And that is why our time machines are not permitted to travel back farther than the middle of the twentieth century.
It had taken Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini some 16 years to rear Beatrice to toxic perfection, nurturing her on lethal vegetable extracts until the rich balsam of her breath was itself a poison. By the time of her regrettable death, this incunabular toxicologist had learned more rapid methods; was he not able to produce the same condition in her lover Giovanni in a matter of months? It took even less time to elevate Laura from her position as control to the focal role in the great (if mad) experiment; soon she, who had ever been as beautiful as Beatrice, was now also as deadly.
That shallow youth Giovanni Guasconti found himself as facilely and superficially in love with one baleful beauty as with the other—indeed, with yet greater ease on this second occasion, since he had been wondering, ever since he knew himself to be a victim of the Rappaccini method, how he was to discharge the normal impulses of youth upon a living object.
All the wedding guests agreed that never had there been a more handsome couple nor a more splendid wedding, even though the bride’s father eccentrically enjoined the use of masks by all—through which, however, all could still faintly perceive the dulcet and balsamous breath of the pair.
Laura and Giovanni were, though the term was not yet in vogue, the guinea pigs of Dr. Rappaccini. They were also young and eager and Mediterranean, and like guinea pigs they bred—if not indeed like hurkles.
After a quarter of a millennium had passed, in the first half of the twentieth century, the pure Rappaccini-Guasconti strain (under a score of advisable pseudonyms) had spread throughout the earth in such numbers that the problem of integration with ordinary, unscented, non-lethal humanity was an acute one. During the eighteenth century the women had passed unnoticed by attaching breath-filters to their face masks; in the nineteenth, the men had inserted filters in their beards. But the barefaced twentieth century posed a dilemma: Live in undesired obscurity, or risk killing off the rest of the race.
The dilemma was solved by a Rappaccini in whom Dr. Giacomo’s brilliance was reborn. Ordinary humanity had always shown a liking for the sweet Rappaccini breath, which was dulcet in contagion. The twentieth century possessed the means of converting this liking into envy and hunger: the power of advertising.
The device succeeded by its own momentum; once it was launched, few Rappaccinis needed to participate in the campaign to make people despise their own living exhalations (as they had already learned to detest their sweat and certain areas of their hair) and to long instead for venomous fragrance. But it did of course take a Rappaccini to introduce, after several decades of preparation, the final touch: Dr. Giacomo’s secret ingredient, derived from plants, which had altered Beatrice and Giovanni and Laura, known to its discoverer as chiorojile and now modernized as chlorophyll.
Today, in this late twenty-first century, we are all balsamous products of the Rappaccini method. The normal population was simply converted, without its knowledge and without undue loss of life (despite minor unexplained epidemics, unexpected failures of medicines, ungrounded charges of germ warfare), by its advertising-induced absorption of the key Rappaccini ingredient. We are harmless to each other, we adorn the very air we respire, and we do not use our time machines beyond 1950.
The first visit of our time travelers was to London in the fall of 1664, a date familiar to readers of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It needed but a few more such visits, particularly those to the fourteenth century and the descent upon the camp of Sennacherib, to cause the World Senate of Scientists to pass stringent laws fixing a chronokinetic barrier at 1950.
This brief report is submitted for what guidance it may provide in the current WSS debate upon travel beyond the already sterile planets of this solar system.
Khartoum: A Prose Limerick
The last man and the last woman on Earth sat on the edge of the last bed.
Somewhere the Arcturians were watching them, gloating over having found at last two specimens, and with marked sexual differences. But both were inured by now to this benevolent scrutiny.
The figure in the shaggy tweeds stirred restlessly. “You’re pretty,” the gruff voice rasped as one hand went out to touch a silk-sheathed knee. “The Arcturians did O.K. by me.”
The improbably jutting breasts rose and fell rapidly. “I like you, too,” the pouting lips admitted. “And of course we are going to have all kinds of fun . . . But when it comes to Perpetuating the Race—well, I’m afraid the Arcturians are in for an awful shock,” he giggled as he reached in, detached one improbably jutting breast, and playfully tossed it to his companion.
The powerful masculine hands half fondled the conical object, then embarrassedly discarded it. The lean rangy body rose from the bed and began shedding the tweed coat. “It’s against all my principles and probably yours; but it’s been a long time and at least it’ll be a novelty . . . I guess,” she grunted as she freed her own quite probable breasts from their overtight bra, “the Arcturians knew what they were doing after all.”
A Shape in Time
Temporal Agent L-3H is always delectable in any shape; that’s why the Bureau employs her on marriage-prevention assignments.
But this time, as she reported to my desk, she was also dejected. “I’m a failure, Chief,” she said. “He ran away—from me. The first man in twenty-five centuries. . .”
“Don’t take it so seriously,” I said. She was more than just another Agent to me; I was the man who’d discovered her talents. “We may be able to figure out what went wrong and approach it on another time line.”
“But I’m no good.” Her body went scrawny and sagging. Sometimes I wonder how people expressed their emotions before mutation
