A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories, Herbert D. Ward [top 100 novels txt] 📗

The four had not stirred from where they had been dropped by the balloon. To do so they would have had to pick their way cautiously. Russell was like an extinct volcano. She was yet hot. But she did not smoke, as one might have expected. There were no smouldering embers left to produce smoke. Combustion had been instantaneous and complete.

But the travellers had no need to go sight-seeing. Everywhere was the same blackened, cooling, ferruginous slag. To see one square yard was to see the whole. The appalling thing about the effect was the cause. Civilization, ever ready with revengeful thrusts, as if protesting against the advance of science, had produced a new accident, a unique disaster.

Swift made an automatic motion for his watch.

"I must go," he said; "I must get my despatch to the Planet in time for the evening edition. We will have a scoop on the whole world."

"I'm your man," said the professor. "We can foot it to the nearest telegraph station in four hours."

"Ah, I forgot," said Swift. "That will lose me the four o'clock edition. I'll have to hold the wire all night if I can get it. I'll wire such an account as no other paper will ever get. There isn't a minute to lose!" It was then that Mr. Statis Ticks, realizing, whether from calculation or from sympathy, that Miss Magnet could make no such forced march, and seeing that the girl only held herself together under the tension of the great excitement, gallantly proposed to remain by her and join the rest of the party that evening by the first team that could be chartered.

But the young lady unexpectedly refused the proposition. Her whole nature shrank from spending another minute in that blasted spot. It was therefore arranged, much to Mr. Ticks' disappointment (for he had hoped to add to his copious stock of mental notes by further investigation on the ground), that the girl should accompany them, as far as she was able, down the railroad, away from the lost city.

After a drink of lake water they started off, Swift supporting Miss Magnet on the one side and Mr. Ticks on the other, the professor stalking ahead.

"Even the lake tastes of it," said Swift. "Ugh!"

"Pass a current of electricity through a tumbler of water and there will be detected the same flavor, though not so strong," answered Mr. Ticks.

The party made two miles slowly. Despite all her Western courage and energy, Insula Magnet tottered by the way. To divert her attention, Mr. Ticks led her on to talk about the electrical wonders of the extinct city. The girl enlarged in a sad way upon its many and its curious uses. The baby carriages, she said, took their helpless occupants on an unaided turn around a large oval track in the park. They went by storage battery. One electrician could take the place of twenty nurses and control the power. Once in a while a baby died suddenly. The doctors invariably pronounced it a case of heart failure. Washing was now entirely done by electrical apparatus, likewise ironing and cooking. The great American problem of the "hired girl," Russell considered herself to have solved.

An ingenious arrangement had been recently devised to have the electricity supply the place of valet-de-chambre, but only a few had used it. One or two thought it a hardship to be aroused from bed whether one would or no, to be washed and summarily dressed by an implacable power that performed its set tasks stolidly in spite of anathemas and threats. Can a man abuse his electrical valet? Let him try it if he dare.

The phonograph was in universal use. The Phonograph Daily was a rival—one cannot call it sheet, rather wax cylinder—just started, and the din made by those loquacious instruments was worse than the chatter of monkeys in the cocoanut groves of New Guinea.

Electric heaters warmed the rooms. Electric paper lighted them with a suffused and generous glow. No one used stairs. Electric elevators did all the arduous house-climbing. No one made calls any more, for it was an easy matter to ring your acquaintance up and see her in her drawing-room while you talked to her. Women made an elaborate toilet for such interviews. It was soon expected that conversation would be entirely dispensed with, for with a sensitive galvanoscope attached to the brain at a certain point, that was to be patented, the minutest current of thought could be registered upon a cylinder.

Authors would only need to fix their attention upon the plot; the delicate instrument would record it indelibly for their hearers' gratification.

The well-appointed electric coup� was always ready. There was no worry about oats and spavin and glanders. Miss Magnet told of many other new contrivances that electricity had now to perform. The development of this power through the new dynamos made it possible for men in Russell to dispense utterly with work. You went so far as to put five cents in the slot at any one of a hundred street corners, and your shoes were electrically polished to a patent leather shine. There was no more night, for carbon and incandescent lamps had stabbed the night so that any hovel was brighter than the average day. The girl stopped for breath and sat down. She was exhausted. Swift cheered her tenderly. But Mr. Ticks dryly remarked:

"Better a city without electricity than electricity without a city!"

The girl smiled at this heresy, and nodded her head emphatically in a feeble way. She could hardly move.

It was at this stage that Mr. Ticks seemed overcome with uneasiness. He got up and sat down again. He kicked the earth. He examined the charred sleepers. He dug for the lost rails. Then he awoke from his occupation with a sudden start as if rudely shaken from a dream. Swift was used to his colleague's idiosyncrasies. Besides he did not now notice them. He was otherwise occupied. But the professor could stand these performances no longer, and with rude emphasis he burst forth:

"Dang it, man, if you've got anything on your darned mind, jerk it out, if not—" Professor Ariel's manners had become decadent in proportion to the time that had elapsed since he and the High Tariff had parted company.

"I—I—" interrupted Mr. Ticks, with a start. "The fact is, I cannot as yet account for that deadly atmosphere that enveloped this section. What was in it to kill? Its effect on me was unlike any other experience that I can recall. It is my inconsolable regret that it is not classified in my mind."

"Did you know," asked Miss Magnet, suddenly, "that a new land improvement company was started this spring for raising four crops a year? All the farms for twenty miles around were bought up. They spent over a million dollars in laying wires in the ground throughout the whole country, on the theory that these voltaic currents applied to grain and fruit and vegetables would excite such crops to quicker verdure and maturity. The company said that it was an experiment on a grand scale; but they were much laughed at. I said it was a dangerous scheme, and nearly lost my position in consequence. I have heard, though, that it was a great success."

During this recital Mr. Ticks' eyes glistened with excitement.

"Ah!" he said, "I am under a thousand obligations to you, young lady. Of course I could not conceive of such a thing, not knowing the facts. It is all plain now. The first discharge, enormous and deadly as it was, was not enough. This network of wires attracted the surplus electricity. The soil must be of such a quality as to convert this territory into an enormous secondary battery. The subsoil must have acted as a monstrous insulator. I shall subject it to a minute analysis. Are we on the verge of a new electrical discovery? Was this deadly phenomenon a hitherto unknown property of the electrical fluid? For to walk within the dead line was like walking into a saturated Leyden jar. Its effect must have also been to devitalize the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere. The victim was electrified and suffocated to death at the same instant. At last I understand the complexity of my astonishing symptoms. The vibratory storm that we so narrowly escaped was not due to barometric depression, but came as a responsive consequence of this surcharged area. When that wire ladder was finally cut off and fell; when it reached a certain position; when one end touched the negative, the other the positive pole, then the current became completed and this gigantic battery was discharged. Had we not been rising at the rate of a hundred feet a second we should have been fused after the fashion of the inhabitants of this ghastly territory. The discharge once having taken place, this country is again free to man and beast."

"Gosh!" was all that the subdued professor could say.

And now the four travellers lifted up their eyes, and saw before them on the horizon black moving, indistinct masses, as if brobdignagian locusts were swarming up the track. Here were the hosts of careworn men, plunging impatiently toward the lost city for the news that the unaccountable and malignant power had hitherto denied them. The four needed courage to meet this unrestrained and desperate mob. Who were these in the van? What pallid faces, what haggard eyes, what piteous gestures! Alas, they were the mourners of the dead! Love had wrestled its way ahead of plunder, and grief had outrun greed. In the front ranks were women wailing and panting desperately to keep pace with unmanned men.

This woeful sight aroused Mr. Ticks. He raised his hands towards the lost city after the manner of an inspired prophet, and there and then uttered the following impassioned warning to humanity, which Swift took down in shorthand in the borrowed notebook:

"Woe unto you that multiply currents you cannot control! Woe unto you that net your country with the trap of sudden death! Woe unto you that toss innocent men on broken wires; that surprise your victims in the counting-house, the home, the street, with destructive bolts! Woe unto you that undermine and overcast the land with a mysterious foe! Behold! your dead shall rise in serried phalanx against you, and their mourners shall rend you to pieces!"

The only burst of eloquence known to the biography of this prosaic man subsided into apathetic silence. His hands dropped heavily at his sides. He turned away from Russell and beheld its blackened site no more.

The throng was now upon them. Multitudes of wild faces asked questions of the four. Who would answer these? Who could tell the terrible truth? The professor paled and walked behind Swift. Mr. Ticks shrank at the awful responsibility, and took refuge behind the professor. Swift halted and trembled.

"Go," he said to the girl. "Go! Only a woman can."

And she went. She stepped out alone—a few paces, and stood quite still. Instinctively the masses stopped before her. Eyes, sleepless with weeping and waiting, riveted themselves upon eyes that were still haunted with a portentous experience. The girl stretched out one hand in mute appeal, and then burst into tears and sobbed:

"Don't! Don't look like that! Oh, you poor people! I am the only one!"

Awestruck and silently, men and women enveloped her and ministered unto her. It was the advance guard of the Red Cross Society, led by Clara Barton, that sheltered this derelict and messenger of woe.

Set upon by a thousand men, Mr. Ticks and the professor told what they knew. Some cursed and doubted and pressed on. Some bowed their heads and turned back. But Swift, who had recognized Dubbs driving two powerful horses and unreeling two telegraph wires, one for the special use of the Associated Press and the other for the Planet, accosted him, and sent the most famous message known to the American newspaper world since the close of the civil war.

It was a long message, and we can only give the more important headlines:

Russell is no more!

Thirty thousand people killed by one unparalleled electric discharge.

The gigantic spark fuses the whole city into one indistinguishable molten slag.

Miraculous escape of one lady. The sole survivor.

Thrilling rescue by the Planet reporters in a special balloon.

The reporters complete the circuit and touch off an over-charged storage battery with a circumference of one hundred and fifty miles.

The territory that was impassable now open.

Fifty thousand people race toward the lost city.

Russell perished of her own electricity.

Civilization's new and formidable danger.

Three months later, on a secular evening, the upholstered pews of an uptown church were filled with a fashionable audience. As the church bells tolled eight the organ pealed forth the wedding march. It was noticed with much comment that the vast audience-room was lighted with gas, the new electric lights being dispensed with. The bride, Miss Insula Magnet, had especially desired