The Speculative Fiction of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

Just then it burst out, “Boom-boom-boom!” like a million thunderstorms in one, and made the whole heavens rock. Then there was a sudden and awful glare of light all about us, and in that very instant every one of the millions of seats was occupied, and as far as you could see, in both directions, was just a solid pack of people, and the place was all splendidly lit up! It was enough to take a body’s breath away. Sandy says—

  “That is the way we do it here. No time fooled away; nobody straggling in after the curtain’s up. Wishing is quicker work than traveling. A quarter of a second ago these folks were millions of miles from here. When they heard the last signal, all they had to do was to wish, and here they are.”

  The prodigious choir struck up—

  We long to hear thy voice,

  To see thee face to face.

  It was noble music, but the uneducated chipped in and spoilt it, just as the congregation used to do on earth.

  The head of the procession began to pass, now, and it was a wonderful sight. It swept along, thick and solid, five hundred thousand angels abreast, and every angel carrying a torch and singing—the whirring thunder of the wings made a body’s head ache. You could follow the line of the procession back, and slanting upward into the sky, far away in a glittering snaky rope, till it was only a faint streak in the distance. The rush went on and on, for a long time, and at last, sure enough, along comes the barkeeper, and then everybody rose, and a cheer went up that made the heavens shake, I tell you! He was all smiles, and had his halo tilted over one ear in a cocky way, and was the most satisfied-looking saint I ever saw. While he marched up the steps of the Grand Stand, the choir struck up—

  The whole wide heaven groans,

  And waits to hear that voice

  There were four gorgeous tents standing side by side in the place of honor, on a broad railed platform in the centre of the Grand Stand, with a shining guard of honor round about them. The tents had been shut up all this time. As the barkeeper climbed along up, bowing and smiling to everybody, and at last got to the platform, these tents were jerked up aloft all of a sudden, and we saw four noble thrones of gold, all caked with jewels, and in the two middle ones sat old white-whiskered men, and in the two others a couple of the most glorious and gaudy giants, with platter halos and beautiful armor. All the millions went down on their knees, and stared, and looked glad, and burst out into a joyful kind of murmurs. They said—

  “Two archangels!—that is splendid. Who can the others be?”

  The archangels gave the barkeeper a stiff little military bow; the two old men rose; one of them said, “Moses and Esau welcome thee!” and then all the four vanished, and the thrones were empty.

  The barkeeper looked a little disappointed, for he was calculating to hug those old people, I judge; but it was the gladdest and proudest multitude you ever saw—because they had seen Moses and Esau. Everybody was saying, “Did you see them?—I did—Esau’s side face was to me, but I saw Moses full in the face, just as plain as I see you this minute.”

  The procession took up the barkeeper and moved on with him again, and the crowd broke up and scattered. As we went along home, Sandy said it was a great success, and the barkeeper would have a right to be proud of it forever. And he said we were in luck, too; said we might attend receptions for forty thousand years to come, and not have a chance to see a brace of such grand moguls as Moses and Esau. We found afterwards that we had come near seeing another patriarch, and likewise a genuine prophet besides, but at the last moment they sent regrets. Sandy said there would be a monument put up there, where Moses and Esau had stood, with the date and circumstances, and all about the whole business, and travelers would come for thousands of years and gawk at it, and climb over it, and scribble their names on it.

  CHAPTER V

  Captain Stormfield Resumes

  I

  When I had been in heaven some time I begun to feel restless, the same as I used to on earth when I had been ashore a month, so I sejested to Sandy that we do some excursions. He said all right, and with that we started with a whiz—not that you could hear us go, but it was as if you ought to.—On account of our going so fast, for you go by thought. If you went only as fast as light or electricity you would be forever getting to any place, heaven is so big. Even when you are traveling by thought it takes you days and days and days to cover the territory of any Christian State, and days and days to cover the uninhabited stretch between that State and the next one.

  “You can’t put it into miles,” Sandy says.

  “Becuz there ain’t enough of them. If you had all the miles God ever made they wouldn’t reach from the Catholic camp to the High Church Piscopalian—nor half way, for that matter; and yet they are the nearest together of any. Professor Higgins tries to work the miles on the measurements, on account of old earthly habit, and p’raps he gets a sort of grip on the distances out of the result, but you couldn’t, and I can’t.”

  “How do you know I couldn’t, Sandy? Speak for yourself, hadn’t you better? You just tell me his game, and wait till I look at my hand.”

  “Well, it’s this. He used to be astronomical professor of astronomy at Harvard—”

  “This was before he was dead?”

  “Certainly. How could he be after he was dead?”

  “Oh, well, it ain’t important. But a soldier can be a soldier after he’s dead. And he can breed, too. There’s eleven million dead soldiers drawing pension at home, now—some that’s been dead 125 years—and we’ve never had three millions on the pay-roll since the first Fourth of July. Go on, Sandy. Maybe it was before he was dead, maybe it wasn’t; but it ain’t important.”

  “Well, he was astronomical professor, and can’t get rid of his habits. So he tries to figure out these heavenly distances by astronomical measurements. That is to say, he computes them in light-years.”

  “What is a light-year, Sandy?”

  “He says light travels 186,000 miles a second, and—”

  “How many?”

  “186,000.”

  “In a second, Sandy—not a week?”

  “No, in a second. He says the sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth, and it takes light 8 minutes to cover the distance. Then he ciphers out how far the light would travel in a year of 365 days at that gait, and he calls that distance a light-year.”

  “It’s considerable, ain’t it, Sandy?”

  “Don’t you doubt it!”

  “How far is it, Sandy?”

  “It’s 63,280 times the distance from the earth to the sun.”

  “Land! Say it again, Sandy, and say it slow.”

  “63,280 times 93,000,000 miles.”

  “Sandy, it beats the band. Do you think there’s room for a straight stretch like that? Don’t you reckon it would come to the edge and stick out over? What does a light-year foot up, Sandy, in a lump?”

  “Six thousand million miles.”

  “Sandy, it is certainly a corker! ls there any known place as far off as a light-year?”

  “Shucks, Stormy, one light-year is nothing. He says it’s four light-years from our earth to the nearest star—and nothing between.”

  “Nothing between? Nothing but just emptiness?”

  “That’s it; nothing but emptiness. But he says there’s not a star in the Milky Way nor anywhere else in the sky that’s not further away from its nearest neighbor than that.”

  “Why, Sandy, if that is true, the sky is emptier than heaven.”

  “Oh, indeed, no! Far from it. In the Milky Way, the professor says, no star is more than six or seven light-years distant from its nearest neighbor, but there ain’t any Christian sect in heaven that is nearer that 5,000 light-years from the camp of the next sect. Oh, no, he says the sky is a howling wilderness, but it can’t show with heaven. No, sir, he says of all the lonesome places that ever was, give him heaven. Every now and then he gets so lonesome here that he makes an excursion amongst the stars, so’s to have a sense of company.”

  “Why, Sandy, what ha
ve they made heaven so large for?”

  “So’s to have room in the future. The redeemed will still be coming for billions and billions and billions and billions of years, but there’ll always be room, you see. This heaven ain’t built on any ‘Gates Ajar’ proportions.”

  . . . Time drifted along. We went on excursioning amongst the colonies and over the monstrous spaces between, till at last I was so weighed down by the awful bigness of heaven that I said I’d got to see something small to back my natural focus and lift off some of the load, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Sandy says,

  “Well, then, suppose we try an asterisk, or asteroid, or whatever the professor calls them. They’re little enough to fit the case, I reckon.”

  II

  Journey to the Asterisk

  So we went, and it was quite interesting. It was a very nice little world, twenty-five or thirty miles in circumference; almost exactly a thousand times smaller than the earth, and just a miniature of it, in every way: little wee Atlantic oceans and Pacific oceans and Indian oceans, all in the right places; the same with the rivers, the same with the lakes; the same old familiar mountain ranges, the same continents and islands, the same Sahara—all in the right proportions and as exact as a photograph. We walked around it one afternoon, and waded the oceans, and had a most uncommon good time. We spent weeks and weeks walking around over it and getting acquainted with the nations and their ways.

  Nice little dollies, they were, and not bigger than Gulliver’s Lilliput people. Their ways were like ours. In their America they had a republic on our own plan, and in their Europe, their Asia and their Africa they had monarchies and established churches, and a pope and a Czar, and all the rest of it. They were not afraid of us; in fact they held us in rather frank contempt, because we were giants. Giants have never been respected, in any world. These people had a quite good opinion of themselves, and many of them no bigger that a clothes pin. In church it was a common thing for the preacher to look out over his congregation and speak of them as the noblest work of God—and never a clothes pin smirked! These little animals were having wars all the time, and raising armies and building navies, and striving after the approval of God every way they could. And whenever there was a savage country that needed civilizing, they went there and took it, and divided it up among the several enlightened monarchs, and civilized it—each monarch in his own way, but generally with Bibles and bullets and taxes. And the way they did whoop-up Morals, and Patriotism, and Religion, and the Brotherhood of Man was noble to see.

  I couldn’t see that they differed from us, except in size. It was like looking at ourselves through the wrong end of the spyglass. But Sandy said there was one difference, and a big one. It was this: each person could look right into every other person’s mind and read what was in it, but he thought his own mind was concealed from everybody but himself!

  CHAPTER VI

  From Captain Stormfield’s Reminiscences

  One day, whilst I was there in Heaven, I says to Sandy—“Sandy,” I says, “you was telling me, a while back, that you knowed how the human race came to be created; and now, if you don’t mind,” I says, “I’d like you to pull off the narrative, for I reckon it’s interesting.”

  So he done it. This is it.

  Sandy’s Narrative

  Well, it was like this. I got it from Slattery. Slattery was there at the time, being an eye-witness, you see; and so Slattery, he—­

  “Who’s Slattery, Sandy?”

  One of the originals.

  “Original which?”

  Original inventions. He used to be an angel, in the early times, two hunderd thousand years ago; and so, as it happened—

  “Two hun—do you mean to say—”

  Yes, I do. It was two hunderd thousand years ago. Slattery was born here in heaven, and so time don’t count. As I was a-telling you, he was an angel, first-off, but when Satan fell, he fell, too, becuz he was a connexion of Satan’s, by marriage or blood or somehow or other, and it put him under suspicion, though they warn’t able to prove anything on him. Still, they judged a little term down below in the fires would be a lesson to him and do him good, so they give him a thousand years down in them tropics, and—

  “A thousand, Sandy?”

  Certainly. It ain’t anything to these people, Cap’n Stormfield. When you’ve been here as long as I have—but never mind about that. When he got back, he was different. The vacation done him good. You see, he had had experience, and it sharpened him up. And besides, he had traveled, and it made him important, which he warn’t, before. Satan came near getting a thousand years himself, that time—

  “But I thought he did, Sandy. I thought he went down for good and all.”

  No, sir, not that time.

  “What saved him?”

  Influence.

  “M-m. So they have it here, too, do they?”

  Oh, well, I sh’d think! Satan has fell a lot of times, but he hasn’t ever been sent down permanent, yet—but only the small fry.

  “Just the same it used to was, down on earth, Sandy. Ain’t it interesting? Go on. Slattery he got reinstated, as I understand it?”

  Yes, so he did. And he was a considerable person by now, as I was a-saying, partly on accounts of his relative, and partly on accounts of him having been abroad, and all that, and affecting to talk with a foreign accent, which he picked up down below. So he was around when the first attempts was made. They had a mould for a man, and a mould for a woman, and they mixed up the materials and poured it in. They came out very handsome to look at, and everybody said it was a success. So they made some more, and kept on making them and setting them one side to dry, till they had about ten thousand. Then they blew in the breath, and put the dispositions in, and turned them loose in a pleasant piece of territory, and told them to go it.

  “Put in the dispositions?”

  Yes, the Moral Qualities. That’s what makes dispositions. They distributed ’em around perfectly fair and honorable. There was 28 of them, according to the plans and specifications, and the whole 28 went to each man and woman in equal measure, nobody getting more of a quality than anybody else, nor less. I’ll give you the list, just as Slattery give it to me:

  l. Magnanimity.

  2. Meanness.

  3. Moral courage.

  4. Moral cowardice.

  5. Physical courage.

  6. Physical cowardice.

  7. Honesty.

  8. Dishonesty.

  9. Truthfulness.

  10. Untruthfulness.

  11. Love.

  12. Hate.

  13. Chastity.

  14. Unchastity.

  15. Firmness.

  16. Unfirmness.

  17. Diligence.

  18. Indolence.

  19. Selfishness.

  20. Unselfishness.

  21. Prodigality.

  22. Stinginess.

  23. Reverence.

  24. Irreverence.

  25. Intellectuality.

  26. Unintellectuality.

  27. Self-Conceit.

  28. Humility.

  “And a mighty good layout, Sandy. And all fair and square, too, and no favors to anybody. I like it. Looks to me elegant, and the way it had ought to be. Blamed if it ain’t interesting. Go on.”

  Well, the new creatures settled in the territory that was app’inted for them, and begun to hatch, and multiply and replenish, and all that, and everything went along to the queen’s taste, as the saying is. But by and by Slattery noticed something, and got Satan to go out there and take a look, which he done, and says,

  “Well, something the matter, you think! What is it?”

  “I’ll show you,” Slattery says. “Warn’t they to be something fresh, something new and surprising?”

  “Cert’nly,” Satan says. “Ain’t they?”

  “Oh, well,” says Slattery, “if you come right down to the fine shades, I ain’t able to deny that they are new—but how new? What’s the idea? Moreover, what
I want to know is, is what’s new an improvement?”

  “Go on,” says Satan, a little impatient, “what’s your point? Get at it!”

  “Well, it’s this. These new people don’t differ from the angels. Except that they hain’t got wings, and they don’t get sick, and they don’t die. Otherwise they’re just angels—just the old usual thing. They’re all the same size, they’re all exactly alike—hair, eyes, noses, gait, everything—just the same as angels. Now, then, here’s the point: the only solitary new thing about ’em is a new arrangement of their morals. It’s the only fresh thing.”

  “Very well,” says Satan, “ain’t that enough? What are you complaining about?”

  “No, it ain’t enough, unless it’s an improvement over the old regular arrangement.”

  “Come, get down to particulars!” says Satan, in that snappish way some people has.

  “All right. Look at the old arrangement, and what do you find? Just this: the entire and complete and rounded-out sum of an angel’s morals is goodness—plain, simple goodness. What’s his equipment—a great long string of Moral Qualities with 28 specifications in it? No, there’s only one—love. It’s the whole outfit. They can’t hate, they don’t know how, becuz they can’t help loving everything and everybody. Just the same, they don’t know anything about envy, or jealousy, or avarice, or meanness, or lying, or selfishness, or any of those things. And so they’re never unhappy, there not being any way for them to get unhappy. It makes character, don’t it? And Al.”

  “Correct. Go on.”

  “Now then, look at these new creatures. They’ve got an immense layout in the way of Moral Qualities, and you’d think they’d have a stunning future in front of them—but it ain’t so. For why? Because they’ve got Love and Hate, in the same proportions. The one neutralizes the other. They don’t really love, and they don’t really hate. They can’t, you see. It’s the same with the whole invoice: Honesty and Dishonesty, exactly the same quantity of each; selfishness and unselfishness; reverence and irreverence; courage and cowardice—and so on and so on. They are all exactly alike, inside and out, these new people—and characterless. They’re ciphers, nothings, just wax-works. What do you say?”