Wyndham Smith Read online

  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 worthwhile, 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?—or was it 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 physic
al 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 th
e 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.