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 physical 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