Green Peyton

“ And the lake? Melbourne?
The Grieg nocturne came to an end. I frowned as I set down my razor, and went into the living room to change the record. Conflicting memories ... where did they meet? On the one hand was the awakening in the cold waters of the lake—only an hour or less than an hour ago. And there was Melbourne, and the strange conversation at the Club. Finally there was this amazing and isolated recollection, like a passage from a dream. ”

“ The deserts flowered again, but the frost would come always to bite the tiny crops. For still the Ice came. All the world now, but for a narrow strip about the equator, was one great silent desolate vista of stark ice-plains, ice that brooded above the hidden ruins of cities that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years. It was terrible to imagine the awful solitude and the endless twilight that lay on these places, and the grim snow, sailing in silence over all.... ”

“ Selda's voice, rising suddenly after her long silence, startled me, and I looked at her, disturbed again by some subtle attraction exercised over me by her body. We were silent a while, then I relapsed into my inner questionings, and turned to Edvar.
"You must live under a sort of socialistic system," I said thoughtfully. "Even a sort of communism?"
"In a sense. Rather it is an automatic life. The soul of the machine pervades us all, and the machines are beautiful. ”

“ I cannot help feeling that man is not yet prepared for such a vast thing. There are sacrifices. One must give up love and all sensual pleasure. This operation not only takes away the mere fact of reproduction, but it deprives one of all the things that go with sex, all love, all sense of beauty, all feeling for poetry and the arts. It leaves only the few emotions, selfish emotions, that are necessary to self-preservation. Do you not see? One becomes an intellect, nothing more—a cold apotheosis of reason. ”

“ More hills rose from the plain on every side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high, which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two mountains. ”

“ Is love something entirely of the flesh, something created by an ironic God merely to propagate His race? Or can there be love without emotion, love without passion—love between two cold intellects? I do not know. I did not ask then. I accepted anything that would make our way more easy.
There is no need to draw out the tale. Already my hand wavers, and my time grows short. Soon there will be no more of me, no more of my tale—no more of Mankind. There will be only the snow, and the ice, and the cold ...
Three days later I entered John's Hospital with Alice on my arm. ”

“ I have created a means of reproducing all the sensations that a man would have in actual living; all the sounds, the odors, the little feelings that are half-realized in daily life—everything. The Chamber takes possession of you and lives for you. You forget your name, your very existence in this world, and you are taken bodily into a fictitious land. It is [Pg 29] like actually living the books you would read today, or the motion pictures and plays you would watch and hear.
"It is as real as life, but it moves swiftly as a dream. ”

“ For men had forgotten about that Last Ice Age when they ceased to reckon time, when they lost sight of the future and steeped themselves in memories. They had not remembered that a time must come when Ice would lie white and smooth over all the earth, when the sun would shine bleakly between unending intervals of dim, twilight snow and sleet. ”

“ Toward the north, the mountains crept out from under the forest and moved down to the sea, rising until they became a vast wilderness of cliffs and rocks, and hid the sea, with peak after peak rising as far as the eye could reach into the snow and the mist. ”

“ The lake was still lined with dark shadows behind glittering ridges of morning sunlight, and a cool breeze played across my face, coming in from the east. Over the city, the sound of a street car rumbling into motion, rising and dying away, was like the crowing of a rooster in the country. ”

“ It is thousands, perhaps millions of years since Sir John explained to me. What little I understood at the time I may have forgotten, yet I try to reproduce what I can of his theory.
"In my study of the processes of birth," he began, "I discovered the rudiments of an action which takes place in the bodies of both men and women. There are certain properties in the foods we eat that remain in the body for the reproduction of life, two distinct Essences, so to speak, of which one is retained by the woman, another by the man. ”

“ I cannot write here all the infinity of emotions I experienced later, when, with Alice in my arms, it suddenly came upon me what I had done. Ages ago—I have forgotten how to feel. I could name now a thousand feelings I used to have, but I can no longer even understand them. For only the heart can understand the heart, and the intellect only the intellect. ”

“ The rest of our time is our own, and the machines go on moving automatically as we have directed them to move. If every man on earth should die this morning, it would be perhaps fifty years or a century before the last machine stopped turning."
"And the rest of the time?"
It was Selda who answered this time. "We live. We devote ourselves to learning and creative thought. We study human relations, or we wander through the forests and the mountains, increasing the breadth and significance of our minds and emotions." ”

“ Fierce storms raged endlessly in winter, and in summer sometimes there was severe frost, sometimes there was only frost. In the high places and in the north and the sub-equatorial south, the snow came and would not go.
Men died by the thousands in the higher latitudes. New York became, after awhile, the furthest habitable city north, an arctic city, where warmth seldom penetrated. And great fields of ice began to make their way southward, grinding before them the brittle remains of civilizations, covering over relentlessly all of man's proud work. ”

“ For a while I examined the valley, but I saw no sign of life there. Then I turned and went slowly up the hill, the sunlight falling warmly on my body, and my feet sinking sensuously in the deep grass.
When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down [Pg 14] and down for miles, to a long, wide plain. ”

“ In the end, snow was there always. Men left New York, Chicago, Paris, Yokohama, and everywhere they traveled by the millions southward, perishing as they went, pursued by the snow and the cold, and that inevitable field of ice. They were feeble creatures when the Cold first came upon them, but I speak in terms of thousands of years; and they turned every weapon of science to the recovery of their physical power, for they foresaw that the only chance for survival lay in a hard, strong body. ”

“ I had never seen a girl who stood so clean, so straight. I watched her until she turned, too, and met my eyes. In them I thought I detected [Pg 38] something startled and unfathomable.
"My God!" I cried across the wind, "you are beautiful!" She frowned a little, but her eyes still looked searchingly into mine. I stepped forward, facing her. But I didn't touch her. I was afraid to touch anything so clean.
"You belong here, Selda," I added. "The wind is a part of you, and the mountains, and the sea. You shouldn't have to live in the midst of all those people in the city. You belong here." ”

“ You seem to pass through certain things slowly and completely, in the tempo of life. Then, when the transitional moment comes, between the scenes, your sensations pass with unbelievable rapidity. The Chamber has possession of your mind. ”

“ Yet there would be a little strange fancy in my head at the same moment, saying,
"Who is this Alice? You know no such person." And truly I would wonder whether she had ever existed.
So, slowly, the old emotions were shed away from me, and I began to joy in a corresponding growth of my mental perceptions. I began to toy idly with mathematical formulae I had forgotten years ago, in the same fashion that a poet toys with a word and its shades of meaning. ”

“ One has to accept it. Nothing can be done. We live according to the machinery of the world. [Pg 45] Everything is known and predetermined."
Suddenly, in the midst of what she was saying, close behind me there sounded even above the roaring of the waterfall a raucous noise like the hooting of a taxi horn. It was followed by a shrieking of brakes, and a hoarse voice near by shouted something angry and profane. A rush of air swept by me, and I heard faintly the sound of a motor moving away, with a grinding of gears. I looked at Selda.
"Did you hear that?"
She nodded, with wide, frightened eyes. ”

“ During the course of it, I asked Edvar questions.
"Your life is amazingly centralized," I said. "Apparently all the things you need are supplied at your rooms on a moment's notice."
"Yes," he smiled, "it makes life simpler. We have very few needs. Many of them are satisfied while we sleep, such as cleansing and, if we like, nourishment. We can study while we sleep, acquiring facts that we may want to use later from an instrument which acts upon the subconscious mind. These dials you see are mainly to give us pleasure. ”

“ Those of them who did not perish of the cold after the intense warmth of their world, and those who were not killed by our hands, those few returned silently home again. And I have always regretted that I had not the courage to go with them.
I watched a time when the world reached perfection in mechanics, when men could accomplish anything with a touch of the finger. Strange men, these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements on their little conveyances. ”

“ We all do the work. Each of us has his own work. Each of us is a craftsman and a creative artist. The real work is done by machine—our machines are the basic structure of our life. But we have men, highly trained and fitted temperamentally for their professions, [Pg 23] who watch and direct the machines. ”

“ But, Sir John, like many fears, it is largely horrible in the foresight. After you have changed your nature you cannot regret it. What you are would be as horrible an idea to you afterwards as the thought of what you will be seems now. ”

“ Our social system has been planned for hundreds of years ahead. Every individual of today and every individual of the next six generations has his definite place, his program, his work to do. There is no place for you. It is impossible to fit you in, for you have no work, no training, no need that you can fill. You have no woman, and there are no women for your children or your children's children. ”

“ I had no consciousness of monotony, for, to the intellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I had left behind. One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was made by a man called Zarentzov. It had to do with the curvature of space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since Einstein. I had long ago mastered the last detail of Einstein's theory, as had, in time, the rest of the world. I threw myself immediately into the study of this new, epoch-making conception. ”

“ Melbourne had been interested to know that I worked for Bausch, the motion picture producer.
"Perhaps you could be of aid to me some time," he said thoughtfully.
"In what way, Mr. Melbourne?" I asked him. [Pg 5]
"I can talk to you about that later," he replied cryptically. "Tell me about your work."
So I told him the conception I had of the motion pictures to be made in the future. He listened with keen interest.
"I visualize a production going beyond anything done today," I said, "and yet one that would be possible now, if there were someone capable of creating it. ”

“ But in the end I found that my 'mistake' had in reality been a momentous discovery. I found that I had only to close certain organs, to re-arrange certain ducts, and to open certain dormant organs, and, mirabile dictu, the whole process of reproduction was changed.
"You have heard, of course, that our bodies are continually changing, hour by hour, minute by minute, so that every few years we have been literally reborn. ”