by H. G. Wells
shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and
personal reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains
and set the seas in their places and change the currents of the
wind.'
'It is the next wave,' said Fowler, who had come out upon the
terrace and seated himself silently behind Karenin's chair.
'Of course, in the old days,' said Edwards, 'men were tied to
their city or their country, tied to the homes they owned or the
work they did…'
'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limit to
man's power of self-modification.
'There is none,' said Fowler, walking forward and sitting down
upon the parapet in front of Karenin so that he could see his
face. 'There is no absolutelimit to either knowledge or
power… I hope you do not tire yourself talking.'
'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while
men will cease to be tired. I suppose in a little time you will
give us something that will hurry away the fatigue products and
restore our jaded tissues almost at once. This old machine may
be made to run without slacking or cessation.'
'That is possible, Karenin. But there is much to learn.'
'And all the hours we give to digestion and half living; don't
you think there will be some way of saving these?'
Fowler nodded assent.
'And then sleep again. When man with his blazing lights made an
end to night in his towns and houses-it is only a hundred years
or so ago that that was done-then it followed he would presently
resent his eight hours of uselessness. Shan't we presently take
a tabloid or lie in some field of force that will enable us to do
with an hour or so of slumber and rise refreshed again?'
'Frobisher and Ameer Ali have done work in that direction.'
'And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the
system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you
lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the
passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man
who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward
to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years.
And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him,
the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his
body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his
body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred. The
psychologists are learning how to mould minds, to reduce and
remove bad complexes of thought and motive, to relieve pressures
and broaden ideas. So that we are becoming more and more capable
of transmitting what we have learnt and preserving it for the
race. The race, the racial wisdom, science, gather power
continually to subdue the individual man to its own end. Is that
not so?'
Fowler said that it was, and for a time he was telling Karenin of
new work that was in progress in India and Russia. 'And how is
it with heredity?' asked Karenin.
Fowler told them of the mass of inquiry accumulated and arranged
by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the
laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the
complexions and many of the parental qualities could be
determined.
'He can actually DO--?'
'It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph,' said
Fowler, 'but to-morrow it will be practicable.'
'You see,' cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and
Edith, 'while we have been theorising about men and women, here
is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for
ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a
minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll
have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal
limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross
inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled
cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these
things I feel like that-like a wet, crawling new moth that still
fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take
us?'
'Beyond humanity,' said Kahn.
'No,' said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth
that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round
planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley
slave…
'In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange
gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar
gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be
venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough
for us; our spirit will reach out… Cannot you see how that
little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and
glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up.
They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will
follow them…
'It is as if a great window opened,' said Karenin.
Section 9
As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went
up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better
watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming
of the afterglow. They were joined by two of the surgeons from
the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought
Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup. It was a cloudless,
windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the
north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on
Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the
east. The little group of people watched them pass over the
mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they
talked of the work that the observatory was doing. From that they
passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so
Karenin's thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and
the great future that was opening upon man's imagination. He
asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities
of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the
things they told him. And as they talked the sun touched the
mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and indented
hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.
Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of
incandescence, and shaded his eyes and became silent.
Presently he gave a little start.
'What?' asked Rachel Borken.
'I had forgotten,' he said.
'What had you forgotten?'
'I had forgotten about the operation to-morrow. I have been so
interested as Man to-day that I have nearly forgotten Marcus
Karenin. Marcus Karenin must go under your knife to-morrow,
Fowler, and very probably Marcus Karenin will die.' He raised
his slightly shrivelled hand. 'It does not matter, Fowler. It
scarcely matters even to me. For indeed is it Karenin who has
been sitting here and talking; is it not rather a common mind,
Fowler, that has played about between us? You and
I and all of
us have added thought to thought, but the thread is neither you
nor me. What is true we all have; when the individual has
altogether brought himself to the test and winnowing of
expression, then the individual is done. I feel as though I had
already been emptied out of that little vessel, that Marcus
Karenin, which in my youth held me so tightly and completely.
Your beauty, dear Edith, and your broad brow, dear Rachel, and
you, Fowler, with your firm and skilful hands, are now almost as
much to me as this hand that beats the arm of my chair. And as
little me. And the spirit that desires to know, the spirit that
resolves to do, that spirit that lives and has talked in us
to-day, lived in Athens, lived in Florence, lives on, I know, for
ever…
'And you, old Sun, with your sword of flame searing these poor
eyes of Marcus for the last time of all, beware of me! You think
I die-and indeed Iam only taking off one more coat to get at
you. I have threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I
warn you I shall be coming. When Iam altogether stripped and my
disguises thrown away. Very soon now, old Sun, I shall launch
myself at you, and I shall reach you and I shall put my foot on
your spotted face and tug you about by your fiery locks. One step
I shall take to the moon, and then I shall leap at you. I've
talked to you before, old Sun, I've talked to you a million
times, and now Iam beginning to remember. Yes-long ago, long
ago, before I had stripped off a few thousand generations, dust
now and forgotten, I was a hairy savage and I pointed my hand at
you and-clearly I remember it!-I saw you in a net. Have you
forgotten that, old Sun?…
'Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the
individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my
billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common
purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountains from me,
well may you cower…'
Section 10
Karenin desired that he might dreamalone for a little while
before he returned to the cell in which he was to sleep. He was
given relief for a pain that began to trouble him and wrapped
warmly about with furs, for a great coldness was creeping over
all things, and so they left him, and he sat for a long time
watching the afterglow give place to the darkness of night.
It seemed to those who had to watch over him unobtrusively lest
he should be in want of any attention, that he mused very deeply.
The white and purple peaks against the golden sky sank down into
cold, blue remoteness, glowed out again and faded again, and the
burning cressets of the Indian stars, that even the moonrise
cannot altogether quench, began their vigil. The moon rose
behind the towering screen of dark precipices to the east, and
long before it emerged above these, its slanting beams had filled
the deep gorges below with luminous mist and turned the towers
and pinnacles of Lio Porgyul to a magic dreamcastle of radiance
and wonder…
Came a great uprush of ghostly light above the black rim of
rocks, and then like a bubble that is blown and detaches itself
the moon floated off clear into the unfathomable dark sky…
And then Karenin stood up. He walked a few paces along the
terrace and remained for a time gazing up at that great silver
disc, that silvery shield that must needs be man's first conquest
in outer space…
Presently he turned about and stood with his hands folded behind
him, looking at the northward stars…
At length he went to his own cell. He lay down there and slept
peacefully till the morning. And early in the morning they came
to him and the anaesthetic was given him and the operation
performed.
It was altogether successful, but Karenin was weak and he had to
lie very still; and about seven days later a blood clot detached
itself from the healing scar and travelled to his heart, and he
died in an instant in the night.
The End
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