The Spike: or, Victoria College Review, October 1906
Astræa Redux
Astræa Redux.
Bilson had had a heavy day and the Biology lecture was drawing to a close. The room was darkened and sections of the arm of a starfish were being projected on the screen. Bilson felt that the season invited reflection, and he began to recall his life-long desire to hit on that peculiar mental attitude that should reverse the flight of Time. Vaguely he heard: "This is a single pair of tube-feet: the ampulla of this one shows particularly well. If the whole starfish were magnified to the scale of this section, he would reach to the tram way viaduct on Salamanca Road." Suddenly the section was no longer a section; but the tip of the arm of the starfish was there, filling the room, while the body of the creature covered the greater part of Kelburne. Then Bilson recognised what had happened. The flight of Time had indeed been reversed. The starfish had gone back through re-agents and imbedding oven, through Tertiary and Mesozoic seas, and had become one of its own ancestors, unheard of for magnitude. But Bilson had little leisure to realise the grandeur of his achievement. The gigantic arm was pressing the walls apart and the huge tube-feet were seizing everything with their suckers—chairs, tables, students lifted by twos, threes, dozens and dropped again as a monkey drops an uneatable nut. Bilson darted beneath the lecture table, where for a time he was saie. Accompanying the heavier noises was a rattle of something small and metallic. it was due to a rain of hair-pins caused by the tube-feet clutching at the heads of the lady students. A sound of fizzing arose, and the smell of burning muscle as the arm came in contact with the roof of the lantern that had given the monster its reincarnation. Suddenly there was an awful crash and the arm withdrew, carrying the window frame and half the wall with it. Bilson ventured to peep round the far end of the table. Where were his fellow-students and the professor? He could see nothing of them and he concluded that in the great reversal they had gone back to a time when their ancestors did not exist.
The arms of the gigantic Asterina were groping along the walls of the College, and Bilson feared lest one of them should again find the opening that had been made. Quickly he darted through the door, which he banged behind him. He ran down the stairs; but he dared not go out, for the doorways were blocked page 24 and the whole building was covered by the monster. Again and again Bilson tried to achieve the courage necessary to rush across to the Arts Building and telephone for help: each time he shrank back at sight of those waving tube-feet. Night; and still no relief. A hideous night it was, full of horrid, crawling noises as the monster moved uneasily; and ever in Bilson's mind was the fear that the huge weight would crush the walls. Morning came and found Bilson as worn as if he had gone forward some æons instead of backward. Still he was hungry, and he went up to the store-room and tried a dogfish; but it had been twelve months in formalin and was clearly impossible. Luckily he found some agar bouillon prepared for Bacteria, and this served for breakfast. Throughout the day he fled from corner to corner in fear, as some movement of the Asterina made him think that the part of the building he was in was being attacked. Evening came, and with it hunger, scantily appeased by a little agar agar and a jar of gelatine; but he could find nothing else.
Another night of horror was upon him, with those creeping arms brushing across the windows. A troubled sleep came, but came not alone, for he was visited by the ghosts of all the dead creatures that had, whether whole or in pieces, ever entered the laboratory. An enormous brain came along the corridor, moving uneasily and bringing a sickening odour of neuroglia in corrosive sublimate. It occurred to Bilson that for a brain to be locomotive was not correct, and he remonstrated. The response was a pickled laugh. "Don't do it," said Bilson: "it's not the thing. Why, you've nothing to walk on, you know." "Slush!" said the Brain, "what about the crura cerebri ?" There came a rabbit without his skin, and with his whole alimentary tract festooned gracefully around the outside of his body. As one freak after another pranced through the sleep of the unhappy Bilson, he decided to address them collectively. "Look here!" said he, "you don't know what has happened. You are not here at all. You are your own ancestors now, and they don't exist." This was satisfactory, for they all withdrew to discuss it, the dogfish, in the Professor's easy-chair, making a great display of his hepatic sinus, gorgeously injected with ultra-marine, trying to keep order and to restrain the facetiousness of the rabbit, who was fanning himself with his vermiform appendix.
Morning did but recall Bilson from the horrors of sleep to the almost greater horrors of waking. Still about the building was the relentless Asterina; but a window here and there was undarkened. Thus he got glimpses of the harbour and saw that all the ships had left the wharf, lest the monster should plunge page 25 down the hill and sink them at their moorings. Mount Victoria was black with fugitives.
Bilson was at bis wits' end to know what to do for food. He went to the chemistry laboratory, determined to synthesise albumen. He had only one great difficulty—the common one of not knowing anything about it. As he was mixing sulphuretted hydrogen and carbon-bisulphide a happy inspiration came to him. He rushed upstairs and opened the incubator. To his unspeakable relief he found several eggs in various stages. He began with one that was only ten days old. As he broke the shell a faint odour was perceptible. Suddenly the Asterina became active and Bilson felt that the smell had reached it. "Look here!" he cried. "You've no olfactory organs, you know. You can't smell. Why don't you play the game?" It seemed to him that the sound of his agonised voice caused Time to pause and then rush swiftly forward through the æons it had re-traced. Came a crash as of the roof falling; but it was the noise of the students pushing back their chairs and leaving the room. Asterina was again no more than sections that would go into the waistcoat-pocket. Time had come to 1906 once more, and Bilson went out wondering where his fellow-students had been throughout the ages of horror he had endured.
X.