?”

“Of course,” replied the Clockwork man, clicking slightly, “quite different. The clock, you see, made man independent of Time and Space. It solved everything.”

“But what happens,” Arthur wanted to know, “when the clock works properly?”

“Everything happens,” said the other, “exactly as you want it to happen.”

“Awfully convenient,” Arthur murmured.

“Exceedingly.” The Clockwork man’s head nodded up and down with a regular rhythm. “The whole aim of man is convenience.” He jerked himself forward a few paces, as though impelled against his will. “But my present situation, you know, is extremely inconvenient.”

He waddled swiftly along, and, to Arthur’s great disappointment, disappeared round the corner of the hedge, so that it was impossible to get more than a fleeting glimpse of that fascinating object at the back of his head. But he was still speaking.

“I don’t know what I shall do, I’m sure,” Arthur heard him say, as though to himself.

Rose Lomas came slowly over the top of the hill. She was hatless, and her short, curly hair blew about her face, for a slight breeze had sprung up in the wake of the sunset. She wore a navy blue jacket over a white muslin blouse with a deep V at the breast. There a fair stretch of plump leg, stockinged in black cashmere, between the edge of her dark and the beginning of the tall boots that had taken so long to button up. She walked with her chin tilted upwards and her eyes half closed, and her hands were thrust into slanting pockets of her jacket.

“Whoever was that person you were talking she enquired, as soon as they stood together.

“Oh, someone who had lost his way,” said Arthur, carelessly. He felt curiously disinclined to explain matters just at present. The Clockwork man was disconcerting. He was a rather terrifying side-issue. Arthur had a feeling that Rose would probably be frightened by him, for she was a timid girl. He half hoped now that this strange being would turn out to be some kind of monstrous hoax.

And so he said nothing. They remained by the stile, courting each other and the silent on-coming of night. They were very ordinary lovers, and behaved just exactly in the same way as other people in the same condition. They kissed at intervals and examined each other’s faces with portentous gravity and microscopic care. Leaning against the stile, they were frequently interrupted by pedestrians, some of whom took special care to light their pipes as they passed. But the disturbance scarcely affected them. Being lovers, they belonged to each other; and the world about them also belonged to them, and seemed to fashion its laws in accordance with their desires. They would not have offered you twopence for a reformed House of Commons or an enlightened civilisation.

“Oh, Arthur,” said Rose, suddenly, “I want to be like this always, don’t you?”

“Yes,” murmured Arthur, and then caught his breath sharply. For his ear had detected a faint throbbing and palpitation in the distance. It seemed to echo from the far-off hills, a sort of “chew chew,” constantly repeated. And presently, another sound aroused his attention. It was the “toot-toot” of an automobile and the jerk of a brake. And then the steady whine of the engine as the car ascended a hill. Perhaps they were pursuing the Clockwork man. Arthur hoped not. It seemed to him the troubles of that strange being were bad enough without there being added to them the persecutions suffered by those to whom existence represents an endless puzzle, full of snares and surprises.

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. So far, we have published Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, serialized between March and July 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.