Wyndham Smith

by S. Fowler Wright

  “I suppose that, as orders are issued by our Hundred alone, they may decide that we who belong thereto shall be the last to remain alive.”

  “So we must hope that they will. But I cannot urge it. It is not my concern. And it might be unwise that it should be proposed by you.”

  “We must hope that its wisdom will be seen by others.”

  “But even so—”

  “Yes. They are sure to require the whole of us to enter together. But we have time to devise a plan.”

  “So we must. It was a foolish thing that I proposed—that sterilizing of the sea. I did not foresee that the discussion would develop the way it did.”

  “Yes. But there is one thing sure. It cannot be done in a week. I wonder how Pilwin-C6P will get over that?”

  “He may propose that the machines be so directed that they will continue whatever he may require them to do. There would be no difficulty there.”

  She looked at him with startled eyes, guessing his thought. “And you might stop them when all but ourselves were dead? You would interfere with the machines?”

  Her voice shook now with a fear with which she had been hypnotized from her childhood’s days. It was such as the twentieth century could only partially understand. A child who attempted to embrace a dynamo’s armature would certainly have been pulled away: it would not have been encouraged to put its head under a steam-hammer, or to fondle a chaff-cutter, and there were some factory laws for the fencing off of machines of particularly bad reputation, as savage animals at a zoo might be barred from the public reach. But the machines of that day were primitive in character, most of them capable of nothing more than one operation monotonously repeated, and generally even that would require the constant watchfulness of a human colleague. They were unable to feed each other. Some of them were even unable to oil themselves.

  Naturally with the passing centuries, changes came. The machines of this day had become automatic, large and small, capable of many complicated operations, and though without any originating intelligence, yet able to act upon intelligent directions in sustained, discriminating ways.

  It was nearly seven hundred years since the genius of the Japanese designer, Hirato, had utilized the sense of smell for the extermination of the Asian tiger. He devised small, crawling, automatic machines with strong steel-toothed jaws, which would follow any strong scent to which they were introduced, and let them loose on the tiger’s tracks. A second machine, set on the same track as the first, with an hour’s interval, might lead a long way or short, but would be likely to come at last to a place where a tiger had struck impotently at a cold, hard, crawling beast that nuzzled maddeningly into his side, and the relentless jaws, roused by the blows, had snapped back with a grip they would not loose until that into which they bit had left them quiet for a long hour, which no living, tortured tiger could be expected to do.

  That had been a novelty then. There was even an old painting extant which showed the last tigers collected on a little tableland to which the machines could not climb, and about forty of these implacable, single-purposed automata ringing them round, and waiting with unrelenting patience to resume their tireless, sleepless pursuit, when desperation or the pangs of thirst should madden the beasts to bound over them and continue their futile flights.

  It was by means of many variations and extensions of this idea, aided by the use of disease viruses of many kinds, that sentient life had been almost completely destroyed upon the land-surfaces of the earth, even where they had not been sterilized by wide-spreading layers of concrete which had been poured, like molten lava from huge mountain-side cauldrons set up in Rocky Mountains, Andes, Himalayas, and Alps, and forming, as they solidified, hard crusts in which no life could root, and through which none could pierce upward to find the sun.

  The machines of this day were, or had been in past centuries, initiated by human thought. They carried out the orders the First Hundred, as they were interpreted to them by lesser men. But they did this with little present interference. They designed and constructed each other. They prepared and supplied themselves with the fuel which they required. Their operations were so extensive, so interdependent, so fundamental, that any ill-formed or unauthorized interference might have incalculable and disastrous results. It was one of the first nursery lessons that nothing could excuse tampering with a machine, or obstruction of its operations. To forget this was the one unpardonable delinquency for which the punishment would be instant death.

  So it had been understood. It was a law which had taken no toll of the present generation of human lives, for it had been universally obeyed. The inhibition had become too strong to be broken at any likely occasion. When Vinetta exclaimed, in a troubled half-incredulous wonder of realization, “You would interfere with those machines?” Wyndham understood very well the instinctive terror that shook her mind. But he was already resisting the impulses of his new brain more instantly, more successfully, than he had at first been able to do. The knowledge that he had only just come into control of that which another had assembled and moulded was sufficient to encourage him to question its precepts, unless they were suggested to him with clear reason in their support.

  He answered, “I should be cautious in what I did. But one thing is sure. They will be confused, sooner or later, when men are dead. They will end themselves. We should expect that. We should not propose to continue them, which would require knowledge I have not got, and might, in any event, be beyond our power, being no more than two.

  “We shall not have the same dread that men have had in the past days lest confusion arise among them, but we must beware that they do us no harm, in a blind way, when they are destroying themselves.”

  “What a world it will be,” she said, “when they have done that! These walls! There will be no houses at all. There will be cold when they have gone! There will be parts of the world, if not all, where we could not live without making heat. We must find how this part would be. Perhaps, if we were near a volcano— They must leave the cars, so that we shall not be kept in one place.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “We have much to think of. But you must not show that it is of moment to you.”

  She had, in fact, echoed one of his own thoughts, which had gone farther. They might ask him to choose, before they would become busy to make an end, in what part of the earth he would wish to be. It might be wise—he had some reason to think it would—to choose a spot many thousands of miles away. But to make such a journey, leaving Vinetta behind, would be to make it improbable that they would meet again, even though she should find means to preserve her life when her companions died

  Facilities of transport were not numerous in these days. The aeroplane as a means of human transit had been obsolete for three hundred years. What use was there in rising, at foolish peril, into the skies, when you could do nothing at last but come back to earth at the same or another place? It was futility in excelsis, and therefore to be rejected even by the most futile age that the earth had seen. For all places of descent had become alike. In a world in which all differences of season or climates had been adjusted, all physical discomforts expelled, and on which vegetation had been largely suppressed, there was little disposition to move about. Oral communication had become absolute over the whole earth. Competition had been eliminated. Occupation had almost entirely ceased. The five thousand communities, each grouped round its central euthanasia furnace, and each housed in ten separate tenements, existed, but did not live.

  In contrast to the desire for continual motion which had been the tragic folly of the twentieth century—a period which had honestly and simply believed that the “progress” of humanity would be demonstrated in future years by the ever-increasing speed at which it would whirl about, and which had pledged the sincerity of this curious faith in the blood of a million dead—the final generation of men required a compelling reason for motion rather than for remaining still.

  It possessed road-tracks, and a kind of automatic car in w
hich men or goods could be conveyed from one place to another, but these were extensively employed, and most often were clocked out to their destinations without bearing a human occupant.

  Wyndham rose. He said, “I must go now. We have seven days. We need do nothing before tonight, when we shall learn more of what the programme will be. After that, I will come again.”

  “No,” she said. “I will come to you.”

  They parted without meeting of hands or lips, but, with a moment’s hesitation, a feeling of awkwardness, of shyness, very strange to themselves, and which was the measure of the novel intimacy which they had established in an age which had become complacent in the belief that it had outmoded love.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It might have been expected, with some reason in its support, that those who had resolved upon such an act as would destroy not only themselves but the race to which they belonged would have shown symptoms, in the brief interval which remained, of depression, if not despair.

  But Wyndham Smith, moving among those who had been the lifelong acquaintances—“friends” would be too warm a word for that tepid relationship—of the body and memories he now possessed, observed an opposite issue. There was slight but definite increase of animation among them, as though, having resolved to die, by the resolution, however faintly, they had come to life—to such life, at least, as they were ever destined to have.

  He was conscious also of a lack of the usual cordiality—repulsion would be too strong a word—in their attitude towards himself, which he was at first disposed to attribute to their knowledge that, though he moved with the form and spoke with the memories of Colpeck-4XP, he was actually the strange ego of a distant and most barbarous time. But further reflections and observations showed him that it had a different and deeper cause. It was his decision to live, even in the solitude of an abandoned world, which divided them from him. He experienced something of the loneliness of one who rejects the religion his kindred own.

  He would have been more conscious of, perhaps more depressed by, this attitude, had not his mind been sustained by the thought of Vinetta’s loyalty, and occupied by vague plans to preserve her life, and equally vague speculations as to what their common future would be likely to be.

  So far as he could anticipate the course of events, the coming week would see no change in the eventless routines of life, except such as might be involved in arranging for the general dissolution, and this would require little beyond preparations of the temples of euthanasia for use on a larger scale than that for which they had been designed. There would also be the question of the machines, which, apart from any request from himself, might be left to work out their own destructions, and that of the sterilization of the oceans, for which his own blundering diplomacy was primarily responsible. He supposed that arrangements would be made for the people of each centre to enter the euthanasia furnaces hundred by hundred, the council doing so at the last, when they had assured themselves that not only had the other nine hundred of their community gone on their unreturning journey, but that an enduring silence had settled upon the five thousand centres of human life.

  Among that final hundred Vinetta would be expected to take her orderly place in the procession of death. What possible excuse would be accepted? What effectual resistance could be made? What hope was there that the remaining ninety-eight would proceed to an abortive annihilation which would leave her alive to propagate their species anew, and make mockery of their own intention of mocking God? He thought of many devices, many plans, but, so far, only to put them aside. He knew that he had to foil ninety-eight of the best brains in the world, of which three were better than his. He could but hope a woman’s wit was working to better purpose than his could do.

  He saw that they must depend entirely upon their own resources, for neither he nor she had any personal influence or authority which they could exercise for their own ultimate benefits, apart from the ruling Hundred to which they belonged. Under the urgency of his lawless twentieth-century will, the brain of Colpeck-4XP devised a most cunning idea by which all he sought might have been gained, by an order which was within his personal authority, and would have done all that the occasion required.

  The trouble was that it could not be privately issued. It could not be privy to himself and those of lower grade who would accept it from him. For nothing could be privately done. When the First Hundred deliberated, the whole of the world’s inhabitants listened in. In fact, everyone could hear everything. The only privacies were in the feeding and sleeping rooms, and there was no possibility of issuing an order during the hours that they were occupied, for everyone was in the same retirement. It would have no reception at all.

  Neither was there hope of escape on the earth’s surface for Vinetta and himself, even though they could have found means of sustaining life, while facing the hostility of their fellows: not in its most solitary island, its deepest, remotest cave.

  There were no lands which heat or cold, deluge or drought, caused to be avoided by social men. Nowhere that would be secure from the iron-toothed automata which would be set to smell their sleeping-couches, then loosed upon them and tirelessly track them down.

  Considering the coldness of his reception among those with whom he took the routine exercises of the day, Wyndham was led to wonder whether this feeling might not augment itself during the week to a more active antipathy, and add further danger to a situation already appearing sufficiently ominous. But reflection enabled him to put this doubt confidently aside.

  There was not, he concluded, enough of aggressive spirit among this race, self-defeated and self-doomed in its attempt to dodge the divine law that only by opposition is strength sustained, to raise any dangerous heat of animosity against himself. Not even though it should be increasingly realized, as the days passed, that this man who had elected to remain alive was not, in his essential soul, one of themselves, but an alien from a barbarous time.

  And their well-trained subordination to restrictive law, all the negative virtues to which they had been moulded by a social order which had no criminal element, no opposition, no rebel motions of any kind, would be sufficient for their restraint.

  Though the impulses of his own alien ego contemplated rebellion, he had coolness of judgment to understand how impossible any lawless or separate action would be to these men and women whose lives of negative security had been repeated for centuries in a monotony broken only, as by a long, slow ripple on a surface of windless sea, by the periodic selecting of mates, the preparation of the public nurseries, and the training of a new generation to accept the calm atmosphere of an existence which bartered pleasure for the absence of pain.

  A celestial watcher, observing that, as the centuries passed, each of these periods had been approached with a diminishing alacrity, or even a positive and progressive unwillingness to encounter the adventurous responsibilities which they involved, might have seen the logical, inevitable end.

  Wyndham Smith concluded that, so long as his compact with Vinetta should remain secret, there would be nothing for himself to fear from his fellow men. But should that be known, there would be no mercy to hope, no defense useful to urge. They would be destroyed together by the cold justice which would hold her to have been bound by her own vote, and it would be a sentence beyond evasion, and without appeal.

  But this secret he might hope that they would not learn. Had it not left the problem of saving her own life unsolved, there would have been no more consolation in that.

  In such thoughts the day passed, and the hour of the council meeting returned.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wyndham Smith took his familiar place with a sense of frustration, of having made a mistake, which was, in itself, an indication of the changed ego which controlled the processes of the Colpeck brain. At intervals during the day, and with increasing inclination during the last two hours, it had occurred to him that it might be advantageous to have a talk with Pilwin-C6P before the council should meet.
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br />   It would have enabled him to ascertain what the proposals for the sterilization of the oceans were, and to consider to what extent it would be to his interest to support or accept them. It would be a natural curiosity for him to feel, a natural enquiry to make; and if it should appear to indicate that he was already shaken in his wild intention of surviving his fellow-men—well, there might be no harm in that!

  He might even have been able to influence the event, to come to an understanding with Pilwin-C6P in advance of the meeting, upon a matter which, from opposite angles, was of more interest to themselves than to the general body of the community. But he had remembered that Pilwin-C6P was not particularly friendly to himself. Tepidly, they had disliked each other. This feeling stirred in him now with an increased virility. Hesitating, he had let the time pass.

  It was a strange feeling to one who had little previous experience of divided will, disturbing his mind with a profundity difficult for one of our habits of indecision to understand. He took his seat now with consciousness of a mental disturbance which, if he should fail to control it firmly, might cause him to betray his alien ego by some abrupt or unseemly word. He looked round on the familiar faces of those who went placidly on their deathward, self-chosen way, with a sense of separation, of latent hostility, which would increase with each passing hour.

  Only the thought of Vinetta was potent to balance and restrain his mind, and she was the one whom he must not see.

  The chairman commencing without preamble, as the habit was, said first, “To operate the resolution of yesterday, I have had an instruction prepared for your approval. I believe it to be the general desire that our intention should be fulfilled with the dignity of deliberation, but as speedily as may be consistent therewith. It is evident that our thousands cannot terminate themselves simultaneously in a seemly manner. The congestion of the disintegrators would be too great. But in companies of one hundred each, at intervals of twelve hours, it should be possible without exception, at each of the five thousand centres.