WHEN THE SUN WENT OUT (7)
By:
August 14, 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.
INTO THE DEPTHS
The stars seemed creeping closer so that they might see and jeer at Mother Earth. A voice broke loose from the roof-tops again. “Come let us creep like ants into our holes, and burrow into the heart of our Mother. Come, come you poor weak things that proudly term yourself Man, Lord of the Universe. Creep into the darkness. Come now, out of this bitter coldness that would grasp you by the throat. Come, all of you, who would play at living. Come!”
A death-like silence settled over the multitude. Then voices were heard again, whisperings and comfortings, and a wail that grew in volume until it seemed to encircle the Earth. The cry of a people forsaken, broken. On the roof of one building a commotion started, then a yell and a scream and a body went hurtling over the roof, down the several thousand feet to the ground. Another followed, and another as men and women despairingly threw themselves over the parapets. More might have followed had not a figure of command appeared on the highest pinnacle of the roof of the Scientific Building.
“Come! To the lifts! We descend to our new home, my people!” he cried out. “Come! New life awaits us. Come!”
In answer the crowds became milling masses as they made their way to the elevators. Forgotten were the weaklings who could not face life any longer. And those who had thought to do the same turned instead to the voice of command.
Ramo and Kuila were amongst the last to descend. They had been as breathless as their fellow-men at the appearance of the Sun, and its last supreme effort. And with its dying Ramo had hidden her face in her hands. Somehow Kuila had found his arm around her, and she had laid her head on his breast while she sobbed.
But even though the Sun had died, and the last hope of Earth departed, Kuila found himself happy, happier than he had ever known. For now he knew that the Sun could not go out for him. And then perhaps, who knows, together they would some day venture out and find a new Sun, a new world, one that had trees and flowing waters, a radiant warmth, and mayhap a moon or two to light their night!
THE END
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”.