WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES 10: YOU SAY UBIK. I SAY UBIQUE.

We have entered the Virgil Finlay era. Look at this cover. Isn’t it great?

Imagine seeing that on a newsstand. I am going to go out on a limb and assume the issue had a reprint of Everil Worrell’s “Vulture Crag” in it. So, technically, this is our second story that received a cover illustration. It’s just not the story we’re here to talk about right now.    

“Web of Silence” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (November 1939)

The scene is Everytown, USA. Sinister things are afoot. Threatening letters have appeared. They are triangular. The script oddly “foreign”. The letter writer, a Dr. Ubique, foretells disaster on a given day at a certain hour. They demand money. At first the town leaders laugh this off as a harmless crank. But then the day and hour arrive and the disaster strikes: Silence. Silence so deep so impenetrable that the whole town comes to a standstill. And that’s the story. What we read is the day by day as people try to go about their lives in the zone of silence. There are tragedies and misunderstandings, comic scenes, and lots of confusion. In a neat touch outsiders start visiting the town as tourists and the highways get gnarled up as people travel into and out of the “sound limit”.

This is one of those odd disaster stories where something bad happens, but it’s not too bad and no one is to blame really. Even when Dr. Ubique reveals himself (a foreign scientist), he admits his letters were all a prank. He’d learned about some rare metals beneath the town and predicted how they would interact with certain approaching environmental conditions (cosmic rays from a nova). He wasn’t the cause, but only the observer. So you can’t blame him. Here’s your money back. Thank you very much and sorry for the trouble.

Overall this story’s fairly ho-hum and never goes full throttle. I mean “The Week It Got Really Quiet” isn’t much of a catastrophe, is it? But what it does depict is some of that 1930s sensawunda. The world is full of scientific marvels and natural laws we barely understand, and they are occurring directly beneath our feet and above our heads. Our Dr. Ubique is both mad scientist and harmless eccentric. In the end nothing will be irreversibly broken and everything will be okay.

Honestly, I felt a bit cheated.

If you’re a Philip K. Dick fan your eyes will likely have lit up at the name of Ubique. Not that there are many connections between this story and Dick’s novel Ubik, but it shows he had no problems reiterating on decades older work. What I am saying is no one should feel ashamed for riffing on old stories. Philip K. Dick did it all the time.

Next week?

A story I have absolutely zero memory of reading. I must have, because I finished the book, but what this particular story was about I have no clue. I guess we’ll find out next week, won’t we?