Title: Star-begotten
Author: H. G. Wells
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Title: Star-begotten
Author: H. G. Wells



A Biological Fantasia



To my friend Winston Spencer Churchill


1. The Mind of Mr. Joseph Davis Is Greatly Troubled

2. Mr. Joseph Davis Learns about Cosmic Rays

3. Mr. Joseph Davis Wrestles with an Incredible Idea

4. Dr. Holdman Stedding Is Infected with the Idea

5. Professor Ernest Keppel Takes Up the Idea in His Own Peculiar Fashion

6. Opening Phases of the Great Eugenic Research

7. The World Begins to Hear about the Martians

8. How These Star-Begotten People May Presently Get Together

9. Professor Keppel Is Inspired to Foretell the End of Humanity

10. Mr. Joseph Davis Tears Up a Manuscript





CHAPTER ONE

The Mind of Mr. Joseph Davis Is Greatly Troubled


1


This is the story of an idea and how it played about in the minds of a
number of intelligent people.

Whether there was any reality behind this idea it is not the business of
the storyteller to say. The reader must judge for himself. One man
believed it without the shadow of a doubt and he shall be the principal
figure in the story.

Maybe we have not heard the last of this idea. It spread from the talk
of a few people into magazines and the popular press. It had a vogue.
You certainly heard of it at the time though perhaps you have forgotten.
Popular attention waned. Now the thing flickers about in people's minds,
not quite dead and not quite alive, disconnected and ineffective. It is
a queer and almost incredible idea, but yet not absolutely incredible.
It is a bare possibility that this thing is really going on.

This idea arose in the mind of Mr. Joseph Davis, a man of letters, a
sensitive, intelligent, and cultivated man. It came to him when he was
in a state of neurasthenia, when the strangest ideas may invade and find
a lodgment in the mind.


2


The idea was born, so to speak, one morning in November at the
Planetarium Club,

Yet perhaps before we describe its impact upon Mr. Joseph Davis in the
club smoking-room after lunch, it may be well to tell the reader a few
things about him.

We will begin right at the beginning. He was born just at the turn of
the century and about the vernal equinox. He had come into the world
with a lively and precocious intelligence and his 'quickness' had been
the joy of his mother and his nurses. And, after the manner of our kind,
he had clutched at the world, squinted at it, and then looked straight
at it, got hold of things and put them in his mouth, begun to imitate,
begun to make and then interpret sounds, and so developed his picture of
this strange world in which we live.

His nurse told him things and sang to him; his mother sang to him and
told him things; a nursery governess arrived in due course to tell him
things, and then a governess and a school and lot of people and pictures
and little books in words of one syllable and then normal polysyllabic
books and a large mellifluous parson and various husky small boys and
indeed a great miscellany of people went on telling him things and
telling him things. And so continually, his picture of this world, and
his conception of himself and what he would have to do, and ought to do
and wanted to do, grew clearer.

But it was only very gradually that he began to realize that there was
something about his picture of the universe that perhaps wasn't in the
pictures of the universe of all the people about him. On the whole the
universe they gave him had an air of being real and true and just there
and nothing else. There were, they intimated, good things that were
simply good and bad things that were awful and rude things that you must
never even think of, and there were good people and bad people and
simply splendid people, people you had to like and admire and obey and
people you were against, people who were rich and prosecuted you if you
trespassed and ran over you with motor cars if you did not look out, and
people who were poor and did things for you for small sums, and it was
all quite nice and clear and definite and you went your way amidst it
all circumspectly and happily, laughing not infrequently.

Only--and this was a thing that came to him by such imperceptible
degrees that at no time was he able to get it in such a way that he
could ask questions about it--ever and again there was an effect as
though this sure and certain established world was just in some elusive
manner at this point or that point translucent, translucent and a little
threadbare, and as though something else quite different lay behind it.
It was never transparent. It was commonly, nine days out of ten, a full,
complete universe and then for a moment, for a phase, for a perplexing
interval, it was as if it was a painted screen that hid--What did it
hide?

They told him that a God of Eastern Levantine origin, the God of Abraham
(who evidently had a stupendous bosom) and Isaac and Jacob, had made the
whole universe, stars and atoms, from start to finish in six days and
made it wonderfully and perfect, and had set it all going and, after
some necessary ennuis called the Fall and the Flood, had developed
arrangements that were to culminate in the earthly happiness and
security and eternal bliss of our Joseph, which had seemed to him a very
agreeable state of affairs. And farther they had shown him the most
convincing pictures of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and had given him
a Noah's Ark to play with and told him simple Bible stories about the
patriarchs and the infant Samuel and Solomon and David and their
remarkable lessons for us, the promise of salvation spreading out from
the Eastern Levant until it covered the world, and he had taken it all
in without flinching because at the time he had no standards of
comparison. Anything might be as true as anything else. Except for the
difference in colour they put him into the world of Green Pastures and
there they trained him to be a simply believing little Anglican.

And yet at the same time he found a book in the house with pictures of
animals that were quite unlike any of the animals that frequented the
Garden of Eden or entered the Ark. And pictures of men of a pithecoid
unpleasant type who had lived, it seemed, long before Adam and Eve were
created. It seemed all sorts of thing had been going on before Adam and
Eve were created, but when he began to develop a curiosity about this
pre-scriptural world and to ask questions about it his current governess
snapped his head off and hid that disconcerting book away. They were
'just antediluvian animals,' she said, and Noah had not troubled to save
them. And when he had remarked that a lot of them could swim, she told
him not to try to be a Mr. Cleverkins.

He did his best not to be Mr. Cleverkins. He did his best to love this
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as fear him (which he did
horribly, more even than he did the gorilla in Wood's Natural History)
and to be overcome with gratitude for the wisdom and beauty of a scheme
of things which first of all damned him to hell-fire before he was born
and then went to what he couldn't help thinking were totally unnecessary
pains on the part of omnipotence to save him. Why should omnipotence do
that? What need He do that? All He had to do was just to say it. He had
made the whole world by just saying it.

Master Joseph did his very best to get his feelings properly adjusted to
the established conception of the universe. And since most of the
scriptures concerned events that were now happily out of date, and since
his mother, his governess, the mellifluous parson, the scripture teacher
at school, and everybody set in authority over him converged in assuring
him that now, at the price of a little faith and conformity, things were
absolutely all right here and hereafter so far as he was concerned, he
did get through some years pretty comfortably. He did not think about it
too much. He put it all away from him--until the subtle alchemy of
growth as he became adolescent sent queer winds of inquiry and
correlation banging open again unsorted cupboards of his brain.

He went to St. Hobart's school and then to Camborne Hall, Oxford. There
is much unreasonable criticism of the English public schools, but it is
indisputable that they do give a sort of education to an elect
percentage of their boys. There was quite a lot of lively discussion at
St. Hobart's in those days, it wasn't one of your mere games-and-cram
schools, and the reaction against the dogmatic materialism of the later
nineteenth century was in full swing there. The head in his sermons and
the staff generally faced up to the fact that there had been Doubt, and
that the boys ought to know about it.

The science master was in a minority of one on the staff and he came up
to St. Hobart's by way of a technical school; the public school spirit
cowed him. St. Hobart's did not ignore science but it despised the
stuff, and all the boys were given some science so that they could see
just what it was like.

Davis because of his mental quickness had specialized in the classical
side; nevertheless he did his minimum of public school science. He burnt
his fingers with hot glass and smashed a number of beakers during a
brief interlude of chemistry, and he thought biology the worst of
stinks. He found the outside of rabbit delightful but the inside made
him sick; it made him physically sick. He acquired a great contempt for
'mere size' and that kept astronomy in its place. And when he came to
grips with doubt, in preparation for confirmation, he realized that he
had been much too crude in feeling uncomfortable about that early Bible
narrative and the scheme of salvation and all the rest of it. As a
matter-of-fact statement it was not perhaps in the coarser sense true,
but that was because of the infirmities of language and the peculiar low
state of Eastern Levantine intelligence and Eastern Levantine moral
ideas when the hour to 'reveal' religion had struck. Great resort had
had to be made for purposes of illustration to symbols, parables, and
inaccurate but edifying stories. People like David and Jacob had been
poor material for demonstration purposes, but that was a point better
disregarded.

The story of creation was symbolical and its failure to correspond with
the succession of life on earth did not matter in the least, the Fall
was symbolical of things too mysterious to explain, and why there had to
be an historical redemption when the historical fall had vanished into
thin air was the sort of thing no competent theologian would dream of
discussing. There it was. Through such matters of faith and doctrine
Joseph Davis was taken at a considerable speed, which left him hustled
and baffled rather than convinced.

But the curious thing about these initiatory explanations was that all
the time another set of ideas at an entirely different level was being
put before him as a complete justification for the uncritical acceptance
of Bible, Church, and Creed. It was being conveyed to him that it really
did not matter what foundations of myth or fantasy the existing system
of Western civilization was built upon; the fact that mattered was that
it was built upon that foundation and that a great ritual of ceremonial
and observance, which might be logically unmeaning, and an elaborate
code of morality, which might ultimately prove to be arbitrary,
nevertheless constituted the co-ordinating fabric of current social life
and that social life could not now go on without them. So that all this
freethinker and rationalist stuff became irrelevant and indeed
contemptibly crude. Reasonable men didn't assert. They didn't deny. They
were thinking and living at a different level. You could no more
reconstruct religion, social usage, political tradition, than you could
replan the human skeleton--which also was open to considerable
criticism.

That put Joseph Davis in his place. Arguments about the Garden of Eden
and Jonah's Whale passed out of discussion. He was left face to face
with history and society. Christianity and its churches, the monarchy
and political institutions, the social hierarchy, seemed to be regarding
him blandly. It is no good inquiring into our credentials now, they
seemed to say. Here we are. We work. (They seemed to be working then.)
And what other reality is there?

By this time he was at Oxford, talking and thinking occasionally,
pretending to think a lot and believing that he was thinking a lot. The
dualism that had dawned upon him in childhood looked less like being
resolved than ever. The world-that-is no longer contested his
fundamental criticisms, but it challenged him to produce any alternative
world-that-might-be. There it was, the ostensible world, definite,
fundamentally inconsistent maybe, but consistent in texture. An immense
accumulation of falsity and yet a going concern. So things are.

It looked so enduring. He wavered for a time. On one hand was the
brightly lit story of current things, the front-window story, a
mother's-knee story of a world made all for his reception, a world of
guidance, safe government, a plausible social order, institutions beyond
effective challenge, a sure triumph for good behaviour and a clear
definition of right and wrong, of what was done and what was not done,
and against it was no more than a shadow story which was told less by
positive statement than by hints, discords that stirred beneath the
brightness, murmurs from beneath, and vague threats from incidental
jars. That shadow world, that mere criticism of accepted things, had no
place for him, offered him nothing. No shapes appeared there but only
interrogations. The brightly lit story seemed safest, brightest, and
best to his ripening imagination; he did his best to thrust that other
tale down among all sorts of other things, improper and indecent
thoughts for example, that have to be kept under hatches in the mind.

Momentous decisions have to be made by all of us in those three or four
undergraduate years; we take our road, and afterwards there is small
opportunity for a return. Mr. Joseph Davis had a quick mind and a facile
pen and he was already writing, and writing rather well, before he came
down. He chose to write anyhow. His father had left him with a
comfortable income and there was no mercenary urgency upon him. He
elected to write about the braver, more confident aspects of life. He
was for the show. He began to write heartening and stalwart books and to
gird remorselessly at dissidence and doubt. What I write, he said, shall
have banners in it and trumpets and drums. No carping, nothing
subversive. Sociology is going out of fashion. So he committed himself.
He began first with some successful, brave historical romances and
followed up with short histories of this or that gallant interlude in
the record.

King Richard and Saladin was his first book and then he wrote The
Singing Seamen. Then came Smite with Hammer, Smite with Sword, and
after that he ran up and down the human tree, telling of the jolly
adventures of Alexander and Caesar and Jenghiz Khan (The Mighty
Riders) and the Elizabethan pirates and explorers and so on. But as he
had a sound instinct for good writing and an exceptionally sensitive
nature, the more he wrote, the more he read and learned and--which was
the devil of it--thought.

He should not have thought. When he took his side he should, like a
sensible man, have stopped thinking.

Besides which some people criticized him rather penetratingly, and for
an out-and-out champion he was much too attentive to criticism.

He became infected with a certain hesitation about what he was doing.
Perhaps he was undergoing that first subtle deterioration from that
assurance of youth which is called 'growing up’, a phase that may occur
at any age. He wrote with diminishing ease and confidence and let
qualifying shadows creep into his heroic portraits. He would sometimes
admit quite damaging things, and then apologize. He found this enhanced
the solidity of some of his figures, but it cast a shadow on his
forthright style. He told no one of this loss of inner elasticity, but
he worried secretly about it.

Then, courageously but perhaps unwisely, he resolved to make a grand
culminating frontal attack upon the doubt, materialism, and pessimism of
shadowland, in the form of a deliberately romanticized history of
mankind. It was to be a world history justifying the ways of God to man.
It was also to justify his own ways to himself. It was to be a great
parade--a cavalcade of humanity.

For some reason he never made clear to himself, he did not begin at the
creation of the world but on the plain of Shinar. He put the earlier
history into the mouths of retrospective wise old men. From the Tower of
Babel man dispersed about the world.

History regarded with a right-minded instinct has often a superficial
appearance of being only a complicated tangle still awaiting analysis,
and it was not always easy to show Man winning all the time and Right
for ever triumphant against the odds--in the long run, that is. The
Heritage of Mankind, the Promise and the Struggle--that was one of the
tides he was considering--implies a struggle with, among other things,
malignant fact. Fact sometimes can be very obstinate and malignant.

He had got himself into a tangle with the Black Death. He had
started--rashly, he was beginning to realize--upon a chapter dealing
with the ennobling effect of disease, one of three to be called
respectively, Flood, Fire, and Pestilence; and that had led him into
a considerable amount of special reading. He had always been for taking
his own where he found it, and he had been inspired by Paul de Kruif's
Microbe Hunters to annex some of that writer's material, infuse it
with religious devotion, and then extend his discourse to show how
throughout the ages these black visitations, properly regarded, had been
glorious stimulants (happily no longer urgently needed) for the human
soul. But he found the records of exemplary human behaviour during the
Black Death period disconcertingly meagre. The stress was all on the
horror of the time, and when everything was said and done, our species
emerged hardly better in its reactions than a stampede of poisoned rats.
That at any rate was how the confounded records showed things. And this
in spite of his heroic efforts to read between the lines and in spite of
his poetic disposition to supplement research with a little
invention--intuition, let us say, rather than invention. That he knew
was a dangerous disposition. Too much intuition might bring down the
disparagement of some scholarly but unsympathetic pedant upon him, and
all the other fellows would be only too glad to pick it up and repeat
it.

And then suddenly his mind began to slip and slide. He had, he realized,
been overworking and, what is so common an aspect of overwork, he could
not leave off. Overwork had brought worry and sleeplessness in its
train. He would lie awake thinking of the Black Death and the pitiful
behaviour to which tormented humanity can sink. Vivid descriptive
phrases in the old records it would have been healthier to forget,
recurred to him. At first it was only the Black Death that distressed
him and then his faith in human splendour began to collapse more widely.
A cracked handbell heralded an open cart through the streets of
plague-stricken London and once more the people were called upon to
bring out the dead. Something revived his memory of the horror pictures
of Goya in the Prado, and that dragged up the sinister paintings in the
Wiertz Museum in Brussels. That again carried him to the underside in
Napoleon's career and the heaped dead of the Great War. Why write a
Grand Parade of Humanity, asked doubt, when Winwood Reade has already
written The Martyrdom of Man? He found himself criticising his early
book about Alexander the Great, Youth the Conqueror.

He had told that story triumphantly. Now in the black morning hours, it
came back upon him in reverse. Something in his own brain confronted him
and challenged him. Your Alexander, it said, your great Alexander, the
pupil of Aristotle, who was, as you say, the master mind of the world,
was in truth, as you know, just an ill-educated spendthrift. Why do you
try to pervert the facts? By sheer accident--and most history is still a
tale of accidents--he found himself in a rotten, nerveless
self-indulgent world that had no grown men in it able to hold him out
and give him the spanking he deserved, and as luck would have it, he had
the only up-to-date and seasoned army in existence completely at his
disposal. He hadn't made it. It came to him. The fools went where he
told them to go. When you wrote all that stuff about his taking Greek
civilization to Persia and Egypt and India, you were merely giving him
credit for what had happened already. Why? Greek civilization owed
nothing to him. He took advantage of it. He picked it up and smashed it
over the head of poor old Darius. Smashed it--just as these plunging
dictators of today seem likely to smash your poor civilization--nobody
able to gainsay them. He left the Glory that was Greece in fragments,
for the Romans to pick up in their turn. He wasted the Macedonian
cavalry and phalanx, just as our fools today are going to waste
aviation. For no good at all; for no plain result. Alexander was just a
witless accident in an aimless world. And think of his massacres and
lootings and how it fared with the women and children, the common life
of the world. Why did you write this florid stuff about Alexander the
Great? And about Caesar--and about all these other pitiful heroes of
mankind? Why do you keep it up, Joseph? If you did not know better then,
you know better now. Your newspapers should be teaching you. Why do you
pretend that a sort of destiny was unrolling? That it was all leading up
to Anglicanism, cricket, the British Empire, and what not? Why do you go
on with these pretences? These great men of yours never existed. The
human affair is more intricate than that. More touching. Saints are
sinners and philosophers are fools. Religions are rigmaroles. If there
is gold it is still in the quartz. Look reality in the face. Then maybe
something might be done about it.

He got up. He walked about his room.

'But I thought I had settled all this years ago,' he said. 'How can I
get on with Grand Parade of Humanity if I give way to this sort of
thing? Already I have spent nearly a year on this overwhelming book.'

He felt like some ancient hermit assailed by diabolical questionings.
But that ancient hermit would at least have prayed and made the sign of
the cross and got over it.

In his solitude Mr. Joseph Davis tried that. But on his knees he had a
frightful sense of play-acting. He didn't believe there was a hearer. He
didn't believe that any one believes nowadays--not Cantuar, not Ebor,
not the Pope. These old boys eased down on their knees out of habit and
let their minds wander along a neglected familiar lane to nothing in
particular.

He got up again with his prayer half said and sat staring at the
situation. Defensor Fidei! He couldn't pray.


3


But this peculiar feeling of--mental duplicity shall we call it?--this
doubt of himself; this struggle to sustain the clear bright assurance of
his chosen convictions, was not the only strain upon Mr. Davis's
serenity. Several other matters not directly connected with his literary
work were also conspiring to disturb his abnormally sensitive mind.

As he walked down Lower Regent Street from Picadilly Station towards his
club, various discontents, new ones and old ones, threaded their way
round and about each other, each rasping against him and eluding him,
dodging down into the subconscious and giving place to another whenever
he tried to challenge it. The day was grey and overcast and it gave him
no help--was indeed definitely against him. He was inclined to think he
would have been wiser to have put on his medium coat rather than his
thin Burberry, and at the same time he found the air moist and stuffy.

Chief among these accessory troubles was this, that for the first time
in his life he was to become a father. It is an occasion few men face
with absolute calm; it stirs up all sorts of neglected or unexplored
regions of possibility in the mind. No psycho-analyst as yet has
investigated the imaginative undercurrents in the mind of the expectant
father. No one has attempted a review of the onset of parentage in the
male. Here we must confine our attention strictly to the case of Mr.
Joseph Davis. For some time he had been developing a curious vague
perplexity about this wife of his, who was so soon to add the
responsibilities and anxieties of fatherhood to his already febrile
mental activities, and that expectation had greatly intensified this
perplexity.

Here again the subtle sensitiveness of the imaginative temperament came
in. A literary man carries about with him in his head a collection of
edged tools known as his Vocabulary. And sometimes he cuts himself. Two
or three years ago 'enigmatical' had, so to speak, stuck up suddenly and
caught him when he was thinking about his wife. And 'fey.' She was
fifteen years younger than he was, he had married her when she was
scarcely more than a girl, and yet, he had been compelled to realize,
she was enigmatical, extremely enigmatical.

To begin with he had loved her in a simple, straightforward, acquisitive
way and she had seemed to love him. He had not thought about her very
much; he had just loved her as a man loves a woman. Their early married
life, subject to the obvious discretions of our time, had been natural
and happy; she had learned to type for him and they had been inseparable
and all that sort of thing. Then by imperceptible degrees things had
seemed to change. His satisfaction in her clouded over. She had seemed
to disentangle herself from him and draw herself together. More and more
was he aware of a lack of response in her.

And then came the memorable evening when she had remarked: 'I don't know
whether I care for very much more of this sort of thing unless I am
going to have a child.'

This sort of thing! Roses, raptures, whispers, dusk, moonlight,
nightingales, all the love poetry that ever was--this sort of thing!
So that was it!

'You are quite well off,' she said.

As though that mattered....

There had been a certain amount of argument, in which delicacy had
prevailed over explicitness, and then she had carried her point. He had
made it plain to her that whatever reluctance he might have displayed at
first was solely on her account and that now they were embarked together
on a shining adventure. They were to make life 'more abundant.' Once the
proposal was accepted his imagination seemed to bubble offspring. He
buried 'this sort of thing' as deeply as he could under high-piled
flower-beds of philoprogenitive sentiment; he tried his utmost to forget
her strangely inhuman phrase.

Yet after everything was settled, still his uneasiness deepened, still
her detachment seemed to increase.

It seemed to increase. But that was where another queer worry came now
into his mind. Had she always had some or all of this disposition
towards detachment, and had he failed to observe it hitherto? In the
first bright months or so of their married life, when he had looked at
her and she had looked at him their eyes had met upon a common purpose
as if they were smacking hands together. But now it was as if her hand
had become a phantom hand that his own hand went right through, and his
gaze seemed always just to miss meeting her deep regard. Her dark eyes
had become inaccessible. 'Unfathomable' the vocabulary threw up. She
scrutinized him and revealed nothing. Husbands and wives ought to become
more easy with each other, more familiar, as life goes on, but she was
increasingly aloof.

The majority of discontented husbands, the burden of comic literature,
proverbial wisdom, testify to the terrors of a talkative wife, but
indeed these terrors are nothing to those of a silent woman, a silent
thoughtful woman. A scolding wife can say endless disconcerting things
and she hits or misses, but a silent woman says everything.

Always nowadays she seemed to be thinking him over. And his morbidly
sensitive self-consciousness filled her silences with criticisms against
which he had no defence.

When he had married her, a young, dark, shy girl, he had radiated
protective possession all over her. It would have seemed impossible then
that he should ever feel--it is a strange word to use about a wife and
as we use it here we use it in its most sublimated and attentuated
sense, but the word is--fear. Latterly his uneasiness with his wife and
about his wife had increased almost to the quality of that emotion.

Of course he had always realized that there was something subtly unusual
about her, even about her appearance. But at first he had found that
simply attractive. She was neither big nor clumsy but she was broadly
built; her brow was broad and her dark grey eyes were unusually wide
apart; the corners of her full mouth drooped gravely and at times she
had a way of moving that was, so to speak, absentminded, preoccupied. At
first he had valued all this as 'distinction’, but later he had come
rather to think of her as 'unusual’. She was far more unusual than the
faint foreignness of her Scotch origin and the slow deliberation of her
speech justified her in being.

He had never liked her people, which was odd because he had hardly seen
anything of them. She had come into his world, as it seemed at first,
romantically. He had met her at a publisher's cocktail party, she had
been invited there rather for her ambitions than her performance, and
she had told him then that her people lived in the Outer Hebrides and
that they opposed her wish to study and write. She had just spoken of
them as 'people'. She had won scholarships at a Glasgow high school. She
had got to the university and so worked her way to London in defiance of
them. She had written poetry, she told him, and she wanted to see it
printed.

But London, she said, wasn't quite what she had expected it to be.
London astonished, frightened, and stimulated her, and kept on seeming
stranger and stranger. She was not growing accustomed to it. People were
always saying and doing the most unaccountable things.

'At times,' she said, 'I feel like a stray from another world. But then,
you know, I felt very much the same when I was at home in the islands
where I was born. Have you ever had that feeling? All you people here
seem so sure of your world and of yourselves.'

It was when she said this that the idea of guiding this quiet, unsure,
and lovely young stranger to all the braveries of life entered the head
of Mr. Joseph Davis. It was so exceptional to meet an intelligent young
woman who seemed unsure of herself and who was willing to be taught and
hadn't already, in an irrational hurry to begin, taken the braveries of
life to herself in her own fashion. It was not so much a candid inviting
white virginity as an elusive elfin one she had. Here, he thought, was
something fine and unformed to mould and shape and write flourishes
upon.

He went about thinking of her more and more, with all those exploratory
impulses aroused in him which constitute falling in love. He was soon
completely in love with her.

When he offered to read some of her verse, she said she didn't want it
read, she just wanted to see it in print and read it herself. When at
last he saw it he liked it. It was like a missionary's translations from
the Chinese; mostly vivid little word pictures. From the point of view
of publication and running the gauntlet of all these modern poets and
reviewers who cut you up with one hand and cut you out with the other,
he did not think it likely to be successful. But it had nevertheless a
curious simplicity, a curious directness and a faint wistful flavour.

He learnt that she was living in a student's hostel in Bloomsbury, he
established contacts with her and he was able to take her about very
freely. Perhaps at one time he had thought simply of becoming her first
lover, but she had an unobtrusive defensiveness that marriage was the
only way to her.

Two rawboned fishermen in bonnets and broadcloth suddenly appeared in
London to 'take a look at him' when the marriage was mooted. They were
the most astonishing and unexpected 'people' for her to produce. They
had her dark colouring and dark grey eyes like hers, but otherwise they
were singularly unlike her. Brawny they were. They had none of her
manifest fineness and restraint.

'You'll have to take great care of her,' they told him, 'for she's been
the treasure of our eyes. She's better than we and we know it. Why we
ever let her persuade us that she had to come on to London is more than
we can explain, but the mischief's been done and you've got her.'

'She's lovely. You're telling me that?' said Davis, and the elder
brother, darkly reproachful, said: 'Aye. We're telling you.'

They stayed in London until the wedding, and entertaining them was a
little like making hay with seaweed. They seemed to keep on looking at
him and passing Hebridean judgments on him. They were full of unspoken
things.

He would say things to them and they would say: 'Eh'--just 'Eh.' Not an
interrogative 'Eh?' but an ambiguous acknowledgment.

They got drunk in a dutiful, dubious, and melancholy way for the
registry office, and the last he saw of them was on the platform at
Victoria when he carried her off to show her the wonders of Paris. They
were standing together grave and distrustful, not gesticulating nor
waving good-bye but each holding up a great red hand as who should say:
'We're here.'

And when at last the curve hid them and he pulled up the carriage window
and turned to her to meet the love-light in her eyes she said to him:
'And now you are going to show me the real world and all those cities
and lakes and mountains where at last we shall feel at home.'

Only she never did seem to feel at home.

She never talked about this family of hers to him, after the transit of
these two samples, and she corresponded with them with an infrequent
regularity. She never gave him any reason to suppose she cared very much
for them. But the fact which presently became apparent, that, unlike
him, she was a good sailor and loved wind and rough seas, seemed to link
her to them rather than to him. Many husbands have objected to their
wives' relations because they were too near, but he found he objected to
hers because they were too remote. And also she loved mountains and
crags and precipitous places. He didn't. They climbed the Matterhorn at
great expense, he gave more trouble to the guides than she did, and at
the summit she seemed to be pleased but still gravely looking for more.

Once on holiday in Cornwall they had been basking together on the beach
after lunch and suddenly her pose, as she sat thinking, reminded him of
a picture he had seen somewhere of Undine, La Motte Fouques Undine,
sweet and detached, looking across the far levels of the sea, lost in
some unimaginable reverie. Undine too had had some uncouth and menacing
brothers. That was when the fancy of her as a sort of changeling, as
something ultra-terrestrial and not quite human first came to him. That
was when 'fey' came out of the vocabulary.

This Undine suggestion hung about for months. First he let this
exaggeration of her faint unearthliness play mischievously in his mind,
and then he tried to restrain and banish it. Sometimes he tried to
persuade himself that every man's wife is really an Undine, but he could
never make really convincing observations in that matter. Maybe, he
thought, you never get near enough to any woman but your own wife to
appreciate her remoteness.

A multitude of possibly quite accidental divergences grouped themselves
about that 'fey'.

He spun the thread of that word's suggestion into a web about her. It
swept aside the one worse alternative that conceivably she was just
simple and lacking in aesthetic enterprise. At first that 'fey' was a
fantastic exaggeration and then it became more and more an observation,
an explanation for her undeniable detachment from so much that excited
and stirred him, and from so much that he believed ought to excite and
stir anybody. That struggle of his ideals with a dark underworld of
doubts, which made it urgent for him to keep thinking, feeling,
appreciating--like an urgent skater over thin ice and a cold abyss of
disbelief--had no counterpart. She could keep still and remain content
in her convictions, in something deep--whatever it was that she knew and
did not communicate.

There was no malice in her detachment from him. He could have understood
malice better. He had seen mutual jealousy and mutual detraction often
enough among his married friends. The better the artists the worse the
lovers. He understood that fight for individual assertion which makes
love a legendary unreality, a blend of fantasy and grossness, in the
world of the intelligentsia. But this was not the assertion of an
individuality; it was a complete indifference to his values. It was a
foreignness--to the whole world.

Whenever Mr. Davis had a slump in his vitality he realized this widening
estrangement from his wife more acutely. The lower the ebb the intenser
the realization. And this day his realization was exceptionally vivid
...

This very morning she had made a remark that stirred him to a protest he
abandoned in despair. There was to be a big concert at the Pantechnicon
Hall with Rodhammer conducting. He was enthusiastic for going. She did
not want to go.

He argued against her disinclination. 'You used to like music.'

'But I have heard music, dearest.'

'Heard music! My dear, what a queer way to put things!'

She shook her head from side to side without speaking. There was a time
when the self-assurance of her faint smile had seemed very lovely to
him. Mona Lisa and all that, but now it irritated him with a sense of
invincible and unapproachable opposition.

'But you've only heard Rodhammer once before!'

'Why should I want to hear Rodhammer again--a little better or not so
good?'

'But music!'

'There's a limit to music,' she said.

'A limit!'

'I've a feeling that I've done with music. It was wonderful, charming,
sustaining, all that music we went to hear--to begin with. I loved that
as much as I've loved anything. But if one has taken music in--hasn't
one taken it in?'

'Taken it in! You mean--?' he tried.

'I mean you don't always want to be sitting down to attend to it after
you've heard--what there is to it. We aren't--professional.'

Professional! When she did use words she used them in a very deadly
fashion. 'I never tire of music,' he said.

'But does the sort of music there is say anything--does it say anything
fresh?'

'It's eternally fresh.'

'How?'

He made a hopeless gesture. 'But why have you become indifferent?'

'But why are you still so enthusiastic?'

'But don't you get--something wonderful? An exaltation? A world of
absolute sensuous emotion?'

'No--I did at first. A sort of exaltation. I agree. And still I
like--rhythm. It's pleasant to hear music going on, but it's no longer
something I want to listen to especially. Going to hear music in
concerts seems to me like going to see pictures in galleries ... Or
reading anthologies.... Or looking over a collection of butterflies in a
museum.... A time comes....'

'Then, in short, you won't go to the concert?'

'I feel a little tired but I will go if you like.'

'Oh! not like that,' he said and ended their talk.

But he went over it again in his own mind and now he was going over it
once more. He knew people to whom music meant much and people to whom
music meant little, but to take up music as Mary had, in a spirit of
glad discovery, and then to put it down again as one might put down an
unimportant novel, distressed his mind. But that was how she seemed to
deal with everything in life. Even with friendship, even with love, she
had that same flash of interest, that rapid appreciation, and then she
turned away. To what?

He spoke aloud, addressing Lower Regent Street: 'You can't afford to
give up music like that. You can't afford to give up art.'

And what he did not say because he could not bring himself to say it,
was: 'And how can you afford to give up love?'

When the child comes, will she give up that?

Or will she go on loving the child. Leaving me behind? My part played?

The eternal going on! This complete instability of values! ...

Could it fail to distress a man who was in effect a professor of stable
values?


4


And here we must note another rather unusual element in the mélange of
Mr. Davis's troubles, a queer little thing that would have mattered
nothing to a less imaginative man, but which was to thread through all
the train of thought upon which he was presently to embark. It was a
very slender thread indeed, a matter so irrational and ridiculous that
it seems almost unfair to him to mention it. And yet it certainly played
a slight deflecting role in guiding him to the strange idea. It cannot
therefore be ignored altogether.

Since his school days he had had a secret detestation of his own
Christian name. Facetious upper-school boys had made it plain that there
was a shadow on it Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, is the
name of Joseph adorned with that halo of triumphant virility which is
the desire of every young male. He had struggled to insist that he
should always be called 'Jo’. But the mortifying realization that he was
a 'Joseph' damped his private meditations.

There was not the faintest circumstance to justify any marital
uneasiness on his part. No one sane could have entertained a suspicion
of his Mary's integrity--nor did he, in the foreground of his mind. And
yet, he would have been happier under a different name.

So it was.


5


Such were the ruling factors in the weak hotchpotch of thoughts and
half-thoughts, fancies, suggestions, dream scraps, and almost completely
unsymbolized feelings that circled in his mind on his way to the
pillared portals of the Planetarium Club and his first encounter with
this strange idea that was destined to stab through his imagination like
a dagger and work a revolution in his life.





CHAPTER TWO

Mr. Joseph Davis Learns about Cosmic Rays


1


The Planetarium Club abounds in unexpected conversations. It has a core
of scientific men who are mostly devotees of the exact sciences, grave,
shy, precise men, but wrapped round them are layers of biologists,
engineers, explorers, civil servants, patent lawyers, criminologists,
writers, even an artist or so. Almost any subject may be started in the
smoking-room where most of the talk goes on, but the feeling against
chewed newspaper is strong. Mr. Davis, as he ascended the club steps,
made an effort to throw off those vague shadows that oppressed his mind,
and to brighten his bearing to the quality that may be reasonably
expected of a temperamental optimist.

But as he recrossed the hall from the vestiary to the dining-room he was
still undecided whether he should sit at one of the small tables and go
on with his state of uneasy deterioration, or take a place at one of the
sociable boards. He elected for solitude, but repented as soon as his
decision was made, and after his solitary lunch he made a real effort at
sociability and joined a talking circle of a dozen men or more between
the window and the fire, sitting down next to Foxfield, that hairy,
untidy biologist, for whom he had a slightly condescending liking. The
talk was rather under the stress of a new member, a parliamentary
barrister, who might be almost anything in a few years' time and
manifestly felt as much. This man had been elected before it was
realized that he was slightly larger than any one else in the club and
disposed to behave accordingly, and his conversational method was rather
an elucidatory cross-examination than an original contribution to the
interchanges.

'Tell me,' he would say and even point a finger. 'I don't know
anything about these things. Tell me--'

'Tell me,' except in the case of monarchs, heirs apparent, and
presidents of the United States, is by the standards of the Planetarium
atrocious conversational manners. But so far no one in the club had been
able to get this point of view over to the new-comer. It would happen
sooner or later but so far it had not happened. He was talking now with
an air of making out some sort of case against modern physics and
demonstrating how entirely more sensible and practical a mind which had
passed through the ennobling exercises of Greats and a straightforward
legal and political training could be.

'Atoms and force were good enough for Lucretius and they were good
enough for my stinks master when I was a boy. Then suddenly you have to
disturb all that. There's wonderful discoveries, and the air is full of
electrons and neutrons and positons.'

'Positrons,' a voice corrected.

'It's all the same to us. Positrons. And photons and protons and
deutrons. Alpha rays and Beta rays and Gamma rays and X rays and Y rays.
And they fly about like solar systems and all the rest of it. And the
dear old Universe that used to be fixed and stable begins to expand and
contract--like God playing a concertina. Tell me--frankly. I suggest to
you--it's a bluff. It's something out of nothing. It's just a way of
selling us mystery bottles with scientific labels. I ask you.'

He paused with the air of a man who has put a poser.

A small, elderly, but still acutely acid old gentleman was sitting deep
in one of the armchairs. The finger had not challenged him, but now he
put out a lean hand and spoke with a thin penetrating voice, like a
rapier, with the faint glint of a Scotch accent along the edge.

'You say Tell me--and Tell me. Will you have the grace to listen while I
tell ye? And not interrupt?'

And when the slightly outsize member made as if he had something further
to say, the old gentleman just raised his hand and said: 'No. Listen,
I tell ye, and told you shall be.'

The rising man, just faintly abashed, assumed an attitude of sceptical
and slightly impatient intelligence, looking round the group for support
in what he evidently imagined was going to be a duel of wits. Just for a
moment he imagined that. And then suddenly he felt like facing twelve
implacably hostile jurymen and the first lesson of the Planetarium Club
entered into his soul. Not to bounce.

Quietly and unobtrusively he allowed himself to lapse into the pose of
the modest best boy in the class who knows that he still has much to
learn and who cannot command any one to tell him but is glad to be told.

'These things boil down,' said the old gentleman. 'I've lectured about
them for years. And followed the changes. When one gets old one has to
be concise and it's fortunate I've had some practice in packing my
statements. Still I'll have to take five minutes. I'll do all I can for
you. Those Oxford teachers of yours--for it's Oxford you come
from--probably left your mathematical philosophy in a worst state than
they found it when you came up from your English public school--if
indeed your formula-dodging schoolmasters gave you any mathematical
understanding at all even there--so I may not be able to explain
everything to you. Some bits I'll just have to tell you--as you put it.
But it's really quite simple and credible stuff they've made of it in
the last twenty-five years, Rutherford and Bragg and Niels Bohr and the
rest of those fellows, and the younger people find no difficulty about
it at all.'

And with that and a galling air of careful simplification he proceeded
to unfold a compact modern view of space and time and the movements of
things therein. 'Don't ask me what electricity is,' he said, 'and I'll
tell you everything else as we have it up to date. It's none so
complicated as you think and there's never a contradiction.'

And very neatly he took his nucleus, twisted up his atoms with electrons
and neutrons round the central proton, and sent them eddying into a
world of throbbing photons. Then he ran his hand along the sixty-odd
octaves of the spectrum from the hundred-yard electro-magnetic
undulations beyond the longest radio length through heat rays and light
rays to X rays and Gamma rays, smacked a few atoms together, shot them
through with helium atoms, and described the results, and by way of
epilogue gave a lucid word to those flying sub-atomies, the cosmic rays.

'After all, it's none so confused,' he said, and indeed the pictures
that arose as one listened to his slightly remonstrating, very
persuasive Scotch intonation had the music of ripples and wavelets, of
dancing reflections upon the side of a ship, of the concentric colour
rings of films on water, of every sort of pleasant patterning and
logical ornamentation. He made dead matter dance and circle, set to
partners, interfere, shimmer, glow, become iridescent and mysteriously
endowed with energy. The atoms of our fathers seemed by contrast like a
game of marbles abandoned in a corner of a muddy playground on a wet
day. He even had a cautious word for the young neutrinos, the latest
aspirants to his dance in the atomic assembly-rooms. The one or two men
who were experts in the subject listened, pleased to hear the A B C of
their subject so lucidly delivered, and the rest were glad to check up
their vague impressions of these fluctuating modern conceptions.

'And where do we come in?' asked someone. 'Where is thought and the soul
in all this?'

'Just a film, just a thin zone of reflection halfway in the scale of
size between those electrons and the stars.'


2


Davis followed that compact discourse in a mood of unusual
self-forgetfulness. It was, he found, as refreshing as good drink, and
as little likely to linger in the system. And even the new member
betrayed a certain humility in his attention.

But he still felt it was his duty to himself to talk.

'Those cosmic rays of yours,' he said. 'They are the most difficult part
of your story. They aren't radiations. They aren't protons. What are
they? They go sleeting through the universe incessantly, day and night,
going from nowhere to nowhere. For the life of me I find that hard to
imagine.'

'They must come from somewhere,' said a quiet little man with an air of
producing a very special contribution to the discussion.

'We note their existence,' said the old gentleman. 'We watch them but we
draw no premature conclusions. They are infinitesimal particles flying
at an inconceivable velocity. They come from all directions of outer
space. And that's as much as we know about them. If I put out my finger
like that for a second or so, there's only just a dozen or so gone
through it in a second. And no harm done. Which is just as well. There's
more up above us in the outer atmosphere. But fortunately they get
reflected and absorbed. You know we have a sort of filtering halo about
the earth, a sort of cloak of electrons, which keeps off any excess of
these radiations.'

'That Heaviside layer,' a stout rufous man, who had apparently been
asleep, interpolated.

'And what may that be?' asked the barrister.

'It's a beautiful sample of scientific terminology,' said the stout
rufous man still somnolently. 'This Heaviside layer, so far as I can
understand it, is called so, because firstly it isn't heavy, secondly it
hasn't any side, and thirdly it is almost as much a layer as--as a
rheumatic chill or a glow of indignation. Go on, Professor.'

His eyes, which had been partly open, closed again.

'You said,' said the examining barrister, 'that fortunately they are
kept off. Why--fortunately? May I ask?'

'My thankfulness may have been a little unwarranted,' said the old
gentleman. 'But these cosmic rays have a lot of energy, considering
their size. They knock atoms about when they hit them. And we and our
belongings are made of atoms. A lot of them, a great lot of them, a real
douche of cosmic rays, might cause all sorts of tissue diseases, blow up
mines, strike the matches in our pockets. But as it is they don't often
hit even one atom--quantitatively they're more ineffective even than
that infinitesimal quantity of radiation that is always coming up from
the radium in the earth; and so Nature is able to clean up any little
speck of mess that occurs.'

'Not always,' said Foxfield suddenly.

'I've heard of that idea you're alluding to, Mr. Foxfield,' said the old
gentleman. 'You mean that idea about the chromosomes.'

'Now tell me,' said the barrister, relapsing for a moment. 'I've heard
somewhere before of this idea you're speaking of. I'm told these cosmic
rays affect--what is it you call them?--mutations.'

'I have no doubt of it,' said Foxfield.

'You'll find no physicist to encourage you,' said the old gentleman.

'Or contradict me,' said Foxfield.

'Aye, aye,' said the old gentleman cheerfully. 'It's a case of not
proven.'

'But what is this?' asked Davis. 'Do you mean that these--these cosmic
rays may affect heredity--inheritance?'

'I should be inclined to say they must,' said Foxfield.

'But why them in particular?' asked the barrister.

'Because we have eliminated almost every other possible cause for
changes in the chromosomes.'

'It's a most extraordinary thing,' said the rufous man, slowly waking up
and passing by swift stages from sleepiness to a bright alertness.

'The chromosomes,' said Foxfield, 'the germinal elements, have very
complicated and enormous molecules. They are rather elaborately
protected from most types of disturbance. They have a sort of
independence of the parent body. They go their way alone.'

'Transmission of acquired characteristics strictly forbidden,' someone
interjected.

'It seems to be. But the X rays, the Gamma rays, and particularly these
cosmic rays can get through, and so, I reason, they must get through--to
start something fresh. Since something fresh is always being started.'

And now it was Foxfield's turn to answer intelligent questions and give
a brief lecture.

He summarized the new realizations of the past twenty-five years about
mutations and survival almost as expertly as the old professor had
elucidated his atoms. He showed how the changing of species bit by bit,
by imperceptible gradations, which the early Darwinians had stressed,
had given place in modern evolutionary theory to a realization of the
frequency of extensive simultaneous sports and mutations. And there was
nothing in the circumstances of an animal species which could explain
these sports and mutations. And so it was that Foxfield was compelled to
think they were produced by some penetrating exterior force.

'But why not Providence?' asked the quiet man.

'Because the vast majority of these mutations are aimless and useless,'
said Foxfield.

'And so, having eliminated everything else,' said the barrister, 'you
lay the burden of change and mutation--and in fact all the
responsibility for evolution--on those little cosmic rays! Countless
myriads fly by and miss. Then one hits--Ping! Ping!--and we get a
double-headed calf or a superman.'

'What an unsettled universe it is!' said someone.


3


And then suddenly the rufous man was touched by fantasy. His sleepiness
had fallen from him altogether. He sat up brightly now. 'Look here!' he
said. 'I've got an idea! Suppose--'

He paused. He produced that 'suppose' like a juicy fruit and hovered
with his hand in the air for a voluptuous moment before he squeezed the
juice from it.

'Suppose these cosmic rays come from Mars!'

'They come, I tell ye, from every direction,' said the old professor.

'Including Mars. Yes, Mars, that wizened elder brother of the planet
Earth. Mars, where intelligent life has gone far beyond anything this
planet has ever known. Mars, the planet which is being frozen out,
exhausted, done for. Some of you may have read a book called The War of
the Worlds--I forget who wrote it--Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, one of
those fellows. But it told how the Martians invaded the world, wanted to
colonize it, and exterminate mankind. Hopeless attempt! They couldn't
stand the different atmospheric pressure, they couldn't stand the
difference in gravitation; bacteria finished them up. Hopeless from the
start. The only impossible thing in the story was to imagine that the
Martians would be fools enough to try anything of the sort. But--'

He held up his hand and wagged his fingers with pleasure at his idea.

'Suppose they say up there: "Let's start varying and modifying life on
the earth. Let's change it. Let's get at the human character and the
human brain and make it Martian-minded. Let's stop having children on
this rusty little old planet of ours, and let's change men until they
become in effect our children. Let's get spiritual children there."
D'you see? Martian minds in seasoned terrestrial bodies.'

'And so they start firing away at us with these cosmic rays!'

'And presently,' said the rufous man, almost gobbling with the
excitement of his idea, 'presently when they have got the world
Martianized--'

'I never heard such nonsense,' said the old professor and got up to go
away. 'I tell ye these cosmic rays come from every direction.'

'And why shouldn't they use a sort of shrapnel?' said the rufous man to
his retreating back. 'Shells full of these cosmic rays, so to speak,
with a back-lash. Nothing impossible in that, is there?'

The old professor's back made no reply. And yet it had a certain
eloquence.

'They'd probably begin with wild mutations,' somebody suggested after a
pause; 'and then get more accurate.'

'It may have been going on for a long time,' said the quiet man, helpful
as ever.

'You're assuming of course that they know a lot more about us than we
know about them,' said the rising barrister.

'And isn't that easily possible?' the rufous man countered. 'Mars is the
older planet. Far beyond us along the line of evolution. What we know is
nothing to what they must know. They may be as able to look through us
as we are to take a microscope and look through an amoeba. And when they
have got the world Martianized, when they've started a race here with
minds like their own and yet with bodies fit for earth, when they have
practically interbred with us and ousted our strain, then they'll
begin to send along their treasures, their apparatus--grafting their
life on ours. Making men into their heirs and their continuations. Eh?
Am I talking nonsense, Foxfield? Am I talking nonsense?'

'The jokes of today may become the facts of tomorrow,' said Foxfield.
'Nonsense pro tem, let us say.'

'I'm beginning to believe my own story,' said the rufous man. 'With your
endorsement. It's wonderful.'

'But tell me,' said the lawyer, also a little excited by this strange
idea, 'is there any evidence in confirmation? Any evidence at all? For
example--has there been any increase of freaks and monsters in the world
in the last few years?'

'It's only recently that there has been any attempt to give a
statistical account of abnormalities and mutations,' said Foxfield.
'Monstrosities are hushed up--human monstrosities particularly. Even
animal-breeders have a sort of shame about them, and wild creatures kill
strange offspring instinctively. Every living creature seems to want to
breed true. But from the fruitfly and plants and so on we know there is
an amount of variation going on--much larger than everyday people
imagine.'

'Mostly unfavourable variation though?' asked the barrister.

'Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent,' said Foxfield. 'With no survival
value at all. Chance. Like the wildest experimenting....'


4


Now this was the last kind of stuff to which an anxious prospective
parent on the verge of neurasthenia ought to have listened.

And yet is it not out of accidents and disasters and fantastic twists of
the mind that the greatest discoveries of science and the profoundest
revelation of Nature's processes have come? Things long unsuspected may
be laid bare by a jest. The jokes of today may become the facts of
tomorrow, even as Foxfield had said.

As Mr. Joseph Davis walked home from the Planetarium Club he seemed to
hear and see those cosmic rays, flashing like tracer bullets, singing
like arrows, gleaming and vanishing like falling stars, through the
world about him. You might wrap yourself from them, the old professor
had remarked, in solid lead, and still they got through to you.





CHAPTER THREE


Mr. Joseph Davis Wrestles with an Incredible Idea


1


It is an open question how freely an obstetrician should talk to the
husband of his patient. Dr. Holdman Stedding erred perhaps on the
communicative side. It may be he should have realized more promptly that
Mr. Joseph Davis was troubled in his imagination, and he should have
exercised more care than he did in avoiding topics that might intensify
his imaginative disturbance. Yet it may be pleaded in extenuation that
it was Mr. Davis who started the subject of these mysterious
extra-terrestrial radiations and that it was Dr. Holdman Stedding who
was taken by surprise with a novel idea. He too had his imaginative
side. He liked novel ideas and there was just that streak of scientific
curiosity and communicativeness in him which impairs discretion.

He was a stout, large-faced, warmish-blond man, always a little out of
breath and always with a faint flavour of surprise in his expression.
And he liked to be made to laugh. His mouth was always just a little
open, as if ready to laugh. But he knew his work marvellously well; he
had strong and skilful hands and he never got flurried.

Davis had called on him before. He had wanted to have an exact account
of the health of his wife, Was she strong enough to bear a child? She
was as strong, said Dr. Holdman Stedding, 'as a young pony.'

The way in which Davis beat about that idea that things were not quite
right with his wife gave the good doctor a queer feeling that a less
reassuring reply would have been more acceptable. For obscure
reasons--sub-reasons rather--it seemed that Davis did not want this
child.

Like every practising obstetrician Dr. Holdman Stedding knew all the
faint intimations of a tentative to abortion, and knew how to nip any
such suggestion in the bud. Panic before fatherhood is a more frequent
thing than the lay mind realizes. It is constantly peeping out in these
consultations. Davis, if such had been his disposition, had departed
unsatisfied. But here he was again.

'I suppose everything is going all right with Mary?' he asked, advancing
uneasily into the consulting-room.

'Couldn't be better.'

'You made a second examination?'

'At your request. It was unnecessary.'

'There is nothing unusual....?' Mr. Davis rephrased his question. 'The
child, the embryo, so far as you can ascertain, is not different in any
way from any other child at the same stage?'

'It is coming on well. There is absolutely no ground for worry.'

'And the mother--physically and mentally. You are sure she can stand
this? Because you know, say what you like, she is not a normal woman.'

'Do sit down,' said the doctor, recapturing the hearth-rug by putting
his visitor into a chair, and then standing over him. 'Don't you think,
Mr. Davis, that you are--just a trifle fanciful about your wife?'

'Well,' said Davis, sticking to his point, 'is she normal?'

‘Few women in her condition remain as sane and healthy as she is. If that
is abnormal. Her mind like her body is as sound as a bell.'

'You don't think a woman can be too sane? I confess, Dr. Stedding, I
don't always understand my wife. There is a sort of hard scepticism in
her mind ... You don't think a woman can be too intelligent to make a
good mother?'

'Really, Mr. Davis! What's fretting your mind? With her clearheadedness
and your literary genius your child may be something quite outstanding.'

'And that is what bothers me. The fact of it is, Doctor, I've been
hearing talk lately.... I don't know if you know Foxfield and his
work.... I take a scientific interest in this as well as a personal
one.... The point is--'


2


He kept the doctor waiting for a moment.

'The point is, do you, with your experience, think that latterly--how
shall I put it?--exceptional children have become rather more frequent
than they used to be?'

'Exceptional? Gifted?'

'Yes, gifted. In some cases perhaps. And also--what shall I
say?--abnormalities?'

'H'm!' said the doctor. He was interested. He attempted a brief survey
of his experience. 'There are some rather surprising children and
youngsters about. But I suppose something of that sort has always been
going on.'

'To the same extent?' pressed Davis. 'To the same extent?'

'Possibly not. It is very hard to say. Naturally in this part of London
and with a clientele like mine, we have exceptional parents. My
impression, my unchecked and uncontrolled impression, is that, in the
world I know, maternal mortality is extremely low and the infants
are--bright is the word. Some with biggish heads. But anything in the
way--of out-of-the-way novelties, no. If you are worrying about
monstrosities--you need not worry. And exceptionally bright children are
nothing to worry about. The Caesarean operation is probably more
frequent nowadays.... That may be due rather to improved gynaecology
than to any increase in mutations....'

Pause.

'I would like to talk to you rather fantastically,' said Davis abruptly.
'It's not only my wife I am thinking about. Don't think I'm mad in what
I am saying to you, but just think I am letting my imagination out for a
romp.'

'Nothing better,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, who like most medical
practitioners nowadays had a disposition towards a rather amateurish
psycho-analysis. 'Say what you like. Let it rip.'

'Well,' said Mr. Davis, and hesitated at the strangeness and difficulty
of the ideas he had to explain. 'Biologists--I was talking to Foxfield
the other day--biologists say that when a species comes to a difficult
phase in its struggle for existence--and I suppose no one can say that
is not fairly true of the human situation nowadays--there is an
increased disposition to vary. There is--how did Foxfield put it?--for
one thing, there is less insistence on the normal. Less insistence on
the normal. It is as if the species began to try round and feel for new
possibilities.'

'Ye-es,' said the doctor, with non-committal encouragement in his tone.

'And as if it became more capable of accepting abnormalities and weaving
them into its destinies.'

'Yes,' said the doctor, weighing the proposition. 'That is in accordance
with current ideas.'

'As an industrious student of history,' began Mr. Davis. 'You know I
have written one or two books?'

'Who does not? My two nephews got your Alexander, or Youth the
Conqueror and your Story of the Spanish Main as prizes last term, and
I can assure you I read them myself with great delight.'

'Well. It seems to me that for ages human life has been playing much the
same tune with variations--but much the same tune. What we call human
nature. The general behaviour, the normal system of reactions, has been
the same. The old, old story. Abnormal people have been kept in their
places. You don't think, Doctor, that that uniformity of human
experience is going to be disturbed?'

'I wish you would explain a little more.'

'Suppose there are--Martians.'

'Well.'

'Suppose there are beings, real material beings like ourselves, in
another planet, but far wiser, more intelligent, much more highly
developed. Suppose they are able to see us and know about us--as we know
about the creatures under a microscope, which have no suspicion of
us.... Mind you, this isn't my idea. I'm only repeating something I
heard in the club. But suppose that in some way these older, wiser,
greater, and better organized intelligences are able to influence human
life.'

'How?'

'They may have tried all sorts of ways. They may have been experimenting
for ages. Much as we might run a reagent into a microscope slide. The
amoebae and so on would have no idea....'

'If you are thinking of anything like inter-planetary telepathy,
anything of that sort, I'm not with you. Even between closely similar
minds, between identical twins for example, I doubt if such a thing is
possible.... I detest telepathy.'

'This is quite a different idea.'

'Well?'

'Suppose that for the last few thousand years they have been
experimenting in human genetics. Suppose they have been trying to alter
mankind in some way, through the human genes.'

'But how?'

'You have heard of cosmic rays, Doctor?'

The doctor took it in with some deliberation. 'It is a quite fantastic
idea,' he said after a pause.

'But neither impossible nor incredible.'

'Some things one puts outside the range of practical possibility.'

'And some things refuse to be put outside the range of practical
possibility.'

'But you don't mean to tell me you believe--?'

'No. But I face a possibility with an open mind.'

'Which is?'

'That these Martians--'

'But we don't know there are any Martians!'

'We don't know that there aren't.'

'No.'

'Quite possibly these rays do not come from Mars--more probably than
not. But--let us call the senders--'

'Senders?'

'Well, whatever originates them. Let us call them Martians--just to
avoid inventing a new name--'

'Very well. And your suggestion is--?'

'That these Martians have been firing away with increasing accuracy and
effectiveness at our chromosomes--perhaps for long ages. That is the
story, the fancy if you like, that I want in some way to put to the
test. Every now and then in history, strange exceptional figures have
appeared, Confucius, Buddha; men with strange memories, men with uncanny
mathematical gifts, men with unaccountable intuitions. Mostly they have
been persons in advance of their times, as we say, and out of step with
their times.... Do you see what I am driving at, Doctor?'

'But this is the purest fantasy!'

'Or the realization of a fantastic fact.'

'But--!'


3


Dr. Holdman Stedding wavered in his mind. Ought he to let this talk run
on or close down on it forthwith?

At least half the disordered minds of the present time, he reflected,
develop delusions about radiations. That kind of fancy has largely
replaced those spiritual visions and inner voices which supplied the
demented with crazy interpretations of their perplexities in the past.
It was dangerous stuff, and the mind of Davis, to say the least of it,
was very delicately poised. And yet there was something faintly
plausible--a sort of fairy-tale plausibility--about this idea that
caught the unprofessional elements of the doctor's imagination. He went
on taking the idea seriously.

'What sort of confirmation is possible?' he considered.

'That is where the puzzle comes in. That is why I am consulting you.'

'You think that if one attempted some sort of examination of human
births, past and present--it would of course be very hard to get any
adequate records about this sort of thing--one might be able to
detect--?'

'That we are being played upon.'

'But you don't believe--?'

'Not a bit of it. Oh, no! I didn't come here to be certified. I am
advancing a certain hypothesis. I am being purely scientific in my
method. I advance a provisional theory that a certain thing is going on.
And, mind you, if anything of the sort is going on, it is of great--of
supreme--importance to our race. And having made our trial assumption, we
try and work out what would be some of the logical consequences of this
process of extra-terrestrial influence, if my theory proves to hold
good. Is it possible to detect non-human characteristics, superhuman
characteristics perhaps, in some of the children born nowadays, and are
these non-human characteristics on the increase? Are there people--what
shall I call them?--fey people about? People as sane as you and I and
yet strange? We can try them with special intelligence tests perhaps. We
can go into the reports of educational institutions. So far I have not
planned the lay-out of this investigation. It is all quite new in my
mind. But isn't it a legitimate inquiry? I ask you.'

'You will need genius for that lay-out.'

'Every original research needs that. But my theory I think is plain. My
theory is that new influences are being brought to bear on human
reproduction. For the purposes of our research I call the source of
these influences--Martians. If my suspicions are confirmed, these
Martians--for purposes at which we can only guess--are thrusting
mutations upon us. They are planning human mutations. So that presently
our very children may not prove to be our own!'

As Mr. Davis said these last words, a full realization of the
indiscretion of this talk dawned upon Dr. Holdman Stedding.

'But that is going too far!' he cried. 'That is going much too far. We
are talking--we are amusing ourselves--with pseudo-scientific nonsense.'

Mr. Davis perceived quite clearly whal was in his interlocutor's mind.
'It is too late, Doctor, to say that to me. This notion has bitten me. I
mean to devote myself to this investigation; I feel called to it; and I
want you to interest yourself in it also. If there is one chance in a
million of this suspicion being true, then it demands attention. Even on
a chance so bare as that we ought to get watchers and searchers,
planetary coast-guards, so to speak, at work. We have to specify and
measure and determine the nature of this inflow and herd it back upon
itself before it is too late.'

'H'm,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, regarding his queer visitor with an
expression of infinite perplexity.

'I am under no delusions,' said Mr. Davis. 'I agree I am talking about
something almost absolutely improbable. Let me make it clear to you that
I am perfectly clear upon that. I am skirting the giddy edge of utter
impossibility. Well and good. But sometimes there are intuitions. How
many discoveries have flashed forth at first as the wildest of surmises?
It may be circumstances have conspired to point my mind in a certain
direction. Never mind about that. I myself do not feel that this is an
impossibility. Just simply that--not an absolute impossibility. No more.
That is where I stand.'





CHAPTER FOUR


Dr. Holdman Stedding Is Infected with the Idea


1


Dr. Holdman Stedding lay awake that night thinking about the state of
mind of Mr. Davis and about the queer idea of a genetic invasion of
Martian qualities that he had propounded. There was something
provocative about the idea; something that made his intelligence bristle
defensively. 'Pure balderdash!' he said aloud, but as a matter of fact
what made it so irritating was that it was not pure balderdash. There
was an attenuated but not unbreakable thread of silly plausibility about
the suggestion that prevented him from throwing it altogether out of his
mind. He threw words like 'balderdash' at it as one might throw stones
at a dog that persists in following one, and presently there was the
damned thing back again.

'If it should chance that something of the sort was going on....'

He found himself asking himself whether there was any sort of evidence
that some new type or perhaps even new types of human being were
appearing in the world. Can there be such things as Martianized minds?
'Silly phrase,' he said. 'But somehow a contagious phrase.'

He ran his mind over its collection of facts about the subject. He knew
most of what was known and he realized that, for the purpose of getting
a conclusive answer, it amounted to hardly anything at all. He reviewed
the question methodically. The most confident statements, he reflected,
are made that man has not changed since Neolithic times, that he has
degenerated since the days of Pericles, that he is larger or smaller,
healthier, less healthy, than his ancestors, that he has become finer
and subtler or anything else that suits the private convictions, stated
or implicit, of the 'authority' who flings out this sort of stuff to the
public. When you came to think it oyer as he was doing, it was all
without exception opinionated rubbish. No one has yet devised the means
of getting the confused and irregular records available into any sort of
order. No one has been able to do that work. People like J. B. S.
Haldane and suchlike pioneer biologists were trying to form a research
society now. Even the men most in contact with the facts have nothing
better than 'impressions' and 'persuasions,' and some, thought Dr.
Holdman Stedding with righteous self-applause, know that that is so, and
some do not let their prejudices rip. Dr. Holdman Stedding's private and
unproven 'impression' was just the impression most favourable to Mr.
Davis's wild surmise. His unproven belief was that a considerable change
in the human mind was going on. He thought that heavy and clumsy types
were not so abundant in the population as they used to be and that
certain new mental types were on the increase.

'But what has that to do with Martians and cosmic rays?' his common
sense protested, and his common sense answered: 'Nothing.'

After which he continued to pursue the subject.


2


Such discursive nocturnal meditations as Dr. Holdman Stedding was now
committed to, combine the advantage that they cover a wide ground and
find the most diverse evidence in their excursions, with the
disadvantage that they sometimes lose their way altogether and never
return to the main issue. For a time the doctor's train of thought was
in danger of the latter fate. He wandered into a labyrinth of
possibility about the peculiar scepticism of the contemporary mind and
the perplexing obduracies and wilfulnesses of so many of the rising
generation. He knew more about the ideas of his hospital students than
most of his colleagues, and sometimes they filled him with hope and
sometimes they terrified him. Like all youth since our race began, most
of them were sheep and went whither they were told or led, but for all
that it was quite conceivable that the proportion of independent and
wilful minds was higher than it had ever been before.

The stiff, troublesome fellows were the interesting ones.

He passed to the marked increase of effctive medical research and from
that to the general inventiveness of our age. Inventiveness had never
been so manifest as it was today. For more than a century it had been
increasing. Directly you said a thing could not possibly be done, there
it was--done. Yet so far no one had suggested that this must be due to
the release of new mental types. It might be.

He felt that he would like to have another talk with Davis about the
whole matter. Where had Davis got his evidently very strong belief that
there were new and strange types appearing in the world? Could he know
of anything that a leading obstetrician of wide scientific reading was
not likely to know? The trouble about talking to Davis was the doctor's
persuasion--possibly an exaggerated one--that mentally he was not too
safely balanced. It would be unwise to 'encourage' him, if he was in
fact drifting towards a delusion. And then abruptly Dr. Holdman Stedding
remembered something.

'His wife!'

Several times Davis had practically asserted that his wife was strange,
odd, exceptional. Dr. Holdman Stedding tried to recall the exact words
but he found he could not do so. But that manifest disturbance at the
advent of a child was bound up with that.

'If he's beginning to think his wife is one of these Martianized people
...! I wonder what a fellow of that sort might not do.... What was it he
said? Something about our very children not proving to be our own?'

Dr. Holdman Stedding spent some time that night trying to recall every
particular he could of both these people. She was very quiet in her
manner, observant, sane. If she was exceptional mentally it was because
she was exceptionally sane. She moved easily and gracefully, as one does
who has no conflicting nervous impulses. She did so even in her present
condition; she was being one of the calmest and most competent patients
he had ever known. 'If she's Martianized,' reflected the doctor, 'then
the sooner we all get Martianized the better.'

But then, he considered, he had not seen her a dozen times altogether
and there might be qualities in her of which he knew nothing, to account
for her husband's attitude, for that faintly distrustful insecurity
about her.

The doctor speculated about the relations of the Davis couple for a
while. He liked her and he found something slightly antipathetic about
her husband. The man's quick, incalculable, and ill-adjusted mental
movements made him uncomfortable. No doubt his literary gifts were
considerable, but like so many of these literary people he had much more
control over himself upon paper than in real life. He must be a great
trial to her and she ought to be protected, now at any rate, from his
possible eccentricities. The doctor felt that something ought to be done
about it, and began thinking of possible things that might or might not
be done, until it occurred to him that it was through this sort of
breach in impartiality that unprofessional conduct may enter into the
life of a practitioner.


3


In the morning he wrote a very carefully considered letter to Davis
which he marked 'Private' and addressed to the Planetarium Club.

It was a long and repetitious letter. It beat about the bush too much to
be quoted in full here, but the gist of it was a warning not to give way
to a 'fantasy-suggestion'. 'These little imaginative ideas one takes
into one's mind are like those insidious creatures the medieval doctors
used to talk about, little things that seem nothing at all, that leap
into your mouth before you know where you are and grow into monsters
inside your brain and devour your sanity.' No human mind, the doctor
declared, was sufficiently balanced as yet to resist the disturbance of
a too persistently cherished idea. That was why nearly everyone who
investigated 'psychic phenomena' or 'telepathy' or 'astrology' or
'chiromancy' or the tarot cards presently began to find there was
'something in it'. Mr. Davis was to think no more about it, distract his
mind, take up chess, play golf on new courses, before this obsession
really gripped his mind. You are standing on the brink of a long mental
slide at the bottom of which is delusional insanity. I write plainly to
you, because you are still a perfectly sane man.'



4


He knows--he knows as well as I do,' said Mr. Joseph Davis. 'But he's
afraid to go on with it....

'I want to go on with it. But how I am to do that I don't know.
Watch.... And meanwhile these cosmic rays fly noiselessly about me--the
arrows of the Martians--and by a birth here and a birth there--humanity
undergoes--dehumanization.'





CHAPTER FIVE


Professor Ernest Keppel Takes up the Idea in his Own Peculiar Fashion


1


Now Dr. Holdman Stedding had a great friend and crony, a bachelor like
himself and a queer imaginative talker, Professor Ernest Keppel. He was
nominally professor of philosophy, but latterly he had engaged more and
more in psycho-therapy. He was accused of psychologizing his philosophy
away into a descriptive science and he was a frequent and formidable
controversialist, more often in hot water than not.

He was a dark, scarred, halting man. He had been scarred by the
explosion of a hidden mine in the German trenches during the September
advance in 1918. The scar ran as a dark red suture from the middle of
his forehead across the left brow, where an overhanging exostosis thrust
his eye into a deep and sinister cavern. Moreover, the explosion had
stiffened the joint of his forearm, injured his pelvis, and left him
lame. Before that he must have been very animated and attractive indeed.
But his mutilation had left a curious bitterness in his nature. He
understood why he was bitter; he did his best not to be bitter, but
taking thought about it could not make him sweet. He was over-sensitive
to the effect of his scar when he met new people; his incurable delusion
that he was repulsive made him abrupt and rude, more particularly with
women, and perhaps he exaggerated the delights of the normal experiences
from which he felt he was shut off. He was prosperous and he lived well,
and his energy and persistence in research and speculation were making a
great reputation for him.

The doctor found his company extremely stimulating. He was accustomed to
bring new ideas to him and toast them, so to speak, in front of his
glowing mind. Indeed he hardly ever took an idea to himself and
assimilated it until he had warmed it up first before Professor Keppel.
And now accordingly he took advantage of a lunch engagement to bring up
the matter of the Martians. They often arranged by telephone to lunch
together, because Keppel's place was so much nearer than clubland.

'I was talking to a lunatic yesterday,' said the doctor, 'and he
broached a most remarkable idea.'

He sketched Mr. Davis's alleged discovery in a tone of appreciative
scepticism as lunch went on.

'It's nonsense,' he concluded.

'It's nonsense,' Professor Keppel agreed. 'But--'

'Exactly! But--'

'But--' repeated Keppel and waved the hand of his inferior arm
stiffly, while his trim parlourmaid stood at his elbow with the
savoury.

A certain brightness appeared in his overhung eye. His expression became
profound.

Dr. Holdman Stedding waited.

'The interesting point,' said Professor Keppel, helping himself to his
Gruyere a la Roi Alphonse, 'the interesting point is, as you say, that
we do in fact know nothing about what human modification may be going on
at the present time. Nothing. Demographic science has hardly begun to be
a precise science--much less an exact science. Our social statistics are
extravagently clumsy. (A) We don't know what to count or measure and (B)
we haven't an idea how to measure it. It is quite possible that new
human types may be appearing in the world, or that once rare types may
be increasing in number relatively. More geniuses--more aberrant gifts.
And the queer thing is that, when this lunatic comes to you and starts
this idea in your head, you don't say Pish or Tush and just turn it
down; you begin to have a vague sense that somehow you have felt
something--you hardly know what.'

'That's it.'

'And when you bring it to me (Do try this savoury. Don't pass it. I got
the recipe from Martinez at that Spanish restaurant in Swallow Street) I
begin to have the same feeling.'


2


'One's imagination wants to play with it. It's as attractive as a hare's
foot to a kitten. Suppose, Keppel, suppose--for the sake of a
talk--there are Martians.'

'Let's suppose it. I'm more than willing.'

'What sort of minds would they have and what would they think of our
minds and what might they not try to make of them?'

'Regarded as an exercise in speculative general psychology? That's
attractive.'

'As a speculative exercise then.'

'Exactly. You know that man Olaf Stapledon has already tried something
of the sort in a book called Last and First Men. Some day we shall
certainly have to come to a general psychology independent of the human
type, just as now these young men in the Society of Experimental Biology
are getting away from the highly specialized peculiarities of human
physiology towards a general physiological science. Now away there in
Mars, as any astronomer will tell you, there are all the conditions
necessary for a sort of life similar, if not identically similar, to
life upon earth, the same elements--air, water, a temperature range not
widely different. The probabilities are in favour of there having been a
parallel--a roughly parallel evolution. Parallel but in some ways
different. The gravitational energy, atmospheric pressure, and suchlike
things are different and that would mean differences in lightness,
vigour, and size. Martian plants and animals would probably run much
bigger. Much bigger.'

'I forget the relative masses of the two planets,' said the doctor.

'I forget too. Roughly it's something like eight to one--perhaps a bit
more. So the Martian, if he had a human form, would be twice as tall and
eight times our weight. A bigger, longer-lived creature. Assuming--

'No. It's not wild assumption. The odds are in favour that there are
or have been growths, detachments, moving feeling things, in existence
on that planet. This is bold speculation, Holdman Stedding, I admit, but
it isn't extravaganza.'

'Go on. But you wouldn't dare to talk to your students like this.'

'Possibly not. How far would the evolution of life, if it had an
independent start elsewhere under slightly but not essentially different
conditions, run parallel to the evolution of life on earth?'

'The same tune, I suppose, with variations.'.

'It is difficult to imagine anything else. There would be plants--I
think green plants--and animals. The animals would run about as
individuals and have senses, something like ours--perhaps very like
ours. They might see more colours than we do, for example, have a longer
or shorter range of sound, subtler feelers in the place of our hands.
Probably Nature has tried out all the possible senses on earth here. But
not all the possible shapes and patterns. Anyhow these Martians would
respond to stimuli; they would have reflexes; they would condition their
reflexes. I believe if we could call up the spirit of dear old Pavlov,
we should find him agreeing with us, that the chances are heavily in
favour of any possible minds there being minds fundamentally like ours.'

'But with a longer past.'

'Yes, Mars was cool long before earth was. A longer past, a hotter
summer and a harder winter--the year of Mars is twice the length of
ours--a larger body and a larger brain. With more room for
memories--more and better memories--and more space for ideas, more and
better ideas. And so the problem comes down to this. What sort of mind
would a man have if he had a longer ancestry, an ampler memory, a less
hurried Life?'

'I accept all that as just possible,' said the doctor.

'It is certainly where the weight of probability lies. Now all these
pseudo-scientific story-writers who write about Mars make their Martians
monsters and horrors, inhuman in the bad sense, cruel. Why should they
be anything of the sort? Why,' repeated Professor Keppel, taking coffee,
'why should they be anything of the sort?'

'Quite nice monsters?'

'Why not?'

'Well, the German professor evolved his idea of a camel from his inner
consciousness; why shouldn't we do the same with our Martians?'

'Having regard to the facts. Why not?'

Dr. Holdman Stedding looked at his watch.

'Not till you've smoked one of those pennant-shaped Coronas you like,'
said Keppel, 'and just a whiff of brandy. Because, confound it! you
started this talk, you've interested me, and you've got to hear it out.
If there is such a thing as a Martian, rest assured, Holdman Stedding,
he's humanity's big brother.'

'Big in every way you think. A super-super man.'

'Good anyhow.'

'Beyond good and evil.'

'Everything alive must have its good and evil. Beyond our good and evil
anyhow. None the worse for that perhaps. No; if you talk of your lunatic
again, you can at least dispel any fear he has of his Martians. The odds
are they are not so much invading us as acting as a sort of
inter-planetary tutor. Bless my heart! At the mere thought I feel a sort
of benevolent influence.'

'No,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, emitting a smoke jet with the
appreciative expression of a cigar advertisement in Punch and weighing
the possibilities of the case with luxurious deliberation. 'It's your
cook.'


3


'She's a very good cook,' Professor Keppel admitted. 'But about these
Martians. We are letting our fancy play too wildly about them. Let's
leave them for a bit. There's another point your patient has raised
that's quite available for separate treatment. Practically another
question. There may or may not be these sane and mature watchers over
human destiny, these Celestial Uncles, these friends in the mdnight sky,
but what does seem to be possible and even within our reach is this
idea, that the species Homo sapiens, because of some possible increase
or change in the direction of the cosmic rays, or from some other
unknown cause, is starting to mutate, and mutate along some such line as
that larger wisdom indicates.'

'Some sort of large wisdom,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding, 'a purely
hypothetical wisdom.'

'You are very precise,' said Professor Keppel. 'But anyhow that is what
we want to know. Is there such a biological movement going on? Is there
any means of tracing it if it is going on? The real feeling at the back
of both our minds is that, if there is not something of the sort going
on, then this breed of pretentious, self-protective imbeciles--'

'Poor Homo sapiens!' murmured the doctor. 'How he catches it
nowadays!'

'Is very near the end of its tether. It's no good pretending you
disagree with that. Haven't all reasonable civilized men nowadays this
feeling of being dilettantes on a sinking ship? We all want a break
towards something better in the way of living. Hopes and our wishes
speak together. And it may be--as we half hope. But how are we to test
this idea? How are we to set about the investigation?'

'Without making everyone think we have gone crazy?'

'Precisely.'

'Nietzsche?' hazarded the doctor. 'Are these his supermen we are
thinking about?'

'He brings too much Oriental bric-à-brac for my taste,' said Keppel.
'And so far as I can make out, he has at least two different meanings
for that Ubermensch of his. On the one hand is a biologically better
sort of man and on the other a sort of aggregate synthetic being like
Hobbes's Leviathan. You never know how to take him. Let's rule Nietzsche
out. Let us just follow up this question whether there is an increase
in--what shall I call them?--high-grade intellectual types.'

The doctor helped himself with infinite restraint and discretion to just
the merest splash more brandy. 'I think, Keppel, there may be a possible
way to set this note of interrogation working.'

'We have our reputations to consider.'

'We have our reputations to consider, but quite possibly this
fellow--well, to commit a very slight indiscretion--it is Mr. Joseph
Davis, the man who writes those extremely popular, those florid--shall
I say?--those almost too glorifying glosses, so to speak, on
history--might do something for us in this respect. His writings, his
association with what one might call the more romantic aspects of the
human record, his almost strained belief in the faith, hope, and glory
of our species, put him, I think, in a position to ask questions....'

'Joseph Davis,' considered Keppel. 'The man who wrote From Agincourt to
Trafalgar? Him! You got this idea about the Martians from him!'

'I told him to think no more about it.'

'But he will?'

'He will. He wants to think about it. He wants to follow this up.
He--something has shaken him up. I can't make up my mind whether he is
going mad or going sane. But if I give him half a hint, he'll be off on
the scent of these Martians now like a dog after a rabbit'





CHAPTER SIX


Opening Phases of the Great Eugenic Research


1


'Now here, now there,' whispered Mr. Davis to himself as he stood on the
doorstep of the headmaster of Gorpel School and looked at the
headmaster's trim but beautiful garden.

It was six months later and high summer and he was the father of an
extremely healthy but extremely intelligent-looking child. And the
belief that he had discovered that the most wonderful event in the
history of our planet was now happening had entered into and become part
of his being.

Ostensibly he had come to Gorpel to lecture on 'The Grandeur That Was
Rome,' but really he had come to look that interesting collection of
boys over and talk to the headmaster about any mentally (or even
physically) exceptional lads who might have attracted his attention.
Nothing was to be said about Martians, cosmic rays, or anything of that
sort. It was to be put before the headmaster as a mild little inquiry
into the prospects of the 'odd' type of boy.

It was Dr. Holdman Stedding who had suggested this line of inquiry to
him. Really the excellent doctor wanted this material collected to feed
the whimsical and nine-tenths sceptical curiosity of Keppel and himself,
but he had succeeded in persuading himself that it was absolutely the
best treatment for Davis's mental worries that his imaginative vagaries
should be steadied and assuaged by a methodical exploration of what
might quite possibly prove to be illuminating facts. This brought with
it a certain sense of benevolence, because Davis was not his patient
under treatment, paid no fees. It was indeed simply helping the man as
one man helps another.

Davis at this stage was looking for mental abnormalities--on the upward
side. He was getting whatever could be got from prison governors,
educational authorities, schools of every sort where there was close
contact between teachers and pupils, even from army instructors,
institutions for defectives, lunatic asylums--and making a general
report and a digest of his results. A number of facts not generally
known was emerging from these inquiries. The proportion of children of
the calculating-boy and musical-prodigy-type seemed to be increasing
quite markedly; finer muscular adjustment was in a very conspicuous way
ousting mere beef from athleticism; critical obduracy at quite an early
age was far more in evidence than it had ever been before.

Possibly Davis, like many investigators, was disposed to find what he
looked for. Dr. Holdman Stedding fancied he could allow for that.

What Dr. Holdman Stedding did not allow for were the practical effects
of these preoccupations upon an author's normal activities. Like most
men of sound professional standing he thought authors did their work
outside time and space and occupied their normal hours in the pursuit of
royalties and publicity and in making speeches on irrelevant topics to
unnecessary societies. But Joseph Davis had been engaged upon a great
constellation of books, which were to give history, ennobled and
illuminated, to the common man. He had schemed that as what he called
his 'life task'. That task was now beginning to look like a modern
cathedral under construction when some new heresy breaks out among the
more opulent faithful and funds run short. Sometimes for six or seven
days not a line was added.

Meanwhile every day it grew plainer to Davis that this theory, which had
at first seemed even to him a fantastic hypothesis, was real and true. A
new quality of human being was being inserted into the fabric of human
life, 'one here, one there'.

It was hard not to talk about it. It was hard to have to keep up the
pretence of making a mere respectable inquiry as trivial and pointless
as--let us say--a research thesis in pedagogics for an American
university. He went about the world to social gatherings, to assemblies
and theatres and restaurants; he mingled in crowds, he watched people's
unsuspecting faces, and now the thought was always in his mind: If only
they knew!

If only they knew what the Martians were doing to them!

At first his attitude had been one of stark antagonism to this Martian
intrusion. He had something more than an ordinary man's instinctive
loyalty to race and kind. He had superimposed a mental habit. He had
made himself a champion of that ancient and venerable normal life of
humanity, unaltered through the ages--except now and then through the
providential punishment of some transitory heresy--the simple, old,
beautiful story of childhood, learning, love, industry, parentage,
honour, and the easy passage to a venerable old age and a brightly
hopeful death. It was a story at once earthly, in the best, the honest
pious peasant sense, and profoundly spiritual. This life, age after age,
had been set in a stimulating round of seedtime and harvest, cold and
heat, thirst and hunger, reasonable desires and modest satisfactions. Of
such stuff was history woven, and across this sound, enduring fabric
were embroidered the great historical figures, in a bright opera-drama
as glad in quality as an illuminated missal. History told of their
conquests, triumphs, glories, heroisms, of heart-stirring tragedies and
lovely sacrifices. They were all far greater than life-size--like the
monarchs and gods in an Assyrian relief--the common people ran about
beneath their feet according to the best historical traditions. So it
had been. So it would go on until at last the Almighty commanded the
curtain to ring down and called the actors forward from their various
retiring-rooms, to receive appropriate rewards.

Such was the picture of the world and its promise that he had been
working to realize, overworking to realize, when this fantastic and
distracting suspicion of a Martian intervention first came to him. It
was as if the vast canvas on which he had been working with such
resolution had suddenly cracked across and betrayed his light and shade,
his heights and depths, as the completest unreality.

Now--and here there seems to have been some gap in his logical
process--he felt that the Martians would certainly be against all these
fine things for which he struggled. Why, one may ask, should the
Martians be against them? Why should they be by necessity spoilers of so
rich and noble a fabric? But he had his full share of that infirmity of
our impatient minds which makes us leap naturally to the conclusion that
what is not uncritically on our side and subject to our ideas is against
us. At the onset of a strange way of living we bristle like dogs at the
sight of a strange animal. He hated these Martians as soon as he though
of them. He could not imagine their interference with our nice world
could be anything but devastating.

His motive to begin with, therefore, was an altogether uncomplicated
desire to detect, expose, and repel an insidious and dreadful attack
upon this dear and happy human life we all enjoy so greatly and
relinquish so reluctantly. These Martians presented themselves to him as
the blackest of threats to all those convictions that make life worth
living upon earth. Indisputably they must be inhuman, whatever else they
are. That went without saying. To be inhuman implied to him, as to most
of us, malignant cruelty; it seemed impossible that it could mean
anything else. (And yet this is a world where lots of us live upon terms
of sentimental indulgence towards cats, dogs, monkeys, horses, cows, and
suchlike unhuman creatures, help them in a myriad simple troubles; and
attribute the most charming reactions to them!)

Among other things it seemed to him unquestionably that the drive of
these so elaborately aimed cosmic missiles among our chromosomes would
be to increase the intellectual power of the Martianized individuals
very greatly. There seemed to be no alternative to that conclusion. And
for some very deep-seated reason in his make-up, it was an intolerable
thought for him that there should appear any class of creature on earth
intellectually above his own, unless they were profoundly inferior to
him morally, and so repulsive and ugly as practically to reverse the
handicap against him. They had to be ugly in motive and action. There
had to be that compensation at least. This idea of their ugliness
followed the idea of their intelligence with such an air of necessity
that it was some weeks before he began even to suspect that the two
ideas might be separated.

At first he pictured a Martian as something hunched together, like an
octopus, tentacular, saturated with evil poisons, oozing unpleasant
juices, a gigantic leathery bladder of hate. The smell, he thought,
would be terrible. And those indirect offspring who were to be so foully
disseminated upon earth, were bound, he imagined, to be not simply
intelligent in a hard unsympathetic way but in some manner disfigured
and disgusting. They would be bound to have turnip heads,
bladder-of-lard crania, shortsighted eyes, horrible little faces, long
detestable hands, unathletic and possibly crippled bodies....

Yet struggling desperately against this trend were certain vague
apprehensions about his wife and child.


2


There was an extraordinary division in his mind at this time. Two
cognate currents of suspicion ran side by side and would not mingle.

His wife was at once associated with and separated from his general line
of thought. If, for instance, Dr. Holdman Stedding had asked him
outright: 'Do you think your wife is one of these people who have been
touched in their natal phase by the magic of the cosmic vibrations?' he
would have answered at once with almost perfect honesty that these
Martian speculations of his had absolutely nothing to do with her. But
he would not have answered the question calmly; he would have had a
touch of defensive indignation in his voice. And it was not a question
he would have asked himself. It was a question he could not have asked
himself; there was some barrier against that.

He was resisting a very obvious impulse to complete the link of
association and fear that linked his long-standing sense of some
strangeness about his wife, with this Martian idea. The two lines of
suggestion were in reality connected and consecutive, but by some
self-protective necessity he would not see that his extreme readiness to
accept the suggestion of a Martian influx had any direct relation to his
long-incubated sense of the elfin quality of his wife. They were groups
of ideas in different spheres.

But these spheres, of which the Martian one was not spinning so busily,
were drawing closer and closer together in his mind. Within a measurable
time they were bound to collide, to coalesce into one common whirlpool,
which might be a very tumbled whirlpool indeed. Then he would be bound
to face the realization that had already projected itself in his words
to the doctor: 'So that presently our very children may not prove to be
our own.'

This intimation, breaking through his resistances, evoked first the
dread of an abnormal child, prematurely wise, macrocephalic, with
dreadful tentacular hands.... So his essential humanity presented the
thing. If the thing was a monster, what should he do?

He thought of doing some very dreadful things.

Such nightmare ideas haunted him more and more distressingly until the
birth of his child. The immediate advent of that event filled him with
almost uncontrollable terror. By an immense effort he concealed it and
behaved himself.

He was amazed--even Dr. Holdman Stedding was amazed--to have the young
man brought into the world after a labour of less than an hour. No
monstrous struggle. No frightful crisis. No Caesarean operation.

'Is he--is he all right?' he asked incredulous.

'Fit as a fiddle,' said Dr. Holdman Stedding almost boisterously.
Because he had found something contagious in the father's uneasiness.

'No malformations? No strangeness?'

'On my honour, Mr. Davis, you don't deserve such a child! You don't.
When they've done a little washing you shall see it. I'm not often
enthusiastic. I've seen too many of 'em.'

And it looked indeed a perfect little creature. When they put it into
his parental arms a great wave of instinctive tenderness surged up in
the heart of Joseph Davis. Like endless fathers in his position before
him, he was overcome by the wonderful fact that the creature's little
hands had perfact nails and fingers.

Why had he ever been afraid?

'I feel I'd like to see her,' he said.

'Not just yet. A little while yet. Though she's doing splendidly.'
Whereupon Dr. Holdman Stedding said a slightly unfortunate thing:
'There's not a painted Madonna in all the world with a lovelier bambino
than hers.'

Mr. Joseph Davis's expression became thoughtful.

Silently he handed back his precious burden to the hovering nurse.

He was minded to go out and not to see Mary for a time.

Then by a great effort he overcame this impulse and stayed indoors in
his study downstairs, and presently he was taken in to her, and when he
saw her, tired but flushed and triumphant, with the child laid close to
her, some long-standing restraint seemed to break between them and he
called her his darling and knelt down beside her, weeping.

'Dear Joe!' she said, and her hand crept out and ruffled his hair
gently. 'Queer Joe!'


3


After that his ideas about the quality of the Martians' influences and
purposes began to change. After all, the two streams of realization came
together in his mind gently and naturally, and he felt with the
completest assurance and with no lingering trace of horror that both his
wife and his child belonged to this new order of human beings that was
appearing upon the planet.

After that it was that his researches, which at the beginning had been
directed mainly to Poor Law institutions for defective and malformed
children, asylums, wonder children, and the more grotesque arcana of
gynaecology, turned rather to schools and universities and the
ascertainable characteristics of exceptional and gifted people. He
passed from a hunt for monsters to an investigation of outstanding
endowment, to the detection and analysis of what is called genius in
every field of human activity. He brooded over the picture riddles of
Durer, he read the notebooks of Leonard. He found a new interest in
symbolic art and in whatever moody and inexplicable decoration from
remote times and places came to his attention. Were these enigmas like
cries in the dark, the struggling intimations of novel reactions and
novel attitudes on the part of Martian pioneers towards the customs and
traditions of our world?

He had never told any one, least of all would he have told Dr. Holdman
Stedding, that dreams about Martians were becoming rather frequent with
him. They were extremely consistent dreams or at least they were
pervaded with a sense of consistency. These dream-Martians were no
longer repulsive creatures, grotesques and caricatures, and yet their
visible appearance was not human. They had steadfast, dark eyes, very
widely separated, and their mouths were still and resolute. Their broad
brows and round heads made him think of the smooth wise-looking heads of
seals and cats, and he could not distinguish clearly whether they had
shadowy hands and arms or tentacles. There was always a lens-like effect
about his vision, as though he saw them through the eyepiece of some
huge optical instrument. Ripples passed across the lens and increased
the indistinctness, and ever and again flickering bunches of what he
assumed were cosmic rays exploded from nothingness across the picture
and flashed out radiating to the periphery and vanished. He felt that
his dreams were taking him into a world where our ideas of form and
process, of space and time, are no longer valid. In his dreams it was
not as if he went across space to Mars, it was as if a veil became
translucent.

Once or twice in the daytime he had tried to make sketches of these
watchers, but their physical forms had always eluded his pencil. He had
never been able to draw very well, but also he had a feeling that even
for a skilled artist there would have been difficulties about the planes
and dimensions of these beings.

Moreover, not only was he finding this difficulty in determining a
Martian form but he was finding a parallel difficulty in fixing any
common characteristics for the earthly types he was beginning to
distinguish as 'Martianized'. All that they had in common was that they
were 'different' and that this difference involved a certain detachment
from common reactions. They lived apart. They thought after their own
fashion. He was not sure whether they were actually insusceptible to
mass emotions; he may have expected them to be, and that with him would
have been halfway to thinking them so.


4


On this visit to Gorpel he pursued what was becoming his usual
technique. It was at once subtle and a trifle crazy. There was a streak
of masochism about it. He had written all his books so far to appeal to
the heroic common humanity in all of us. And now he was using the same
stuff to eliminate, so to speak, common humanity. He was looking for
minds that did not respond.

He had brought down a lecture that had always proved extremely
successful with ordinary schoolboys, 'The Grandeur That Was Rome’. In
this he unfolded his tale of the heroic patriots who stud the Latin
tradition, from Horatius defending the Bridge, to Caesar crowning the
great task of the Republic by annexing it to British history, Octavius
creating the Empire and Justinian giving us Roman law. It was a
procession of statuesque figures, more or less clean-shaven and for the
most part in togas, evoking as they passed a fungoid growth of
unnecessary aqueducts, corpulent amphitheatres, and Corinthian columns,
and conferring on the whole world the blessings of the Pax Romana. The
Punic Wars, with a faint flavouring of Anti-Semitism, too faint to be
disagreeable, he presented as a gigantic necessary struggle between
noble north-side soldiers and revengeful, obdurate, but extremely
competent south-side loanmongers. He ignored every reality of hate,
suspicion, greed, panic, and brutish cruelty that characterized that
monstrous mutual destruction of the Mediterranean civilizations, the
Punic Wars, and still less did he let those essential features of the
mighty Pax, the omnipresent cross for rebels and the omnipresent
tax-collector for every one, peep out from behind those glorious Roman
arches. As he orated this familiar discourse he watched the boys. A few,
incapable of attention, were inattentive, but the discipline of the
school was good and their inattention was passive. The majority were
responsive. They drank in the mighty fable. Their eyes betrayed their
imaginative excitement. Their faces became nobler, stern. They became
conquering generals subduing barbarians, pro-consuls assuaging the
bickerings of subject races.

It was an answer to trumpets that stirred in them. It was what he had
heard someone call the 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' reaction.

With all that Davis was familiar. But now he was looking for scepticism
and intelligent dissent.

There was one little fellow sitting up near the corner who from the
start he felt assured was Martianized. He had untidy hair and a shrewd
faintly humorous white face, and he listened throughout, cheek on hand,
very attentively and with a questioning expression. He heard, untouched.
The real Martian quality.

'That's my boy here,' said Davis and inquired about him afterwards.

'A queer little chap,' said the headmaster. 'A queer little chap.
Behaves pretty well, but he's somehow disappointing. Doesn't throw
himself into things. A streak of something very nearly amounting
to--well, scepticism. Yet his people are quite decent people and the
Dean of Clumps is his uncle. He asks questions no other boy would think
of. The other day he asked, what is spiritual?

'Well,' said Mr. Davis after a thoughtful pause, 'what is spiritual?'

'But need I tell you of all people?'

'What did you tell him? I'm finding a sort of difficulty in putting this
in a chapter I am writing about the saintly life.'

The headmaster of Gorpel did not answer the question immediately.
Instead he went on to say in a slightly offended voice: 'I find all my
normal boys understand the word without discussion, take it for granted.
Spiritual-Material, a natural opposition. One ascends, the other
gravitates. There it is, plain as a pikestaff. No need to discuss it'

'Unless some little--toad, like that, asks the question point-blank.'

'He refuses to see. Why, he said, should we make a sort of extract of
reality and call it spirituality and pretend the two things are primary
opposites?'

'He said that! Rather--subtle.'

'Too subtle for a boy of his age. Unwholesome.'

'But spirit isn't an extract, is it?'

'So I said to him. "Life," he said, "seems to me just one, Sir. I can't
think of it in any other way. Sorry, Sir, I've tried."'

'He said that--that he couldn't think in any other way? That's very
interesting. How did you meet that?'

'In his particular case I explained by means of illustrations.'

'And he was satisfied?'

'Not in the least. He criticized my illustrations. Rather penetratingly,
I admit. He wanted me to define. But you see, Mr. Davis, the fundamental
things of life cannot be defined. He made me realize that more clearly
than I have ever done before. All the great fundamentals, Deity,
Eternity--Faith in What?--it is as if there was a sort of holy of holies
beyond the reach of exact definitions. So it seems to me. It is useless,
I find, to argue about them. It robs our attitudes of dignity ... robs
them of dignity.... We are reduced to logic chopping. Quibbles.... We
understand by intuition what we mean and what other people mean. Best to
leave it at that.'

'And you told him if he didn't understand what spiritual meant, not to
go on thinking about it yet but wait.'

'And pray,' said the headmaster of Gorpel.

'In effect I said that. In effect. Not exactly. Not too definitely. One
must go carefully. Afterwards I made him learn Corinthians One Thirteen
by heart - not as if it was exactly an answer but as if it threw a light
- and I hope it did him good.'

'You don't know?'

'I don't know. These are elusive matters, Mr. Davis. A boy who wants to
argue must not be indulged too far. There are limits.'

'I wonder,' said Mr. Davis, feeling his way carefully, 'if perhaps
types--types like this youngster may really be something more than
merely obstinate. Whether by some instinctive necessity, by some
difference in themselves, they may not find something--some inacceptable
lack of fineness, some lack of clearness, in various distinctions we
assume, distinctions we have assumed and which we make by habit....'

'I can't entertain thoughts like that,' said the headmaster abruptly. 'I
cannot conduct the work of this great school and prepare my regiment of
youngsters year by year for their attack on life and responsibility, if
I am also to carry on an examination of the fundamental values we set on
things.'

'But if presently instead of one inassimilable boy you find half a dozen
of him turning up--or a score?'

The headmaster looked at his visitor. 'I devoutly hope not, Mr. Davis,'
he said. 'I devoutly hope not. You are giving me food--not for
thought--no!--for nightmares....'

'Now here, now there,' said Mr. Davis as he stood on the headmaster's
doorstep. 'Certainly that boy is one of them. They don't see life as we
see it. They can't think of it in our way. And they make us begin to
doubt that we see it ourselves as we have always imagined we did.'





CHAPTER SEVEN

The World Begins to Hear about the Martians


1


It is almost impossible to trace how this realization that mankind,
under the spur of the cosmic rays, was launched upon a career of genetic
change, seeped from the minds of the first discoverers, Laidlaw, that
rufous man in the Planetarium Club (to whom it seemed no more than a
passing freak of fancy), Mr. Davis (who was first to take it seriously),
Dr. Holdman Stedding, and Professor Ernest Keppel, into the general
consciousness. But a few weeks after the birth of Mary's child, an
article appeared in the Weekly Refresher from the pen of that
admirable scientific popularizer, Harold Rigamey, in which, as Professor
Keppel rather inelegantly put it, he 'completely spilt the beans’.

It is possible that Rigamey got the thing at second or third hand from
Dr. Holdman Stedding, who oddly enough seems to have been the least
discreet of all that primary group. Dr. Stedding may have described it
to one or two fellow-practitioners as an example of the extreme
intellectual elaboration that may appear in a case of delusional
insanity. There is no evidence that Laidlaw, after his first imaginative
outbreak, ever gave the matter a second thought until he got the echo in
the newspapers. But he may very well have repeated his fantasy on some
after-dinner occasion. He was the last survivor of the old Bob
Stevenson, York Powell, school of talk, a gorgeous talker.

Harold Rigamey was a peculiarly constituted being, he had a mind that
did not so much act as react. He was a born ultra-heretic. He
disbelieved everything and then doubled back on his disbelief. From a
sound historical and literary training he had recoiled in a state of
unsympathetic curiosity to science and had achieved a very respectable
position on the literary side of journalism by writing about science in
a manner that caused the greatest discomfort and perplexity to men of
science. He found wonders for them when they saw nothing wonderful and
incredible triumphs of paradox in their simplest statements. He mated
them to the strangest associates.

He had an infuriating openmindedness to every unorthodox extravagance.
He hated dogma and he was full of faith. He was always reconciling
science and religion, spiritualism and behaviourism, medicine and
Christian Science, and this reconciling disposition won him quite a
large following of readers eager to keep their mental peace amidst the
vast, the incongruous, alarming, and sometimes far too urgent
suggestions of our modern world.

They were all a little uneasy with him and that was a part of his charm.
There were stimulants in all his sedatives. When he asked his readers to
come and meet spiritual worth, they were never quite sure whether that
meant the dear Archbishop of Canterbury, all clean and scented with his
pretty purple-and-red evening clothes, his pretty lace cuffs, his pretty
episcopal ring, and his general vacuous urbanity, or whether it meant a
rather repellent, though no doubt equally edifying, encounter with some
unsanitarily pure and indecently stark fakir on a bed of nails; and when
he remarked upon the stern veracities of science, whether it would be a
fresh explosion in the mathematical engine-room, a vitamin of incredible
potency, or a breathing exercise from America that at once confirmed and
completed the remarkable inhalations of ancient Tibet, he had in mind.
For some time Harold Rigamey had been working out in his own mind some
sort of linkage of interplanetary communications with the all too
neglected science of astrology; he thought he might make something quite
exciting out of it, and this weird idea of Laidlaw's came to him like
the voice of the Lord to a Hebrew prophet.

For some time he had been feeling that his characteristic methods of
popularizing science were no longer growing in popular favour. Men of
science are a peculiar, an almost ungracious, class, and very often the
more you popularize them the less they like it. Maybe it was a public
realization of their lack of appreciation for Harold Rigamey's services,
or maybe it was just a surfeit of subtle but occasionally very
incomprehensible wonders, that was affecting the first abundant public
response to Harold Rigamey; at any rate he felt that his popularity was
dimmer than it used to be. A really new and exciting topic, that only
needed a little care and thought in the handling to go far and wide, was
just the tonic he had been requiring.

Mindful of the faint elements of insecurity in his own credit he set
about the subject with considerable skill and discretion. He first
informed his public through a couple of articles, called 'The Voice of
the Stars’, of a 'growing realization' that 'extra-terrestrial forces of
some unknown kind' were 'indubitably' attempting to establish
communication with our planet. He invoked almost every known authority
upon extra-terrestrial radiations, produced in a skilfully clipped form
some rare unguarded statements by eminent professors, promoted one or
two rash speculations by obscure people in remote parts of the earth to
a distinguished scientific standing, and invented a few anonymous
scientists of his own. (Some day Nature will have to publish a list of
otherwise non-existent scientists, available for public controversy.)

'Scientists tell us' was a very favourite phrase with Harold Rigamey. He
wrote of 'numerous efforts' which he said had been made to 'discover
codes' in these extra-terrestrial radiations and of the growing
conviction of 'scientists' of all sorts and shades and sizes of the
existence of these persistent attempts to attract our attention from
outside our world.

'This present century,' wrote Harold Rigamey, 'already goes far beyond
its predecessor, the Century of Invention. This is the Century of
Discovery. The sixteenth century was a Century of Terrestrial Discovery;
but this is the Century of Extra-Terrestrial Discovery. Already the
immortality of the soul, or at any rate persistence after death, seems
to be experimentally established, and now we realize upon the most
convincing evidence that man is not alone on his planet; he is a citizen
in what may prove to be an abundantly populated universe.'

Eminent men of science read Harold Rigamey's latest revelation of what
science is doing in a mood of apoplectic fury. 'What are we to do about
this sort of thing?' they said to their wives at breakfast, and their
wives said: 'My dear, what can you do?' And there the matter ended.
The mystical mathematicians with their expanding and contracting
universes, relativity-exponents, and the like retired from the arena of
popular attention like a small group of concertina players on the entry
of a large brass band. An unprecedented mail informed Harold Rigamey of
the successful opening of his campaign. His next stage was to go on to
'The Fantastic Connexion of Cosmic Rays and Human Mutations' and then
straightaway to 'The Martian Genes' and 'The Martian Type' and so told
the whole story as we have already seen it unfolding in the mind of Mr.
Joseph Davis, but with a richness of confirmatory detail altogether
beyond our modest record of actualities.


2


The reception of the astounding revelation was ample and inconclusive,
and it afforded Professor Keppel considerable scope for his gift for
bitter comment. Popular intelligence, the professor pointed out to the
acquiescent Dr. Holdman Stedding, has long since ceased to attach any
real importance to concrete statements except in so far as they concern
football and cricket results, the winners of races, and (with caution
and reservations) stock-exchange quotations. Outsi