And now what do we have? Einstein where we once had Darwin, reason lording it over anarchy, compassion melting away man’s natural antagonism that has graced the pages of history with heroic adventures. And instead of keeping religion where it belongs—in a beautiful building erected for that purpose and supervised by a professional —now any amateur can practice it—and does. I use “amateur,” of course, in its root derivation from the latin word “amo” as meaning “a person who loves.” It is as though Christ, securely pinioned on a million crosses for two thousand years, had suddenly got loose and, coming out of the cathedrals, had entered into us.
I often chuckle when I think of the world Orwell pictured in his book 1984. In some ways he was prescient but what neither he nor anyone else foresaw was that a world could be organized for benevolent as well as for sinister purposes. From my point of view, it might have been better if we had gotten Orwell’s Big Brother. No matter how entrenched a dictator may be or how abject his populace, there is always a chance of overthrowing him and getting back your freedom. But what can you do when you live in a society where everyone’s your Big Brother and you’re even in danger of becoming one yourself!
Apologists for the New Age ask me why I still moon over the good old days when people lived in fear of almost everything. How am I to explain to those who have never felt it that fear can be a pleasurable emotion? Why do children delight in ghost stories that send chills up their spines? And they still do to this day. My friends reply that fiction is one thing, reality another, implying that this is a distinction my generation failed to observe. There is no getting past this deadlock. They have logic on their side; on mine is the hallowed memory of nearly fifty adventurous years.
I’m willing to concede that we still have pioneering today but mostly in the realm of ideas. Only very rarely is it possible to enjoy a physical experience that involves any appreciable risk—which to me is the essence of adventure. Once it was out of military control, science began to intrude itself into everything we did, leaving almost nothing to accident. Even in space travel we have seen the new science calculate extra-terrestrial conditions with such accuracy that a passenger rocket can now take off for an unexplored planet with scarcely more of a flurry than a plane flying from New York to Paris. In the last fifty years I can recall only one incident of any importance that hadn’t been anticipated and prepared for. I can still feel the good, old-fashioned goose-pimples I got when word came back that interplanetary life had finally been encountered in the outer reaches of the solar system in what had been known as the “ring” of Saturn. Call me bellicose or what you will, I confess that I relished the prospect of a little action between us and these creatures who were described in the report as “thought existing in a frame of hydrogen atoms.” In the old days strangers whose appearance, was so odd and different from our own would have been treated as inferiors and put in their place. But it goes to show to what extremes religion can take you once you let love get into your system. There was no battle at all. Before anyone could so much as blow a bugle, we and the strangers were amiably exchanging the latest information about the universe.
I think we got the best of the bargain if that’s any consolation. In spite of their rather elementary appearance, it seems that they had once been as complex as we and it had taken them several light years to achieve their present degree of simplicity and immateriality. And as we know, they were already experimenting to find ways of shedding the few atoms of matter they had left. Complaining that they found any material substance cumbersome in getting places, they hoped soon to become pure thought which could flash through space in no time at all. In answer to our questions they said that the method they intended to use was to gradually fuse their identity with— as nearly as we could translate it—the creative mind pervading the universe.
I admit this is all beyond me, but I tried to make a rough analogy that it was like separate railways merging into a great trunk line, doing away with obsolete rolling stock and giving more efficient service. Incidentally, the Saturnians remarked that they had tried for many centuries to communicate with us but, aside from intuitive flashes picked up by certain sensitive individuals, they were not very successful. With extreme tact they observed that possibly we were slightly retarded in telepathy because we seemed to be more concerned with matter than with mind.
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At least that’s no longer the case. We now use our minds on almost everything—with some pretty strange results, to my way of thinking. Take the question of original sin. The modern ethical scientists claim that sin isn’t original at all and that, if the Book of Genesis means anything, it means that the serpent in the Garden tipped us off on how to slide away from our primal knowledge of what is right. In other words virtue was original, sin had to be cultivated. Even if that’s so, they can’t deny it has added spice to our lives. Try to imagine our literature if sex, for instance, hadn’t been regarded as a natural territory for sinning. I remember the fun we had finding out about it in back of the barn. Now there isn’t a child in nursery school who hasn’t learned scientifically all there is to know about it. Whatever satisfaction he is able to get from sex when he grows up, it can never be the same as when it was seasoned with a delicious sense of sin.
And consider what’s happening to death. Every year it’s getting harder and harder to die. I know from my own experience. With the molecular injections they’ve been giving me, my cell tissue refuses to wear out. I think I can truthfully say I don’t feel a day older than fifty years ago when I was still in my hundreds. The most virulent germs are coaxed into a genial embrace with mating molecules, a union that produces nothing but health. As for accidents, they hardly ever occur. But when they do, any organ in the body, damaged beyond repair, can easily be replaced.
But this isn’t the worst. Science is not only needlessly prolonging individual lives by medical means, it is beginning to attack the whole concept of death on a broad philosophical front. They learned from the Saturnians that space is a sort of mental bridge to the infinite, open to human traffic as soon as it has unloaded its excess weight of matter. Already a few venturesome minds have been out roaming around the universe on exploratory missions. And where they lead, the rest will follow. I can’t predict how long it will take but, with all the resources of modern science mustered for the effort, I know the outcome is inevitable. Our body, the last refuge of our sweet mortality, is definitely on the way out. It is no longer the fashion for our poets to pay their melancholy tribute to the brevity and transitoriness of life. They are now more moved by mathematics than by sentiment.
And what about me?
I can confess it to these pages because no one will see them until after my death. Yes, I’ve made up my mind. While there is still time, I shall “forget” to take my injections for two or three years. No one is going to deprive me of the last great adventure left to my kind.
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Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Page 19