CHAPTER XIX

THE STORY OF THE CYLINDERS

“So it was you, Arnold,” said Sanson quietly. “Well ... what do you think of Sir Spofforth’s theories now?”

All my hatred and fear of him had died in that blinding revelation. Bewilderment so intense that it made all which had occurred since my awakening dim, a sense of pathos and futility at once deprived me of my fears and robbed him of his power; and we might have been the fellow-workers of the old days again, discussing the problem of consciousness.

He seated himself on the mud mound, and his voice was as casual as if we had just returned to the laboratory after escorting Esther home. And indeed I could with great difficulty only convince myself that I had not fallen asleep and dreamed this nightmare.

“You see, it has all come to pass, Arnold,” said Sanson, twirling the Ray rod idly between his fingers. “A world such as I foretold—a world set free. Enlightenment where there was ignorance; the soul delusion banished from the minds of all but the most foolish; the menace of the defective still with us, but greatly shrunken; the logical State so wonderfully conceived by Wells, with Science supreme, and almost a world citizenship. It is a glorious free world, Arnold, to which humanity has fallen heir, and the fight for it has been a stupendous one. And it is a world of my creation! I have done what Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon failed to do; I have brought humanity under one sway, out of the darkness into light, out of ignorance to knowledge. I have set man, poor plantigrade, on his feet firmly. He looks up to the skies, not in the blind and foolish hope of bodiless immortality, but knowing himself the free heir of the ages. Wasn’t it worth the battle, Arnold?”

My sense of pity deepened. Surely there can be no worse fate for any man than to accomplish his desires! I thought of all the unknown idealists who had given their lives to the accomplishment of great projects and failed, achieving nothing—inventors, dreamers, a gray, fantasmal legion whose lost hopes ranged back from age to age; and I saw how their works were blessed and their failures glorified in contrast.

“Yes, I thought that it must be you as soon as I examined the sheets from the Strangers’ Bureau,” continued Sanson, in his matter-of-fact manner. But it seemed so incredible that the cylinder had erred that I allowed my pressing duties to let me forget my impulse to take immediate action. Unfortunately, while we were fellow-workers I did not take your finger prints, but I had, of course, observed your characteristic indexes, and also, if you remember, you were kind enough to my fad to permit me to take your cranial measurements. I did not think that there could exist two heads like yours, combined with those indexes, within a single century. For your occipital region is excellent, approximating my norm, while your frontal area is that of a moron. In short, you are a typical Grade 2 defective, Arnold—essentially so; and I have no doubt that, thanks to your five centimeters of asymmetrical frontal development, you have emerged into this universe of reality still clinging fondly and affectionately to your dualistic soul theory.

“But never mind!” he continued, smiling rather grimly. “I have no intention of handing you over to Lembken’s ridiculous priests to be tried for heresy. There will be no more priests after a little while. The public mind is now ripe enough for the abolition of this stupid compromise of the transition period from God to Matter. One more animist will do little harm in a world in which they are still far from uncommon. And then, I am not a man of cruel impulses, Arnold, and I do not want to penalize you for having come into a world in which you are an anachronism. So you have spent three weeks in London?” he ended, scrutinizing me sharply.

“Yes.”

“And came back by night to see your birthplace, I suppose,” he said maliciously. “I don’t know how you escaped the battleplanes. Unless they are growing slack.... I found one scoutplane without its searchlight working, and shall send its commander to the leather vats if I discover him ... well, Arnold,” he resumed, “I could not believe that you had come out of your cylinder before your time. You came within an ace of disrupting my work, my world, if you only knew it—you with your missing five centimeters! I put implicit faith in Jurgensen’s mechanism, and, as it proves, I was to blame. I came here tonight to see if you could really be gone.”

“You knew that I was here?”

“Why not, Arnold, since I put you here?” he returned, looking at me in a quizzical manner. “I have paid you periodical visits during the last five and thirty years. You looked charming in your sleep, Arnold! The fact is, it was a difficult situation. There was no way of destroying you, even if I had been so minded. I might have buried you ten feet underground, or thrown you into the sea, I suppose, but the men who moved you would have betrayed me unless I murdered them—in short, it was a problem how to dispose of you without violating my naturally humane impulses. So I did the best thing—covered the cylinder with mud and let you lie here.

“That Jurgensen timepiece was splendidly contrived, Arnold,” he continued. “Too splendidly, in fact, for in the haste of sealing you I left the pointer six months ahead of time, as well as with Esther. It has perhaps occurred to you that you went to sleep in June and awoke in December?”

It had not occurred to me, but I made no answer to his sneering question.

“In fact, Jurgensen gave me a six months’ leeway on his hundred-years clock, and the complication of figures prevented me from discovering it. I moved the pointer to the end of the dial, assuming that the last point was a hundred, and not a hundred and a half. And then, Arnold, there was another most regrettable mistake. You remember that you were sealed up quickly, and rather impulsively, so to say? I found that, in hurriedly capping you down, I forgot entirely to add twenty-four days upon the smaller dial for the leap-years; and so you returned that much ahead of Esther. It was a very bungled arrangement excusable in you, but not in me.”

“Lazaroff!” I began, and then corrected myself with an apology as I saw his brows contract. “Sanson—”

“Thank you,” he replied ironically.

“You will at least answer two or three questions, will you not?” I pleaded. “How did you induce Esther to enter the second cylinder? Why did you trick me? And how have you contrived to outlive the century without appearing more than half your age? I think my questions pardonable.”

“I shall answer them all,” said Sanson. “I may tell you that it was never my plan to send our monkeys ahead of us into this world. I meant to go, Arnold. But unexpectedly there came into my life something against which I had made no provision. In other words, absurd as it sounds, I fell in love. Then I planned to take Esther with me. But this plan, too, was changed, for, to be quite frank, I gathered that she preferred you to me. I then conceived the entertaining idea of taking you both with me, so that our rivalry might be renewed in a world where your advantages of personality would be counterbalanced by my power. Arnold, I never for an instant doubted that I should stand where I stand today. So, having persuaded you to enter the cylinder—and how I laughed at your imbecile complaisance—I invited Esther to follow you. There was no difficulty. On the contrary, she could hardly be convinced that I was in earnest. However, I speedily convinced her by the simple process of putting on the cap. Then, since the cylinders can be manipulated from within, I myself entered the third.”

“You, Sanson!” I gasped. “You, too, have slept a hundred years?”

His look became envenomed, and the quick gust of passion that came upon him was, to my mind, evidence of a mentality unbalanced by unrestrained authority.

“Arnold,” he cried, “would you believe that an end so carefully planned, so mastered in each detail, could be thwarted by an instant’s lack of balance? You remember that, of the three cylinders, one was already set a century ahead? That, save for the six months’ leeway that existed on all the dials, and was, therefore, immaterial—that one, calculated to the utmost nicety, leap-years and all, was the one I had selected for myself already. That was the one Esther entered. The dial upon the second cylinder I set in your presence, but omitted the four and twenty days. That was your cylinder. And the third—mine—do you remember?—was set to sixty-five.

“I removed this cylinder to a second vault of which you do not know. I awoke in 1980. Arnold, I entered it and forgot the dial! When I recovered strength—and I had supplied some food products to last me during that brief period of recovery—I hurried to this vault. I found only your cylinder, behind the fallen bricks. When I saw that you still slept I thought your mechanism had gone wrong. Then, going back to examine my cylinder, I realized the truth. I, who had loved Esther with all my power, and vowed with all my will to win her, I, a young man of twenty-five, must wait for five and thirty years before she awakened. When my time came to claim her I would be old. O, Esther, what I have endured during these years!”

The baffled love of half a life-span overcame him. I watched him, almost as shaken. The tyrant of half the world, greater than any man had been since the days when the Caesars reigned, he had bound himself to a more awful law than any he could contrive. It wrung my heart even then, the man’s grim hopes and long enduring love, checked by so slight a chance.

“I found Esther was gone,” continued Sanson presently, rising and beginning to pace the vault. “I might have re-entered my cylinder, but I did not know whether she survived in hers. I knew my ambitions claimed me, and my duty to save humanity and raise it up from the ape. Even she had to yield to that sacred and pitiful impulse. I learned soon that the cylinder which contained her had been discovered and adopted as a symbol of freedom. I found the world aflame and flung myself into the heart of the revolution. By will I made myself the master of men. In six months my dominance was unquestioned. I could have become supreme, but I chose to work through others, that I might have the leisure to devote myself to my plans for the regeneration of man. I have succeeded; I have made the world better, Arnold, and I have made it free. But now, when at last the reward of my long toil approaches, when at last I can show Esther what I have achieved for her, and lay the world at her feet, I am an old man, and the prize has turned to ashes.”

His grief conquered him again, and he paced the vault like a madman, weeping with all the abandonment of one who is above the need of conventional repressions. I remembered the antics of the crowd that followed me to the court. Sanson’s grief was as unrestrained as their malice. But I was brought back from pity by the realization of this new and dreadful complication. Sanson loved Esther still. And he had worked for her. I recalled her immature feminist views. He had believed her youthful impatience of authority rested upon as firm a conviction as his beliefs! He thought he had freed humanity. And all the uncountable wrongs of earth had been heaped up by him as a love-offering to lay at Esther’s feet.

I flung my prudence away. I clasped him by the hands.

“Sanson,” I pleaded, “don’t you see, don’t you understand what the world is today? Each age has its own cruelties and wrongs; but, if poverty has been abolished, have you not set a heavier yoke upon men’s necks? Their children torn from them, the death-house for the old, the vivisection table—”

“That is all true, Arnold,” he answered, “and sometimes, even now, that old, inherited weakness that men termed conscience stirs in me. That fatal atavistic folly!—for what is death, after all? A painless end, a placid journey into nothingness, a resolution of the material atoms into new forms, which shall, in turn, create that consciousness men used to term a soul. Their children? Bah! Arnold, through suffering we win upward. In the world-nation that is to come, the narrow, selfish instinct called parental love—a trick of Nature to ensure the rearing of the race—will not exist. It will have served its purpose. All I have done is nothing in comparison with the great secret now almost within my grasp. That is the meaning of the vivisection table—the research work that will enable me to offer man immortality!”

I recoiled in horror at the sight of the fearful fanaticism upon his face.

“Yes, it is that, Arnold, which I am almost ready to bestow upon the world!” he cried triumphantly. “The old problem of consciousness and tissue life on which we worked so long has practically been solved by means at my disposal in a civilized world. Then we shall live indeed. There will be no requirement that knowledge should progress painfully through the inheritance of our fathers’ labors. We ourselves shall climb the ladder of omniscience. The fit shall live forever, and we shall weed out the moron and defective without scruple, preserving a race of mortal slaves to labor for us in the factories and in the fields, holding them subdued by the threatened loss of that life which we shall control and permit to them so long as they are obedient. That is the noble climax of man’s aspirations. Immortal life, in these bodies of ours, and Esther mine, not for a span, but for eternity!”

I believed him—I could not help but believe. Can anything be impossible, so long as man is gifted with free will for good and evil? Must he not have the ladder to scale Olympus, and thereby learn of heights beyond? I flung myself upon my knees before Sanson, like some poor father pleading for his son’s life, and implored him to draw back. As he stood watching me I babbled about the terror in the world, the boon of death, the long-linked chain of humanity, bound all together as a spiritual unit, which he would sever. I reminded him of the old days under Sir Spofforth, of the old, free world we had lost. How had he bettered it? I think I moved him, too, though, when I ended, he was regarding me with a cold smile of negation.

“You want me to turn back, Arnold,” he said. “Once there was a time when I hesitated. But ... can even that God of yours turn back? Come with me, Arnold, and for the sake of the old friendship to which you have appealed I will give you power. Defective as you are, you shall live your life to the full capacity of your talent. You shall not suffer because you came so unkindly into this world of ours. If your mind turns toward pleasures such as that foul defective Lembken enjoys, they shall be yours. If not, then you shall work with me as you used to do. When I and Esther rule the world together, immortal as the fabled gods, you shall sit at our feet and be our confidant.”

That I hoped still to win Esther had never entered the man’s mind. The sublimity of his egotism was the measure of his blindness. Just as he had entered the cellar, so self-absorbed that he had failed to see the benches and the crucifix, nor dreamed that here, where his evil dreams began, their end was planned, so, now, he did not see. The devilish will that had carried him thus far would bring him to destruction.

At my hands, if I played the part shrewdly. But I lost all self-command.

“Though you have all the world at your feet, Sanson,” I cried, “you can never hold me to obedience, nor Esther either. I love her, and we shall both die before we yield!”

For an instant I saw his face before me, twisted with all the passions of his thwarted will; then I saw the blinding white light leap from his Ray rod as he fired at me.