Hunted by a man-made monster, they fled into an empty world, two last survivors who dared to gamble for the dawn of a new forbidden day. . . .
CHAPTER ONE
Wyndham Smith was at Guy's Hospital at the time he had his experience, a medical student in his second year.
He looked round a room floored and walled and furnished in the same substance, which was strange to him - "ebonied glass" came to his mind - and across at a man who was strangely dresses - Oriental? - no, not exactly that - and with an aspect of age with in the grave dignity of his face, and of youth in the smooth freshness of his skin, who was saying in a distant and yet not unfriendly way:
"I suppose you are puzzled as to where you have come?"
"Once before," he replied, "I had a dream something like this. I mean I knew I was dreaming the while I dreamed. I remember hoping I should not wake till the end came; but this is the most vivid dream that I even had."
The mans lips moved to a slight smile. "You need have no fear about that."
"No? I feel as though I were awake now."
"So you are."
Wyndham Smith looked round. He considered the polished shadows of the walls, and the brighter opaqueness of the ceiling which gave a diffused light to the room. He was not convinced.
"Then, perhaps," he said, "You will explain how I got here."
It was a reasonable request, though he saw that a dream might invent an answer of no reliable value.
"That," the protagonist of his dream replied, "is what I propose to do. It is a courtesy which I might have extended freely to a young man of your profession, but it is necessary apart from that. It is important here from the early part of the twentieth century. You are now - by an extension of your system of reckoning - in the later part of the forty-fifth."
"You can't expect me to swallow that."
"No? I wonder why. Has the idea of such transmigration, either voluntary or enforced, never entered your mind? Even so, you have had some years of training which should make you receptive to new ideas. I thought that yours was a time when the implications of relativity began to be understood."
"I am afraid," Wyndham Smith said honestly, "that I am one of those to whom the implications of relativity are not clear. I am willing to believe that time is the fourth dimension which has a plausible sound. But I don't go far beyond that. . . As to people being able to jump about in time, from one age to another, even if it were shown in theory that they could - which would be hard to believe - observation tells us definitely that it doesn't occur.
"May I ask how you have been able to observe that?"
"If it did, people would appear suddenly among us from nowhere, and others would disappear in the same way. You couldn't even take a census."
"You are half right and half wrong. Your year was nineteen thirty-seven, was it not, in the reckoning of your day?"
"Yes, that's what it is now."
"Ye-es. No man has gone back to that period, or is likely to do so. Having known it, you can't be surprised. . . But they have been fetched away in large numbers English people in your century being a favourite selection for many purposes. . . I learned your language from one of them.
"I know that isn't true. If it were, we should notice they had disappeared."
The older man was unmoved by the bluntness of this contradiction. "If you think," he said, with a quiet certainty, "you will know that it is. . . Did you never hear of the number of people who disappeared in England at that time - even in London alone - every month? What do you suppose had become of them?"
"I suppose that they had changed their names, or wandered away."
"Do you know the proportion of them that were never found?"
"Not exactly. I know it was a large number."
Wyndham Smith remembered reading a newspaper account of such disappearances a few days before. (Was it that which had given him this most vivid dream?) He could not recall the figures, but he knew that the number who were never traced had been described as very large - "inexplicably large" had been the expression used. He was frank about that, both to himself and the stranger to whom he spoke. He added, "But, at most, that doesn't prove that they disappeared into futurity: it only fails to disprove that anyone did."
"Yes. But, at least, it proves that you were wrong in the reason you gave for discrediting such a possibility."
"I must admit that," he answered with the same frankness as before, and with a growing disposition not to contest the possibility further. After all, why not let a dream have its way?
The stranger seemed to perceive without further words that it was accepted as a hypothesis on which the conversation could be continued. He went on:
"It is necessary that you should be informed as to where you are, owing to the experience which is before you, the nature of which will naturally be grasped more readily by one who has had some training in medical science, however elementary, than it would be by most others of the period from which you come.
"It was partially understood in your own time, though the idea itself was less clearly perceived than were its implications and consequences, that the individual man is of dual personality. The seat of the ego - the man himself, as distinguished from the physical body which had been formed from ancestral cell - was vaguely located in the hinder part of the brain, and that location has since been more exactly fixed. . .
"With the advance of surgery, the grafting or exchange of the major organs of the body naturally led to the consideration of the possibility that the ego itself might be transferred. But that which was simple in theory was found to be difficult in practice, owing to the fact that the cell - if that word be allowed - of which the ego consists was found to be so small that its minuteness is beyond human comprehension, if not measurement, and that, for the operation to be successfully performed, it must be transferred without the remotest trace of surrounding matter,"
"I remember," Wyndham remarked, accepting the initial improbability to which he had been introduced in his interest in this explanation, "in - in my own time that an American scientist calculated that if the germs from which every Englishman had originated since the Norman conquest were heaped together, they would never cover a needle's point."
"That," the stranger answered, after a moment's pause, "must have been, by an extremely large margin, within the truth; but the germ-cells of which you speak are themselves as much larger than the essential ego as the space occupied by our planetary system exceeds the size of its central sun."
"But you say that these difficulties have been overcome?" Wyndham asked.
Since he had decided to abandon himself without resistance to the course of this vivid dream, the quiet authority and assurance of the stranger's words were bringing conviction to a mind which had been trained to learn and accept surprising facts from the lecturers of his own profession. He had a vague but pleasing vision of himself as being sent back to his own time by this courteous and able stranger after learning such things as would place him in the forefront of the scientists of his time.
Was it - his mind wandered to ask - by this method that the great "discoveries" of past generations had been communicated to those who had given them to the world, without revealing a source of knowledge which would have discounted their own eminence, if it had not been received with derision, or introduced them to a sorcerer's stake? Was it such an experience that had come to the friend of Paul when, in his own words, "he was caught up to the third heaven, and heard unspeakable things"?
"They have been overcome," the stranger replied, "but not easily. The operation requires elaborate preparations, and can only be performed at long intervals, and upon not more than four individuals - that is two exchanges - at once."
"May I ask what is the result of the operation, if every trace of surrounding matter should not be successfully separated?"
"Insanity - at the least. Insanity both to the ego transferred with adhesions which will be foreign to the brain with which new relations must be established, and to that which is introduced to a depleted environment."
"And if it be successful? I suppose that the knowledge - the memories - "
"You suppose rightly. I see that you perceive some of the limitations of the results of this operation, and the possibilities that remain."
"I should have though - "
"Yes. You would have guessed correctly, so far as guessing would be likely to go; and beyond that you would have seen that only experiment could resolve the enigmas your mind would raise. . . But the time for guessing is past.
"If you will listen carefully, on a matter which is likely to be of the utmost interest to yourself, it is what I propose to explain."
Wyndham did not like that expression "of the utmost interest to yourself." He did not like the way it was said. His heart missed a beat. Was he to be the subject of one of these interesting experiments?
The thought was one from which he shrank in a most unscientific spirit. The beauties of vivisection - even its moral altitudes are matters which the vivisected may fail to see. He was glad to recall - which he had been so near to forget - that you cannot die, nor suffer hurt, in a dream. He made no answer; and the stranger, after a moment of keen though quiet scrutiny, as though reading his mind very easily, commenced the explanation he had promised to give.
"I should tell you first that it has been practicable, for a very long period, to transfer all parts of the principal organs of the body, so that the anomaly was no longer possible (for instance) by which a scientist might be frustrated in his work by a defective gall bladder or a sluggish liver, while a common lunatic would be going about with these organs robustly alive. Grafting or substitution would quickly restore the physical harmony which the quality of his work required.
"You will not suppose that such results were achieved without some unexpected difficulties, some unforeseen complications, some inevitable catastrophes. But the practice is now firmly established, and it might be difficult to find a man of more than eighty or a hundred years, one or more of whose vital organs have not been substantially or radically repaired.
"You will see that this custom had beneficent consequences in ameliorating the conditions of the poor, for no child could be born who was not potentially valuable, if not in itself, yet to prolong the existence of others; and to the meanest of mankind there was opened the high, unselfish destiny that his lungs might expand with a monarch's breath, or his heart beat in a statesman's breast.
"For those wretched females who were allowed to marry, before the era of the present orderly methods, there was the hope that, if they could produce offspring of more than average quality, and with the requisite regularity, their lives might be indefinitely prolonged by a grateful country, and there were some whose bodies were so, successfully repaired or renewed that they lived for more than two hundred years.
"Nor must you suppose that the direct benefits of this advance in surgical science were confined to those who were eminent in the state, or required for the continuance of its population. Purchases and exchanges became frequent among all classes of the community, and no cause of litigation was more common than that arising from this description of bartering. A man complaining, for instance, that he had been led by fraudulent misrepresentation to surrender a sound stomach for a heart with a defective valve. And as you will easily see that at least three persons, and probably more, must have been directly involved in each of these transactions for a few men would desire to make a direct exchange of the same organ only, and none would wish to be left with two of the same kind - the equitable adjustment of these disputes might; be far from simple, and the cancellation of the contract by the return to a man of his own property might be unfair to an innocent party, not directly concerned in the dispute."
"It is an idea," Wyndham took advantage of a moment's pause to remark, forgetting his previous fear in the interest of the subject, "of many fascinating possibilities, but I should suppose that, in such cases as the women you mentioned, whose ages must have been over two hundred, there could be so little of the originals left that the question of identity would arise. Would they not have ceased to be the persons that they first were, and become compilations of other and younger women?"
"It is a question which naturally and necessarily arose at a comparatively early time, when major operations of this kind were first recognized as being of a beneficent and practicable character. It was a line of defence in an ancient and famous trial, when a wealthy criminal distributed his vital organs so freely among his associates (even including some portions of the brain itself) that there arose a serious issue of how far the human form in the dock could be held responsible for the deeds with which it was charged, or how otherwise the criminal could be, brought to justice.
"The case actually resulted in an acquittal, it being decided that the man had escaped beyond the possibility of arrest, and it was this trial which led the government of that day to set aside a large fund for the determination of the location of personality in the human body. . . with an ultimate consequence which has brought you here."
The last remark was a sharp reminder to Wyndham Smith that his interest in the instruction he was receiving might not prove to be of a merely academic kind. And feeling, like the man about to be hanged, that he could bear anything but suspense, he put the question directly, "And do you mind telling me what that is?"
"It is to that that I was about to come. But, before giving you such, information, I wish you to have a clear mind as to the nature and consequence of the transfer of the human ego from one body to another.
"In the first place, our experiments have demonstrated that the ego has an identity absolutely separate from the body which it inhabits, and over which it has a limited muscular control. It follows, as you may have anticipated, that when an ego is transferred, it leaves behind all the memories, all the knowledge, which were stored in the brain which it had previously governed, and acquires the knowledge and memories of the one which it commences to occupy.
"It might be supposed that the practical result would be as though there had been no transfer at all. But this is not so. The ego which enters the body. of another inherits the knowledge which that brain has acquired, and the physical dexterities to which it has trained its members, but does not necessarily sympathize with the proclivities which have caused that knowledge to be accumulated, or those physical abilities to develop: it may commence at once to train its acquired brain to other uses, its body to different sports.
"Having explained this you will understand that if (for instance) your own ego should be removed from your present body, and another introduced, the fresh tenant would acquire memory of this conversation, and would therefore readily understand what had occurred on an explanation being supplied. And, in the same way, if you should be transferred to another body, you would be equally so informed if the knowledge had been previously so imparted to the brain of which you would obtain control."
"You mean," Wyndham replied, endeavouring to maintain an impersonal attitude towards the subject, and suppressing the cold fear of a more immediate interest, "that if (for instance) my ego were so transferred, I should lose the memories that I now have, with all the knowledge of the time from which you say that I am already so widely removed, and should be dependent upon you to inform me even of the fact of my present identity?"
"That is what the position would be, but, in place of all from which you would have parted, you would have acquired the use of the stores of another brain, and its natural abilities, which might be more, perhaps much more, than those you had left behind, and of which also - it is an equal chance - you might make more energetic and successful use than had the ego by which they were previously controlled."
"That is quite clear," Wyndham admitted; "and I can recognize it as logical probability, though it is less easy to accept as a possible eventuality; but may I ask" - and he could not entirely control his voice, as he said this, to the casual tone which he desired to use - "why you should be. giving me this information? May I, perhaps, be privileged to watch such an experiment, so that I may describe it when I - " He was near to saying "When I wake: up," but substituted "When I return to my own time," as being more courteous to his auditor. For the denizens of a dream cannot desire to be made conscious of their own unsubstantiality, of which even the dreamer may not be aware while the dream endures. But was it really a dream? - if he could only be a little surer of that!
If - it was the next moments thought - if he could only awake! For the answer to which he was listening confirmed the worst of his secret dread:
"You have - as I can see that you are sufficiently intelligent to anticipate - the exceptional honour of having been chosen from among millions of your time and race, to be the subject of such an experiment."
Wyndham Smith did not respond with an aspect of gratitude to this complimentary assurance. He strove to convince himself that the danger which appeared to threaten him was too remote from reality - too fantastic to fear. Yet if - indeed -
"May I ask whether, if I should submit to so strange an experience, I may ultimately be restored to my own identity?"
"I regret that I cannot reply to that question, for the answer, even if I know it, which you need not assume, will give information to the ego which will shortly control your body, which it might not be convenient for it to have. . . For the moment, I must leave you, there being no more to say."
As he spoke, the stranger rose from his seat and passed out through the solid-seeming wall, which gave way before him as having no substance whatever.
Wyndham Smith was left alone to consider the fate to which he was incredibly destined. It was a suggestion of fantastic horror, and yet - He remembered a remark which had been made by Professor Kortright at the lecture last Tuesday night. He had explained, as a surprising fact, that a man has no regard for - the welfare of the corpuscles, even for the nerves of his own body, so long as he does not share their danger, or while they are powerless to hurt him with any message of their own pain.
He had said that the benefits which had resulted, in certain classes of operations, from the use of local, in addition to general anaesthetics, demonstrated that the general one does not prevent the torture of the isolated nerves, but only frustrates their efforts to awaken those of the brain itself to a kindred anguish.
Yet how many, he asked, would pay an extra fifty pounds, or even ten, to save the nerves of his own limb from such an experience, if assured that he himself would be unable to feel the pain? They would be roused to readier sympathy by some tale of the abuse of a dog in a distant town!
"I myself" - those had been the professor's words, and in saying them had he not implied all the distinction between the ego and the inhabited body which had been the theme of their discourse of the previous half-hour?
With this thought, there came also the supposition that that lecture might have supplied the idea from which this dream was born. Surely that must be so, and - unutterable relief. It was no more than a dream - indeed - a dream therefore from which it must be possible to wake, and that waking Wyndham resolved that he would no longer delay. Not but that it might have been of interest to penetrate somewhat farther into the fantasy that the dream proposed - if only, while he did so, he could be sure that it were no more.
But the uncertainty was too great to be longer endured. He was resolved to wake from a nightmare which was become too real. . . And then he found that it was something he could not do. . . Surely you could wake from a dream? Surely, surely, when you strove to wake with your utmost will, with the whole mind concentrated on what must be the waking vision - the window opposite, which must be visible in the moonlit night (Wyndham remembered that there was a moon that was near the full) the bed-rail - the familiar walls. . .
But the familiar walls did not return. He saw only the ebonised, glassy surface through which the stranger had so absurdly, so impossibly, passed away. . . He would resolve for himself if it were substance or shadow that held him now. He rose, and walked to the wall.
He felt a substance that was neither cold nor warm, being of the same temperature as the hand that he pressed against it. But otherwise it was polished granite to feel. Granite-hard: granite-smooth. He paused at the place where his late companion had vanished, feeling it with patience and care. But it was all equally smooth, equally hard. . . Very surely it was a dream. But it was a dream that he could not break.
CHAPTER TWO
And now Wyndham Smith - if it were he - if he can be properly identified in that lithe, exotic figure in the single garment of purple, so different from the appearance of the medical student that he had been a few hours (or was it something more than two millenniums?) before stretched himself on a bed. The hour must have been near to noon, for the sun shone downward into the roofless chamber, from a blue cloud-flecked sky, but he was conscious of nothing strange in being stretched supine at the highest hour of the day.
He lay busy enough, for he was occupied with his own thoughts, and it was the only occupation that most men had in the only world that he now knew. For he knew nothing now of the experiences of the body which he had once controlled, to which its parents had given the title of Wyndham Smith.
Colpeck-4XP lay on the bed, remembering that he had agreed only yesterday that his ego should be transferred to that of a primitive of the commencement of the machine age, whose ego should have control of his own body for - it had not been clear for how long. Then he could not be Colpeck-4XP? He must, in reality, be Wyndham Smith. It was no use to resent that, as he oddly did. He was himself, and should be satisfied with his conscious life, and the control of so perfect and important a physical personality. If it were true that he had once inhabited the body of a primitive, half-witted savage of the early machine age, how unbelievably fortunate he now was!
Yet, queerly, all the force of a powerful intellect found itself in difficulty when it strove to persuade him thus. All the bodily consciousness which was not his own ego, but which had subserved another for many years, rose up in impatient protest against the alien control that it now felt, and, because his own consciousness worked through it, its resentment was not easy to thrust away.
Yet it must be done. . . He was aware, for it was a remembered conversation of yesterday, that the ego which would waken today in the body of Colpeck-4XP was to be that of the primitive, Wyndham Smith, and that the intention had been to discover how one of that early age would react to the traditions and environment that he would inherit with his new body - and to the world crisis which was to culminate before the end of the present day. . . A foolish, futile thing, for the event was agreed, and he had given his own ready assent. It was worth while, if only because it was an adventure, of a kind, after the possibilities of adventure had long been lost to the hopes or fears of an ordered world.
He had agreed only yesterday about that, though perhaps with somewhat less alacrity than some others, for life was not entirely unpleasant, even in these terrible days, but he had agreed. . . At least - he? Was it he, or another, who had assented then? He remembered the promise he had made yesterday afternoon that when he waked today he would review the whole question with a firm resolution to put aside all previous bias or decision, and face the sombre prospect anew. Well, he would do that fairly enough, useless as he knew it to be. For he would weigh that which was no less than a settled and certain thing. . . How far back should he now begin?
Perhaps it would be best to go back even to the very beginning of civilizations to the utter barbarism of the period from which he supposed that he himself had come. The time which had half-emerged from the primitive custom of manual labour, and had self-styled itself the Machine Age, having no imagination of the end of that far road on which it had taken the first blind, blundering steps.
Then they had made their crude machines with their own hardened, discoloured hands. They had not even realized, in a denseness difficult to comprehend that the stored energies of the earth could be so utilized and controlled that they would do the work of men without help beyond that of the human brain - that machines would make each other far better than they had first been erected by human hands. With a comic futility they had sat in the machines they made, moving, to no useful end, about the surface of the earth, while their machines collided continually, killing both those who were seated therein, and those who walked in the same ways - killing and maiming to a total that rose into millions of ended or damaged lives and still they who remained would climb into their machines, and start them whirling about to increase the tale of the dead. . .
A wild, incredible age. An age of nations and wars. . . Perhaps it was hardly necessary to go back so far. . . There were so many things that existed then which had ceased to be. So many conditions of life that were now no more than an evil, alluring dream. . . After that, there had been the abolition of war. The abolition of nationality. The abolition of social inequalities. The abolition of the barbarisms of competition. The control or abolition of every form of animal or insect life. The control of climate, with the consequent abolition of extremes of temperature, or discomforts of tempest. The almost absolute abolition of disease. Finally, the abolition of pain, complete and final, as evidenced by the fact that he felt no smallest discomfort from the operation which must have been performed upon him.
So mankind had risen and proved its strength, coming to a serene supremacy over the follies and failures of earlier millenniums, and over the physical forces to which they had once succumbed. And so, at last, for five hundred years, they had endured a life which was without difference or result: without hope or fear, except the fear of its individual end, which would now approach, at a steady pace, to a settled date, until now, to break the monotony of eventless years, a new idea had been born. It had originated in the mind of Pilwin-C6P and was no less than that the incompetence of the Creator should be challenged and demonstrated by the universal suicide of mankind.
Languidly, indifferently with most, but with an occasional individual eagerness or enthusiasm, it had been endorsed by the huge majority of the five million adults who were now the total population of an ordered world. It had been agreed unanimously from hundred to hundred, rising in the intellectual scale (which was now immeasurable with an exact accuracy, and had become the sole basis of political organization) until it required no more than the assent of the final hundred - which he was one - to be operated of immediately.
The mind from which the suggestion had come was one from which a new idea would be likely to emanate, if any originality of purpose should still be possible to the human brain. It was not merely that he had himself the eminence of being in the first hundred. The Pilwins, for nearly two thousand years, had been intellectually distinguished, and over sixty percent of the seven hundred who now bore that name were among the first million in the mental ranking of mankind - a percentage with which even the Colpecks could not compare.
Besides that, the name had a conspicuous record for individual initiatives in earlier centuries. It was a Pilwin who had removed the ice-caps of the poles. It was another Pilwin who had conceived the bold, successful project (already partly accomplished) of destroying all forms of alien life, in one comprehensive motion, by spreading a concrete-like substance over the major portions of the earth's surface, reserving only such limited areas as might still be required for the production of human food. Not that this was an invention of any Pilwin brain. Even in barbarous times many small portions of the earth's surface had been spread with concrete, so that all possibilities of life had ceased, both beneath or above it. But that had been done without deliberate intention: a mere careless gesture of blasphemy against the Creator of life. It was a Pilwin who had first conceived it as a means of sterilising the earth in a widespread way.
It was the same Pilwin who had proposed a chemical process which would have sterilised the oceans also, though that had been obstructed by fear of sinister incidental consequences which only the experiment could have resolved; and it was another who had formulated the orderly and convenient method by which the generations were kept twenty-five years apart.
Considering the brilliant achievements of the Pilwin intellect, Wyndham Smith (as we may still conveniently call him, though with a somewhat dubious accuracy, as he reviews Colpeck's memories in a Colpeck's brain) observed that it was this custom of the quarter-century intervals that rendered the proposal of Pilwin-C6P so particularly opportune, since it meant that there were no children to be consulted, or consigned to possibly reluctant end: for a child might still exist for a space of years before the love of life would be wholly gone.
Wyndham Smith, reviewing the various arguments in favour of this procedure which his brain had evolved or heard during the last two months, and pleasantly conscious of intellectual freedom and audacity such as his ego had not previously experienced, was obliged, though with some amount of irrational reluctance, to make, frank acknowledgment of their weight and quality.
The work of mankind might have been worth the doing, or it might not. But, be that as it might, it was at least clear that that work was done. Man had come to complete supremacy over the earth, and - greater difficulty - over himself also. Contending forms of life had been eliminated, or suppressed. The major physical forces of the planet, which had made him their early sport, were now in harness. The discords and confusions which had set nation against nation, class against class, were no more than traditions of muddled incompetence, becoming increasingly difficult to realize, if not to believe.
Every form of struggle or competition, every variety of hardship, disease or pain, had been eliminated - and was it possible to regret that? If there be competition, there must be those who will fall behind. Victory must involve defeat, which is a barbarously unpleasant experience. If, as the result, they had merely discovered that, if there be none behind, there can be none in front, that pleasure ends with the cessation of pain, was it a responsibility which could be laid at any other than the Creator's door?
Now, with nothing left either to hope or fear, the generations would come and go. Every twenty-five years a quantity of selected children would be added to the population of the world. In the same period, the same number of people would pass into painless death. A generation would be born, and another die. But what use was there in that? A futile, aimless, endless monotony, which - wonderful, single remaining power - it yet lay in their hands to bring to a seemly close. . . Yes - the arguments were not easy to overset.
And this evening, at the eighteenth hour, the First Hundred were to meet to adopt or discard the proposal which had first come from themselves, and had since been agreed with unanimity by the whole remaining population of the world. . . And it was understood that it would be agreed tonight with the same unanimity - probably without discussion - unless he only were to resist.
It was only because the First Hundred would exhaust every possibility of preventing error on so momentous an issue, even when there was no doubt or division among themselves, that they had introduced him, an alien ego, to one of their own best brains, to observe how he would react to its accumulated knowledge, its recollected experiences, its instinctive emotions.
He - and he only - would be liable to resist the decision of a united world, and though he was still resolved to consider the problem in every aspect as the sun declined through the long hours of the afternoon, it was a resistance that he had little inclination to offer. Should not the curtain make its orderly fall at the close of an ended play?
CHAPTER THREE
Wyndham Smith looked around the spacious, low-ceilinged room which he knew so well. In its midst was a table, long and large, around which were a hundred seats. His acquaintance of the previous night sat at the head, and his own seat was third away on the left.
He looked at that which he scarcely saw, for his mind was occupied with the question which brought him there, and his eyes encountered familiar things. Had he still occupied the body in which he came, he would have been intrigued and puzzled by many strange and some inexplicable experiences which had been his since he had left his own room less than an hour before, but which he had not regarded at all; as he would have been baffled by the sounds of a strange tongue. For the language which he now heard was not that in which Wyndham Smith had been first addressed which had been that of his own tongue, and his own time.
He would have been puzzled even by such details as that he was not aware of any freshness or staleness of air, which was alike in an unroofed space, or in the crowd of that shallow room, but, as it was, his mind could work oblivious of surrounding sights, and only negatively aware of the familiar faces around him now. . . Faces that had differences of type and colour, and yet would have seemed strangely, bafflingly, even terribly, alike to the wonder of his previous eyes.
They were faces of some difference, in that they showed faint traces of various races, but they were alike in an impression of intellectual power of a passive sort, and still more so in a lack of animation, of physical character, which left them passionless and serene as death. It was, indeed, to the serenity of the newly dead, before corruption has seized its prey, that they may be most accurately compared, although it was clear enough that they possessed a vigour of physical life which was too constant for their regard.
Wyndham was aware - it was a routine fact, which did not need to be said - that, though they sat without visible audience, all that was spoken there would be heard by the five million population of the whole world, and would be decisive and final, if - as there could be little reason to doubt - it should approve the plan which had already received the support of all the lesser intellects of the human race.
The chairman, three seats away, commenced without rising, and without preamble or any form of address. His visible audience turned faces towards him which were gravely, unemotionally, attentive, and controlled even a faint tremor of excitement, not at the near prospect of their own extinction, but of the intellect only, at the thought of an event unprecedented, when it had seemed that all novelty must have left the world.
"We have met," he said, "to record our votes upon a resolution which has been adopted unanimously by those of lower intelligence, and which may have been discussed sufficiently by themselves, of which discussions we are all more or less completely aware. The resolution is that we shall release ourselves from the aimless burden of life by a general euthanasia which is to be arranged for the seventh noon after today. It is a course which, if it be adopted, must be unanimous, for if there be exceptions, however few, its central purpose will be upset, which is to rebuke the Creative Power by the complete self-ending of human life.
"Expressing no opinion myself, from which my position requires me to abstain until yours be known, I will ask each of you in turn whether the resolution has your support, that our verdict may be known to all those who hear."
Having said this, he addressed those who sat round the table, one by one, calling them by their distinctive numerals, and by the names of their houses, "Do you agree or dissent?" And the replies came in a steady, toneless monotony, "I agree. . ." "I agree. . ." - only the voices of the women, who were about equally numerous, being slightly softer than those of the men.
It was indeed by their voices that an alien onlooker would most readily have decided which were the women, for the dresses of all - a single garment of purple - were alike, and the hair of all was trimmed in the same way.
As the chairman commenced on his right, it followed that ninety-six of the hundred names had been called before it came to Wyndham's turn to reply. He sat listening to that monotonous chorus, of assents, and he was unsure, even then, what he would say when his time should come. His reason told him that the human race had served whatever purpose it had, and that there was an absurdity in continuing it perpetually through succeeding generations with the endless iteration of a recurring decimal.
This perception was not complicated by any theory of there being a permanent value in the individual life, or a survival from death, for such beliefs had long left the world. They had no place in the brain which he now controlled, and, even in that which his ego had ruled before, they had been regarded as too unsubstantial to affect the actual conduct of life. They had been rejected finally by implication fifteen hundred years later, when it had been resolved to limit the human race to five million selected lives.
In that resolution, which had sought no more than to limit births to a number which could realize (it had been supposed) the maximum comforts and pleasures of human existence, there had been the seed of that which was put forward today. . .
But though the new brain of Wyndham Smith might be fecund of arguments in support of the resolution, which it seemed, as the names were called, that all others approved, his ego, fresh from the strifes and discords of a different world, was still half unwilling to own their weight - would indeed have been resolved to reject them, but for a dreadful doubt which had arisen to confuse feeling and tend to enlist it in reason's cause. . . If he should dissent from the resolution, and it should thus founder for lack of the unanimity which it required, would he be allowed to continue in this life, which, with all its futile negation, was the only one that he now knew? Or would he be sent back to the unimaginable horrors and barbarisms from which he had been made aware, however feeling might revolt, that his ego came?
And then, diversely, against this instinctive revulsion that was clamorous in the pain-free body, his new-found intellect asked, If that life to those who lived it was less endurable than is yours today, why was not self-destruction then a more general thing? But yet - cold, misery, pain (his body had once felt pain, in his early days, and it was an experience he would not forget), perhaps hunger and thirst, perhaps even compulsory uncongenial toil - would they not change the present dreariness of existence to more active hell? . . . And it would soon be his turn to speak, for the voices of those who answered were near him now.
He became aware that all eyes were upon him, with a stir of interest, of expectation, which had not been evident as the question had been asked and answered till now; and he understood that they must all be aware that though they looked at a familiar form, and knew that it was controlled by a Colpeck brain, they knew also that its ego was of a distant age. He was the last insurance against mistake which the chairman had thought it prudent to introduce. . . And it was to him that the chairman was speaking now - "Do you agree or dissent?"
He heard his voice, and seemed to learn from it for the first time, what his answer would be. "I dissent."
The stir of interest, of expectation, was more pronounced. His memory told him that the assembly had not been equally moved - slight as its emotion might now be - by any previous event that it had considered within his time. But the chairman showed no emotion, no surprise, at this reply which might deny the will of almost the whole of the human race. He asked quietly, "Do you dissent from a settled mind, or do you desire that the question be more discussed?"
"I would have it further discussed."
Then it is so it shall be."
The chairman went on with the formal questions, taking the replies of the remaining two, and when it had been heard that they also agreed, so that Wyndham Smith was the sole dissenting voice in the world of men, he turned his attention to him again, with a question which was the routine of such a position.
"By what argument do you dissent?"
Wyndham did not find it easy to answer that. He might have said that he felt an instinctive antipathy to self-destruction: that his was a fighting ego which was not willing to own defeat; but he knew that his feelings had not been asked. It was reason he was invited to give.
There was a pause of silence before he said, "It is that which should be done completely, if it be attempted at all. From most evil conditions man has struggled free at the last, and has found - as you are agreed - that there is nothing better beyond: that he has come by a hard road to a house where no treasure lies. If we are so certain of that, should we not end all life, and not only ourselves? Should we not sterilize the land and sea so that life, which, there is sound reason to think, is a peculiarity of this planet alone, will come to its final end? For else, may not life assert itself in a new form which will be akin to that which we have destroyed, and our protest be a Creator's jest?"
It was not what he intended to urge. It was merely the first criticism which could be supplied by a brain which did not respond to the feeling which called upon it. In the long minutes of silence that followed - which were no more than the customary courtesy which all speakers received at that assembly, where haste was a forgotten word, and it would have been thought unmannerly to answer without a pause of consideration - he had a better thought, which he also spoke:
"Also, if it be allowed that we have come by a bad road to no better end, there is yet a choice which we might prefer to take rather than that which is so nearly agreed. We can go back by the way we came, to find, perhaps, a somewhat different advance to a fairer goal."
His words fell into the same silence, which they prolonged. He was not surprised at that, his brain being familiar with the ways of his fellow-men. He became aware that this silence was shared by five millions beyond those walls, who had supposed few moments before, that their own voices had sealed their doom.
Pilwin-C6P was the first to speak. He said, "It could be done. It might be the better way. Nor need it long defer that on which we are already resolved."
He thought only of the first proposal that Wyndham made. Being the one who had originated the idea of the cessation of human life, he would have been likely to support the resolution with more than average decision, but Wyndham's argument recalled the proposal his ancestor had made for the sterilization of the oceans, which had been rejected at that time for reasons which would have lost their force if it should be preceded by the extinction of human life. He saw his ancestor justified at the last; and though any feeling of pride or satisfaction in the prestige or achievements of his clan, or of an individual ancestor, would have been esteemed a barbaric indecency, such as he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he could be degraded to feel, yet the atavistic instinct stirred faintly beneath his mind, rendering him more tolerant of Wyndham's argument than he would otherwise have become.
It was a point on which he spoke with authority, and the chairman, after a pause of a few minutes to give opportunity for any further comment, and seeing that all were silent in acceptance of the statement that Pilwin-C6P had made, gave his ruling thereon.
"The first amendment," he said, "which has been proposed, is no more than a point of detail, such as may be resolved here without the delay which a general reference would require. On the assurance which we have received that the elimination of life in non-human forms could be completed without complicating the major proposition, I am prepared to rule that we may authorize that such steps be taken immediately that the resolution itself be accepted with the unanimity which it requires."
He addressed Wyndham directly as he concluded, "If you can accept the resolution on that condition being agreed, your second argument will not arise."
But Wyndham had also had time for thought. He was clear now as to his own will, and his arguments were gaining order and strength in a mind that must respond to a new control. "But," he replied, "it is the second which I prefer."
The chairman regarded him with a gravity which approached rebuke. If the removal of the first objection would leave him unsatisfied, what point had there been in considering it at all? But he saw that, by a fine distinction of logic, this objection might be repulsed. For Wyndham had allowed that he was open to argument on the main proposal, and it might be that, if he should be persuaded that his second proposition was of an impossible quality, he might then accept the resolution with the newly accepted condition attached thereto, which he would otherwise have declined.
He asked, "You propose that men should go back to the barbarism from which they came?"
"I propose that men might revert to conditions of less settled security."
Had Wyndham Smith been, in his previous body, in control of the brain it held, he would doubtless have surprised the assembly by following this statement with a speech in its support, which might have lengthened into thousands of randomly chosen words; but he knew that the custom here was of a more orderly kind.
The debate which went on for the next two hours was a matter of grave and silent consideration, frequently punctuated by brief, pregnant, carefully worded remarks, many of which were of such a nature as to give no indication of the side to which the speaker's mind was disposed to lean. The members of the assembly appeared to be too absolute in self-control, or too deficient in emotional vitality, to be stirred to any mental excitement, or emphasis of expression, by the momentous nature of the question with which they dealt. Only the ego of Wyndham Smith, accustomed to the urgencies of more strenuous days, was restrained with effort to the same outward placidity by the traditions of the brain of which he had so recently gained control.
But from the pregnant silence, these occasional observations, an opinion gradually emerged that there would be a probably insuperable difficulty in obtaining any general measure of agreement as to the extent or nature of the retrogression to be undertaken; an almost invincible reluctance to face once more the pains and dangers from which mankind had escaped by so bitter and long a way. The unanimity which had accepted its own defeat, which had agreed upon the fulfilment, if not the frustration, of human destiny, could not be anticipated even for the abstract principle of an alternative which must be repulsive to the finer instincts of every sensitive and civilized mind, and still less would there be any probability of agreement upon the details of retreat to the savageries of competition, the horrors of death and pain.
It was Pilwin-C6P, seeing the imminent prospect that the plan for which he felt parent's affection would go down before the opposition of a single man (and he, as they all knew, being no more than the ego a distant, barbarous age), who proposed the solution which would be sufficient save it.
"Why," he asked, "should it not be resolved that each man be free to follow the preference of his own heart? Let it be decreed that he who declines the high gesture of human suicide, by which mankind will reject the life which it has not asked, and has found to be no more than the gift of a jesting god, may revert to such barbarisms as a baser nature may prefer."
There was so near an approach, as he said this, to outdated passion in words and tone, and the proposition itself was so amazing - for it had been the fundamental principle of the proposed event that should extinguish human life with an entire finality - that it would have produced a clamour of bewildered protest in an assembly of a more volatile kind. As it was it was followed by a universal silence, in which the first stupefactions of surprise gave way to understanding and then consent.
For, even though this Colpeck of alien ego should elect (fantastic thought!) to remain in solitary discord when the whole procession of his fellow-men should have passed through the gates of death, it would still appear a fantasy beyond serious consideration that he should find a companion of kindred mood. Solitary as he would be - with no possibility of procreation remaining - he might plumb such depths of barbarism as his soul desired, might prolong his absurdity of existence to its latest hour, and he would be no more than a final mockery in his Creator's eyes, an optheosis of the futility of the race He made. . . The proposition would have been agreed without further words, but that it was desirable that the five millions of inferior listening intellects should understand the decision, and the conclusion from which it came.
The resolution, as first proposed, was adopted with one dissentient, and on the chairman's ruling that this was sufficient to fulfil the condition of unanimity on which the proposition was based, Wyndham understood, from the knowledge of their procedure his brain supplied, that it was an assumption beyond the necessity of words that all must accept the fate for which their own votes had been freely cast. The authority of the assembly would be forthwith used for the prompt and painless end of themselves and their fellow-men. It was that for which they had not the will and sanction alone, but the ample power; and from which only such as he would have further freedom of choice, from the moment the resolution had been proclaimed.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Wyndham Smith, ranking fourth among the intellects of the world by the right of his Colpeck brain, had listened to the monotonous assents of the ninety-six voices that had preceded his own, his eyes had followed the repeated question down the farther side of the table, looking without curiosity at faces he knew before, of men and women whose lives were as empty, their characters as colourless, as was his own in this alien personality that he had so strangely acquired.
It was not likely that he should regard with particularity a girl of no more than twenty-three years, at the far end of the table, who was placed as ranking fifty-seventh among this intellectual aristocracy to which she belonged.
Yet his eyes had lingered a moment, his emotion stirred to admiration at a hint of vivacity, a difference of animation which lit the cold, sad beauty of her face, and subtly separated it from the equally regular profiles of other women who sat above or below her. The moment of interest, of admiration - it was no longer than that - was of the ego of Wyndham Smith, and was countered by the protest of the Colpeck brain, which had been taught to view her with a faint disfavour, being the strongest emotion it was accustomed to experience, and which also knew the vague suspicion, and the definite taboo, which divided her from the expected destiny of the women of her generation.
The Colpeck brain, had it concentrated upon her sufficiently, hearing the toneless assent she gave to the verdict of common death might have thought that there were few among the five millions of mankind - to be exact, no more than forty-four others - who would be so certain to cast their votes in the same scale.
For at the time of her birth the settled peace of the world had been stirred and shocked by the discovery of a monstrous crime. A woman who could not have been very far from her fiftieth year, and who had borne in her youth the three children allowed by law, had actually contributed three further children to the nurseries of the race.
It was a monstrosity against which no precautions were taken, since at this period any initiative of criminality had long left the world. It was discovered only by, unlikely accident, shortly after the birth of the third - being, actually, the woman's sixth - child. It stirred the emotions of men, at once to horror and fear, as it would have seemed unlikely that they would ever be moved again, like the last ripple of a tide that was settling to eternal quiet. The woman's death was quickly agreed, as a warning, however needless, to other lawless impulses which might linger among mankind.
The deaths of three children were decreed with a more urgent necessity, for ancient wisdom had taught that it is among the later children whom a woman bears that there will be found the fire-bands who scorch their kind. Indeed, it was only after the establishment of the custom of limiting children that the world could be observed to approach steadily to the placid harbour in which it was anchored now.
But here a difficulty arose. The fourth and fifth children, having been registered and branded in the usual routine of the common nursery, were identified and eliminated without difficulty. But the mother had unfortunately had some hours of warning before the discovery of her criminality had been finally demonstrated, during which she had contrived to change her just-born child with some other, so that, after the most exhaustive investigation, there had still remained forty-five girl-children of whom it was impossible to say with certainty that any one might not be the sixth offspring of the woman's most lawless blood. Faced with this position, the wisdom of the race, putting passion aside, had preferred the lesser evil, and had offered her pardon if she would identify the issue of her iniquity. But this, with an unrepentant obstinacy, she had declined to do; and when every resort of ingenuity had been exhausted in the endeavour to discover the secret which she concealed (or which, indeed, it is a more probable supposition was no longer hers, owing to the method she had employed for mixing the children), she was reluctantly executed.
After the first sound and natural impulse to destroy the forty-five infants among whom the one unfit for life had been inextricably mingled had been debated, it was weakly resolved, and may be regarded as indicative of the decadence of a failing world, to let them live, under some disabilities of education and other experiences, with the condition that they should not be allowed, on reaching the age of maturity, to contribute to the usual quota of babies, so that the disturbing element might not take evil root in the generation to come.
But, in spite - unless it were because? - of the disabilities they had experienced, when, on the commencement of their twentieth year, they had been intellectually graded by the usual perfect and impartial method, it was found that they were of a most unusual average intelligence, so that though the one already mentioned was actually ranked among the first hundred of the five millions of mankind, the suspicion which this circumstance must have fixed upon her was mitigated by the fact that several others, all of whom could not be of abnormal ancestry, were almost equally eminent. . .
To the first proposal of universal euthanasia there were few who had responded with a more ready affirmative than had Vinetta (a name which, individual and with no following numerals, proclaimed her, in spite of the recognition of her intellectual status, as outcast among her kind), which is not surprising in consideration of the life of watchful repression which had been hers since, as a child of three, she had overheard the remark of a female keeper: "That's the one, if you ask me; the little misborn girl."
From that hour she had moved and spoken in cautious dread lest some development of character, even some trick of gesture, might betray her, as having been that of the mother whom, with a growing confidence, she believed to have been her own. For who could say that the doom which had been suspended before might not still fall upon her, If her development should appear to supply sufficient evidence of the parent from whom she came? Her own destruction, and the release of her companions from disabilities which were not justly theirs, might have been considered measures of an equal and obvious equity.
So she had moved, watchful, imitative, among the tepid emotions of aimless, emulationless, dreadless surrounding lives, till the hints of her unwary childhood were forgotten or negatived by the restraints and repressions of later years. Saved from sourness or malignity of temper by a nature which would have been buoyant, joyous, adventurous, in more normal circumstances, her thoughts were yet darkened by the bitter knowledge of her mother's murder, and by a mental aloofness, half hatred and half contempt, towards the civilization which she had entered through no legal door.
Of all the millions who were united in passive recognition of the fact that their uncoloured lives had drifted into a calm that was worse than wreck, she may have been the only woman whose heartbeat hard at times with a rebellion she dared not show. She assented at once to the Colpeck project, not as thinking it a gesture by which the Creator must take rebuke, but rather as one which He would accept with the same willingness as herself, and with entire approval of the self-judgment by which the human race had saved Him the trouble of staging their appropriate end.
When Wyndham Smith had proposed his second objection to the resolution her heart had leaped to a sudden hope, which might, in a different environment, have given birth to incautious words. But she was saved from that by the custom which discouraged unpondered speech, and by the repressions of two decades.
The quick hope had died as she had silently recognized the absence of response among those around her, and then - at last had leaped again to the flame of wild audacity of which she saw that she must not give the faintest sign. Inwardly she congratulated herself on the wisdom of her earlier silence, for it was clear that the resolution would only have been accepted in the form in which it was finally passed with the certain confidence that one man alone would elect to live - even if he would do so after considering the solitude which would be before him, with the discomforts which his isolation would inevitably involve.
She did not dare to look up the table to Wyndham Smith lest their eyes should meet, and her glance betray to others the emotions she must not show. She sat passive, with downcast eyes, striving to isolate herself in her own thoughts, and as she reflected thus there came a doubt, and a quietening fear.
Welcome as the proposal had been, gladly as she would have accepted the adventure of living in the old dangerous, doubtful ways, she did not like the direction from which it came. She had a special aversion, not to this Colpeck alone, but to the whole Colpeck clan. It was a Colpeck who had been active in the investigation which had exposed her mother's escapade: another Colpeck who had proposed the verdict by which she died. It was peculiarly the Colpeck policies, the Colpeck attitude, which had brought her race to this point from which it sought escape by the road of death. Passion towards an individual, either of hate or love, she had been taught to regard as a vulgar criminality such as had long ceased to degrade her kind. But she knew herself to have many criminal impulses which she dared not show. Her existence was an impropriety in itself. She had the lawless mind, the unnatural emotions of a sixth child: she had the blood of one who had played the outlaw among her kind.
Now she thought to make secret approach to the one man who refused the wisdom of all his race, and, in doing this, to flout their will, even as her mother had done before, and as he had no purpose to do. What he did - whether he should stand out, or cease to oppose that which he could not stay - would be done with the permission of all. What she would propose to him would be to make derision of the gesture of refusal which they had planned to make in the face of God, so that it might rouse no more than derisive laughter in the Heaven which they defied.
Like her mother, she would declare lonely war upon the will and wisdom of all her kind, but now in a larger way, by which she might defeat the settled purpose of all. Was it to this great end that she was born, and that her mother had sinned? But - what would a Colpeck say? Might he not decline the offer with horror or contempt? She felt that this was what the Colpeck who was fourth in the intellectual order - the Colpeck of yesterday - would be likely to do. He was not one to condone anything of a lawless kind. And she felt that he disliked and distrusted in his tepid way, as she disliked him with the pulse of a freer blood. . . She wished it had been almost any but he. But - the Colpeck of yesterday? He had seemed somewhat different in the last hour. . . And then she remembered - and it was then that she was aware of a sharp fear - where the difference lay, she knew that the hours of sleep of the coming night were to see the reversal of the operation of the night before. The ego of the primitive man which now ruled over the Colpeck brain would be restored to the savage from whom it came, and he would be returned to his own time, with no more than the vexation of a dream that he could not clearly recall. The restored Colpeck ego would be able to review the memory of what he had thought and said today, but would he approve and adopt? It was doubtful - or it might be said that it was less likely than that. It was an improbable thing. Vinetta went to her own room with sombre and thoughtful eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wyndham Smith - or let us say the body that had been his when he walked in another world - paced with a restless impotence the limits of that confining room, which it seemed that those who would visit him could enter or leave at will, but which met him at every point with smooth, impenetrable walls, through which he could find no breach.
He knew - for he had been told, and he half believed - that he was no more than the one-day occupant of a body that was not his; that this strange-seeming environment was his familiar home, and the memories, that seemed so natural and so near, were no more than those of an alien ego, which himself had never experienced, and which tomorrow would be outside his knowledge or recollection, when he should have resumed control of his native body and brain.
He half believed - indeed, more than half - for his memory revealed that which had been spoken in this same room on the previous night, when it had been Wyndham Smith himself who had listened and made response. And, beyond that, he was conscious of some discords of feeling and judgment, some reluctances of his own ego to accept the explosive standards of life and conduct which were approved by the brain which he now controlled. Without knowledge or memory of the life of the world which was round him now, he felt, though he was debarred from its actual contact or sight, that he would control the body of Wyndham Smith; to somewhat different purposes than those which had produced the accumulated experiences of which he was conscious now. . . He was roused from these thoughts by a woman's voice.
"I suppose," it said, "you do not know who I am?"
He turned to see a girls form, with a face the beauty of which was saddened by a shadow of self-restraint, even of self-repression, but was yet serene, as being assured of its own efficiency to meet the challenge of life in whatever form. The shadow was not one that would have been seen except by one who looked with the eyes of another world. "No," he said, with a slow deliberation, "I do not know you at all."
"So," she said, speaking as slowly as he had done, though from a different cause, for she was using language which was strange to her, and she saw that the error of but one word might be fatal to all she hoped - "so I supposed it would be. . . Yet you know enough to guess that you may have seen me with other eyes."
"Yes, I can guess that."
"Yet" she went on, "it is as strangers that we must meet now. . . Do you think me one who would be likely to lie?"
He weighed the slow gravity of her speech with such wits as he had, and in the light of the experiences of Wyndham Smith in another world. He looked into eyes of a very clear grey, under darker brows, which it would be easier to love than to disbelieve.
"No," he said, "I do not think you would lie."
"Then I can say that which would give life to me, and, it may be, also to you. . . Do you wish to die, either in your own body, or in that which you now wear?"
"No," he said, "I would rather live." In the body of Wyndham Smith there could be no doubt about that.
"Then if you will listen to me, you may both live, as may I. . . I should warn you first that you must not mention that I have been here, from whatever cause. It would be fatal to me, and to that body to which you may return at your next sleep, nor could I say what result it would have to that in which you are now. . . But I tell you that which must be known by the brain which you now rule, for its use at a later time.
She went on in clear, careful, unemotional words, and with an economical brevity of explanation that allowed no obtrusive detail to obscure the outline of that which she had to say. She told of the conditions of life in her own world, and the despair which had risen at last into a common resolve to end the appalling quiet of its stormless seas. She told of how the ego which had belonged to the body of Wyndham Smith had inspired that into which it had been transferred to a rejection of what would else have been no less than the universal will. She told of other things which it is needless to detail here.
She said at last, "What I must ask you is this, and you must know that the choice is yours, for I will have nothing done by a trick, or against your will. Would you retain the body you now have, or resume that which was yours till the last hour, of which I have told you all that I can in a little space? And before you answer that, I would show you my own fear that if you should return to the brain and body you had before, you may lack the resolution to take the hard path of continuing life, which it is my purpose to share."
"I do not think you need fear that."
"Yet I do; and, if you feel that you love life you may fear it for yourself. For you must consider that you had no will to make stand against the common resolve, when you had that body before."
The Colpeck ego that was in the body of Wyndham Smith considered this. He could not think that he would embrace death in a needless way; yet the argument had a force that he could not deny, and he would be fool indeed if he should ask his return to a body that lacked courage to guard the existence he valued now. And he thought that, whether this were a real danger or not, it was a transfer of very doubtful advantage to him. Now that he had the knowledge and memories that were Wyndham Smith's, he knew that he had a good life, and one to be guarded with care, even though it might have its pains, its perils, its frustrations and toils. The alternative of a time which had become so barren of pain and grief that men had come to an end of joy would have had little allure, even without the further knowledge that this life was, at the best, to be cast aside for an experimental solitary reversion to more primitive things.
"I am content," he said, "to be where I am, and to go thus to the backward days, if you can bring it to that."
Vinetta was glad to hear him say that, for it took her forward a short way on her chosen road, but she was not greatly surprised, and she knew that the part that was still ahead was of a more dangerous kind, and might be far harder to win.
"I can promise nothing," she said; "for it must be arranged, if at all, so that he will also agree, to whom I must go now. I must talk to him in a straight way, as I have done here, and what I offer he may refuse, and perhaps denounce. But I shall not be easy to thwart, for I try for a stake which is great to me, being a better life than I thought ever to have, besides that it will bring that which my mother did to a great end, such as she would have been glad to foresee."
"As for you, if I fail, you will know well enough, when those who have charge will come to put you to sleep as they did before, but, if I succeed, I suppose that you may go to sleep when you next will; and, beyond that, you will know nothing at all.
Having said that, she went, with no further words nor regard for him whom she left behind, with whom she had no concern, whether for evil or good. Except that she had a bitter thought: "He is Colpeck still, in whatever body he be, it is all one; and he had no liking for me, for the dream that we two might have been as one in a world alone, though it stirred (in a faint way) the body which another ego had ruled, left him cold of soul, as he ever was.
"Am I the only one of my race who has living blood? And will the new ego that is in the Colpeck body today be of strength to rouse it to better ends, or will its own cowardice prevail, when he considers what, may be the toils of a lonely life? Will he be glad of the offer I make, as giving comradeship, and a further hope than could be his, if they should leave him alone? Or will his brain still work in the Colpeck way, so that he will see outrage in the lawless course by which I think to mock the will of the race, and make Heaven's jest of that which they seek to do?
"Well, it will be soon known, and if I fail we must all go to the common doom; for there has been enough of the life we live. They are right in that, having weighed themselves, as I think, in a true scale."
With these thoughts she went. As for Wyndham Smith, he waked in his bed, being aware that he had slept too long, for broad daylight was in the room.
"I have had," he said, "a most silly dream."
And, if, after that day, he was somewhat different from what he had been before, and ordered his life to more futile ends, it was no more than may often be seen, that men will change as the years go by; and there may be many reasons for that, and among them one that we do not guess.
CHAPTER SIX
Vinetta knew that what she did next must be at some risk to herself, but it was the path to the sole hope that she had. Nor may the risk at this stage have been very great. She had the advantage of being under no suspicion at all. Her lawless birth (which was no more than a doubt against which the odds were forty-four to one) had long ceased to be questioned, in view of the discretions of recent years. And her own vote had been given in the popular, expected, direction. Nor did suspicion readily stir among those who, however intellectually eminent they might be in comparison with their contemporaries, had long ceased to be alert to the possibilities of rebellion in a world where lawless impulses had become as rare as noxious weeds in their glasshouses of husbandry.
Her dread was less that she might be observed to seek conference with Colpeck-4XP than that she might fail to persuade him to what she would.
She knew that the operation which would restore the twentieth-century ego to its barbarous body would be timed for eight a.m., and would involve preparations by which its subjects would be isolated for a previous hour. It was shortly after nine when she returned to her own apartment, after visiting the body of Wyndham Smith. She had chosen a time at which she had known that the routines of her own companions, which were of an absolute regularity, would secure her from observation.
Now she would wait until ten, at which hour the ninety-nine other members of her hundred (and therefore the co-occupants of a single residence) would be engaged at their solitary meals. She was of a disposition to outrage convention, and test the quality of this alien ego, by visiting Colpeck-4XP at a time which would certainly be unobserved, but which would be considered fundamentally indecent by any human being now living, except perhaps herself - she was less than sure of that - and, even more doubtfully, him.
But she would try. And if he should refuse to talk under such conditions, or to be observed during the taking of food, he might, at least, understand that there must be urgent cause for such an intrusion and consent to meet her at a later hour, for which there would still be time. And that decision gave her a clear period of leisure in which to arrange her own thoughts; to face boldly her lawless desires, and the criminalities by which she contemplated their realization; and to order the arguments by which she must endeavour to win this alluringly barbarous stranger who had come into possession of Colpeck body and Colpeck brain to co-operate with her.
And as she thought during the next hour, her mind busy with many arguments and doubts, many speculations and fears, she would have said that she was oppressed by the greatest trouble her life had known, which would be hard to deny, she being faced by the twilight of all her race, and with no more than precarious hope of avoiding the common death. Yet the fact was that she had been waked to a more vivid mood than she had known in the years behind. Life roused itself at the nearness of death, as, in those who deserve its boon, it will ever do. If she had more fear than her life had known till that hour, she had also more active hope. Fear and hope fed from the same dish, on which they equally thrived. She had more fear than when she had voted for her own end, for resignation was gone.
There came a time when her evening meal slid on to the table, as it would ever do at the same hour, by which she knew that the time for which she waited had come.
She must not stay to eat, though the routines of life had become so absolute that she had a puzzled wonder as to what the consequences of such abstention might prove to be. She rose at once from the pneumatic couch on which she had reclined in the relaxation of thought, and made a way to the apartment of Colpeck-4XP which no bolts obstructed, and which was independent of opening doors.
The solidity of matter, which had been an accepted faith of the nineteenth century, had become, in the twentieth, more or less theoretically denied or experimentally refuted, without being recognized for the utter delusion which it was subsequently demonstrated to be.
It was recognized as a mathematical possibility that, as an atom consists of molecules as far apart from one another, and relatively as small, as the planets of the solar system, if each of these molecules should be themselves of no greater density, nor composed of more solid particles, then, if the universe were compressed to an absolute solidity, it might - even on the assumption that the material has objective reality - be compressed into less space than is now occupied by a pin's head: but this knowledge was incomplete and unapplied.
Vinetta (avoiding the sliding rails by which the food-machines and other services did their silent, punctual work) walked through walls that were opaque to sight, and contained sound, but were no hindrance to her, or to the purple garment she wore. The privacies of the world which Vinetta knew were not secured by bolt or lock, but by an iron rule of routine, which had become stronger than any law.
Now she made a circuitous way through rooms which would be vacant at such an hour, and walked at last, with a quiet face, but a fast-beating heart, into the one she sought.
"Do you mind," she asked, "if I talk to you now? It is important - to me," Colpeck-4XP had been sucking mixed fruit-juices through a tube, in small quantities, at the regulation intervals. A plate of some pink substance which, apart from its colour, had the appearance of grated cheese stood before him to be eaten later. He looked up astonished, perhaps repelled, by this invasion, unprecedented not merely in his individual experiences but in the records of eccentricity or crime during several previous centuries.
"I shouldn't have come without cause," she said uncertainly, controlling with difficulty the desire to withdraw from the sight of another human being absorbing drink.
"No," he agreed dubiously. "I suppose not." He had ceased to drink. He laid down the glass tubes. Her sense of having outraged both his modesty and her own diminished somewhat with this cessation, though, as his eyes met hers, she could not control a blush such as may not have been observed for three hundred years on a woman's face.
"I haven't come to Colpeck-4XP," she went on, bravely ignoring her burning cheeks, "but to Wyndham Smith."
That was what she had resolved to and it seemed to have some effect.
"Yes," he said, though still in that dubious puzzled voice. "There is that. But why have you come?"
"I went to see Colpeck-4XP," she answered, "an hour ago."
"You - Yes, I see. But why?"
"He will be willing to remain in his present body, if you concur."
The information was of a nature to cause Wyndham Smith, now that the first shock of traditional unseemliness was over, to forget the circumstances in which they met.
He had been thinking rather sombrely, during the last hour, of the alternatives that lay before him - either to return to a barbarous, bloody world of which he had no recollection now, and of which he could only form a vaguely terrible picture, or to face the utter loneliness of a deserted earth, with no better prospect than solitary death at last, which would end his species with himself - one of these, or else to join the general euthanasia which was the deliberately selected doom of his fellow-men.
But the actual choice he had supposed to be even less than that. The accepted rule was that a transferred identity must be adjusted within two clays unless both the egos concerned should prefer to continue in their exchanged tenements, and such an occurrence had never been. Was it likely now?
The information she brought gave him a choice which he might not have had, and which might not be easy to make. It was welcome news. But it explained nothing. Before he discussed, he must understand. "Why," he asked, "did you get him to tell you that?"
"Because it was essential for me to know whether, if I should agree on something with you tonight, I should have to deal with someone else tomorrow."
Yes. He saw that. That was sense. But what bargain could she wish to make? "To what," he asked, "do you want me to agree?"
"Before I say that, will you tell me whether you mean to go back to the other life?"
"It sounds the most natural thing to do."
"History tells us that it was very horrible. Pain. Heat. Cold. Quarrels. Bad food. Diseases. All sorts of muddle and dirt. Even insects under your clothes."
"We haven't decided that this life is any good."
"But that must have been worse in ever so many ways."
And yet people wished to live."
"But you are going to live. You've arranged that."
"Not in a very attractive manner."
"Then it is just to oblige Colpeck-4XP to come back to that, if he thinks even the twentieth century wouldn't be so bad? It's you who've done that for him, and then you won't face it yourself."
"That's foolish. He can end his life here, if he will. He'll be no worse off than he was before. In fact, better. I've given him a chance that he wouldn't have had the initiative to get for himself.
This was a disconcerting reply. She had hoped something from this argument of justice, knowing that the brain which Wyndham Smith now controlled was of a particular scrupulosity on points For honour. But his reply was difficult to rebut. She had a better hope when he added, "But I haven't said yet that I won't let him have his way."
She said, "There won't be much pleasure in being the only creature alive, even though the machines go on working, as I suppose they will, more or less"
"I doubt that. . . No. I don't see that there will."
Their eyes met. Prompted by the insurgent ego of twentieth-century barbarism which now controlled it, the brain of Colpeck-4XP became alive to the implication of this amazing interview.
"Suppose," she said, refusing to withdraw the gaze which he met so disconcertingly, "that you were not quite alone?"
He did not affect to misunderstand He answered directly, "You could not do that, even if I would agree - if you would dare. You have voted for your own death."
"But I was the rebel child."
It was an audacious assertion, even though it might be a true guess. Yet what penalty could it now bear, even though it were believed, even though it should be broadcast to the 4,999,998, who would be shocked by its shameless boast? There can be little for fear or hope, for resentment or retribution, among those who have united to end their race.
After this, there were some minutes of silence. The ego of Wyndham Smith warred, with the brain, the acquired character, the traditions of Colpeck-4XP, and the conflict was confused beyond speedy determination or assurance of victory for either side.
Vinetta understood something of this. She judged correctly that to ask too much at this moment might be to get nothing at all, which she must not risk.
But these new sharp emotions of hope and doubt had a fighting quality which would not be still. She asked, "You will not go back?"
He considered this. "No," he said, with deliberation. "I will stay here. I will see it out. That is, if he agree."
"He will agree," she said confidently. Her voice had a note of victory, of exaltation, such as had not been heard for centuries from a human throat.
With cautious boldness, she pushed forward her lines of attack, asking more, though much less than all. "You will not expose me that I have come here?"
No," he answered, with the same reluctant-seeming deliberation as before, as though being forced along a path that he feared to tread, "I will not do that."
"I wish," she said, "you would eat. Why should you stay for me? It is I, not you, who transgress. The time is short now. You will miss your meal."
"So," he answered, "will you." He added, "I cannot eat while you are here. It is not done."
She saw, as he said this, that he waged a fight which she must help him to win. She must not forget that he was handicapped with a Colpeck brain, or rather with one that had been trained to value the Colpeck traditions, cautions and inhibitions.
She said, "There was a time when men ate in each other's presence."
"There was a time," he replied, "as you have reminded me, when insects might crawl upon human flesh." His hand made a spasmodic shrinking movement as he said this. It was a vile thought for one before whose birth most insects had left the world.
"There was a later time when it became a marriage custom to eat together, though all other men, except young children, would feed apart."
"But," he replied, "that custom is long since dead in more decent times. It is left behind."
She asked, "Where will our customs be in a week's time? We do well to boast! But there will be one custom that is ended now."
She reached over. She took his spoon. She ate a mouthful of food. After that, she went with averted eyes. Neither did he look at her. They were both ashamed at what she had done. But she had raised a chaos within his heart that he could not still.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"I am not Colpeck-4XP I am Wyndham Smith." So he told himself a score of times as he paced his room during the night, sometimes in explanation, sometimes in self-excuse, sometimes in the endeavour to mould desire to the point of settled resolve.
Yet it was hard to realise, if not to believe. Its truth was evident in the fact alone that he was awake and disturbed with conflicting thoughts. Every memory, every tradition of conduct, every argument with which his mind was stored was on the side of the race to which he was otherwise so remote, yet which, by one irrevocable word, had become his in its hour of death.
He saw that he had three questions to vex his mind, of which he must dispose in an orderly rotation.
(1) Did he really intend to survive the general race-suicide which he had been solitary to oppose?
(2) If so, did he wish Vinetta to be his wife in the future days?
(3) If he did, was there any possible method by which she could escape the common fate, after she had consented thereto?
He saw that, if he should answer the first question in the negative, the other two did not arise, and that it should therefore have prior consideration. Similarly, if the second should be negatived, the third need not be asked, and that was further evidence that he had numbered them rightly.
Yet their precedence was less simple than that, for, had the first stood alone, he would have had a week for its leisured consideration, whereas an affirmative answer to the second might entail prompt action in various ways, so that, for its sake, the prior question must be promptly resolved.
Again, the reply to the second might be influenced by those which could be given to the other two, so that, at the last, he saw that he must reverse their order. As he debated these questions, he saw, more clearly than he had done before, the fundamental upheaval of all the habits and experiences of life, as he had hitherto lived it, which a lonely survival would mean; which, in most ways, would be little different if the survivors were two.
Vaguely, he saw that the machines must go - that fertility must be released, to recapture an earth from which it had been driven as an insanitary, obscene, insubordinate force, too barbarous for modern man to endure. The results of such changes must be beyond the forecasting of human wit. A new balance of nature must be established. It might not occur without much wastage, amidst which his own life, or that of his children, might be overwhelmed. He had thought that, whether there should be one or two that survived, there would be no more than minor resulting differences. And so, in many ways, it must be.
But with the thought of children, he observed one enormous variation. If he were to survive alone, it could but defer for a few more years the final passing of the race of men from the earth which they had lacked wisdom to make a tolerable home. But if there were two - that would be, indeed, to mock the whole purpose of this gesture by which man was to reject the gift of life, casting it back with contempt at the feet of God. Suppose the two who lived should found, to better purpose, a better race? Those who died might be judging themselves rather than their Creator, and their verdict might not be wrong.
As he thought this, the brain of Colpeck-4XP, driven by the ego of Wyndham Smith, stirred itself to a passionate hope, to hard resolve. It roused itself to a great game, which must be played for the greatest stake that a man could have. And the mere thought of taking on such conflict against fate, and against his kind, brought a sense of bewildering freedom, of escape from the smooth, soft, eventless servitude which had gained no more than the absence of all the adverse impacts which had pained or thwarted those heroic ancestors who had endured under different skies. He saw that, in a blind folly, man had sought to change the nature and purpose of human life, saying that it was evil only of which they would make an end, and, arm-in-arm, good and evil together had left the world. . .
From many conflicting thoughts he was aware of one resolution finally formed. He would live, if he could - with her.
Would he live alone? He was less sure. He was less inclined to that than before. After this new dream, it had a barren, abortive aspect, which he would be tardy to choose.
Could he contrive that not only his life, but hers should endure? It was hard to see how that could be done. Yet a way there must surely be. . . But first he would communicate with him who now had the body of Wyndham Smith - which it was not easy to think that any ego would wish to hold - and agree that they should continue as they now were.
From the high dream he had had, he came to a sharp fear that this agreement would not be made; but he found that Vinetta had been right about that, for the ego of Colpeck-4XP was content to flee from a dying world to one which was more familiar to the brain that now served its will.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wyndham Smith - as it may be preferable to call him, if it be allowed that the ego is more than the body in which it dwells - did not sleep till late, and waked some minutes after the universal hour. It was a fault of routine which it would have been his normal duty to report to the physician of his hundred, who would have examined him, and either rebuked whatever deviation of conduct might have caused this eccentricity, or recommended either immediate operation, or an early visit to the nearest euthanasia furnace if he had observed any indication of failing health, for it had long been an axiom of worldly wisdom that, however absolute the control of pain might have become, the beginning of a disease is the better end of it at which to die.
But even the most docile member of the community might have felt it needless to take such precaution when it was understood that the thousand of such refuges which the world contained were to be visited by the whole of its inhabitants in a week's time. To Wyndham Smith it came as no more than a moment's recollection of the precepts that childhood learned, to be rejected in the instant that followed. The illegality which he had in mind was more serious in itself, and less to be condoned by the resolution that the last night's council had taken. He waited until the hour of the morning meal arrived, drank and ate with a brevity which would leave him a clear forty minutes free from fear of interruption in what he did, and went to Vinetta's room.
Having reached it, he knew that he had come to a place where no one would intrude unasked, if the present order should continue for many years; nor could those who were within be seen or overheard. These personal rooms, with their opaque though penetrable walls, were the only real privacies that the earth contained at a time when any sound, near or far, excepting themselves, could be picked up by a million receivers, if they should chance to be directed upon the area from which it came.
His caution must be that he should not exceed his time, and that Vinetta should neither be observed to be in consultation with him, nor to neglect the normal occupations that passed the tedium of her waking hours.
She looked up as he entered with sudden joy, her eyes shone with something of the buoyant courage of youth, meeting in his own an excitement, if not an elation, that equalled hers, for she guessed at once what his coming meant, and that the first battle was almost won.
She said, "I was sure you would. I have not let myself doubt. Not even when I was most afraid in the night."
He answered gravely, but with the same buoyancy in his voice and the thought he spoke, "Yesterday it was five millions to one. We have halved it now! But we must not think that it will be easy to do."
Her bowl of food was half-emptied. She pushed it towards him with its single spoon. She said, "You must eat with me. You reckon well. But you must not call us two. We are one from now.
He took up the spoon, but not as readily as she would have liked, so that she added, "It is no more than your custom was."
"Yes," he agreed, with a puzzled look, as of one who strives to recall a forgotten dream, "I suppose it was." He put the spoon to his mouth. But having taken this in a ritual way, he pushed the bowl back. "I had some", he said, "before I came here. I need not rob you of food. I have come to talk."
"So we must," she agreed. "And they will not guess. . . It would be useless to propose that they leave me alive. They would never consent to that."
"No. They would destroy you at once, if they had the least suspicion of what we plan. They would tell the machines. After the vote you gave, they would have all men's support."
She knew that to be true. The order of the First Hundred would be obeyed by those who attended on the machines, and the automata had a terrible power. It would be useless to evade or resist. They both knew that; too surely for the wasting of words.
She asked, thinking of the machines, "Will they order them to destroy themselves, or will they let them go on?"
"I have wondered that. But we shall hear. As I am to remain alive, they may be willing to consult my preference in what they do."
"I suppose that, as orders are issued by our Hundred alone, they may decide that we who belong thereto shall be the last to remain alive."
"So we must hope that they will. But I cannot urge it. It is not my concern. And it might be unwise that it should be proposed by you."
"We must hope that its wisdom will be seen by others."
"But even so - "
"Yes. They are sure to require the whole of us to enter together. But we have time to devise a plan."
"So we must. . . It was a foolish thing that I proposed - that sterilizing of the sea. I did not foresee that the discussion would develop the way it did."
"Yes. But there is one thing sure. It cannot be done in a week. I wonder how Pilwin-C6P will get over that?"
"He may propose that the machines be so directed that they will continue whatever he may require them to do. There would be no difficulty there."
She looked at him with startled eyes, guessing his thought. "And you might stop them when all but ourselves were dead? You would interfere with the machines?"
Her voice shook now with a fear with which she had been hypnotized from her childhood's days. It was such as the twentieth century could only partially understand. A child who attempted to embrace a dynamo's armature would certainly have been pulled away: it would not have been encouraged to put its head under a steam-hammer, or to fondle a chaff-cutter, and there were some factory laws for the fencing off of machines of particularly bad reputation, as savage animals at a zoo might be barred from the public reach. But the machines of that day were primitive in character, most of them capable of nothing more than one operation monotonously repeated, and generally even that would require the constant watchfulness of a human colleague. They were unable to feed each other. Some of them were even unable to oil themselves.
Naturally with the passing centuries, changes came. The machines of this day had become automatic, large and small, capable of many complicated operations, and though without any originating intelligence, yet able to act upon intelligent directions in sustained, discriminating ways.
It was nearly seven hundred years since the genius of the Japanese designer, Hirato, had utilized the sense of smell for the extermination of the Asian tiger. He devised small, crawling, automatic machines with strong steel-toothed jaws, which would follow any strong scent to which they were introduced, and let them loose on the tiger's tracks. A second machine, set on the same track as the first, with an hour's interval, might lead a long way or short, but would be likely to come at last to a place where a tiger had struck impotently at a cold, hard, crawling beast that nuzzled maddeningly into his side, and the relentless jaws, roused by the blows, had snapped back with a grip they would not loose until that into which they bit had left them quiet for a long hour, which no living, tortured tiger could be expected to do.
That had been a novelty then. There was even an old painting extant which showed the last tigers collected on a little tableland to which the machines could not climb, and about forty of these implacable, single-purposed automata ringing them round, and waiting with unrelenting patience to resume their tireless, sleepless pursuit, when desperation or the pangs of thirst should madden the beasts to bound over them and continue their futile flights.
It was by means of many variations and extensions of this idea, aided by the use of disease viruses of many kinds, that sentient life had been almost completely destroyed upon the land-surfaces of the earth, even where they had not been sterilized by wide-spreading layers of concrete which had been poured, like molten lava from huge mountain-side cauldrons set up in Rocky Mountains, Andes, Himalayas and Alps, and forming, as they solidified, hard crusts in which no life could root, and through which none could pierce upward to find the sun.
The machines of this day were, or had been in past centuries, initiated by human thought. They carried out the orders the First Hundred, as they were interpreted to them by lesser men. But they did this with little present interference. They designed and constructed each other. They prepared and supplied themselves with the fuel which they required. Their operations were so extensive, so interdependent, so fundamental, that any ill-formed or unauthorized interference might have incalculable and disastrous results. It was one of the first nursery lessons that nothing could excuse tampering with a machine, or obstruction of its operations. To forget this was the one unpardonable delinquency for which the punishment would be instant death.
So it had been understood. It was a law which had taken no toll of the present generation of human lives, for it had been universally obeyed. The inhibition had become too strong to be broken at any likely occasion. When Vinetta exclaimed, in a troubled half-incredulous wonder of realization, "You would interfere with those machines?" Wyndham understood very well the instinctive terror that shook her mind. But he was already resisting the impulses of his new brain more instantly, more successfully, than he had at first been able to do. The knowledge that he had only just come into control of that which another had assembled and moulded was sufficient to encourage him to question its precepts, unless they were suggested to him with clear reason in their support.
He answered, "I should be cautious in what I did. But one thing is sure They will be confused, sooner or later, when men are dead. They will end themselves. We should expect that. We should not propose to continue them, which would require knowledge I have not got, and might, in any event, be beyond our power, being no more than two.
"We shall not have the same dread that men have had in the past days lest confusion arise among them, but we must beware that they do us no harm, in a blind way, when they are destroying themselves."
"What a world it will be," she said, "when they have done that! These walls! There will be no houses at all. There will be cold when they have gone! There will be parts of the world, if not all, where we could not live without making heat. We must find how this part would be. Perhaps, if we were near a volcano - They must leave the cars, so that we shall not be kept in one place."
"Yes," he agreed. "We have much to think of. But you must not show that it is of moment to you."
She had, in fact, echoed one of his own thoughts, which had gone farther. They might ask him to choose, before they would become busy to make an end, in what part of the earth he would wish to be. It might be wise - he had some reason to think it would - to choose a spot many thousands of miles away. But to make such a journey, leaving Vinetta behind, would be to make it improbable that they would meet again, even though she should find means to preserve her life when her companions died
Facilities of transport were not numerous in these days. The aeroplane as a means of human transit had been obsolete for three hundred years. What use was there in rising, at foolish peril, into the skies, when you could do nothing at last but come back to earth at the same or another place? It was futility in excelsis, and therefore to be rejected even by the most futile age that the earth had seen. For all places of descent had become alike. In a world in which all differences of season or climates had been adjusted, all physical discomforts expelled, and on which vegetation had been largely suppressed, there was little disposition to move about. Oral communication had become absolute over the whole earth. Competition had been eliminated. Occupation had almost entirely ceased. The five thousand communities, each grouped round its central euthanasia furnace, and each housed in ten separate tenements, existed, but did not live.
In contrast to the desire for continual motion which had been the tragic folly of the twentieth century - a period which had honestly and simply believed that the "progress" of humanity would be demonstrated in future years by the ever increasing speed at which it would whirl about, and which had pledged the sincerity of this curious faith in the blood of a million dead - the final generation of men required a compelling reason for motion rather than for remaining still.
It possessed road-tracks, and a kind of automatic car in which men or goods could be conveyed from one place to another, but these were extensively employed, and most often were clocked out to their destinations without bearing a human occupant.
Wyndham rose. He said, "I must go now. We have seven days. We need do nothing before tonight, when we shall learn more of what the programme will be. After that, I will come again."
"No," she said. "I will come to you."
They parted without meeting of hands or lips, but, with a moment's hesitation, a feeling of awkwardness, of shyness, very strange to themselves, and which was the measure of the novel intimacy which they had established in an age which had become complacent in the belief that it had outmoded love.
CHAPTER NINE
It might have been expected, with some reason in its support, that those who had resolved upon such an act as would destroy not only themselves but the race to which they belonged would have shown symptoms, in the brief interval which remained, of depression, if not despair.
But Wyndham Smith, moving among those who had been the lifelong acquaintances - "friends" would be too warm a word for that tepid relationship - of the body and memories he now possessed, observed an opposite issue. There was slight, but definite, increase of animation among them, as though, having resolved to die, by the resolution, however faintly, they had come to life - to such life, at least, as they were ever destined to have.
He was conscious also of a lack of the usual cordiality - repulsion would be too strong a word - in their attitude towards himself, which he was at first disposed to attribute to their knowledge that, though he moved with the form, and spoke with the memories of Colpeck-4XP, he was actually the strange ego of a distant and most barbarous time. But further reflections and observations showed him that it had a different and deeper cause. It was his decision to live, even in the solitude of an abandoned world, which divided them from him. He experienced something of the loneliness of one who rejects the religion his kindred own.
He would have been more conscious of, perhaps more depressed by, this attitude, had not his mind been sustained by the thought of Vinetta's loyalty, and occupied by vague plans to preserve her life, and equally vague speculations as to what their common future would be likely to be.
So far as he could anticipate the course of events, the coming week would see no change in the eventless routines of life, except such as might be involved in arranging for the general dissolution, and this would require little beyond preparations of the temples of euthanasia for use on a larger scale than that for which they had been designed. There would also be the question of the machines, which, apart from any request from himself, might be left to work out their own destructions, and that of the sterilization of the oceans, for which his own blundering diplomacy was primarily responsible. He supposed that arrangements would be made for the people of each centre to enter the euthanasia furnaces hundred by hundred, the council doing so at the last, when they had assured themselves that not only had the other nine hundred of their community gone on their unreturning journey, but that an enduring silence had settled upon the five thousand centres of human life.
Among that final hundred Vinetta would be expected to take her orderly place in the procession of death. What possible excuse would be accepted? What effectual resistance could be made? What hope was there that the remaining ninety-eight would proceed to an abortive annihilation which would leave her alive to I propagate their species anew, and make mockery of their own intention of mocking God? He thought of many devices, many plans, but, so far, only to put them aside. He knew that he had to foil ninety-eight of the best brains in the world, of which three were better than his. He could but hope a woman's wit was working to better purpose than his could do.
He saw that they must depend entirely upon their own resources for neither he nor she had any personal influence or authority, which they could exercise for their own ultimate benefits, apart from the ruling Hundred to which they belonged. Under the urgency of his lawless twentieth-century will, the brain of Colpeck-4XP devised a most cunning idea by which all he sought might have been gained, by an order which was within his personal authority, and would have done all that the occasion required.
The trouble was that it could not be privately issued. It could not be privy to himself and those of lower grade who would accept it from him. For nothing could be privately done. When the First Hundred deliberated, the whole of the world's inhabitants listened-in. In fact, everyone could hear everything. The only privacies were in the feeding and sleeping rooms, and there was no possibility of issuing an order during the hours that they were occupied, for everyone was in the same retirement. It would have no reception at all.
Neither was there hope of escape on the earth's surface for Vinetta and himself, even though they could have found means of sustaining life, while facing the hostility of their fellows: not in its most solitary island, its deepest, remotest cave.
There were no lands which heat or cold, deluge or drought, caused to be avoided by social men. Nowhere that would be secure from the iron-toothed automata which would be set to smell their sleeping-couches, loosed upon them, and tireless to track them down. . .
Considering the coldness of his reception among those with whom he took the routine exercises of the day, Wyndham was led to wonder whether this feeling might not augment itself during the week to a more active antipathy, and add further danger to a situation already appearing sufficiently ominous. But reflection enabled him to put this doubt confidently aside.
There was not, he concluded, enough of aggressive spirit among this race, self-defeated and self-doomed in its attempt to dodge the divine law that only by opposition is strength sustained, to raise any dangerous heat of animosity against himself. Not even though it should be increasingly realized, as the days passed, that this man who had elected to remain alive was not, in his essential soul, one of themselves, but an alien from a barbarous time.
And their well-trained subordination to restrictive law, all the negative virtues to which they had been moulded by a social order which had no criminal element, no opposition, no rebel motions of any kind, would be sufficient for their restraint.
Though the impulses of his own alien ego contemplated rebellion, he had coolness of judgment to understand how impossible any lawless or separate action would be to these men and women whose lives of negative security had been repeated for centuries in a monotony broken only, as by a long, slow ripple on a surface of windless sea, by the periodic selecting of mates, the preparation of the public nurseries, and the training of a new generation to accept the calm atmosphere of an existence which bartered pleasure for the absence of pain.
A celestial watcher, observing that, as the centuries passed, each of these periods had been approached with a diminishing alacrity, or even a positive and progressive unwillingness to encounter the adventurous responsibilities which they involved, might have seen the logical, inevitable end.
Wyndham Smith concluded that, so long as his compact with Vinetta should remain secret, there would be nothing for himself to fear from his fellow-men. But should that be known, there would be no mercy to hope, no defense useful to urge. They would be destroyed together by the cold justice which would hold her to have been bound by her own vote, and it would be a sentence beyond evasion, and without appeal.
But this secret he might hope that they would not learn. Had it not left the problem of saving her own life unsolved, there would have been no more consolation in that.
In such thoughts the day passed, and the hour of the council meeting returned.
CHAPTER TEN
Wyndham Smith took his familiar place with a sense of frustration, of having made a mistake, which was, in itself, an indication of the changed ego which controlled the processes of the Colpeck brain. At intervals during the day, and with increasing inclination during the last two hours, it had occurred to him that it might be advantageous to have a talk with Pilwin-C6P before the council should meet.
It would have enabled him to ascertain what the proposals for the sterilization of the oceans were, and to consider to what extent it would be to his interest to support or accept them. It would be a natural curiosity for him to feel, a natural enquiry to make; and if it should appear to indicate that he was already shaken in his wild intention of surviving his fellow-men - well, there might be no harm in that!
He might even have been able to Influence the event, to come to an understanding with Pilwin-C6P in advance of the meeting, upon a matter which, from opposite angles, was of more interest to themselves than to the general body of the community. But he had remembered that Pilwin-C6P was not particularly friendly to himself. Tepidly they had disliked each other. This feeling stirred in him now with an increased virility. Hesitating, he had let the time pass.
It was a strange feeling to one who had little previous experience of divided will, disturbing his mind with a profundity difficult for one of our habits of indecision to understand. He took his seat now with consciousness of a mental disturbance which, if he should fail to control it firmly, might cause him to betray his alien ego by some abrupt or unseemly word. He looked round on the familiar faces of those who went placidly on their deathward, self-chosen way, with a sense of separation, of latent hostility, which would increase with each passing hour.
Only the thought of Vinetta was potent to balance and restrain his mind, and she was the one whom he must not see.
The chairman commencing without preamble, as the habit was, said first, "To operate the resolution of yesterday, I have had an instruction prepared for your approval. I believe it to be the general desire that our intention should be fulfilled with the dignity of deliberation, but as speedily as may be consistent therewith. It is evident that our thousands cannot terminate themselves simultaneously in a seemly manner. The congestion of the disintegrators would be too great. But in companies of one hundred each, at intervals of twelve hours, it should be possible without exception, at each of the five thousand centres.
"I propose that the order of the procession shall be left for the free determination of each centre, which will naturally consider our and its own convenience in withholding to the last those who are in any way concerned in control or provision of the essential services.
"I propose that the procession shall begin at six a.m. tomorrow, and that the succeeding hundreds shall gain oblivion at intervals of twelve hours thereafter, so that - as we shall necessarily be the last of our own thousand - our own release must be deferred until five days hence, at this hour."
Having said this, the chairman waited for about five minutes, during which no one spoke, and after this interval of assenting silence he put the question to each in turn, and the chorus of "I agree" - "I agree" went down the length of the table and came up on the nearer side, until, arriving at Wyndham Smith, the chairman said, "I suppose that you do not vote?" And he replied, "I do not dissent," as he knew that the rules of procedure for such occasions required him to do.
In fact, the resolution was one to which, had it not been liable to misunderstanding, he would have assented with pleasure. It deferred Vinetta's danger until the last, and that with the satisfaction of thinking that the forces of opposition would be diminished by half a million twice daily, until at last they would be a mere half-million to two! And considering how the half-million would be scattered over the earth's surface, and engaged in simultaneous self-destruction, perhaps ninety-eight to two would be a truer arithmetic. With the odds moving so rapidly in the right direction, Wyndham might be excused a moment of satisfaction, feeling the terms of the resolution to be of great importance than the fact that Vinetta, voting for it, had confirmed her assent.
Having disposed of the main proposition with such pleasant unanimity, the chairman came to the further business arising from the resolutions of the previous day.
"It having been resolved," he said, "that we should precede our own departure by doing whatever the circumstances may allow to abate the vexation of life in inferior forms, and in particular from its further gestation in the vast reservoirs of the oceans, and this being a matter on which our brother Pilwin-C6P is our acknowledged authority, it may be convenient to hear his advice thereon."
It was an invitation which appeared to be expected, and to which Pilwin-C6P was quite ready to respond. With no more pause than the etiquette of the assembly required he proceeded to make a statement delivered in the usual leisurely manner, but with a faintly oracular tone that stirred Wyndham Smith to a fresh antipathy, which he rebuked in vain as evidence of the inability of his barbarous ego to accept the restraints and standards of a more civilized time. Did he wish to be incapable of strong feelings? Even of strong dislikes? He was not sure that he did! But he must cease to debate himself. He must listen. What was the sententious fool saying now?
"We know that life, at least within its own most limited range, which is no more than a short distance above the earth's surface, and a shorter below, has a most insurgent quality. It exists in almost infinite variety, in almost incredible minuteness, in an incalculable number of individual units. It has a persistence, and an adaptability, very difficult to restrain, or overcome.
"Yet. . . we have found ways. To an extent we have succeeded. If it were practicable to cover the whole surface of land and sea with a coating of concrete no more than two feet in thickness, it is probable that the problem would have been finally solved. But that is not practicable.
"My ancestor, Pilwin-V2H, thought that it could be accomplished other ways. He had a scheme by which at last the earth would have been divested of life, excepting only ourselves, and any inferior organisms which might be required directly for our own use.
"It would be vain to consider now whether, or how far, he were right or wrong. He would have commenced upon the oceans, and the collective wisdom of his contemporaries decided that it was an experiment too hazardous in its results for them to permit.
"But the record of his proposals - of the methods he would have adopted - remains. And the two main objections, which were raised at the time, no longer apply.
"It was said first that the consequences could not be entirely foreseen or controlled, and that they might prove to be inimical to the health or comfort of mankind when the destruction would have reached an irrevocable point. With that opening objection we are no longer concerned.
"It was also urged that the means available were inadequate to the proposed occasion. That view was adopted by a large majority of the council of that time, and may have been right, though it was one with which Pilwin-V2H, and others who specialized in his department, did not agree. But this, again, can give no guidance to us, for we shall be able to utilize machinery which either did not exist at that time, or was required for human service.
The wind-controls in the polar regions and the Sahara, together with the Australian, Gobi, and Mississippi temperature plants could all be diverted to this purpose, and would provide a total of sustained efficiency which even the oceans might not be wide or deep enough to resist successfully."
As he ceased, a strange sound came from the lower end of the table, the sound of fear in a human voice. With less than a seemly interval after C6P had spoken, it asked, "You would not release the winds while we still live?"
"No. It would be absurd to propose that. The machinery would be diverted from its present uses on our last day."
A graver, move self-controlled voice asked, "The machinery would continue to operate for a sufficient time?"
"We can see no reason for doubting that. It might continue even u