Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [51]
— GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP
I.
“VIVIFICATED”
NEAR THE CLOSE of the nineteenth century the Society of Futurity was formed for scientific experiment on a colossal scale. There was a considerable number of associates, all of whom were bound to secrecy, and these supplied a large endowment fund. To make their obligations of reticence the more sure, the secrets of the society were not told to them, after all, but were preserved by a small head committee known as The Three.
The Three were to be perpetuated in each generation by successors appointed by the first Three. Of the original trio, the famous inventor Gladwin was one, and he found in Gerald Bemis, a young friend of his, a willing subject for a vital test — nothing less than the attempt to suspend his life for two or three centuries and return to consciousness and activity after that interval. It was an old idea, but it had never been carried out except in imagination and in impossible books. Gladwin, however, thought he had now solved the problem, and was anxious to try his solution.
Bemis was a stalwart, handsome fellow, full of life, with a gay smile ever ready to brighten his lips, and with short auburn curls a-dance on his broad, frank forehead. He was highly educated, and an enthusiast in matters of science. But what came still more to the point, he had suffered a reverse in love, and fancied that he could take no further personal interest in the present life. Suicide was alien to his temperament as well as to his strong natural and religious instincts and faith. But “vivification,” as Gladwin’s new process was called, would relieve him from conscious existence now, and also make him a pioneer of the human race in advancing into another generation beyond, while still retaining membership in his own generation.
“It is done,” he exclaimed to Gladwin. “I agree to be vivificated!”
Yet, after the decision had been made, he underwent severe struggles. Now that he was to part from the world for so long a time, the living, moving, human creatures whom he saw upon the streets, in clubs and hotels, at receptions, at fashionable dinners, or at the theatres — so charged with intense interest in their daily affairs, ambitions, and ideas — appealed to him in a new way. “Stay with us!” They all seemed to be saying to him, though their lips moved not. “You are one of us! Don’t go! Don’t leave us! Take your share of human experience while you are here among us, and can be sure of it!”
The trial was hard indeed. But he persisted; although “Life prolonged without the old companionships,” he admitted, “is little different from death.”
When the appointed day came, and he went out to Gladwin’s high-walled laboratory in a woody solitude near New York, to be sealed up for futurity, contemporaneous life began to dwindle in his view. The crowds he saw in passing, his acquaintance, friends, relatives — even Eva Pryor, whom he had loved so ardently but in vain — all shrank in their proportions until they seemed nothing more than the diminutive and automatic busy reflections of reality in the kinetoscope. With this changed and dreamy mood upon him, there came to him a feeling that he, also, had been reduced to pigmy size, in his own mental vision. Considering the extraordinary ordeal through which he was about to pass, such a sense of his-own littleness and insignificance was restful and encouraging. Calmly, therefore, he lay down upon the couch prepared for him in a secret and well-guarded alcove of the laboratory, robed in a simple garment of linen, which was dressed, bleached, sterilized, and scrupulously clean.
Gladwin gave him chloroform until he became unconscious. Then a solution of the lately discovered compound, Tetrethylcylonammon, was injected under his skin. This gradually reduced his heart’s action and his respiration to zero.
When, under its influence, all movement had ceased and his animation was entirely suspended, he was placed in a large glass cylinder twice the length of his