Mary Shelley s Frankenstein - Leonore Fleischer, ebook
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MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN BY Leonore Fleischer PROLOGUE Life The newly created planet whirled in the cosmos for more than a billion years, a molten globe ripped again and again by explosions from its core, its surface oozing and erupting liquid fire. If flamed, then it burned, then it smoldered, but it was still hot enough to melt rock and vaporize water. Yet, eventually, in a million years, it would cool, and the toxic icy moisture that formed its atmosphere would melt as condensation on the surface, creating a vast ocean that covered most of the planet, broken only by scattered chains of still-erupting volcanoes.Another half a billion years and more passed by in the history of the planet Earth. Because of the heavy cloud cover, only dim light from the sun broke through to the surface, which choked under a cloud cover of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and methane. There was very little oxygen, and no life. How could life form in that stinking morass of poisonous chemical gases?Yet is it not the essential nature of life to form, to live, to reproduce, to adapt. . . in short, to survive and prevail? Life is in the loving mother suckling her baby, but it is also in the small bits of coral that link to form great reefs under the sea. Life is in the strong, callused hand wielding the sculptor’s chisel, but it is also the single-celled paramecium waving its cilia under a microscope. In the infinite scheme of things, the artist and the bacterium are first cousins.The miracle does not lie in the incredible diversity of Earth’s living species, in the differences between the human baby and the protozoa and the bird and the house cat and the lichen and the komodo dragon, between the kangaroo and the kangaroo rat, the algae and the humpback whale. No, where the miracle lies is in that first moment of creation of something out of nothingness. For there, close to five billion years ago in Earth’s endless ocean, was floating a primordial soup of organic chemicals—organic, but not alive. Carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, hydrogen, separate chemicals.And yet, the mode actually happened. Something touched these disparate elements and they formed into compounds—carbohydrates, amino acids, nudeotides—the very building blocks of life. From these compounds would come the first single-celled organisms, near-invisible microscopic beings that ate, moved a little, excreted, divided themselves to multiply, and were, by any definition you can name, alive.And out of those primitive single-celled bacteria would one day arise Alexander the Great, Homer and Virgil, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mozart, Madame Curie, William Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, Jane Austen, Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Isaac Bashevis Singer, a cricketer named Grace, and a baseball player named Willie Mays. From the same simple protozoic organism would be born the painter Paul Gaugin who, when he was dying in Tahiti, would write upon his final masterwork the all-important, unanswerable questions: “What are we? Where did we come from? Where will we go?”Unanswerable because: almost five billion years ago, something touched those loose chemical elements floating like microscopic dumplings in the primordial soup, touched them and made them alive. But what? Whose magical hand touched them? What caused that miraculous instant in time when life came into existence where it hadn’t existed but a moment earlier?Many would tell you with the greatest certainty that it must have been the hand of God. But to some others, scientists, the most reasonable answer is a simple one—a natural power source, crackling with energy, most likely radiation or lightning. Yes, common lightning. Picture the first strands of DNA forming under the impact of a strong energy field and little oxygen. Violent electrical storms raging over the surface of the new planet, bolts of lightning striking the ocean, causing chemical reactions, creating the first life. Life’s first ingredients were already present in that vast ocean—all they needed was the magic touch of electricity.This would be a much more comfortable theory if it could be proved empirically, reproduced in a laboratory. But so far, although many, many have tried over the centuries, nobody has yet succeeded in creating life in a test tube.But suppose that somebody could!To create life—surely that must be the highest aspiration of scientific endeavor. What benefit to the human race could be greater than overcoming death? The scientist who finally ascends that unclimbed pinnacle by performing that miracle and cheating death must therefore be the most honored human in history. His name must be enshrined and blessed forevermore. He must be the happiest of men.And yet.. . what terrible consequences might follow this most godlike of acts? To use the magic touch that makes life eternal? Should life be eternal? Is death not the inevitable last scene in the cycle of nature? Who dares to interrupt that cycle? What might follow such an interruption?The gods do not take kindly to mortals who usurp their powers, not even for the benefit of humankind.What if, instead of being honored, the creator of life was instead punished as cruelly as the immortal Titan Prometheus?Before the beginning of history, the greatest god of all, Father Zeus, hid the precious gift of fire away from early man. Prometheus, taking pity on the poor naked creatures trying to exist without heat or light, stole some fire away from the gods and gave it to humankind. For this benevolence he was punished most terribly. Zeus had him chained to a rock, and sent an eagle to devour Prometheus’s liver by day. By night, the immortal liver would regenerate, only to be devoured again the next day, so that Prometheus’s torment was an eternal sentencing.And what of the human soul, Man’s only immortal part? Can this, too, be recreated in the laboratory?And, if it can, will it be a redeemed soul or one damned, like Prometheus, to eternal perdition? Much of what follows is taken from the pages, written in a large, flowing hand, of The Journal of Victor Frankenstein. 1 Ice “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee From Darkness to promote me?”—John Milton, Paradise LostThe Barent Sea, 1794 The large wooden ship pitched and yawed, her hull grinding through the thirty-foot swells, her canvas sails straining and flapping dangerously as they filled with the heavy, icy winds. Sailors dressed in slick oilskins clambered with enormous difficulty over the topdeck, trying vainly to keep the vessel under control, but a storm of inconceivable force and violence kept lifting the ship from the waves and dashing her down again, a raging animal worrying its helpless prey with razor-sharp teeth. The merciless ice-laden winds howled around the hapless vessel, whipping the sea into a frenzy to slam again and again at her hull.Although the three-masted sailing ship the Aleksandr Nevsky was built heavy-hulled to withstand the harshness of the Arctic seas, she was hardly a match for such a sudden ferocious storm as this one, and the weight of her decking and timbers cut down sharply on her ability to maneuver. Beaten by the waves and the winds, the Nevsky groaned and shuddered as she plowed through the swells.Visibility was close to zero; not only was the Arctic night inky dark, but a thick mist enveloped the scene, blotting out the constellations and making navigation close to impossible. The only illumination came from momentary bursts of heavy lightning, which cast an eerie glow over the ship, silhouetting the frightened sailors before plunging them back into the depths of night. Making progress in these storm-tossed waters was out of the question; it was all the Nevsky could do to keep herself afloat against all odds.Out of the darkness and chaos the prow would appear and disappear into the raging sea, crashing upward through a swell and slamming back down again, plunging nose-first into the trough. She was still sailing under canvas; the shrouds on the mainmast and mizzenmast had been stowed, but the square-rigged yards on the foremast were still swelling in the howling winds, straining at the mast as the icy blasts from the frozen north tore through them.Dark shouting figures could be glimpsed and half glimpsed as the crew emerged from the swell and were submerged again, clinging desperately to the lines, slipping and sliding in the sea water that washed over the deck, hampered by their heavy oilskin clothes flapping in the gale and in danger at any moment of being swept overboard into the frigid sea.From below decks, the terrified howling of large, wolflike dogs rose to add their noise to the noise ofthe storm. Poor sailors even in the best of weather, the teams of sled dogs in the hold were now almost hysterical with fear because of the steep pitching and rolling of the ship. Their natural environment was the open tundra of clean fresh snow, not the foul-smelling convulsing confinement of a ship’s hold in a winter storm.At his station in the prow of the Nevsky, young Billy Jenkins, the lookout, heard a sharp cracking noise above him, felt an ominous shivering rippling through the bow, and peered up through streaming water. Dimly, he could see that the topsail brace on the foremast had splintered. The canvas yard had shredded in the wind, and was now hanging useless.“Captain!” he called, but the raging winds snatched the word from his lips and carried it out to sea, unheard.Joseph, the second mate, tried desperately to secure the shredded sail before it could come crashing perilously down on the deck. One...
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