Free The Wonder Effect by Frederik Pohl

there would be a hue and a cry-I wonder, was I ever once as consecrated as he?-and if he did not, he might all the same use it for the subject of one of his “scientific” romances. After I am gone, of course, but surely that event cannot be long delayed, and in any case that would spoil it. And I want the work. I do not think I have another book remaining-forty-one fat volumes will have to do-but this can hardly be a book. A short essay; it must be short if it is not to become an autobiography and, though I have resisted few temptations in my life, I mean to fight that one off to the end. That was another jeer of Shaw’s. Well, he scored off me, for I confess that some such thought had stirred in my mind.
    My lifelong struggle with voice and pen against social injustice had barely begun in 1864, and yet I had played a part in three major work stoppages, published perhaps a dozen pamphlets and was the editor and principal contributor of the still-remembered Labour’s Voice. I write with what must look like immodesty only to explain how it was that I came to the attention of Miss Carlotta Cox. I was working with the furious energy of a very young man who has discovered his vocation, and no doubt Miss Cox mistook my daemon-now long gone, alas!-for me.
    Miss Cox was a member of that considerable group of ruling-class Englishmen and women who devote time, thought and money to improving the lot of the workingman. Everybody knows of good Josiah Wedgewood, Mr. William Morris, Miss Nightingale; they were the great ones. Perhaps I alone today remember Miss Cox, but there were hundreds like her and pray God there will always be.
    She was then a spinster in her sixties and had spent most of her life giving away her fortune. She had gone once in her youth to the cotton mills whence that fortune had come, and knew after her first horrified look what her course must be. She instructed her man of business to sell all her shares in that Inferno of sweated labour and for the next forty years, as she always put it, attempted to make restitution.
    She summoned me, in short, to her then-celebrated stationer’s shop and, between waiting on purchasers of nibs and foolscap, told me her plan. I was to go to Africa.
    Across the Atlantic, America was at war within herself. The rebellious South was holding on, not with any hope of subduing the North, but in the expectation of support from England.
    England herself was divided. Though England had abolished slavery on her own soil almost a century earlier, still the detestable practise had Its apologists, and there were those who held the rude blacks incapable of assuming the dignities of freedom. I was to seek out the Dahomeys and the Congolese on their own grounds and give the lie to those who thought them less than men.
    “Tell England,” said Miss Cox, “that the so-called primitive Negroes possessed great empires when our fathers lived in wattle huts. Tell England that the black lawgivers of Solomon’s tune are true representatives of their people, and that the monstrous caricature of the plantation black is a venal creation of an ignoble class!”
    She spoke like that, but she also handed me a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds to defray my expenses of travel and to subsidize a wide distribution of the numbers of Labour’s Voice which would contain my correspondence.
    Despite her sometimes grotesque manner, Miss Cox’s project was not an unwise one. Whatever enlightenment could be bought at a price of two hundred and fifty pounds was a blow at human slavery. Nor, being barely twenty, was I much distressed by the thought of a voyage to strange lands.
    In no time at all, I had turned the direction of Labour’s Voice over to my tested friends and contributors Mr. Samuel Blackett and Miss Emma Chatto (they married a month later) and in a week I was aboard a French “composite ship,” iron of frame and wooden of skin, bound for a port on the Dark Continent, the home of mystery and