Wyndham Smith

by S. Fowler Wright

  “I propose that the order of the procession shall be left for the free determination of each centre, which will naturally consider our and its own convenience in withholding to the last those who are in any way concerned in control or provision of the essential services.

  “I propose that the procession shall begin at six a.m. tomorrow, and that the succeeding hundreds shall gain oblivion at intervals of twelve hours thereafter, so that—as we shall necessarily be the last of our own thousand—our own release must be deferred until five days hence at this hour.”

  Having said this, the chairman waited for about five minutes, during which no one spoke, and after this interval of assenting silence he put the question to each in turn, and the chorus of “I agree”—“I agree” went down the length of the table and came up on the nearer side, until, arriving at Wyndham Smith, the chairman said, “I suppose that you do not vote?” And he replied, “I do not dissent,” as he knew that the rules of procedure for such occasions required him to do.

  In fact, the resolution was one to which, had it not been liable to misunderstanding, he would have assented with pleasure. It deferred Vinetta’s danger until the last, and that with the satisfaction of thinking that the forces of opposition would be diminished by half a million twice daily, until at last they would be a mere half-million to two! And considering how the half-million would be scattered over the earth’s surface, and engaged in simultaneous self-destruction, perhaps ninety-eight to two would be a truer arithmetic. With the odds moving so rapidly in the right direction, Wyndham might be excused a moment of satisfaction, feeling the terms of the resolution to be of great importance than the fact that Vinetta, voting for it, had confirmed her assent.

  Having disposed of the main proposition with such pleasant unanimity, the chairman came to the further business arising from the resolutions of the previous day.

  “It having been resolved,” he said, “that we should precede our own departure by doing whatever the circumstances may allow to abate the vexation of life in inferior forms, and in particular from its further gestation in the vast reservoirs of the oceans, and this being a matter on which our brother Pilwin-C6P is our acknowledged authority, it may be convenient to hear his advice thereon.”

  It was an invitation which appeared to be expected, and to which Pilwin-C6P was quite ready to respond. With no more pause than the etiquette of the assembly required, he proceeded to make a statement delivered in the usual leisurely manner, but with a faintly oracular tone that stirred Wyndham Smith to a fresh antipathy, which he rebuked in vain as evidence of the inability of his barbarous ego to accept the restraints and standards of a more civilized time. Did he wish to be incapable of strong feelings? Even of strong dislikes? He was not sure that he did! But he must cease to debate himself. He must listen. What was the sententious fool saying now?

  “We know that life, at least within its own most limited range, which is no more than a short distance above the earth’s surface, and a shorter below, has a most insurgent quality. It exists in almost infinite variety, in almost incredible minuteness, in an incalculable number of individual units. It has a persistence and an adaptability very difficult to restrain or overcome.

  “Yet…we have found ways. To an extent we have succeeded. If it were practicable to cover the whole surface of land and sea with a coating of concrete no more than two feet in thickness, it is probable that the problem would have been finally solved. But that is not practicable.

  “My ancestor, Pilwin-V2H, thought that it could be accomplished other ways. He had a scheme by which at last the earth would have been divested of life, excepting only ourselves, and any inferior organisms which might be required directly for our own use.

  “It would be vain to consider now whether, or how far, he were right or wrong. He would have commenced upon the oceans, and the collective wisdom of his contemporaries decided that it was an experiment too hazardous in its results for them to permit.

  “But the record of his proposals—of the methods he would have adopted—remains. And the two main objections, which were raised at the time, no longer apply.

  “It was said first that the consequences could not be entirely foreseen or controlled, and that they might prove to be inimical to the health or comfort of mankind when the destruction would have reached an irrevocable point. With that opening objection we are no longer concerned.

  “It was also urged that the means available were inadequate to the proposed occasion. That view was adopted by a large majority of the council of that time, and may have been right, though it was one with which Pilwin-V2H, and others who specialized in his department, did not agree. But this, again, can give no guidance to us, for we shall be able to utilize machinery which either did not exist at that time, or was required for human service.

  “The wind-controls in the polar regions and the Sahara, together with the Australian, Gobi, and Mississippi temperature plants, could all be diverted to this purpose, and would provide a total of sustained efficiency which even the oceans might not be wide or deep enough to resist successfully.”

  As he ceased, a strange sound came from the lower end of the table, the sound of fear in a human voice. With less than a seemly interval after C6P had spoken, it asked, “You would not release the winds while we still live?”

  “No. It would be absurd to propose that. The machinery would be diverted from its present uses on our last day.”

  A graver, more self-controlled voice asked, “The machinery would continue to operate for a sufficient time?”

  “We can see no reason for doubting that. It might continue even until the exhaustion of its sources of power—that is, the deposits of coal and oil that the earth contains.”

  “In fact,” a young man with Arabian features beneath a high forehead, and with eyes of an indescribable sadness, whose position at the chairman’s left indicated that he had the second-best intellect in the world, asked languidly, “You would electrocute life?”

  “In the oceans. Yes. I do not say that it would be done quickly. But, in the end, yes.”

  “Why not on land?”

  “That might also be possible.”

  “And in the air?”

  “I am less confident about that. But conditions might be made such that it could not endure.”

  “It has a sound of futility unless it be wholly done.”

  “The sterilization of the oceans,” the chairman interposed, “is a matter on which we are already agreed. We discuss methods only on which we must, as I think, be guided by the advice we have heard. But if it be possible to extend the operations to land and air, it would be in order to propose that.”

  “So I would,” the Arabic-featured one answered, “if it were advised that it could be done.”

  “I could not promise that,” Pilwin-C6P answered frankly, “unless we, or some of us, should remain alive, under less pleasant conditions than we now have, a sufficient time to direct the operations.”

  This statement was received with a long silence. Across the Arabian face there passed the faint semblance of a mirthless smile. He shook his head, as though at his own thoughts. It was clear that the price was more than any there was disposed to pay.

  Wyndham Smith judged that, though the proposal of their deaths had been first made in the form of a gesture of refusal against the unkindly skies, yet they had been impelled to embrace this extremity much less by desire to affront their Creator than by weariness of their own lives.

  Vaguely, it gave him a better hope of the issue of the battle he had to win. It encouraged him with the thought that those around him were not greatly concerned in this question of continuing life, and to remember that, but for his own blundering argument, the proposition might not have been considered at all.

  “Before,” he said, “this proposal be put to a final vote, may I ask how its operations will affect the possibilities of comfortable life on the earth during the coming years on which point you will agree that I have an intere
st that you do not share?

  The question did not meet with an immediate reply, which indeed, by the ordinary procedure, he did not expect; but he felt that it was received, if not with any reaction sufficiently strong to be called hostility, yet with an indifference, an aloofness, which might come to the same result.

  “You will observe,” the chairman said temperately, breaking the lengthened pause, “that it is by your own desire that you will remain, and if you prefer a course which is contrary to that which will be taken by all your kind, it may not be their first concern to make it easy for you. Yet”—turning to Pilwin-C6P—“it is a question that should, as I see it, be answered plainly.”

  Pilwin-C6P did not object to do this, but his voice, as he replied, had a faint tone of contempt, as that of one who turns his mind to a small thing. “The earth, as I suppose, will not have much comfort when we are gone. We could not change that, if we would. But it is large for one man. And his lonely life cannot be a matter of much beyond a few weeks—or a few years, if you will. Why should he not go, while he can, to one of the islands in the tropic seas?

  “No man has stepped on them perhaps for some hundreds of years, but they will be there still. Their climate will be such that a man’s life may endure even though we remove the controls of heat and wind that we now have. And even what we do to the seas will be slow to reach or affect them.”

  Wyndham Smith listened to this, and thought that he had heard nothing deserving thanks. The idea that he might find a tolerable refuge on one of those remote, abandoned islands had already occurred to his own mind. But, if he should agree to take such a journey, what possibility was there that Vinetta would escape singly and join him there?

  Or did he desire that, for their own temporary convenience, they should locate themselves in some solitary place from which they or their descendants would have little hope of reaching a wider world? And an island set in the sea from which life in the coming weeks, or years, was to be electrocuted away, with results incalculable, but certain to be adverse, if not fatal to that island life? There would be no more fish. The fish-eating sea-birds, if any such still lived in those lonely seas, would die. Where would death end?

  From wandering into such details his mind was recalled by the fact that another spoke. It was Avanah-F3B, whom he had reason to like. A man seated almost opposite him, of grave placidity, with thoughtful, introspective eyes. His place indicated that he was almost the lowest intellectually, among the First Hundred, but, actually, where there were five million to be graded, there was not much difference in that. He was the chief official historian, his knowledge of the world’s past being very great.

  He said gently, “If our brother have the great courage to remain alive for a time when he will be the last of his kind, might he not take such control of the machines as the occasion require, so that they may all do that which we aim to reach?”

  It was a second suggestion that Wyndham Smith had no pleasure in hearing; but he recognized fairly that it was both reasonable in itself, and likely to arise in the mind of one who regarded the course of human existence as a panoramic whole to which an orderly finish was now being put. His mind, trained in the historical sense, must look with the same curiosity forward as back.

  But what should he say in reply? Whatever he might have randomly urged on the previous day, he had no desire for the policy of sterilization to succeed—certainly no wish to assist it. And he was, by his personal predilection, as well as by his acquired proclivities, of a scrupulous honour, which would object, even at this emergency, to pledge itself to that which it would not do.

  The chairman was acute enough to perceive the hesitation which delayed his reply, and gave it a natural interpretation. “It may be,” he said, “that Colpeck-4XP is not finally resolved that he will live a solitary life when all his kind will have left the earth. If that be so, it becomes a pledge that he could not give.”

  Wyndham Smith saw that he must speak. Certainly it was a pledge that he would not give. Was it one that, apart from the doubt which had been suggested, he could directly refuse? How would such a refusal be received? But was there really a doubt? Suppose that Vinetta should falter, after further consideration of the hardships they might have to face? Suppose—a larger fear—that she should fail to escape her accepted doom? Would he have the heart to remain alive in an empty world? Since her proposal had been made, the idea of such solitude had become hard to endure. He said, with sincerity in his voice, “I am not yet of a final mind.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wyndham left the council feeling that, if he had no special cause for satisfaction, yet that it had gone as well as, in reason, he could have hoped, and better than he had had some occasion to fear.

  He had heard the second resolution—that for the sterilization of the seas—passed with the same unanimity as the first, he being excused from voting upon it in the same way as before, but that had been after it was agreed that he should confer privately with Pilwin-C6P to discuss the possibility of assisting the project if, or when, he should finally resolve upon the folly of avoiding the common death. It was a pledge which bound him to little, and which he had not seen his way to avoid.

  He had not looked at Vinetta, nor, he supposed, had she looked at him. It was a cause of satisfaction that she had been discreetly silent, and had voted for the two resolutions in a manner which had drawn no notice upon herself. So far, he supposed, there was not, in any human mind, suspicion of what they proposed to do.

  So far, so good. But suppose her attitude had been no less than sincere? Suppose that, with further thought, she had seen the terrible folly of the escapade which she had impulsively proposed? He knew how his own body, unacquainted as it was with pain or discomfort of any kind, shrank from the anticipation of what might—what certainly would—be before it, if his resolution should persist. And his body, inexperienced in hardship though it might be, was controlled by an ego of more vigorous, more optimistic, more barbarous days, while she had no such driving force, no such alien vitality. Would it be wonderful if she should reconsider?

  He forced his mind away from this self-torturing doubt to wonder what his experiences might have been in that far life of which he could now have no memory. Would he, he wondered, recall them, however faintly, if they should be recounted to him? Suppose he should ask Avanah-F3B to describe what life had been in the England of that distant day? Would it be vaguely familiar? Would it perhaps come back to him as, by some accident of associated ideas, one is reminded of a dream which otherwise the waking consciousness would never have known? More probably, and more to the present point, might not knowledge of the barbarisms through which he had actually lived until yesterday give him resolution and courage for those which must be his again in so short a time? Certainly, he would have a talk with Avanah-F3B.

  But suppose—his mind swung back again to its previous doubt—suppose she had seen the wisdom of that which was the considered judgment of everyone of five millions except themselves? A flicker of rebellion, a stir of insurgent life, might be natural enough, if she were really that sixth, unintended child. But was it likely that it would endure? Women are traditionally more disposed, even than men, to walk in the trodden path. Well, she had said she would come to him. She must stand the test. He would remain where he was, and, should she fail, they would all go to a common grave; for he saw now, with a convincing clarity, the folly, the barrenness of a single protest A misery to himself, to end in wretched, abortive death—and a jest to the mocking gods.

  So he resolved. And in the mood of the torturing doubt which may be worse than despair he remained till the evening meal appeared; and after that, for some time, in a deepening gloom, for she was not quick to come.

  But she did so at last, with serene eyes, and such a smile bending her lips that he was led to contrast the memory of how she had appeared to him during the earlier days; for it was a smile which, till then, he had never seen. He did not know that her coming had brought the same l
ight to his eyes, and that he smiled in response to her, as Colpeck-4XP had never been seen to do.

  “I thought,” he said, “you would never come!”

  “You didn’t doubt me?” she asked, a shadow of disappointment darkening her eyes. And then, before he could reply, with a deeper realization of what they were, “We have begun to live, you and I, even before they are quite dead!”

  He had risen when she entered, leaving a meal which, having been taken more rapidly than the regulations required, was nearly done, but a tiny dish of some opalescent material suggestive at once of china and polished steel, still showed a little untouched pyramid of mottled-grey powder. She looked at it as she asked, “Are you going to swallow that?”

  “Yes,” he said, “why not?” He looked bewildered, and then his eyes changed to a more understanding surprise. “I had not thought—” he began, and stopped, seeing all that her question meant.

  It was this powder which, taken regularly, secured the body from extreme sensations of any kind. It could be discommoded neither by heat nor cold (which might have exposed it to greater dangers had not all extremes of temperature been banished, and fire rarely seen until the last hour of life, unless it were at a volcano’s mouth); and the severest pain would be reduced to a slight, persistent discomfort, such as would be a warning that the physician’s visit should not be long delayed.

  That might mean nothing worse than an increased dose of the easeful drug, and a process of painless repair, or, if the damage were pronounced to be beyond remedy, there would be the journey to the euthanasia furnace, the taking of increased quantities of mottled powder, and a gradual sliding down in a failing consciousness to the pleasant glow of a furnace they would not feel.