WHEN THE SUN WENT OUT (3)
By:
July 15, 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.
KUILA REI
Thus had twenty great caves been dug out when at last word came from the astronomers that the Sun’s power could not possibly survive the week. Night and day the work continued so that thousands might be made fairly comfortable. There was much lamenting on the Earth’s crust as the world watched the fading of the Sun. It was hard enough to lose the warmth of the Sun, but to have to creep into the damp cellar of the Earth was almost too much for the soft men and women who had lived luxuriously under the shadow of mighty machines that had given them all.
Kuila Rei journeying in his flyer from the observatory wherein he had spent almost his whole life, since he had emerged from the City of the Children, thought of all this. The flyer had been built several thousand years before. Once it had been the very latest type of Lighter-than-Air machines that Science had produced. And it still was, for no better had been brought forth since. It sat like a bubble on the thin air of the globe, and in form it resembled a bubble. It was a perfect globe fashioned from a material that resembled glass, but its qualities were as different from that brittle, splintery material as night was unlike the day. Alu, the ancients called it, and it was as transparent as the air, yet as strong as Earth itself, malleable as clay and lighter than air. The greatest weight could not smash or crush it, the sharpest point could not even scratch its surface.
Within this indestructible chamber sat Kuila Rei on a seat covered with a leathery material whose back could be let down for sleeping purposes. His feet rested on a similar pad and on a bar in front of him that extended from side to side were placed the various levers that controlled the machine. Under the seat was fitted the motor contained in a small metal box, taking up no more than a cubic foot of space. The oxygen tank twice the size of the motor stood near by.
Flying thousands of feet above the ground Man had found that the thinning atmosphere was too rare and each flyer was consequently supplied with its own oxygen tank containing enough of the precious gas to sustain the pilot for one hundred hours. An open valve in the side of the globe allowed enough of the poor grade of air to flow from the outside to the tank and thence into the globe reviving the air sufficiently to the proper proportions needed for the driver. The motor, ingenious and yet of a marvelous simplicity, used for its fuel the carbon dioxide expelled by the occupant of the machine, thus also keeping the air clean and fresh. Through another vent the motor tossed off its waste.
On entering his flyer Kuila had set the indicator for Central City, and turned the height gauge to the altitude he knew it best to fly. He had no more to do but wait until he arrived at his destination. Had he been able to see the ground over which he was flying, at a height necessary to avoid the irregularities of the Earth’s surface, he would not have been interested in the least. For where ages before had flourished beautiful trees and wild jungle verdure; where jeweled pools had lay dimpling in the sun; where brilliant birds and chattering monkeys had lived joyously (in that part of the world that had once been called Brazil) there was nothing now other than a wasteland, grey, bleak and cold, its face like the worn, wrinkled visage of the old.
Kuila had with him a collection of ancient books and archives that he had discovered during his life. Many hours he had studied them, and in those hours he had lived not in the barren world of today, but in the beautiful sunlit years that had gone before. In his books he had read of the glory of the sun, of the vast, ever-moving waters (all ice now), of green happy lands, of the moon that had once lighted the sky at night. Ah! if only he could journey to a world that was as fresh and young!
Not until he felt the growing stuffiness in his machine, due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide no longer being used by his motor, did he realize that he had come to a stop, and that he was floating like a bubble over the city.
Like every man-made structure that still existed Central City had been built in the far-off past. Here had been the core of the once-great realm of the Earth. Here sat the Five, scientists all, who directed the welfare of mankind. Here had the greatest of men lived. Building after building rose thousands of feet in the air, each building an entire community in itself, joined to its neighbors by numberless airways for both pedestrians, ground and air cars. Several great arteries were still used by the small population of the city. But for the most part the city that had once housed thirty millions lay as dead, the skyscrapers untenanted and cold; although to this day there was no sign of decay. One could pass from chamber to chamber and find the belongings of their past owners neatly in order. The decay of the race had been gradual. There had been no hurried flight. Only the slow disintegration of a well-satisfied people.
Kuila Rei maneuvered his flyer gently down the roof of perhaps the most gigantic skyscraper in the city. As he drew near he saw that the roofs of the surrounding buildings, as well as the one to which he was descending, were crowded with people. Room was cleared for his machine close to the hangar and a small group detached themselves to aid him in pushing the machine under cover.
An aged man standing near by spoke to him. “It is the last time you shall fly through the air of this condemned world, O Rei,” he murmured and sighed. Kuila scowled at the reminder of that fact, and pushed himself into the heart of the crowd. He found his way to one of the kiosks that housed an elevator and stepping in it he pressed the indicator for a floor a thousand feet below.
The drop occupied less than a minute and he was in a corridor. He hurried along to an office wherein several people were still lingering. In the center of the room stood a machine with a mouthpiece on its face, and into this he dictated his report. He stated his name, age and occupation and explained that he had been the last to leave the observatory of Mount 83; that it was in perfect condition, a condition, he conjectured, that would withstand the ice-flow that was slowly surmounting the peak on which the observatory stood. His report ended, he turned away. He knew that the machine would relay his report to an adjoining office, write it in indelible print on a thin metal sheet and file it away with similar reports in alphabetical and chronological order.
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: 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 | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire” | Francis Stevens’s “Friend Island” | George C. Wallis’s “The Last Days of Earth” | Frank L. Pollock’s “Finis” | A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool | E. Nesbit’s “The Third Drug” | George Allan England’s “The Thing from — ‘Outside'” | Booth Tarkington’s “The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” | H.G. Wells’s “The Land Ironclads” | J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder | Valery Bryusov’s “The Republic of the Southern Cross” | Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space” | A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” | Max Brand’s The Untamed | Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” | Clare Winger Harris’s “A Runaway World” | Francis Stevens’s “Thomas Dunbar” | George Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales” | Robert W. Chambers’s “The Harbor-Master”.