Part 1 (1/2)
The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars.
by L. P. Gratacap.
PREFACE.
The extraordinary character of the story here published, which some peculiar circ.u.mstances have fortunately, I think, put into my hands, will excite a curiosity as vivid as the incidents of the narratives are themselves astonis.h.i.+ng and unprecedented. To satisfy, as far as I can, a few natural inquiries which must be elicited by its publication, I beg to explain how this unusual posthumous paper came into my possession.
It was written by Bradford Torrey Dodd, who died at Christ Church, New Zealand, January, 1895, after a lingering illness in which consumption developed, which was attributed to the exposure he had experienced in receiving some of the wireless messages his singular history details. I was not acquainted with Mr. Dodd, but some information, acquired since the reception of his ma.n.u.script, has completely satisfied me, that, however interpreted, Mr. Dodd did not intend in it the perpetration of a hoax. His scientific ability was undoubtedly remarkable, and the facts that his father and himself worked in an astronomical station near Christ Church; that his father died; that his acquaintance with the Dodans was a reality; that he did receive messages at a wireless telegraphic station; that he himself and his a.s.sistants fully accredited these messages to extra-terrestrial sources, are, beyond a doubt, easily verified.
A mutual friend brought me Mr. Dodd's papers, which I looked over with increasing amazement, culminating in blank incredulity. On rereading them and considering the usefulness of giving them to the public, I have been influenced by two motives, the desire to satisfy the fervently expressed wish of the writer himself and the reasonable belief that if they are preposterously improbable their publication can only furnish a new and temporary and quite harmless diversion, and that if Mr. Dodd's experiment shall be in some future day successfully repeated his claims to distinction as the first to open this marvelous field of investigation will have been honorably and invincibly protected.
L.P. GRATACAP.
CHAPTER I.
In the confusion of thought about a future life, the peculiar facts related in the following pages can certainly be regarded as helpful.
Spiritualism, with its morbid tendencies, its infatuation and deceit, has not been of any substantial value in this inquiry. It may afford to those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is a humiliating and ludicrous vagary.
At the conclusion of a life spent rather diligently in study, and in a.s.sociation especially with astronomical practice and physical experiments, I have, in view of certain hitherto unpublished facts, decided to make public almost incontrovertible evidence that in the planet Mars the continuation of our present life, in some instances, has been discovered by myself. I will not dwell on the astonishment I have felt over these discoveries, nor attempt to describe that felicity of conviction which I now enjoy over the prospect of a life in another world.
My father was the fortunate possessor of a large fortune, which freed him of all anxieties about any material cares, and left him to pursue the bent of his inclination. He became greatly interested in physical science, and was also a patron of the liberal arts. His home was stored with the most beautiful products of the manufacturer's skill in fictile arts, and on its walls hung the most approved examples of the painter's skill. The looms of Holland and France and England furnished him with their delicate and sumptuous tapestries, and the Orient covered his floors with the richest and most prized carpets of Daghestan and Trebizond, and of Bokhara.
But even more marked than his love for art was his pa.s.sion for physical science. His opportunities for the indulgence of this taste were unlimited, and the reinforcement of his natural apt.i.tude by his great means enabled him to carry on experiments upon a scale of the most magnificent proportions. These experiments were made in a large building which was especially built for this object. It contained every facility for his various new designs, and in it he antic.i.p.ated many advances in electrical science and in mechanical devices, which have made the civilization of our day so remarkable. I recall distinctly as a boy his ingenious approximation to the telephone, and even the recent advances in wireless telegraphy, which has been the instrumentality by which my own researches in the field of interplanetary telegraphy have been prosecuted, had been realized by himself.
It was in the midst of a life almost ideally happy that the blow fell which drove him and myself, then a boy and his only child, into a retirement which resulted in the discoveries I am about to relate. My father's devotion to my mother was an ill.u.s.tration of the most beautiful and tender love that a man can bear toward a woman. It was adoration.
Though his mind was employed upon the abstruse questions of physics which he investigated, or edified by new acquisitions in art, all his knowledge and all his pleasure seemed but the means by which he endeavored to gain her deeper affection. She indeed became his companion in science, and her own just and well regulated taste constantly furnished him new motives for adding to his wide acc.u.mulations of art.
I can recall with some difficulty the day when with my father in a room immediately below the bedroom in which my mother was confined he awaited the summons of the doctors to see his wife for the last time. It was a rainy day, the clouds were drifting across a dull November sky. Through an opening in the trees then leafless, the Hudson was visible, even then flaked with ice, while an early snow covered the sloping lawn and whitened the broad-limbed oaks. I remember indistinctly his leading me by the hand through the hallway up the stairs, and softly whispering to me to be quite still, entered the large room dimly lit where my mother, attended by a nurse and a doctor, lay on the white bed. I remember being kissed by her and then being led from the room by the nurse. My father doubtless lingered until all was over, and the dear a.s.sociate of his life, whose tenderness and charity had made all who approached her grateful, whose genial and appreciative mind had supplied the stimulus of recognition he needed for his own studies, pa.s.sed away. After that I seemed dimly to recall a period of extreme loneliness when I was left in charge of a private instructor, while my father, as I later learned, bewildered by his great loss, and temporarily driven into a sort of madness, wandered in an aimless track of travel over the United States.
On his return the sharp recurrence to the scenes of his former happiness renewed the bitterness of his spirit, and he reluctantly concluded to abandon his home. His own thoughts had not as yet clearly formed any decision in his mind as to where he would go or what he would do. It was inevitable, however, that he should revert to his scientific investigations. He found in them a new solace and distraction, but even then his pa.s.sion for research would not have sufficed to adequately meet his desperate desire to escape his grief, if in a rather singular manner there had not come to him an intimation of the possibilities of some sort of communication with my mother through these very investigations in electricity and magnetism in which he had been engaged.
I had become quite inseparable from him. He found in me many suggestions in face and manner of my mother, and particularly he was interested in my peculiar lapses into meditation and introspection which in many ways suggested to him a similar habit in her. On one occasion when, as was his wont, before we finally left the old home at Irvington, he had taken me in the summer evenings to the top of the observatory, then situated about half a mile west of the Albany road, we had both been silently watching the sun sink into a bank of golden haze, and the black band of the Palisades pa.s.sing underneath like a velvet zone of shadow, I turned to my father and in a sudden access of curiosity said:
”Father, if mother had gone to the Sun, would she speak to us now with a ray of light?”
My father smiled patiently, half amused, and then standing and looking at the sun's disk, disappearing behind the Jersey hills, said, ”My son, it was a curious thought of a well-known French writer, Figuer, who lost his son, who was very dear to him, that his soul with armies and hosts of other souls, had departed to the sun and that they made the light and heat of this great luminary, and this wise man felt some comfort in the thought that the heat and light of the sun as he felt himself bathed in radiance and warmth were emanations from his boy, and his eyes and body seemed then in a figurative, and yet to him, very real way, communicating with his boy. You smile. I know it is with interest. Let me read to you from Figuer's singular book what he has written about it.”
He disappeared and left me also standing and looking upward at a faint wreath of cloud, tinged in rosiness, which floated almost in the zenith. I was then about eleven years old, precocious for my years and gifted with a sympathy for occult and difficult subjects that became only intensified through the peculiar concentrated companions.h.i.+p I had from day to day, and month to month enjoyed with my father.
This narrative may be inadvertently cla.s.sed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a time so long past. I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these interviews with my father are here literally related. That, of course, is beyond the limits of reasonable probability. But I do insist that in the following pages the occurrences described are very faithful transcripts of those connected with the peculiar inquiry and experiments my father and myself began, and brought to a startling conclusion.
Although conducted in the form of an imaginative story the reader is importuned to give them his most implicit credence.
My father soon returned with the small volume of Figuer and read, I imagine, that pa.s.sage which runs as follows in Chapter XIII:
”Since the sun is the first cause of life on our globe; since it is, as we have shown, the origin of life, of feeling, of thought; since it is the determining cause of all organized life on the earth--why may we not declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and the other planets are nothing more or less than the emanations of these souls?
that these are the emissions of pure spirits living in the radiant star that come to us, and to dwellers in the other planets, under the visible form of rays?