“I believe you are right,” she said smiling through her tears.

  As I opened the door with one hand and clutched Irwin firmly with the other, a disquieting thought came to me, and I said to Dorothy, “If I succeed, as I hope I can, in returning Ted to his former state, so that he is really the Ted Marston of old, am I liable to lose you to him, Dorothy?”

  She came close to me and laid a hand on my arm. “Don’t worry on that score, Frank. I believe I’m changed myself, for I could never again love Ted.” Coming close to my side and putting her lips to my ear, she whispered, “And do you know I don’t believe I’ve been quite the same since I had that light injection of evolutionary germs. Could it—do you think—?”

  “I know it,” I laughed. “Probably the very first dose improved Ted too, but he did not know enough to quit when he passed beyond the range of present possible environmental influence. He became drunk with the lust for power which he mistakenly thinks is his.”

  “I’d hardly say ‘mistakenly,’” said Irwin, who had been a silent listener. “His power is a fearful thing.”

  Stooping, I kissed Dorothy as she stood close by my side, and in another moment Irwin and I were outside in the darkness.

  VI

  I kept a firm grip on Staley’s arm, for I did not want him to escape and apprise Ted of my coming. No words passed between us as we proceeded in the direction of the secluded laboratory.

  What an ideal place it had been, from their point of view, in which to develop their nefarious scheme. Completely hidden by tall trees and dense shrubbery, it seemed as completely isolated as a desert isle.

  Knowing that Ted expected Irwin’s return with his sister, I permitted Irwin to enter first and watched him through the open door as he slunk abjectly into the large room that was brilliantly lighted and occupied the front portion of the building. Beyond this, its door in a line with the entrance at which I stood, was a smaller dark room where could be glimpsed the faint reflections from bottles, test tubes, and various chemical paraphernalia. It was apparent in his every move and his self-conscious mien that Irwin hoped to reach the other door before it became necessary to reveal to Ted the fact that Dorothy was not with him. In thinking it over, I presume that Ted’s eagerness to see the girl enter, and his firm belief that she was with her brother, allowed Irwin to reach the other door unmolested, and just as he entered the darkened interior, I stepped boldly into the first large and well-illuminated room.

  I say I entered boldly. I did, but with that act my boldness ceased for I was rendered craven by what I beheld. Upon a cushion at the far end of the room reposed what looked to me like a phosphorescent tarantula. As I gazed with widened eyes and gaping mouth, I realized that it was not of the spider family at all. The circular, central part was not a body, but rather a head, for from its center glowed two unblinking eyes, and beneath them was the rudiment of a mouth. The appendages, which had upon first appearance resembled the legs of the spider, I perceived were fine hair-like tentacles that were continually in motion as if a soft breeze played through them.

  When I realized that the thing was regarding me with those staring expressionless eyes I tried to summon forth what little dignity I could muster, for instinctively I sensed that the repulsive form housed an exceptional intelligence. But I had never undertaken a more difficult task, and I was thankful for the moment that I was not standing in front of my biology class at the university.

  “Well, what do you think of the bacteria theory of evolution now?”

  Had the thought flashed through my brain, or had a thin, piping, gasping voice put the question to me through the medium of sound? Evidently sound had played some part, for as I looked at the cushioned monstrosity, I saw that the aperture beneath the eyes was moving.

  “Don’t you recognize your old friend Ted Marston?” came the derisive query in thin, wheezing tones. “Is the gap too great for your feeble consciousness to cross?”

  “God in heaven,” I fairly screamed. “You—Ted Marston!”

  “The same,” continued the voice, which though faint, carried with it a quality of undying persistency. “Do you realize that as you stand before me you are perfectly powerless to do other than my will? Do you know that it was I who prevented your entering the laboratory a few days ago? When my mind is concentrated upon you, you have no volition of your own?”

  I realized that what he said was indeed true. He controlled me as completely as a master mechanic controls a machine.

  He continued, satisfied with the demonstration of his power.

  “You have evidently prevented Dorothy’s appearance, but I can attend to that later. For the present I will astonish your feeble mind with a few facts. The rapid growth of evolution bacteria has reduced my body to an efficient minimum. The tentacles that surround my body take the place of all the old five senses except that of sight, and in addition to the five senses known to man in your stage of evolution, I have added seven more, and I verily believe more will evolve in time. These tentacles are more sensitive than the radio antennas of your era, and they pick up thought waves with little or no difficulty.”

  At this moment Irwin was visible on the threshold of the farther door, a decrepit being completely robbed of his personality. I questioned Marston in regard to him. The inhuman monstrosity gave a mirthless laugh. “Here we are, the triumvirate,” and again the sardonic laughter wheezed on the air. “I found Irwin easier to manage with decreased mental ability, and I find all I rule must be like him, before Dorothy and I can control the world.”

  “Your scheme,” I cried in horror, “is to impair men’s minds and then to rule mentally as a god?”

  “You are really very intelligent for so low a creature,” he mocked. “I would do well to begin with you. Irwin,” he called, “I need your assistance.”

  As he called to Irwin, I felt his mental hold upon me relax, and I moved a step toward him while Irwin looked at me in surprise. An invisible barrier stopped me almost instantly. He continued to hold his attention upon me, while the man in the adjoining room was moving about apparently carrying out his command for a mind-enfeebling treatment upon me.

  “You know, it was one of your theories in the old days, Frank,” the thing that was Ted continued, “that God accomplishes His purpose through the agency of man. Well, that is exactly the manner in which I shall accomplish my purpose: through mankind. But unfortunately I have yet to take humanity back mentally, for I am not God—yet!”

  “Yet—you vile blasphemer!” I screamed, and then I saw it! I knew that the only thing to do was to forget what I saw in the adjoining room and occupy all of the monster Marston’s attention, all of it! I cursed him, threatened and even attempted violence, and all the while, a being that stood mentally at the dawn of humanity approached from the anteroom bearing in his arms a great crowbar.

  Could I keep from betraying by so much as a batting eyelash the approach of the man with the clouded brain?

  “I will defy you, Marston,” I screamed, “and I will do it alone, I—I—I. Do you understand? It is I, Frank Caldwell, who will oppose your rule.”

  A gathering mist blurred my vision, but as if viewed through a breeze-wafted veil, I saw the spidery product of evolution rise apparently without support and float in the air toward me like a bloated octopus in the water. Another second that seemed an eternity and the bar descended with all the force of brute man behind it, and I knew that the quivering mass of flesh could exert no more evil influence upon humanity. A few more blows and the thing that had been Ted Marston was no more.

  LESLIE F. STONE (1905–91) was the pen name of the Philadelphia-born science fiction writer Leslie Francis Silberberg (née Rubenstein). She began writing stories at the age of nine and made her first professional sale, a series of original children’s fairy tales, to a local newspaper when she was fifteen. At nineteen she discovered the adventure magazine Argosy and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars stories, which inspired her to try out SF writing. Stone recalls that “back then, women’s lib was but a gleam in feminine eyes,” and so when a friend cautioned that the nascent SF community might not be friendly to women authors, she decided to send out stories under the androgynous pseudonym Leslie F. Stone (“Day” 101). Hugo Gernsback bought her first batch of stories in six weeks, and Stone quickly learned that the editor “liked the idea of women invading the field he had opened” (“Day” 101). Accordingly, she retained her pseudonym but, like most other women associated with early magazine SF, allowed Gernsback and other editors to publish her portrait and to refer to her as a woman in editorial comments.

  Between 1929 and 1940 Stone published twenty stories, mostly with Amazing, Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales. However, between her “sexist experiences” with new editors who entered the field in the late 1930s and the “horrifying use” of nuclear weapons in World War II—which seemed to herald the beginning of a future far different from those she crafted in her fiction—Stone decided to retire from SF in 1945 (“Day” 102). She spent the next two and a half decades caring for her labor journalist husband and their two sons while launching a second career as “a prize-winning ceramicist and gardener” (Davin, Partners 410). In the 1960s Stone started a third career at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. At that time she also reaffirmed her commitment to SF by revising her 1929 novella “Out of the Void” (reprinted in this anthology) for publication in book form. Her stories have been featured in anthologies such as Groff Conklin’s The Best of SF, Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age, and Arthur B. Evans et al.’s The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction.

  If Stone was welcomed into the early SF magazine community on her own terms as a woman, it is likely because, regardless of her sex or gender, she produced fiction that was clearly in line with Gernsback’s vision for the genre. As an interplanetary romance that follows the adventures of two humans who lead a slave revolt on the distant planet Abrui, “Out of the Void” provides plenty of thrills for a general reading audience. Meanwhile, Stone’s detailed description of rocket propulsion—dropped into the middle of the story textbook style, complete with italics in case readers miss it—and the shorter lectures on subjects ranging from the benefits of vegetarianism to the possibility of satellite suns introduce young people to basic scientific and technological principles. But Stone also goes beyond the current state of technoscientific knowledge in her depiction of interstellar travel and communication, irradiated houses, and premade foods, all of which seem designed to inspire scientists and engineers. As such, “Out of the Void” delivers the entertainment, instruction, and prophetic vision that Gernsback insisted would make SF a truly distinct popular genre.8

  Furthermore, while Stone downplayed the impact of first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement on her life as an SF author, issues of sex and gender are central to her storytelling practices. Like many other women writing fiction for the early SF magazine community, in “Out of the Void” Stone employs a male narrator to appeal to what many assumed was a predominantly young male audience, but then introduces her female lead’s voice indirectly through letters (for other examples of this very common practice, see Lilith Lorraine’s “Into the 28th Century” and Clare Winger Harris’s “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” both featured in this anthology). She also uses elements drawn from popular forms of women’s writing to speculate about the future of sex and gender relations. For example, Stone invokes the turn-of-the-century feminist utopian belief that new sciences and technologies would liberate women from domestic labor to imagine a future where women and men participate equally in home-making, education, and statecraft. She also draws on the gender ideals central to nineteenth-century domestic fiction to cast her male human lead as “an admirer and respecter of women who likes the heroine as much [as] or more than he lusts for her” (Baym 41). Significantly, in an era when authors often treated the alien other as a Darwinian competitor for scarce resources (including women), Stone extends the characteristics of the domestic hero to her alien antagonist as well, using the alien’s encounter with her brave, intelligent female lead as the means by which he is transformed from ruthless competitor to partner in progress and exploration. Thus “Out of the Void” emerges as a complex piece of feminist SF that weaves together the literary techniques of the past and the technoscientific issues of Stone’s present to imagine how men and women might build better futures together.

  “Out of the Void”

  Amazing Stories, August–September 1929

  THE NARRATOR STARTS ON A FISHING TRIP

  The possibility that life is sustained upon a number of our sister planets has changed to probability, but we on Earth have as yet had no conclusive proof that such life is to be found on other orbs. There has been talk of sending a man to the moon by a rocket, and we hear much about radio telegraphing to Mars. Yet, up to the time of these events of which I am writing, none of our scientists had taken seriously the possibility of a visitor reaching Earth from another planet.

  Neither had I!

  I am not a scientific man. In fact, I am not even a radio fan. To me, the moon is an appendage—an interesting appendage, to be sure—of this good old world, and the stars are there to relieve the monotony of the night sky. It doesn’t matter to me whether the Earth is round, whether it moves around the sun, or whether there is life on our sister planets or not. I offer these introductory remarks because I want it understood that this is being told from a layman’s viewpoint—from a disinterested layman’s viewpoint. I have no theory or explanations. I have only cold, bare facts.

  I am one of those beings usually designated as the T.B.M. I go to the shows whose patronage depends largely on that class of man. And like a great many brethren, I am a devotee of the art of fishing. This is not a fish story, however, though it has its beginnings in a fishing trip!

  It was on one of those rare occasions when I slipped away from the turmoil of Wall Street to my own particular fishing lodge, a ramshackle little hut on the bank of one of the finest trout streams in the east, bar none, that I had my adventure.

  That afternoon I had telephoned the wife that I would not be home for dinner for three or four nights. Catching the last train out, I was soon disembarking at my wayside station. I carried nothing but a small grip containing my necessities and my beautiful fishing rod. Walking briskly I left the confines of the tiny New Jersey village, and plunged into the dense woods that hedged in my shack.

  It was already night, and I hurried, for I had the city man’s fear of the dark. I met no one, though once or twice I had the sensation that the woods were full of spying men. Once through the trees I saw the gleam of what appeared to be the eyes of a cat, or a wolf, but I laughed that off, realizing it could be no more than two fireflies.

  I hurried on my way whistling. Then my furtive eye caught the gleam of glass. Ah, thought I, a new neighbor! I resolved that I would pay him a visit the next day. The shack was reached at last, and with hands trembling with joyful excitement, I pushed open the door. I lit the oil lamp, filling it from a tin I kept for that purpose. The night was warm and I needed no fire. I busied myself in making the place habitable.

  It was about five minutes later that I discovered the theft, and the jewel. I had always kept an old suit of clothing hanging on a nail against an emergency such as a wetting, for instance, although I always brought an extra suit of khaki with me. Now the suit was gone! The suit wasn’t worth anything; an old-clothes man wouldn’t have given me a cent for it, but I did not like the idea of a thief around my hut. What could anyone have wanted with that suit? Then I saw the jewel!

  There, on a small shelf, where I usually kept my toothbrush, hairbrush, razor, et cetera, quite close to the rack on which I had hung the old suit, was the most perfect ruby I have ever seen. At least I thought it was a ruby. It flashed and glowed like a thing alive. For several moments I stood there, too enraptured to touch it. I knew immediately that the jewel had been left in lieu of payment for the old suit! But what sort of person would do such a thing? To whom could that suit have been worth a ruby? A thief, an escaped convict? No. A thief or an escaped convict would hardly have considered payment at all.

  I went to sleep with that ruby under my pillow. And for the first time the door and windows were locked. The next morning I was up early with a tingle in my blood. Just outside my window I could hear the song of the stream as it bubbled and swirled among its rocks and pools. Dressing, I stopped only for a cup of coffee.

  All morning I fished, completely oblivious of any mystery. It was not until after three o’clock in the afternoon, when I finally went to the shack for some food, that I recalled the ruby. That jolt knocked all spirit out of me. I lost every desire to resume my sport. I sat brooding over the jewel. It was too strange. I recalled the curses that some notorious jewels had cast over their possessors. This might be such a gem. Or again, what if the thief had not intentionally left it and should return?

  Hurriedly I left the hut. I needed air, but the stream and its trout did not lure me. The gleam of glass that I had seen the night before appeared again. The owner of that glass might know something about this mystery. Anyway, I needed to talk to someone.

  Half running, I quickly came to the spot where I had glimpsed the glass. There was no mistaking it—right there was a converging of two paths. At first I saw nothing; the trees and vegetation hid it, until looking upward, I saw the gleam again. I thought it was the roof of a greenhouse. Wondering who in the world would build such a structure in this part of the country, I walked toward it.