H. Wells - The World Set Free

work they did…'

'I do not see,' said Karenin, 'that there is any final limitto

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 seehis

face. 'There is no absolute limitto either knowledgeor

power… I hope you do not tire yourselftalking.'

'I am interested,' said Karenin. 'I suppose in a little while

men will ceaseto 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 thinkthere 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 continuallylengthening, continuallyfuller 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 knowbetter 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 thoughtand 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

continuallyto 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 spiritof man like the shrivelled

cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hearof these

things I feellike that-like a wet, crawling new moth that still

fearsto 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 knowhow to bear the strange

gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar

gases and all the fearfulstrangenesses of space will be

venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough

for us; our spiritwill reach out… Cannot you seehow 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 thoughtsreturned again to the mindof 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 touchedthe

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 thoughtto thought, but the thread is neither you

nor me. What is truewe all have; when the individual has

altogether brought himselfto the test and winnowing of

expression, then the individual is done. I feelas 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 spiritthat desiresto know, the spiritthat

resolves to do, that spiritthat 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 I amonly taking off one more coat to get at

you. I have threatened you for ten thousand years, and soon I