Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy, and Horror

by David Henry Keller

  "It certainly is odd," replied the inventor. "What is her serial number?"

  Government Official, Class D, Division 7, No. 4830, Gross Number, 259799987. Her name is Ruth Fanning. Ever hear of her?"

  "Slightly." The inventor smiled. "That woman has been my first assistant for a number of years. I could have told you offhand, without any instrumentation, that she was a four star personality. But I never thought of marrying her."

  "She is in the next room. Suppose you go in and talk matters over with her?"

  Hubler was far more embarrassed than the woman who was waiting for him.

  "This is a great surprise to me, Ruth," he stammered.

  "It is not to me," was her calm reply. "I had an idea it would be like this."

  "Are you willing to marry me?"

  "Certainly! What did you think I had been waiting for all these years? I could not marry you till you had your permit and were typed, could I?"

  "But how did you know we were of the same type?"

  "Womanly intuition," was her smiling reply.

  They told the head of the bureau that they were willing to marry. After working together, it seemed the proper and natural thing to do. He gave them the proper papers, they received the general treatment, and started life in a two-person apartment.

  The Hublers returned to their work. Life was very much the same as it had been, perhaps a little more intimate, more in unison than before, but, in a large way, not much different. They were living in a two-person apartment instead of two one-person apartments, but standardization had reached the point which made all apartments very much the same, irrespective of the number of occupants. They continued to work their hour a day, five days a week, spending the other hours in the pursuit of happiness and culture. After having worked together for twenty-five years, it was hard to put into effect any new or very novel social pattern of behavior.

  In the course of time, their child was born in a Government hospital. A serial number was tattooed on his back, and he was transferred to a Government nursery, for the care of the infant was felt to be one of the most important duties of the Commonwealth. What use to produce babies one hundred per cent perfect and then have everything spoiled by an untrained mother! Why entrust this most delicate period of existence to the unskilled human mother, when it could be given with perfect confidence to a perfect machine? Thus, for the first two years of the child's life, it was cared for by machinery which did everything necessary for the welfare of the young citizen, and did it in a perfect and standardized manner.

  The Hublers never saw the child. It was believed that much unhappiness was caused by the surplus affection of the mother, so the law provided that in these vital years there be a complete separation of parent and child. However, reports of the growth of the child were sent by mail every month, and at the end of the first and second years, photographs were taken and sent to the Hublers. The proud parents placed these in a baby book. If they fretted over not being permitted to see their child, they did not confess it to each other; they realized the advantage of such a life to their son and were willing to make any sacrifices necessary for the future welfare of the baby.

  At two years, the Hubler boy was walking, talking, and able to dress and undress himself. He had an intelligence quotient of three hundred, which meant a mental age of six years. At that time, he was taken out of the nursery kindergarten and placed in the grade school. There, all the teaching was done by machinery, standardized in every respect. Contact between the young pupils and older adults was rare. While there were periods of relaxation and play for the young students, life as a whole was rather serious.

  The education was varied according to the predetermined future of the child. If a boy was to become a musician, why give him the preliminary training necessary for the development of a scientist? Thus, each child became a specialist early in life, and many valuable years of existence were saved which had been wasted a century before.

  The Hubler boy advanced rapidly. At eight years, he was past the help of machine instructors. From then on, he received the personal guidance of the few remaining philosophers, for it was early found that his mind was suited for philosophy and not for very much else. At ten, he was a beautiful boy, but such a deep thinker about things which no one else had ever tried to think of before, that he was both a trial and an inspiration to his professors.

  At the age of twelve, his maturity was recognized, and it was thought advisable to give him a name, make him a full citizen, and assign him to a government position. The parents were asked to select a name, and naturally, they selected Jacob Hubler. Junior. They were delighted when they were told that he had been made Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the National University, and given full citizenship. A free unit of society, he could now do as he wished with his time, the only restriction being in the hour a day five days a week rule for all government employees. The first thing he decided to do was to visit his parents.

  So far, they had not seen him. But they had prepared for the happy event by moving into a three-person apartment. It was very much like their two-person apartment only a little larger and with an extra bedroom.

  Jacob and Ruth Hubler could hardly wait for their son's arrival. They had his baby book out on the table; they wanted to tell him of their marriage, show him the reports and his baby pictures. They wanted him to know what his birth had meant to them and how they had loved him all these years. They did not look a day older than they had looked thirteen years ago, but, somehow, they felt more important and quite advanced in years. Their boy was coming home to them!

  Their son! The culmination of nearly a century.

  At last, he came—a young man with a beautiful body and a wonderful intelligence. He greeted them without emotion, talked to them without effort. Recognizing them as his parents, he spoke only of the debt the individual owed to the state. He was courteous and polite, but, in some way, he did not seem to be interested in the things they were interested in. Jacob, Senior, spoke of his new household inventions; Ruth told of her part in the work. He, the young philosopher, looked a trifle bored, and talked of Erkenntnisstheorie and the undue subjectivity of the temper. At last, he rose from his chair:

  "I must go," he said in a tone of polite apology. "I have an important engagement with a philosopher in China. I must take the next Oriental air machine for Canton. He is an old man, and it is very important that I confer with him before he dies."

  The mother put her hand on his shoulder and whispered timidly:

  "Won't you spend the night with us, Jacob? I made your bed myself, and your room is all ready,"

  "I am sorry, but I have made this appointment and must go."

  "Well, come again, and as often as you can," said the father rather cheerily. "Always glad to see you, my boy."

  Jacob and Ruth went out on the balcony of their apartment. It was on the two hundredth story and overlooked Greater New York. They stood there, and, somehow, his arm stole around her waist, and her head dropped on his shoulder. He touched her cheek as he whispered:

  "That is a fine boy. Sure is great to be a father."

  She shivered in his arms.

  "I am cold," she said. "The autumn is past, and there is the chill of winter in the air. If you will pardon me, I will go to bed."

  For a long time, Jacob stood there on the balcony, alone.

  Once he was back in the living room, he took from his pocket a Government communication. It was from the Child Permit Department.

  "YOUR SON, JACOB HUBLER, JR., HAS FULFILLED IN EVERY WAY THE EXPECTATION OF HIS PRENATAL CHARTS. AS A PHILOSOPHER HE IS A SUCCESS. BUREAU OF STATISTICS ADVISE US THAT THEY NEED SEVERAL MORE PHILOSOPHERS. THIS LETTER IS YOUR OFFICIAL PERMIT TO HAVE ANOTHER SON. REPLY AT ONCE DESIRE OF YOUR WIFE AND SELF CONCERNING THIS."

  He read it over several times. At first it seemed to be hard to understand. He had been so busy improving the standard of kitchen equipment that he had given but little time to other matters. Still holding t
he letter in his hand, he went over to the central table and opened the baby book. He looked at the first few pictures and then could not see very well because of the film over his eyes.

  Closing the book, he went over to the wall wireless and tapped out a letter in reply, addressed to the Child Permit Department. One sentence was the answer, one sentence and the name; and the message read:

  "WE WILL NOT HAVE ANY MORE CHILDREN."

  JACOB HUBLER.

  He walked as quietly as he could to his wife's bedroom door.

  Her room was dark, and he could hear her sobbing in the darkness.

  He went in and touched her hair. Wanting to comfort her, he did not know what to say. The world was no longer all before them.

  — Milton

  NO MORE TOMORROWS

  IN thinking over the great disaster of my life, I am always impressed with the fact that I came near success. There was only a hairbreadth between success and my ambitions. It is true that I failed, but I am not the first man who failed because of too great trust in a woman.

  The idea would never have come to me had it not been for a peculiar combination of circumstances. First came the fact that I was, by years of labor, one of the greatest of psychological workers in the entire world; perhaps it would be better to state that I was not one of the greatest, but THE greatest. Then came the failure on Wall Street and the loss of my entire fortune. At that time, while I needed ready cash, the thought came to me, and I lost no time in capitalizing it.

  Fortunately for me, the Internationale had agents in New York. I had heard of them, their activity, and their unlimited funds. Within three days, I had arranged for a conference.

  There were three of them. To this day, I know of them only by their numbers. "Twenty-one" seemed to be the leader. He was a small, one-eyed man with a head that seemed to be a constant burden to him on account of its unusual size. It needed to be large to hold all the store of knowledge he possessed. "Forty-seven" looked like an idiot. He had the largest nose I have ever seen on anyone; it seemed to start at the hair line and, sweeping down over the face in a generous curve, ended within a short distance of his chin. In talking, he used that nose as a trumpet, varying the tone and volume by partly closing one or both nostrils with the tips of his fingers. He was nauseating to look at, but adorable to listen to. "Thirty-four" was a blind man with one arm. I thought for a long time that he had lost it in the late war, but one night I found that he had a very short arm growing out of the shoulder.

  "Twenty-one," "Forty-seven," "Thirty-four"—these were the men Russia had placed in America to undermine our social fabric and make us easy plucking when the day of final reckoning came. These were the three men I met in the back room of a slum restaurant the night that I sold everything I valued for the gold they had so much of.

  They sat there on three sides of the tabic, "Twenty-one," as usual, supporting his hydrocephalic head in his hands, elbows on the table; "Forty-seven" humming a Mozart melody through his nasal trombone, and "Thirty-four," his face with hollow sockets twitching pitifully, tapping nervously on the table with the one hand that was able to reach it. No wonder I was nervous and slightly nauseated, for, though I had a wonderful idea, I was not at all sure of my ability to convince them of its worth.

  "The human brain," I began, "is the organ which differentiates man from the lower forms of life. We, the human race, the Genus Homo, owe our supremacy to the great development of that brain. The mid-stem, the cerebellum, is similar in anatomy and function to that of the lower types, but when we consider the cerebrum, the two hemispheres, the various lobes with their twisted convolutions, their deep sutures, then we see what makes us more than animals and only a little less than Gods.

  "Gentlemen, I ask you a question: 'What do we do with those lobes of the bilateral cerebrum?' We accumulate knowledge. Once we acquire a fact, that fact is never lost; at the worst, it is only accessible in our subconscious, awaiting the proper stimuli to cross the threshold and become the property of our conscious ego. So, we acquire knowledge.

  "In other words, we remember what we have learned, and that mental quality is called memory. How far back does memory extend? Who knows? Freud, Adler, Jung, White, all of them, quarrel over the question. They cannot agree as to whether memory can be inherited or only acquired. I, as a psychologist, have my opinions, but why bother you with what I think?

  "For there is something more important to consider tonight. I am thinking of the mental power of preparing for the future. Ah! That power indeed is possessed only by man. The squirrel buries a nut; but, forgetting where, allows it to grow into a tree. The mason-wasp may place food in an earthen cell; but she fails to see that the scientist, Fabre, has carefuly cut the bottom out of the cell, destroying its usefulness.

  "Man prepares for the future. He does it not only as an individual, but also as a nation, and almost as a race. Working in the todays of life, all his plans, ambitions, and desires are located in his tomorrows. How have the great nations of history attained their fame? By carefully planning the future of their national life. Every rich man has become such by having a vision of the future, and then making a programme for his tomorrows. Am I right?"

  They agreed with me. The truth was axiomatic. There was no need of argument. In fact, I gave them credit for seeing where my argument was leading me before I reached the middle of it. So I went on:

  "In every nation there are, at best, a hundred men who have a sufficient mental force to plan for the future life of their commonwealths. They sit and dream; and then translate their dreams into economic and militaristic programmes which, they hope, will make their nation greater. These men are not concerned with the naval tonnage of today. What they want to know is the ratios that will exist between them and their rivals ten years, thirty years, from now. They live in the future. They can look only one way—forward. Historians backward turn their piercing gaze through the vanished centuries, but these dreamers think only of the history that will be made in the years to come.

  "All the nations have their eyes set on Russia. They know that she is a sleeping giant, a terrific entity that so far has not learned to apply its power. The nations fear Russia, and the dreamers of all the nations are preparing for all the tomorrows, when the Great Bear will come down from the Ural Mountains.

  ''Your country faces a superhuman task in its plan to socialize the world. You also have your dreamers. I know that you have plans for the next ten, the next fifty, years. But the nations are playing a game of chess with you, and their intelligentsia is at least as brilliant as yours.

  "Now here is my thought: Suppose something should happen to the one hundred great thinkers in a dozen of the supreme countries of this earth? Suppose that something should happen simultaneously to all of them? And what if this something prevented them from paying any more attention to the tomorrows of their nations? Can you visualize what would happen with England, France, Italy, Japan, the United States, and a half dozen more, simply living in the todays of life? Legislation would collapse for lack of leadership. Finances would become despairing wrecks. The economic foundations of the world would be shaken. Armies would disappear, and navies would rust away in the harbors. Only Russia would plan, only your country would be able to progress; and, whenever you wished to, you could crush the rival nations as a steam roller crushes out the ruts in an earthen road. That is the idea I want to sell you."

  "Magnificent!" shrieked "Twenty-one."

  "Beautiful!" whistled "Forty-seven" through his trombone.

  "But an impossible nightmare," sighed "Thirty-four," his pallid face twitching as he threw aside my plan as a fantastic dream.

  "I am a psychologist," I continued, not in the least dismayed by their criticisms, (for I knew the real truth of the theory). "For years, I have studied the human brain, normal and abnormal. With scalpel, and every known instrument of precision, I dug into that greatest of all creations. And some time ago, I found out something that no one in the whole world knows. I located th
e brain center which enables man to visualize the future and plan for it. I have found out the part of the brain where he keeps his tomorrows.

  "That in itself is an achievement of note. But," and here I lowered my voice to whisper, "what would you think if I told you that I have isolated a toxin, so specific, so powerful, that it can be given to a man in his food, just a few drops, and at once the ability of this Tomorrow Center is destroyed? It simply ceases to function. The man lives on as he has always done, but he has no more tomorrows."

  "You say it can be given in food?" whinnied "Forty-seven."

  "A drop or two in a grape, or in a glass of wine?" trembled "Twenty-one."

  "I see it all! I can leap forward and in imagination visualize the results!" cried "Thirty-four." "It will make Russia ruler of the universe overnight."

  "You are confident of your ability?" asked "Forty-seven."

  "Absolutely!" and I was confident. More than that, I knew that these representatives of the greatest power in the world believed me, and would pay me well for the formula necessary to manufacture the drug. The manner of giving it, the ways that would have to be devised to finish the treatment; why, that was their business. So, I simply smiled at them as I repeated:

  "Absolutely!"

  They believed me. It was not even thought necessary to consult with the higher men in the Internationale. There would be no signatures, they said, and no incriminating document; but ten thousand dollars that very night and ten million upon the delivery of the first four ounces of the drug with the complete directions for making it.

  We shook hands on it, and "Forty-seven," pulling from his pocket a roll of bills, counted out twenty $500 "yellow boys." At the sight of what he had left, I cursed myself. I could have had ten times ten thousand without protest, but I knew the other money soon would be mine. And Leonora would be mine. She had resisted the love of an unknown scientist, but when she knew that she could help in the spending of ten million dollars, what would she say? And there would be more than that. These men had told me that if the medicine worked, I could have anything I asked of Russia—anything I wanted, and they would be glad to give me my slightest desire because of the great gift I had handed them.