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    The Chamber of Life
    The Chamber of Life
    The Chamber of Life
    Ebook70 pages51 minutes

    The Chamber of Life

    By Green Peyton and Austin Briggs

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    The Chamber of Life
    Author

    Green Peyton

    Green Peyton Wertenbaker (23 December 1907 - 26 July 1968) was a U.S. editor and author. Born the son of American football coach William C. “Bill” Wertenbaker and hailing from a literary and professional family—his brother Charles Wertenbaker (1901-1955) was a renowned Time journalist and author, and his niece is the noted playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker—Peyton began his writing career as a science fiction writer. One of the pioneers of Hugo Gernsback’s development of “Scientifiction” (scientific fiction), he wrote his first story at the age of 15, The Man from the Atom (1923), which centers on an invention that allows a man to grow so vast and so quickly that he moves beyond into the macrocosm and is unable to return to Earth. A number of other SF stories followed between 1926 and 1930. In the early 1930’s he turned to writing regional novels: Black Cabin (1933) and Rain on the Mountain (1934), both as Green Peyton (his given names), which became his byline of preference. He also served on the editorial board of Fortune magazine from 1933 to 1938, and became a contributing editor to Time Magazine in 1939. During World War II he served as an air combat intelligence officer in the Pacific aboard the USS Suwannee and his experiences formed the basis for 5,000 Miles Toward Tokyo (1945). In 1950 he became involved with the fledgling Aerospace industry, returning to some degree to his first love. He assisted Dr. Hubertus Strughold with The Green and Red Planet (1953), a physiological study of the possibility of life on Mars, and wrote the scripts for a series of thirteen half-hour TV films on the human problems of space flight, Doctors in Space (1958). In 1958 he joined NASA as a speechwriter, eventually becoming chief historian of the Aerospace Medical Division. He completed Fifty Years of Aerospace Medicine (1968) just before his death.

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      Book preview

      The Chamber of Life - Green Peyton

      Project Gutenberg's The Chamber of Life, by Green Peyton Wertenbaker

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The Chamber of Life

      Author: Green Peyton Wertenbaker

      Illustrator: Austin Briggs

      Release Date: June 21, 2008 [EBook #25862]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAMBER OF LIFE ***

      Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Annie McGuire and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July 1962, a reprint from Amazing Stories October 1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

      A Classic Reprint from AMAZING STORIES, October, 1929

      Illustrated by BRIGGS

      The CHAMBER of LIFE

      By G. PEYTON WERTENBAKER

      Copyright 1929 by E. P. Inc.

      A Strange Awakening

      My first sensation was one of sudden and intense cold—a chill that shot through my body and engulfed it like a charge of electricity. For a moment I was conscious of nothing else. Then I knew that I was sinking in cold water, and that I was fighting instinctively against the need to gasp and breathe fresh air. I kicked weakly and convulsively. I opened my eyes, and squeezed them as the bright green water stung them. Then I hung for an instant as if suspended over the depths, and began to rise. It seemed hours before I shot up into the open air again, and was drinking it deeply and thankfully into my tortured lungs. The sun touched my head warmly like the hand of a benign god.

      Floating gently, I lay there for a long while before I even looked about me. There was a vague confusion in my head, as if I had just awakened from a long sleep. Some memory seemed to be fading away, something I could still feel but couldn't understand. Then it was gone, and I was alone and empty, riding on the water.

      I glanced about, puzzled. Only a few yards away rose the gray stone side of the embankment, with its low parapet, and behind that the Drive. There was no one in sight—not even a car—and the open windows of the apartment houses across the Drive seemed very quiet. People slept behind them.

      It was only a little after dawn. The sun, blazing and tinted with pink, had hardly risen from the horizon. The lake was still lined with dark shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like the crowing of a rooster in the country.

      I shivered, and began to swim. A few strokes brought me to the embankment, and I clambered up, almost freezing as I left the water. I was fully clothed, but without a hat. Perhaps I had lost it in the lake. I stood there, dripping and chill, and suddenly I realized that I had just waked up in the water. I had no recollection of falling in, nor even of being there. I could remember nothing of the previous night.

      A glance along the Drive told me where I was, at the corner of Fifty-third street. My apartment was only a few blocks away. Had I been walking in my sleep? My mind was a blank, with turbulent, dim impressions moving confusedly under the surface.

      Trembling in the chill air, I started up the Drive. I must go home and change at once. Something came back to me—a memory of talking to some friends at the Club. But was that last night? Or months ago? It was as though I had slept for months. We had had a few drinks—could I have been drunk, and fallen into the lake on my way home? But I never took more than two or three drinks. Something had happened.

      Then I remembered the stranger. We had all been sitting about the lounge, talking of

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