WHEN THE SUN WENT OUT (2)
By:
July 8, 2023
Leslie Silberberg, who wrote as Leslie F. Stone, was one of the first women sf pulp writers. She often worked with Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. Gernsback published her 1929 story “When the Sun Went Out” as a chapbook. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize it here for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7.
A HOPE
What they were to do when the last machine halted forever, when those machines would no longer turn out their barest necessities, they were not able to conceive. In fact, they gave no thought to the future at all. These simple-minded offsprings of the mechanical geniuses of the world existed, living on the fruits of the machines that produced foods, and materials from the air, as well as the soil, and from minerals dug from the Earth’s core.
And now the Sun, from which much of the energy that drove these machines was obtained, was dying. The Sun would be a Sun no longer. It would become cool and perhaps foster new life in its tepid waters, life that would after ages crawl out upon a new as yet unlighted land.
However, as always in man’s history, time and time again, it was in dire need that his supremacy eventually asserted itself. And such was now the case. A few men of stronger will and greater intellect had realized the state of affairs into which they were being plunged, and under their inspiration for the past fifteen years, a new activity had seized the Earthlings. Those who still possessed an understanding of mechanics were called forth. Together they built new machines out of the scraps of the old, and with these commenced digging night and day a shaft in the Earth that was to be the salvation of Mankind.
Without a doubt the Earthlings could not abide any longer on the surface of the Earth. Year after year great fields of ice had come down from the Northlands gradually encompassing the land, driving its peoples further and further into the South. They were increasing in such numbers that their cold was taking hold on the Earth and the Sun’s weak rays could not stave them off. It would only be a question of time before the narrow belt at the equator that was alone untouched would be conquered by the Great Ice Flow.
There had been some talk of building machines that would carry them away from Mother Earth to a new planet and a new sun. But the wisest men knew the futility of such a course. True! History did tell of several such attempts; some had been successful, some not. Yet that had been in a day when men who understood such machines had lived, and they had not been built in a moment or day. To build ships that could bear them millions of miles through space was too difficult a feat for people who had just awakened from a lethargy in which they had dreamed and played for many centuries. For the present, only one course was open. Then when Man was more fully awakened, he might make other plans.
Already Man had reached the depth of almost a thousand miles below the surface. New machines were hollowing out great caves in the Earth’s bowels in which the present population hoped to survive. The construction of the machines of the past now being studied from the records that remained, new discoveries were made and it looked as though Mankind were taking a new lease upon life.
After the first shaft had been driven, a second was started. It had been found that at this depth the temperature was a little below the normal heat required for the comfort of man, but until better provision could be made it would be necessary to make that do. Heating apparatus would be installed, lights, sewerage, everything to make the underground caves livable, and then with the years to come men would continue to dig deeper as the cold of the ice-coated Earth penetrated.
Giant caves were being hewn out of the living rock to house the five hundred-thousand souls that now made up the populace of the world. As each cave was dug it was lined with Ega, a glass-like substance that was sprayed from the mouth of a machine and which hardened into a hard, almost impregnable shell, and coated to a uniform thickness and smoothness.
For the present the sole idea was to provide room enough for the world’s inhabitants to seek protection from the wretchedness and bitter chill of the Earth’s surface. Everything must be upon a communistic basis; so many people allotted to each giant cave. Later small caves were to be hewn out for individual comfort and privacy, but that would take time.
Underground many obstacles barred their way. Subterranean rivers were a source of trouble and sometimes disaster to the diggers, but with their newly discovered ingenuity the workers learned to overcome and divert them to their own purposes. Sink holes, crumbling rocks and other calamities often retarded progress. But sometimes Mother Nature presented them with a few of the gifts that were still left in her cornucopia. There were natural caves, a deposit of precious metals, and barriers that fell without man’s efforts.
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.