The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Our sun,” intoned Boswell. “Our sun. . . .”

  (Are Boswell and the biologist destined to be among the last of the human race? Read the absorbing conclusion to this masterful novel in the next issue.)

  1935

  DAWN TO DUSK

  l We have already learned, during the first two parts of this amazing novel, that the race of man is about to end, not through any fault of its own or any destruction from space, as in most science-fiction stories dealing with this idea, but simply because man had lost the power to reproduce his own kind.

  Boswell and the biologist, coming from our own time, which is practically the beginning of civilization, have slept for two billion years to awaken in the future, when man was about to die.

  However, the story is not yet ended, and, we have often heard, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”—though it certainly is a very slim hope in this case.

  Very seldom have we come across such a vivid and logical story of the entire existence of mankind in this solar system.

  PART THREE

  Conclusion

  WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE:

  l Professor Reinhardt invites six men to his home in Boston, five of whom are distinguished, world-renowned scientists, the other being a young chemist friend of his. He tells them that he has discovered the secret of suspended animation and intends to go to sleep, with any who will accompany him, for ten to twenty thousand years. All of them refuse, laughing at his crazy idea, except the young chemist and two of the scientists who go with him into the long sleep to the future world. Professor Reinhardt and Boswell, the chemist, are the only ones who survive. They find themselves in a strange world, and they can only guess what year it is. The strange beings, though human, strike them as far advanced over their own type, and this leads them to think that they have traveled much more than twenty thousand years into the future. Then, as an after-effect of the sleep-virus, they fall unconscious for a while.

  After their complete recovery from their time-voyage, they become fast friends with Monituperal, a historian of the future, and they are shocked to learn that they had been in the state of suspended animation for two billion years!—instead of the supposed maximum of a half-million. They are on Mercury, Earth having died ages before, and the sun has waned to almost a cinder. Monituperal tells them part of the Story of Mankind, the rest of which appears in this instalment. As part two closes, we find that the biologist and Boswell had looked at all of the planets in the solar system, through an intricate mechanism, and found them all dead and barren, save Mercury. Sterility, however, is about to spell the doom of humanity, the death of the sun being no serious obstacle to the supercivilization of the End. Now go on with the story:

  CHAPTER IX

  The Pace of Progress

  l Boswell lowered himself into his seat. Above him was suspended the queer orb that Monituperal had described as a vision and sound projector. Near him was seated the professor, his kindly brown eyes clear after his long and refreshing sleep. In front of them both was seated Monituperal, grave and thoughtful. They were about to take up the promised Story of Mankind.

  Boswell felt exuberant. The “day” before he had been unduly depressed both by the tragic revelation of doom to civilization and the visions of a host of dead worlds. But sleep had softened the distressing reality and he awaited the words of Monituperal with a fierce expectancy. The Story of Mankind, stretching over a period of two billion years, ought assuredly to be profoundly interesting. What accomplishments, achievements, projects, and dreams must have realized themselves in that time, all products of that spark known as Intellect, he thought to himself. He forced to the back of his mind any abnormal thoughts, determined to enjoy to the full what Monituperal would reveal.

  Finally Monituperal lifted a finger and came to life from the seeming trance he had been in. After the globe above them had taken a position between them, the bulbous-headed man spoke.

  “Professor Reinhardt and Andrew Boswell, I have promised you a Story of Mankind in the solar system. Later, during your period of education, you will be given a much completer series of data, but at present I will give the skeleton outline of that record. In view of the fact that the period of time covered will be two billion ‘years,’ it must necessarily be very sketchy and incomplete, a thread rather than the whole cloth. I am telling you this story because it will help your minds to bridge that enormous gap between the present and that remote past from which you have come. It will also immeasurably help you to adjust yourselves to this life of which as yet you have had but the briefest glimpse, for certain definite reasons.

  “First of all, let us define civilization. What is your idea of it, Professor Reinhardt?”

  The biologist thought a moment. “I would call it the rise of rational life to a state of undisturbable efficiency and independence of Nature.”

  “And what is your definition, Andrew Boswell?” asked Monituperal.

  Boswell thought longer than the biologist had. “Civilization, I would say, is the progress of Intellect against Nature, meaning nature in its broadest sense, including human nature.”

  Monituperal smiled his half-smile. “You must pardon my asking you questions once in a while, my friends, but it is interesting to us to hear your answers, reflecting as they do the psychology of early Man. You are both right on the face of things and as far as your experience can guide you, but actually Civilization is not a fight between Man and Nature, but alliance. Nature, it is dreadfully true, is powerful and destructive, but it offers more of help than it does of hindrance. Once Man sees the benefits of Nature instead of its potential destructiveness, he can win Nature as a steadfast ally. For every evil there is a cure; it took Man almost to the present to fully learn that. And now that we know it. . . .”

  Monituperal shook himself free of a spell of melancholy that suddenly fell upon him.

  “That, my friends, was the lesson Man gradually learnt as he lived and thrived. At first it seemed like a battle against Nature. Nature seamed so persistently bent on destroying and breaking-up the works of Man. But Man could not know from the start that with the benefits he could get from Nature for but the asking, he could be forever free of catastrophe. He had to learn that slowly and painfully, point by point, item by item. He grieved when he lost a friend or relation, not realizing that his grief was pointless and unnecessary as long as the race lived on. The individual, in relation to the whole race, counts for little. . . . You think differently, Andrew Boswell?”

  Boswell started at this bit of mindreading, for he had actually been doubting within himself.

  “In a way, yes,” he stammered as Professor Reinhardt looked at him in surprise. But Monituperal was not angry or surprised.

  “It’s this, Monituperal,” continued Boswell more firmly. “The continuation of the race does not carry with it the continuation of the same degree of intellect. Each man born must relearn what his predecessors have learned before him. In this light, the individual, could he live indefinitely, would prove just as capable and advanced as the race, living and dying individual lives beside him.”

  Monituperal nodded. “Granted, but there has never been found a way to prolong individual life more than a scant five or six hundred of your ‘years.’ Death to our bodies has staved off the efforts of all Mankind’s terrific power in science to increase the life span. It is something removed entirely from the jurisdiction of even Nature. It is in the hands of that Higher Power that rules our lives, however remotely. Only by the continuation of the race has Mankind been able to grow the flower of divine intellect. It seems a wasteful process, because, as you say, each man must relearn what has gone before and work from there on. But it is the rule of life.”

  “Where does the intellect go when death claims a man?” asked Boswell.

  Monituperal threw up his hands. “That is something our minds can in nowise predict or find out, Andrew Boswell. It is one of the mysteries of life. From the Dawn of Life to its end, Mankind has wonde
red that over and over. The answer is not of this life’s understanding. We are helpless before it.”

  “Then what can the race accomplish that the individual can’t?” asked Boswell curiously. “If the same spiritual problems confront the race at the end as confronted each individual in the beginning, what is the purpose of endless continuation?”

  “As I said previously, we today know no more about the purpose of life than the first man at the Dawn of Life. We frankly admit it to be an unsolvable problem. But this is leading us nowhere at present. Let us leave the discussions on philosophy for some future time. My story today has to do with the material and scientific advancement of Mankind since the Dawn of Life.

  “As I have suggested before, our actual knowledge of the beginnings of rational life in the solar system is as nothing. But by undeniable facts in certain experiments with the spores of intelligence, we have derived a series of suppositions that must closely approach the truth.

  “Sometime in the long ago past—it could not have been far removed from your age—when the earth was ideally suited for life, some of those spores of intelligence settled in its hot and misty atmosphere. Where they came from, what strange peoples of what distant star system made them, how long they drifted in space, we can never know. But they carried that spark of intellect. Within its shell, each bit of frozen protoplasm had that quality that to this day has never been analyzed, isolated, or artificially duplicated—rational intelligence. It is neither chemical, physical, nor electrical in nature. It is not a ray or beam or corpuscle. It is not matter nor energy. It is something beyond and above all these—something man cannot reproduce.

  l “These spores, little as we know of their ultimate nature, we do know to be very fertile if placed in the right sort of living conditions. In experiments performed many times in a variety of ways, we have watched these spores melt off their outer shell which man equipped them with for protection, and burrow themselves into mud, dirt, or almost anything, provided there is warmth, light, and moisture present. But here they die off quickly, just as completely as a full grown man dies, unless they meet with some form of life already there, non-rational life, of course. From the experiments we have deduced the following: they cannot of themselves evolve into a form of life; they die quite easily if it is absent; they require nourishment after the hard shell is off; and the intellect contained in them often remains submerged for periods of time that may be measured in ages. It was found that only upon a peculiar process of actual merging with some primal principle of life would the spark of intellect reappear, but only after ages of evolution. By the use of a multitude of scientific principles, the first experimenters with the spores fused them in a biological sense into a primal cell and then caused that cell to evolve into endless forms of species in comparatively short periods of time. Even then, some of the complete experiments took hundreds of ‘years,’ being carried on from generation to generation. The most unexplainable thing that came to the experimenters’ notice was that the first signs of intelligence always delayed in appearance until suddenly it would appear in one of the long chains of evolved creatures that had originated from the original cell fused with the original spore. Since that time, which was a half million ‘years’ ago, a set of complicated rules has been worked out that explains that curious submergence of intelligence in favor of later reappearance. But they are too complicated to even touch upon now.

  “Suffice it to say that there have been produced forms of rational life in the laboratories which derived solely from one spore and one cell. They were not left living for very good reasons, as they resembled the human form not in the least. It would have probably marked the downfall of Mankind to have allowed these forms of rational life to live and reproduce along with us.

  “So from these facts it became apparent that only under the most favorable of conditions, by the sheerest of chances, would rational life spring up on a world and thrive. It is highly probable that only one of the perhaps countless spores that touched Earth and the other planets in that dim past when the solar system struck a swarm of the spores, is responsible for Mankind existing in the solar system today. In the first place, only earth was ideally conditioned at the time when the spores arrived. In the second place, non-rational life had evolved just to the point where a spore could find its way into one of the primal cells.

  “It is a fascinating and at the same time morbid question for us to ask or rather wonder if any of the countless spores we have scattered into space will ever strike the right conditions and evolve into a new civilization. We can never know. Only on some unformed star system or distant nebulae can that happen and it will not take place for a length of time that makes the two billion ‘years’ we talk about seem like the wink of an eye.”

  Professor Reinhardt had been sitting up tensely during the preceding description of the biological experiments, clasping and unclasping his hands spasmodically, for it had quickened his innate scientific interest in the science that he had followed so devotedly during his other life. Now he relaxed somewhat, but his eyes were shining eagerly.

  Monituperal continued. “So by resemblances, we surmise that rational life arose on earth through the medium of the evolving forms of life, finally coming to the front only when the species of genus homo had appeared. We know very little of the numerous forms of life between the primal cell and man—our earliest records tell us about only a very few—but they were all skipped by that elusive quality of rational intelligence until genus homo spread his arms to the heavens above and began to think and wonder. From then on it became a matter of development. No doubt the earlier civilizations were crude and ‘barbaric’—as I will find out more fully from you when I read your brains—but the spark, once there, grew and gained power. Along with it grew up the forms of non-rational life that have evolved in turn upon almost every planet and planetary satellite in the solar system and which will evolve eventually on our dying sun when it cools down to the proper point. But only on Earth was there a class of living creatures with divine intellect. Non-rational life lives and reproduces and dies without leaving voluntary trace of its existence; only man has always left premeditated links from the past—which is only one of the great differences between rational and non-rational life.

  “Now from supposition we skip to fact. Of the period in which you lived we know absolutely nothing. No records exist telling of your age except vague traditions, and sometimes seemingly fantastic—in our conception—tales. The Man from the Dawn of Life—as he has been called ever since he was found a million ‘years’ ago—was of an age approximately a hundred thousand ‘years’ after you. He was our only connecting link to the origin of life, for the first permanent records of Mankind were not made until a million ‘years’ after that.

  “I will sketch briefly what we learned from him. His civilization was hardly more advanced than yours, I presume, at least in the scale with which we measure advancement, but it seems that they had traditions that dated back to the ‘Pre-Glacial Period,’ as they called it, which told of ships that visited other planets. Apparently, Mankind, in the latter part of your period, had interplanetary connections, but the secret had been lost after the devastation of the ice age. This ice age not only destroyed a well-advanced civilization, but it sealed like a book the beginnings of Mankind so that they were in the main ignorant of the origin of life except in a vague way.

  l “This Man of the Dawn looked very much like you in shape and form and features. He revealed that there were many different ‘races’ of Mankind on Earth, almost a different race on each of the numerous ‘islands’ he spoke about. Some were dark, some light; some big, some small; some clever, some dull. They had wars and much disagreement, crime, religion, and perhaps everything you had in just a different degree. It seems that the whole earth at that time was divided by the abundant waters into innumerable islands, none larger than about ten thousand ‘square miles.’ How does that compare with the earth you knew?”

  “Astounding
ly different,” answered Professor Reinhardt. “In our time there were five large areas of land and only a few islands, easily counted.”

  Monituperal nodded and went on. “Some of the traditions that they had concerning the age before the ice are very curious and interesting. I have mentioned interplanetary travel. Another dealt with war, and if it is anything like the truth, I am afraid that the earth must have rocked and trembled at times as warlike humans battled each other. Their tradition tells in glowing rhetoric of titanic struggles in which stupendous engines of destruction hurled terrific energies about in a mad attempt of humans to settle their petty differences. The air was said to crackle and flame with lurid electricity and piercing beams and scathing rays and bullet-like ships and a host of other things are mentioned in those tales. How much is truth our informer could not say, but doubtless a good deal of it was based on fact.

  “Our attitude today toward the thought of war, which is a thought that comes to us only from aged history, is definitely impersonal. I doubt that one of us living today, excepting you two, can even remotely think of war and see a true picture of it. It has been bred out of our minds and all we feel today is a sort of pity for those early humans who thought of war as a necessity.

  “Then many more of their traditions spoke of mysterious and almost divine discoveries that had been irretrievably lost during the ice age when Man had been driven to the equator and barely survived there in small numbers, losing much of his previous knowledge in the primitive struggle to live against unyielding Nature.