The Rise of Ransom City
CHAPTER 2: MY HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER 11: THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND PART
CHAPTER 18: THE AMAZING AMARYLLIS AND MR. ALFRED P. BAXTER AND MR. ELMER MERRIAL CARSON, AND OTHERS
CHAPTER 21: A VISIT TO THE FLOATING WORLD
CHAPTER 23: MR. ALFRED P. BAXTER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSCHAPTER 28: THE BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH PART
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BY ELMER MERRIAL CARSONIt seems I have worked half my life on this account of Mr. Harry Ransom and his labors. I have published more books in my life than I can now recall, I have founded two newspapers and run three into the ground, I have rewritten my own autobiography four times— one of the hazards of longevity— and it seems to me now that this book has cost me more labor than all the rest put together. Ever since I first met him, Mr. Harry Ransom has made my life difficult.
This is Mr. Ransom’s story, and for the most part it is told in his own words., I have corrected the man’s unorthodox spelling, and in a few places where his pages were torn or fouled or never recovered, I have had to guess at his meaning. Some of his punctuation appears to be of his own invention, and I have forced it into a more standard mold. I have preserved all his digressions from the point and I have corrected only a small percentage of his errors. What I believe Mr. Ransom intended as his title was one hundred and sixty-six words long, which is an abomination that no publisher can abide. I have shortened it.
I do not intend to say anything much about Mr. Ransom here. I do not intend to express an opinion on whether he was a good man or a bad one, a genius or a charlatan, an honest man or a traitor. He was the kind of odd fellow one used to meet back in the century gone by, in the days when the Great War was at its height.
All that is to say that my editorial duties have been light. The labor I speak of has mostly been a matter of tracking down the pages of Ransom’s manuscript. But that has taken me half a lifetime.
I received the first two hundred pages of Ransom’s manuscript thirty-six years ago last month, in one intimidatingly large parcel, left for me at the post office in the town of Colriffey, where I was at the time rooming with friends and working on a novel. Ransom’s manuscript promised— as you will soon see— an explanation and an apology of a kind for recent events in the great war. There was no indication of who had left it for me, and no letter of explanation as to what Ransom meant me to do with it. There was no “Hello Elmer I hope you are well”; there was nothing but two hundred pages of Ransom’s outlandish life story.
At the time, nobody had heard from the gentleman in question for quite a few years. His fame was waning, or his notoriety, or what ever you’d call it. I guessed he meant to rekindle it, and wanted my help. He talked about building a city in the wilderness. I wanted nothing to do with the matter. I was tired of war and talk of war and justifications for or against it. The novel I was working on was a light and fantastical comedy, later published as
A Toad’s Tale
. I was not at all happy to hear from Ransom, whom I had last met back in Jasper City, shortly before it fell to the Line, and I held him at least partly to blame for that fall. What’s more, I had only to read a few pages into the thing to see that it was dangerous stuff, and that if half of what Mr. Ransom had to say was true, then the spies of Gun and Line would be very interested indeed in his story.
Those two hundred pages covered Mr. Ransom’s life from his birth in East Conlan, which is a dull little mining town in the eastern part of the Flinders, through his travels out on the Western Rim, with a great many digressions on his fabulous Ransom Process, and up to the famous Incident in White Rock. Along the way, Mr. Ransom managed to claim credit for the exploits of Liv Alverhuysen and the late John Creedmoor and for the beginning of the end of the Great War and for many other things besides. Two hundred pages; he promised more. One part of the story delivered, three to come. He wanted me to publish his story. He was on his way out west to make his new world. He had a typewriter with him, and by the Powers, he meant to use it.
I read his two hundred pages in one night and burned them in the fireplace and left town the next day. Those were dark times and I am not ashamed to say that I was afraid.
And that was that for a few years. No more parcels of pages came in the post. Maybe I was traveling too much; maybe spies or censors intercepted them. Maybe Mr. Ransom had lost interest, or found someone else to publish his story, or fallen down a ravine out there in the western wilderness. Wherever he was and what ever he was doing, he was long gone from the known world. I heard from time to time about Ransom City, the utopia that he and his colleagues were said to be building out there beyond the borders of the settled world, though nobody knew exactly where. I wrote another two or three comic novels and made a little fortune and I tried to retire.
In the fall of 1906, a part of the third of the four parts of Ransom’s story was sent to me care of my publishers. It came to me from a young lady who had inherited it in the papers of her recently deceased father, who had formerly been a Professor of Physical Science at Vansittart University. The pages were not signed, but she knew they concerned me, because they were the pages of the story in which Mr. Ransom recounted his meeting with me, back in Jasper City, back in ’91. I was surprised firstly to see that he had continued his story, and secondly that his account of our meeting was passably accurate.
Well, I cannot abide loose ends, and I cannot abide gaps in the story; and besides, retirement did not suit me. I set out to track down the rest of Ransom’s narrative, a few pages here and a few pages there. And that is a story in itself, for Mr. Ransom’s pages got scattered all over the world, which was the way of things back in those bitter waning days of the Great War. I have been all over the West in search of the things, and I have spent a lot of money, and I have met with retired Officers of the Line and aged Agents of the Gun and I have been in danger; I attribute my longevity to the exercise Mr. Ransom has given me. The events of Mr. Ransom’s story faded into history, and my dangerous hunt turned into an old man’s harmless hobby. A few more pages here; a few pages there; the recollections of certain people who knew him, which have clarified some illegible passages. The thing is as complete now as it will ever be. Maybe Mr. Ransom never achieved half his ambitions, and maybe he never made good on any of his promises, but at least he has kept an old man busy in his retirement. And who knows; maybe he did.