1713. THE COMING OF THE ICE. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Ill. Paul. (Reprinted in Ashley, History of the Science Fiction Magazine, Part 1.) Short story. 

*  Time: into the far future. 

*  A soliloquy by an incredibly ancient man, alone in an ice-covered waste caused by renewed glaciation. 

*  Back around 1930 his friend Sir John Granden discovered the secret of eternal life. This was a surgical procedure, involving removing certain organs, closing others, and opening still others that were dormant. The operation seems to involve sterility and loss of sexual desire. 

*  Donnell, the narrator, volunteers to undergo the operation; he is urged on by his fiancee, who agrees to live chastely with him. Unfortunately, she and Granden are killed almost immediately after the operation. 

*  Donnell lives on, for thousands of years. He amasses knowledge, but is soon faced with the humiliating fact that human evolution has progressed and that he can no longer cope with the new intellectuality. 

*  Hundreds of thousands of years pass, during which mankind continues to evolve, now becoming a balloon head with a tiny body. 

*  And then the glaciation comes. All mankind is dead except Donnell and a dozen future men. The future men commit suicide, and Donnell is left alone, presumably to freeze to death. 

*  Throwaway points along the way: The East conquered the West in a planetary war. 

*  Humanoid Venusians unsuccessfully invaded Earth. 

*  Immortality was rediscovered. 

*  Future man is telepathic. 

*  In his late years, before the coming of the ice, Donnell was put in a zoo. 

*  Perhaps suggested by Leonard Kip's "The Secret of Apollonius Septrio." 

1032. THE SCIENTIFIC ADVENTURES OF MR. FOSDICK. MR. FOSDICK INVENTS THE SEIDLITZMOBILE. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Ill. Paul. (First published in Modern Electrics, November 1912.) 

*  Short story. 

*  Fosdick has constructed an automobile powered by the gas produced by Seidlitz powders. When, out on a jaunt, Fosdick and the narrator are unable to replenish their Seidlitz powders, they use instead bicarbonate of soda and sulfuric acid. The result is overpower and an explosion, but no real harm is done. 

1701. THE STAR. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Unsigned ill. (First published in Graphic, Christmas Number, 1897. Reprinted in Wells, The Country of the Blind; Wells, The Works ofH. G. Wells, Vol. 10; Wells, The Short Stories of H. G. Wells; Wells, Best Science Fiction Stories; Wells, Tales of Space and Time; Wells, 28 Science Fiction Stories; Gunn, The Road to Science Fiction; Rabkin, Science Fiction, and elsewhere.) Short story. 

*  Catastrophism offers a chance to build a better world. A small planetoid enters the solar system and collides with Neptune, creating a small new sun that rushes toward Sol. The Earth, along its path, suffers enormous damage, what with earthquakes, heat, and tidal waves. Most of the human race perishes, but the remainder will build a better new social order. 

1779. "WHISPERING ETHER." Amazing Stories, June 1926. Unsigned ill. (First published in the Electrical Experimenter, March 1920.) Short story. 

*  The irony of fate in a science-fictional situation. 

*  Professor Proctor, who has invented an incredibly powerful explosive, traps an industrial spy who has come to steal his secret formula. How did Proctor catch the spy? A mechanical thought reading device that he wears on his head. 

*  The professor, unfortunately, cannot resist the temptation to boast and taunt. The two men struggle; a small quantity of the explosive is detonated; the thought-reading device is destroyed; and the professor is knocked out. 

*  When he regains consciousness and explains what happened, he is certified insane and put into an asylum, for the burglar will not support his story. 

*  Also involved is an after-the-fact prediction of World War I by reading thought. 

*  Primitive. 

837. THE RUNAWAY SKYSCRAPER. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Unsigned ill. (First published in Argosy, 22 February 1919. Reprinted in Ross, The Best of Amazing.) Novelett e, described in more detail in Science-Fiction: The Early Years. According to Leinster, the story was begun as joke upon an editor, but, to Leinster's surprise, was accepted. 

*  Strange sensations and peculiar behavior on the part of the sun, which rises in the west and sets in the east, with ever increasing speed, accompany the nudging of the Metropolitan Building into the fourth dimension (time). The building ends in precolonial New York, when Manhattan is a forested wilderness. Arthur Chamberlain, an engineer, and his secretary, Estelle, are the leading characters. As the strongest will and best brain among the skyscraper's involuntary passengers, Chamberlain orders matters for temporary survival and work out a way for the skyscraper to return to its original time. Chamberlain theorizes that the building was too heavy for its foundations, whence its settling in time. Perhaps if the building could be lifted a little, it would fall temporarily back into "place." Such is done. The time travelers have been away for about two weeks, though the building returns only a matter of seconds after it left. 

*  Leinster's first science-fiction story, handling a theme that he returned to several times—civilized men forced to survive under primitive conditions. 

*  Not high literature, but still more readable than most of the other stories described in this book. 

175 AN EXPERIMENT IN GYRO-HATS. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Ill. Paul. (First published in New Broadway Magazine, June 1920.) ( Reprinted in Moskowitz, Science Fiction by Gaslight.) Humorous short story. 

*  Walsingham Gribbs, an aristocratic young man about town, would be a good catch for any local maiden save for one fault: he has so little control of his legs that he always seems drunk. The reason for Gribbs's condition is an unfortunate experiment of his father's, who whirled him around on a rotating platform that escaped control. 

*  The narrator of the story, a hatter who wants his daughter to marry Gribbs, constructs a hat w ith a gyroscopic motion that will keep its wearer upright. But the hat, too, escapes control, whirling Gribbs around—in the opposite direction from the original mishap, thus curing him. 

*  Somewhat amusing, but by no means up to Butler's better work, as in Mike Flannery Off Duty and On or "Pigs Is Pigs." 

797. THE MALIGNANT ENTITY. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Ill. F. S. Hynd. (First published in WeirdTales, May/June/July 1924 Anniversary Issue. Reprinted in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1934.) Short story. 

*  One of the earlier versions of the wicked amoeba situation. 

*  Mysterious events! Professor Townsend, in good health the night before, is found next morning in his laboratory as a stripped skeleton. Late, the policeman who is standing guard after the skeleton is discovered is similarly skeletonized. 

*  A colleague, Dr. Dorp, believes that the solution to these events may lie in Townsend's research. He is right. Townsend had discovered how to create life, and in a sixty-gallon tank lives the product of his science a giant amoeba that can pop out and eat people quite rapidly. Part of the amoeba is destroyed, but a nucleus escapes temporarily. It is captured, and as it is being burned, it reveals part of the mystery. It takes on the form of a criminal, perhaps a burglar, whose evil potentialities supplemented the natural hunger of the giant germ. 

*  A crude job. Dr. Dorp reappears in the following story, #798, "The Radio Ghost." 

416. DR. HACKENSAW'S SECRETS, SOME MINOR INVENTIONS. Amazing Stories, June 1926. Ill. Paul. Short story. 

*  Pep (a young girl protagonist) visits Hackensaw (a very great scientist and inventor), who soliloquizes about his latest inventions. Most of the story is devoted to his experiments for a mechanism to rid the business world of secretaries, whom he characterizes as ignorant, gum-chewing ninnies. His first machine is an electric typewriter that used electric contact between fingertips and keys to print more rapidly than pushdown keyboards. His final invention in this area is a voice-activated machine that prints from dictation, homonyms being distinguished by special prefixes. This machine also translates many languages. 

*  Other devices are an antitheft sign for automobiles, a process for canning bread, and a mechanical judge. The rationale for the mechanical judge is paradoxical: The weaker case will pick the better lawyer. Therefore the mechanical judge, which measures intelligence and legal skill, automatically will find for the weaker advocate. 

*  Other inventions are devices for measuring a woman's age, the height of her skirts, and the hardness of her arterial walls. But the doctor drops this chain of research when he loses all his female friends. 

*  Curiosity fare only.