Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [4]
“By specializing it may be possible for science to create a type of animal capable of doing the heavy work of the world — creatures of vast physical strength, coupled with a higher form of intelligence than has been evolved as yet in any animal, excepting man.”
— PROFESSOR OSTWALD, Leipzig University.
I AM JAMES BROADBENT, the author. I hold the record for fiction production — forty-eight novels in twelve years, each one turned out with clockwork regularity in three months, and each one consisting of precisely one hundred thousand words. I don’t write masterpieces, but I have a reputation for good, solid, sensational stuff, and I keep my contracts to the letter. What with serial, volume, American, and occasional continental rights, my books bring me in an average of £200 apiece. In other words, my income is £800 a year. It is my ambition to make it a thousand. For this purpose I agreed to produce five novels this year, but I could not do it in London. I was good for four books a year there; and not a chapter more. An extra stimulus was necessary for the production of a fifth, and I thought I should get it in Devonshire from the moors, the sea air, and the sunshine. There, at any rate, I should have perfect quietude.
In this I was mistaken. The month after I took possession of my cottage a dangerous criminal escaped from Dartmoor. He had plenty of choice of habitations in which to seek a temporary refuge; and it was distinctly annoying that he should make a bee-line for mine. You no doubt read the account in the papers, and may remember that he was captured in my study by the police after a desperate struggle, in which I, an interested onlooker, was injured. I had to wear my right arm in a sling for a month, and for a literary man this is a drawback.
However, by daily practice, I found I could attain considerable dexterity on the typewriter with my left hand. I compose direct on to the machine, rarely altering what I type; and last Monday I was working against time in order to make up for the hours I had lost, when a figure walked through the open French window. I finished my sentence and swung round on my chair.
A less reassuring object I have never seen. It was apparently a very short man, dressed in an ill-fitting coat which reached nearly to the floor, and a cap brought down low over his face. His chin was buried in his collar, and I only saw an ugly nose and a swarthy cheek.
I stared at him in surprise and annoyance. “Well?” I asked.
“Forgive me for not taking off my cap,” he said. “There are reasons.”
He spoke in a high falsetto, stopping once in the middle of a word, then giving a curious catch, and continuing. There was a singular artificiality about his voice. It reminded me of a gramophone. He added: “I throw myself upon your mercy. I am an outcast.”
He spoke these words without feeling, mentioned his position in the universe as a mere matter of fact, and again there was the curious catch in his voice.
“I suppose you’re another escaped from Dartmoor?” I said, mentally resolving to leave the neighborhood forthwith.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “I come from Baxter’s. I’m one of his creations.”
“The deuce you are!” I exclaimed, and I have no doubt my voice expressed the annoyance I felt. Bad as it was to