“I have no features, no senses that I could describe to you, yet I can realize the universe infinitely better than you can with your elementary senses. I am aware of planes of existence you cannot imagine. I can feed myself with pure energy without the need of a cumbersome body, to transform it, and I can move and act, despite my lack of limbs, by means and with a speed and power utterly beyond your comprehension.
“If you still have fear of the threats I made two stages back against your world and race, banish them! I am pure intelligence now and as such, though I can no more feel the emotions of love or friendship, neither can I feel those of ambition or pride. The only emotion, if such it is, that remains to me still is intellectual curiosity, and this desire for truth that has burned in man since his apehood will thus be the last of all desires to leave him!”
* * * *
The Last Mutation
“A brain—a great brain!” Dutton was saying dazedly. “Here in Pollard’s laboratory—but where’s Pollard? He was here, too . . .”
“Then all men will some day be as you are now?” I cried.
“Yes,” came the answering thought, “in two hundred and fifty million years man as you know him and as you are will be no more, and after passing all the stages through which I have passed through tonight, the human race will have developed into great brains inhabiting not only your solar system, no doubt, but the systems of other stars!”
“And that’s the end of man’s evolutionary road? That is the highest point that he will reach?”
“No, I think he will change from this great brain into still a higher form,” the brain answered—the brain that three hours before had been Pollard!—”and I am going to find out now what that higher form will be. For I think this will be the last mutation of all and that with it I will reach the end of man’s evolutionary path, the last and highest form into which he can develop!
“You will turn on the rays now,” the brain’s order continued, “and in fifteen minutes we will know what that last and highest form is.”
My hand was on the switch but Dutton had staggered to me, was clutching my arm. “Don’t, Arthur!” he was exclaiming thickly. “We’ve seen horrors enough—let’s not see the last—get out of here . . .”
“I can’t!” I cried. “Oh God, I want to stop but I can’t now—I want to see the end myself—I’ve got to see ...”
“Turn on the rays!” came the brain’s thought-order again.
“The end of the road—the last mutation,” I panted. “We’ve got to see—to see—” I drove the switch home.
The rays flashed down again to hide the great gray brain in the cube. Dutton’s eyes were staring fixedly, he was clinging to me.
The minutes passed! Each tick of the watch in my hand was the mighty note of a great tolling bell in my ears.
An inability to move seemed gripping me. The hand of my watch was approaching the minute for which I waited, yet I could not raise my hand toward the switch!
Then as the hand reached the appointed minute I broke from my immobility and in a sheer frenzy of sudden strength pulled open the switch, rushed forward with Dutton to the cube’s very edge!
The great gray brain that had been inside it was gone. There lay on the cube’s floor instead of it a quite shapeless mass of clear, jelly-like matter. It was quite motionless save for a slight quivering. My shaking hand went forth to touch it, and then it was that I screamed, such a scream as all the tortures of hell’s cruelest fiends could not have wrung from a human throat.
The mass inside the cube was a mass of simple protoplasm! This then was the end of man’s evolution-road, the highest form to which time would bring him, the last mutation of all! The road of man’s evolution was a circular one, returning to its beginning!
From the earth’s bosom had risen the first crude organisms. Then sea-creature and land-creature and mammal and ape to man; and from man it would rise in the future through all the forms we had seen that night. There would be super-men, bodiless heads, pure brains; only to be changed by the last mutation of all into the protoplasm from which first it had sprung!
I do not know now exactly what followed. I know that I rushed upon that quivering, quiescent mass, calling Pollard’s name madly and shouting things I am glad I cannot remember. I know that Dutton was shouting too, with insane laughter, and that as he struck with lunatic howls and fury about the laboratory the crash of breaking glass and the hiss of escaping gases was in my ears. And then from those mingling acids bright flames were leaping and spreading, sudden fires that alone, I think now, saved my own sanity.
For I can remember dragging the insanely laughing Dutton from the room, from the house, into the cool darkness of the night. I remember the chill of dew-wet grass against my hands and face as the flames from Pollard’s house soared higher. And I remember that as I saw Dutton’s crazy laughter by that crimson light, I knew, that he would laugh thus until he died.
* * * *
So ends my narrative of the end that came to Pollard and Pollard’s house. It is, as I said in beginning, a narrative that I only can tell now, for Dutton has never spoken a sane word since. In the institution where he now is, they think his condition the result of shock from the fire, just as Pollard was believed to have perished in that fire. I have never until now told the truth.
But I am telling it now, hoping that it will in some way lessen the horror it has left with me. For there could be no horror greater than that we saw in Pollard’s house that night. I have brooded upon it. With my mind’s eye I have followed that tremendous cycle of change, that purposeless, eon-long climb of life up from simple protoplasm through myriads of forms and lives of ceaseless pain and struggle, only to end in simple protoplasm again.
Will that cycle of evolutionary change be repeated over and over again upon this and other worlds, ceaselessly, purposelessly, until there is no more universe for it to go on in? Is this colossal cycle of life’s changes as inevitable and necessary as the cycle that in space makes of the nebulae myriad suns, and of the suns dark-stars, and of the dark-stars colliding with one another nebula again?
Or is this evolutionary cycle we saw a cycle in appearance only, is there some change that we cannot understand, above and beyond it? I do not know which of these possibilities is truth, but I do know that the first of them haunts me. It would haunt the world if the world believed my story. Perhaps I should be thankful as I write to know that I will not be believed.
* * * *
As I reread “The Man Who Evolved,” I tried to remember when I had first learned about cosmic rays and evolution. I failed. It is as though I always knew about both phenomena, even though I was clearly not born with the knowledge.
I honestly believe that I learned about both from science fiction stories to begin with. I might even have come across them first in this story.
There are some pieces of knowledge that I remember clearly having learned from science fiction stories.
For instance, in Hamilton’s The Universe Wreckers, much of the action took place on the planet Neptune, which was treated in the story as the most distant of the planets. (Pluto had not yet been discovered, and when I heard news of the discovery, in 1931, my first thought was that it messed up Hamilton’s novel.) It was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton. I remember that piece of learning quite clearly.
It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell, Jr., that I first heard of relativity.
The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one.
This is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge. In the case of “The Man Who Evolved,” Hamilton was
on solid ground when he maintained cosmic rays to be a motive force behind evolution. They are, but only in so far as they help create random mutations. It is natural selection that supplies the direction of evolutionary change, and this works, very painfully and slowly, upon large populations, not upon individuals.
The notion that a concentration of cosmic rays would cause an individual human being to evolve, personally, in the direction inevitably to be taken by the entire species is, of course, quite wrong. Concentrated radiation would merely kill.
However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science.
It was the mark of the early and rather unsophisticated science fiction stories of the 1930s, by the way, that they often opened with one scientist lecturing others on subjects those others could not fail to know in real life (but of which the readers had to be informed).
I remember that the very first story I ever wrote for publication (but which was never published), “Cosmic Corkscrew,” began that way, with the scientist-hero lecturing a friend on cosmic rays and neutrinos. No doubt, that opening helped Campbell decide on an immediate rejection (see The Early Asimov).
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* * * *
In the very month in which I completed the eighth grade, I read another story that stayed with me: “The Jameson Satellite,” by Neil R. Jones, in the July 1931 Amazing Stories.
THE JAMESON SATELLITE
by Neil R. Jones
PROLOGUE
The Rocket Satellite
In the depths of space, some twenty thousand miles from the earth, the body of Professor Jameson within its rocket container cruised upon an endless journey, circling the gigantic sphere. The rocket was a satellite of the huge, revolving world around which it held to its orbit. In the year 1958 Professor Jameson had sought for a plan whereby he might preserve his body indefinitely after his death. He had worked long and hard upon the subject.
Since the time of the Pharaohs, the human race had looked for a means by which the dead might be preserved against the ravages of time. Great had been the art of the Egyptians in the embalming of their deceased, a practice which was later lost to humanity of the ensuing mechanical age, never to be rediscovered. But even the embalming of the Egyptians — so Professor Jameson had argued — would be futile in the face of millions of years, the dissolution of the corpses being just as eventual as immediate cremation following death.
The professor had looked for a means by which the body could be preserved perfectly forever. But eventually he had come to the conclusion that nothing on earth is unchangeable beyond a certain limit of time. Just as long as he sought an earthly means of preservation, he was doomed to disappointment. All earthly elements are composed of atoms which are forever breaking down and building up, but never destroying themselves. A match may be burned, but the atoms are still unchanged, having resolved themselves into smoke, carbon dioxide, ashes, and certain basic elements. It was clear to the professor that he could never accomplish his purpose if he were to employ one system of atomic structure, such as embalming fluid or other concoction, to preserve another system of atomic structure, such as the human body, when all atomic structure is subject to universal change no matter how slow.
He had then soliloquized upon the possibility of preserving the human body in its state of death until the end of all earthly time — to that day when the earth would return to the sun from which it had sprung. Quite suddenly one day he had conceived the answer to the puzzling problem which obsessed his mind, leaving him awed with its wild, uncanny potentialities.
He would have his body shot into space enclosed in a rocket to become a satellite of the earth as long as the earth continued to exist. He reasoned logically. Any material substance, whether of organic or inorganic origin, cast into the depths of space would exist indefinitely. He had visualized his dead body enclosed in a rocket flying off into the illimitable maw of space. He would remain in perfect preservation, while on earth millions of generations of mankind would live and die, their bodies to molder into the dust of the forgotten past. He would exist in this unchanged manner until that day when mankind, beneath a cooling sun, should fade out forever in the chill, thin atmosphere of a dying world. And still his body would remain intact and as perfect in its rocket container as on that day of the far-gone past when it had left the earth to be hurled out on its career. What a magnificent idea!
At first he had been assailed with doubts. Suppose his funeral rocket landed upon some other planet or, drawn by the pull of the great sun, were thrown into the flaming folds of the incandescent sphere? Then the rocket might continue on out of the solar system, plunging through the endless seas of space for millions of years, to finally enter the solar system of some far-off star, as meteors often enter ours. Suppose his rocket crashed upon a planet, or the star itself, or became a captive satellite of some celestial body?
It had been at this juncture that the idea of his rocket becoming the satellite of the earth bad presented itself, and he had immediately incorporated it into his scheme. The professor had figured out the amount of radium necessary to carry the rocket far enough away from the earth so that it would not turn around and crash, and still be not so far away but what the earth’s gravitational attraction would keep it from leaving the vicinity of the earth and the solar system. Like the moon, it would forever revolve around the earth.
He had chosen an orbit sixty-five thousand miles from the earth for his rocket to follow. The only fears he had entertained concerned the huge meteors which careened through space (at tremendous rates of speed. He bad overcome this obstacle, however, and had eliminated the possibilities of a collision with these stellar juggernauts. In the rocket were installed radium repulsion rays which swerved all approaching meteors from the path of the rocket as they entered the vicinity of the space wanderer. The aged professor had prepared for every contingency, and had set down to rest from his labors, reveling in the stupendous, unparalleled results he would obtain. Never would his body undergo decay; and never would his bones bleach to return to the dust of the earth from which all men originally came and to which they must return. His body would remain millions of years in a perfectly preserved state, untouched by the hoary palm of such time as only geologists and astronomers can conceive.
His efforts would surpass even the wildest dreams of H. Rider Haggard, who depicted the wondrous, embalming practice of the ancient nation of Kor in his immortal novel, She, wherein Holly, under the escort of the incomparable Ayesha, looked upon the magnificent, lifelike masterpieces of embalming by the long-gone peoples of Kor.
With the able assistance of a nephew, who carried out his instructions and wishes following his death. Professor Jameson was sent upon his pilgrimage into space within the rocket he himself had built. The nephew and heir kept the secret forever locked in his heart.
* * * *
Generation after generation had passed upon its way. Gradually humanity had come to die out, finally disappearing from the earth altogether. Mankind was later replaced by various other forms of life which dominated the globe for their allotted spaces of time before they too became extinct. The years piled up on one another, running into millions, and still the Jameson Satellite kept its lonely vigil around the earth, gradually closing the distance between satellite and planet, yielding reluctantly to the latter’s powerful attraction.
Forty million years later, its orbit ranged some twenty thousand miles from the earth while the dead world edged ever nearer the cooling sun whose dull, red ball covered a large expanse of the sky. Surrounding the flaming sphere, many of the stars could be perceived through the earth’s thin, rarefied atmosphere. As the earth cut in slowly and gradually toward the solar luminary, so was the moon revolving ever nearer the earth, appearing like a great gem glowing in the twilight sky.
The rocket containing the remains of Professor Jameson continued its endless tr
avel around the great ball of the earth whose rotation had now ceased entirely — one side forever facing the dying sun. There it pursued its lonely way, a cosmic coffin, accompanied by its funeral cortege of scintillating stars amid the deep silence of the eternal space which enshrouded it. Solitary it remained, except for the occasional passing of a meteor flitting by at a remarkable speed on its aimless journey through the vacuum between the far-flung worlds.
Would the satellite follow its orbit to the world’s end, or would its supply of radium soon exhaust itself after so many eons of time, converting the rocket into the prey of the first large meteor which chanced that way? Would it some day return to the earth as its nearer approach portended, and increase its acceleration in a long arc to crash upon the surface of the dead planet? And when the rocket terminated its career, would the body of Professor Jameson be found perfectly preserved or merely a crumbled mound of dust?
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 6