THOMAS DUNBAR (4)
By:
January 23, 2023
Gertrude M. Barrows, who would later write under the pen name Francis Stevens, published “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” in The Argosy in 1904. She was nineteen; this was her first proto-sf story. It’s one of the earliest tales of a lab-created superman — and most likely the first such story by a female author. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize it here for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8.
The grinding motion was quite swift, but the lateral movement was comparatively slow. I should say that it must have taken about four minutes for the two stamps to pass from one end of the fifteen-foot vat to the other.
In the vat floated a plank. On the surface of the slide, almost in the middle, sprawled a man, his arms spread out on either side, not daring to move an inch on the slippery paste, for the slightest motion meant a slip downward into the hissing acid.
Worst of all, there seemed to be no means of getting across to him. The great engine occupied one side entirely to the wall — on the other the second vat barred passage.
Beyond the vats the room extended some little distance, and there was a door there, open, through which one could see a fenced yard piled high with ashes and cinders.
And the great stamps, twenty cubic feet of solid metal in each, were making their inevitable way toward the man. When they reached him — well, their smooth surface would afford him no finger hold, even if their rapid movement allowed him to clutch them. They must push him down — they might stun him first, but most certainly they would push him down.
I need hardly say that I did not take in the full significance of all this at the time — it was only afterward that I fully understood the details.
Even as Lawrence ran he shouted:
“Stop that engine! Quick, men!”
I saw two stalwart workmen spring at the levers of the stamp machine — saw them twisting at a wheel — heard another crash, and a deep groan from all! The guiding mechanism had slipped a cog, or broken a rod, or something.
In my excitement, shaking so from weakness that I could hardly stand, I had half fallen against a piece of machinery that seemed to be at a standstill. Unconsciously my fingers grasped at a sort of handle.
I heard a whirring noise, felt something like a tremendous shock, and a burning pain. I let go the handle in a hurry, just as Lawrence wheeled on me with the cry, “For God’s sake, you fool——”
But I could give no heed either to what I had done or to him. My eyes were still fixed on the unfortunate man on the slide.
The stamps were not more than five feet from his body now, and their low rattle and swish sounded in my ears loud as the tread of an army.
“A rope! ” cried Lawrence in despair.
And then, in my horror, and in the sheer impossibility of standing by quiescent and seeing a fellow-being done to death in this manner, I did a mad thing.
Wild with resentment, as if it were a living thing I could have fought, I flung myself on the great, swiftly revolving fly-wheel of the engine, seized its rim in my fingers, and braced back with all the force in my arms and shoulders.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., 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. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.