Dialogues With the Devil

by Taylor Caldwell

  But you were not satisfied. You thought of wars between the Masters, but they were too content with their lives. You even thought of inspiring rage among the people, but they were too enslaved. What you could not do in three centuries was done for you, out of the very outraged heart of nature, herself.

  The people of the planet numbered some five billion. The children of the Elect, and the scientists and artists and professional men who served them, numbered less than two million. As more and more machines were cultivating the land, the countrymen had dwindled to a few thousand, and they were never permitted into the cities. They lived lives as stultefied and as hopeless as did the people of the cities and the towns. No education had been permitted them for three centuries. They, too, had been bred to serve. There was no amusement and recreation for them, and if they looked toward the cities they saw a rounded blaze of glass, sealed away from sound and conjecture. They knew only that the cities devoured their fruits and grains and meat, and that they received, in turn, a handful of silver and a warning stare. They had learned to ask no questions.

  But there came a day when the census takers were puzzled. No children had been born on the countryside or in the cities of Lencia for two years, except for the children of the Elect. Another year passed, and another, and another, and the wards of the hospitals where children were born were empty. An investigation was demanded. Who was the criminal who had induced the people not to bear any longer? But there was no criminal, except for nature herself, who could not endure the slavery of a whole planet, where once freedom had lived. No investigator asked himself the momentous question: Can a people become so attenuated and so lifeless and so careless of living that their very reproductive impulses no longer responded? Can life, itself, become so worthless that instinct itself dies? No ruler of any planet has ever asked himself this question, but it is an inexorable one, and explains the death of many civilizations in the universes.

  Ten years passed, and save for the children of the Elect, no child was born on Lencia, and another decade passed and the cities and the countryside knew no children’s voices. The aged died. The population began to dwindle. The Elect were greatly alarmed. “Who shall our children rule, and who shall serve them, unless the people breed again?” they demanded of each other. The obvious answer never occurred to them. Some thought it may have been the glassy enclosures of the cities, which shut off the sun from the people. Some doctors declared that the imprisoned cities, closed from the sun, lost valuable life-giving rays which may have been the source of the fruitfulness of the reproductive organs. Some suggested that for several hours a day the domes of glass be lifted, in order that the mysterious rays might reach the bodies of the people. But a serious objection was raised to this. If the people scented the wide airs of the world and freedom, who knew but what they would revolt? A little freedom is a dangerous thing, as certain nations on Terra have discovered, and which thousands of other planets have also discovered.

  Some there were, among the Elect, who exhorted the people of Lencia to breed, “for the sake of our life and our existence.” The people listened, baffled. They did not know why they approached the marital bed so listlessly, and why no encounter brought forth a child. The waters of the cities were then imbued with certain chemicals alleged to stimulate the life-giving properties. The food coming into the cities was instilled with those same chemicals. The people did not breed. Hordes were brought before physicians for examination. The people appeared moderately healthy, though considerably shorter in stature than the Elect, and very docile and meek. It was observed by the doctors that their voices were dull and sluggish, and their eyes uncomprehending, and their bodies flaccid for all their labor. Medicines were prescribed, and warnings were issued by the governments that it would be considered a great crime if the people did not obey. But children were not born, except to the Elect. Hours of work were shortened; more meat was given; intoxicants, denied to the people for three centuries, were suddenly released to them; drugs were issued in mass quantities. The people did not breed. The disgusting anthills where the people dwelt were empty of the sound of children, and people forgot that there had ever been infants. The people aged. It had been designed even before their birth that they would live no longer than the age of fifty orbits around the sun, though the Elect lived one hundred. There were millions of burials but not a single birth except among the Elect.

  The rulers gathered together to discuss the frightful situation, and you were among them, silently laughing. It was even suggested that the men of the Elect forcibly impregnate the females of the people, so that they would raise up slaves unto them, for the security of their kingly children. The factories and the countryside were showing the effects of the dwindling population. Who would serve and feed and pamper and cosset the children of the Elect of future generations? Many of the Elect agreed to seize the younger females of the people for breeding purposes, but a cry arose: “We must not corrupt and degrade our imperial blood!” It was a quandary. Nevertheless, it had to be done, and no doubt you were amused at the alacrity of the male Elect who went about the cities and the countryside and chose the females with whom to bed from among the people. The women did not resist, nor their men. It was of no use. The women did not breed.

  Freedom is not divisible. At last, the women of the Elect did not breed either. The malaise entered into their bodies and their souls. Desperate measures were resorted to without avail. The physicians and scientists were threatened, to their despair. And the population steadily and implacably dwindled.

  Now all are old and decaying on Lencia, and it is a wilderness. The domes of the cities have long been removed, but the fruitful sun is powerless to stimulate the life-process. The people did not respond to their sudden freedom. In truth, they fretfully complained that the rains wet them, that the sun burned them, that the winds chilled them, that the lightning frightened them. They implored their masters to protect them again. At last the Elect learned, too late, that liberty, itself, is a life-giving force and that men do not tamper with the hearts, souls and bodies of other men without the inevitable and lethal result, and that in “protecting” their people from the forces of nature they condemn them to death. There must be adversity, struggle, anxiety and uncertainty and hope in the souls of men if they are to exist at all. The fear of a dangerous future must constantly spur men on not only to survive but to live and reproduce and build. If this is removed then life is removed. Security from storm and ferocity, as you have remarked yourself, Lucifer, is an invitation to extinction. When will the rulers of the planets learn this terrible truth for themselves before the time of correction has passed?

  When will your most hated planet, Terra, learn this? Once men are treated as children, deprived of competition and insecurity, and are guarded, they die. It is the law of life.

  The thirty-nine sisters of Lencia have studied this phenomenon from afar, and they have pledged each other that freedom will never be restricted from among them. They watch the dying sister planet. Sighing, they await the day when no life but purely animal will exist there, and then they will take the planet for their own, and remember the lesson they have learned.

  Or, will they? Will they make a hell of their worlds as so many multitudes have done before them?

  Alas for Lencia. If her death will be a warning to all others then she has not died in vain. But men, as you have observed only too truly before, rarely learn from experience and history.

  Rejoice, if you will, at the end of Lencia the Beautiful. But, I doubt that you rejoice.

  Your brother, Michael

  Greetings to my brother, Michael, who himself, alas, never learns from the history of men!

  I am sorrowful, not for the death of Lencia the Beautiful, but for your sorrow. You indeed have too tender a heart for the contemptible races! I rejoice, not repine, that again I have proved myself right and Our Father wrong. There are a thousand ways to death and only one way to life, but men indefatigably seek the roads to destruction. If
they were not so inclined by their very nature they would not listen to me. Lencia died, not by war, as so many other planets died, but through the sluggish ways of what she designated as peace and security. Again, I only suggested. It was in the power of the men of Lencia to reject.

  I am deeply interested in what I perceive of Heaven, where there seems a tremendous coming and going as of late, and not all the faces are joyous. What is it that portends? I remember His prophecy, and so I am alert to any stir in Heaven.

  Is it possible that the Christ will degrade Himself again before man on Terra? I shall fight that possibility with all my powers. I shall guard His Majesty. I have already begun the process. Even now, whole nations for the first time in Terra’s history are declaring that “God is dead!” This was once the province of only a few cynical and enlightened men, who hardly dared speak abroad for fear of the superstitious and the faithful. Did not Socrates die for something similar, though it was very mild? He spoke of “God” and not gods, and for that he was executed. He was considered a great criminal by the ignorant. Yet he was a man faithful to his noble idea. But the men of Terra, in uncountable millions, are neither wise nor faithful. They proclaim, with their round and defiant faces, “He does not exist!” or “Our old conception of God was wrong and we must have a New Definition!” They even announce that God appears to have vanished from the affairs of men; therefore, He is no longer potent, if ever He was potent. (That, as you know, is my suggestion.)

  It is as if ants, who had never seen a man but had heard only rumors of him, declared that as they had not observed him, themselves, he could not possibly live. Other ants had seen the stature of man and had heard the thunder of his step—so they alleged. But as these particular ants had neither seen nor heard the myth was not valid.

  To my mind an honest and industrious ant is worth a whole world of men, for the ant labors ceaselessly according to his good instinct, is never slothful, never given to vice or depravity, and as his nature is sound he adheres to it. If an ant said, “There is no Man,” I should be inclined to believe him, for ants are sensible, and never lie, and their opinion would be valuable. There are even occasions when I permit myself to dream that there are no men.

  My anger is your satisfaction, but as we are brothers I will confess that I am not entirely succeeding in my campaign to have the whole of Terra declare that “God is dead.” (But I will!) It was Our Father’s design that men should have free will—therefore, that was a surety that He would not interfere. But to my understandable umbrage I no sooner had the millions shouting that “God is dead!” when millions of the lukewarm, in concern, began to examine their consciences and ask themselves, “Is He indeed dead?” Even those who had never believed in Him at all were startled at the thunderous cry of denial, and questioned of their hearts. In all of Terra, now, for the first time in her detestable history, men are not only denying God but are rediscovering Him or finding Him when they had never even sought Him, and should never have begun the search or the inquiry if it had not been for my own damned. Does Our Father believe this is keeping His word that He would never overtly interfere with the will of man? We have always treated each other with courtesy and openness. I find His present and insidious interference offensive and startling. With exasperation and fury I ask myself: Why does He continue to manifest His concern and love for these loathsome creatures, When He has permitted greater and more magnificent planets to will their fulfilled death? This has become an unjust war between two polite warriors. I have not deflected from my course, but it appears that Our Father has, and incomprehensibly. Lay my complaint before Him, Michael, for that is only just.

  He will not succeed, though He has already invaded the hearts of millions who never knew Him before and cared nothing as to whether or not He existed. You will say that the extraordinary outcome is my own doing, and not Our Father’s, but that is not correct. I feel His presence very keenly on Terra now, and the Shadow of His Spirit.

  Therefore, though you swear you have no knowledge of what is truly transpiring in Heaven, I remember the prophecies of His Son, and the prophets, concerning the Last Days when the Christ will come again to Terra and “all things shall be made new.” And I also remember that in those days there will be the great calamity which I am devising, and which will destroy man by the hundreds of millions, and his planet with him.

  I keep my word, though it appears that Our Father does not. Enough. I will keep my word to make Terra a cinderous mass of fragments between Venus and Mars, as I made fragments of Justia, between Mars and Jupiter. What a glorious day that was, when men on Justia exploded their planet! What a bonfire was lit in the solar system! So fierce was it that the forests of Mars were burned, and the oceans and the rivers seethed and passed away in steam—though men had not as yet lived on him. Uninhabited Terra trembled in her orbit, in the midst of her sullen clouds and ice, and a crimson scar was laid on Jupiter, and Venus, then teeming with men, looked at the skies and said to themselves, “What a wondrous but appalling sight!”

  I succeeded in less than one hundred centuries with Justia, whose people were almost as stupid and benighted as the men of Terra. I shall succeed with Terra, also. I am not satisfied with the crude if deadly weapon I have given her men, and the knowledge of which is expanding through my efforts. My scientists are inventing another of vastly more power and destruction. If Our Father continues to interfere, when once He promised not to do so, but to leave man to his own will, then I shall hasten with my plans so that He will look about blazing fragments and on no world at all, and there will be no man to herald the Christ—if He still intends to visit that earth.

  But, to lighter matters. We both knew a man on Terra who never in his life ever considered whether or not Our Father existed, and never cared to pursue the matter. I considered him my own. He was not faithless; he was just without faith. Inexplicably, he was also a good man, for all my efforts, just and kind and honorable in all his dealings, merciful and gentle and benign. For reasons I could never understand Our Father did not give him the Grace of Faith, so I was confident of his soul. But when he died he went immediately to Heaven, and Our Father exclaimed, “Welcome, My son!” No, I do not understand.

  I thought to amuse you by relating an episode which gratified me greatly.

  There was a young man on Terra who possessed a diabolic beauty, but more than that he was an astronomer-physicist of formidable powers, much esteemed in that section called by men the United States of America. (How men love to divide up their planets into sections and give them curious appellations!) Women adored him, but he did not adore them. Proud of his enormous intellect, heaped with honors by his government, a man of many tongues and many minds, he was also blind and did not see what he believed could not exist. In short, despite his intelligence, he was as stupid as his fellowmen.

  Eternally unfortunate for him, he had an accident, and in due course he was conducted to my tenebrous palace in the gloomiest section of my hells. I am always fascinated by such men, and infernally piqued by them, and so I received him personally, at my request. I sat upon my pearl and ebony throne, and he was brought to me through the long and murky and silent lines of my demonic courtiers. At the foot of my throne he paused and stared up at me incredulously.

  “I am dreaming,” he said at last, and then he looked down at his bloodied hands and then touched his bleeding face.

  “Indeed,” I said with all courtesy. “A dream that never ends.”

  He turned then and stared at the double line of my courtiers, and they regarded him gravely, the black and scarlet shadow of their wings on the vaulted ceiling of my throne room and on the black and polished walls and on the gleaming dark marble floor. He saw the white glitter of their adamantine faces, the frozen hatred in their illuminated eyes. He shuddered, and returned to me.

  “This does not exist,” he said. “I am dreaming. I shall soon awaken.”

  “Never shall you awake again, Man,” I replied. “Never shall you sleep again. You
have arrived at your eternal home. Do you know me, Michel Edgor?”

  “Your voice is familiar.” He smiled with that urbanity known only to men of his kind. “I will remember soon. You are very awesome, I must admit, and very beautiful. You are not what I had expected.”

  “And did you expect me at all?”

  He hesitated. “No, I did not. Certainly I am dreaming. You do not exist; you never existed, as God never existed.”

  I smiled at him, and there was a sudden and sullen roaring in the distance, a clamor that made him flinch. I waited until it had subsided.

  “If I existed—and do not, according to you, Man—what name would you give me?”

  He hesitated again, and smiled as if at a jest. “I heard of you in my childhood, from my benighted mother and my pastor. That was long years ago.”

  I was impatient. “My name, Man!”

  He was embarrassed. “Lucifer? Satan? Oh, this is absurd! I am talking with a dream.”

  “It is your dream, not mine, Michel Edgor. You bleed, do you not? That is only your memory of the accident that killed you, on a public road. You do not bleed, in all truth, for souls do not bleed. You stare. You thought you did not possess a soul, did you not? Sorrowfully for you, you do, indeed, and it is your soul which stands before me now. Gaze on your hands again.”

  He could not take his large dark eyes from me for several moments, then he looked at his hands and started. He felt his own fingers. He said again, “This is absurd. I feel flesh, tangible flesh, yet you assert I am a soul.”